Robert Henriquez, Panama’s Minister of Commerce and Industry,  endorses Petaquilla’s Molejon mine as a model for future mining ventures in his country, including Inmet’s nearby prospective $4 billion Cobre porphyry copper-gold deposit 20 km south of the Caribbean shore in Colon province.

Penonome & Panama City, Panama – In the 50 years following Christopher Columbus’s accidental discovery of the Americas, Spaniards hauled some 21 tonnes of gold out of the east-west isthmus of what is now called Panama. There ended, by AD 1550, Panama’s mining industry. Her dense jungles, populated by snakes and bugs and panthers, and overburdened with mud so slick and greasy you can bury a Land Cruiser in, forbade future prospecting.

Fast-forward 460 years, and Panama is back in the gold-mining game. Petaquilla Minerals, Ltd. (TSX: PTQ) entered gold production this year at its 2,200 tonne/day Molejon open-pit mine north of Penonome, the first of several new precious and strategic metals projects on Panama’s plate.

“Panama lies on a bed of copper and gold,” Robert Henriquez, Panama’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, told us in a recent interview in his Panama City office. “We feel that mining is an area of great potential for us.” He endorses Petaquilla’s Molejon mine as a model for future mining ventures in his country, including Inmet’s (TSX:IMN) nearby prospective $4 billion Cobre porphyry copper-gold deposit 20 km south of the Caribbean shore in Colon province. “They are doing a very nice job and we support their project.”

Forget what you think you know about Panama. Bananas, notes Henriquez, account for just $150 million of Panama’s $25 billion gross national product. The nation’s debt rating was upgraded to Investment Grade status earlier this year by Fitch, Moody, and S&P, joining Mexico, Brazil and Chile in the BBB-minus category. Panama grew its economy even in the depths of the global recession and its jobless rate peaked at 6.4 per cent, versus the 10 per cent in the U.S. and 20 per cent in Spain.