Panama’s pending free-trade agreement with the US could be endangered by the election as head of the country’s National Assembly of a man who Washington believes is responsible for the murder of a US soldier in Panama in 1992, according to one of the country’s leading opposition politicians.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mireya Moscoso, the former Panamanian president who started the free-trade initiative between the two countries when she was in office, said she feared that the election of Pedro Miguel González, a member of the ruling PRD party, could bring grave economic consequences for the Central American nation.