It so happens that the Arteconsult gallery is at the moment hosting a show by Cuban-American painters Frank García and Humberto Calzada, and that the above work is Calzada's "Una cena para un Presidente." By coincidence, it's an appropriate title for our cover graphic. Two days before the exhibition opened Panama's president scored a huge political victory when the Legislative Assembly approved her Supreme Court nominees, Winston Spadafora and Alberto Cigarruista. If the arts are more interesting to you, check out some more of Calzada's and García's works in the Arts section. If you're more interested in politics, look for the Spadafora and Cigarruista story in our News section.

Regular readers will notice that we missed an issue. You may also notice that, especially in the News Briefs and the Business and Economy Briefs, there is a lot more to report this time than usual.

This is a double issue because the edition that we were due to upload on December 29 never happened. Our new webmaster's Internet Service Provider Cable Onda, which is part of the MEDCOM conglomerate, is responsible for that. On December 26, according to a MEDCOM technician who doesn't care to be identified, there was a power surge and outage that messed up their Internet service. Repairs that were done didn't solve the problem, leaving thousands of their customers offline for the holidays.

Now were it just a matter of a technical glitch and the holiday season getting in the way of repairs, it would be just another example of life in the Third World. However, MEDCOM took the opportunity of its technical problems to practice a little juega vivo. They told our webmaster that she had been cut off for lack of payment, even though she had paid her bill, and that to get reconnected she would have to pay the January bill plus a reconnection fee. We scrambled to get the money together and paid what Cable Onda demanded, AND THEN they told her that she had never been disconnected at all, but that she'd have to wait until after January 7 to get her service restored anyway.

It just didn't seem worth it to upload volume 7, issue 24 on January 8 and then a few days later come up with volume 8, issue 1, especially when we're in the process of changing webmasters. Thus this double issue, which marks the start of our eighth year of publication.

And meanwhile, as you can see from the briefs, during our absence a lot happened in Panama.

The biggest story is clearly the Supreme Court.

Spadafora's and Cigarruistas approval has tilted the political balance on the high court to an Arnulfista majority, which is something that should have been expected. Mireya is not the sort of president who would appoint someone outside of her narrow circle of political allies to such important posts, so even had Spadafora or Cigarruista been rejected, any replacement nominees would also have been Arnulfistas.

The court had already been discredited, both by some of its actions and by the previous legislative battle over the judiciary. Recall that the nation listened to an audio tape of a Supreme Court magistrate negotiating a bribe to free a drug trafficker, and then the assembly sent the judge back to his job by voting to impeach him by a less than sufficient majority for his removal.

In the battle leading up to Spadafora's and Cigarruista's ratifications, both the government and opposition factions did and said regrettable things. There were some words of wisdom from some of the independent figures who took positions on the controversy, but despite those exceptions the debate turned nasty, petty and downright stupid.

You may recall that The Panama News took an editorial stand against Spadafora's confirmation. We did so because of his repeated stands against freedom of the press, his bad habit of mixing personal and public business, and for his lack of leadership as minister of government and justice at a time of generalized political corruption.

However, arguments alleging a romantic relationship between the president and her former justice minister were ugly and irrelevant. It is this newspaper's position, and long has been, that public figures have the right to private lives. Even if all of the bochinche --- which both Moscoso and Spadafora denied --- was true, it had no bearing on the latter's qualifications to be a high court magistrate.

The pro-administration legislators' arguments that the assembly has a duty to confirm any Supreme Court nominee who meets the legal requirements for the job were almost as obnoxious. The best of Panama's lawyers argued that the legislature should demand higher standards than that, and it's a shame that their advice was not taken.

Alberto Cigarruista and Winston Spadafora are two different individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, and deserved separate consideration. They didn't get it from either their opponents or their supporters.

It was most unfortunate that both Spadafora and Cigarruista were attacked for having in the course of their legal careers represented unpopular clients. Spadafora was denigrated for having represented arms merchants, while Cigarruista was faulted for having represented pushbuttons in Los Santos. Worst of all, Cigarruista was attacked for having represented Chinese citizens wishing to legally immigrate to Panama. Anti-Chinese racism is historically an Arnulfista vice, but its employment against an Arnulfista doesn't balance or correct any past wrong. Cigarruista's adversaries should hide their heads in shame for this gutter-level tactic.

As the vote approached, the Arnulfista comptroller, Alvin Weeden, sent in his men to shut down a quarry for which PRD deputy Miguel Bush had a concession. The concession was clearly illegal --- Panama's Constitution specifically prohibits the granting of public concessions to legislators, and in any case Bush's contract had expired. The Arnulfistas alleged gross corruption, while Bush alleged political intimidation. Then it turned out that Bush got his illegal concession from none other than one Mireya Moscoso Rodríguez. The president says that she made a mistake, and now the nation must wonder how many other similar errors she committed.

When the voting took place, the PRD's unity broke down and the president won. He may be ahead in public opinion polls, but PRD leader Martín Torrijos was unable to unite his party and that inevitably calls into question the presumption that he will be its presidential nominee in 2004.

There are other negative things to report, but also some positive developments.

Carnival is coming early this year, and after a brief scare when it looked like SAMAAP's annual West Indian Fair might not be held in 2002, Earl Patrick Watson reports in the Community section that the show will go on.

Though the economy is still bad, in the Business section Earl also reports the tale of a hair stylist who came back to Panama from New York and has earned a good reputation in his field.

Tourists are coming, maybe in smaller numbers than had been hoped, but surely more than anyone expected in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. See our Travel section for some examples of some of the apparel that a number of visitors buy in lieu of T-shirts with cliches.

The sports scene is livelier than in past years, with professional baseball and better boxing than we have seen in a long time.

Over the holidays Prince Claus of The Netherlands recognized one outpost of excellence in Panamanian culture, La Prensa's "Talingo" arts supplement. Talingo clearly deserved the Prince Claus Trust's "Freedom Space" award.

Before you think that we have become one of these syrupy "happy news" publications, however, let me assure you that this issue also gets into matters that are serious and not particularly positive. Our lead Business story is an interview with economist Mark Weisbrot, about Argentina's woes. In the Opinion section we have Michelle Lescure's column about Eagle, the dog who sniffs out the remains of disappeared adversaries of the former dictatorship; Amnesty International's protest about impunity for killers in one of our neighboring countries; an environmental coalition's continued argument against nuke shipments in the Panama Canal; and my observations about a disturbance of the peace in Panama City. Even in the Review section, we get down to the very serious matter of what YOU might do to support a Panamanian journalist who was ordered jailed for what he published.

What about The Panama News? Our financial situation remains horrible and won't change much until we are able to raise enough money to go back into print, but there are a number of signs that 2002 will be a better year for Panama's English-language newspaper than last year was. We survive in a harsh economic climate, and intend to persist.

You may also notice that this issue looks different --- a little cruder, really --- than recent ones. I'm learning to do my own webmaster work, along with a fellow journalist, and we haven't got it down perfectly, especially when it comes to making the menu bar work. Thus, to get to features like the Editorial page, Sparky the Wonder Dog's column, our little report on the Drug Wars, the Letters (this time, one from the bereaved O'Donnell family), our Cool Internet Sites, the Gallery Guide and the Calendar, use the hyperlinks on this page. In future issues we should be getting back up to our accustomed standards.

Eric Jackson
Editor

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