Let us give the devil his due. Revelers in Nombre de Dios may be able to blame a minor welt or two on the diablitos. Any politician who is caught up in the current wave of scandals has no such excuse.

Carnival went fine for me. Mostly I worked, but a big part of the job was taking in this year's West Indian Fair on Saturday and Sunday. On Carnival Tuesday I made my way to the Hotel El Panama parking lot, where I caught Samy and Sandra Sandoval's act. I left after that and caught the night's last musical presentation in Panama City, Dominican-Panamanian merengue artist Sergio Vargas (who was accompanied by Samy and Sandra by the end of his show), on TV.

The day after Carnival was over elsewhere, Earl Patrick Watson went out to Nombre de Dios to catch the diablitos, whose costumes are in the Atlantic side style rather than in the better known Interior tradition. Earl's visit to Nombre also provides the basis this issue's Dining page. Previously, he took pictures at this year's West Indian Fair, which appear in our Community section.

Meanwhile in the capital, the wave of scandals that has engulfed the Legislative Assembly has taken on a life of its own, even though at the moment there does not seem to be the obvious "smoking gun" that will send politicians or those who pay them off to jail. Conflict of interest provides the subject matter for much of the public disenchantment with the politicians, as well as for my Opinion column and the lead story in our Business section. For those of you who read Spanish, over in our new Spanish-language News section we have Probidad's report on Latin America's most notorious corruption cases in 2001.

On the other hand, this issue's Editorial gets into some things that Panama's public officials did right. Despite so many Panamanian politicians' penchant for filing criminal charges whenever the reports about their conduct are less than flattering, it seems to me that it would be just as wrong for journalists to ignore the positive as it would be to be intimidated into covering up negative news. Another positive story, our review of the current Museo Afroantillano exhibition on West Indian women in Panama, also has a government connection: though the museum couldn't survive without the non-governmental support of SAMAAP (the Society of Friends of the West Indian Museum of Panama), the facility is in fact cared for and subsidized by the National Institute of Culture (INAC), a public agency.

Sadly, the world scene is largely negative. We journalists mourn for Daniel Pearl, our assassinated colleague from The Wall Street Journal. Panama looks on with concern as Colombia's never-ending civil war escalates. The madness in the Middle East also seems to have no end in sight, and provides the subject matter for Opinion pieces by journalist Willy Gutman and Rabbi Michael Lerner. Also in the Opinion section, former and possibly future US presidential candidate Al Gore comments on a situation that he believes makes the United States more vulnerable to turmoil in the Middle East; and the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders protests the Pentagon's latest attempt to manage the news without regard to the truth.

Our Letters section gets into a threat to Panama's maritime industry, while the Science page is about the decline of world fisheries, a subject that this country only ignores at great peril.

The changes in the way we look continue with this issue. One of the new features is a special button that takes readers to our past coverage of a marine archaeological site in the Caribbean Sea near Nombre de Dios, the remains of a ship that may well be Christopher Columbus's Vizcaina. Whatever the identity of that ship, it's a major archaeological find and a great opportunity for Panama to develop its intellectual infrastructure and for Nombre de Dios to attract more tourists. Last December we botched the links to the graphics that went with that story, so now you have the opportunity to see what you missed.

In another story about the development of Panama's intellectual infrastructure, I report on a recent forum at the University of Panama, where scholars talked about the process of formulating proper studies for projects like the planned Panama Canal watershed expansion. On the one hand, Panama has not yet arrived at that nadir of cynicism in which politicians who don't intend to do anything about a problem go around boasting about how they commissioned a study about it. On the other hand, the prevailing Panamanian norms of land use planning, environmental impact statements and other studies are woefully low.

On the Atlantic side a major land use issue is whether the rest of the mangroves around Limon Bay will be destroyed, and in our Spanish-language News section Willy Carrera gets into why that matters.

As always, I thank those who have helped us in various ways and remind you that our condition is so precarious that your individual support may be the difference whether or not English-language journalism continues in Panama.

Money contributions and book purchases, while they are important and we encourage them, are not the only ways that you can help. We need contributors who are willing to work for little or nothing in the pecuniary sense, covering stories about which they have the aptitude and interest to report. Sections of our calendar and things like the guide to English-language religious services in Panama need a lot of help, and it would be nice to publish a directory of English-speaking community groups again. We also need sales help, in the form of people who are able to sell ads in either English or Spanish and inclined to work on a commission basis.

Eric Jackson
the editor

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