Having finished Panama's November season of patriotic parades and the locally important December 8 Mothers Day, and the Americans having celebrated Thanksgiving, Hindus having observed Diwali, Muslims having broken their Ramadan fast on Eid al-Fitr and Jews having held their Hanukkah festivities, the Christmas season is upon us. It is a time of great joy, both secular and religious, across Western Christendom, which includes mostly-Catholic Panama.

This joy finds its artistic expression, for example in the tagua nut nativity scene above. Tagua, Panama's "vegetable ivory," has in recent decades become a medium for artwork, primarily by Panama's Embera and Wounaan sculptors. The work you see above and in the Arts section is by carvers at Isla San Antonio, a Wounaan community in Gamboa.

(The tagua sculpture photos are by Pat Alvarado, the lady who feeds and edits Sparky The Wonder Dog. Pat has returned from a trip to Asia in time for the holidays.)

This also is and has been a season for days off, parts of which I have spent on the job with my camera. Thus the Outdoors section features a scene from a holiday morning at the beach, and the Arts section records another holiday morning exploring the public art at the flagship of Panama City's park system, Parque Omar.

Ah, but we're a serious newspaper, and as any cop will tell you, all is not sweetness and light in the holiday season. This is the time of the year when muggers and pickpockets work the crowds of shoppers. It's a season when I have to be especially careful about where I go with my camera, for example.

It's also crunch time for the Legislative Assembly, whose regular session ends with the year. That means the occasional change for the better, a lot of ordinary government housekeeping, and an unhealthy proportion of poison pills mixed into an avalanche of legislation. The executive, prosecutorial and judicial branches of the Panamanian government also have a habit of using the holiday season, when people's minds are on other things, as a blind for underhanded moves.

It's our job to cover that part of what's newsworthy that's unpleasant, too, and along with the more uplifting stories we do that too. It turns out that the subject of terrorism keeps rearing its head, and thus its manifestations appear in several articles herein.

On December 5, a group of anti-Castro activists who allegedly planned to set off a massive deadly explosion at the University of Panama in November of 2000 were in court, and I was there covering it. Two days earlier, a decomposing headless corpse was found in Jaque, apparently another victim of Colombian paramilitary violence. Our national police chief and government and justice minister downplayed the story, which again raised questions about the Moscoso administration's true policy in dealing with displaced Colombians and the AUC death squads. Both of these stories are covered in the News section.

Meanwhile, as we probably saw in Mombasa, Kenya, Osama bin Laden's boys are on the offensive again. Toward the end of November Al Qaeda supporters published an Arabic-language "Letter to America" on the Internet, and this found its way into English translation by way of British jihadi groups. It has been published in the British press, but in the United States the corporate mainstream media are afraid to let their viewers, listeners and readers know about America's enemies out of fear of being identified with those enemies.

I can't agree with the American corporate mainstream. I was raised by parents who, taught me that to be any kind of a racist, but particularly a Nazi, was one of the very worst things a person could be. Yet on our family's bookshelves, there was a copy of Mein Kampf.

Hitler got away with what he did for as long as he did in part because not enough people paid attention to the evil aims he outlined years earlier in his book.

The American political cliche of our time is to liken everybody who isn't eager to go to war over the slightest real or contrived provocation as a modern-day version of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sold out Czechoslovakia in a vain attempt to appease Hitler. The people who so liberally throw that epithet around also tend to favor militant ignorance, the attitude that equates knowing one's enemy to being that enemy. That sort of militant ignorance gave Chamberlain the political space to blunder on September 30, 1938, and it allowed America to be taken by surprise on September 11, 2001.

Thus Osama bin Laden's Letter to America appears in our Opinion section. I trust that many will read it and come away with a better understanding of the threat we face. I also expect that those who disagree with my decision to publish Osama's diatribe will give us an interesting Letters section in a future issue.

The Business news is mixed but more positive than negative, both for Panama and for The Panama News.

Anecdotal evidence and visual comparisons of this year's holiday shopping crowds with last year's suggest that we're seeing a little upturn in the retail sector. As Panama's centennial year gets underway, tourism is also up. People in some of the sectors that are down predict better times in 2003. An obnoxious ban on Internet telephony has been suspended by Panama's Supreme Court.

On the other hand, the International Monetary Fund is demanding serious tax reform from Panama and I am far from the only observer here who thinks that's very unlikely to happen. The maneuvering over the president's tax plan is unfolding by the minute, as are the details before the legislature, but I don't see the political will to pass the large tax increases that the IMF is demanding. The rich don't want to give up their privileges, putting the squeeze on the poor would lead to rioting in the streets and our faltering economy could go down for the count under the sort of blow that international lenders are demanding.

In November The Panama News set a new readership record, and so far in December our daily visitor numbers are higher than November's. Starting in July, every month has broken our previous monthly readership record and the number of people who visit our site has more or less doubled. Our ad sales have also increased, but of course double next-to-nothing is still not very much.

Meanwhile Citibank, where The Panama News has had an account for years, has informed us that they don't want to deal with small businesses anymore, so we need to start looking for a new bank. This is likely to be a royal pain, because Panama's banking and finance sector is shrinking all the way around and it has become hard to open a bank account, particularly for a tiny business like ours.

Citibank's withdrawal from the small business sector, which we could see several years ago when they cut off our ability to deal with credit card transactions because we made less than $1000 per month worth of credit card sales, is by no means unique. For example, in the past year the Panama branch of Merrill Lynch transferred all brokerage accounts of less than $250,000 to Uruguay, of all places.

When such multinationals say that they only want to deal with Panama's millionaires, they're really saying that they're pulling out of Panama. There aren't that many rich people to go around. Our banking sector is also contracting because the money laundering industry is in decline, there's a worldwide consolidation ongoing in the finance industry and the scam artists have milked Panama for what it's worth and are now fleeing, generally with other people's money.

(Speaking of scam artists, in one of several high profile bankruptcy fraud cases, a fugitive businessman has fled the country in possession of a Panamanian diplomatic passport. The foreign minister who issued it wants to be Panama's next president, and Mireya is using a series of Electoral Code "reforms" to rig the system in order to make that possible. These proposed election law changes are touched upon in our Editorial, in my Opinion column and in the News section. Should you be surprised that part of the "reform" that Mireya sent to the legislature was yet another attempt at government control over the news media?)

So 2003 approaches bearing the prospect of new hoops through which The Panama News must jump in order to survive. I may be tired and clumsy and approaching a buzzardly old age, but I do intend to jump through those hoops.

Eric Jackson
the editor