Dry season is here. Aside from the clear sky, the slightly higher daytime temperatures, the substantially lower relative humidity and the absence of rain, Panamanians who pay attention to Mother Nature notice dry season's arrival by the shift in wind direction. The breezes are coming steadily out of the north now.

The winds have brought us the caraval Niña, a rough approximation of one of Christopher Columbus's discovery ships, shown above. For the next few days it will be one of the main attractions on the Amador Causeway, at the Flamenco Marina. If you can't be in Panama to see it for yourself, the ship does call at many North American ports, and you can see more photos of it in our Travel section.

Coming from the north, dry season winds mean the end of Caribbean diving season. The breeze makes the Atlantic side's shallow waters choppy, stirring up sands and sediments and making it too murky to see very much. Thus the seasonal change has ended a disappointing season near Nombre de Dios, where the pathetic political class's sticky-fingered squabbles prevented any work on Panama's most important archaeological site, the sunken caraval that may be Christopher Columbus's Vizcaina, during 2002.

Dry season's onset also means baseball season for Panama. In this field, too, Mireya Baba and her Forty Thieves have cheated the national tourism industry of one of its potential important attractions. We don't have professional winter ball here this year because Panama needed to upgrade the lighting and playing surface of at least one of its baseball venues (other than the excellent National Stadium) to get Major League Baseball's approval. None of those stadia, which are owned by the National Sports Institute (INDE, a governmental agency), received the repairs needed to convince the big league owners that Panama's a safe place to allow their expensive professionals to hone their talents during the off-season. The cost of things like glossy magazines showing the president's sister handing out goodies, TV commercials extolling the virtues of public officials and governmental institutions caught up in scandals and full-page newspaper ads showing the National Tourism Institute (IPAT) director standing next to dignitaries could have covered the cost of the repairs. But that didn't happen, and the only silver lining in this dry season cloud is that voters will know this administration's priorities when the time to pass judgment comes around.

But still, it's baseball season and the national junior tournament is about to get underway. There will be plenty of major league scouts in attendance and not enough recruiters from US colleges and universities, and some of the kids we will see in the tournament will go on to play professional ball in the United States, Canada, Japan or Mexico. The schedule for the first round of the junior tournament is featured in our Sports section.

The beginning of dry season also more or less coincides with a personal milestone. This edition is being uploaded on my 50th birthday. In Panama's economic crisis the production of The Panama News has not been financially rewarding, but the job has its other compensations and, God and creditors willing, I am prepared to continue. This paper began at the end of 1994, so the onset of this dry season marks the beginning of our ninth year and I'm planning to celebrate our tenth birthday shortly after the next administration takes office.

(December is a slow month for online publications, as people are busy shopping for and celebrating the holidays. Thus the steady increase in readership that we had been experiencing since June took a pause. It is expected that in January our readers in the United States will find websurfing in general and perusing The Panama News in particular to be attractive ways to spend cold winter days, while here in Panama a lot of our readers will find the beaches more tempting than the Internet during dry season. But in both places, Christmas shopping season has come and gone and the advertising market upon which this newspaper largely depends will be into its annual January lull.)

I also took some days that I might have otherwise spent reporting celebrating the holidays. Nevertheless, I've done my best to make this an issue worth reading.

In the Opinion section, Willy Gutman sounds off about the spread of militant Islam in the region, Norman Girvan takes a look at political trends in the Caribbean region, an important section of the US antiwar movement condemns both Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush's war plans and I ponder the practical implications of recent changes to Panama's Electoral Code. Supporters and opponents of Venezuela's government also say their respective pieces. This issue's Editorial is about the changes in this country's tax system that President Moscoso just signed into law. Our Letters cover a wide range of subjects and include several takes on the wisdom of publishing Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" in the last issue.

In both the English and Spanish News sections, we feature the Journalists Against Corruption report for 2002. (This is a long document, and the section that deals with Panama in particular is toward the end.) We also take a graphic look back at the outgoing year. Our News Briefs and Business & Economy Briefs are full of little holiday-season horror stories, not because we like to dwell on such things but because Panama's political and economic elites like to do as much of their dirty work as possible at times when people aren't paying a lot of attention to the news.

Our Science section, which has usually tended toward things biological, gets into the practicalities of broadband Internet service in Panama City this time. We hope to feature a lot more on the science, technology and economics of computers in that section over the coming year.

This issue's Dining page features recipes for a Panamanian-style New Year's Day feast. We will get back to the more usual fare of restaurant reviews in the next edition.

As Sparky the Wonder Dog guards the house, I plan to be literally and figuratively out and about this dry season, working on these initiatives:

1. The recruitment of more volunteer contributors for the various sections of The Panama News;

2. An effort to systematically increase our ad sales;

3. An expansion and modernization of our online book sales business;

4. A series of specialized seminars in English language and literature, beginning with a class in Legal English; and

5. Another special print edition.

If all goes well, we will be back with regular print editions of The Panama News sometime before the end of 2003. Even if we can reach that difficult goal, however, the core of our existence will be this online publication.

We survived 2002 and, though we know there will be obstacles and we will need a lot of help to accomplish our objectives, The Panama News is going full speed ahead into the new year.

Un Año Nuevo Próspero,

Eric Jackson
the editor