community

This photo is the scene behind Calle 50's "Intelligent Building," an impressive high-rent Panama City landmark that's home to banks, corporate offices and the swank City Club. Just beyond the wall with the art form that's known as "tagging" in the urban ghettoes of North America is Nueva Paitilla, an upper-middle class neighborhood. Flowing across the foreground is the Matasnillo River, a stinking stream laden with human excrement that, a few blocks downstream flows past the Paitilla Hospital and then empties into Panama Bay at the side of the affluent Punta Paitilla. That many members of Panama's economic and political elites consider it acceptable to live near such an open sewer says many things, few of them flattering, about the people who run this country. Photo by Eric Jackson

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