editorial

The US Army National Guard has come again and gone again, and Panama ought to be grateful for the school classrooms, health clinics, roads, bridges and water wells that have been built. Now let’s see the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Public Works and local communities put these things to good use and properly maintain them.

This was a good deal for all concerned. The United States has its desires and needs, and so does Panama. While the benefits that this country received are more tangible, the American military got some needed practice during these exercises, and some well deserved good publicity as well.

The Nuevos Horizontes program won’t operate in Panama during the months preceding next year’s elections. Most likely it will return in 2005. That’s some wise scheduling on the Americans’ part, because it limits the use of US soldiers and diplomats as stage props for campaign speeches by opportunistic politicians.

Foreign aid is often opposed in the donor countries because it is seen as a one-sided transfer. That’s rarely the case. Usually foreign aid requires that the money be spent on products and services from the donor country, such that a lot of the money never really gets transferred out of the country. US assistance to road building projects, for example, is in large part a subsidy for US road building equipment manufacturers.

Foreign aid is also frequently viewed as a transfer from poor and middle class taxpayers in donor countries to rich people in recipient countries. This has often been true. The collapsed Banco DISA, for example, was founded on US loan guarantees and mainly served the interests of a few well connected individuals who neither needed nor deserved US assistance. The stereotype has so often matched the reality that international financial institutions and donor country aid agencies now at least go through the motions of preventing its repetition.

And let’s see Nuevos Horizontes and US aid to Panama in general in their proper contexts. With the exception of American soldiers training Panamanian cops in jungle warfare out at Fort Sherman, US Plan Colombia mercenary supply operations out of Tocumen and who knows what truly covert operations, the American military is gone. The Peace Corps and the US Agency for International Development remain on the job here. Still, the United States is not at the top of the list of countries that aid Panama. Taiwan, Spain and Japan all give more.

The social and economic problems that Nuevos Horizontes helped to alleviate in the San Felix area did not go away. They will not be solved by the United States, nor by Taiwan, Spain, Japan or any other country. If there is to be any solution, it will have to come from Panamanians.

Panama should be grateful for the help that it gets from its friends, but we really do need to get out of the habit of expecting foreigners to do the things that we need to do for ourselves. Hard work, with intelligent planning and the benefits going to those who do the work, is the route to a prosperous Panama.

One should never underestimate the cunning of humans when they want to find out things. Especially irrelevant things. The more irrelevant the things, the more cunning they get.

Diane Di Prima

It’s a rather tedious fact of life that most of us who are confined to the human condition spend a great deal of time wishing to be something we’re not.

Kinky Friedman

You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Margaret Atwood

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