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Actually, the photo taken above was shot from the side of a dirt road in San Felix district, across from a school that just got two new classrooms courtesy of the US military. This is in the Ngobe- Bugle Comarca, one of the most impoverished parts of Panama, a place where few tourists go. What you see is part of Panama’s vernacular architecture, the way that people in these parts who can’t afford cinderblocks or concrete or plumbing or electrical fixtures build.

The last time I was in this neighborhood was in 1995, when about a mile away the Ngobe-Bugle General Congress met along the banks of a river in a place that was claimed by both an arrogant foreign mining company and the Ngobe nation. Now the company’s gone and the spot is one of the comarca’s nicer recreational assets.

The company’s offer was heavy on the pollution and light on the jobs, thus an offer that could be and was refused. But people here want and need development. It so happened that National Guard and Reserve units from the United States needed some practice at engineering, tropical medicine and other specialties, and that was an offer that the locals accepted. The closing of this year’s Nuevos Horizontes maneuvers is our lead News story this time.

There’s more reporting than usual in this issue. In the Business section, Dutch journalist Okke Ornstein takes a look at another sort of development offer, one that tends to make Americans look bad in many Panamanian eyes, even though the people who get hurt the most tend to be gringos rather than panameños. Read and be advised: eat noni if you can stand the stuff and you think it will do you any good, but beware when someone makes a noni investment pitch that sounds too good to be true. It is.

I also caught up with a former US Army South commander, who came here with a conservative group, and a former political prisoner who most definitely did something to offend the former dictatorship and says he took substantial abuse in return. These stories are in the News section. Back in the Business pages, I caught a presentation of an important long-term study on Panama’s social and economic development.

The production of this issue has been dogged by a problem I wanted to see --- heavy rains. Two resulting power outages on production Sunday have put me slightly behind my pace, and now that the ground has been soaked and darkness has fallen, newly hatched insects are swarming around my computer screen. Ah, life in the tropics!

The politicians are coming around these days, distributing literature and canvassing door-to-door, driving down the street in sound trucks and so on. There are some spirited PRD primary races, but the general election is a year away.

If the politicos are campaigning early, I'm following them a year in advance, too. My Opinion column this time is about what Martín Torrijos might do to blow his lead in the polls between now and Election Day. The section goes far afield this time, from retired businessman Juan Manuel Handal's column on his battle with tobacco to Association of Caribbean States Secretary-General Norman Girvan's article on missed deadlines in international trade talks; from imprisoned American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier's take on the Iraq War to the US Treasury Secretary's talk to Brazil's American Chamber of Commerce. For those of you who are bilingual, the Spanish Opinion section gets into the recent arrest of four journalists in Panama, a couple of takes on an upsurge in Cuba's political repression, the Caribbean airline crisis and a topical question of journalistic ethics.

For those of you who mostly like to look at the pictures, we have a returning Panamanian-American Prisoner of War, a return of something we hadn't seen in awhile to Howard and a portrait of a candidate for Public Enemy Number One.

On the cultural side, this issue gets into dark fantasy and Chinese brainteasers, a film series about one of humanity's more unfortunate vulnerabilities, and the eternal struggle between dogs and men over newspapers.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor

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