Here we have a Cable & Wireless public telephone that has been vandalized and is out of service. With good reason, many Panamanians despise the UK-based phone company that has corrupted the Moscoso administration and its Public Services Regulating Board, illegally held onto a Panamanian monopoly that was supposed to end at the beginning of this year and earned itself a reputation for cooked books and securities swindles on the global level. Thus many leftist student militants see it as a political act to vandalize C&W's public phones. However, the people who rely the most on the public phones that are being put out of service are the working people whose cause the left espouses. In this Panama City neighborhood, someone who has neither a home phone nor a cell phone may have to search over several blocks to find a working pay phone to make an emergency call. Phone vandalism is far worse in rural areas, where it can leave an entire community without the means to call for assistance in the event of a crisis. Photo by Eric Jackson

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Misguided way to punish a hated monopoly

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