review

El Hidaldo
Beatríz Valdés, editor

El Imparcial
Cristóbal Sarmiento, editor


Do you know the concept “hidalgo?” If you don’t you will not understand Latin American history very well at all, and some key moments events in English history will also fly over your head.

“Hidalgo” is a Spanish contraction for “hijo de algo” --- somebody’s son. A polite English-Spanish dictionary translates the word as “nobleman,” but strictly speaking, a number of the hidalgos who infested the Americas as part of the Spanish Conquest were bastards who could hold no title of nobility, but whose fathers could still pull strings on their behalf. Many of the rest of the hidalgos were the younger brothers of eldest sons who inherited the family titles and fortunes. In the next generations after the Conquest, the sons of the upstarts (who generally hailed from southern Spain, which had recently been conquered from the Arabs, which is why Latin Americans speak without the Castilian lisp) who made a lot of money in the New World could also be hidalgos.

(The stage was set for the Spanish Armada when England's Catholic Queen Mary I married Felipe II, the king of Spain, who exported hundreds of predatory hidalgos to her realm, where they made a lasting bad impression on the yeoman farmers from among whom arose the landed gentry and the urban craftsmen and merchants whose most successful successors would become the British Empire’s industrial and commercial elites. Mary died and her Protestant sister Elizabeth I quickly shed the hidalgos, who are to this day associated in the English popular culture with the Spanish Inquisition and Latin American corruption.)

Hidalgos then, and their present-day cultural progeny, consider work beneath their dignity. They were, and the people who aspire to carry on their traditions are, a parasitic caste.

Beatriz Valdés is back in print. For more than a decade she published El Heraldo, a free tabloid that was part rabiblanco social pages and part highbrow culture. That publication was surely read more by high society wannabes than by the rabiblancos themselves, and its logical base of advertisers was ultimately taken over by the much slicker and far more vacuously consumeristic Ellas, the La Prensa women’s supplement. El Heraldo was one of the casualties of our turn of the century economic crisis.

But now Beatriz is back, in much the same form as she was back then, with El Hidalgo. I found a copy of its volume one, number two at the Hotel Caesar Park while looking for one of those hard-to-find copies of The Visitor.

El Hidalgo covers the arts and letters, and in a very shallow celebrity-worshipping way, the sciences. (Dr. Adán Ríos may have taken out a patent for an AIDS vaccine, but that’s a far cry from saying that he’s developed one that works.) It features a posed portrait of the ladies of an exclusive gourmet cooking club.

El Hidalgo is in large part brought to you by the Panamanian people. No it’s not a public institution, nor is it a nonprofit operation. Its biggest advertiser, however is the Tribunal Electoral.

Why would the institution in charge of our cedulas and our elections be spending public funds to advertise in a new publication, one that directs itself to a very small sliver of Panamanian society?

See, it’s like this: Beatriz Valdés’s brother, Eduardo Valdés Escoffery, is the president of the Tribunal Electoral. True hidalgos consider the public trust as something to be privately appropriated for the benefit of their families.


At least most of El Hidalgo’s advertisers are from the private sector, notwithstanding that the public institution over which the owner’s brother presides bought the most space in issue number two. In El Imparcial, most of the paid ad space was bought by the Ministry of Health.

I bought the first issue of El Imparcial for 35¢ from the vendor on the corner. It’s a 16-page newsprint tabloid, entirely in black and white. The print quality is relatively decent.

The paper praises Health Minister Fernando Gracia because he “successfully confronted medical threats” and Government and Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona, who “controled the student demonstrations” and bases a report on Seguro Social on one source, who holds Juan Jované responsible.

El Imparcial also praises the Panama-Taiwan free trade pact now before the Legislative Assembly, in a story whose main source is Agriculture Minister Lynnette Stanziola.

The economy page has an article about the end of Cable & Wireless’s telephone monopoly, which hasn’t happened, and somehow manages to deal with the story without mentioning the sweetheart “contract” between a C&W exec and his brother-in-law by which the Ente Regulador set the impossibly high benchmark interconnection fee and the nefarious roles of Moscoso relatives and cabinet members who serve on the C&W board of directors.

El Imparcial has a health page, which declares West Nile virus, SARS and ebola to be worse health threats than AIDS and suggests, without ever explaining why, the use of marijuana in treating HIV infections.

On the opinion pages, El Imparcial highlights Martín Torrijos in most unflattering column entitled “El hijo del dictador.” He’s panned as an arrogant ingrate with scant education and little relevant experience, and a guy who’s fond of inventing myths about himself.

Thus the Panamanian traditions of papers that appear in the months before an election, and of papers that have clear partisan alignments but deny this in the face of all the evidence, are alive and well in El Imparcial.

If Canal Once and La Estrella hadn’t already shown us, El Imparcial is yet another reminder of the trash-strewn wasteland that’s Mireyista culture in general and Mireyista journalism in particular.


Also in this section:
Cool Internet sites
New government-funded Panamanian papers
US News & World Report and Venezuela

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