How can it be?
Moreover, how can I write about it?
Long in advance,
I knew that this second issue of October --- a month that
happens to have five Fridays, which gives us a three-week
interim between the last issue of this month and the first
edition in November --- would be the regular edition looking
immediately forward to the nation’s centennial. I knew it
this time last year. I figured that the front page photo would
be on a patriotic theme and the content would be dominated by cool places for the tourists to visit, celebrations of
our national cultural scene, and upbeat indications at the start
of our second century as an independent republic.
Until about the
middle of August, I had no idea that this issue would be part of
our fundraising drive. The plan was to conduct our semi-annual
two-issue fundraising appeal in September, but then the Sobig.F
worm attack jammed our email boxes and it seemed prudent to put
off The Panama News fundraiser for a month.
Then in
September we saw a crisis unfold around Seguro Social, but at
the time it didn’t occur to very many people that on the
eve of Panama’s centennial we would see our annoying national government go into an institutional meltdown.
However we find
ourselves in more interesting times than could have been
suspected. It has come to the point that the drums and bugles
and majorettes and the tourists who are coming to behold them
are yielding center stage to a tidal wave of public indignation,
which is also forcing our fundraiser to the bottom of this page.
Yes, this issue still informs of the parade routes and covers the extraordinary centennial
museum displays, musical gatherings, sporting events and so on --- those are also important
parts of the news --- but even that is being given a bitter
flavor with the government’s announcement that
Panama’s most renowned musician, Rubén Blades, is
being excluded from the official celebrations explicitly because
of his politics.
The growing
protest against the government can’t be lightly dismissed
as an exercise in wishful thinking by an editor who voted
against Mireya in 1999. It is, for example, a press conference
at which folks such as the Kiwanis Club, the Panamanian Business
Executives Association, the Catholic Church, the nation’s
public employees’ union and its bar association called for
the resignations of four members of the Supreme Court and
Panama’s Attorney General. It’s a presidential campaign with dynamics that have been
transformed by rapidly expanding scandals, in which the ruling
faction’s candidate is now ignored as irrelevant. It’s
an upcoming general strike that will surely turn our
republic’s 100th birthday into a six-day weekend for a
large part of the Panamanian economy. It’s a matter of the
sleaze that surrounds Mireya becoming the most salient feature
of this country in many foreign eyes.
If you read the
last issue, you may recall a speech that US Ambassador Linda
Ellen Watt made to Panama’s Chamber of Commerce bursting
like a bombshell in our body politic. That discourse on
corruption let everyone know that the looting binge accompanying
the last year in power of a clique that will never return to
office has reached the point that Uncle Sam feels offended.
So why should
the American government care? Let me get back to that question
by starting off on another tangent.
Understand that
I can get egotistical about my writing. Based on extrapolations
of a score on a law school aptitude test I took more than 20
years ago, observations that I have made over the course of a
decade in Panama and a lot of writing samples that I have read,
I’d estimate that there are about a dozen people in this
country who write more or less as well as I do in the English
language. Who is a “better” writer is in many ways a
subjective matter, but at the very least I’d have to say
that, either by comparing his best with my best, or the overall
body of his work with mine, Richard Koster is a better writer
than I am. A bunch of other people down here may or may not be
better writers than I am, but in any case we’re in the same
league. It’s a relatively small group. I don’t know
all of these people, but whenever I find myself at a gathering
of the local chapter of the National League of American Pen
Women I encounter several of them. Some of these folks write
novels, others children’s books, others short stories,
still others memos for corporations or public institutions.
One person whom
I consider at least my peer as an English-language writer does
ads. Donna Siebrasse de Sanchiz is an American married to a
Panamanian, a former aide to Republican US Senator Larry
Pressler, and the main brain behind this country’s
affiliate of the Ketchum International ad agency. As part of a
consortium with BBDO, she is one of the creators of an ad
campaign to promote Panamanian tourism, one of the current
government’s few success stories.
Next year’s
$10 million ad campaign is up for public bidding and the
government’s IPAT tourism agency has declared the BBDO-
Ketchum consortium unqualified. Donna is not the only one being
insulted by IPAT --- all bidders were deemed unqualified,
including, for example, the consortium that includes the Madison
Avenue giant Young & Rubicam.
Huh?
Next to the old
“No se puede” --- unless the right palm gets greased --
- routine, the rigged bidding qualification is the all-time
classic of Panamanian government corruption. Leave it to the
Mireyistas, not a one of whom can write his or her way out of a
paper bag in English, to slap Donna, the people who worked with
her to create a winning ad campaign, and American industry in
the face like this. (And if the contract goes to one of their
relatives rather than a bidder willing to pay kickbacks, will
the Mireyistas have the temerity to pirate the slogans and ad
copy that BBDO/Ketchum created?)
This sort of
thing is why the US Ambassador HAD to speak out.
But with the
labor movement in the streets and attracting ever more diverse support with each protest, church and
business leaders crying foul and calling for the scalps of the
high and mighty and even the Kiwanis Club getting radical about
the situation, what did the Moscoso Gang do? Mireyista Supreme
Court magistrate Alberto Cigarruista went on the TV and bragged
about what he knows about the public corruption that he and his
colleagues have legalized. Mireyista tourism director Liriola
Pitti and her accomplices played games with the ad contract. A
business-backed team of Latin American education experts gave
Panama’s public schools failing grades and the Mireyistas
blamed the Americans. Leading members of the ruling parties
crossed over to the opposition and the Mireyistas called it
betrayal.
No, Mireya. YOU
and your entourage are the ones who have betrayed Panama, again
and again, for four long years.
And The Panama
News is the publication that has chronicled this sad story for
this country’s English-speaking community, and for readers
in the United States and around the world.
I wish that the
news I bring to you twice a month would have a more positive
balance. It was more upbeat in this paper’s earlier years,
and I expect that it will be more positive again, once the
Mireya Moscoso nightmare has ended. But I call them like I see
them --- leaving space for people who disagree with me to have
their say --- and it’s not always a pretty picture.
The Panama News
exists because there are readers who want the good news and the
bad, and glimpses of both the beautiful and the ugly, in English
from the crossroads of the world. Our download logs tell us that
there are ever more of you.
However, my work
and that of the contributors to The Panama News, plus this
website’s growing popularity, do not necessarily add up to
long-term survival. This publication could fold just like another worthy website, Al Giordano’s Narco News, is
folding. We need financial support to continue, both from
advertisers and from readers’ contributions. The Panama
News is in serious debt after several years of a national
economic crisis, and that debt leaves us vulnerable to all sorts
of threats.
For example, the
threat of a mechanical breakdown. Our last computer monitor died
recently, and it was a disruption and a sacrifice to replace it.
That’s what happens when there isn’t money for a
regular capital maintenance and replacement budget.
For example, the
threat of prosecution over our debt to Seguro Social, a threat
that has been made by prosecutors who have repeatedly demanded
to know “Why haven’t you closed The Panama News?
”
For example, the
threat of not having the money to rent our office, buy and
develop film, put in the necessary time at Internet cafes,
attend sporting and cultural events and otherwise do the things
that are necessary to bring you the news. The only reason why
this issue is coming to you is that a friend donated the money
to develop a roll of film and the free use of a computer and
scanner.
The situation is
desperate but not impossible. In fact, there’s reason to
hope for better times that will allow us to bring you bigger and
better issues of The Panama News.
But whether
it’s mere survival or bold strides toward greatness, The
Panama News can’t do it without financial support from the
readers. You can do that by buying an ad. You can also do it by
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