At the risk of coming across like an insufferable pop psychoanalyst, the above photo, which is courtesy of the Presidencia, leaves me with the impression that a deeply shaken Mireya Moscoso was putting on one of her phoniest smiles and her chosen successor Martín Torrijos was trying awfully hard to be civil. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know these people personally. But the tension in the photo seems palpable to me.
Meanwhile, diplomats are being diplomatic but Mireya’s fistful of families and friends are getting kicked off of the gravy train. It has started with the evaporation of foreign assistance to the one branch of government that the Mireyistas think they can control after the September 1 inauguration, the judiciary.
In the last issue The Panama News noted the attempt by the Moscoso appointees who control the quasi-privatized Tocumen Airport authority to hand out vendor concessions at the new terminal, which will not be finished until about a year and one-half after Mireya leaves office. There are definite and consistent rumors about who some of the new concessionaires will be, but I think that these will not come to pass, because I can’t imagine the incoming PRD administration allowing Mireya’s relatives to pick those plums.
What’s a disgraced outgoing president to do in such unhappy circumstances? Why, go on shopping trip to Asia and Europe, of course, and en route attend a royal wedding in Spain. Ms. Moscoso was one of only five Latin American heads of state present for those nuptial vows. Most of her colleagues were too busy for that.
In her absence, a gang of at least a dozen men, led by one of the president’s few fellow landowners along the route of the much-criticized “Ecological Road” from Boquete to Cerro Punta through the Volcan Baru National Park, began a highly illegal machete and chainsaw massacre in the park. They only felled about 100 trees before they were stopped. Charges are being pressed against those who have been identified, but as this issue was uploaded nobody had yet been thrown in jail and the president hasn’t been available for comment. But in the Opinion section I comment about it --- take them away!
So is she really going to do it? Is she really going to jam the unpopular road through the park before she goes? Is she really going to shower herself, her family and her friends with lavish bon voyage gifts for Mireyismo’s long cruise to political oblivion?
It seems as if some of her people are already jumping off that ship. Winnie Spadafora supported and took advantage of the outgoing government’s information control policies, but now his future on the Supreme Court is at stake, old adversaries are coming back to power, and --- surprise, surprise! --- he has overruled the exceptions to Panama’s transparency law that the lady whom he frequently escorted to social events put into place. Just like the present legislature, most of whose members won’t be back in September, has purported to cut back the privileges that the next assembly will enjoy.
Nobody who knows anything can say that these sorts of things were unexpected, but there is reason for optimism. Count the votes --- those cast on May 2 or those in the incoming Legislative Assembly --- and the only way it adds up is that the usual sorts of lame duck games will be unsustainable. I don't expect that Martín will be in the mood to play, but in any case we shall know soon enough how good I am at predicting these things.
If the expressions in our cover photo are pained, those coming from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are downright painful. In our News section I run some of these, along with a primer on some of the legal questions involved. (Does The Panama News have the right to run these photos? Although we did not take them, buy them, release them first or obtain any written authorizations, it is my legal judgment that these are now US government records and as such are in the public domain, whether you want to look at it from the perspective of US or Panamanian copyright laws.) I think that Seymour Hersh deserves another Pulitzer for his work on this story and that the corporate media with the money to follow this story where it might go should continue to do so, but in the little world of Panamanian journalism my news analysis gets into aspects of the story that haven’t been touched.
Iraq also plays prominently in half of this issue’s Opinion columns. We start by reprinting what the man in the hot seat, Donald Rumsfeld, had to say to an audience of his friends, the folks at the Heritage Foundation. Then Rabbi Michael Lerner, who most definitely is not Rumsfeld’s friend, expounds on the moral, social and political ramifications of the scandal. Eloy Fisher follows up with his usual irreverence, as he considers how George W. Bush might spin this mess away.
The ferocity of the US election campaign is growing every day, and I expect it to be very close and ultimately won or lost on people’s perceptions of their own economic prospects under the main contenders. Down here the GOP is already well organized to turn out the absentee vote, but the Democrats are also coming together. In this issue I highlight the American community’s senior Democrat, Richard Koster. (Yes, I was elected as a Democratic precinct delegate several times in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and think that a Kerry presidency would be a change for the better, but in future issues I intend to give our local Republicans fair coverage of what they have to say for themselves as well.)
Leave it to a guru from India to shed some happiness and light on this issue. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar --- not to be confused with the musician who has a similar name --- is a yogi with a classical Vedic education and enlightened, pragmatic views that ought to be of interest to people of all religious and philosophical persuasions. The crowd he drew to ATLAPA was quite impressive, with Panama’s Hindu community turning out in force, yet outnumbered by the non-Hindus in the audience. What made this even more impressive to me was that Sri Sri’s visit came on the heels of a startling defeat for the Hindu religious right in his own country, a development that I expect will advance the cause of world peace. Among our Opinion columns, Mark Weisbrot looks at developments in India from an economist’s perspective.
Those of you who are bilingual, even just a little bit, may find our Spanish section interesting this time. The Panama News and Las Noticias de Panamá rarely publish the same stories in both languages, and we don’t do so in this issue. On our Spanish pages we have some important stories about foreign investment in Latin America generally, new Colombian government concessions to our neighboring country’s right-wing paramilitaries, a act of US-Panamanian friendship by the American Embassy and the US Marine Corps and an upcoming book presentation that’s part of the celebrations of Panama’s Day of the Black Ethnicity. (Which takes place on May 30, the anniversary of an anti-slavery proclamation by the old Spanish Empire.) Our Spanish-language opinion section includes sociologist Marco Gandásegui Jr.’s take on where Panama needs to go from here and an essay by one of the supporters of the anti-Castro Cuban activists who were recently sentenced to prison here. You bilingual folks might also want to check out our English-language Community section sign up for the mostly-Spanish La Carta de Panama email forum.
Finally, for those of you who have not yet directly experienced Panama, don’t let my Travel section excursion through a night of insect fear scare you off. As for the majority of readers who have already tasted the water of the Chagres River? You’ll know.
Enjoy.
