Highly qualified health experts can and do differ about how much good it does, but a wallow in warm volcanic mineral water feels great even if it does fall short of curing all that ails ye. It's another of the attractions of El Valle, to which I paid a little visit for our travel section this time.
There was a three-week gap between issues this time, much of which, quite frankly, I have spent resting and processing this year's mangos. As those of you who noticed the missing calendar and dining sections in the previous issue may have surmised, I needed the breather. The El Valle excursion was a break from the break.
I also took a little time to work on the links buttons, in this case adding things to the tops of the news, letters and travel pages. Yes, I know --- I have for various reasons been procrastinating on the long-awaited website makeover, only making baby steps like these so far. Greater changes are on the way.
Meanwhile, even if I take a few days out of the loop, the world moves on. In the past three weeks a lot has happened in Panama and a lot of other things that may affect us have happened elsewhere. There are some major national and international stories pending out there.
The Democrats had their convention in Boston, and what sounded to me like the most intelligent discussion, the keynote address by Illinois state senator Barack Obama, is in this issue's opinion section. I plan to give the Republicans similar space after their convention in New York.
Also in the opinion section, we have three different perspectives on what's going on in Haiti, those of US Secretary of State Powell, South African President Mbeki and Pennsylvania prison inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The big regional news story that's immediately looming is the presidential recall referendum in Venezuela. Long ago I predicted that there would be a recall vote and that Hugo Chávez would survive it. But I'm a journalist, not a prophet, and as these words were written the outcome looked very much in the air to me.
Looking forward on the local horizon, Martín Torrijos is gradually announcing his new team. It looks like the constitutional changes that he promoted will get passed by two successive legislatures and become a large mess for the courts. The new president will take office facing severe challenges --- none worse than the financial quagmire that his administration will inherit --- and by pushing the constitutional reform effort he has spent some of his post-election good will. However, as the curtains come down on a five-year political nightmare the country's mood seems fairly optimistic to me.
The hopeful mood is in large part due to the sad state of affairs at the moment. We are witnessing the death agony of the Moscoso administration, and it's not a pretty sight.
After a sordid five years of crime in the suites, Mireya has called special legislative sessions to consider a wide range of demagoguery about crime in the streets --- even as the Electoral Tribunal was nullifying a Darien election result due to a vote-buying scandal that if traced to its origins would surely implicate people at the top level of the administration. In the meantime, Mireya's had more than 2,000 people locked up, mostly for minor offenses, causing a tremendous aggravation of this country's already serious jail and prison overcrowding.
Despite her protests that anyone who doesn't support her last-minute "hard hand" is pro-crime, most of the people who have to deal with the realities of the problem from day to day are aghast and most of such legislation as she is likely to push through is likely to be repealed by the next assembly.
It is perhaps ironic that while Panama lives through such times, I have received sad news about an ex-convict I knew. Frank "Big Black" Smith was one of several people who in practice taught me the fallacy of all the hue and cry about getting tough with crime. He died natural causes in a North Carolina hospital at the age of 70 the other day.
Thirty-six years ago, Big Black was the coach of the inmates' football team at a New York state prison called Attica. A huge man doing time for the robbery of a dice game, he was erudite (mostly by self-education), a bit older, calmer and wiser than most of the others, and one of the few guys who had a good rapport with most of the guards and most of the inmates.
The 1971 Attica prison uprising found Smith working in the prison laundry, and called out by his peers to head the security detail that guarded those guards held hostage. His immediate task was to keep some of the crazier and more vindictive prisoners from killing the guards.
When the state had had enough and Governor Rockefeller gave the order to attack, several of the hostages were killed --- by the state police in their wild-shooting assault. Frank Smith did his duty to humanity and protected the hostages, but Nelson Rockefeller shirked his duty in his conduct of the attack and killed both inmates and the guards he was supposedly rescuing.
(For those who are not old and buzzardly like me, or who have run in different circles in your life, you may want to refer to one of the all-time classics of American journalism, Tom Wicker's book "A Time to Die." This is about the Attica rebellion, in which the New York Times columnist found himself directly involved when he was named by the inmates as one of the people whom they wanted to serve as mediators with the state.)
A number of inmate leaders were slain when the police moved in, and it has been alleged that a couple of these were summary executions of men who surrendered unwounded. In any case, the fate of L. D. Barkley and Sam Melville was not to be Big Black's.
Smith was stripped down and made to lie on steel bed springs with a gun to his head. A football was placed between his chin and chest and he was told that if he let it drop he would be shot. The state police then proceeded to burn him with cigarettes and lighters under that threat.
After his release Frank Smith, along with the late Akil Al-Jundi, led the plaintiffs in the Attica Brothers' civil lawsuits against the state and Rockefeller. Ultimately they prevailed, and Smith was awarded $375,000 in damages for the torture that was inflicted upon him.
Smith, like Al-Jundi, played an honorable and progressive role after his release from prison. I met both of these men while active in legal and political defense efforts for America's political prisoners. Frank Smith was always down-to-earth, sober and pragmatic --- downright "small c" conservative in a way --- in a movement that always seems so hopelessly out on the fringe but which has over the years won the release of many Puerto Rican independence fighters, Black Panthers and veterans of the Weather Underground.
Frank Smith never got to coach a high school, college or professional football team, but after his release he showed the qualities of a great coach wherever he went. Big Black's was a voice of reason when a large part of a whole generation was going nuts over crack, the voice of one of the usual suspects when someone was demanding the release of political prisoners, for a time the voice of one of those most valued legal assets --- a paralegal with jailhouse lawyer credentials, a gentle old tough guy who would neither beat you up nor fall for your squirmy little responsibility dodges.
Are there any lawyers out there, any professionals of any kind, who want to know what "fiduciary" means? Consider the example of Frank "Big Black" Smith. There was a man who always kept the faith. Frank Smith was a human being with feet of clay like the rest of us, but despite that he was a very decent man who turned out to be a great asset to society.
While I do believe that there are criminals against whom society needs to be protected, one of the lessons that I draw from this old association is that a one-size-fits-all "lock them up and throw away the key" approach to crime is the product of thinking that's at the same time lazy, impractical and wasteful, as well as mean-spirited.
It's not that I think that the criminal aspect of a generalized fraying of the Panamanian social fabric is a matter to be ignored, nor is it that I'm an old-fashioned American liberal who confuses understanding the origins of anti-social phenomena with excusing those who indulge in criminal conduct. The bottom-line truth, however, is that both politically motivated militant ignorance and the "hard hand" approach have undergone prolonged tests in many places, without particularly impressive results.
And I really don't want to hear it from crooks like the Mireyistas.
As the Moscoso years have slipped by a tedium has set in. It has been a while since I've had any fun chronicling the Mireyistas' sleaze --- when it was new it was sometimes almost funny, but mostly it has been five years of being insulted by people with an exceptionally creepy high school in crowd mentality. I'm eager to see the country move on to another period in our history. There's only one more issue of The Panama News to go before we start talking about the Moscoso administration in the past tense, and that's fine with me.
I really do look forward to the Torrijos administration, even though I do so with multiple doubts and a major dose of skepticism, and even though a big part of the story to come will be whether and how the worst of those who came before are punished for their crimes. It really is time for the nation to turn a page.
And it's as good a time as any to take the cure in El Valle.
Enjoy.
