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In the eastern religions, they talk of karma. All of the philosophies and religions that have withstood the test of time come to a similar conclusion. Evil exists in this world, and tyranny and corruption exist in public life, but even when change is delayed for more than a lifespan, tables turn, a day of reckoning comes and those who were once high and mighty in their arrogance are laid low. In one of the many passages in which the Bible expounds on this concept, it is written:

“If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they.”

And so Panama is about to be relieved of the burden that Mireya Moscoso has placed upon us. On her way out she and her followers have helped themselves to yet more of the public trust and one of the first great tests of the incoming Torrijos administration will be whether and to what extent it allows the Mireyistas to keep what they have taken.

This was not Panama’s first kleptocracy, and we have seen worse tyranny. But the nation is ready for change, and not merely a new cast of characters doing the same old things.

Actually, the whole region, maybe the whole world, is in flux.

The recent recall election in Venezuela will not convince Hugo Chávez’s enemies to give up, but it has weakened Washington’s hand in these parts, and Latin Americans are increasingly looking south rather than north for models of a better economic order. As befits the watershed event that the Venezuelan referendum is likely to be for this region, we look at it from several different directions. The review section includes an analysis of La Prensa’s coverage, while in the opinion columns Oscar Heck sums it up from Caracas and Mark Weisbrot from Washington, while over in the Spanish section Mexican writer Edgar González Ruiz views it in more apocalyptic terms.

I don’t think that Martín Torrijos’s overtures toward South America, which may lead to Panama’s membership in MERCOSUR, are unrelated.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Charley spared Panama a certain amount of rain and also some political turmoil. We are outside of the hurricane belt, but just close enough so that big tropical storms tend take away our rainy season clouds and drop their precipitation on someone else. In this case our rain fell on Tampa just when US and Panamanian negotiators were set to meet there, and the storm forced the postponement until October of the fourth round of bilateral free trade talks at which Mireya had hoped to get an agreement before she left office. The postponement of the Tampa negotiations led in turn to the postponement of planned street protests here.

I have a hunch that American election year politics will delay any possible bilateral agreement once again.

Because so many of the people who read The Panama News are US citizens, and moreover, because so many members of this country’s American community are military veterans, I have included in this issue the discourses of both George W. Bush and John Kerry before the recent Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. Also, in our community section, there is information to help US residents of the isthmus who want to cast absentee ballots in time to be counted in the November 2 election.

This newspaper’s big birthday --- our 10th --- is coming up at the end of December. Meanwhile, we have other birthdays to notice in this issue.

Anona Kirkland, who used to write the social section in the old Star & Herald and is Panama’s senior English-language journalist, celebrated her 100th birthday recently and we caught the festivities at St. Luke’s. A small but in many ways representative section of the country’s English-speaking community turned out, so although it was Anona’s day the story is almost as much about us as it is about her.

A couple of days later the Panama Canal observed its 90th birthday. This issue marks that event with the Panama Canal Authority’s celebratory take on the occasion and with a glance at the controversy about the waterway’s future.

Even our outdoors section touches on a birthday of sorts, notwithstanding the fact that endangered sea turtles lay eggs rather than give live birth.

In these days when hope and optimism are the prevailing moods, it’s easier to remember to stop and sniff the flowers. But then, probably not this flower.

So maybe you might want to appreciate Panama’s disappearing but far from disappeared bus art instead.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor

PS: The photo above is courtesy of the presidencia, but I doubt that I see in it the same message that Mireya would have liked to convey. I witnessed her "hard hand" crackdown from a laundromat on Via España, and it is the subject of my opinion column this time.



BREAKING NEWS: Mireya has pardoned me, along with four Cuban terrorists, a bunch of corrupt politicians and a large minority of the journalists in this country. The afternoon before the pardons were announced Michael Pierce, a lawyer for American scam artist Tom McMurrain, whose company charged me with criminal defamation for reporting on his noni-teak-real estate schemes, offered to drop the charges in exchange for the unflattering articles being removed from this website. I refused. The articles in question are online: here, here, here, here, here and here.

No apologies are forthcoming from this quarter.

Read all about the pardons in the next issue.