Extreme weather up there, sunny days down here

Yep. In Parque Porras on weekends and afternoons, the bombero and community marching bands are practicing. The high school girl who lives across the street from the office is practicing her baton twirling moves again.

It rains just about every day, on the average with slowly increasing intensity, but when there’s a hurricane in the Caribbean it usually sucks away our moisture and we get a sunny day or two. That’s what we see above, in an NOAA satellite photo of Hurricane Ivan at the time that it had just devastated Jamaica, was in the process of trashing the Cayman Islands, was beginning to sideswipe Cuba and en route to dumping Panama’s seasonal rains on Alabama. Notice how clear the skies over most of Panama were at the time.

Inexorably, the really heavy rains of November and early December approach. Since the photo above was taken, our precipitation has come back with a vengeance.

It won’t be long before the snook start coming from the Caribbean Sea into our Atlantic side rivers and streams to spawn. This annual migration, of which local sports fishing enthusiasts are well aware, hardly registers in our national tourism picture, but it should.

Soon a certain class of the faithful will be taking their purple robes out of the mothballs, and already a lot of folks have made or are making their airline reservations. It won’t be peak tourist season until the dry season comes at the end of the year, but the October 21 Festival of the Black Christ in Portobelo in effect marks the beginning of the 2004-2005 tourist season.

Close on its heels will come Independence Day on November 3, and all the patriotic parades and celebrations of our eleventh month. They will not be as big a deal as last year’s centennial festivities, but they will still be a very big deal. As these words were written on a Sunday morning, I could hear just how big a deal it is --- the local bombero band was practicing just down the street, all decked out in their red, white and black dress uniforms, treating the neighborhood to a selection of drum and bugle marches.

Then on December 8, Panamanians will head home to see Mom. Mothers’ Day here, on the Catholic Day of the Immaculate Conception, is a very important holiday, the last big event of the year’s rainy season.

Does it show? I LIKE Panama’s rainy season. Even if the roof at the Edificio Muchachas Guias, where The Panama News office is located, tends to leak. Even if I frequently have to swap my preferred rainbow flip-flops, which work remarkably like water skis on many city sidewalks during a rainstorm, for actual shoes.

I am definitely not promising you the absence of inclement weather, but nevertheless, does this description make you readers in northerly latitudes want to come visit Panama now?

(By the way, despite the ongoing rainy season, we are getting first warnings of an El Niño effect in progress, which usually means a longer and dryer dry season, something that most farmers hate and the salt dryers around Aguadulce love. When these phenomena get severe enough they affect the operations of the Panama Canal and do weird things to our fisheries.)

What I am telling you about our climate is different from what the tourist brochures emphasize. It’s not contradictory, but just different.

The American Chamber of Commerce recently held their annual tourism forum at the Hotel Miramar, and I was there with my reporter’s notebook. Rubén Blades gave his first public presentation as the new director of Panama’s governmental IPAT tourism bureau, a position that has been given cabinet rank in the Torrijos administration, at the forum. US Ambassador Linda Watt’s preceding remarks and the panel discussion that followed were very good, both in their own right and by comparison with previous versions of the event. Of course, this was AMCHAM, which is by and large united by a free market economic philosophy. But this year we heard little ideology and a lot about the successes and problems of people who actually make their livings in the Panamanian tourism business. Notably absent was the gushy froth that spews forth from those whose profession is hype. It wasn't missed.

As in, the makings of a a good business section story. Actually, the lead business section and travel section stories, because I deal with the Blades presentation separately. Moreover, as the new IPAT director put out the call for suggestions, The Panama News takes him up on his offer in this issue’s editorial.

There has also been a lot of news this time, not all of it to do with the change of administrations.

But the change in our national government is a big story, or rather a series of them.

The Torrijos administration really had no other choice but to take some austerity measures, which will be painful but relatively short-term.

The new president did have a choice of people among whom to select a new Social Security Fund director. That choice was René Luciani, who is not particularly popular with some of the labor unions and who is committed to making some hard decisions that are sure to bring the protesters out onto the streets. The government is going to raise the required payments or lower benefits or both because it has to, and we shall see whether or not it further inflames the situation by privatizing the pension fund’s management or distributing the sacrifices inequitably.

An inexorable process of audits and investigations of the previous administration’s abuses has been set into motion, and even if a court, an attorney general or a president tries to call a halt to this process before it reaches its logical conclusion in a criminal prosecution of Mireya Moscoso, the matter will not go away anytime soon. Along with the audits and investigations, there are some technical inspections and studies underway, with respect to the second bridge over the canal that leads to nowhere, and to the overpass between Albrook and Balboa that has been completed but not opened, apparently for a very good reason.

Meanwhile, society is rid of some parasites. Erstwhile Bocas del Toro real estate - noni - teak scamster Tom McMurrain has been taken away in handcuffs to face allegations that he stole more than $9 million from investors in one of his previous scams, the one he was running in Atlanta from 1997 to 2000. Darien’s ethnic cleansing lady, Haydée Milanés de Lay, will have to continue her campaign to dispossess the indigenous communities outside the comarca without the income and immunity of a legislator. These two stories might have been predicted, as can be the likelihood that their protagonists will now sink into obscurity.

However, the Bocas real estate hustle for which McMurrain is rightly infamous will continue to be a story, not only because the San Cristobal Land Development mess that McMurrain leaves behind will take awhile to sort out, but also because he was not the only real estate scamster in that neck of the woods. Moreover, the futures of those current and former Panamanian public officials who lent their assistance to Tom McMurrain’s scam --- former Vice-President Arturo Vallarino, Attorney General José Antonio Sossa, prosecutor Julio Laffaurie Forero, former Bocas Mayor Eladio Robinson and former regional IPAT director for Bocas Mauricio López, to name the most prominent among them --- really do need to be sorted out. (Even if La Prensa is totally ignoring the story and El Panama America can’t get it right.)

Ah, but am I getting too serious, too pugnacious? Maybe it’s something I ate. Maybe the teacher needs to sit me in the corner to study my Kuna words and play with my coloring book.

It could be that I’m just in one of those moods, with external stimuli working upon my general nature.

This is, of course, the September of our semi-annual fundraising drive. Unfortunately, there has been some sort of electronic problem affecting the site in recent days. What's happening now is that some --- but not all --- attempts to visit The Panama News have elicited a “forbidden” message. The problem is being looked into, but as this issue was uploaded it was reducing our readership numbers and I was still baffled. At first glance it seems that somehow this website is being treated as if it were publishing obscenity or racism, so that certain browsers set to "moderate filtering" block access. But at this point I can't say for sure.

I am going to have to get to the bottom of this problem, and then decide what to do about this fundraising drive in light of what I find. Recall that last year I had to put off the September fundraiser due to a worldwide Internet worm attack that was affecting this site and my email boxes.

To those who have contributed toward the cause, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Those of you who want to see this publication continue so much that you are willing to contribute toward the reduction of this publication’s debts, promotion of its further operations and the hope of its return to print publication in time for our 10th birthday at the end of this year, make your checks out to Eric Jackson* with a note that it’s for The Panama News, and mail them to:

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That time of the year