In the unique
Panamanian style
Yes, Panama was once part of the Spanish
empire. That was a long time ago, however, and we have gone off in our
different directions. Moreover, small as Panama is, we are a nation with
regional cultures. Here you see
santeños annoying this bull, a pastime unlike the highly
stylized gory spectacles seen in
Spain or Mexico, and also
something that you won’t often see in parts of
Panama
other than in the Interior. It’s bullplaying rather than bullfighting,
nothing nearly so sanguine as the cockfights that are not only common
weekend events but also the symbol for one of this country’s minor
political parties. Read
Darrin DuFord’s take on this Los Santos event in
our travel section.
Los Santos is, of course,
Panama’s driest province. It
even has a desert. But terrible
floods and landslides that took place
while the last issue of The Panama News was being produced are front and
center in the national mind. There are the relief efforts to which many
private citizens, companies and
governments contributed. There are serious
questions about building practices that contributed to the death and
destruction. The longer term public policy challenge that lurks behind
many of the more immediate concerns is the subject of this issue’s
editorial.
Compared to our neighbors across the
Caribbean Sea in Haiti,
Panama’s tragedy was minor. By all accounts, what happened and is
happening in Haiti was and is as much the product of a dysfunctional government
as of the weather.
The United States, citing an amazing unorthodox doctrine that it has the
right to intervene to remove “failed governments” in other countries, did
just that when it packed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide onto a
plane headed for exile, but we can see from the television pictures of
hungry mobs and armed gangs assaulting international food relief efforts
that the creation of a “successful government” was apparently not part of the US
plan. In our opinion section
Jenna Liut
of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs weighs the new US intelligence
director’s qualifications by reference to his record with respect to
Haiti, and in our science section the Pan-American Health Organization
notes one of the
biological fallacies behind something the present inept Haitian
government has done in response to the
catastrophe.
Sadly, in the world’s poorest countries only great calamities
attract much attention from the multinational media corporations that are
based in the industrialized world, and even then we mostly see and hear
the lurid, at the expense of the intelligent.
Leading our review section we look at a documentary about a less
acute but still very severe aspect of poverty in one of our neighboring
countries. Nicaraguan director Rossana Lacayo was recently in town to show
her “Hidden Truths” video, about the widespread and growing phenomenon of
prostitution in her country. Her work skips the lurid and goes heavy on
the intelligent, and as it comes with English subtitles those of you who
do not understand Spanish very well can still benefit from seeing it,
assuming that its distribution makes it available to you.
That showing, by the people who put on the
University of Panama’s Cine
Universitario, brought an overflow crowd to Excedra Books. In that sense
as well it was an important cultural event, because the group’s regular
premises on campus have been closed for remodeling and this was a clear
reminder that this small but important Panamanian cultural institution
lives.
So does the Theatre Guild of Panama, which is giving advance notice
of their
upcoming play, a Halloween weekend whodunit to start the new
English-language theater season.
Also very much alive is the
Fundacion Humanitas, which will be
having a fundraising dinner to bring some love and caring to needy cats
and dogs in the metro area’s poorer neighborhoods.
This issue also takes notice of some of the other important actors
in our community and cultural scenes. Sculptor
Emily Zhukov, to whom The
Panama News owes many favors for things she has done for us over the
years, has a new exhibition. Panagringo theater director-producer
Bruce
Quinn is putting on a Spanish-language production of The Wizard of Oz.
Who’s New and the Artguilders are about to put on their usually excellent
annual
Christmas Bazaar. Maybe the most important thing about a recent
boxing night was that it was the occasion for sports journalist Héctor
Villarreal and the TVN network to revive live coverage of our national
fight scene after a pause of several years' duration.
These are the things that a community
newspaper like The Panama News ought to cover. We will do a better job of
it to the extent that it’s more a matter of “we,” rather than just me.
Send in your articles, photos, letters, press releases, calendar
announcements and other contributions if you want to make this a better
news service.
Meanwhile, many eyes here are fixed to the
north, as the United States gets ready to hold crucial elections. The
Panama News is responding, as we have been, by trying to bring you some of
the more important things that Mr.
Bush and Mr.
Kerry are saying. This
time we publish the transcripts of major foreign policy speeches by the
respective candidates in our English-language opinion section, and we also
have
Democrats and
Republicans making pronouncements on domestic
situations in the Spanish-language opinion section. And yes, there are
other alternatives for the American electorate, as we are reminded on the
letters page.
The problem with people getting
“forbidden” messages when trying to click onto The Panama News seems to
have gone away --- I still don’t know exactly how and why we had it ---
and since then it appears that our general trend of readership growth has
resumed. Mail responses from our fundraising drive are just beginning to
trickle in --- the mail seems to be taking a week or so longer than usual
--- so it’s hard to say how much the electronic problem affected us. I do
thank everyone who has contributed toward The Panama News.
One potential problem that we noted in the
last issue is, according to the Panama Canal Authority, not likely to be a
problem for them. I sent them some emailed questions about an
El Niño effect that’s underway, and got some
responses from
Carlos A. Vargas, their man whose job it is to know about
such things. He says that the canal’s experts project that this El
Niño will be too weak to affect canal
operations.
Problems never cease, but life would be boring without them. I have
to get philosophical about it until I can replace the broken floppy drive
on my venerable old Mac, which has made me produce this issue on a
different computer, using a different program. I hope that the
unmistakable signs of learning new tricks in the course of production do
not detract too much.
Enjoy.
Eric Jackson
the editor
