What’s this? An urban birthday cake? A night-time lava flow down Via España?
It’s the bomberos’ annual torchlight parade, a smaller event than in years past. It was still a good show and the community still turned out to hear the bombero bands and cheer Panama’s heroic firefighters on, but this year’s participation was limited to the capital’s fire brigades and the procession was led by the poster boy for the 20-30 Telethon rather than the president.
I suspect that if President Torrijos skips the parades but does a better job of funding the bomberos --- who in many cases have to work with equipment that’s inadequate for the challenges they face --- people will understand and approve.
The parade marked the 117th birthday for the Cuerpo de Bomberos, and although any presents will come late in this time of government austerity, there can be no doubt that more modern tools are at the top of the firefighters’ wish list.
Both yours truly and The Panama News are December’s children, so as the Christian world gets set to observe the birthday of its savior, we have additional reasons to celebrate.
The Panama News published a special initial issue toward the end of December of 1994, then began regular publication as a free distribution tabloid in January of 1995. The paper has been through ups and downs. It was driven out of regular print publication by economic forces, but then rode the waves of technological change back to an honorable place near the top of the list of websites from and about Panama. Now that its tenth birthday is at hand, The Panama News has a wish list of its own.
Yes, it includes getting back into print publication sometime in the coming year, in at least a special issue if it’s not possible to raise the funds to go back into print on a regular basis.
But really, that’s not first on the list. The website is the most important aspect of The Panama News now, and it will continue to be that even if it resumes as a tabloid. There will always have more space online, and that’s also where most of the readers will be.
Moreover, even though donations of money and equipment are always appreciated, neither cash nor digital cameras head The Panama News wish list. A lot of people are needed to contribute a little work to the paper, and not all of these volunteers need to be in Panama. Volunteer services, the things that can make The Panama News a much stronger community newspaper, are at the top of our 10th birthday wish list.
To wit:
• Articles about science and the arts, by scientists and artists. Yes, I know you folks at the Smithsonian must be adept at academic writing for peer-judged specialized journals to advance in your fields. But the grant money that keeps you working depends in the long run on non-scientists having an appreciation for what you do. Popular writing by serious scientists is a long tradition, but to be as good at it as Rachel Carson, Carl Sagan or Isaac Asimov were, you have to practice. In the artistic fields, you may have noticed that there are vast areas of culture that The Panama News does not report, largely because it has nobody who loves and knows those art forms as well as you do. Whether it’s fashion or music, computer games or dance, movies or cartooning --- or whatever --- your appreciation of the arts could make this a much better publication.
• Help with the calendar. This includes people to gather information about sports leagues, music scenes and other local happenings, in the provinces as well as in the capital. It includes someone, not necessarily in Panama, to revive the tradition of including tidal and astronomical data in the calendar.
• Volunteers to compile and write news briefs about Latin America and the Caribbean. Panama is the Crossroads of the World, and we are living in a time when most of the English-speaking world gets all of its news from just a few corporations, which give only occasional and often inane coverage of our region. The Panama News is not going to have the resources to open any foreign desks anytime soon --- remember that the editor still spends most nights sleeping on the office floor --- but if somebody who reads Spanish makes a habit of scanning Latin America’s online newspapers and compiling the most important and interesting stories into one-paragraph summaries, and somebody who need not read Spanish (although that, or a working knowledge of French or Dutch, would help) could do the same with respect to the Caribbean, The Panama News would be a more complete and interesting newspaper.
• Photographic contributions. The Panama News doesn’t get to Chiriqui, Bocas, the central provinces, Colon, Kuna Yala or the Darien nearly as much as it should. Sports coverage is spotty at best. Even in Panama City the paper is not represented at half of the cultural or community events that it ought to attend. Then there’s the sparse coverage of Panamanian and Zonian community events in the US. Those of you who think that you can’t write may still have digital cameras, and if you take pictures of newsworthy events, reduce them to low- or medium-resolution jpg graphics and send them to editor@thepanamanews.com as email attachments, you may find in yourself the photojournalist that you never suspected was there.
• Help translating things from Spanish to English. You may or may not have noticed that The Panama News was the only place where you could find an English version of President Torrijos’s inaugural address, and that we were able to publish this thanks to the donated labor of Kevin Harrington, a regular reader and one of the best translators there is. The regular columns of Raúl Leis and Miguel Antonio Bernal are translated from their Spanish originals. For me, translation is time-consuming. For people who are more perfectly bilingual than I am, the same jobs take less time. But it’s still difficult and important work, and with a bit of translating help The Panama News could bring you much better coverage of Panama and Latin America.
Understand that while the paper presently has little or no ability to pay contributors, we have a barter system of sorts in which people who help out can be compensated with advertising.
You may have noticed various modifications to this website over the past year. More changes are in the works. In the coming months I want to take the paper’s first steps into audio and video. Plans are in the works to transform the Spanish sections into something that the worst of Panama’s media barons will come to fear and the best of them will view as their incubator of new talent. On the woefully deficient business end of The Panama News there may be new alliances in the year to come.
Do not let all this talk about hoped-for improvements lead you to believe that there isn’t a lot of good stuff in the present issue. There are many goodies herein. And how, other than what was happening at the moment, were they selected?
From time to time I hear allegations, mostly from people who don’t actually read The Panama News, that this is a tourist newspaper. On the other hand, there are occasional voices calling for a paper that’s narrowly oriented toward tourists and American expatriate retirees, and lamenting the fact that it doesn’t wear the kind of blinders that Fox News does. But let me give you readers --- and any wannabe competitors out there --- the lowdown on my basic editorial policies.
First, the most important story to tell about Panama is its economic development.
Second, the political parties and aristocratic families exercise editorial control over most of this country’s media, but not The Panama News.
Third, the English-reading constituency that this publication serves is amazingly varied, both within this country and when one considers the many English-speaking former residents who live outside of Panama and depend on The Panama News for news about the isthmus to which they maintain ties.
Yes, people coming here from the United States to retire, or thinking about doing so, are important parts of our readership. I hear those many requests for more information about moving here from points north. And this issue’s business section has a long article by Sam Taliaferro, the developer of Boquete’s Valle Escondido, about the challenges of coming down here to do business and the benefits that Panama could reap by doing a few things to attract more foreign retirees.
In that same section, for those who live on the local economy, there is a preview of the government’s steps toward controversial changes in the social security system. This issue will surely explode onto the streets and into future headlines.
It seems to me that all but one of Seguro’s problems can be addressed in two general ways: first, getting Panama closer to full employment; and second, making the system more efficient through modern practices and a crackdown on abuses.
The remaining problem, however, is the big one. The retirement system’s present structure is actuarily unsound, and to deal with that either contributions must be raised, benefits must be cut, or some cocktail of these bitter medicines must be swallowed. Raise contributions too much and you’d drive more small businesses into the underground economy and wouldn’t increase the fund’s income at all. Cut benefits too much and you’d have a lot more misery on the streets, which in turn would have its direct and indirect financial costs. So hard decisions must be made. It’s a time for vigilance and advocacy, but not for intransigence.
Also in the business section, I cover the conflicts and common interests of the United States and Panama in the important cattle industry.
The opinion sections are also full of economic discussions this time. On the English side, there are economist Mark Weisbrot’s column on the state of the US dollar, Gabriel Espinosa González’s analysis of how business is trumping politics in the strained relationship between Colombia and Venezuela, Zoila González Maicas’s piece on Caribbean efforts to develop a sound regional approach to tourism development and a warning by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions of the likely consequences of the impending expiration of a world textile agreement. In the Spanish opinion section FEDAP, the alliance of many of Panama’s professional groups, pleads for continued protection in the face of free trade talks.
Another Spanish-language story in this issue has added significance for The Panama News. Gonzalo Menéndez wrote for this paper when he was just our of the university but for a number of years was too busy working for the government to contribute articles, now finds himself in private business. You see, he was director of the National Environmental Authority (ANAM), the third director of that agency in a row to stand up to the pressures of the president who appointed him and withhold a permit for her controversial proposed road through the Volcan Baru National Park. Now Gonzalo has written an article about global warming, the Kyoto Protocol and how Panama is addressing the issue. Gonzalo's brother, Luis Menéndez, has also pitched in with a feature on the Isla Iguana Wildlife Refuge, complete with beautiful wildlife photos, which graces this issue's travel section.
Finally, let's get back to sundry subjects that literally or figuratively touch upon the themes of births or birthdays. Between this issue and the next one Panama will observe Mothers’ Day (December 8), which we celebrate on the Catholic Day of the Immaculate Conception, and Human Rights Day (December 10), the birthday of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The World Health Organization, in a science section article released on the recent World AIDS Day (December 1), takes up a topic that implicates both motherhood and human rights, the relationship between HIV in women and violence against women, an ugliness that often finds its expression in babies born infected. To observe Human Rights Day the English opinion section includes the Pesticide Action Network’s petition against a proposed US Environmental Protection Agency experiment that would violate human rights, and the Spanish opinions include a summary of where in the world journalists are jailed, by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.
So this is an issue full of hopes and wishes for the future, but also the sober assessments of the past and present that are necessary if we are to see brighter days ahead.
Enjoy.
