Here we have a Carnival queen from the large Panamanian community in New York at the recent Antillean Fair in Panama City. Again this year, US residents of West Indian extraction who trace roots through Panama came here in droves for Carnival, filling chartered planes and booking lots of hotel rooms. Add in the kids who go school in the USA to celebrate Carnival and Americans who were either stationed here with the US military or part of the Zonian community who came for the party and we see an important demographic fact both for this country’s tourism industry and for The Panama News readership. There are an awful lot of people outside of Panama who maintain their historic ties to the isthmus and they find reasons to visit here with some frequency.
The final touches on this issue will be, as usual of late, a few days late. However, the main features are uploaded. In addition to our trip to the Antillean Fair, we visit the Embera on Madden Lake, learn a lesson while trying to visit the Darien, and take a peek at Bruce Quinn, who has been honored for his half-century directing and producing local theater productions by being named Panama’s Theatrical Person of the Year for 2005. The news section leads with the new attorney general’s report on several of the high profile corruption cases she inherited, and in the business section we visit USMA for the continuing debate on the tax increase that’s now a done deal.
There’s a lot happening in our region, and in the relationships between foreign entities and countries in our neighborhood. The letters page, for example, touches among other things upon one of the alleged local aspects of China’s emergence as a major industrial power. Our English-language opinions begin with a slam on a Bush administration appointment with historic and practical significance to Latin America and the Caribbean and proceeds immediately to Roger Noriega’s defense and explanation of Bush’s policies in the hemisphere. Our Spanish-language news section is mostly about events in Panama, but also takes a look south to Uruguay, where a new leftist government is about to be sworn in. The Spanish “opiniones” section is a bit more internationalist and serves to illustrate some things about our neighbors in Ecuador and Colombia, including the inaugural speech of Luis Macas as the new leader of the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, an increasingly powerful and radicalized political force in their country; a look at the spillover of Plan Colombia across international boundaries --- a problem that Panama shares --- from an Ecuadoran leftist perspective; and an update on the international movement to free Ingrid Betancourt and the other hostages who have been kidnapped and are being held by Colombia’s thuggish FARC rebels.
(How dare I call FARC a bunch of thugs when body counts and anecdotal evidence indicate that the government allied AUC paramilitaries are even worse? Just the facts. While there are certainly good individuals caught up on all sides of Colombia’s endless civil conflict, the inability to find a collective “good guys” combatant faction is no excuse to apply some relativist partisan calculus that turns thugs into heroes. From a practical Panamanian perspective, the lesson I draw from both the Ecuadoran take on the Colombian government’s expanding abuses and the plea of Ingrid Betancourt’s supporters is that this country needs to do all it can to keep Colombia’s conflict out of Panama and Panama out of Colombia’s conflict. )
Meanwhile in Panama, we are all waiting for an announcement of the Torrijos administration’s social security reform package. In our letters section and elsewhere Guillermo Endara continues to call for a referendum, and opinion columns by Raúl Leis and Miguel Antonio Bernal also look into the future possibilities and present lack of meaningful public participation in the making of decisions like the one about to be made about Seguro Social.
This issue’s sports section is one of the things that’s late being uploaded, and meanwhile I received a call from Pablo Prieto about an article in the last issue. In it I noticed that this year the teenaged boys didn’t put in the best time at the Amador Regatta cayuco race, as is usually the case. But Pablo pointed out that while this may be true, the boats in the medal categories don’t have rudders, while those in the open categories are allowed this equipment, which makes the comparison somewhat unfair. I didn’t know that and it is a significant difference in the rules.
Our cayuco racing scene has found international corporate sponsorship from Nissan this year, and that bodes well for both the sport and the tourism business that it boosts. The next events are the sprints on the Chagres River in front of the Gamboa Rainforest Resort on March 5 and the Ocean-to-Ocean Race through the Panama Canal on the 18th, 19th and 20th.
Maybe some of these things may get a snippet on CNN or Fox, but I trust that you are here largely because the corporate mainstream rarely covers Panama, and then often badly. And we’re just a small part of a vast region that these US-based news outlets tend to ignore.
Which doesn’t mean that stories that those guys cover and The Panama News mostly doesn’t are of no interest here.
Iraq’s Shiite majority and Kurdish minority choosing their leaders in about as fair an election as could happen during an atrocious war? What I now hope is that the victorious slate, the people aligned with Ayatollah Sistani, will for their own reasons do what’s right for the USA by asking the Americans to leave Iraq.
North Korea with the bomb and an escalating war of words between the Bush administration and Iran? Well aren’t those the logical consequences when a major power claims the rights to dictate regime change in other countries and to wage preventive wars, and officially lists those countries as “evil?” It’s not good that Israel is likely to lose its status as the Middle East’s only nuclear power or that Pyongyang’s arms program has complicated things for South Korea, Japan and other neighbors, but these developments, after all, are the rational reactions of governments that have been explicitly threatened.
The assassination of Lebanon’s former President Hariri? This is a horrible and unsolved crime, one that would play into the hands of sickies who’d like to reignite Lebanon’s troubles or provide an excuse for more foreign intervention in the Levant. Let us hope that Lebanese authorities and if necessary INTERPOL can bring those responsible to justice, and insist that the United States, Israel, France and Syria in particular all desist from even the thought of usurping this role.
A ceasefire between the Israelis and the Palestinians? We’ve been disappointed so many times before that celebrations don’t feel right at this point. When both sides suppress their respective fanatics then we’ll have greater cause for optimism.
More revelations about the Bush administration buying off American pundits and journalists? As when Panamanian governments have done the same, I’d say it’s a worse scandal for journalism than for government, and that the proper response is that people should just tune out the offending opportunists.
Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles tying the knot? Like most Panamanians I wish them happiness, even though I’m not a monarchist, and especially because I’m not awe-stricken by royalty I wish as a journalist that people in my profession would give the Windsor family some more peace and privacy. Setting aside if one can his status as heir to the British throne, the things that he says about architecture and urban design, his observations about the state of the English language and his choices of acts for benefit concerts by the Prince’s Trust all give good reason for people to pay attention to what Charles Windsor says and thinks.
Yes, we do think about these things down here in Panama. But The Panama News is for those who want to keep track of Panama, and whose global point of view takes in Latin America and the Caribbean before gazing farther to stories taking place on the turf that the US-based news corporations cover.
The American corporate mainstream did notice in passing when Rubén Blades won his sixth Grammy --- but they didn’t consider its Panamanian political significance like I did. On the other hand, despite their far-flung international desks, they seem to have missed the debate over international shipbreaking regulations that appears in our pages.
From the contributions and communications I have received, and from the download logs we get from our web server, I would gather that someone out there appreciates this publication’s puny efforts at plugging the egregious gaps left by the major players.
Enjoy.
