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front page
Photo by Leslie Aldredge
It wasn’t the devil who did it
The Panama News is under a multi-pronged electronic assault just at the time of our semi-annual fundraising appeal.
There are new twists, but we have seen this before. Recall that the last such fundraising month was delayed when somehow The Panama News was classified like a pornographic or racist website, such that Internet filters prevented a lot of readers from clicking onto us. That attack was specifically directed at The Panama News. A year earlier, our September fundraising appeal was delayed by uncertainties generated by the preceding weeks’ KlezE worm attack, a still unsolved crime that was directed against the Internet as a whole, most likely for the purpose of compiling email lists for sale to spammers.
On the weekend of February 26 and 27, in one of the email boxes to which this page links I received more than 5,000 identical messages, sent from separate hotmail addresses --- anonymous and apparently machine generated --- telling me that they were going to teach me a lesson about respect and responsibility.
A few days later, a hacker entered this website and inserted links to spam published by a Los Angeles company, which doesn’t respond to our emails about it. You can see this here or on almost any other page in the last issue and noticing the thick green lines that appear under one or more words on the page.
We have been hacked before, fortunately never catastrophically, but the inevitable little psychological irritant is that on our web administration page there is never any indication of when the hacker has broken into the cyberpremises of The Panama News. (The first time that happened was when The Panama News published an article about Plan Colombia support flights operating out of Tocumen Airport, and there was this cat-and-mouse game of someone erasing the story, me putting it up again, the hacker deleting again and me replacing it again, several times.)
And then, amidst all of this, the ancient Mac on which this paper is produced crashed. Now our CD-ROM drive hadn’t been working for awhile, and I first had to deal with that hardware problem --- it turned out to be a loose plug --- in order to replace the operating system and programs. And wouldn’t you know that the only program that I couldn’t download was the web design software.
When you have an existing website from which to extract templates, it’s possible to do a web page without a web design program, but for someone as inexpert at html as I am and moreover working on a Mac and uploading to the web on a PC, it’s a horrible learning experience that makes law school look easy.
But when I use the word “we” to describe The Panama News, it’s not a snotty assertion of a royalist attitude but an acknowledgement that, even though it’s largely a one-man production, this publication depends on the support and participation of many other people. Of course there are the contributors, regular, occasional and one-time. (And by the way, in this issue we introduce a new student intern from the US, Joel Inwood, who has written a tribute to the late Hunter S. Thompson. The founder of gonzo journalism, by the way, was once part of Latin America’s English-language press corps as a reporter for the San Juan Star.) You wouldn’t be reading these words were it not for people who have lent the use of their computers and expertise in this time of crisis. The Panama News wouldn’t exist at all without our advertisers and people who send money in response to our twice-a-year fundraising months. And then there are the people who have in recent months sent, and are in the process of sending, badly needed photographic and computer equipment.
Let me take this occasion to pass on word about one of our staunchest of friends, Janet Levi. She does the Kuna Words Coloring Book features in our fun section, and is one of the people who has helped us by lending the use of her computer in times of crisis. Janet recently had surgery to remove several brain tumors and it seems that the operation was a success. She’s still in the hospital and faces a difficult rehabilitation process, which may be eased just a bit by the knowledge that The Panama News and its friends are pulling for her quick and complete recovery.
I don’t intend to let all of the generous friends of this enterprise down. Bear with me and I’ll get this issue completely uploaded.
And if you care to contribute toward the cause, you can do so financially by sending a check made out to “Eric Jackson” --- there is no bank account in the name of The Panama News, so checks made out in that name are not negotiable, and with very few exceptions money orders are non-negotiable in Panama as well --- with a notation that it’s for The Panama News, and mail it to:
The Panama News
Apartado 55-0927 Estafeta Paitilla
Panama, Republic of Panama
And I thank those of you who have helped out, and will help out, from the bottom of my heart
Mainly, though, I want to thank you with a really good issue of The Panama News.
For example, the cover story, found in the arts section, is Leslie Aldredge’s photo feature on the Portobelo Diablos and Congos Festival. Then there’s my photo excursion to Colon’s Costa Abajo in the travel section. (Yep. This issue does have an unusually strong Atlantic side orientation, with, in addition to those aforementioned pieces, visits to a really good restaurant in Colon and a rustic diner in Rio Indio reported in the dining section, and a business section update on a controversial mining project that touches western Colon province as well as northern Cocle.)
Meanwhile, the long-simmering issue of corruption in Panama’s judiciary is boiling over, a confrontation over as yet undisclosed changes in Social Security Fund policies looms large over the nation’s discourse and the ever more acute polarization between left and right plays itself out in our letters and opinion pages.
One of this issue’s opinion pieces is the US State Department’s report on human rights in Panama. Yes, it would be easy to discount anything that the government that brought us torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and a wave of shootings and arrests of journalists in Iraq and elsewhere has to say about human rights. Moreover, it would be easy to condemn a report that talks about ethnic minority rights in Panama and skirts the reality that we are a society dominated by a tiny fringe of our less than 10 percent white minority. But without dismissing them, set such concerns aside for a moment and read this long and informative document. It’s the product of a lot of good work by some of the people at the US Embassy here and a “must read” for anyone who wants to be well informed about Panama.
(This is a report about the human rights situation here in 2004. I wonder how next year’s report will deal with the disturbing expansion of apartheid policies in the Panamanian media. The latest racist outrage is at the TVN television network, whose owners have hired Colombian consultants and are carrying out the latters’ recommendations to banish dark-skinned faces from news anchor positions. The employees at TVN have responded with a union organizing drive, which the management is doing its best to crush. Okke Ornstein, a Dutchman resident in Panama who has contributed to The Panama News and has a website of his own, has published a worthy report on this situation.)
In the letters section right-wing activist William Bright Marine recycles the Moonie legend about Red China dominating the Panama Canal, and a couple of our opinion columns also address China issues that will inevitably affect this country. Researcher Xuan-Trang Ho of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs considers China’s higher economic and political profile in Latin America generally. Greenpeace International notes the new Chinese energy policy, which, although they don’t get into that aspect of it, may reduce the threat of low-lying areas of Panama being inundated by rising sea levels
Those of you who read Spanish may be interested in ADITAL’s interview with deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, while in the English opinion section Rebecca Rush looks at the Haiti situation as one of several irritants within CARICOM.
So despite the momentary problems, let this issue be a reminder that The Panama News gets by with a little help from its friends. That’s how we provide an alternative for people who are interested in Panama, the Americas and the world and whose curiosity is not satisfied by the increasingly dumbed-down, intimidated, manipulated and manipulative corporate mainstream news organizations.
I hope you find my work, and that of all the other people who make The Panama News possible, worthy of your support.
Enjoy.
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