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Elliott Abrams, Oliver North and John Negroponte did a fine job in Central America. Under Reagan and Bush countries became free in Latin America. This is in stark contrast to the Carter years. He began the surrender of the Panama Canal and then Clinton allowed it to be turned over to China via the infamous Law 5 that gives Communist China control of the ports and functions of the Canal. Carter was more interested in exchanging right wing for left wing dictatorships. Today Iran stands at the brink of allowing a terrorist nation to have nuclear weapons. The same Iran that under Republicans was an ally, Carter surrendered it to our enemies. Many in the world have died because of his actions.

Panama can consider itself lucky to have Roger Noriega where he is. He is a big fan of Panama and is one of those most responsible for the enforced fairness of the rejection of Toro Balladares and his attempt to change the constitution and run for re-election. Without these men USA Ambassador Davis would not have come to Panama to help us fight for freedom. Without these fine men and the leadership of the best president in my generation (Ronald Reagan), Central America would have gone communist. We were lucky that we had the fine men who believe that democracy is more important than communism.

Do me a favor and stop the foolishness about how they circumvented the Congress. They had to protect the interest of the USA as well as Latin America. Because if it had been up to Dodd, Kerry, Byrd and rest of the appeasers, Latin America would have exchanged right wing for left wing dictatorships. Perfectly acceptable for the Democratic Party. Under Republicans nations become free, under Democrats they stay or become dictatorships.

Maybe it is time to remember that from 1995 to 2000, in poll after poll paid for by enemies of the USA, the people of Panama wanted the USA to stay at a rate of 75-80%. Also remember that 50,000 good jobs, paid at USA wages are no longer in Panama and that does not even include the fact that there are less Panamanian workers in the Canal today than there was in 1979. Panama cries and moans about cleaning up ammunition dumps and chemicals. Let then take the huge profits they get from the Canal and spend a fraction and clean it up themselves. It is the pineros and rabiblancos that decided that getting a piece of pie was more important than the welfare of Panamanians. They threw away the special relationship that existed between Panama and the USA. And as always it is the people who will suffer when things go bad and these bastards take the money they have stolen and go to live in Miami. Y para el pueblo mas yucca.

In conclusion, when Democrats start their whining about we cannot be the policemen of the world and if I think that we should go impose our system and values on others, I have to laugh. My answer is too bad we cannot. If it means imposing freedom, free elections, justice religious and racial tolerance, freedom of the press and democracy on others, I say hell yes. What greater gift can you give or better legacy can you leave as a country.

William Bright Marine

Offensive comparison

It's totally inappropriate to compare former Cocle Governor Richard Fifer with a species of venomous snake.

The pit vipers are our friends! Without all those patokas, fer-de-lances and bushmasters out there, the rats and mice would cause a lot more damage to our farmers' crops than they do and we might have a major hantavirus outbreak.

So let's not unfairly compare our scaly friends to disreputable politicians.

name withheld
Panama

Close the Darien Gap

The infamous Darien Gap breaks the Pan American Highway running from Alaska to Cape Horn in Panama and Colombia. The gaps are in Panama (Darien Gap) and Northern Colombia, are in the section also called the Inter-American Highway. The route from Yaviza (Panama) to Colombia is surveyed but not constructed. The Darien Gap refers to a large swath of undeveloped swampland and forest separating Panama and Colombia. The Darien gap is the missing link in a road connection through the American continents.

Range Rovers and other vehicles, which attempt transcontinental journeys, frequent the Gap. The first all-land motorcycle crossing was by Robert L. Webb in March 1975. The first all-land auto crossing was in 1984 by Loren Upton in a CJ-5 Jeep.

The Colombian side of Darien Gap is dominated primarily by the Rio Atrato, a flat marshland at least 80 km (50 miles) wide, half of this being swampland. The Panamanian side, in sharp contrast, is a mountainous rain forest, with terrain reaching from 60 m (200 ft MSL) in the valley floors to 1845 m (5900 ft MSL) at the tallest peaks (Cerro Tacarcuna).

From the Colombian side, the terminus is about 27 km (17 miles) west of Barranquillita, at Lomas Aisiadas (Casa 40) located at 7° 38' N, 76° 57' W. On the Panamanian side, the road terminus is the town of Yaviza at 8° 09' N, 77° 41' W. This marks a straight-line separation of about 100 km (62 statute miles). In between is marshland and forest.

Now, all but 54 miles are complete, but the proposed route cuts through Panama's 1.3 million acre Darien National Park and Colombia's 172,800-acre Los Katios National park.

The bill for completion is estimated at between $115 and $300 million, of which the US agreed to in May of 1971 to pay two-thirds. Panama and Colombia are responsible for the rest. The 34 remaining Colombian miles, for example, will come from a four year, $6 billion road improvement project aimed at modernizing their economy, and encouraging free trade and investment in the region. Foreign ministries as well as public works and transportation ministries in both countries have come out in favor of the highway as a way to "facilitate their economic integration."

The Colombian transport ministry under Juan Gomez is firmly in the pro-highway camp calling it outrageous that today there is still no road thatconnects all of the Americas. Even Colombian Ex-President Gavaria has entered the debate saying that: "It is not possible that, as we reach the 21st century, the Americas are not united because of a few kilometers of road. The road would help the two governments to preserve sovereignty on their frontiers and it would benefit trade and tourism...."

Foreign trade, both legal and illegal, is growing in both of these countries and in the region as a whole. Project proponents claim the highway will allow better management of legitimate trade and a better chance of controlling the drug trade. The road will help them subdue a now largely lawless region which has served as a hiding place for guerrillas, and drug traffickers.

Along with the road would come railroads, pipelines, telecommunications, tourism and commercial ventures such as hotels, gas stations that would service this new portal between the Americas. The advent of cheaper USA goods to South America and manufacturing growth in the South America. The creation of more opportunities for South Americans and thus more resistance to crime and drugs. The time is now to act.

name withheld
USA

Family and society threatened by same-sex marriage

How long can a workable and desirable society survive if its government begins to pass laws which act to separate the state from morality?

In Canada Pierre Trudeau began the slide into an amoral abyss with the liberalization of abortion laws. Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin seems hell-bent on continued decline and dissolution. James Burnham foresaw this some years ago in his book "Suicide of the West" where he theorized about the "liberal" demise of society.

Martin seems to say "I hold no moral principles personally that I must carry into my working life --- I am a politician and can separate my personal values from my political views and still not lose my sense of judgment." This is a bizarrely schizophrenic attitude. Morality and faith can not be restricted exclusively to the private sphere. In fact, no politician in any society or government can, in good conscience, rule coherently in the service of the common good apart from their own faith or values. The conscience being one and indivisible does not permit the acting out of parallel lives.

It is becoming increasing clear to Canadians that Martin's thinly disguised totalitarian goal is to carry on the family-unfriendly legacy of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who, according to his own misguided vision of a "just society" acted to separate the state from morality with anti-life and liberal divorce legislation.

Some rights are more communal in nature than "individual" and marriage is one of these. When any one of us looks in the mirror with only a modicum of discernment, can we not see that family wherefrom we originated?

For Martin, however, the family and its work count for nothing in his hierarchy of power; in his world view the family serves only as a service to others. The family, however, is not a "client" of the state as Martin seems to think. Rather, the state and society depend upon the family (which precedes the state) and its work to bring up morally sound citizens. Nor is the family an aggregation of individual preferences but an organic unity whereby mother and father are not replaceable or interchangeable but complimentary.

For all the blows this institution has suffered over the last half-century, the family remains at the core of society and traditional marriage remains as the cornerstone of this traditional family. Politicians should tread carefully, because while many social "scientists" seem to believe that the family unit is endlessly flexible, and can take any number of effective forms, it does have a breaking point.

Martin has shown no concern for the opinion of the Canadian people having defiantly refused to consider a referendum on such a critical issue. He has no apparent regard for the social risks and moral consequences his political actions will have on future generations of Canadians. His natural dictatorial proclivity is shown by his public refusal to offer his own party members a free vote on the issue; all Liberal MPs have been ordered to vote for the recently introduced Bill C-38 ( in the House of Commons) that would legalize same-sex marriage throughout Canada.

In Lewis Carroll's "Through The Looking Glass" Humpty Dumpty exclaims: "When I use a word... it means what I choose it to mean --- neither more nor less!" With equal and reckless abandon Martin has conspired to stifle all public debate on the issue of same-sex marriage while quietly engineering a re-definition of the term "marriage" --- something that is still sacred in its traditional manifestation to most Canadians.

Contrary to the views of our rather rash and arrogant Prime Minister who seems to take his cues from Humpty Dumpty, there must be some objective standard, some inner principle for discerning the common good. Otherwise, democratic governments can authorize anything that any group in society asks for, as long as the group phrases the request in the language of "rights". Ultimately we will end up with anarchy.

Already we have seen the nihilistic yet impeccably democratic result of such contemporary legislation involving life itself. I am thinking here of existing enacted and pending articles of legislation --- such as that found in Canada and the Netherlands --- that legalize same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and genetic manipulation.

If we believe marriage has anything to do with the creation of life and the raising of children, then same-sex marriage must necessarily be seen as contrary to natural law. It closes the sexual act to the gift of life. It does not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. And let's not confuse technologically-created and manipulated life as being natural. No doubt the future will bring us babies created from same-sex partners. Let's not have the hubris to assume that there would be anything natural in this, even if future Supreme Court interpretations were to require application of such emerging technology.

The family is the fundamental and natural unit of society and all the major human rights documents affirm this. Moreover the Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right to know and to be raised by their biological parents.

I would argue that we are currently on a one-way road to an unlivable society, or at the very least, a society that none of us would consciously choose, if but only we could see the future implicit in the seed we are planting.

While the Canadian government is working to legalize same-sex marriages I hope that lawyers, politicians and judges of other nations will have the greater foresight and fortitude; that they work to uphold the institution of marriage as it is defined and not deconstruct it to appear merely as an expression of free love.

Paul Kokoski
Canada

Please explain

Can someone please enlighten me as to just how former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet can possible be considered the greatest hero of the Western hemisphere? (See Ed Nemechek's letter in Volume 11, Number 4.)

According to Ed:

Pinochet "saved Chile by overthrowing a Marxist dictator."

Fact: Allende was democratically elected by the people of Chile. It was actually Pinochet who was the dictator.

According to Ed:

If it was not for Pinochet, "the people of Chile today would be languishing in a vast prison state and never again would be heard the muse"

Fact: According to Amnesty International and by the Chilean government's own admission more people, including students, opposition members, union officials and religious leaders, died under Pinochet's brutal regime than at any other time in Chile's recent history.

In 1998 Pinochet lost a referendum on whether he should remain in power or not, such was his popularity in Chile.

One only has to look at Panama's history to see what Ed and his ilk believe in.

Like Pinochet, Noriega was a friend of the USA. That was, until he started spouting anti-US rhetoric. Then, shock-horror, he was suddenly labeled a dictator, a drug baron and a threat to democracy that had to be removed. Had he remained loyal to his US masters then Panama would probably still be a dictatorship.

Ed believe that Pinochet did much to protect out hemisphere --- perhaps he could at least come clean and say that Pinochet did much to protect US interests, in much the same way as many other Latin American dictators.

I am lucky in that I was born in the UK, and have never experienced the horrors of living under a dictatorship. The current UK government has done much to support the US efforts against terrorism since 9/11, probably more than any other single country outside the USA.

However, it might be interesting to readers, and possibly a surprise to Ed, to note that the current UK government was founded on Marxist principles, and each and every year at their annual convention the party faithful sing "The Red Flag." So please tell me Ed, how ironic is that?

name withheld