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Photo by Eric Jackson

Hard fought

This was the closest thing to a cool breeze that this Golden Gloves finalist felt in the tournament's final round, which looked cool enough to get on our front page. But actually, the excursion to this year's Golden Gloves tournament isn't the lead story, nor is it atop the sports section nor even the lead boxing story. The latter honor clearly has to go to "La Araña" Vásquez's thrilling victory to become the WBA's world junior flyweight champ.

Cover stories are chosen mainly on the basis of the qualities of the available graphics. Lead stories are something else. Probably the most important story of this issue is my coverage of the CADE business executives conference --- about the Panama Canal this year --- which tops the business section. The lead English-language opinion piece is the English translation of President Torrijos's opening night address to that gathering.

In the news section the Torrijos administration's diplomacy with the United States is at the top and may have the most far-reaching consequences, but the problem of reporting it is that one must inevitably deal with a  mosaic composed of bits collected from other media, which raises more questions than answers and leaves gaps that can only be filled by extrapolation or speculation, in order to make a reasoned estimate on what's going on.

The Panama Historical Society and the Smithsonian's new monthly Spanish-language lecture series usually have a time conflict, but this month the society's president, John Carlson, went to Amador's Punta Culebra for a joint event, his lecture on the history of those islands, how they were connected and the various ways they were fortified. At the end of his talk, Carlson spoke out against irresponsible construction at several of this country's important historical sites, including a surviving cobblestone segment of the colonial era Las Cruces Trail that's slated to be replaced with a residential subdivision and archaeological sites on the west bank of the canal that are to be destroyed by other developments.

The National Assembly has been busier than usual lately, and two of their actions merited more mention than just in the briefs. The legislature finally got around to passing a law to implement a major aspect of this country's theoretical constitutional ban on many forms of discrimination, and the Panamanian Committee Against Racism says why it is pleased but not satisfied in our opinion section. The deputies also passed, and the president signed, a biological corridor law that among other things gives whales enhanced legal protection while in Panamanian waters.

We have also received word that US Ambassador Linda E. Watt will be leaving Panama and the State Department this summer. One need not appreciate the administration she served to appreciate the job she did here. Although she was surely involved in some interesting and controversial things that will only appear on the public record decades from now --- if the ever ever do --- the part of her job that people did see was a brilliant canvassing of the entire country to promote better Panamanian-American relations on the level of individual human being. The next ambassador, whose appointment has not been announced, will surely have a tough act to follow.

These have been tough days for US diplomacy in the region. In her recent tour of several Latin American countries, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice spent a lot of her time answering questions about or hearing criticism of US relations with Venezuela, to her great exasperation. Plan Colombia, one of the centerpieces of American policy in the region, came under some unusual scrutiny recently when one of the people killed fighting some FARC rebels alongside the AUC paramilitaries turned out to be a Colombian Army sergeant, and then two men caught running munitions to the AUC turned out to be a US Army colonel and sergeant. Most spectacularly, the Bush administration got a new OAS secretary general whose candidacy it had opposed, an unprecedented setback for US policy in the region.

So will President Torrijos, ever so discrete and scripted, accustomed to so many subtle balancing acts even within his own party and coalition, become the personal bridge between the estranged powers of north and south, the Aggie who can get along with both W and Hugo Chávez, the president who can embrace South America's MERCOSUR economic alternative and still talk free trade with the North Americans? It would be a very Panamanian thing to do, and the sort of balance that the president's late father often struck in his time. But the prerequisite to play such a role is a US administration that wants to cross those bridges, along with a congress willing to accompany it, which we may or may not have at the moment.

Torrijos is being put to the test on a number of fronts, as is to be expected in his particular post. One thing still hanging as these words is the immigration director's insistence that it's OK for his private law firm to practice in front of immigration tribunals, a position that's under fire from within and outside of the administration. In the previous administration the definitive word of what level of corruption would be tolerated also happened early in its term, when Mireya's first immigration director resolved a pay dispute with his undocumented Nicaraguan maid by summarily deporting her and he still had a job the next day. Recall that in the administration before that, the sale of Panamanian travel documents to illegal Chinese migrants became the cause for Washington to revoke former President Pérez Balladares's US visa. We shall see soon enough how real the PRD campaign promise about "zero corruption" will be, but over at Migracion it's a special case in which any substantial move away from "total corruption" would represent true progress.

In the first item of this issue's letters page, the anti-corruption pledge is implicitly questioned by a man who's not happy about Panama allowing former Ecuadoran President Abdala Bucaram back into the country. Bucaram is back, but his brief and disastrous attempt at a comeback may lead to tighter restrictions than those which allowed him to run an Ecuadoran political party from Panama.

Ah, but grafts of foreign politicians onto our body politic are not the only questionable transplants considered herein. In the science section the World Health Organization weighs in on xenotransplants, the grafting of tissues from other species onto human bodies, and concludes that for the moment it's mostly a bad idea.

Also in the realm of bad ideas, this issue's editorial considers one proposal coming out of the Torrijos administration, its drawbacks and the important issues that it raises.

But isn't it so much safer to talk about bad papayas than bad public policies? A fruit may not be a vegetable, but if you criticize it there's still an excellent chance that it won't charge you with criminal defamation. Limes tend not to be litigious. Pomegranates are not known to request political asylum. Still, on the poetry page of this issue's fun section, Diego Santiago braves the potential slings and arrows of irate readers' abuse and ponders the challenge of bad papayas.

Meanwhile in the community section, The Panama News picks up the challenge of encouraging and recognizing good writing in the English language. We also go to the movies, pay homage to one of Panama's sons who did great things elsewhere and take time to appreciate the orchid.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor

PS: Yes, I know this issue is appearing a bit later than usual. The chaos of getting a new roof over the office and the problems of keeping the ancient Mac working amidst all the construction dust have lengthened production a bit, so if the story you are looking for isn't there, go on to something that has been uploaded and come back to see the missing story in a little bit.