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Not just kids' stuff

The November patriotic parades are largely and most directly for the kids. They are one of the ways that society shows off its culture and history and institutions. They afford an opportunity for high school kids to learn how to keep a beat or sound a true note. They are Panama, saying “this is who we are.”

The parades also bring in a lot of tourists, especially from the Afro-Panamanian community in Brooklyn, New York. They allow many a Panamanian of humble means to earn the money to give a few Christmas presents by selling food or beverages along the way.

But for a moment I want to get back to the subject of kids these days, citing a few topical cases in point:

1. In The Panama News reader survey, which runs again in this issue, I note that I'm thinking of turning the Spanish section into a student newspaper and ask whether people think it's a good idea. Now, because this poll uses a reader response method it's not scientifically random, but still, it gives some rough guidance of where the readers are at. And opinions about this idea are mixed, and often quite strong. People are concerned that the Spanish section would be turned into a University of Panama leftist faction fight. There is a lot of hostility to the younger generation in general. On the other hand, a lot of people think it's a great idea.

Let me confess to you my subversive intent here. The University of Panama has not student media. It has a journalism school, the Faculty of Social Communications, in which The Panama News and I occasionally get vilified. In league with the racist and xenophobic Sindicato de Periodistas, they want to restrict the practice of journalism in this country to their graduates.

But the education the kids get in that department is so wretched! They study things like the structure of news organizations, how to write a paragraph and the inverted pyramid style of presenting a story. They aren't required --- really, aren't allowed --- to take courses in the arts, the sciences, the social sciences, history or so on. And thus on day last year, on a trip to see progress on a plant to breed sterile screw worm flies, I met a “qualified” graduate of that school who didn't know that flies go through an egg, larva, pupa and adult life cycle.

The other day, when I went cover FBI director Robert S. Mueller III's press conference with Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez, two things impressed me. First, though I had been invited and was on the list, the press flack at reception --- most likely a member of the Sindicato --- wasn't going to let me in. After that was resolved, another Ministerio Publico press flack controlled the microphone and of course only let people from the corporate mainstream ask questions --- and on the whole, these were such stupid queries! You had the best paid members of the press corps demonstrating that they know zip about US federalism or diplomatic formalities.

So anyway, I'm thinking that, since I don't have the time or ability to make the Spanish section what it ought to be, maybe I could use it to make an end run around all that nonsense. Journalism is a craft that you learn by practicing it, not a lifetime ticket on a gravy train that you get with a diploma from a deficient University of Panama department.

2. Look for The Panama News to be co-sponsoring an event early next year at which some important scientific, historical, academic and developmental questions will be addressed by a top expert and celebrated author. I can't give you any more details yet, but be advised that this ragtag micro-enterprise does intend to play a larger role in Panama's intellectual development.

3. In the apartment building next door, well within earshot, there is a kid who must be about three years old who has been a little screecher from the start. Now he can talk, and he shouts demands at his parents and emphasizes them with an ear-splitting shriek, followed by a well-practiced grating whine. The parents are starting to shout back at him.

When you see the little boy, he usually has these dark circles under his eyes. As in, his underlying problem is very likely a food intolerance or allergy, which is the cause of a lot of hyperactivity in children. But that having been left untreated, he has learned some behaviors that are a pain not only to his parents but also the neighbors.

In US culture, they'd prescribe Ritalin. A pill with an instant solution to all problems is and has been the unfortunate mainstream culture up there.

Now I was a hyperactive little monster before the days of Ritalin, and a pain to parents and teachers. I have mixed feelings about psychiatric medications, basically believing that they should be only one part of a selection of many different curative or palliative tools.

The parents next door really ought to get their son to a pediatrician who specializes in either food reactions or psychological problems because I suspect that with the right dietary restrictions --- or the right pill --- they can calm him right down. And then they need to be firm and consistent about making sure that he gains nothing, and occasionally loses something that he wants, when he whines.

4. Meanwhile in Colon, the patriotic parades were much reduced because gangs threatened violence where the route crossed territory they claim as their turf.

Here, too, there is an underlying cause: grinding poverty and a feeling of hopelessness. Few kids who have something positive to look forward to in life get involve in this petty gangsterism, and those who do so join the neighborhood gang because despite their ambitions all the kids around them see their futures as a dead ends and it becomes a matter of social pressure and physical safety to join the kids who could leave them lying in a pool of blood if they don't.

Panama really ought to have a program where young adults in places where such conditions prevail are put to work for meals and modest pay picking up litter, filling potholes, planting trees, building park facilities and so on. Panama really ought to have a coherent and inclusive longer-range national development plan. These things will erode the basis for gangsterism.

But that's a gradual solution, and those who threatened gang violence and thus diminished Colon's celebrations really do need to be hunted down and brought to justice for what they did.

(Do I sound annoyed? Well, part of it is that I am writing under the influence of some flu-like bug, which, in addition to the patriotic festivities and the Bush visit affecting days that I usually spend producing the paper, will make the completion of this issue several days late. There have been some interesting fever dreams, but so long as the illness doesn't end up giving me an odd compulsion to peck around on the floor for grains, it's just another minor annoyance.)

Corrections and clarifications also carry with them a certain amount of annoyance, but The Panama News is more willing to run them than a lot of other media because it's not caught up in the vicious corporate culture of the mainstream. We try to get the story right and when we don't we correct it. And to the extent that we're dealing with a correction, a clarification or an update remains to be seen because a trip to San Carlos had to be postponed.

I sat down for coffee at the Caesar Park with Luis Dutari, who heads the Vista Mar golf and resort community development for the Shahani Brothers. He said that, notwithstanding the rumors I had heard from certain members of the San Carlos City Council and others and passed on, the project has not been sold. He said there was an offer by someone who wanted to buy into it, but that was rejected. (Before my conversation with Dutari, another developer told me that the Shahanis had not sold.) The nature of these statements was identified in the article, but really The Panama News shouldn't be publishing bochinche so let this be a correction.

More importantly, Dutari pointed out that the Shahanis have no interest in that dam on the Rio Teta (which we have never alleged) and that Vista Mar is not going to get the water for their golf course from it (which we have stated several times).

As Dutari explained it, there is enough water on the property to drill a dozen or so wells into the aquifer that everyone else in the town uses to get the 10 million gallons of water it will take to fill the project's five artificial lakes. However, the water level in that one is going down, and though they plan to use salt-resistant grass on the golf course, they do fear the prospect of saltwater infiltration of their wells. Plus, they don't want to get into arguments with neighbors, who just might blame them if the aquifer runs dry or seawater seeps into it. Also, there is the cost factor of a dozen or so relatively shallow wells. So Dutari tells me that the plan is drill a couple of much deeper artesian wells into a lower aquifer to get the water they need.

Dutari noted that he also has surfed Tits Point since he was a kid, and that nearby surfing beaches will be one of the selling points for this development, so he, too, is concerned about the potential ecological damage that the Rio Teta dam may wreak.

Anyway, something came up on his end so my visit to Vista Mar was put off, but look for more on this story, which may have in it something in the nature of a correction or something more like an update, in a future issue.

While I was working on this issue, days normally spent in front of the computer, by luck of the calendar, were spent taking pictures of parades. I think I may have caught the flu bug in those crowds, but in any case that wasn't the end of the changes --- George W. Bush came to town on days that I usually work on production, so that brought me away from the computer as well. I got the story, but all of these distractions played havoc with the upload schedule.

It seems that the latest meeting about free trade between the United States and Panama did not go well, mainly because neither side is willing to budge on the agricultural issue.

Now it seems that the US government, which a few years ago was saying that it wouldn't have anything to do with a canal expansion effort, is demanding equal access to the contracts for that huge construction job. But think about what that does to the arguments of those Panamanian business and government leaders who are promoting the expansion. One of their aces is the multiplier effect, the economic ripple that will sweep through the entire Panamanian economy if the billions of dollars needed to do the job are spent in the Panamanian economy. But what if most of those dollars go to foreign companies that use huge computerized machines that no Panamanian knows how to run, under the direction of foreign managers? So I would think that this, too, would be an unpalatable US demand to concede.

Our opinion columns go all over the place as usual this time, but particularly around Latin America, which is divided about the prospects of hemispheric economic integration and mostly not very receptive to the the model the George W. Bush brought to the region to sell. Remember that while he still expresses hope for a free trade agreement with the United States, Martín Torrijos is also bringing Panama into MERCOSUR, the South American common market whose leaders have very different ideas about economic integration than the NAFTA-CAFTA model that the American government is promoting.

We also have an interesting column by an Arab journalist of conservative bent, distributed by the somewhat right-wing Freedom Now News, about what has happened to Al-Hurra, the Arabic-language satellite network that the US government created to compete with Al-Jazeera. Yes, it's a column by a guy with an ax to grind, but it's also a tale that rings true about Uncle Sam blowing money on Beirut hustlers. Mr. Khalil wants an Al-Hurra that embraces American journalistic standards and promotes an American point of view. But of course, we have a White House that issued press credentials to a gay prostitute with a mandate to lob softball questions, so there remains the question of whether the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has a clue about the standards of American journalism.

Finally, the lead business story is about something in which I played a role. It has been dubbed by others “The Mutiny,” a rebellion against Mr. Donald Winner's pretensions to control most of Panama's English-language discussion groups. It would have been nice to have someone other than myself to do this story, for the obvious conflict of interest involved, but there wasn't such a person and it's too important a story to ignore. And while it was happening, I must say that there was this heady feeling of revolution in cyberspace.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor

My apologies for the delays in getting this issue uploaded!