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opinion

Also in this section:
Leis, Until when is unexploded ordnance off the agenda?
Jackson, Departed giants, law enforcement standards and great performances
Human Rights Watch, Stand up the Bush administration's torture policy
Khalil, Why Al-Hurra has failed
Lettieri, The sordid Honduran electoral campaign
Weisbrot, An economic report from Caracas
Bemowki, It's not as if the Democrats are innocent about Iraq
Silié, Fear of migrants
Betto, Welcome to Brazil, Mr. Bush
Bernal, Patriotism, sacred holidays, the country --- everything's for sale

Departed giants, law enforcement standards and great performances

by Eric Jackson

When you're bipolar and drift toward the up pole, you can be insufferable, whether it be a matter of euphoria or rage. You can also be brilliant, or it seems that way at the time. The problem is that your powers of conentration get sapped, such that your mind is like a rapidly spinning disc from with unrelated tangential thoughts fly off in widely disparate directions in rapid succession. Maybe it's not entirely bad to have been a bit manic for a few days these past weeks, times when a lot was happening. For one thing, it will allow me to cover a lot of ground in this column of brief observations about a lot of different things. To wit:

Departed giants, in alphabetical order

●      Rosa Parks was a seamstress by trade, but don't ever let anyone convince you that she was “simple.” She was a sharp as a laser working class political activist, a stalwart in the Montgomery NAACP for many years before she refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man and sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and through that the rise to prominence of the Revernd Dr. Martin Luther King. Years later, when I met her in Detroit, she was an astute advisor to a US representative.

●      Vicente Pascual was a wealthy man, a pillar of the community who at various times presided over the Panamanian Business Executives Association, the Panamanian Industrialists Synidicate and the Rotary Club. But he by no means could be called a rabiblanco. He was a middle class kid who went to the country's most illustrious public school, the Instituto Nacional, and did the Eagles' Nest proud. He was a lifelong bookworm and member of the Panama Historical Society. Were all the rest of Panama's business leaders to adopt Vicente's scholarly attitudes and pass them down to their subordinates as the sort of culture they expect from those who want promotions, we'd quickly be a more highly developed society.

●      Herasto Reyes was a santeño and a leftist who became one of the strongest journalistic pillars at that quintessential rabiblanco paper, La Prensa. The daily on 12 de Octubre will muddle along, but they have suffered a terrible loss. The winner of a Miró Prize for one of his several books, Herasto surmounted the reactionary old stereotype that if you are of the left you are by definition too biased to be a good journalist simply by being too good for such a trite label to stick. As a University of Panama journalism graduate, he was also proof that brilliant people do occasionally come out of squalid academic niches.

Law enforcement controversies that ought not to be

●      It seems that Rolando Mirones is trying to unify the private hiring of public police protection, and one of his steps in this direction was the establishment of a bank account, in his name, to which promoters who wanted cops at their dances would pay for the service. The private security guard industry doesn't like any of this and El Panama America considered the account in the chief's name scandalous. On the latter point Comptroller General Dani Kuzniecky agreed, and ordered Mirones to put the account in the name of the program rather than his own name. The account in Mirones's name was unseemly and a structural invitation to corruption --- if not to this National Police chief then to a subsequent one --- but the concept of paying for extra public services is a sound one, even with regard to the police. Whether it's riding with a chicken truck or standing guard at a nightclub, these semi-privatized activities of our public police force have been practiced for many years and it's reasonable to want to make everything official and above-board. And if they want to put in the proper safeguards and make it possible to legally pay your traffic ticket to the officer on the spot, it can be a worthy and convenient public service rather than a shakedown racket. However, Mirones has to realize that the mere appearance of corruption can be devastating and approach his reforms with that always in mind.

●      Are your papers in order? The special registration of everyone who lives within a few blocks of the Hotel Miramar, where George W. Bush booked lodgings for his visit here, was a creepy bit of security overkill. Better if his visit would have been set in a secluded location that's easy to guard and has no close neighbors to annoy than to associate the United States government and its chief executive with this unwarranted infringement upon citizens' liberties here, as has been done.

Great performances

●      The Public Ministry press flacks and some of the few journalists allowed to ask questions --- all of them from the corporate mainstream, of course --- put on lame performances by asking ill-informed questions at the October 28 press conference with FBI director Robert S. Mueller III and Attorney General Ana Matilde Gómez. It is an ugly reflection of  journalists' education in this country when a TV reporter asks an FBI director about the distribution of law enforcement funding in Panama by making an erroneous comparision with the United States that completely ignores US federalism and the existence of local and state police forces there, or when another mainstream reporter displays her ignorance of diplomacy by asking him to list the five most corrupt Latin American republics. But Mueller's frank, good-humored, intelligent and diplomatic answers to the sometimes dumb questions put to him amounted to great representation for the United States of America. And our Procuradora is such a fox when she smiles! (Yes, I know. We pay her to enforce the law, not to be a smiling ornament. And she does her job well, from what I can see, whether she's wearing her usual dour expression or looking more relaxed.)

●      It was a high school play with all of the expected stumbles, but everyone had a great time at the Academia Balboa's presentation of “Dracula.” As I get ever longer in the tooth, I still retain my childhood delight with werewolves and vampires.