Getting into December's holiday season

Well, almost. Before Christmas and Hanukkah comes another very big holiday, Mothers Day, which Panama celebrates on the Catholic Day of the Immaculate Conception. But the hotels and especially the politicians have been busy putting up Christmas decorations, and some parts of the city are prettier because if these efforts. What you see above is the shelter at Panama's Parque Urraca at night, in its seasonal decorations.

Now of course many of the holiday decorations that various levels of government put up would be considered illegal in other countries that have different norms of separation between the religious and secular spheres. So far, however, I have not heard anyone in Panama complaining about public funds and spaces being used to promote Christian messages, nor have I noticed anyone of Jerry Falwell's ilk concocting a “Christmas is Constitutional” campaign to intimidate anyone from taking anti-religious stands.

The subject of religious freedom in Panama has been broached on Panama Forum, this country's best English-language email discussion group, of late. Everyone agreed that there is a high degree of religious freedom here, but some of us noted that there are still some problems and questionable areas. Our constitution recognizes that we are a predominantly Catholic country but provides that there will be freedom of religion. But in the Moscoso administration a Spanish Catholic missionary was expelled for working with campesinos who fear that they'd be displaced from their farms by a canal expansion project. Then there's the old case from the Omar Torrijos dictatorship in which Father Héctor Gallego was disappeared by soldiers, which continues in the form of Martín Torrijos's unwillingness to find the late priest's remains and resolve that matter or the cases of more than 100 others who were murdered by the authorities during nearly 22 years of military rule.

We are a society which has religious warfare and extreme intolerance in its history. When Francis Drake and Henry Morgan attacked the isthmus, the Catholic churches were among their top military targets. As part of the old Spanish Empire's Viceroyalty of New Granada, we had the Spanish Inquisition here, with its court sitting in Cartagena. The struggle for independence from Spain had as one of its sub-texts the conflict between Masons like Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín on the one hand and the Catholic Church, which considered and still considers freemasonry to be a form of heresy. During Colombia's almost nonstop 19th century wars between Liberals and Conservatives, one of they key points of dispute was the latters' insistence that Catholicism be privileged as the official state religion.

In light of this history Panama has made its own rules and compromises that occupy a middle ground between the severe secularism of places like France and Mexico and the theocracy of some of the Middle Eastern countries. In addition to our constitutional nod toward Catholicism, we have catechism in the public schools and laws against abortion. On the other hand, birth control and divorce have long been legal here.

Of much greater concern to me than public affectations of piety by public officials are the ways in which this country's church leaders allow themselves to be used by politicians. For example, the Catholic hierarchy and Ecumenical Council now find themselves as promoters and guarantors of a Seguro Social proposal that would sometime in 2006 bankrupt the Maternity Fund. Notice, however, that when these same religious leaders as part of a broad social coalition filed a complaint with the National Assembly about acts of corruption by eight Supreme Court magistrates, the politicians wasted no time in blowing them off, without bothering to look into the matter.

Mahatma Gandhi long ago noted that those secularists who demand a strict separation between politics and religion know very little about religion. To me it's a good thing when people engage in politics because of their deeply felt beliefs. Better that someone seeks public office to serve God's will as she or he sees it than to serve personal or family interests. That said, although both Martin Luther King Jr. and Jerry Falwell arose to prominence through branches of the Baptist faith I make distinctions between them, just as I do between the versions of Islam promoted by Malcolm X and by Osama bin Laden, the Judaism of Michael Lerner and that of Meir Kahane, and the Hinduism preached by Mohandas K. Gandhi and that which motivated his bigoted assassin.

And I enjoy rather than deplore the decorations that are going up around much of the city --- even if I would prefer a mayoral Christmas tree without the Coca-Cola corporate logo on it.

Meanwhile, the region is now into an election cycle that at once delights and dismays a political junkie like me. The opposition faction of the Honduran oligarchy just won, but I expect no change there. As these words were written the old parties that Hugo Chávez has run off the field have withdrawn from the Venezuelan legislative elections and that might be good or bad --- good if it leads to the rise a new loyal opposition within the paradigm of a post-oligarchic Venezuela, bad if it leads Chávez or his followers to believe that they now have a blank check to govern according to their whims. By the time the next issue appears Bolivians will have voted, with polls predicting that the radical indigenous leader Evo Morales will come in first place but with less than a majority, which would mean that the nation's legislature would pick its next president.

Chile and Haiti will also go to the polls in December. Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela (again) will hold elections next year. Panama will probably hold a canal expansion referendum in 2006.

I have little doubt that the leftward trend that's seen across much of Latin America will be manifested in some of these elections, but I expect that Colombia's right-wing President Álvaro Uribe will get another term and it would be no surprise if the Brazilian left lost ground due to scandals afflicting President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's administration. In our opinion section, Nicaraguan-American writer Silvio Sirias tells why he doesn't expect Daniel Ortega to lead the Sandinistas back to power in Nicaragua.

Look for Washington to get in a little tizzy about Evo Morales in Bolivia, but if the current Mexican front-runner Manuel López Obrador leads the left to power in his country next July it will send shock waves throughout the region and probably spell the end of NAFTA as we have known it.

Also before the next issue comes out, Iraqis will have gone to the polls again. This will do nothing to calm the insurgency, but it will give the United States a good opportunity to declare victory and leave. President Bush won't take advantage of this possibility and thus Iraq is likely to be the key issue in next year's US congressional elections. I suspect that whatever happens in the United States, there will be no happy ending to the Iraq story.

And what about Panama's canal referendum? The smart money still bets that it passes, even though we have yet to get a specific proposal and very likely may go into an election without all the cards on the table. But the odds have just shifted in the direction of the “no” side because the Torrijos administration's tolerance for corruption is now so flagrant that any smart opposition will be in a position to change the question from “should we make the investment to modernize the canal?” to “can we trust this administration to honestly and efficiently manage contracts of that magnitude?”

Note that in the community section I again put out the call for people who want to be on a renewed email list for reminders of when The Panama News is uploaded to sign up. The email address I have given, editor@thepanamanews.com, has been overloaded a couple of times in the past couple of weeks. It seems that there's a new spate of computer worm spams going around, plus I have been getting all these emails asking if I want to confirm registrations that someone made in my name. Add a good faith message or two with long attachments to the mix and that mailbox overflows. Please do sign up if you want the email reminders, and if you have a long message to send me, direct it to my other mailbox, e_l_jackson_malo@yahoo.com.

In several respects November was a disastrous production month, but even so we broke some of our readership records. I must say, however, that I am not happy with the quality of the past couple of issues and it would have been much worse without the help of several readers. The corrections that were sent to me are appreciated rather than resented, and in the coming months I want to get a more regular system of volunteer correctors and editors in place.

However, let me explain two things that several people sent in as corrections, one a matter of diction, another of grammar:

1) “Rump” is not only a reasonably polite word for the part of your anatomy on which one sits. Among the six meanings in my Webster's dictionary, we find “A legislature having only a small part of its original membership and so being unrepresentative or lacking authority.” The classic example is what was left of England's Long Parliament after Oliver Cromwell's purges, with its most notorious act being the trial and death sentence passed upon King Charles I. More modernly it also applies to political party leadership like the Bolsheviks after Stalin's purges or MOLIRENA under the current Rosas regime. I would also say it applies to a “national dialogue” in which many sectors were excluded from the outset, striking doctors were kept out by a government decision to oust their union's leadership, the Panamanian Federation of Professional Associations was thrown out after a failed Torrijista coup attempt, and most of the unions that went out on strike against Law 17 walked out after not having been taken seriously for several months.

2) The apostrophe goes after the “s” when one is writing in the plural possessive. It does not go at the end of the proper name of someone whose name ends with that letter. It's “Torrijos's” rather “Torrijos'.” I know that I'll get an argument about this, possibly including from some of the teachers I had in school. However, I won't get that argument from the people who taught me writing at the grad school level. As page 1 of William Strunk Jr.'s and E.B. White's “The Elements of Style” puts it:

Now we might still want to argue about some of the other idiosyncratic usages in The Panama News, but it's “President Torrijos's policies,” “the Torrijoses' family traditions” and so on.

One correction that was not off base I received from Rina Stella Barba. In the issue before the last one, in an article about the controversy over the proposed Law 132, I described her as a beachfront property owner. Actually she isn't. She's an environmental activist who, among other things, wants to keep the public beaches public and thus opposes the notion of granting long-term tourism development concessions that would effectively privatize many of Panama's most beautiful beaches.

Let me give you this brief update on the 2005 Anona Kirkland Writing Contest. It was one of the things that got delayed by November's problems but the entries are in and the winners will be chosen before the end of this year. I apologize for the long wait, but I ask the contestants not to despair.

Finally, let me note that in the process of putting together this somewhat more “cultural” than usual issue, I finally made it down to the Arteconsult gallery's new premises on Calle 50 to see some paintings, some by a Cuban and others by a Peruvian. Although the gallery has moved beyond my usual walking distance, its new locale is larger and better than the old one and this particular exhibition indicates that the sense of taste is still as good as it was when Arteconsult was on Avenida Samuel Lewis. Earlier on the day I went to that inauguration, I caught the artwork that was part of the China Expo at ATLAPA and received an emailed photo of a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza statue in Brussels. The next day I translated playwright/sociologist Raúl Leis's column on violent television, received another Diego Santiago poem, finished a book review on a work of satirical fantasy, considered different standards of radical chic as shown by photos taken on previous days and took the picture at the top of this page. The following evening I caught the Theatre Guild of Ancon's “Treasure Island” Christmas show. I have been busy, but if it were not a fun job I wouldn't be doing it.

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Find the boat of your dreams through Evermarine --- http://www.evermarine.com
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