Most ads are interactive -- click on them to visit the folks who make The Panama News possible

front page

photo by Eric Jackson

Passing the faith to a younger generation

The photo above was taken at the Don Bosco Procession in Panama City, an event that drew as many or more participants as any of the 2004 campaign events or the 2005 protests against the Seguro Social changes. It was an indication of how influential the Catholic Church is in Panamanian society, which has freedom of worship and thriving religious minorities, but is overwhelmingly Catholic. In order to fully understand Panama, it’s necessary to know something of the history of the Catholic Church on the isthmus, the basic tenets of the faith and the roles that it plays in society and public affairs.

By chance, there are religious angles to much of what happened in the news these past few weeks, and to many of the stories in this issue of The Panama News.

In the review section, there is an article about a concert at the Teatro Nacional by Patricia Elena Vlieg. On the eve of the Don Bosco Procession, it happened to be a benefit for the Archdiocese of Panama.

Our travel section contains two photo stories, each of which takes a brief glance at Catholic art, one in my scenes from the Casco Viejo and one in Ivan Klasovsky’s visit to northern Italy.

In the Palestinian elections a Muslim religious party, Hamas, won a stunning victory. As a lifelong supporter of Palestinian nationhood, a believer in democracy with a preference for secular politics and a supporter of a peace process that results in two states living in peace and friendship side by side in the Holy Land, I have mixed feelings, one of which is not surprise. In the opinion section Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery weighs in on the significance of Hamas’s electoral success.

In the United States the widow of a Protestant minister passed away, and it was big news because Coretta Scott King was the defender of her late great husband Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. A civil rights activist in her own right, she shared the sorrows of other wives of great social leaders --- demands on her husband’s time and attention that detracted from the home life, having her husband’s weaknesses thrown in her face by people who didn’t like him, the anxiety of having an incarcerated spouse and the ultimate indignity of having her life partner taken from her well before his time by an assassin’s bullet. So great was her late husband’s legacy that his birthday is a national holiday in the United States, and so noteworthy was Mrs. King’s passing that George W. Bush mentioned it in his State of the Union Address.

The Bush speech is published in Spanish translation in our Spanish opinion section, and my reasons for its inclusion there go to the role that I perceive for The Panama News.

In this day of dumbed down journalism and corporate priorities that put a cute blonde American woman’s murder over events that affect the lives of tens of millions of people across Latin America, people like me live off of and supplement the huge gaps that the corporate mainstream news business leaves. The Panama News for the most part doesn’t compete with Fox and CNN. Because those channels carried Bush’s speech and most of the English-speaking community down here was able to watch it if they wanted, it would be of relatively little value to publish it in English here. But most of this newspaper’s readership is to a greater or lesser extent bilingual, and those who use English as a second language but are more comfortable in Spanish will not have had an opportunity to catch the entire State of the Union Address in Spanish. The Spanish-language media here only ran stories summarizing it.

This website’s Spanish pages almost never contain the same things that are in the English sections, and also rarely include articles that can be found in the Panamanian corporate mainstream. I cater to niches not found on TVN or the MEDCOM channels, or in La Critica, La Prensa, El Panama America, El Siglo and so on, so that the thinking Spanish-language reader can be better informed.

And, as Panama is a backwater left for the most part without regular coverage by the English-language multinational news business, we cover news and publish opinions from and about Panama and its surrounding region that Fox, CNN et al ignore. Judging from our readership figures, we have found a lot of people who appreciate the information we provide.

So what is "our surrounding region," anyway? Panama is the narrow strip of land at the southeastern end of the Meso-American Isthmus, but historically and culturally much more South American than Central American. In a long-standing and growing economic sense, and also because we have a Chinese community that’s more than 150 years old, we are a Pacific Rim nation. And as a visit to Colon, Bocas del Toro or Rio Abajo should demonstrate, we are also something of a Caribbean country. A lot of this website’s readers have Antillean roots.

This time, as usual, our opinion section touches upon Caribbean affairs. But one thing that has just happened there was most unusual: the CARICOM nations have created a Caribbean Single Market that looks much more like the European Union than NAFTA. Remarks made on the occasion by Edwin Carrington, the secretary-general of the Caribbean Community, are found in the opinion pages. While the Caribbean region’s population is small compared to North America’s or Latin America’s, its example of economic integration ought to weigh heavily in the minds of Panamanians, given that our country is both applying for membership in MERCOSUR and negotiating a NAFTA-style free trade deal with the Americans. Panama is the Crossroads of the World, and we would do better by looking all around us for relevant lessons. Moreover, at this juncture an effort to form a relationship with the new Caribbean economic unit could be the means by which a lot of old issues about Panama’s relations with its neighbors across the Caribbean Sea --- starting with our anachronistic and racist immigration policies --- might be sorted out for the benefit of all parties concerned.

Still, this is The Panama News and we look mainly at Panama. Silvio Sirias considers an isthmian cultural phenomenon and wider issues of artistic development. The news section updates developments in the kidnapping of two Spaniards by armed Colombians who invaded the Panamanian district of Jaque, and in the opinion pages Raúl Leis tackles the more general issues of our troublesome border with Colombia. The sports section is hard-hitting --- what else could it be when it includes coverage of a home run derby won by Panamanian slugger Carlos Lee and a world championship boxing match? We look at vernacular architecture as part of the solution to Panama’s housing problems and the winner of the Panama Quilters’s raffle. We consider a prison brutality scandal in our news section, this country’s evolving energy policies in our business pages and this issue’s editorial, and President Torrijos’s elevated but precarious popularity.

And we don’t forget to appreciate the flowers --- both the endangered wild plants and the cultivated orchids.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor

PS: Do you know the Panamanian Spanish usages for the word “vaina?” Let me invoke it in the sense of “annoyance.” It has come to my attention that a gringo engaged in the real estate business in the Pedasi area, has been sending out sales hype over the Internet under the title “Panama News.” He has no relationship with this publication, nor has he ever. Nor do I expect that he will. No necesito esta vaina.