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photo and electronic manipulation by Eric Jackson

Lord, Lord, start the Carnival!

It's that time of the year again, and it's both a lot of fun and serious business. Three tidbits of news well illustrate Carnival's nature:

1) Tourism Minister Rubén Blades is taking off for Los Angeles during Carnival, to take care of some personal business he says. In making this announcement he made a noteworthy claim and a maybe or maybe not newsworthy declaration. He said that Carnival in Panama isn't much of a tourism draw, adding that everybody flies to Colombia's San Andres Island for the occasion; and he said that starting next year the national government will take over Carnival by setting up a national Carnival commission whose term will encompass the rest of the Torrijos administration.

2) Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro overruled Carnival director Mingthoy Giro's decision to move the celebration to Avenida Balboa this year, restoring the capital's festivities to the usual location along Via España. The decision came after concerns were expressed about ingress and egress to and from the Santo Tomas Hospital and Hospital del Niño complex just up the street and complaints from area residents about all the inconvenience. The mayor, however, cited as his main concern that Parque Urraca and the seawall and median along Avenida Balboa that the city has spent so much money improving and maitaining would be trashed by the large crowds.

3) As these words were written, the mechanics at COPA Airlines were threatening to go on strike just ahead of Carnival. Hotel owners and other tourist-dependent businesspeople have appealed to the Labor Ministry to step in and declare a cooling off period, as Carnival is a very important economic event for them and a strike on our principal airline would do them immense and irreparable harm.

So if Blades is right, wouldn't the mayor's and the hotel owners' concerns be irrelevant?

But Blades is wrong, on several counts.

First of all, not "everybody" goes to San Andres Island. Some of the wealthiest Panamanians do, but certainly the 40 percent of our population who live in poverty don't, nor for that matter do the great majority of locals who could afford to fly away for a few days.

Second, it's not true that Carnival doesn't bring in tourists. The Afro-Panamanian community of the United States in particular --- the descendents of those who built the Panama Canal --- charters many special flights and fills many of our hotels for the occasion, year after year.

When Rubén Blades made his claims, he probably without realizing it highlighted some the worst things about the Torrijos administration in which he serves: an obnoxious and elitist concept of who counts, a system of preferences that encourages millionaire white child molesters to settle here while ignoring black middle class people with historical ties to Panama, and an improvisational style of governing that's based on the imaginations of people in extremely narrow social sectors rather than upon any serious study or consideration of the facts. Quite frankly, it's unbecoming of a man who did so much for Amnesty International and who served as a United Nations anti-racism ambassador.

I'm willing to cut the director of the government's IPAT tourism bureau some slack for a gaffe. Unfortunate statements are one of the things that happen to the best people in public life, and those who go the greatest lengths to avoid them tend to be the least candid and most dishonest of all politicians. But IPAT has done relatively little to publicize Carnival, a most important tourist attraction, even on its websites where the lack of budget can't be reasonably proffered as an excuse. Blades ought not to be heard saying that starting next year there will be some new entity to do the job that he should have been doing.

Meanwhile, in recent weeks the kids of SAMAAP's quadrille dance group have been working out downstairs from The Panama News office in the Muchachas Guias building, because they'll be performing at the Antillean Fair, which takes place on the Saturday and Sunday of Carnival on the grounds of the Museo Afroantillano in Panama City. Our front page graphic this time is of calypso singer Leslie George, who will be one of the featured artists at that event. We got a preview of his act at INAC's recent Caribbean night, photos from which appear in our arts and fun sections.

This turns out to be a larger than usual issue of The Panama News, especially heavy on the arts and sciences.

I review two plays and a book this time, La Cucarachita Mandinga on the Admin Building steps, The Importance of Being Earnest by the Theatre Guild of Ancon and Joachim Bamud's Panama Jack respectively. There is news of the upcoming Second Panama Scenic Arts Festival and of an Argentine film festival at the University of Panama.

The Cool Internet sites feature of the review section is this time dedicated to issues surrounding the notorious Danish anti-Muslim caricatures and the often violent protests against them. Conflicting values of freedom of the press and of artistic expression, freedom from religious bigotry and racism, editorial responsibility and the democratic sensibilities of majorities and minorities in various countries are at play here. I picked five websites that can serve as the starting points for an intelligent consideration of the subject.

In addition, much of this issue's opinion section is devoted to freedom of expression issues. There is Michael Lettieri's piece on the persecution of Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho, who is being prosecuted for her truthful report about a wealthy pedophile. Human Rights Watch answers questions about the Danish cartoons controversy. Nat Hentoff speaks to a conservative audience about how the Fairness Doctrine stifled free expression in broadcasting when it was applied in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission. The testimony before a congressional committee of the leader of the US chapter of Reporters Without Borders, about the role that American companies play in China's suppression of dissenting thoughts on the Internet, is included.

No doubt my editorial choices will displease both Muslim jihadis and their mirror-image Christian bigots.

My decisions about what to include in this issue's letters section may also offend some people, and some of you who object will not be fairly dismissed as fanatics or otherwise unreasonable individuals. I had to balance my usual reticence to publish vulgarity against my aim to provide a public service when I received a series of particularly offensive emails from a man who sells real estate and runs investment schemes here. Although it may get this website blocked by some filtering programs and may offend the sensibilities of some of the readers, I think those concerns are outweighed by letting people know the sort of person they may be dealing with, in his own words and in my following editor's note.

There is a larger than ever sciences section, which includes an article by my old friend Brandt Irion about a satellite imagery verification project on which he has been working, a presentation on ways that invertebrate populations are used to monitor the health of rivers and streams, a NASA thing about finding Mayan archaeological sites using satellite technologies, the World Health Organization's warning about the perils of counterfeit medications and more.

The lead article in the science pages is about a field trip by the US ambassador and the Panamanian agriculture minister to a nearly finished facility to produce sterile screw worm flies. That's a tale with multiple interesting angles: it will be a state-of-the-art biological containment facility, and the techniques used to build it will probably transform Panamanian construction. The project of which it is a part has nearly eliminated screw worms from Panama, something that not only cattle ranchers but also those who love and care for dogs, cats or horses ought to appreciate. The techniques, and the facility, can be converted to battle other serious insect pests we have in Panama, like the Mediterranean fruit fly. But the event was in large part for the purpose of the campaign in favor of a US-Panama free trade agreement, an argument for the proposition that the Americans are not insensitive to Panamanian agricultural sanitation concerns. The free trade argument takes up most of our Spanish-language opinion pages and also leads our business section.

These latter are serious topics to consider as Carnival is upon us. But then, maybe you are not the sort of person who appreciates large crowds in which people are drinking. Maybe you'd rather fly off to Germany, from whence Ivan Klasovsky has sent us wintertime photos. Maybe a long weekend at the beach in San Carlos is more your style.

Whatever, your pleasure, enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor