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Pianist wishes he had been here

My name is Wally Chilcott (Pianist - Panameño). I just got an e-mail from a friend showing the events from the third Panama Jazz Festival, whereby Mauricio Smith was honored. I would have liked to be there, since Mauricio was part of my group when we played  at the "Club W," and prior to that, at the  Club Happyland. Presently, I am in Los Angeles, California, and still playing music. Please keep me  informed as to future  asuntos.

Wally Chilcott 

Lori from Canada

P.S Liberals are out after twelve years not sure how the Conservatives will do but, we need a change from the Liberal scams here in Canada, the heaviest taxed country!

An old friend of our landladies

I live in Florida and was interested to see a link to the Panama News' Muchachas Guias activities in a local Girl Scout publication. I was further delighted to recognize, immediately, my friend from the 1980s Gloria Lawrence. I was involved with the Girl Scouts at Albrook at the time, and had a lot of interaction with the Muchachas Guias. I have said often in the years since that it was THAT contact that made our four years in Panama so rewarding.

I remember Gloria as being a lovely and gracious person who went out of her way to make me feel welcome. I visited the camp at Penonome with Clarita Wright on one occasion, and that was another highlight of my Panama years. I also remember Teresa Pomare (I hope I have spelled this correctly) and her kind welcome when I visited the area where she lived. Sorry, I cannot remember the name of the town! We had such fun with the LBP program, which I completed three or four times myself. Many other names come to mind: Maria Eugenia, Paula, Maria, Theo, and countless others. What wonderful memories they conjure!

Overall, I want the Guias to know that I remember them fondly and I treasure the beautiful gold orchid charm they gave me when I returned to the states. You all hold a special place in my heart!

Fondly,

Nancy Dirkes
Seminole, Florida

How can your feelings be mixed about Hamas?

You wrote: “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.”

How can you have mixed feelings about the success of cowardly terrorists who kill innocent people at bus stops, in restaurants and so on?

Name withheld
USA

Editor’s note: On the matter of terrorism against non-combatant civilians --- an offense under Islamic law as well as in the legal traditions that govern the rest of the world ---  I am as dismayed about the electoral success of Hamas as I was when the Israelis chose the butcher of Sabra and Shatila as their prime minister. I’m also not one to celebrate when the religious right wins in any country. But what used to be the political center among Palestinians attracted entirely too many crooks, and the Palestinian left has spent years arguing about who’s the vanguard without offering any real plan for their nation’s progress, so it was Hamas almost by default. At least the recent elections had the virtue of having the people who got the most votes being declared the winners.

Anyone who has supported any political or social cause or movement over the course of decades will have had his or her faith tested by scandals and mistakes. This is human nature. As one who believes in the establishment of a free and viable Palestinian country, watching the recent campaign was a case in point. As it became clear that Hamas would do well, Al Fatah became ever more strident in its rhetoric, to the point where it’s only a slight exaggeration to characterize the Palestinian debate as “They promise to drive the Jews into the sea, but if you elect us we’ll not only drive them into the sea, we’ll chum the water to attract sharks.” It was very ugly, but does not in my opinion detract from the justice of Palestine’s aim to be a sovereign nation like any other.

Now that Hamas is elected, they have a constituency to serve. Nihilism tends to lose its charm when there are children to be educated, families to be housed, workers to be employed and so on. My hope is that Hamas will evolve into just one more right-wing governing party like so many others, and that the more progressive Palestinian forces will regroup under better leadership and come back to have their day in the sun.

Ticos also part of the leftward trend

The results of the February 4 presidential elections in Costa Rica could hardly have been more dramatic. Oscar Arias Sánchez, the center-right candidate running on the National Liberation Party ticket has apparently won as predicted, but just barely. He was ahead in the vote count, but by a whisker-thin 0.3 percent of the vote --- just three votes out of each thousand --- when the Tribuno Supremo de Elecciones, the judicial organ that organizes and supervises the elections in Costa Rica, ordered a manual, ballot-by-ballot recount of the entire million-plus presidential vote. The final result, and who may become the next president of Costa Rica, may not be known for certain as long as the ballots are being recounted. Since Costa Rica uses paper ballots throughout the country, a complete physical recount is possible and will be done.

The big news is that Oscar Arias's main rival, Otton Solís, a center-left candidate running for the Citizens' Action Party, pulled out from way behind --- just two weeks before the voting, he was polling 20 points behind Arias --- and now has apparently come within a whisker of winning the election outright, no runoff required. Everyone is astounded at the result --- no one, not even Solís's own pollsters, had any inkling it would be this close. The sudden, abrupt, and dramatic shift to the left in Costa Rican politics has caught everyone by surprise.

What caused it? When looking at how the country polled versus how it actually voted, the one thing that really stands out is the cantones (counties) in the rural parts of the country where large, mostly family-owned farms currently growing commodity crops, such as rice, corn, beans and wheat, as well as export crops such as bananas and pineapples, as well as some tree plantations, all voted hugely differently from how they had polled. I had an inkling this might happen (and said so to my friends) when I visited Guatuso --- in the heart of rice and pineapple country --- and saw Solís banners everywhere and not an Arias banner anywhere in sight --- in fact, I saw only one on the entire trip. I listened in on one political discussion between my neighbor who was with me (an ardent Arias supporter), and his acquaintence, and the principal topic of discussion was corruption. The Guatusan said that Solís was a better candidate because he was the more sincere and less tainted by chorizo (literally "sausage" but a word that has come to be synonymous with corruption). But I suspect that the real reason he voted for Solís, as did his neighbors throughout rural Alajuela and Heredia provinces, is because he voted his wallet --- Solís was the only candidate of the four major parties to come out firmly against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and so those Costa Ricans for whom opposition was a deciding factor had no choice but to vote for Solís. This is an issue in these regions because a free trade agreement would put those large farmers in direct competition with huge agribusiness farms in the United States, and likely throw many of them out of business, as a result of American farm subsidies that depress commodity prices to artificially low levels. Most of the farmers I have talked to say that they would have no fear of a free-trade agreement if those subsidies did not exist --- they're certain that their lower labor costs and longer growing seasons would allow them to more than compete. But the fact is the subsidies do exist, and they are not likely to go away anytime soon, even under CAFTA mandate, as the experience of the Mexican farmers under NAFTA has demonstrated.

The national legislature in Costa Rica, the Assemblea Legislativa, consists of a single chamber composed of 57 diputados, its members coming from two sources --- half are picked directly by the voters, who vote for them individually from their districts. The other half are "party list" candidates, selected by the party, and portioned out according to the percent of the vote that party garners in the presidential vote, with the tie-breaking vote coming from the president's party list. To get a single list-member into the Assemblea, the party has to poll at least 4% of the total presidential vote. The presumed winner, Arias, got by far the largest number of seats --- 26, both list and local candidates. That was, of course, not quite a majority. Otton Solís, his nemesis, got 17, and the Libertarian party, Foggy Bottom's favorite, got 6. The incumbent party, the Social Christians, whose candidate, Ricardo Toledo, polled a measly 3.6 percent of the vote, got only five seats, all local candidates, as it didn't get enough presidential votes for a single list member, and the minor parties got the remaining three seats, all local candidates. This means that if Solís should happen to win the recount, he will face governing from a minority position within the Assemblea. That could make governing somewhat difficult without a lot of patient negotiating. Fortunately, both Arias's party and Solís's party are fairly closely aligned politically. This should make getting the ten votes he would need a lot easier. For Arias, building a majority vote in the Assemblea should not be difficult except on the most contentious issues.

Analysis of the US meddling: With the incumbent Social Christians being the local equivalent of the Republican Party and being strongly supported by both the Catholic Church (the incumbent president is widely believed to be an Opus Dei member) and the hard core conservatives, you might have thought that the Boys from Foggy Bottom would have dumped a ton of money into it, trying to get it re-elected, as they so frequently do here in Latin America. But the problem was that this party faced a huge backlash from the extremely unpopular programs that President Pacheco has tried to push through in the last four years, as well as his perceived limitations as an administrator, negotiator and diplomat. His party has suffered greatly as a result. Starting from a 21% rating in the polls at the beginning of the campaign, it gradually and steadily declined to where the polls were predicting a 5% result, but it didn't even make that much --- it barely pulled in 3.6%, not enough to qualify it for a single list-member diputado representative in the Assemblea. Rather than whipping a dead horse, Foggy Bottom's choice was to support Otto Guevara, running on the Libertarian Movement ticket. The rumors are that a huge amount of money had been dumped into that party's campaign, funnelled through the ultra-conservative think tanks in the US, such as the American Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institute and others. Their money has made up a huge proportion of the Libertarian budget since its founding, and may have done so in this election campaign. But it not only didn't help, it actually seemed to hurt --- once questions about their funding began to be asked openly, their support dropped like a rock. Two months ago, it was in the high 20s, and going into the election, they were still polling in the low teens. But they barely pulled out 8% of the actual vote. The difference seems to have gone primarily to Solís.

All of this confirms that the leftward trend in Latin American politics generally is happening here in Central America as well, and the trend is most pronounced in countries where public education is strongest. There is little doubt in my mind that his open support for CAFTA cost Oscar Arias at least five percent in the polls, and opposition to CAFTA gave Otton Solís at least a ten percent boost, if not more. People have grown wary about the grand pronouncements from Washington about what is in their best interests, and Washington --- especially since the advent of George W. Bush --- is increasingly seen as self-serving and pursuing an economic empire at the expense of local interests. Latinos, given their improving access to the Internet, are becoming better informed and educated every day. And that is costing Washington dearly in terms of prestige, support and tolerance of its increasingly radical and nakedly self-interested agenda. As a result, Latinos are turning to the one portion of the political spectrum that consistently opposes Washington's hegemony --- and that is the left.

Where do we go from here? My bets are that the shift to the left will continue in Costa Rica. Oscar Arias's party, the National Liberation Party (PLN) is pretty much a spent force --- as it has shifted to the right, its major political stars, all center-left, have bailed out and moved to Otton Solís's party, the center-left Citizens' Action Party (PAC) which is now where all the stars are. The PLN ran Arias, a national hero, but already a past-president, basically because they no longer have anyone else --- and Solís is not only popular, but is seen as clean of corruption issues, and so is likely to remain popular. The incumbent far right Social Christians (PUSC), embroiled in numerous corruption scandals (two of their past presidents are on trial for taking "fees"), have essentially no support remaining. And so, if Solís does not become president in May, at this point I expect he will four years hence.

Arenal Cowboy
Costa Rica

About a tourist guide book we reviewed

Hello to everybody in your web site, my name is Rene Guardiola, I'm a tour guide native from Panama and I met Patricia [Katzman] some years ago before she started selling her first book about Panama. In that time she interviewed me after some people gave her references about my tours and other servivces related with tourism in Panama. She included my name in her book as good tour guide in Panama, but she only had my home phone number. I remember I gave her my e-mail adresses and cell phone number, but they were not included in the book. I have received a lot of phone calls at home but when I'm not there my maid speaks no English and that's all. Please for the next edition, if it's possible my e-mail adresses are reneguardiola@hotmail.com or reneguad@cableonda.net. Also my cell phone number is 6-625-7564, or for the best information please access www.yourmaninpanam.com, please thank Patricia for being so genttle and include me in her book, and also tell her that everybody is being very satisfied with my services. Thanks again,

René Guardiola
Tour Guide
Panama

"Just" wars and double-tongued Democrats

On May 2, 2003 Pope Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, stated: "He (John Paul II) did not impose this position ('Iraq War not necessary') as doctrine of the Church but as the appeal of a conscience enlightened by faith" (Zenit News Agency). Unlike many US Democrats, Pope John Paul's thoughts on the Iraq War were not voiced in an arrogant, judgmental manner. He loved America, and praised President George W. Bush's moral leadership (Zenit News - June 4, 2004).

Pope John Paul II never praised President Clinton for his "moral values," because Clinton, along with most Democrats, believes you have the "right to kill" through abortion --- a horrible crime against humanity that has resulted in the cruel deaths of millions of innocent, defenseless, unborn human beings. Cardinal Ratzinger later confirmed: "There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion, even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia" (Italian magazine "L'espresso," June 2004).

Would Pope John Paul II have considered it a "Just War" if France, England, and the US had disarmed Germany, preventing Hitler from invading Poland and other countries? The vast majority of Americans agreed with President George W. Bush's decision to disarm Iraq, and eliminate their capacity to wage war when it was thought Iraq was developing biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons that could be used against America, and other nations. Aided by the Democratic Party, the House and Senate overwhelmingly approved the Iraq War Resolution.

On February 17, 1998 President Clinton stated: "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." Solid evidence that clearly shows faulty intelligence on Iraq initially came from Bill Clinton.

Vincent Bemowski
Menasha, Wisconsin
USA