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photo by John Flisek

Getting busy

John Flisek turned his camera on one of my sister's orchids just at the time when a swarm of euglossine bees came to partake of its nectar, and the result was this impressive photo. It can serve as a metaphor for many things.

The prolonged holiday season that begins with Independence Day in early November and ends with Carnival is now over, and it's time for kids to go back to school and working people to get down to brass tacks.

"Busy as a bee," they say, and this website has taken on some of the aspects of a beehive of late. We have never been busier, and in February we broke through three impressive thresholds: the 2,000 readers per day monthly average, the 5,000 page views per day marker and the 25,000 hits per day level.

Euglossine bees come in many species and sometimes even experts have difficulty distinguishing them without DNA testing, but one of the distinguishing features of the genus is that its various species tend to specialize in visiting particular sorts of orchids. These insects, like The Panama News in a way, seem to have found their niche.

The Panama News has plenty of occasions to consider niches and the consequences of their creation or loss on many levels. It's one the things that happens to a newspaper that pays attention to the natural environment. Especially so, given that this publication has always considered Panama's economic development, from the point of view of the man who sells bollos out of a big tub he carries on his shoulder as well as according to the spread sheets of the major banks, to be the number one story in this country.

Let me cite an example of a niche that someone fills and its potential destruction. Do you read the "Bear in mind" quotations at the bottom of the editorial page? Those are compiled with some deliberation, certain principles, and various aims that cut to the heart of what The Panama News is. One of the principles is that wisdom is not an exclusively male property. One of the aims is to foster a greater understanding of Panama and of Latin America among people who speak English as a first language. Thus from time to time you will find among those quotations things that noteworthy Latin Americans have said.

The great majority of Latin American quotations that find their way into The Panama News came my way (and your way) via one Augusto Barragán, who for the last eight years or so has been supporting himself and his family by running a little used book and magazine exchange just off of Via España in Calidonia. It's not far from The Panama News office. The other day a city crew came by and confiscated his tables, a part of a municipal beautification program they say. They also ousted the man from whom I buy my vegetables, who had long operated a stand nearby. Barragán is a purveyor of the novels and stories of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez that I read, and the source of collections of writings by Justo Arosemena, Ricardo J. Alfaro, Omar Torrijos, Simón Bolivar, José Martí et al that are on my office bookshelves. I have on a couple of occasions been called upon to help Barragán's son with his English homework. The city, for its myriad reasons, trashed a little economic niche that was important for the intellectual life of the neighborhood.

Meanwhile over at the National Assembly, President Martín Torrijos opened the new legislative session with a speech, the complete text of which appears in our Spanish-language opiniones section, wherein he made certain representations about the job situation in Panama. The only way that what his excellency said about that particular subject can be true is if the large minority of Panamanians like Augusto Barragán and the man from whom I buy vegetables --- people who work in the informal economy --- are counted as "employed."

That, of course, is a proposition that's challenged by militant labor leaders and hotly debated among respected economists. The semi-underground informal economy is nevertheless very real and provides the only means of sustenance for a huge chunk of urban Panama. My own preference for shopping on the street is not at all unusual in my neighborhood, notwithstanding the generally bogus advice in the snobbier tourism and living in Panama guidebooks that this should not be done.

This digression about the informal economy gets us back to the situation of The Panama News, which instead of closing during the economic free fall at the turn of the century retreated from its prior corporate existence and print publication and clung to life as a micro-enterprise with one foot in and one foot out of the informal economy. We have been able to do this in part by asking readers for contributions during the months of March and September.

Look at the readership figures and you might say that The Panama News is thriving. But then I have been sleeping in the office for more than five years now. Look at our ad sale revenues and you will realize that we don't make enough money to hit the $800 per month threshold that will require us to do a lot more paperwork and pay income taxes. But we are close enough, and I'd like to see this publication smash through, not be smashed by, that legal barrier.

How far are we from resuming print publication after all these years? On a special issue basis it's really not all that far, but putting together a team with a business manager, a payroll, the computers with the proper programs and an office that's big enough to be suitable for regular print issues is another matter.

How far along are we toward the goal of being a community newspaper rather than a one-man show? Well, think about the columns by Silvio Sirias, Raúl Leis and Miguel Antonio Bernal. Note part two of Brandt Irion's report on some atmospheric research in which he has been participating. See John Flisek's photos from Bocas, Ivan Klasovsky's pictures of Eastern Germany and German Carnival celebrations and Gary Johnson's report on Carnival in Venice. Go to the community section to find out about the benefit that Dori Cohen and Janet Levi are putting together for Pat Chan's Spay Panama project, and know that the entire Spanish-language opinion section is by Panamanians about Panama. Be smart and consider Sparky the Wonder Dog's sage advice.

Then consider my main distraction during the production of this issue, the organization of Dr. T.A. Heppenheimer's visit to Panama in late March and the first half of April, which will include a couple of speaking engagements. Heppenheimer, some of you Atlantic siders may know, is the only actual rocket scientist to have graduated from Cristobal High and is a noted science and technology historian. His book "Turbulent Skies" became the basis for the PBS television series "Chasing the Sun." Because he wrote NASA's authorized two-volume "History of the Space Shuttle" and also because his late mother was my late father's medical secretary, he seemed to me to be the logical person to ask, last year when the first private manned space flight had just happened and the first private launch of a satellite from international waters in the equatorial Pacific was about to happen, whether Panama might find a niche in the space industry given those directions in which it's developing. So Tom Heppenheimer's coming back to Panama to talk about the subject, and organizing his visit is yet another milestone in this publication's growth.

By all the standard bottom line measures except possibly Arthur Andersen's, The Panama News is an abject business failure. Yet it's a popular, respected and growing source of information about Panama, it gets by with a little help from its friends and I'm once again asking you to help support it.

You can now make credit card contributions by email through Pay Pal, thanks to an alliance we have made with Henry and Nora Smith's business. (Their Retire Panama company helps people looking to retire down here find homes and otherwise iron out the details.) Click here  or on the box to the left of our logo at the top of this page to get the details on how to send us a contribution via Pay Pal.

Sending checks seems to get slightly more complicated every time. Long ago Citibank closed our company account along with those of all other micro-enterprises. The other banks generally want a corporate structure and a minimum amount of business in order to open a company account. Thus for several years we have only been able to deal with checks made out to me, Eric Jackson, personally. A check made out to The Panama News might make fine wallpaper, but it isn't negotiable. Nor, given Panama's benighted banking practices, is any sort of money order no matter to whom it's made out, even if it is sold to you as an "international" money order. And then Correos just added an extra little twist: for some truly bizarre reason they have changed the numbers on the boxes at our post office for the second time in less than a year, this time adding an extra digit!

To send a contribution by snail mail, then, you need to make your check out to "Eric Jackson," with a notation that it's for The Panama News, and mail it to:

Eric Jackson
Att'n The Panama News
 Apartado 0831-0-0927 Estafeta Paitilla
 Panamá, República de Panamá

And if enough of you pitch in, then maybe this time next year this publication will have grown from a micro-enterprise in the form of a sole proprietorship into a structure with which it's easier to do business within which I can dedicate my attention more fully to journalism.

I thank everyone who has helped out over the years, and those who are about to pitch in to keep this cause alive again.

Let this issue be the principal means by which I thank the people who have kept The Panama News alive. It's one of the larger, graphically richer and I think better issues that has been published. Herein we consider serious topics like Panamanian financial crime, developments in a torture case against a former dictator and the travails of Third World psychiatry, and also take an artistic view of Carnival, taste some West Indian flavors and stop to look at the orchids.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson
the editor