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

front page

When we read a study that the ACP hides from us...

In public debates, representatives of the Panama Canal Authority frequently bait those who dare question what they say that their experts have found and published in more than 55,000 pages of supporting studies. It's a most dishonest forensic tactic, because not only are most of these documents in an English language that most Panamanians don't understand, but in any case between a Byzantine indexing system the authority uses on its website and its tactic of publishing the documents in the difficult to download format of huge PDF documents, they have ensured that most people who can read the studies in the languages in which they were published won't be able to download them.

Ah, but The Panama News had the cooperation of someone with a fast computer and a broadband connection, who was able to help out with the 40-minute download of the principal archaeological study about some of the stuff that's in the way of the bulldozers and shovels. And it turns out that the baiting about not reading documents deliberately made hard to obtain is only a small part of the ACP's ethical offense here.

Let me not stick to the "polite" longer word here. The promoters of the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan, using funds that belong to the people of Panama, misrepresented the results of a study that the ACP commissioned. But let's not use a five-syllable word where four letters and one syllable suffice: they lied. They repeatedly said that there are probably no important archaeological sites in the place where they propose to dig, and in fact they know that there are. The pre-Columbian gold pendant shown above (the front and back side of the same piece) was found in an ancient tomb near Cocoli. That grave wasn't even the most important archaeological find in the relatively small part of the construction site that was surveyed. Thus, for the first time in awhile, our cover story is found in the science section.

In that section you will also find the story for this issue on which I spent the most time. I owe the readers and the folks at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute an apology here, because their annual science seminar was back in March and only now am I publishing my report on it, after previous false starts. The thing is, there were 21 presentations in different scientific fields, in none of which I have any formal education worth mentioning. I almost always have to do homework after hearing a STRI lecture before publishing a story about it, and this seminar was 21 widely varied lectures over two days. The result may be the longest thing The Panama News has ever published.

I know that not all the readers are interested in the sciences, and I realize that being too long-winded will lose other readers who do like that section. Maybe this is an article you will want to print out and read away from your monitor.

One point of this long article is that Panama is academically underdeveloped and the team of world-class scholars at the Smithsonian ought to serve as an example of the standards to which this country should aspire.

Is that's what's happening at the institution that's supposed to guide all higher education in this country, the University of Panama? Not really. See Miguel Antonio Bernal's column about the controversy over the "Rector Magnifico's" probably fake doctorate. Plus, in our news section we touch upon the university elections, the campaigns for which are well underway.

In some of the dailies, it's high school students who are the focus of attention. As in a furor over teenage sex, with adults or with one another. We look at that in our news section and our editorial, but actually pay more attention to the excellence that some private high school kids have demonstrated in the arts.

Our review section also took more of my time than it usually does. I read a 467-page book to review, an important piece of journalism about what has happened to the United States in Iraq. For the Internet site reviews this time I concentrated on the theme of great public works projects gone terribly wrong. (I couldn't find English-language references outside of our own archives about the Albrook traffic overpass, the Centennial Bridge, the Corredor Norte or the Cerro Colorado copper mine, to name four relatively recent Panamanian debacles.) I guess that makes for a fairly dark review section, but the lesson to draw in both instances is not pessimism but caution.

The contributors have been sending us a lot of good things for this issue as well. We welcome Susan Hahn, who writes about the other side of paradise, to our opinion section. Silvio Sirias looks up an old hero. The shipping execs who make up the ACP's international advisory board weigh in on the canal expansion proposal. Willy Gutman, an immigrant to the United States, is back with his take on various claims being asserted in the US immigration debate. (If you think about it, what Willy says about newcomers in the United States and Israel also ought to be instructive to North American expatriates who are moving down here, and also has to do with one of the reasons why this website has a little Spanish section.)

Our community section begins a new adopt-a-pet feature, and passes on the US Consulate's information about obtaining Canal Zone documents. Gaenor Speed went all the way to Cadiz and its famous Andalusian equestrian school and gave us this issue's travel story. And then a reader treated me to a vegetarian lunch, which is the subject of the dining page.

June, July and August tend to be one of our slow seasons, as a lot of readers go on vacation and don't look at computers screens. Being a Colon buay by origin and in various other ways, I appreciate the heavy rains and have found myself planting and transplanting things and preparing for the annual mango processing binge. This is not peak tourist season, even if we are getting ever more visitors who come here to see a rainforest during the rainy season. But for those of us who have gotten over concepts like "time is money" and who don't think first and foremost about annoying driving conditions when the tropical cloudbursts come, these really are wonderful months to live in Panama.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson

the editor