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Photo by Eric Jackson

Rainy season over Panama Bay

There are all sorts of lifestyles in Panama. We are The Crossroads of the World, and we have one of the world's biggest economic gaps between rich and poor, and these two factors alone create an amazing diversity in how people live. A lot of people in the American community here maintain their ties with family and friends in the United States by heading north during the rainy season --- now, when it's summer vacation for many up in the States, or later when it's fall up there and the height of our rains down here --- and then entertaining visitors during the dry season, when it also happens to be cold in most parts of North America.

Me? I can't afford that, and besides, I like the rainy season.

Now some of you readers --- a distinct minority --- have never actually been to Panama in the rainy season, and may be under the impression of days of endless rain for month after month. But while you occasionally do get drizzle all day punctuated by downpours, more often you have a morning that gets increasingly muggy, then sometime in the afternoon the sky turns black and the rain pours down hard for a little while, and then afterwards it clears up and you have a cooling breeze off the ocean. This is a picture of one of those afternoons.

So what can you do on a rainy day?

It's a good time for gardening, except of course when the rain is actually falling. Turn up the moist soil, stick in a seed, seedling or cutting, wait for Mother Nature to turn on the tap and you'll probably be surprised how much it grows day to day.

When the rain is really coming down hard, it's a good time to curl up with a good book, the white noise of the water pounding on the rooftop deadening all of the other distractions of a noisy city. (By the way, Panama City's Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro just issued a new anti-noise decree and they have been having special educational seminars for the corregidores and a public awareness campaign directed toward kids. Will it make a difference? I sure hope so, but I'll wait and see.)

Rainy season's also a good time to play with a kitten. Cats seem to have this sense of when things human are slowed down by the weather, and thus in need of feline intervention. Plus, when the rains are particularly heavy it tends to drive rodents out of their outdoors burrows and into buildings, and that creates extra work for the cats among us.

It has been a three-week gap between issues, with a lot of news both here in Panama and in the Latin America - Caribbean region generally.

This is a time of grand political debates, with a pendulum swinging toward change but different countries adapting to the fluid situation in different ways.

In Mexico it's still too early to tell whether the conservatives have hung on or whether the various challenges to their projected win --- in the courts, before the election authorities, in the streets --- will bring the PAN down and NAFTA as we have known it with it.

In Peru the candidate who championed free trade with the United States got eliminated in the first round, the one who liked Hugo Chávez's vision of a new Latin American economic order much better got trounced in the second round and an extremely unpopular lame duck president and legislature ratified a free trade deal with the USA. People who look at all of Latin America in terms of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez --- far too many people in the States --- will probably not be able to understand the directions that Alan García ends up taking in his second presidency.

In Bolivia President Evo Morales bolstered his support when his party won a majority of the delegates to a constitutional convention. However, a simple majority is not enough to make changes and Morales didn't get the super-majority he would have liked, so there will have to be compromises. In the same election Bolivians narrowly defeated a proposal for regional autonomy that had mainly been promoted by people in the Santa Cruz area, under which most of the impoverished country's oil and gas reserves lie. The greedy little notion of Santa Cruz splitting off with the nation's wealth seems to be going nowhere, but a less centralized government might still be one of  the compromises that goes into a new constitution.

Hugo Chávez was here on June 22, and I caught his whole speech --- more than three and one-half hours of it --- at the University of Panama. I didn't feel threatened or insulted, or get the impression that I was listening to a nut case or somebody driven by hate. But he did talk too long, and the campus radicals and non-radical poseurs seeking validation by their proximity tended to be annoying. Most of the people who showed up to hear the Venezuelan president were not students, nor were they members of the little leftist sects. What the Panamanian establishment has to fear is not that this multitude will take marching orders from Hugo Chávez, but that there are all of these Panamanians who don't register in the in-crowd's calculations who yearn to turn the tables on those who dominate society. Moreover the presence of the SUNTRACS construction workers' union in the crowd, and the absence of its leader Genaro López from the dais, was a subtle counterpoint to the student groups' silliness. López, whom most Panamanians see as the principal spokesperson for the working class --- even those who don't like him tend to concede that --- doesn't need a foreign leader's blessing. The union he leads was working the crowd rather than trying to get in the picture with the celebrity. What was happening that night was a far more serious challenge to the powers that be than the one posed by little bands of rock-throwing kids, and Hugo Chávez really wasn't the one throwing down the gauntlet.

The people who came to hear Chávez will be players in next big challenge to Panama's power elite, but the latter won't be so lucky as to be dealing with just them. Many disparate forces are mobilizing against the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan to expand the Panama Canal, for many reasons. Almosy all of the people who came from the Interior to hear Hugo Chávez are likely to be grass roots campaign workers for the "no" forces.

I dedicate this issue's editorial to a critical if unpleasant aspect of the canal decision, the matter of trust. The lead business story is about a substantial setback, one that can't readily be hidden or explained away via the manipulation of news or polls, for the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan. In the news section we look at how the controversy has touched one of the important outposts of Americana here, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

For those of you who are bilingual (or learning to be such), much of the Spanish opinion section is dedicated to the canal expansion debate. It starts with President Torrijos and his message upon sending the proposal to the legislature. That's followed by an economics-based opposing point of view from the UNNO coalition, biology professor Ariel Rodríguez's environmental objections, Panameñista health spokesperson Jorge Gamboa's concerns about public health needs that he thinks the plan should be but isn't addressing, the leftist FRENADESO umbrella group's call for citizen action against the proposal and former Panama Canal translator Kevin Harrington's take on the "yes" campaign's attempt to cast the debate in terms of what should be done with all of the money that Panama is supposed to make from this proposed investment.

Over in the fun section, there is this anonymous classic spoof of the ACP's slick power point presentations and manipulative tactics. In the reviews, notice is taken of a new collection of Panamanian music from the mid-60s to the mid-70s that ought to both help people understand the roots of some of today's sounds and ensure that a lot of worthy artists do not slip into total obscurity. This issue also takes another glance at Panamanian bus art, which might be consigned to oblivion by economic fiat.

So rain or shine, serious or light-hearted, there will be many things for you in this issue. Enjoy.

Eric Jackson

the editor