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photo by Eric Jackson

Mmmm --- spicy Peruvian fare, for a good cause!

Of course, all Peruvian food is not spicy, and when it's served to a primarily Panamanian clientele, they tend to turn down the heat. As a Colon buay I would never deny that we have some subcultures --- the West Indian and Kuna ones, to name two --- that appreciate the picante, but garlic and culantro are our gastronomic mainstream's ubiquitous spices. Peruvians are fire-eaters by comparison, and what better way for someone who can't tell one Latin American cuisine from the next to savor the differences at the year's top food fair, the diplomatic women's Caravana de Asistencia Social. Started years ago to finance the purchase of toys for poor kids who otherwise wouldn't get anything for Christmas, the annual event has since expanded the good works it supports and the participants to include non-Christian countries.

It's good to see a country that's simultaneously engaged in several acrimonious rows take the time to kick back and enjoy life, and in the process support a good cause. But the truce only went so far.

I did late lunch at this ATLAPA event, and the cab in which a young woman who works at a bank and I made our way out to San Francisco had to take a circuitous route. A little while before the president inaugurated a new National Assembly session behind police barricades that kept the peaceful but vociferous striking teachers away from the legislative palace, and then construction workers and university students reacted to the politicians' speeches by blocking several key roads in the capital.

That was on a Friday, the end of an extraordinary week for politics junkies, almost surely the week that the "no" campaign overtook the "yes" forces in support for the October 22 referendum. If I am right about this we probably won't see any more La Prensa polls about the subject before the vote --- the PRD has a long history of suppressing the publication of polls that don't tell the people what the party wants them to hear. But what has happened may have been best summed up in a cartoon published in La Estrella, itself on the move upwards but still a long way from overtaking La Prensa in circulation.

So if The Panama News can't afford to hire pollsters (and we can't --- but read on), how might I estimate a sea change in the referendum campaign? Mainly by two things, the observable movement of various social forces and the also observable actions of the Torrijos administration and the ACP.

The conservative MOLIRENA party's national executive committee started the week off by voting 65-5 to join the "no" campaign, repudiating the position of the party's three members who sit on the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) board of directors. To hear an old guard Mireyista on the losing side of this intra-party disagreement, Adolfo Linares, essentially call MOLIRENA president Gisela Chung a communist was extra added entertainment.

The following evening I went sat in an overflowed university auditorium to cover what several scholars had to say about environmental factors that bear on the canal expansion decision and then hear journalist Maribel Cuervo de Paredes interview the former chief of the Panama Canal's Dredging Division and prominent critic of the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan, Tomás Drohan. This was a "no" campaign event --- so far the "yes" people won't agree to any substantial debate --- and the large crowd, which was primarily middle class and middle aged, was fired up in a way that I haven't seen on the other side. It was so gratifying for an independent journalist like me  to see Maribel, one of Panama's few outstanding journalists, who in the past year or so was run off of FETV, then out of the Latin American Journalism Center, then from her position as a La Prensa columnist, vindicated in this way. (She's on Radio La Exitosa now, but I suspect that this triumphal night was just the beginning of her comeback.)

The morning after that, the Panama Canal Pilots Union had a presentation wherein they said contradictory things about the referendum itself but showed videos and made a technical presentation indicating grave safety problems with the concept that the ACP has adopted for the proposed third locks and complained that they had never been consulted. (Officially the union isn't endorsing either a "yes" or "no" vote, but its leader says that the canal expansion is something that can't be put off.) The "yes" campaign attempted to spin the event as an endorsement, but it's precisely what they didn't get. As the week went on, several more canal employees in various ways approached me to complain of a campaign of intimidation designed to force them into the "yes" campaign. So whatever spins may be played, the ACP's seemingly rock-solid unity is crumbling and Mr. Alemán Zubieta et al are now playing damage control.

Then the heavies of the "yes" campaign held a panicky meeting and shook up the campaign staff for the umpteenth time. Now former Christian Democrat legislator Milton Henriquez, the former co-host of the insufferable RPC "Debate Abierto" talk show, is in charge of turning things around. Plus, the ACP hired an American public relations firm, Edelman, to deal with the beating they have been taking in English on the Internet. Although The Panama News is still cut off of the ACP's press release list and the "yes" people are trying to boost a copyright pirate as an alternative, Edelman sent us a reply to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs take on the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan that appeared in the last issue, and that response is in our opinion section. And meanwhile Dutch journalist Okke Ornstein's Noriegaville website was blasted in La Prensa and I got this angry letter from one J.J. Vallarino Jr., which I publish among this issue's letters to the editor. Most bizarre of all was the apparent decision by the "yes" campaign that since they've been getting clobbered by a ragtag collection of opponents who have few resources, they'd have to mimic their critics and use the media of the excluded --- would you believe spraypainting on walls? --- to get their message out.

It's fascinating to watch, and still very much a horse race.

And where else have I been these past couple of weeks? At the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, where they unveiled a new online tool that they're developing. Covering the teachers' strike, which continued as these words were written, and the Seguro Social employees' strike, which was settled. Reading several books at one time, one of which is the new Sparky the Wonder Dog collection.

(Have you been saved? Have you taken Sparky into your life as your own personal wonder dog? Then say "Hallelujah!" and put your hands on the video screen, then roll around on the floor barking in tongues! If this doesn't work to cure all that ails ye, then you just might want to consider the possibility that you aren't a dog.)

This issue's Spanish opinion section is almost entirely devoted to the canal expansion question, and a good many of the English opinions are as well. However, the columns that begin with Miguel Antonio Bernal's look at the Big Dig scandal-tainted consultant that the ACP hired to do the cost estimate for the new locks end with things about culture and urban policy. Dr. Watson R. Denis gets into Emancipation Day in Trinidad - Tobago, Silvio Sirias interviews an outstanding writer, Raúl Leis writes about urban affairs in Panama and mainly the lack of attention to them, and I pay my respects to the late Maryann Mahaffey, a Detroit city councilwoman whom I really admired. (And what would that latter piece have to do with Panama? For one thing, if we had more politicians who tried to be like her this country would be in a lot better shape than it is today.)

Finally, I would like to remind you that September is one of the two months when The Panama News asks readers for contributions. There are some special projects in the works and some expensive hardware and software on the wish list. (Will I be able to come up with a grand for a professional digital camera, or a similar amount for another computer to expand production capabilities, or a similar amount again for a legal copy of Quark XPress with which to produce a coming special print edition? We shall see.)

The Panama News is run as a micro-enterprise in my personal name, so any checks you might send must be made out to "Eric Jackson," with a notation that it's a contribution for The Panama News, because there is no bank account in the name of The Panama News. Thanks to a business alliance with Henry and Nora Smith's little company you can also contribute by credit card through Pay Pal --- click onto the black button at the bottom of this page's ad column for details about that.

And how do you know that the money won't just disappear, with you getting nothing in return? Well, you're reading what you get in return right now --- a few advertisers, a few contributors and too few people who make donations when we ask for them in September and March keep The Panama News afloat and a lot of other people take advantage of this support and my efforts by clicking onto this website for free.

(But then, if you are a very special person, I need to give you a better answer than that. I am the world's worst businessman and constantly preoccupied with producing the next issue, but I am convinced that the right person could take over the management of this publication, make it pay for her time and give me the extra resources to do a better job. That person (who could be a she or a he) would have to be able to sell and conduct business negotiations in both English and Spanish, create and keep records, navigate the pitfalls of Panama and understand and appreciate what The Panama News is in the first place. If you have any ideas in that regard you may want to send me an email so that we might get together and talk.)

Anyway, whether your main concern is furnishing your home or protecting it, or whether this time of the year stimulates your interest in books or in football, I think you'll like this issue.

Enjoy.