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Rival groups of which nobody had ever heard before --- apparently a "University Students Front for YES" and a "Victoriano Lorenzo Group 3" --- leave their respective campaign graffiti on a wall in Perejil. Photo by Eric Jackson

Down to the wire

Maybe the English-language expression "down to the wire" is irresponsible to use in today's Panama. The maleantes might think that there's some wire to steal and stage an Election Day crime wave. But a campaign that should have been longer but lower-keyed, with more information about the details of the proposal and fewer idiotic slogans than we ended up getting, will culminate with the casting of ballots on October 22. Although there will be an important aftermath however things go, the nation and The Panama News will shift our attention to other things.

Things other than the canal expansion referendum campaign have been going on all along, of course. A string of deaths, apparently caused by an across-the-board switch in blood pressure medications for some 9,000 Seguro Social patients --- some of whom should not have been prescribed the substitute drug --- has had the country in a panic. Because one of the arguments against the Torrijos - Alemán Zubieta Plan is that we can't trust the people who run our government or the ACP when it comes to contracting decisions, regardless of fault this purchasing disaster can't be very helpful for the "yes" side.

Then the nation is also embroiled in a controversy about little criminals. Violent youths have politicians and ordinary citizens calling for harsher treatment of young offenders, with the Catholic Church and various experts who deal directly with the problem calling for a more reasoned approach.

Chase, the man who periodically checks The Panama News mailbox, lives in El Chorrillo and tells me that the other day he was walking down the street and encountered a man lying on the sidewalk with a knife stuck into his chest and a pistol at his side. "It was a little boy, just 16 years old, who stabbed him," Chase said. He has told me before about even younger killers whom the neighbors are afraid to testify against, but in this case Chase said that the witnesses hesitate to talk to police because the man who was stabbed had been terrorizing the neighborhood with his gun.

While I was at St. Mary's Church covering a canal debate between Fernando Manfredo and a team from the Panama Canal Authority, El Chorrillo's most notorious gang, El Pentagono, blew away one of its rivals from the politically connected Viteri gang just outside the Figali Convention Center on Amador, as people were leaving after the Marc Anthony concert. Despite the large crowd, the gunman got away.

And then at the Louis Martinz trade school in San Miguelito, teachers walked out after a pistol carried in a student's knapsack accidentally went off and killed a bus driver. A few days before that an irate mother had assaulted a teacher who gave her kid a bad grade. For more than two years now they haven't been able to call the police from the principal's office because thieves have stolen the wires. There are gaps in the fence and the budget to fix that is continually cut --- next year they'll deal with it, the ministry says, but meanwhile the tools with which the kids are supposed to learn are constantly stolen.

So people are undestandably fed up and the hoodlums in our legislature are offering simplistic "solutions" while the church is pointing out certain fallacies in what the politicians say but is also failing to address a very real problem.

To deal with this sort of crime one must understand its causes and the course of its development. One needs to draw the distinction between understanding antisocial behavior and excusing it. One needs to realize that many murders are provoked by the victims, and also that those who kill when provoked are usually dangerous individuals from whom society needs to be protected.

Politicians who play on emotions and insist upon longer incarcerations under more brutal conditions for all crimes except those white collar heists that they and their friends commit are beneath contempt. But when Curundu residents complained after a toddler is killed in shootout over turf by rival teenage gangs and two gang members who were involved in the gunfight but didn't actually shoot the little boy were arrested and then released after two days in custody, the offended neighbors were and are not the dupes of demagogic politicians. They are ordinary citizens who object to living in a war zone. They are not unreasonable when they insist upon the removal of violent individuals who circulate among them.

Punishment, rehabilitation and corrections budgets are related but separate issues. So are economic issues like the availability of work, the qualities of jobs that can be had and the expectations that have been created. The public clamor in its most basic and rational expression is to sort out the various  issues in another set of conversations, but to take back the streets from the gunmen --- and gunboys --- now.

This was one of these times with three weeks between issues of The Panama News, and one of the things that happened since the last time we published was the opening of the United Nations General Assembly session, with all of the speeches by heads of state. I know that these were broadcast on CNN and thus many people got a chance to see and hear the speeches live, but nevertheless I dedicate a good portion of both the English and Spanish opinion sections to the text of some of the more important speeches. I do this not because I think that many of the readers of The Panama News will be inspired, but because I think that you want to be well informed and the contents and tenor of these speeches are most instructive about the state of world affairs.

In the English section there are the UN speeches of US President George W. Bush, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. All three speeches are very hard line, with Bush taking an amazingly patronizing and insultingly domineering tone, Chávez going way beyond the bounds of diplomatic politeness and the completely outrageous Ahmadinejad --- a guy who calls for the destruction of Israel and denies that the Holocaust ever happened, although not on this occasion --- coming across as the moderate among the three.

That the representatives of the US - installed government of Iraq stood up and applauded Ahmadinejad has got to be the definitive proof of how miserably the Bush foreign policy has failed.

In the Spanish opinion section, the leading article is the transcript of Martín Torrijos's address to the UN, which was wishy-washy rather than hard line and which included a campaign pitch for a "yes" vote more properly made in a face-to-face debate with his critics here than in a speech to world leaders. Then there are the words of the US ambassador to the OAS, John Maisto, to the Panamanian Business Executives Association (APEDE), the most serious and thoughtful of this country's business organizations. Maisto spoke about democracy, and although he had diplomatic etiquette on his side in his choices of what to leave out, it seems downright bizarre that anybody could talk about democracy in Panama at this time without mentioning how it's being mocked by the government's efforts  to secure a "yes" vote in the referendum.

This issue had me staying up until after three in the morning to catch Nostalgia Night, a birthday party for Vitín Paz that included many of the combos nacionales of the 60s and early 70; trekking through the mud to an endangered part of the Las Cruces Trail in the woods at the former Fort Clayton; catching Rubén Blades for his presentation on the state of Panamanian tourism and Hitesh Mehta's discourse on high-end ecotourism that's both profitable and sustainable at the AMCHAM tourism forum; and on a couple of visits to a new bagel place near the Einstein head's left ear in El Cangrejo.

Finally, I want to make some announcements about The Panama News.

Some of you had trouble connecting to this website in September, as on a few occasions I did as well. My web server told me of several attempts to hack into the website, some of which got so far as to put things on the index page. Security measures have been upgraded. On one night I got a series of some 3,000 computer generated spam emails to my e_l_jackson_malo@yahoo.com email box --- they were a pain to clean out, but it's a large box so it was not shut down. My other email box, editor@thepanamanews.com, was repeatedly shut down by email bombs with large attachments, emails asking me to confirm subscriptions to "Belarus Babes" and other such things that someone signed me up for and more "ordinary" spam bundles. These things usually happen in the months when reader contributions are requested. Anyway, the most important thing for you to know is that an email to my yahoo box is more likely to get to me than one to my thepanamanews.com box.

Second, as these words were typed a special print tabloid edition of The Panama News was at the printer. It's a joint effort with Miguel Antonio Bernal's Alternativa, a 24-pager with two front pages, 11 with English-language content on The Panama News side and 13 Spanish-language pages on the Alternativa side. This special edition is on the occasion of and oriented to the Panama Canal expansion referendum, although there are also a few unrelated articles. The distribution is going to be haphazard, but if you want copies to put out for customers at your business or to students at your school, send me an email or give me a phone call to ask. If you can't find a copy, there will be some available at The Panama News office at least.

Finally, there are other changes in the works, which are aimed at expanding The Panama News from this website into other media over the coming few months. Stand by for word about a radio show or the resumption of print publication, or both.

And enjoy.