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photo by Eric Jackson

A new record

Those who practice the sport of cayuco racing are ever stronger and ever faster, as was shown by the crew of Chava, shown here crossing the finish line to set a record in the male trophy class at the Balboa Yacht Club Regatta at the opening of the 2007 cayuco season.

Not counting the unprecedented number of boats at this particular event, four records fell that day. One first-place finisher that didn't set a record was the police boat, Expreso Comando, had a policewoman aboard and thus raced in the mixed open category rather than in the male open division as in previous years. You still don't want to try to outrun the police in a cayuco.

The most important news and business story in this edition happens to be in the review section. Say what? See, the most consequential of many important issues facing Panama at the moment is the US-Panama Free Trade Agreement, and after a month and a half of continuous hype about what it says and is supposed to do, the governments of Panama and the United States finally published the document. Links to the English and Spanish texts are in our Cool Internet sites, a regular feature of our review section. (Also in that section, we get into a good science fiction murder mystery.)

We have a larger than usual Spanish-language opinion section, which includes a number of critiques from the left of the free trade proposal. I will publish defenses of this draft treaty to the extent that I get them, but will not, in the name of "balance," restrict criticism in the face of pretension by the Torrijos administration, its supporters, and some elements of the American community that The Panama News doesn't exist. If people on one side don't care to submit their opinions, they should not expect this to lead to a restriction on the space accorded to those who hold different points of view. But on the other hand nobody should think that because he or she disagrees with me that his or her opinion has no place in The Panama News --- especially about such a complicated and important subject as the free trade deal with the United States.

I intend to, in addition to hosting a free-wheeling debate in the opinion sections, cover this important story straight-up in the business and news sections of coming editions. Right now I'm reading, and just because I have a legal education doesn't make this a less complicated and difficult document to follow. For example, I am particularly interested in intellectual property provisions, but this part of this proposed agreement refers to several other treaties, some even longer and more complex than the document under consideration. And if Panama agrees to ratify a certain treaty, does that prevent us from taking a reservation about some issue?

As best I can tell, the proposed treaty on its face would prohibit the sale in Panama of radios capable of taping music off of the air, or of computer programs that would allow a person to copy tracks off of a CD for his or her personal use. It would also seem to require us to adopt US rules on medicine patents and thus high US medicine prices and restrictions on generic medications. But to be sure about that I'll have to read all of the referred-to treaties and know for sure whether Panama can take reservations to sections of them if and when it ratifies them, and even then it's likely that I will find that top experts disagree.

Center stage in the news at this particular instant --- because it won't be until at least March before the legislature takes up the Free Trade Agreement --- is the Penal Code reform process. Can you believe that the Torrijos legislative steamroller is backfiring and stalling over the abortion issue? Amazing but true, in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.

These have been days of religious fervor in and around my neighborhood. The Salesians celebrated a century of work in Panama with an unusually huge version of the Don Bosco Procession, and meanwhile the Evangelicals were packing them into the Artes y Oficios Stadium for their own Hosanna Festival. Hardly anybody believes in the authorities anymore, not even those who support them for the personal advantages that they receive or expect or perceive, but there is a heartfelt need to believe in something.

This time we have a very good contribution by a talented travel writer about the Azuero Peninsula as Panamanian tourism's final frontier. In this edition we also meet a man from Mars who descended upon the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute for a conference that might or might not have vindicated Darryl Dawkins's "chocolate thunder" claims after all these years, take a peek at the American Society dry season picnic, get an update on the grossest disease in my daddy's old tropical medicine handbook and look forward to the Diablo and Congo Festival in Portobelo next month.

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson

the editor

PS: Are you here for Carnival and disappointed to find yourself subjected to people shouting at you over electric drum machines rather than hearing actual music? Before a free trade deal makes it illegal, you may want to upload the address http://www.thepanamanews.com/In_Case_of_Hip_Hop.mp3 to your Windows Media Player or Real Player program. If you click on the links to that feature on the pages here it will take awhile to download but once you have the hour of music only you will be able to play it without those annoying buffer breaks.