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Panama City Carnival woes

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Panama News Briefs

Panama City's Carnival woes

by Eric Jackson

At the beginning of this year's Carnival, the president and both vice-presidents were out of the country and people were complaining about what the presidential appointee in charge of Panama City's Carnival and seeming the whole country, former El Siglo sales director Mingthoy Giro, had done.

The scene of the party was on the Transistmica beetween the Artes y Oficios vocational high school and the Assemblies of God church. The road was blocked off starting the previous Wednesday, which annoyed many city drivers.

But wait --- Mingthoy's route put the party in front of to places of worship, the Chinese Buddhist Temple and the Assemblies of God Cathedral. So at the last moment the Carnival area was shortened at both ends to deal with that problem.

But of course, that meant last minute changes in where vendors could set up, last minute changes in security at the Carnival entrances and so on.

In practice one of the things that it meant was the breaking of one of the promises and basic premises of moving the party to the Transistmica. At the new site, it was promised, there is more space so the problems of previous years like food vendors being put right next to or in front of the foul-smelling portable toilets wouldn't happen again.

Think again --- the same abuse happened this year. From the vendors' point of view, it was hardly the only one.

There were, for example, the independent beer vendors, who paid their money to the Carnival organization and various other governmental entities, and to the electric company for their temporary hookups --- and THEN found out that the foreign-owned beer companies had set up their own stands and were refusing to supply the independents.

(Did Martín send his congratulations to Minghoy from afar? After all, the elimination of Panamanian small business in favor of monopolistic multinationals is the whole point of the Free Trade Agreement for which he went to Washington to lobby. What happened to the independent beer vendors was consonant with the alpha and omega of PRD economics.)

So this reporter went to the party on Friday night, entering through one stop and frisk point in front of the Oxford school, taking a long walk over the hill to another stop and frisk point down near the car dealership, and not bothering to mix into the huge crowd in front of the main stage that was being shouted at by rappers. I figured that I'd catch some actual music at one of the other stages.

But there were no other stages. To be sure, there was another one in the street at the intersection of Via Brasil and the Transistmica, but whatever was to happen there was something you'd have to pay for to get in, and in any case there wasn't anything happening. There were a bunch of boom cars, one of them blasting the most viciously misogynistic English-language gangsta rap, the rest doing reggaeton that in many instance was only marginally less horrible. Finally I encountered a booth where a lady was grilling chicken and playing cumbia.

But this was odd ---  chicken and chorizos, but no meat on a stick this Carnival. The chicken lady explained that this year meat on a stick was considered a weapon, because of the skewers. For some reason they didn't apply that to the sticks upon which the chorizos were grilled. Other than a possible bribe from chorizo makers, I couldn't make any sense of this.

In any case, down by the end where the chicken lady worked there were hardly any customers for the early festivities --- no alternative stages to generate any business at that end of the route.

A little farther down there was a bar, where people were dancing to merengue. It wasn't part of the official Carnival as such, but at least this establishment lucked out by the sudden announcement of a Carnival route that compelled the unexpected closure of many neighboring business establishments, and showed its appreciation by offering something that an old buzzard like this reporter might want to hear.

The first night, then, was a big disaster for vendors, a dud along most of the route and just annoying for anyone who's not into rap.

On Saturday the lights went out for many of the vendors and didn't come back on until several hours later. (Sorry about that --- the foreign electric monopolies just collect the inflated prices, and aren't responsible for the consequential damages.  Come to think of it, they probably aren't sorry about it either.)

Then in the wee hours of Sunday, despite all the police security, two Curundu gangs had a shootout in the Carnival area, leaving a 22-year-old member of Matar o Morir dead (guess it was the latter for him) and two members of Los Sagrados, aged 15 and 16, under arrest for murder.

Time for more improvisation. Now, without prior notice to the public, the number of entry points in which to stand in line and be frisked were reduced. I was taking nearly an hour to get in, after walking a mile or so around from where one could get in on Friday night to Via Brasil.

But that was annoying for tourists, so more improvisation. Boot-licking imitators of all the worst of US culture like Martín Torrijos and his entourage are, they dealt with the long line problem by racial profiling. A black undercover cop went down the men's line pulling out all the white guys and those who were over a certain age and sending us to a quicker entrance, leaving all the young black males to wait.

By Monday, more improvisation --- to let all the people who forked out money for vendors' booths know how much they were appreciated, Carnival authorities let the walking street vendors in and it was possible to encounter the deadly meat on a stick.

That day La Prensa carried the story of how Mingthoy Giro is accused by the Comptroller General of mishandling the funds for the 2006 Carnival. (To be fair, it wasn't anything like embezzlement, just questions about who approved and who received more than a million bucks in expenditures for various services.) This year Giro had refused to divulge financial details, but it did come out on the eve of Carnival that the foreign musicians were getting way more money than the Panamanian ones for playing on the main stage.

On Tuesday afternoon the floats with light-skinned queens and comparsas with primarily black memberships were a lot of fun, and despite the lack of a stage anywhere near the end of the route near the Assemblies of God, the parade finally did bring some people and sales to the vendors in that area.

However, the parade demonstrated a great fallacy in Giro's planning and the justification she gave for it. We were told that the festivities were moved to the Transistmica because that street is much wider than Via España and there is thus more space for activities that were crowded in at the former locale. That may have been true as to the available area in front of the main stage, although in years past the existence of other stages helped to relieve that problem. It certainly wasn't true for the parades, because the floats and comparsas used only one side of the street between the curb and the median, which meant even less room than on Via España and people still had to jostle for much of a chance to see the parade down that narrow half-street defile.

But now, another improvisation --- they had blocked the perpendicular street, without prior notice to the bus drivers. That meant that, while I took the bus back to Calidonia via Pueblo Nuevo and Via España on Friday night, this time the Calidonia bus detoured to the right through El Ingenio and down Tumba Muerto.

So what does the Panama City Carnival organization tell us?

Many things, if we want to analyze Panamanian culture with a fine-toothed comb whose prongs include anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, history, the forensic sciences and public health, only some of which I have touched on here. But more than anything it reflects the nature of the present PRD government, which is essentially a political patronage machine put at the service of an alliance of several oligarchic business sectors. The banking, real estate and construction sectors that the government represents were in the fore during the canal expansion debate, but the first and surest beneficiary of that sordid episode in our history was the advertising business, into which President Torrijos married by making the daughter of the guy who founded the ad cartel his wife. Mingthoy Giro is essentially a functionary drawn from middle management of the advertising business as well.

And you know what? As is usually the case when there are enduring monopolistic practices, the people coming out of such industries tend to be mediocre or worse. Worse, as in the organizational skills that Mingthoy Giro demonstrated in this year's Carnival.

Assembly approves new press gag laws on second reading
Church weighs in against weakening domestic violence laws

Panama City Carnival woes