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The National Police and hit men from companies closely allied with  top government officials are killing people

Sound the alarm!

The Torrijos administration, largely staffed by apparatchiki from the dictatorship, has crossed a major threshhold. The president's "zero corruption" campaign pledge was broken long ago, its environmentalist posturing of 2004 is a distant memory, its "the people to power" song and dance is now well known to mean a certain few people who happen to possess lots and lots of money. All of those things would make it just another crooked rabiblanco government, of which Panama has seen so many.

But now, just like his daddy's dictatorship and that of nightmare Noriega years that followed, Martín Torrijos's administration has killed people and is going well out of its way to ensure impunity and more of the same.

Norberto Odebrecht SA is a corrupt company that was at the center of a scandal that led to the impeachment of a Brazilian president --- the construction firm served as clearinghouse for a massive government bid-rigging and bribery scheme. Because of Panama's corporate secrecy laws, those who own pieces of the Panamanian Odebrecht subsidiary are not known as a matter of public record. There have been persistent rumors, however, that the president's cousin, Hugo Torrijos, owns a piece. When I put the question about that to Odebrecht's publicist last year, I got an evasive answer. But meanwhile, in defiance of a court-ordered receivership of the insolvent PYCSA construction consortium, a major asset, the concession to build a Panama to Colon toll road, was transferred from PYCSA to Odebrecht without reference to the receiver. More recently, the huge Costa Cintera construction contract went to Odebrecht despite it not having the lowest bid of the small group of companies allowed to bid.

The Torrijos administration is trying to smash the labor movement, particularly its largest and most militant union --- no, the lapdog FENASEP government workers organization doesn't really count as a union --- the construction workers' SUNTRACS. They are doing this by promoting company unions and by violence against labor activists.

To get a job on the Panama-Colon toll road project, a worker has to join a company union, quit SUNTRACS and sign a contract that's in Portuguese. Odebrecht has hired hit men to keep real union members away. All of this is highly illegal but our Noriega-era retread Labor Minister Reynaldo Rivera thinks it's just fine.

Meanwhile out on Isla Viveros, a consortium called Grupo Viveros is building an upscale resort to be marketed to foreigners only. Its chief spokesman is a Colombian hoodlum named Gustavo De La Cruz, who on the front page of the PRD-aligned La Prensa threatened that if SUNTRACS is not removed people will be killed. And who are the partners of this foreigner who comes here and makes death threats? Well, one of them is a French ex-lawyer named Andre Beladina, who was convicted of embezzlement from the Belgian bank for which he used to work. Another one of them is one Héctor Alemán, a PRD legislator and not just a garden variety ruling party hack, but in fact the manager of President Torrijos's 2004 presidential campaign. (Our immigration laws say that convicted felons like Beladina aren't supposed to be allowed into the country, and that foreigners who go around making death threats can and should be thrown out, but when such undesirable aliens are the president's campaign manager's business partners, Panamanian law once again becomes a dead letter.)

On August 13, Odebrecht company goons stabbed two SUNTRACS members and committed an armed robbery of a photojournalist from El Panama America, to take away the memory chip with his photos of the stabbing. The government has shown no interest whatsoever of taking action in this stabbing or this robbery, and in fact Government and Justice Minister Olga Gólcher, one of the government's oustanding examples of an unreconstructed Norieguista, blamed SUNTRACS for the violence visited upon its members and the press by the Odebrecht hit men.

The following day an Odebrecht goon shot three SUNTRACS picketers, killing Colon labor leader Osvaldo Lorenzo.

Two days later, the National Police opened fire on unarmed SUNTRACS members at Isla Viveros, killing Luigi Argüelles. Gólcher and her subordinates have issued several versions of the incident, and the investigating prosecutor and the medical examiner have exposed these as bald-faced lies.

Meanwhile in Altos de Golf, a group of laborers directed by an attorney for General Manuel Antonio Noriega is restoring a mansion where the former dictator used to live. Now isn't that strange? After the 1989 US invasion the government expropriated the building because after lengthy hearings it was found that it had been acquired with the proceeds of illegal activity. The property was turned over the the Ministry of Finance.

Ah, but the present Minister of Finance, Héctor Alexander, just happens to have been the Minister of Planning and Economic Policy when Noriega ran the government here.

Much of the money behind President Torrijos is of the ad agency cartel into which he married, and he has gone well out of his way to ensure that his party and its allies control the mainstream media. It shows in the steady stream of venomous attacks on organized labor.

But this control is not yet absolute.

True, the government is backing a bogus criminal defamation prosecution of yours truly on behalf of one Mark Boswell alias "Rex Freeman," a self-proclaimed investment whiz and "permanent tourist," erstwhile Colorado "Patriot" militia shill and a guy who offers unlicensed banking services here.

True, the PRD and government institutions bribe purported journalists on a massive scale to get fawning coverage.

But then the folks at El Panama America, who are very conservative and anti-union, remember how the president's father went after the radicals, causing a wave of deaths and disappearances that Martín Torrijos has done his unsuccessful best to make Panama forget. And then one day the cops showed up at El Panama America and confiscated it.

(And wouldn't you know, at Noriega's old mansion in Altos de Golf, one of the guys who showed up to watch the renovation work was one Escolastico "Fulele" Calvo. Fulele was the guy to whom the dictatorship gave the El Panama America offices and print plant, from which he published the pro-dictatorship La Republica until the 1989 invasion. In more recent years Fulele had occasion to throw slurs at The Panama News on behalf of one Tom McMurrain, a swindler who now resides at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in the USA but at the time was running a teak and noni plantation investment scam that had the backing of top members of Mireya Moscoso's administration, most notoriously the first vice president at the time, one Arturo Vallarino.)

So while La Prensa spews out Gólcher's pro-crime Norieguista diatribes, El Panama America has taken a principled stand against murder with impunity, and not out of any love for SUNTRACS.

Me? My basic social allegiance is to working people rather than management, even if I wish that the leaders of SUNTRACS and Panama's other working class and progressive organizations would get smarter about politics and ditch those stodgy and unprincipled old concepts of "vanguard" and "front."

Independent mayoral candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal also disagrees with some of the left's vestigial ways of thinking and acting, but notice where he was and where his likely opponents were not when people started to get killed, and read what he has to write about the situation in which Panama now finds itself.

Do not panic, but do understand that the Panamanian government and its allies are now killing people. A page has been turned. We are in a different situation now, and we need to adjust our attitudes and behaviors to face a threat to everyone's liberty.

Do not panic, but heed the alarm that the woman is beating out from her upstair window.

Do not panic, but women and men of courage and integrity, now is the time for you to step forward.

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If all of the above discourse about a corrupt government now arrived at the stage of killing people bores you and all you're interested in is your investment in Panama City real estate, maybe it IS time for YOU to panic. It seems that there was less backing for the celebrated Trump Ocean Club project than the public was led to believe, and what had been the cooling down of an overheated speculative high-end real estate market may be turning into a rout.

They are still working on that Trump thing, so the promoters having to go out for financing they previously said they already had may be just a blip, and the preference of the Bolsa de Valores bond sale over a bank loan would carry some tax advantages, but the whole situation does seem to indicate that things are not as hot as they seemed to real estate speculators just a few weeks ago.

There is still a housing shortage for ordinary Panamanians so I can't see a total real estate collapse. However, if you listened to all the hype and bet a lot of money on the prospect of hordes of millionaires headed for the polluted shores of Panama Bay, I suspect you are about to learn something about market forces.

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All summer long the production of The Panama News has been late and incomplete, and I have been getting complaints from the readers about it. There are several factors in play, the most severe of which is that I can't pull the all-nighters that I did 10 years ago, and if I work a 20-hour day anymore I tend to be a zombie for the next day or two.

One factor is both aggravating and mitigating. Last October I began the Wappin Radio Show, which airs when the oft-interrupted Radio Libre radio signal is working but in any case has a larger audience through the podcasts on this website. The twice-a-week show is about 45 minutes of music and about 15 minutes of news, and it has attracted quite a following. Part of the reason for that, more than my strange eclectic tastes in music, is that it keeps people who listen on a regular basis more frequently updated on the news about Panama than just reading the twice-a-month updates of The Panama News does.

The thing is, doing that radio show is a lot of work, distracting me for an aggregate of one full working day a week. It's worth it, and maybe with some capital improvements I can both improve the quality that I get from recording into a little Olympus hand recorder and then splicing the voice tracks with the music tracks and speed up the work that's needed. But in any case this podcast sound component of the website is and has been a substantial addition to my overall work load.

A daily publication is well beyond my financial and physical capabilities, but I am adding some new features that will provide some daily updates on this website.

I have placed a button that you can click to get to the Panamanian government's SERTV radio and television service, where in turn you can click a link to watch SERTV television on your computer. Now having said all that I have said above about our current government, why would I include a link to their propaganda channel? Well, rotten gang of Norieguistas that they are, what their TV channel says is still part of the complex and developing story that is Panama and long ago I said that whenever Channel 11 went online I'd provide a link to it.

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Are you downright annoyed by not knowing when articles in The Panama News are being uploaded? Then by all means sign up for The Panama News email list. Being on the list gives you periodic updates on the production process, alerts about important developing stories, announcements of events of which notice came too late to get in the calendar and links to interesting articles in other publications.

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This August has five fridays, so there is a three-week gap between this issue and the next one. However, there are some foreseeable breaking stories about labor strife and General Noriega's legal situation that will likely be the subjects of special updates before the next issue appears.

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September, as long time readers may recall, is one of the two months per year when reader donations are solicited. Almost always during those months, and quite often in the weeks leading up to them, The Panama News has been subjected to electronic attacks. At the moment there is an increase in bundles of spam sent to my email boxes and people signing me up for things, but various measures have been taken so that it will not be so easy for them to overflow my mailboxes as in the past.

Let me take this opportunity to solicit not money but labor.

The Panama News has a little band of regular or frequent contributors of columns, news stories, features and photos and can always use more. See, for examples, Allen Hawkins's photo of an octopus's garden in Bocas, and Milton Roldan's bird pictures in our outdoors section. Milton, by the way, did photography for us when he was a student at the University of Panama and these days does freelance work in Colon and is one of the country's emerging bird photographer. Send Milton an email if you are interested in buying prints of his bird photos that are suitable for framing.

Proofreading help is needed, which can be in the form of a more structured working arrangement in the production process or just by sending me an email pointing out the typo or grammatical error in the text.

I would really like to spin the Spanish sections off as a distinct student publication in which young journalists denied the opportunity to sharpen their skills by universities that have journalism departments but no student media can learn this craft. That would entail some people with the right sorts of skills and attitudes to act as mentors and some students with initiative and an urge to better themselves.

I want to give other people the opportunity to create online radio shows --- news, music, comedy, commentary and whatever --- on an expanded Wappin podcast page that features more than just my twice-a-week show.

Someone has expressed an interest in adding video features and although I won't have time to get into creating things in this medium myself I would like to add video to the website.

There will be gradual changes to the website, but one thing I have long hesitated to embrace is the "total makeover" that makes The Panama News flashier and even more beautiful but more time-consuming to produce or more difficult to navigate. I will listen to anything, but just because I listen to an idea or proposal doesn't mean I'll accept it.

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Let me leave you with two things about ATLAPA.

First, there are some of my photos of the National Artisans' Fair.

Second, be sure to mark Thursday, September 6 on your calendar as the day when the diplomatic women and friends of many nationalities put on the Caravana de Asistencia Social, this massive international food and beverage fair at ATLAPA that funds many great causes and features many great cuisines. (Hmmm --- will the Greeks, the Israelis or the French have the best pastries this year? Will I be most tempted to run the risk of a gout attack by the Peruvians, the Spaniards, or the delicacies proffered by the people of some other nation? Will the Germans or one of the Scandinavian countries have the best beer stand? Will I like Taiwan's finger food better than India's or vice versa? Choices, choices, and all of them good.)

Enjoy.

Eric Jackson

the editor