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A Panamanian New Year's muñeco. Photo by Eric Jackson 

More than a new year for The Panama News

Shown above we have a New Year's muñeco, part of a cool Panamanian cultural tradition.

Arturo Araúz is a legislator best known outside of his circuit for his controversial proposals about foreign language requirements for Panama's education system. In his constituency, which encompasses Chame and San Carlos districts, he's better known for sponsoring an annual muñeco contest. It's a worthy contribution to the nation's cultural life.

Muñecos are effigies of prominent characters of the outgoing year, which are burned on bonfires at Interior-style New Year's parties. Popular television characters and political figures are common themes, and even with the distorting influence of TV stations and politicians hiring people to do muñecos of personalities they want to promote, people's choices of whom to depict are one indication of what's on the public mind. I would expect a few high-profile political scandals to play in this year's mix, but I'm not really the best person at predicting such things.

If you want to see the muñeco culture, drive on the Pan-American Highway between around Gorgona and around Santa Clara before New Year's comes and goes, and look for the dummies beside the road.

The decrees are to be in the form of banking laws, tourism, customs and immigration. I hope that some of this past year's errors in immigration policy will corrected, but don't expect the wide-ranging changes that Panama really ought to make. There are some obvious tasks in the tourism and customs areas, the one to create a tourism authority and the other to implement some regional customs agreements, and if Martín sticks narrowly to those things there shouldn't be too much damage done. However, I expect him to put some creepy special interest provisions into those decrees and hope that he proves me wrong. Banking law changes? It's very unlikely that anything I'd consider positive would come out of this particular president's decrees on that particular subject.


Now that for everyone but the Fleet Street crazies the feeding frenzy over the strange case of those maladroit English fraudsters, Mr. and Mrs. Darwin, has run its course, the main international story about Panama has to do with a grandstanding bit of political posturing about the 1989 US invasion by the controversial president of our National Assembly, Pedro Miguel González.  It is a sign of slightly deteriorated intergovernmental relations between Panama and the United States, and whenever a demagogue plays an anti-American card it will be reflected as a green light to that small minority of Panamanians who really dislike the gringos to let their attitude hang out.

I am a dual US-Panamanian citizen, one of the small minority of Americans who criticized the 1989 invasion at the time and also one of those few Panamanians in journalism who has been willing to discuss the ugliness that came out among us in the subsequent looting. It is fitting that Panamanians take the occasion of December 20 to reflect on our history. It would be nice if Americans thought seriously of the lessons of those events too. Where González gets it wrong is when he thinks that his nationalist credentials are somehow validated by his posturing.