Fun in the sun

It's the height of tourist season in Panama, when North America is cold and we're having our dry season.

So, taking a stroll out to catch a late morning high tide at the nearest surfing beach to where these words are written, would I find it "touristy?"

Compared to, say, just up the beach from the Kennedy family's compound on Cape Cod at the height of tourist season there, it's not the least bit crowded. However, the visitors from northerly climes were recognizable. Some were so, unfortunately, because they had not learned about tropical sun and had burned themselves.

(Take in easy, especially those of you who are of melanin-deprived ethnicity. You got to Playa Palmar for that moderate soul tan, not to burn yourself.)

This is, of course, not the height of surfing season on the Pacific side, whose prime surfing spots are hours to the southwest along of stretch of the Azuero Peninsula that runs from Playa Venao in Pedasi district to various spots in Tonosi. The best waves are in July and August.

This is the surfing season on the Atlantic side, as the Caribbean Sea gets choppy this time of the year.

So will Panama ever compete with the world's great "beach tourism" spots like on some of the Caribbean islands, Europe's Riviera, Cozumel in Mexico or Ibiza and the other Balearic Islands? I think we can get a slice of that market but the basic reality that most of Panama gets a lot of rain for most of the year limits us a bit.

Now I happen to like rainy season, and because we have them we have rain forests that the other places don't, and, assuming that they are not all cut down to make us "just like Disney World" for the plastic imitation people who run this country, that's a tourism advantage we have over the better known beach meccas.

As it so happens, we are just now getting into a part of our tourist season that's already huge and ever growing --- the time of the year for cultural tourism. When the next issue appears Carnival will be underway, and that's the biggest tourist attraction of them all. On Carnival Saturday and Sunday, Colon buay that I am, I always put in an appearance at the Antillean Fair on the grounds of the Museo Afroantillano. That's an ever more important event for several reasons:

1. So long as the white minority dominates the official Carnival, the black community tends to have much foxier Carnival queens --- it's a demographic no-brainer because the much larger black population has a larger pool of gorgeous young ladies among whom to choose;

2. As a demonstration of his power, President Torrijos has for the past few years imposed a Panama City Carnival organization run by dolts. Note that in the internal PRD elections, her highness the capital's Carnival czarina, Mingthoy Giro, lost her bid to get elected precinct delegate. She had the name recognition and people who thought about how the Carnival has been run voted accordingly;

3. Meanwhile in Cocle, it seems that more and more the governor and police treat Carnival not as this important cultural and economic event to be encouraged and improved but as an invasion of undesirables to be suppressed. The Water Carnival on the Zarati River is still fun, but it would be so much better were the cops dispersed, largely in plain clothes, so as to control bad situations rather than deployed as they have been these past few years in ways that create that police state kind of a feeling;

I'm a politics junkie, not a prophet. The last issue's front page was written before the New Hampshire primary and will not be rewritten after the fact to pretend that I was not surprised by Hillary Clinton's impressive victory there.

Nor, now that my first preference in the initial field of candidates is out of the race, am I about to take down my endorsement of Bill Richardson. I went for the guy whom I thought would be the best president, not the one I thought most likely to win.

That leaves me with a decision to make among the remaining alternatives in the February 5 - 12 Democrats Abroad Global Primary. If you are a US citizen --- whether that's your only citizenship or you are a dual citizen --- and inclined toward the Democrats, this is your opportunity to take part in the presidential nominating process. There will be 11 Democrats Abroad delegates at the Democratic National Convention, they will be apportioned on the basis of the results of the primary and if this race goes down to the wire as it well might, they could be decisive. (But if it's anything nearly that close, look for a huge fight over what to do about Michigan and Florida, which were stripped of their delegates due their defiance of the national party's edict about the scheduling of primaries this year.) To vote in the Democrats Abroad primary by Internet, mail or fax in the primary, you must register by January 31. However, if you vote in person at the polling station that will be set up at the Elks Club in Balboa on the afternoon of February 12, there is same-day voter registration.

By the way, both Hillary and Obama supporters are working to turn out the vote in this primary and some of the rhetoric is getting kind of hot. Carlos Russell, a prominent member of the Afro-Panamanian community in Brooklyn, makes his pitch for Obama in our opinion section. But Jim, a reader who likes Hillary, says that Obama understands very little about recent history and the nature of the current US economic plight. "Anyone who has anything good to say about Reagan has no business running for office," he writes dismissively about Obama.

The English-language section also includes speeches by candidates Clinton, Obama, Romney and McCain. The Clinton and Obama campaigns also figure in our Spanish-language opinion section. Why no GOP stuff in Spanish? Mainly because the Republican candidates either have no Spanish sections on their websites or only give a trite paragraph or a tirade against Cuba if they do. With the exception of the Cubans, it appears that most of the Republicans are ready to write off the Hispanic vote this year.

Does your dog or cat have ticks? Just to be on the safe side, you may want to medicate your pet to protect yourself. There are a bunch of "ordinary" tick-borne diseases that you, too, might catch, but now we are seeing some cases of a mysterious and deadly disease that's probably carried by ticks. Vets now have pills that are very effective at keeping the ticks off of your pets.

I am on all sorts of mailing lists by choice, and a few by the choice of people who don't much like me or are trying to sell me something. Now spammers are often creative with their email subject lines, in order to pique the curiosity and thus get a click on other than the delete function.

The spammers are never so good, however, as the folks who sent me this email proclaiming the advent of "organic tequila for sea turtles." Now I know that there are sea turtles that nest on Mexican beaches, and I would gather that any country that invented tequila would have its share of drunks. But isn't it some sort of animal cruelty to serve tequila to a sea turtle? It turned out, however, not to be what the subject line suggested to my imagination.

While we are considering the possibility of being mean or nice to animals, let's take a moment to appreciate what Pat Chan and all the volunteers at Spay Panama are doing.

Remember Mr. Urrego, the Colombian who had bought an island in the Perlas and set up a sophisticated electronic communications center there, and who was arrested last year for drug trafficking and money laundering? Recall at the time he said it was all a mistake, that he was working for US authorities.

If Urrego was working in a sting operation for Uncle Sam, did Panamanian authorities know this?

If they did know, was the arrest an intentional affront in the course of generally deteriorating US - Panamanian relations? Or was it a deliberate move to take down an anti-drug operation for the benefit of drug trafficking interests?

If they didn't know, is the Torrijos administration now annoyed that the Americans would run an operation like this on Panamanian territory without informing the Panamanian government? Is this the sub-text of Pedro Miguel González's complaint that a bilateral anti-drug agreement violates this country's sovereignty?

And what about that Banco Continental floor manager who allegedly took care of Urrego's financial affairs, and who is now awaiting further legal proceedings in a hellish Panamanian lock-up? Under Panamanian law, is it the crime of money laundering to hide or otherwise manipulate the assets of someone who's doing a drug sting for Uncle Sam?

(Here in Panama there is no bail for drug trafficking offenses and there is no presumption of innocence. So what if Urrego was working for the Americans and the banker thought that he was working for a guy who was working for the Americans? The draconian nature of our legal procedures in drug cases --- which is something that's US-inspired --- could mean years in very severe prisons for these men, or for just your ordinary DEA agent who gets wrongly accused. The bottom line on this problem is that the War on Drugs is a lost cause and attempts to deny or reverse this reality only make things worse.)

Finally, this issue goes heavy on the history, both in our review and travel sections.

I review an important new book on mid-19th century Panamanian history by University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee professor Aims McGuinness. If you want to both get ahold of this book and build our local cultural infrastructure, order your copy through Exedra Books.

And does it belong in the travel section? I'm not sure. Maybe community would have been better, and though there is an opinion expressed it's primarily history. Wherever the article by Bill Phillips about US military chaplains, Douglas MacArthur and the end of infamous Japanese "comfort stations" does belong, it certainly belongs in this online newspaper.