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There have been many important developments in the world and the region of late, and while our news pages tend to be more narrowly focused, our opinion columns tend to go all around the Americas and beyond.

It will be Obama versus McCain in the United States in November, and I'm giving and will be giving both of them space in the opinion section. The talk among political scientists is whether this year's US election will be a realigning one as was the beginning of the New Deal in 1932 or the start of a more conservative era in 1968, but whether it will or will not be I'd like to do my bit with The Panama News to help the voters who will decide that issue to make informed choices.

Guantanamo is becoming a US political issue, as well it should. By a one vote margin the US Supreme Court has struck down the Rube Goldberg legal construct that held that since Guantanamo is on the island of Cuba what the US government does there is not subject to the jurisdiction of the US courts. What has been going on in Guatanamo and the worldwide gulag of secret US prisons is a disgrace, and the 5-4 margin of the high court decision about whether Guantanamo inmates have the right to have the court consider habeas corpus petitions indicates the high stakes in the upcoming US presidential election. It really will make a difference whether vacancies on the court are filled by McCain or Obama appointees.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez has acknowledged, more politely than a lot of others would do, that the FARC guerrillas are an anachronism. Because of the right-wing death squads and Álvaro Uribe the death squad president it's easier to say that FARC should release its hostages and lay down its guns that for the communist rebels to actually do that, but the guerrillas really ought to move away from what they've been doing for all these years and the government ought to give them the guarantees to allow them to do this. So why did Chávez call on FARC to end the guerrilla war? Some, like the Washington Post, opine that he was embarrassed by documents purportedly in a FARC computer seized by the Colombia Army. To me a far more sensible explanation was that he recognized that most Venezuelans, like most Panamanians, consider FARC to be a bunch of thugs.

Is Uncle Sam readying gunboats to deal with Venezuela and other Latin American countries whose governments refuse to do what the politicians in Washington want them to do? That's scandalous and there would be a bigger uproar about it in the region if people didn't figure that with the war in Iraq the Americans don't have the capacity for any other major military adventures at this moment.

And which way is Cuba headed? The big headline in the US corporate media has been about Cuban hospitals now offering sex change operations on their menu of free health care services. Especially if one is a Cuban hermaphrodite or other transgendered person, it can be an important issue. However, the fate of political prisoners, the possibilities of a more open and democratic Cuban society and the chances for an end to the long feud between Washington and Havana are matters that affect more people and the nature, extent and directions of changes in Cuba are not all that clear at this point. It's a series of questions that's likely to occupy more attention from The Panama News in the coming months, at least until certain things get clarified. There will not be a party line about what gets published about Cuba on this website and in this issue there are a couple of things with which a lot of people are sure to disagree.

In the Spanish-language opiniones section, there is a petition from Václav Havel, José María Aznar, Mario Vargas Llosa and a number of other mainly moderate conservative political figures defending anti-Castro Cuban dissident Carlos Alberto Montaner. In the English-language opinion section, Project Censored's Peter Phillips praises the extent of press freedom in Cuba. When he submitted that column I did not let it pass without commenting that there are a couple of dozen journalists in prison in Cuba, and he said that he had interviewed undercover police agents who had, along with some of the imprisoned journalists, received payments from the United States government to conduct propaganda against the Cuban government. I don't doubt that this is true, but then I don't advocate the jailing of Panamanian hack journalists who take money from Taiwan or the United States or Balbina Herrerra to slant the news either. It's one thing to expose one who abuses his or her freedom of expression as an unworthy jerk, and quite another to treat the person as a criminal.

Also in the ambit of Cuban - American relations, the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta recently turned down the appeal of the Cuban Five, men sent by the government of Cuba to spy on anti-Castro groups in the United States, some of which are behind a string of terrorist attacks on Cuba. The Cuban position is that the Cuban Five were not spying on the United States, but conducting undercover anti-terrorist law enforcement work. Weakening the US espionage laws is probably not a good idea, but a crackdown against anti-Cuban terrorist activity directed or carried out from US territory and the return of the Cuban Five to Cuba in exchange for comparable humanitarian concessions out of Havana would be some positive steps for the next US administration.

And Guantanamo? The United States should just abandon the place, leaving a set of keys and a note for the Cuban authorities at the gate.