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Volume
14, Number 16 |
Production is underway
on the next issue. Take a few peeks: Leap for the gold
The
track in Beijing was springier than most
and after all the long jumpers made their adjustments the distances
were shorter in these Olympic games than in the past several. However,
everyone had to adjust and Colon's Irving Saladino, having gone to the
games as world champion, came home as Olympic champion. *
* *
The country feels good about it, is mostly ignoring all of the sleazy politicians who pirated Saladino's image for their campaign ads, and probably won't be very forgiving of the politicians who used Saladino's performance and homecoming as distractions to pass new police state laws. Is it ironic that one of the candidates who appropriated Saladino's image sent her goons to the Electoral Tribunal to ban an opponent's TV ads because they used her image? Well, mostly it's just a typical double standard from a typical politician whose word is not to be trusted. *
* *
Maybe I'm prejudiced because I grew up on the Atlantic side. I compare Saladino's well-considered and careful adjustments to a less than optimal track with the unthinking and haphazard moves that the people who run the government from Panama City make. I compare the National Environmental Authority's awful performance during the Torrijos years with the quiet but effective turtle conservation efforts by Kuna Yala's indigenous authorities. And I sure do wish that instead of trying to take credit for a brilliant Panamanian athlete's prowess, the politicians would do some good things for his home town of Colon and take credit for those. It's about time for Colon to celebrate excellence, but it's not as if this one athlete is the sole example. You won't find a seaport that's more efficient than Colon's Manzanillo International Terminal, a subsidiary of Seattle-based Stevedoring Services of America that made a deliberate effort to hire its work force from Colon and didn't go wrong. The Colon Free Zone is the wholesaling and warehousing center for Central America, northern South America and much of the Caribbean not because there is no competition, but because the merchants there are on the whole better than the competition. If Irving Saladino is the top athlete in his specialty, so is fellow colonense Celestino Caballero, the WBA super bantamweight champ. The man who has won more Miro prizes for writing plays than any other living Panamanian --- Raúl Leis --- hails from Colon. So does the president of Panama's Supreme Court. Panama City has some of the best urban parks of any Latin American capital, but the city of Colon has Area Recreativa Lago Gatun to match them. This issue there's another Colon Buay in the news for doing good things. Fred Kardonsky, the president of Towerbank, held a press conference to announce his company's contribution toward what will be a defining Panama City landmark, the Frank Gehry-designed Museum of Biodiversity that's being built on Amador. Towerbank will be the patron of one of the museum's eight galleries and its "Prism of Life" display. Despite all the warnings not to go there --- mostly from people who have seldom if ever gone there --- Colon makes a mighty contribution to Panama. The sad thing is that, like everywhere else in the country that's not a few privileged precincts in Panama City, it doesn't get a fair share in return. But maybe Saladino's golden leap might carry a few resources back to the Gold Coast. * *
*
If a team of Spanish
researchers joyfully discovered that the folks in Kuna Yala had
everything under such good control that --- unbeknownst to
outsiders --- the comarca is and has been home to the world's
largest leatherback turtle nesting area, the "other" marine
conservation tale coming out of Panama is an unhappy one indeed. The
president pleads incompetence and the legislature exudes sleaze, but
the bottom line is that a very important fishery is now threatened
by short-sighted greed.
*
* *
There is a certain sort of militant who takes to the streets and throws rocks to support this or that cause. And then there is Greenpeace. They're taking to the sea and dropping massive boulders for one of their causes, an end to bottom trawling in a sensitive area of the North Sea. This world also has all sorts of charitable non-governmental organizations that specialize in providing services, education and tools rather than engaging in protests. In Panama these groups are sometimes shaken down, sometimes driven out, and sometimes bent to serve the needs of the very people who are most responsible for the problems that the groups are trying to address. And then there's Sustainable Harvest International, which declined a donation from and photo op with a notorious and well connected environmental offender. * *
*
This past week some of Panama's
mainstream print dailies were writing about me, in relation with what
turned out to be a non-event. I had a court date on August 20, for
which I had been preparing and over which I had been fretting for
months. I was set to stomp all over Mark Boswell alias Rex Freeman and get this thing
dismissed. Actually, my fondest dream was to have the hearing end with
some police officer taking Boswell alias Freeman away in handcuffs ---
the man is, after all, a fugitive from justice.
But alas, Boswell alias Freeman, true to the paper-shuffling wimp faction of the patriot militia movement from whence he hails, didn't show up. That would not have stopped the proceedings, but the lack of a court interpreter did. They recheduled the hearing for September 10 at 2 p.m. (A bunch of friends showed up to support me and the cause of freedom of the press, and I am grateful for this support. I'm calling for people to come to the court for the next try, on September 10.) I felt disappointed that after nearly two years of esta vaina I still didn't get my day in court, but as we left I saw something that put it into perspective. It was a woman walking down the hall in handcuffs, escorted by a policewoman and headed toward the adjacent courtroom. I had no idea of what offense she had allegedly or actually committed. But I do know about the hellish conditions in Panama's jails and prisons, where about two-thirds of the too-many inmates have not been convicted of any crime but are awaiting trial. And I realized that while everyone waited around for a hearing that didn't happen in my case, someone rotting away in a place like La Joya or the Women's Detention Center missed a chance to get his or her case heard, and the injustice to that person was much more painful than the one done to me on this day. Justice delayed truly is justice denied, but it's far worse when the delay is spent behind bars. *
* *
So we
have the guys at the Electoral Tribunal working overtime to uphold the
lofty standards set by Noriega's presiding Electoral Tribunal
magistrate, Yolanda Pulice, by censoring the television ads of a
candidate who would dare oppose Balbina in the primary; and we have
this government backed scam artist, who through his Venture Resource Group (VRG) is
offering unregistered banking services and making pitches for
unlicensed investment funds like the following:
"What Kind of
returns will I see? ... and he wants to have me thrown in jail for something I have written. What could be more ridiculous? Well, on a local scale, we had the recent arrests in Colon of some members of Guillermo Endara's Vanguardia Moral de la Patria party for the highly animalistic crime of signing up new members of their party. The cops didn't want to hear anything from the election official who was there to take the signatures.And then internationally, there is the criminalization of an exceptionally dangerous board game. Ooooh, gotta get me one of those. Plus some language tapes, so I can get my Arabic inflections right while casting such vile curses as "May the fleas of a diseased camel infest the eyes of your first born!" (I'll leave the English-language patriot militia curses --- with all the right paranoiac inflections, of course --- to one Mark Boswell.) Enjoy. PS: People who are on The
Panama News email list are notified as new articles are uploaded onto
this website, as the production cycle bears an ever more tenuous
relationship to the stated dates of any particular issue. Send me an email
asking to subscribe
if you want to get on the email list.
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2008 by Eric Jackson email: editor@thepanamanews.com or e_l_jackson_malo@yahoo.com Mailing
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