Get ye back, Devil!

photo by José F. Ponce

Get ye back, Devil!

It's usually not a whole lot of fun being pursued by the devil, or, unless one has a properly perverse sense of humor, running for public office and being demonized by the opposition. It's worse when the opposition is largely composed of religious fanatics who actually believe it.

The USA is about to put an end to such a campaign and sometime on the evening of November 4 we ought to know the result. Meanwhile, many Americans in Panama have cast or are casting absentee votes, and all the issues from up there have been and are being debated down here. If you are a US citizen living abroad and have not cast your vote, click onto either the Overseas Vote Foundation or the Democrats Abroad in the column of interactive ads on the right-hand side of this page, follow the links and get to the pages that are designed to make it easy for you to vote.

Meanwhile Canada had a much shorter and more civilized election campaign, which resulted in an inconclusive election whose results people from our small but quickly growing Canadian community gathered to celebrate.

(Yes, there are plenty of Panamanians who object to the imprecision of US citizens calling themselves "Americans," but the Canadians and their ever so reasonable culture are living proof that the common Panamanian usage of "norteamericano" is also an imprecise adjective for things and persons identified with the United States of America. Because there isn't the generally pejorative connotation here and because it's far easier to say than "estadounidense," I think "gringo" is the better word. Soy panagringo de doble nacionalidad, colonense por nacimiento y gringo por parentela.)

Panama's presidential election is shaping up to be as rough-and-tumble, or even more so, than the contest between Obama and McCain. At this point it seems quite a bit closer as well.

One indication is the failure of the Catholic Church's regular sponsorship of an ethical pact among the candidates. The ruling PRD objected to provisions that they couldn't use government money to finance their campaign and that the different parties would have freedom to criticize their opponents' records in office and proposals for the next government. The PRD objected to those provisions and the opposition said it wouldn't agree to an ethical pact without them.

Meanwhile everyone who's running for president of Panama is nominally Catholic, but it's the Panameñistas who are playing the religious card, as Bosco Vallarino repeatedly did in the recent televised mayoral debates.

Panameñista presidential hopeful Juan Carlos Varela is glomming onto the Catholic hierarchy's and Evangelicals' opposition to the proposed sexual and reproductive health law but doesn't seem to be gaining much traction. He's the scion of the Hermanos Varela liquor distilling family, but I doubt that his problem has much to do with PRD candidate Balbina Herrera deriding him as a purveyor of demon alcohol. Varela's big problem stems from his party's association with the scandal-tainted Mireya Moscoso kleptocracy, while Balbina herself is plagued by a series of scandals related to her party, including alleged crimes by key members of her old San Miguelito entourage.

The leading opposition presidential candidate, Ricardo Martinelli, is also slightly vulnerable to those who want to allege guilt by association, having served as Minister of Canal Affairs in the Moscoso administration and Social Security Fund director in the PRD administration of Ernesto Pérez Balladares. The man has a record in public offices that can be criticized and a reasonably coherent political philosophy with which people might disagree, but he's a supermarket baron who came from a somewhat rich family and built a business that has made him very rich and instead of attacking his record or his ideas President Torrijos is using taxpayer funds to go around the country criticizing Martinelli (and Varela) for being rich. Abuse of the public treasury aside, I think that such an appeal is unbecoming from the dictator's kid who married the ad cartel founder's daughter --- and spending a bundle subsidizing the ad industry in which his family has a stake --- but there you have it.

* * *

The little girl in the photo above? She marched through the drizzle in Anton's Toro Guapo Festival, and maybe the discomforts of that, rather than being followed by diablitos or cast in the role of an angel, is the reason for her expression.

(Armed with a cross that can double as a wooden stake, she was no doubt well protected. True, a diablito might be less uptight than a vampire in the presence of a cross, but he'd be just as vulnerable to a wooden stake through the heart as Count Dracula.)

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These words are written in San Carlos, a stone's throw away from Playa Ensenada. Housing Minister Gabriel Diez is planning to privatize that public beach for a high-rise beachfront development to be marketed to foreigners. Members of a fishing community that has worked out of there longer than any living person can remember fear that the project will evict them, and they and others are concerned that it will overload the infrastructures of the town of San Carlos and trash the environment by the removing mangroves. Looking at the map that La Prensa published, I understand the fishing community's concern. However, when I went there Diez's work crews were putting up a fence but not fencing off the public beach.

* * *

Old timers in town tell me that Playa Ensenada is also the historic site of a battle wherein Liberal guerrilla general Victoriano Lorenzo rescued a shipment of arms from its Conservative would-be captors and headed to the hills to fight another day with those weapons. The history books I have consulted tell of the battle for the arms shipment, but don't mention the specific beach --- there are several of these in San Carlos.

This country has a lot of history, but pays too little attention to its historical sites and archives. The political and economic elites here are full of people who have strong motives to conceal the crimes upon which their family fortunes are based or the sordid deeds of their political parties, so surely that's one of the reasons why the teaching of history in the Panamanian public schools gets shortchanged in government budgets and distorted by the textbooks that the Ministry of Education approves.

However, here and abroad, people with different motives are working to rescue Panama's history. One part of it is the subject of an ambitious international effort to document the stories and cultures of West Indian people, on the islands and in the diaspora, through the taking of oral histories. Another is the continuation of the Panama Historical Society after the death of John Carlson.

Are we going to have a serious election debate in Panama? Are we going to make sensible economic plans in either or public or private sectors? Are we going to live anything better and more distinctive than an imported Mickey Mouse culture? We need to know our history to do any of those things very well.

* * *

I have been asked about a couple of websites that have names similar to The Panama News. The relationship between these sites and this one is that they are an illegal monopolistic ploy by one Donald K. Winner to disseminate his pirated trash and scurrilous attacks in a way that attracts web surfers away from The Panama News. Any other website that uses some version of the name Panama News that's not www.thepanamanews.com is neither this, the oldest English-language news publication in Panama, nor in any way friendly to us.

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The Panama News publications schedule of old has become ever more theoretical, and one of the old rules is about to fall by the wayside. It used to be that when a month had five Fridays, there would be a gap in which there would be three weeks between issues instead of two. That will not be the case with this next issue. However, when you consider that coming up soon we have the US elections and the long Panamanian Independence Day - Flag Day weekend, that will affect the pace of the next issue's uploading.

* * *

The American Society is putting on an election night event at the City Club and I am told that dinner ticket sales have been going slow. Don't know if it's a matter of Democrats not caring to deal with a Republican dress code or Republicans not caring to party on the evening of what might be a Democratic blowout, or whether people are just slow making their plans. Part of it surely is that some folks are planning to watch the election returns but will skip the dinner, and if you don't want to go to the dinner you can just show up at the City Club and pay your five bucks. Make your reservations for the dinner, if that's your thing.

Meanwhile, the question remains unresolved whether the dispute between the Torrijos administration and the nation's full-time firefighters will affect the participation of the bombero bands in the November 3 and 4 patriotic parades. The parades are always nice, but the bombero bands are always one of the main attractions. And understand what's going on --- the government owes the firefighters a pay raise, which it has withheld without justification, but meanwhile it's letting one of its most highly favored foreign contractor corporations get away with 80 percent cost overruns.

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This is kind of a graphically rich issue, largely thanks to the work of José Ponce. He not only caught the festival in Anton and took his usual shots of life in the capital city, but also caught glimpses of a strange little terrorism drill, a painter's exhibition and some of the country's outstanding religious art.

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