opinion

Ancon Hill, a symbol in more than one way
Eric Jackson

For those patriots of both the Panamanian and US persuasions who insist that the symbols of their nations' glory must be anointed with blood, Ancon Hill fills that bill. In the events of January 9, 1964 and the following days, young Panamanian men died on the lower slope of that hill in the process of claiming it as their country's own.

Emblematic was 18-year-old high school student Estanislao Orobio, who carried a Panamanian flag across the street from what was then the Panama City limit into the Canal Zone and onto the lawn of the Tivoli Hotel. He was shot through the neck by a Canal Zone cop and killed.

Higher up the slope, a young American soldier assigned to night-time guard duty during that confrontation took a step in the dark and fell off into a steep ravine to his death.

Nowadays Ancon Hill is a national park, worthy of that for its natural features regardless of any of the history. It's the place where the wind comes off of the Pacific Ocean and is diverted upwards, and thus a major node on hemispheric flyways upon which millions of birds migrate. There are two species of deer in the woods up there.

Military men long realized the hill's commanding position over the city, and the inverse of that is that the flagpole on top is visible from much of the capital. In that sense, too, it has become a symbol of the nation.

So wouldn't you know that there are these plastic people who got all sense of culture from imported Hollywood fiction and their extensive reading of the print on US treasury notes, who think it would be a really cool idea to put a tourist recreation center on the summit of Ancon Hill, and connect it by cable car to the cruise ship facilities on the Amador Causeway? It would be "just like Disney World," the pathetic supporters of this monstrous proposal gush.

It would be illegal to so desecrate a national park, so environmentalists sued and the project is tied up, permanently I hope, in the Supreme Court.

And further down the slopes? Despite a Reverted Areas land use plan and the boundaries of the national park, a group of prominent individuals betrayed Panama and purported to divide and sell lots for new residential developments. Among the individuals behind that plan one finds the University of Panama rector with the fake doctorate, Gustavo García de Paredes, and the PRD's presidential candidate, Balbina Herrera, he by virtue of his former position with the old Interoceanic Regional Authority board of directors, she by virtue of her former position as housing minister.

Thus Ancon Hill is a symbol of both the Panamanian nation and of its betrayal, a symbol of both our natural beauty and the relentless attack upon it.

People ought to pay with their public careers and reputations for the parts they have played in the commercial attacks on Ancon Hill. Balbina should be hounded all up and down the campaign trail about it. The "Rector Magnifico" shouldn't be able to face any student group without being called to account for his behavior.

Understand this, if you are a puzzled American: whatever you may believe about the recurrent proposals to amend the US constitution to ban the burning of the American flag, you probably believe that the protester who torches Old Glory merely besmirches his or her own reputation and cause, that whether or not this form of expression ought to be a crime, it's a creepy statement. And so it is for a Panamanian to desecrate Ancon Hill.

Let me put it another way, in terms of a directly analogous US precedent. There have over many years been a series of proposals to boost southern central Pennsylvania's economy by commercial developments in and at the edge of that historic battlefield where the Civil War's outcome was largely decided. Some of these things were actually built. But due to popular revulsion, most of these developments have been blocked and those that haven't been were demolished. Look at Ancon Hill as something as sacred to Panamanians as Gettysburg is to Americans. Then you might understand the full meaning of its proposed desecration.