The Panama News --- Front Page

The embattled Bobby Velasquez campaign in Perejil

PRD faithful campaign in Perejil with Bobby Velásquez. Photo by Eric Jackson

The Panama News fundraising time

We don't get millions of dollars in cash from Colombian gangsters

When David Murcia Guzmán, the incarcerated young Colombian who's now the talk of the town, was spending his days tooling around Panama City in a Lamborghini and had the presidential guards watching his back, The Panama News didn't get any invitations to talk money in his plush digs. Nobody in his entourage came around with a large wad of cash for us. We are not part of, nor does this publication receive business from, the monopolistic ad cartel that the first lady's father founded. We don't get government funding, by way of ad sales or otherwise. We don't suck up to the conspicuous consuming hoods who periodically show up among this country's American community and predictably impress the usual "community leaders." With all due respect, our reporting shows no more respect for the powerful than for anybody else. Call us on the phone and try to impress us with how illustrious your family is and we may very well hang up on you.

See, The Panama News sells ads and provides an economical way of matching businesses with customers, but our primordial purpose is to report about Panama and give our readers a selection of views from outside the commercial mainstream about the realities of this country, Latin America, the Caribbean and the world. There are other places to go for your government propaganda and "BUY NOW!!!" hype.

The Panama News will condemn an atrocious war even if it offends some potential advertiser to do so. We were against the Moscoso administration's corruption and we're against the Torrijos administration's corruption, well knowing the financial cost of taking such positions. During eight long years of the benighted Bush administration, we didn't go with the flow and we paid a price for that, but we also helped grow the alternative and doing that has also helped us to establish a regular readership of a bit more than 50,000 people.

Surprise, surprise --- we're not a lucrative business. We haven't been able to make a regular payroll in years. José Ponce's good camera got a chipped lens and we have had to delay its repair, with him working with a cheap back-up in the meantime. We desperately need a newer, faster computer for our office and could really use a laptop to give us a bit more mobility. We need help, probably in the form of hired professionals, to develop custom templates for a content management system that will make The Panama News easier to read, with no dead links, new articles being constantly added, and a few new customized scrolling headlines and links pages to keep people up with the day-to-day and hour-to-hour news of our country and region. We need a travel budget, to get to places like the Darien and remote points in the Interior more often.

(Were we a more profitable business, The Panama News would have paid for a ticket for José Ponce to travel to California, to visit a gravely ill relative. That, however, was beyond our means.)

In March and September of every year we ask our readers for contributions toward the cause. We understand that in Panama, in the USA and in the many places around the world where people read The Panama News, these are hard times.

Please contribute as generously as you can, to sustain and improve The Panama News. It's easy to do:

Contribute by credit card

The Panama News can accept donations by credit card via PayPal. If you want to help us out in that way, go to http://www.paypal.com and select the "send money" function --- if you don't have a PayPal account you will have to sign up --- send your contribution to thepanamanews@panamaretire.net, et voila.

(PayPal will say you are sending money to Henry Smith. Henry and Nora Smith’s panamaretire.net business, provides a great array of services to people who are thinking about moving here. We have an alliance with them that lets us piggyback on their PayPal account, as PayPal wants you to have a US account, which we do not have. The money will get to The Panama News.)

Contribute by mail

Our mailing address is at the bottom of every page in The Panama News. If you send us a check drawn on a US or Panamanian bank by mail, we have to deal with slow service but it usually gets to us. However, as wonderful as Panama's much-touted banking system may be, its service is abominable and the banks here don't provide accounts for tiny businesses with small incomes. Thus any check must be made out to me (Eric Jackson), rather than The Panama News. And money orders, even those that say that they're "international" money orders? Forget it. Money orders are not negotiable in Panama.

Contribute at our office

The Panama News office is in the Edificio Muchachas Guias --- Panama's Girl Scout headquarters --- the second to the last building on the right on Calle 3ra in Perejil, which is the street that runs behind Colegio Javier. You may want to call to arrange a time to meet, but if you stop by the place during ordinary business hours, find us absent, and leave an envelope with the Girl Scout leaders, they will make sure that it gets to us.

Enough said about fundraising for the time being, except to thank all of our supporters over the years and all of you who are about to see fit to pitch in for The Panama News again.

* * *

The Russians are coming! Photo by José F. Ponce

Panama has a small but growing Russian community, and Russia being a country with many racial and ethnic groups, should it seem at all strange that the University of Panama would, in conjunction with the Russian Embassy and community, pay homage to the greatest Afro-Russian of them all? Forget the ethnic identification and hyphen for a bit, though, because those are not used when Alexander Pushkin is honored as the founder of modern Russian literature.

If Russian writers are not your cultural phenomenon of choice, you may want to click onto this issue's Cool Internet sites feature and check out a music video by Aventura, the most famous exponents of the Dominican musical genre of bachata, which is quite popular in Panama. Also, the opera is coming to town and if you are new to this region's culture there's a place that you can go for free salsa dancing lessons. Or maybe you're more attuned to indigenous music and dance forms than Hispanic ones.

* * *

It's election campaigning season here in Panama and for people who like that sort of thing it's highly entertaining.

However, we are witnessing a series of squalid scandals that's emblematic of a broken government that has become a drag on the national economy and an imposition on people's private lives. It's best for your health to laugh about it, because the more natural responses would be tears or angry shouting.

The May 17 presidential candidates' debate? The two leading candidates were there but there should have been two others, even if their presence or absence could not have affected the election's final outcome. The political parties and Electoral Tribunal have invented a rule that independents can't run for president, so the leftist who's excluded from the ballot but running a write-in protest vote campaign, Juan Jované, wasn't invited to the debate. Former President Guillermo Endara, running a distant third, declined to participate. We ended up with Balbina Herrera, representing a party with too high a percentage of looters, of which the people have grown weary over these past five years; and Ricardo Martinelli, the conservative businessman whose principle appeal is that he's not Balbina. They exchanged barbs and revealed only minor differences in their respective proposals. It would have been nice to have somebody without a chance of winning breaking up the intellectual inertia by bringing up some different ideas and creating some new public opinions that the eventual winner would have to take into account.

How bad have things become? Consider that our de facto culture minister was gunned down while walking across the street --- not the target of terrorists, but just in the wrong place when armed hoodlums tried to rob an armored car picking up money from the national lottery --- and that wasn't the lead story in any of the most respectable newspapers. Consider that not only is President Torrijos entangled in the Murcia scandal, but meanwhile one of his vice presidents is in hot water over something unrelated, and one of his diplomats had to step down after being accused of corruption in the foreign press.

How bad? Maybe so bad that future generations will only be able to make sense of it if the story is presented in the form of a madcap comedy. Or maybe they could do a Torrijos administration science fiction story, wherein the dominant PRD faction is cast as a black hole that inhales money.

* * *

So if insane laughter, tears or rage seem unseemly, you may want to go shopping. I did.

Or maybe playing softball, flying a kite, fishing or looking for a parking space in Chepo might provide the distraction you need. This is, after all, Panama. There are lots of fun things to do here.

Enjoy.

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