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I have been editing The Panama News for more than 15 years now, and I field a lot of questions about whether Panama is a good country to come to live. Another version of it is when people ask me where it looks like Panama is headed.

Recently we have had some incidents in the Darien, where a cop stepped on a land mine and he and a colleague were seriously hurt. The Martinelli administration is blaming FARC, cordoning off the area to reporters and other outsiders, arresting Panamanians, banning travel and making warlike declarations. Certainly, if Colombia's leftist FARC rebels planted a land mine in Panamanian territory that's unprecedented and an ominous turn of events. So on an email group someone asked me: "Eric, are you suggesting that Expats ought to start planning their exit strategy from Panama, before the 'ominous turn of events' gets worse?" I responded (without the hyperlinks):

I think that some of the things that Martinelli is doing have already added to the real estate bubble pop to send various expats looking for greener pastures. I think that some of the dynamics among expats, with so-called leaders increasingly recognized as shills for what the FBI calls "affinity fraud," have led people who harbored illusions to become disillusioned. Clearly, there is already a trickle of foreigners leaving.

I sure hope that Panama does not descend into systematic warfare with FARC or anyone else, let alone warfare that comes to Panama's major population centers. I also hope that Martinelli does not use the situation in the Darien as one more excuse for mass arrests, curtailment of civil liberties and elimination of what little is left of the rule of law.

And as we are going down a road that may lead us to that stuff, I hope that the American community in particular but foreign residents in general do not become identified as a cheering section for repression. None of us should relish the prospect of explaining to an anti-American mob the difference between ourselves and some fascist who has pretended to speak for us.

When I was growing up in the old Canal Zone, I remember the constant fear of an anti-American mob. Zonian society had all types, but at key junctures belligerent rednecks shoved everyone else aside and spat venom at Panama and Panamanians, which was one of the big reasons for the anti-American mobs --- which sometimes harmed the very Americans who had the best and friendliest ties to Panamanians but just happened to be in the way.

Things are not like that now. The American community in this country is not a besieged colonial enclave, but the neighbors down the street. There is a reason why I put the above video at the top of this page. For all of its problems, Panama is a great place to live --- especially if you come here without too many illusions to be shattered by our realities. Beware of the predatory hustlers and their online siren songs, but nevertheless those foreign newspaper reports about how Panama is one of the top retirement spots are built upon a large core of truth.

However, at the moment Panama has a government that's looking for fights in several directions, bringing angry and frustrated crowds out into the streets. There are a few foreigners who take it upon themselves to cheer the government on, urging it to smash the labor unions, crush the environmentalist movement, get involved in Colombia's war, dispense with the rule of law, dispossess rural communities and give their land and water rights to foreign corporations and so on. That is by no means typical of today's American community, but there is an element, mostly belligerent drunks, eager to play the role that we saw played back in 1964.

I was asked a question, and I called it like I saw it. I did not name names. There are a number of characters who fit the bill.

So along comes this fool who writes on his website:

Dennis Melton is an expatriate living in the Republic of Panama. He runs a fishing charter business, and he is the Moderator of one of the English language Yahoo Email groups - Panama Forum. There is one individual on that net who is both mentally ill and negatively obsessed with me. This person regularly and routinely uses Dennis Melton's Panama Forum to launch personal attacks against me, most recently accusing me of being a "shill" for criminal activity and fraud artists, and calling me a "fascist." ...

One way of the other - either he controls the nut jobs over there, or he gets to see his name in lights over here. I'm fed up with this crap. The gloves are coming off. Either Dennis Melton shuts this guy down, or he's going to be made to understand how I feel.