The Panama News has a couple of sections in Spanish, as most of Panama's English-speaking community is bilingual or ought to be trying to learn the national language. For those who are trying to improve their Spanish, this online dictionary and multiple translation machine can be quite helpful.

OK, so zombies do eat brains. Why is that a problem for these guys?

There are also plenty of Americans who dislike Halloween for religious reasons. It's actually not Anglo-Saxon in origin. It's a festival for just after the harvest moon that goes back at least to the pagan Celts and may even be pre-Druid. There are serious believers, and not only in Christianity, who object to having anything to do with anything pagan. Nobody would expect Education Minister Lucy Molinar, a member of the right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei and a woman who came of political age at Chile's most conservative university at the height of General Pinochet's death squad repression, to like Halloween in Panama's schools.

However, the politicians' attack on Halloween, the annual Zombie Walk, and rock and roll has been couched in gringo-baiting terms. It's a counterfeit nationalist card. Why, we can only guess --- but there are some good guesses.

Martinelli got prosecutors to declare that there was nothing unusual, suspicious or illegal about his receipt of $800,000 from Colombian gangster David Murcia Guzmán --- who is now in prison in the United States to serve out a long Colombian racketeering sentence and face US drug money laundering charges. Martinelli's lapdog acting attorney general, Giuseppe Bonissi, parks Murcia Guzmán's Mazeratti in the attorney general's parking spot and stations cops out front to keep journalists from taking photos. The rulings out of the subservient courts are increasingly ridiculous, including the setting aside of an American citizen's $50 million charitable bequest on behalf of a pompous and predatory rabiblanco family. The president pardoned cops who not only shot and killed innocent fishermen but planted false "evidence" on the victims. The president invented a fanciful kidnap conspiracy plot, allegedly headed by a US citizen of Puerto Rican origin, and used the occasion to replace his US security advisors with Israelis. The president lied about his relationship with Ramón Martinelli, his cousin and the former treasurer of the ruling Cambio Democratico Party, his hand-picked member of the Central American Parliament, the guy who ran an illegal party dues deduction scam at IDAAN when that water and sewer utility was a party fiefdom in the Moscoso years, now in prison in Mexico on charges of laundering money for one of the most violent drug cartels of all. Special legislation has been passed to address the possibility of a police coup d'etat.

Martinelli and his crowd are playing a silly anti-American card because they're afraid of the US government. They're afraid of the Americans because all indications are that the president has long maintained corrupt ties with international gangsters and Washington is for the most part not amused. Even the right wing of the American spectrum is increasingly jumping off of the Martinelli ship, as shown by scathing critiques coming out of the Wall Street Journal and the Cato Institute, to go along with Time magazine's unflattering take.

Yes, there are the aspects of sheer idiocy, religious fanaticism and a desire to distract attention in the politicians' assault on such horrible threats as Halloween and the annual Zombie Walk. But there is real fear here, and it's not about zombies coming to eat their little brains.

Special Update: The day before the event City Hall backed down on its absolute prohibition of the Zombie Walk, but warned that people have to stay on the sidewalk and that they won't tolerate anything "disorderly." The following night the mayor revoked the permit and police and presidential guards harassed people on their way to the event, stopping the march from going its planned route and made several arrests.

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The Fighting Owls with the ball, the champion Stallions in pursuit.
Photo by Eric Jackson

One bit of Americana that lives on in Panama is American football. It's a minor sport, a mostly upscale thing that kids of parents who were educated at US universities play. I caught a great game between high school kids, the finale of the Panama Football League's varsity season.

Before the game, I noticed that the defending champion Stallions were in general taller, heavier and more muscular than the challengers, the Fighting Owls, and they had a few more players on the team and a substantially larger cheering section in the stands. So would that say "blowout?"

It wasn't. The Stallions did win to retain their championship, but only after being behind much of the game and meeting stiff resistance all the way. It was a great game.

Do you care to read things about football as a metaphor for politics, war or The Meaning of Life? I didn't think so. It's a game that gets played seriously, and that's all it really is --- except maybe a religion for some. I congratulate the young athletes of the Stallions and the Owls for their performance.

There are some other things in this part of the world that may be affected by the US elections.

All of the immigrant-bashing and anti-Latino race baiting that has characterized Fox News and the Republican campaign has already left its bitter taste in Latin America, but regardless of the rhetoric the real choices that the United States has are restricted by aging demographics. There is a requirement for large-scale immigration to do all sorts of jobs that are necessary and won't otherwise be filled, and to avoid a future trap of too many retirees and not enough people working. The possible solutions might be mean or magnanimous, idiotic or ingenious, but the range of what's possible in the real world is far smaller than posturing politicians would have you believe. But of course, continued demagoguery and political gridlock while realities change on the ground is also a solution of sorts.

It will be both interesting and disgusting to see how immigration works as a political issue in the United States this year, but its effect in Panama will be marginal. To the extent that US voters get really obnoxious about it, the result will be mostly beneficial down here. You see, because it's harder to get a US visa, and because people who do get visas tend to be treated so badly when visiting the United States, Panama has been steadily stealing business from the United States as a shopping mecca, airline hub and now as a home port for cruise ships. One of the worst-hit states is Florida, a GOP-leaning state where the Republican Party has been taken over by hardcore ultra-right fanatics. Leave it to the moderates to understand how Florida's economy is being hurt, but mostly they are afraid to talk about it these days.

What stands to more profoundly change things in Latin America is California's Proposition 19, the legalization of marijuana for recreational uses which may or may not pass. Passage of that measure would of course be met with all manner of lawsuits in California and posturing in Washington, but it would be the beginning of the end for the so-called "War on Drugs" that is an unfortunate cornerstone of US policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ever since the Noriega crisis, there has been an understanding in Panama that is so widespread that it is seldom discussed. Even though our government, courts, prosecutors and police forces are heavily infiltrated and corrupted by the drug lords, Panama can't explicitly have its own drug policies that differ from the ones that Washington wants. But if California can have such a thing, then independent countries throughout the Americas are going to start thinking that they can, too.

The War on Drugs is a failure and it would be good to see California voters pass that judgment. However, nobody should vote for marijuana legalization because pot smoking is harmless. It isn't. It's an unhealthy vice, one that surely damages the lungs and the cardiovascular system, one that has other effects on the body that are not so well known because the drug's illegality and ample government funding for dishonest pseudo-research over the years have hindered good science.

But Californians would put marijuana into the same restricted and taxed status that applies to alcohol and tobacco, which are also unhealthy vices. That's how it ought to be.

Yes, we --- in Panama as well as in California --- should tell kids that marijuana smoking can waste a lot of their time, energy and money and over time have them waking up to coughing fits in the morning. But we should have the sophistication to distinguish an unhealthy vice from a dangerous crime.

Can you deal with that ambiguity? Consider the life, works and genius of the man who wrote and recorded the following song, which is about marijuana. He died 40 years ago at the age of 27 from the effects of drug abuse:

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As I mentioned earlier, I have been in intensive campaign mode of late, especially on Facebook. Other things have gotten in the way, and all of a sudden it's more than a month since my last front page. I plan to get back to brass tacks about covering Panama, but in case you haven't noticed, just about every morning I get up, read the online newspapers, and post the day's main stories about Panama on the Facebook page. I often comment upon them in English, but rarely translate them. I used to collect all sorts of notes and clippings and then once every two weeks or so spend a 12-hour or more day distilling them down to somewhere between 20 and 40 brief paragraphs, some in the economy section of The Panama News, some in the news section. Even more stuff than that gets onto the Facebook page these days. Plus, people send me things about upcoming cultural, sports or community events and I routinely repost them, so Facebook is taking the place of the old calendar section as well.

I would, however, like to improve upon this method of doing the calendar, but would need someone to volunteer to help do it. There are various online calendar programs, the most attractive one of which I have seen being Google's. To have a Google calendar that's linked to The Panama News in the way that our Panama Unclassifieds are a Yahoo group attached to this publication --- as you may notice by clicking on one of the links to this free advertising section on this page --- is the idea, but it takes one or more volunteers to run it.

I have been on Spanish-language talk radio a little bit lately. I'd really like to have my own show in English again, but that's a lot of work to do well and the business of radio in this country can be a major pain.

They're gonna put me in the movies. Actually, they already have. I have my bit part in Luis Romero's upcoming documentary, El Ultimo Soldado, that will be premiering on Panama's SERTV public channel and in more than a dozen other Latin American countries on Saturday, November 20. It's about the decolonization of what used to be the Canal Zone and the evolution of US-Panamanian relations. If you go to the website there is a tiny glimpse of me a little more than three and one-half minutes into the movie trailer:

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Enjoy.

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