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The Paradise Papers: explore the connections of those around Trump

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With Panama opposing, US tightens sanctions against Cuba

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UN
On November 1 Panama voted, as it has before, for the annual United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning the US embargo against Cuba. This time only Israel joined the United States in opposing it and nobody abstained. Last year the Obama administration abstained and in the quarter century prior to that there were always some small Pacific island and African states that would oppose the resolution or abstain in order to avoid American wrath or maintain US aid. Not now. Under Donald Trump the Americans are more isolated than ever before. Vote tally screen at the UN.

World condemns American sanctions
against Cuba, Trump tightens them

by Eric Jackson

On November 8, one week after the United States lost a 191-2 United Nations General Assembly vote about American sanctions against Cuba, the Trump administration, as it had warned, tightened these restrictions. Panama’s representative at the UN, Laura Flores, cast the vote against, telling her Cuban counterpart that the long-standing Panamanian position had not changed. Like most other Latin American countries Panama does not particularly approve of Cuba’s form of government or economic system but like all other Latin American countries it considers that these are not the business of the United States.

In new US measures against Cuba Americans will only be able to travel to Cuba on “people to people” exchanges under the sponsorship of organizations subject to US government control and these only for academic purposes. It will be a crime for US citizens to stay at a hotel in Cuba or to conduct any transaction with most Cuban enterprises. There is still a certain leeway for Americans with relatives in Cuba to visit their families there.

What it practically means for Americans living in Panama remains to be seen. In the years when all most all travel by US citizens to Cuba was illegal under US law, Cuban immigration would stamp a visa on a separate piece of paper rather than a US passport and proof of travel in violation of the sanctions was difficult. Since those times Panama’s Copa Airlines has greatly expanded its service from Panama to three destinations in Cuba. We have no word yet on how the airline will respond to the new rules or how the US authorities might pressure Copa into helping with their enforcement.

The tightened rules go into effect on November 9 but those with airline tickets purchased before Trump announced his intentions to increase restrictions this past June will be grandfathered in on at least some of the rules.

 

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Jackson, On a day when many Americans will vote

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JC
Once a conflicted and ultimately rejected president of the United States, Jimmy Carter went on to be the greatest of American Sunday school teachers — a vocation that merits greater respect these days.

On a day when Democrats should be voting in several states…

by Eric Jackson

The news has been repeatedly slamming the faces of Americans into the pavement. Actually, not just Americans. Among Americans, not just those in the USA. Among Democrats, perhaps a confirmation of some of our beliefs but also evidence of the breach of them in our midst. We are given pause for uncomfortable introspection, in the quaint and now sort of disreputable academic phrase of yesteryear, “values clarification.”

In Virginia, a centrist Democratic lieutenant governor, a physician from a patrician family who won a primary against a progressive and has brought in the Clintons and much of that crowd for his general election race, started by centering his campaign on improving the state’s schools and protecting and extending people’s access to health care. The Republican, Ed Gillespie, has been making his bid by talking about race and about guns.

So, you Northern Virginia voters of Afro-Panamanian roots, what do you think about THAT? Did anyone teach you enough state history to know about the “patterollers” and their relationship to the Second Amendment? These were the state militia, generally deployed in organized groups of three to six white men, whose main job was to keep blacks off of the roads to prevent runaways or the organization of slave revolts. All free white men of military age were expected to participate or to hire someone to take their place. The institution made Quakers unpopular, and in some states illegal. Patrick Henry railed against the Constitution that came out of the Philadelphia convention because it did not protect the right of white people in states like Virginia to bear arms, and this is the purpose to which he referred. So if you self-identify as a black person, what do you think about another Virginia campaign about guns?

But then, Virginia has too many African-American voters for the Republicans to want to rile them all up so that they appear at the polls today, so the folks to whom they point as reason for the fine white citizens to be armed and ready to kill somebody are immigrants from Latin America. Salvadoran gangsters are the tatted-up poster boys, but there aren’t enough of them and they haven’t caused enough trouble in the state to justify all of the many costs of a general ethnic cleansing. But there you have it: today’s Republicans aren’t talking about arresting a few lawbreakers, they’re talking about a roundup of all immigrants and a lot of them, with their talk about “anchor babies,” do not distinguish among immigrants and the US-born children of immigrants. And people like that have never been able to distinguish among Salvadorans, Mexicans, Panamanians and other Latin Americans, let alone among individuals of those descriptions. So if you identify as Hispanic, what do you think about THAT?

We get a massacre of white people at a small town Baptist church in Texas to add a somber note to this election day. In the hours when that awful story was breaking, the comments below the mainstream media reports — comments sections that generally do nothing to exclude pseudonymous Nazi trolls and Russian bots posing as such — blame was immediately cast upon black people, and on Muslims. As details emerged, the white guy who did it was cast in outright libelous reports as an anti-fascist anarchist (antifa) and the Texas attorney general called for all religious congregations to be armed. Further details muddied those stereotypes. An armed member of the congregation did give chase, and did shoot the criminal — but not before 26 innocent people were killed. The criminal? A sexist terrorist, who had beaten his ex-wife and broken the skull of her young son by a prior relationship, and whose mission that day included revenge on her family that took the life of her grandmother.

Wait a minute. “Sexist terrorist?” Isn’t that ruled out by definition of anti-terrorist laws that generally require opposition to some government or intimidation of some defined ethnic or faith group in a society? But in the USA, those laws were for the most part written by men and reflect that reality.

Do you want to know terror? Have a gun pointed at you in the context of domestic violence. I know. Statistically, forget about that stuff about a hero driving off an intruder with a gun — homicides and suicides within the household are what firearms deaths within American society are mostly about.

(And the Republican gun nuts who dismiss the suicide statistics as irrelevant? None of them are ever heard to champion the right of a patient who is suffering the pain of a terminal illness to end his or her life.)

So should Democrats feel superior? She we define THEM as the party of horrific abuse against women, and US as the enlightened people? Almost all of us adult male Democrats can take a hard look within and know that this has not been our personal history. And then there is that champion of the “donor base” — to which the DNC gives preference over the rank-and-file these days — Harvey Weinstein. He’s been in the news a lot, too. Not only for his abuse of power against women, but now for his hiring of Israeli mercenaries to terrorize those who would speak out against it.

And Americans living abroad — have we fled from all that? I see where Mexico just arrested a gringo cult leader for multiple counts of murder. I have seen American sexual predators, including convicted ones, coming to Panama in search of submissive women and children. Wild Bill was an active white supremacist up there before bringing his crime wave here. We get all sorts of wannabe armed cultists and “sovereign citizens” coming here from the USA, and Panamanian authorities, warned many times, seem oblivious. Or is it that they have been paid to be oblivious?

So Virginia and New Jersey vote today, as do a lot of other Americans in local or special elections. Who’s moral? Who’s the majority? Imperfect people need to look within, and find that sense of decency, and vote accordingly. It does matter.

 

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Perez, Making 2020 transparent

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TP

Making 2020 Transparent

When I ran to serve as chair of the DNC following the 2016 election — a cycle unlike any other in American history — I knew that repairing our party’s structural flaws and healing the deep divisions among our supporters would not be easy. While we’ve made remarkable progress since last November, we still have a long way to go.

I am more committed than ever before to restoring voters’ faith in our democratic process because even the perception of impartiality or an unfair advantage undermines our ability to win. That is unacceptable.

To that end, the new DNC under my leadership is committed to the task of making sure that our 2020 nominating process will be unquestionably fair and transparent. And all the people I’ve brought on board since taking over as chair are working according to the following principles:

  • We believe that only through transparency and accountability can we rebuild the trust we need to win elections.
  • We believe that it’s critical to build an infrastructure that supports all candidates and helps Democrats win.
  • We believe that a party must listen if it seeks to lead.
  • We believe in the principle of equal opportunity for the American people and for our candidates in our party elections.

Of course, as any leader knows, principles only matter when they inform and inspire action. After listening to Democrats from every wing of our party, I’ve developed a series of concrete reforms to put our principles into action and guarantee that under my watch, the new DNC will work to rebuild trust with the people we represent. These principles are:

  1. To ensure that no candidate participating in our presidential nominating process gains any unfair advantage — real or perceived — during our primary season. We will decide the debate schedule in advance, instead of negotiating it after all our candidates have entered the race.
  2. I will ensure that any and all joint fundraising agreements will be transparent, including the new Democratic GrassrootsVictory Fund agreements we’ve developed with all 50 state parties. This is the first time the DNC has signed joint fundraising agreements like this so early and before the mid-term elections.
  3. At all times, I will follow the rules established in the Charter and Bylaws of the Democratic Party, not least of all as they pertain to the selection of our nominee for president of the United States. If there are opportunities for the DNC to make changes to the Charter and Bylaws to be even more transparent, I will work with the DNC body to pass those changes.
  4. I will continue to support the Unity Reform Commission, whose goals are both to unify and reform the party we all love. We will work with the Unity Reform Commission to implement their collective recommendations for meaningful change in our party.
  5. I will continue working to reform and revive our party by empowering diverse grassroots Democrats at the leadership table. We will build on our recent successes with small-dollar fundraising. And we will reject contributions from corporate PAC donors whose goals conflict with our platform.
  6. In addition to committing to a transparent process, I will work with all members of the Democratic Party to make the 2020 process as inclusive as possible, including working to protect the right of every Democrat to make their vote and their voice heard in the primary process.
  7. I will work with our DNC members and progressive partners to ensure that the 2020 process is transparent, accountable, and representative of the will of rank-and-file Democrats

We should never confuse unity with unanimity, and it is my unequivocal goal to regain the trust of voters and unify and strengthen our party to ensure we can elect Democrats from the school board to the oval office. I will not rest in the fight to restore the faith of hardworking families in the political party I love.

 

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Sanders, Revitalizing the Democratic Party

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Don Bernardo
At a Bernie rally in East LA.

Revitalizing the Democratic Party

by Bernie Sanders

Politics is not a baseball game, and it is not a soap opera.

People are hurting in this country, and our job is not to be distracted by political gossip and Donald Trump’s tweets. Our job is to revitalize American democracy and bring millions of people into the political process who today do not vote and who do not believe that government is relevant to their lives. Our job is to create an economy and government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent and wealthy campaign contributors.

Here’s the problem: the strategy the Democratic Party has been pursuing in recent years has failed. Since 2009, Democrats have lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures across the country. Republicans now control the White House, 34 out of 50 governorships as well as the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. In dozens of states, the Democratic Party is virtually non-existent. Too much is at stake for our country and our people for us not to learn from our past failures and move forward in a way that makes the Democratic Party stronger so we can take on and beat Trump and the right-wing Republican agenda.

What the recently released book excerpt from former interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile made clear is that unless we get our act together, we are not going to be effective in either taking on Donald Trump or in stopping the extremist right-wing Republican agenda. We have to re-establish faith with the American people that in fact we can make positive changes in this country through a fair and transparent political process that reflects the will of voters across this country.

In order to do that, we need to rethink and rebuild the Democratic Party. We need a Democratic Party that opens its doors to new people, new energy and new ideas. We need a Democratic Party that is truly a grassroots party, where decisions are made from the bottom up, not from the top down. We need a Democratic Party which becomes the political home of the working people and young people of this country, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American … all Americans.

And we need to make it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party is prepared to take on the ideology of the Koch brothers and the billionaire class — a small group of people who are undermining American democracy and moving this country into an oligarchic form of society. YES. We will take on the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street, corporate America, the insurance industry, the drug companies, and the fossil fuel industry.

Now, what the Establishment (political, economic and media) wants us to believe is that real and fundamental changes in our society are impossible.

No. We cannot guarantee health care to all as a right. No. We cannot revitalize the trade union movement, raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour and provide pay equity for women. No. We cannot effectively compete in the global economy by making public colleges and universities tuition-free. No. We cannot lead the world in combatting climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels. No. We cannot reform our broken criminal justice system or finally achieve comprehensive immigration reform.

They want us to think that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, a nation which has more income and wealth inequality than almost any nation on earth, the best that we can do is to accept tiny, incremental change.

I could not disagree more.

Right now, a Democratic National Committee Unity Reform Commission, comprised of people who supported our campaign, people who supported Secretary Clinton’s campaign, and people appointed by DNC Chair Tom Perez are working on a set of policies that will determine the future direction of the Democratic Party. In many ways, this Unity Commission will determine whether the Party goes forward in a dynamic and inclusive way, or whether it retains the failed status quo approach of recent years. It will determine whether the Party will have the grassroots energy to effectively take on Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their reactionary agenda or whether we remain in the minority.

In my view, this Commission must:

* Make the Democratic Party more democratic and the presidential contests more fair by dramatically reducing the number of superdelegates who participate in the nominating process. It is absurd that in the last presidential primary over 700 superdelegates (almost one-third of the delegates a candidate needed to win the nomination) had the power to ignore the will of the people who voted in the state primaries and caucuses.

* Make primaries more open by ending the absurdity of closed primary systems with antiquated, arbitrary and discriminatory voter registration laws. Republicans are the ones who make it harder for people to vote, not Democrats. At a time when more and more people consider themselves to be Independents our job is to bring people into the Democratic Party process, not exclude them. It is incredibly undemocratic that in some states voters must declare their party affiliation up to six months before the primary election.

* Make it easier for working people and students to participate in state caucuses. While there is much to be said for bringing people together face-to-face in a caucus to discuss why they support the candidate of their choice, not everybody is able to attend those caucuses at the time they are held. A process must be developed that gives everyone the right to cast a vote even if they are not physically able to attend a state caucus.

* Make the DNC’s budget and decision-making processes more open and transparent. If we are going to build a Party that relies on working people who are willing to give $5, $10 and $27 donations, they deserve to know where that money is going and how those decisions are made.

I look forward to following the progress of the Unity Reform Commission, and I urge Chairman Tom Perez and the entire Democratic National Committee to develop policies which move the Democratic Party forward in a very different direction — a direction that will lead us to national and statewide victories. It’s important that you do the same:

Please sign the petition calling on the Democratic National Committee and Chairman Tom Perez to accept, support and implement policies which make the Democratic Party more inclusive, more democratic and more transparent.

Right now, our job is to come together, and not be distracted by the political gossip and drama of the moment. We must fight President Trump’s destructive efforts to divide us up by the color of our skin, our gender, our religion, our sexual orientation or our country of origin. We must rally the American people to oppose Trump’s proposal to provide massive tax giveaways to billionaires while taking away the health care that millions now have.

But we must also make it clear — if we are going to elect Democrats who will move us forward as a country — that we must institute long-needed reforms in the Democratic Party. When we do that, we will not only create a dynamic and progressive party, we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.

 

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So, what is this day that Colon and Panama celebrate?

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starlet
At the time, fear and political expediency distorted news coverage: the paper was a key part of the plot.

Colon Day: a very Panamanian revolution

by Eric Jackson

So, what were the details of Panama’s smashing military victory over the 500 Colombian Army troops stationed in Colon to maintain Bogota’s authority on isthmus?

First of all, understand that most of these soldiers were bored and war-weary, people who had been mobilized for the Thousand Day War that has ended about a year earlier. Second, consider that throughout the war the Conservatives held control of Colon, Panama City and the Panama Railroad route between the two cities.

Politically, this was traditional Liberal turf. It was under Conservative control due to a great Liberal blunder at the war’s outset, an insane charge into machine gun fire on Panama City’s Calidonia Bridge over the Curundu River. There were some 500 Liberals killed in that battle, but many of their weapons were rescued and sent to the Interior, for Liberals to fight another day. That they did, in a civil war that essentially depopulated and scorched Cocle province with Liberal guerrilla general Victoriano Lorenzo grabbing the weapons from the Conservative mayor of San Carlos who died trying to intercept them, leading a retreat to a mountain stronghold northwest of El Valle, then sweeping down to take Penonome and Aguadulce. But Lorenzo had been betrayed, then executed at the Casco Viejo’s Plaza Francia some six months earlier.

In Colombia the Conservatives had everything rigged but could not muster a quorum for the senate to approve any treaties nor muster the votes in the rump senate to pretend to do so. In Panama City, the Conservatives were politically in a bad way, not because they didn’t rule with an iron fist but because the city’s food supply from Cocle and points west was cut off both by loss of production and by a Liberal blockade. The blockade lifted with the war’s end but those who had fled their farms for the city mostly did not go back and Panama City was starving. In early 1904, when the first US Army medical mission arrived in the city, they found that the leading cause of death was beriberi, a starvation disease.

After the rump of the Colombian senate had declined to ratify a canal treaty with the United States the previous August, things were getting desperate for the shareholders in the moribund but still existing French canal company. Its concession would expire at the end of the year. Thus its shareholders, the biggest of which was the Panama Railroad, would have little or nothing to sell. The railroad company and the local Conservatives needed a new paradigm, quickly.

So a coup plot was hatched, essentially a Panama Railroad and Conservative Party conspiracy, with the connivance of the US government. The new president, Manuel Amador Guerrero, was the railroad company doctor.

The top Colombian military officers were bribed. Orders went out for the next levels of military commanders to take the train from Colon to Panama City for urgent consultations. They got on the train, and out in the jungle near the Continental Divide the engine decoupled from the officers’ car and sped away. The troops at the Colon garrison were thus left leaderless.

And besides, November 3 was a Colombian holiday. Even though Ecuador had gone its separate way, on November 3, 1820 Cuenca had declared independence from Spain and the Colombians still celebrated it. A boring day for bored soldiers, and the bars, stores and banks were mostly closed. However, the Colon office of the Star & Herald had money in its safe, the publisher, the mayor and those with liquor sales licenses were in on the plot and courtesy of the press all available liquor in town was purchased and delivered to the garrison. The troops got drunk en masse.

By the time that anyone sobered up enough to notice, the USS Nashville had landed and disembarked its Marine contingent. US forces were patrolling the streets.

What were the troops to do? The mayor made a gracious offer. They could get on a ship and sail back to Colombia, with guarantees of no violence or abuse from the Americans or the fine citizens of Colon.

That offer was accepted, and on November 5 the soldiers got on a ship and sailed away.

Thus went the resounding military victory in Panama’s war of independence from Colombia. Colon has celebrated it ever since.

 

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Bernal, We will liberate Panama!

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MAB

We will free Panama

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

Day by day Panama ever more needs a civic commitment — one with both an attitude and an aptitude — to give the citizenry what we need to free ourselves from the structural bonds of corruption.

With the case of the criminal mega-corporation Odebrecht, we have come to a fork in the road: we are either capable of rising to the occasion as a society, or we will continue a descent that ends in Panama just being a place where people live — but just people, local or foreign, for whom our country is just a business or a place to conduct business.

Panama, as a nation, as a country and as a republic, has been turned away from the values, the principles and the objects that belong to each of these concepts. The gravity of the facts does not seem to have been taken into account by those who run the government, notwithstanding that these stubborn facts daily assert themselves and await a civic reaction that does not occur.

And that’s why it’s imperative to have a citizens’ action movement to achieve freedom, to break the chains of consequences that daily corruption with impunity brings to us.

Education, the quality of life, the rule of law, all of the economic, social and procedural guarantees — none of these will improve if we do not manage to free ourselves from outdated, outdated and degenerated structures that dominate our society.

Only we can accomplish the task of freeing ourselves, in a joint effort among all of us who love Panama and who are willing to rescue our nation, our country and our republic from all of the cheap political tricks and those who promote and are favored by them.

The obstacles will multiply to the extent that we do not act decisively and patriotically. Only by freeing ourselves from the current power structures will we recover our dignity and our identity in order to be the private and public persons whom our times demand.

Let’s not allow the voices that discourage our protests to deaden our will to free Panama.

 

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Flag Day: an alternative notion of independence is born

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flag
November 3, Independence Day, commemorates a formal act. The hilariously smashing military victory that secured Panama’s separation from Colombia is more properly celebrated on Colon Day, November 5. But in a sense it might be said that the first gesture of Panamanian independence, still very much a work in progress, was on November 4, 1903. Does Flag Day get lesser respect because the banner’s creation was mostly women’s work? Archive photo by Eric Jackson.

Flag Day, when Panama started to be a country of its own

by Eric Jackson

Intellectually lazy journalists and policy makers from the north, and the less scrupulous or less educated members of Panama’s aristocratic families, will refer to Panama as a Central American country. Did the US Southern Command use Panama as a control and jumping off point for Central America’s death squad wars of the late 70s and 80s, and did Panama lend a hand toward negotiating an end to those? Did Ernesto Pérez Balladares signal a new economic orientation for General Torrijos’s old party with his effusive praise for Honduras as an economic model for Panama to follow? Did Mireya Moscoso and the more provincial of the Panamñistas like the idea of themselves being banana republic oligarchs, just like in Central America? So Panama is a member of the Central American integration process, and our thuggish ex-presidents can claim a certain amount of immunity from prosecution for their crimes as members of the Central American Parliament. But Panama was never a member of the United Provinces of Central America. Under the Spanish crown, we were neither part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala nor the Viceroyalty of New Spain as the Central American Republics historically were.

Nope. Panama’s South American. We’re one of the Bolivarian Republics that rallied to the banner of The Great Liberator Simón Bolívar. Along with what are now Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador we were part of Spain’s colonial Viceroyalty of New Granada and later Bolívar’s Gran Colombia.

Let’s not get into racism, into the supposition that the conquerors’ written language was the beginning of history. There is an older linguistic record here, notwithstanding centuries of efforts to erase it. The languages of most of our indigenous nations — the Guna, the Ngabe, the Bugle, the Naso and the BriBri — are of the Chibchan family of languages, which as best we know trace roots to the central plateau of what is now Colombia. Our other two indigenous nations, the Embera and the Wounaan, are historically known to come from the Pacific lowland jungles of what is now Colombia. There are suggestions that these latter two peoples’s ancestors made their way there from the Amazon basin. Leave it to DNA research and archaeology to modify these genesis and exodus tales, but for now it’s reasonably safe to say that all of Panamas’ pre-Columbian roots are also South American. The place was already an important crossroads when the Spaniards got here and the people knew of the Aztec and Maya civilizations to the north and west, and of Incas and Aymara of the Andes, as well as the circum-Caribbean trade and cultural zone which largely also traced roots to South America, to the Orinoco Valley from whence the Tainos and Caribs are thought to have come. We were South American then, if still the route by which Mexican corn got to the southern continent and Bolivian hot peppers became part of Caribbean island culture.

Come 1903, were both the native and Spanish histories to be overlain with a North American definition? Separation from Colombia was, after all, mainly a foreign project. See, a moribund but still existent French company had this concession from Colombia to build a canal, which was set to expire on December 31, 1903. Once that happened the Americans, who were interested in taking over the canal project, would have no reason to buy out the French company’s stake. Perhaps most of the shareholders in the French company were in France, where Panama had also become a synonym for a financial boondoggle, but the dominant active parties were the Panama Railroad Company, a New York corporation represented by the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. The railroad had hauled away dirt and rock excavated by the French companies’ effort and took shares as part of their compensation. They looked forward to a similar and more profitable relationship with an American effort to finish the canal. Yes, they got Teddy Roosevelt interested and yes, they convinced war-weary Panamanians that it was a good idea, but the conspiracy that hatched our separation from Colombian came out of the railroad company, its law firm and a clique of friends from the Conservative Party that held sway in Panama City at the time. For appearances they brought in a dissident Liberal or two, but this was a corporate / Conservative plot with US backing.

The great liberator chosen for Panama was the railroad company’s physician, Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero. The details were mostly left to an engineer for and shareholder in the French company, Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla, and New York attorney William Nelson Cromwell. A revolution kit was provided for Amador Guerrero, complete with a declaration of independence apparently drafted in the offices of Sullivan & Cromwell and a proposed Panamanian flag designed by Mrs. Bunau-Varilla. Amador Guerrero’s talent was in medicine and his passion was for gambling but politically maladroit as he may have been, a flag and declaration of independence putting the imprint of the United States on the new republic were things that he knew to be inappropriate, things that would cause him problems with all of the rest of Latin America. So he ditched the Sullivan & Cromwell declaration and handed the task of writing a more suitable declaration to a committee whose leading light was dissident Liberal Carlos A. Mendoza and he handed the job of designing a new flag to his son, Manuel Encarnación Amador. The younger Amador, a man of his times, was not one to sew things even if he was a competent draftsman, so he made a sketch and in turn handed the project over to his mother, María de la Ossa de Amador. She ran this underground women’s committee to procure the material and produce enough of these flags to get them on the streets of the capital once the coup had begun. So on its second day, November 4, 1903, the Republic of Panama had a flag.

 

no
No means no. Especially when Panamanian women insist. Archive photo by Eric Jackson.

 

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¿Wappin? Panamá atípica / Atypical Panama

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lewd pulsating jungle rhythms

Panamá atípica / Atypical Panama

Banda Republicana – Himno Istmeño
https://youtu.be/Ay38HPFygWM

Maestra Milagros Blades
https://youtu.be/-H5ey92_8Qo

Black Tea Project – Sentimientos del Alma
https://youtu.be/P5N4UnvNBPE

Víctor Boa – Ruffles
https://youtu.be/YqD0wAnuqvM

Danilo Pérez – Galactic Panama
https://youtu.be/gCuBFzhKCUY

Idania Dowman – Boquete Jazz & Blues Festival 2014
https://youtu.be/Xc7mOqAePak

Carlos Garnett – Mystery of the Ages
https://youtu.be/v2hbLGEryRA

Lord Kon Tiki – Veranillo Push Push / Armstrong in the Moon
https://youtu.be/oXH4KEGnk_Y

Joshue Ashby & C3 Project – Colón Surgirá
https://youtu.be/u4t_uOzc-84

Rómulo Castro – La Rosa de los Vientos
https://youtu.be/QUoV65mVgss

Roque Cordero: Sinfonía n.º 2 (1956)
https://youtu.be/WGUewyhHMg8

 

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Editorial: Panama is…

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The Wall
Remnant of the wall that surrounded the Casco Viejo, with more recent buildings in the background. Photo by Eric Jackson.

Panama is…

It’s a place, with the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south, with Colombia to the east and Costa Rica to the west.

But mostly it’s a nation composed of people. Panama is Indigenous, and European, and African and Asian. It’s Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist and Bahai and non-believing. At The Crossroads of The World, almost everybody and everything passes through, and we have developed our own distinctive if many times imperfect sensibilities of how to pick and choose among what they have to offer.

Do we want to define ourselves as what we are not? It gets to be a slippery slope. And WHO we are not? That can and often does get downright ugly.

Back in 1903 we decided that we would no longer be a part of Colombia’s never-ending civil conflicts. Since then a lot of Colombians have come and woven themselves into the fabric of Panamanian society precisely because they were looking for peace.

We have had a complicated relationship with the United States. Still, along the way Panama embraced and assimilated a lot of Americans, and still does. There is a consensus not to embrace the meanest strands of that society to the north. Even if, as a world boxing power, we often beat them up.

Can Panama be improved? Of course. Let other people brag about how great their countries are. For Panamanians, national improvement is the essence of patriotism.

¡Que viva Panamá!

 

Bear in mind…

 

It is not impossible for honest men and patriotic men to live together, working for their country, if they have the flexibility to recognize their mistakes, if they are capable of loving their fellow men and appreciate that others are as worthy as they are to be happy.

Belisario Porras

 

Power doesn’t corrupt. It unmasks.

Thelma King

 

The voters need to deploy all their honesty to resist the onslaught of the parties — they should never adopt another guide than their conviction of the merits of the citizens whom they have decided to elect.

Justo Arosemena

 

~ ~ ~
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