The Panama News

Be that as it may, it’s a glimpse of the place on Bartolome Island in the Perlas Archipelago where the “Survivor” television show’s “tribal councils” will be held. It seems that CBS has built reasonably good copies of some of the architectural features of Panama’s old Spanish forts, in a very beautiful setting.

The “reality TV” game is underway, with most of the action taking place on the islands of Mogo Mogo and Chapera and the production headquarters on Contadora. This photo and another in our Travel section were surreptitiously taken and forwarded to The Panama News courtesy of the Survivor Maps website. CBS really doesn’t want such photos, and has Panama’s coast guard --- which lacks the resources to adequately guard our coasts from more serious threats --- working to keep gawkers and photographers away. I won’t be causing them any problems. I don’t intend to intrude or to ruin any surprises before the show airs in the United States this fall.

One thing I can safely say, however, is that the contestants surely must have been drenched in recent days. Panama rarely gets hurricanes, but we were sideswiped by a tropical storm and got several days of unusually heavy rains. For those of you who haven’t experienced tropical cloudbursts, you may want to check out our Outdoors page this time. If the folks at CBS don’t present the phenomenon to the North American audience ten times better than I have, it will be fair to say that they blew it.

Art Mokray does some of the same things I do for his Art’s Bochinche column on the Panama Canal Society of Florida website. Art’s mostly a chronicler, someone who summarizes events that have been reported in other media. That’s what our Panama News Briefs and Business & Economy Briefs mostly are too. (You may reasonably ask where the sources are mentioned. If an item in the briefs is taken from one source it’s noted, but if it’s from multiple sources it’s not. I’m always open to discussion about whether that’s a proper procedure and I point it out every now and then to keep faith with the readers.) Anyway, Art also manages to slip in a bit of original journalism into his columns from time to time and in one recent example he tells an interesting tale of a little logistical accident that the Survivor folks had.

I’m getting quite a bit of email and even phone calls from Survivor fans in the United States and Canada, and am informed of at least one group who have their plane tickets ready to come down to Panama and see the site of the competition once it’s over. I extend my welcome to Panama to Survivor fans who are thinking in these terms, and advise that it would be best to get around the country and experience a variety of our many attractions.

Odds are that some of these visitors will fall in love with Panama and decide to come live here. There is a very useful English-language Yahoo email list, Viviendo En Panama, for folks who have taken such a plunge, or who are thinking of doing so.

I was recently a protagonist in a ruckus in that email group when somebody made a request of the sort I get from time to time at The Panama News. A couple wanted advice on lawyers, “facilitators” or orphanages through which they might adopt a Panamanian kid. I pointed out that this country’s laws discourage international adoptions and added that I support that policy, and away it went. Really, VEP is an advice group rather than a forum for debates, flaming or otherwise, so I owe Melodye an apology for my role in a protracted online argument.

The Letters page and Opinion section of this newspaper, on the other hand, exist precisely for debate about this and sundry other issues. To the extent that hard times have made The Panama News largely a one-man show featuring too large a dose of my own opinions that’s a shortcoming. On the other hand, when people like you consider this a fitting forum to publish opinions it’s progress toward my goal of producing a community newspaper for the place and state of mind that’s The Crossroads of the World.

(And as this IS the news medium that serves Panama’s English-speaking community, let us note an important milestone involving one of our own. Dr. Marion Clarke Martin has been unanimously elected as the dean of the University of Panama’s medical school. As Earl Watson points out, she’s the first woman and the first black person to hold that post.)

In the Opinion section this time Dr. Bernal gets into international law and the quality of Panama’s best jurists. Our Business section includes a bit of original reporting, a presentation by a distinguished panel of economic conservatives to an audience mostly composed of Panamanian admiralty lawyers, at which I was the sole representative of the national press corps.

Also in the Business section, based on a variety of sources, there is the continuing saga of Marc Harris. I find the web page defending him most interesting. It reminds me of when I was a teenager working on the underground newspaper in Ypsilanti, Michigan and we used to get these letters from members of the Manson Family. “Our Father, who art in jail” was the tenor of the weirdness way back then, but in Harris’s case it’s a set of wild conspiracy theories and an appeal to send him money to spend in jail (US Postal Money Orders only, so it seems). But then, the whole point of Harris’s “octopus” and “black hole” financial webs is conspiratorial. I do not expect US federal prosecutors to put anything close to the whole Marc Harris story on the public record, for one thing because to do so would likely embarrass prominent political figures in several countries.

“And what about YOUR troubles?” someone might ask. Yes, the newspaper’s troubles persist and prosecutors want to formally question me about our debt to Seguro Social. However, our slow readership month of June is behind us and both the number of visitors to the website and our ad revenues are growing. I don’t intend to flee to Nicaragua or anywhere else. The plan is to hold out here at 9° North and bring you, and people who have yet to discover The Panama News, a newspaper that you’ll want to read.

I hope that you do. Enjoy.