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It would be very hard for anyone today to imagine what the Panama Canal Zone was like in its heyday, which would have been in the 1940s and 50s. It was after the Suez Crisis of 1956 when Egypt took control of its Canal that the whole question of sovereignty over the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone began to change: you could say the whole process of decolonization in the developing world which was strongly backed by the U.S. after WWII, put an end to America’s oldest colony. But while the Canal Zone was in existence it can’t be denied that it was the most stunning commune ever built: the planning of the Canal Zone was like something straight from the imagination of Walt Disney. With its beautiful streets, trees, housing, public pools, lakes, and jungle, it was a testament to America’s will to power at the turn of the 20th century. And the atmosphere within the Zone was like that of an affluent country club: the perfectly cut grass and the shade of the large mahogany trees made one feel lucky and privileged to have been let through the door of this little paradise. The beauty of the place was so complete that those who grew up in it felt superior not only to Panamanians, but even more so to mainland Americans, for in America after the Second World War maids and servants disappeared from most households and life in general became more equalitarian – all of these changes never came to the Canal Zone. The Zone was built at a time when equality and quality were opposed ideas.  Most of the people who first came to work on the Canal and to live permanently within the Canal Zone were Southern Baptists. And the secretive and closed nature of the American South was easily transplanted to the Canal Zone. If you came to the Zone later on, say, in the 1960s, you had to work hard to be accepted as a true Zonian (the name for those that lived in the Zone). There was no private property in the Zone - all property was owned by the U.S. government. And the U.S. government took very good care of those who lived within the Zone: there was a phone number to dial in order to have your lawn mowed, a picture hung on your wall or a window fixed. Telephone calls were free; if you had a problem with your plumbing, you called the plumbing department; electricity meters did not exist, families were given a one-month vacation to the States with airfare paid by the U.S. government. All services and repairs were paid for by the U.S. government. And those that grew up in the Zone were normally given preference for job openings so that generations would settle in the Zone.

The above shot was taken in Quarry Heights. Most of the homes in Quarry Heights were occupied by U.S. Generals and Doctors who practiced at nearby Gorgas hospital. Today, there is a nice mix of artists and professionals living in Quarry Heights. Some of the houses in Quarry Heights are still for sale. Most need some work in order to bring them up to date, but look at those two story screened- in porches and all the beautiful tropical plantings.

Well, I live in the Zone now and it has changed a lot from what I understand, but it still is a great place to live, especially now that its more unsavory sides have disappeared. The following should give you some idea about what the Zone is like.

An Afternoon In The Zone

It was a Sunday and we decided to take a walk/run through the Canal Zone. We ran the mile from our house to the Administration Building of the Panama Canal. The Administration Building is located in Balboa Heights, one of the most exclusive areas in the Zone; the atmosphere around the Administration Building is of lined palms and tropical plants with early 20th century tropical houses of the highest quality. The Administration Building sits on a steep hill; at the top of the hill and around the Administration Building people come and make cardboard sleds out of old boxes and then slide down the steep hill as though they were on a sled ride in wintertime New England. When we reached the Administration Building, Gabi wanted to walk on and so we walked around the Admistration Building and headed up a winding road that led pass the Governor’s Old Residence – now the Canal Administrator’s Residence - to Quarry Heights and Ancon Hill.  The Administrator’s house sits on a spot below Ancon Hill and the house points out towards the Hill: the Administrator’s Residence was originally located near the Culebra Cut next to the Canal, but was later moved board by board to its present location in Balboa Heights. Cattycorner to the Administrator’s residence is the entrance to Quarry Heights. The houses in Quarry Heights used to be occupied by U.S.military generals and U.S. medical doctors who practiced at nearby Gorgas hospital, the U.S. hospital for the Zone. Gorgas hospital was originally named Ancon hospital, but was named in 1928 after Dr. William Crawford Gorgas, the Alabama doctor who discovered the cure to yellow fever, a vital discovery because it allowed the U.S. to finish building the Panama Canal without incurring so many deaths. Gorgas hospital is built on the site of the former French hospital "L'Hospital Notre Dame de Canal". The hospital was originally built of wood, but was rebuilt in concrete in 1915 by Samuel Hitt. Walking around or in Gorgas hospital you are amazed that a building of that age, in a tropical climate like Panama, looks that good: old wall clocks from the 30s keep perfect time, the masonry of the hospital is flawless and the way the hospital is built into Ancon Hill makes the hospital seem almost organic to the sloping hillsides of Ancon Hill. The hospital has been turned into law courts since the reversion of the Zone and is being well maintained by the Panamanian government. On the road below the hospital is an old Anglican church, San Lucas, which is built up among trees. Below the hospital is the 4th of July, which was once a prosperous shopping and residential area that used to mark the border of Panama City and the Canal Zone – it is now run down and sparsely inhabited. And as you follow the road that wraps around Ancon Hill, you will also see other notable displays of tropical American architecture - this fact is little known to many people. The houses on Ancon Hill are set among gigantic mahogany trees, bamboo, ferns and many have views of the Canal and Panama City. Ancon Hill is cooler than most neighborhoods in Panama City because of all the shade trees. 
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The old canal zone has a number of hidden gems that few people know about. If you are looking for something a little cheaper than the above houses, try Gamboa or Cardenas. I will write an article soon on those two areas.

We walked into Quarry Heights; there are some old wooden houses still for sale. All of the large houses are made of wood and built around tennis courts, palm trees and green spaces.  The Panamanian Foreign Ministry is located here also; their offices are in the old U.S. Military's Headquarters and if you want to spy U.S. military architecture from a long lost time, then walk into the main lobby of the Foreign Ministry building and check out how dark the mahogany is and how low the lights are. Anyway, the road forks after you pass the guards gate at the front of Quarry Heights and on the left of the fork begins the road to the top of Ancon Hill. You will pass by some small apartments that have white vinyl siding and look like small apartments you might find in some small one-horse working town in Pennsylvania – the apartments are also surrounded by tropical vegetation. As you pass the small apartments and make your way to the road that leads up Ancon Hill you will see some old wooden houses that have views of both the Inter-American highway and the Bridge of the Americas, the bridge that spans the Canal and connects North America and South America; in the Canal, ships pass by – headed either for the depths of the Pacific Ocean or to Miraflores Locks, the first pair of locks that ships encounter when entering the Panama Canal from the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally, you will see a submarine pop-up from under the Bridge of the Americas as it makes it way through the Canal. Some of the houses on Ancon Hill appear to be empty; others are occupied, but the atmosphere is relaxing and the feeling here is more that of the deep countryside than urban sprawl, even though downtown Panama City is only minutes away. The walk up Ancon Hill is along a small shaded road that you can drive or walk on – there were a number of people riding their bikes down the hill as we began our ascent. When you reach the top of Ancon Hill, the view of the city is wonderful because not only do you have a “long-lense” view of the city, but you also hear the sounds and bustles of the city as well. The city sounds very near; the day we went we heard marching bands practicing for a future parade, maybe November 3rd, Independence Day from Colombia. The 3rd is the one you want to be here for this year. 100th birthday of Panama.

It was early dusk when we had started climbing Ancon Hill and now it was becoming dark: the darkness filled in the light and the faces of people disappeared from view as they walked by us. The running didn’t go well on the way back, slippery and dark, and as a heavy rain set in, I reached the house tired and wet. 

Some Thoughts On Being An Expat In Panama

Well I came to Panama and I had the great fortune of first knowing the country from the deep countryside. That is really the way to begin to see a place like Panama or any country, I think, because from there you can follow the root to the head. And I love Panama and the people are alive; you won’t be bored and I am not saying that this is for everyone, but at least come for one Carnaval. I promise you won’t regret it. Panama City grows on you like a vine. You hate it while you are in it, but when you leave it, you really miss it. The nightlife is not great; you won’t really find what you are looking for in a nightclub. There are millions of restaurants of every kind. Public transportation to the interior of the country is excellent. The road from the city to the airport is the best I've seen in any city around the world. There's a small art scence, but because business is so important artists are not well respected. The pollution is tolerable, though the buses spread both noise and air pollution. Roads are very good. Flights can take you directly to New York, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo or Los Angeles. People in Panama can be friendly, though they have a reputation for not being friendly - they are very suspicious at first. 

If you want to work in Panama then teaching is a good place to start. This is a good way to enter Panama because you can meet lots of people in many different professions while teaching. Go out and meet people: go to Sunday parties in the morning and nice weddings at night. And plant, plant, plant: this country is great for flowers, orchids and bamboo.
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The question of being a foreigner will never be important as that’s not new to people: Panama has more diversity in population than anywhere I know. You have West Indian, Kuna, French, Spanish, Maroon, American, Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Arab, Japanese, Colombian, Guayami, Korean, Taiwanese, German, Russian, Jamaican, Pakistani, and others. So when you talk with someone you can see all of these influences and the velocity of communicating with such complex people all in this small – 3 million people – country is not boring: and you constantly are learning that you really know very little about someone.  Investing In Panama Panama has always looked to attract foreign capital: it imports five times what it exports. Mostly tourism, banana exports, shrimp exports, Canal fees, and foreign capital have covered the trade gap: there is almost $40 billion in Panama’s banks, which is quite high for a country with a population of 3 million, 300,000 of which have money to put in a bank. In Panama the business environment is excellent. Business people are king; no one likes a businessman more than Panamanians. I am always surprised by the number of business people with different ethnic backgrounds that are trading and negotiating and just trying to make a buck in Panama: in this environment there is little consensus so that public interests as represented by government policy is weak in comparison to private business interests. Each ethnic community in Panama has its own nitch: Muslims; used cars; Indians, small-loans and electronics; Jewish, clothes and banking; Greeks, shipping and fishing; Italians, imports of fine goods and supermarkets; Spanish, furniture; Chinese, restaurants, construction and banking.  In this business environment just make sure that you don’t tread across someone else’s private interest. You have to make a local contact in Panama in order to get what you need done, though some kinds of businesses – internet-based businesses - fall outside this fact – but still a local contact will help.  Panama has great construction and great communications, a legacy of the Canal. There are many Internet providers and banks that offer everything from web hosting to e-commerce accounts.

This is one of the newer houses in Quarry Heights, with Ancon Hill in the background. The house in the first photo is directly to your left from the above photo, and the house in the second photo is to your right and cattycorner from the above house. In between the houses are green spaces and tennis courts.

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One way to invest in Panama would be gold and copper. Petaquilla Mine is among the world's five largest undeveloped copper-gold porphyry deposits, though mining accounted for less than 0.5% of Panama's gross domestic product (GDP). The Canal accounted for 30% of GDP.

In the 1990s there was a gold mine built by Greenstone of Canada in the Cañazas district of Veraquas province. The mine closed around 1999 and has been quiet ever since. The problem with investing in mining in Panama is that most of the gold and copper deposits are located on the Conmarcas or Indian reservations. And with Panama’s excellent history of protecting indigenous groups and the indigenous groups deep desire not to have mines, mining in Panama is costly as far as the human factor is concerned. Greenstone stopped their operations because of a collapse in their stock prices: over speculation on the quality and amount of gold. Doug Casey told me the one time that I met him that Canadian mining companies are like little “Choo-Choo Trains” – meaning the stock price skyrockets in a very short time and then just as quickly falls-through-the-floor. Like real estate you need to know when to buy and when to sell; unlike real estate, mining can collapse overnight. I watched the collapse of Greenstone’s open pit gold mine from the hills above the mine. 
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This shot was taken from Ancon Hill looking down on the old French Quarter of Panama City. Quarry Heights is directly behind and below from where this photo was taken. Taboga Island and the Canal are to your right and Contadora and Isla del Rey are straight forward. This shot was taken during the1960s or 70s.

The collapse was foreseeable for two reasons: the demoralization of the lead geologist - a great friend of mine - and the emotional collapse of the chief mining engineer, who in this case was from the UK and was wanted on manslaughter charges in Canada: I did not like this man.  I really never knew anything about a gold mine before living above one, but over time I got an idea of how one works. The "investors" are flown in with great fanfare with women and booze laid out to the tilt, then everyone puts hard hats and ear plugs on and heads out to the "Site", where next to a drill or some loud piece of machinery they try to listen to the geologist, who is holding a rock and pointing at it with great determination, explain why they should put their money into the project. Following this, everyone heads back to the women and booze: speculation indeed. There's lots of screwing: other people's wives, local girls, whores - I never met so many people with two or three families in two or three places. Also, everyone has a firearm in case the locals rise up: in glove-compartments, under spare tires, below seats, and above sun blinders.  But after a while the money tightens and all the foreigners that work at the mine are living together in one house, like when the project began. But now the good times are memories. The party dies, nerves tense, the money dries up and collapse. You're left with a new swimming hole for the locals - and the cycle begins again.  There are some very old mines in Veragaus Province, Panama, near where the Greenstone mine was located; in fact, the Remance Mine, an underground mine, is one of the oldest in the Americas: you arrive to the mine by way of the old colonial town of San Francisco de Veraquas. The town also has one of, if not the oldest, church in the Americas. Another type of investor in Panama are those people who come to invest their money in tax shelters. Some do this in order to hide money from their wives or husbands, others hide money from family members and still others hide money from high government taxes back home. This is fine, though I think it is a terrible way to get to know a country, but some people don’t give a shit about that. Look if you plan to do this then do it on your own. If you don’t have the guts to do it all by yourself then you better know that the odds are that you are going to get burned in the end. It’s not unusual for an investor to place his or her  money with an offshore money handler and then watch that money handler make money disappear: your greed feeds their greed and you lose your money, and there is no one you can turn to at the bottom and say:“Hey Wait”. Panama City has some very good lawyers – millions of them, so prices are competitive - so if you want to do offshore investing in Panama find a good lawyer to be your offshore contact. Open your own corporations using your money and your lawyer: taxes on these corporations are in the hundreds of dollars a year and are completely private.

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But the best way to invest in Panama is buying some land in the mountains or near the oceans. A lot of people I know buy land in Panama and then build nothing for years: they come and visit or camp on the land they bought: part of the fun of owning land in Panama is the whole process of getting something built on it. The common rule here is:“the harder the construction, the better the piece of land”. 

Remember Panama is very private and the personal freedom you feel here will allow you to be creative and relaxed – there is always stress no matter where you go, and there is stress here as well, and a certain level of stress is healthy, but when the stress level in society completely distorts your personality and your relations with your family and friends, or worse still, when it sends your neighbor out on the street with a 30 odd 6 or through your backdoor with a meat cleaver, then it's time to leave. A lot of people in the States just snap from the high stress in their lives, and it doesn't have to happen.

EndNotes

There have been a lot of Panamanians who have come up to me and asked about the war in Iraq. They are always in some way concerned about Americans: remember they watched a lot of people from the U.S. Army leave for Vietnam. Fort Sherman on the Caribbean side of Panama was the home of the U.S. School of Jungle Warfare. So Panamanians have known Americans in times of war. One of the questions that always arises is the role of the U.S President in the new conflict: is Bush a Republican version of Jimmy Carter, which in Panama would have a kind of positive connotation or is he darker and more unpredictable. Rather than dumb or smart most people in Panama see Bush as either sane or boiling with rage. Panamanians more often than not say Bush's facial expressions are filled with rage rather than calm and that during Bush-Blair news conferences Blair projects his concern about Bush's rage. 

During the 2000 election a lot of people in Panama were surprised by the exsistence of an electoral college: this piece of electoral "technology" was an excercise in chin-scratching for many ; in fact, many Panamanians researched the U.S. electoral college and how it has operated in the U.S. since independence. They discovered that the electoral college determined the election of 1877 between the Democrat Samuel Tilton, the southern candidate, and the Republican candidate Rutherford Hayes. Hayes, the Republican won the election because Tilton who had 184 votes, one shy from winning the election, lost the last 19 electoral votes to Rutherford Hayes, the northern Republican candidate who had 166 votes before the last three southern states voted him into office.

One of the more interesting uses of the electoral college system occured during President Park's presidency in South Korea, where after 1971, Park could chose directly 1\3 of the seats in the electoral college. So he walked into all subsquent elections with 33 and 1/3 of the national vote, though the public did not know this. Park, who was president from 1961 to 1979, was responsible for modernizing South Korea and making it into the economic powerhouse it is today; he was machine-gunned to death by his lifelong friend, Kim Jaye Kyu, during a 1979 dinner party to which Park had been invited to by Kyu. 

Writer and good friend R.M. Koster thinks that George Bush's motivations as President are directly connected to his relationship to his father. "For men, a stong father is always a problem--living up to expectations that one will follow in his footsteps." My friend Cef thinks the whole Iraqi army has gone underground and is just beginning the fight. Another friend from Panama told me that the invasion was a smart idea because it isolated the fighting and terrorism to the Middle East, rather than North America and the U.K: the U.S. Army will become the target of future terrorist attacks from the Islamic world, instead of U.S. civilians.

Hope to go to Costa Rica soon. I love Costa Rica because it's so pesado (Heavy Duty). When you hit the streets of San Jose you can feel the danger, sex and blood: when I think about Costa Rica I always think of a black-eye and a big heart. But Costa Rica has real style; it has some of the best Bed & Breakfast hotels anywhere in the world. Have tea or coffee at the Hotel Costa Rica. There is a nice park named, La Sabana, in the center of San Jose that has Eucayltus trees, a pond and playing fields. In the 90s there were bands of Chapulines (grasshoppers) or street gangs in Costa Rica that would rob you down to your underwear - the problem has been cleaned up. The new President of Costa Rica - the last 16 months - got his start as a 5 minute doctor on National Television. At 8:00PM everyone tuned into Commentaries With Dr. Abel Pacheco. Dr. Pacheco received his Ph.d in Psychology. If you travel in the countryside of Central America you will see that many people think that they are on the brink of sudden-death - some live whole lives with this fear. 

Quotes

"This must never be put out of mind: Saddam Hussein from now on lives for revenge. All else - Kurds, Saudis, chemical armaments, Western contacts, competent media - however important for present consideration, become traps, perhaps deadly traps, when not related to the main issue. If this sounds irrational or paranoid, it is no more or less so than he is, and it is he who is the measure"

"The survivor is mankind's worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom. Is it possible for us to escape him, even now at the last moment?"

"In my later life I've become more successful with other people because I don't give a damn about personal ambition. At my age, that's fruitless. I don't want recognition. Recognition is a pain in the ass. But having a good time is not fruitless".

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