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The nearest large town to El Cope is Penonomé, which is the capital of the province of Cocle. Penonomé is known as the Indian capital of Panama: the Indian population as well as Indian history is very old and very deep in Penonomé. The town is the capital of the Indian population in Panama and its name is the most Indian sounding name of any large town in Panama. The other towns have mostly Spanish names. Penonomé is also the geographic center of Panama. I am told the center of Panama is down some small street behind a house near the main square. So Penonomé represents the heart and soul of Panama, though there is nothing special about the place and you really don’t need to spend anytime there. On the drive out to El Cope a friend (Cef) was riding with me and as we drove he told me that the historical evidence shows that there was a huge movement of people moving through Panama in the pre-Colombian period. Most of the movement was from West to East, or from Costa Rica to Colombia through Panama. There is some genetic evidence to suggest that Panamanian Indians mixed with the Inca Empire in Peru. No doubt many of the Indians that eventually arrived in South America passed through where Penonomé now sits and many would have probably collected food from the rich agricultural mountains behind the town. You would think with the way Panama is shaped, its place on the map, and its nature and forests, that people would have glutted at the point where Panama rests, but they didn’t; they moved quickly through maybe because of the quick death that people experienced due to disease. Now on the drive to Penonomé you encounter another history, one that is much closer to today. The U.S. history in Panama and that history you encounter in the town of Rio Hato. You will know when you are approaching Rio Hato because the Inter-American highway crosses an old airstrip that was originally built by the United States. Most people think that the U.S. military was confined to operations in the Canal Zone, but the Americans had bases in the interior of Panama; there was also a base in Los Santos and an Anthrax Island off the coast of Los Santos. The U.S. base in Rio Hato was big. The U.S. moved out from the base in the late 1960s or early 1970s. This strong American presence in the interior of Panama meant that small towns like Rio Hato were suddenly inundated with Americans. You can sometimes see this American presence in the people who still live in the countryside around Rio Hato. On very rare occasions you will see campesino farmers who have the features of, say, someone from Ohio or Idaho: they are children that were born to Panamanian women but whose fathers were American military. Panamanian women would come to the base in Rio Hato looking for American men, and, well, they ended up having American kids, but the American father was not willing to take them in, or take them to the States or onto an American military base or they didn't know about the pregnancy. You can see how this happened: many of the Americans who came to Panama as soldiers came from very rural areas in the U.S., such as Idaho, Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and for them the most cosmopolitan place they had ever experienced was Panama. Panama City was the biggest city they had ever been to; it was certainly the first place they had ever been to that allowed prostitution or gambling: in short, they went wild with the freedom and status they had as American soldiers in Panama. And sometimes they were good to Panamanians and sometimes fucking assholes – like anywhere or in any situation, but Panamanians had to put up with it because of the great difference in power between the two countries;also, the Americans made the quality of life in Panama - in monetary wealth - better than most countries in Latin America. Panamanians know about Americans and what they think and do in private – they watched Americans go to war in Vietnam and all that followed until the present day. The Panamanians were like a fish that fed at the mouth of the giant shark. And they control and take care of one of our great accomplishments and important trade links. And they do like Americans because we spend all that cash we earn by putting ourselves in the pressure cooker and we share the same relaxed casual lifestyle. Back to the trip. As we drove towards Penonomé my friend told me that when he was a child – he is now 55 – that Indian children would be put out along the Inter-American highway so that they might be picked up by someone and taken away. In fact all along the highway into Costa Rica there would be children standing alone along side the road hoping to be picked up and taken to a home where they would be taken care of. The Inter-American highway was built in the 1930s as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America. The road stretchs from North America through South America. In the Darien Gap in Panama the road stops but then picks up again and flows down into South America. The appropriations for the Inter-American highway were passed by Congress on March 26th 1930. The road became a lifeline for people in the deep interior of Latin America; it allowed people to be educated and helped Central American countries improve their trade links. It was a great American accomplishment not unlike the Panama Canal. A Little On Driving In Panama City When you drive
in Panama City - not the interior - you should be careful, as the buses
can be very dangerous. This is a little warning to you if you plan to visit
Panama: driving in Panama City can be very tough. I am not saying don’t
rent a car: you should, but get out of Panama City as quickly as possible.
There are American school buses painted wild colors that are known as Diablo
Rojos (Red Devils) that can be very dangerous so you need to be careful
around Diablo Rojos. Ask any person in Panama: what is the thing you hate
most about Panama and they will say something like traffic and Diablo Rojos.
A colonel in the Panamanian police force told me that the drivers of Diablo
Rojos were very dangerous because at night they would often drive while
under the influence. The fine in Panama for driving under the influence
is $500; the colonel told me he knew of a case where a man had fines of
up to $30,000 for driving under the influence. That meant he had been arrested
60 times for driving under the influence. I asked my friend the colonel
how would somebody be able to pay that back? He told me that they would
pay $10 a day…no, no,no,no……$10 a week. Funny those numbers rubbing up
against each other and then the dispensing of justice and the pay schedule.
Strange to image something like this in today’s U.S.A. I asked if
this man was still driving? I don’t know, maybe, I would think so: he needs
to pay the fine.
Latin liberalism is something that is not well understood but it has its roots in anarchism or what an American might loosely call libertarianism, though there is a huge differences between the two: American libertarianism is about money and taxes and a little less social control, but money is central to the roots of American libertarianism. Latin liberalism, on the other hand, is about complete individual freedom of mind and body from state control, wealth creation doesn’t really factor in: being true to your instincts does: psychological freedom as opposed to economic freedom. There is a very strong tradition in Latin America of individualism. And it goes more or less like this: the individual should not be forced to conform completely to the states’ or the communities’ desires; that the state is corrupt because it uses force to manipulate the individual into doing things he or she would not otherwise voluntarily do. And this manipulation contorts the individual, creates anxiety and eventually leads to people being disciplined and submissive by and to the state, because their behavior seems deviant – and often it is, but more importantly, sometimes it isn’t. In short, the state and its power is always a negative force not just in the market, but also in its relationship to people as dispenser of rules and laws. So the state should be fed as little as possible. Now the possible downside of this is that the state cannot act as a balancer in society in order to create a fair playing field if it is reduced to nothing. Without any state a kind of Social Darwinism is established in society because some people will come to dominate and establish rule. Then communities pull apart as their members begin to share less and less between themselves as a community and begin to only associate with people that have the same ability to compete as they do. Anyway, some other time. Sorry. Our destination was Omar Torrijos Herrera National Park; I had been to the Park before but did not know how to arrive to El Mirador, the point where you could see both oceans. In order to find out where we needed to go we stopped at the local ANAM (the natural resource agency in Panama) office in Penonomé and asked the workers there about the spot we were looking for. Did they know how to get there? They did. Our asking was a great surprise to them and they were very helpful in helping us find the right directions to El Cope and El Mirador; in fact, they began competing with each other about where we needed to go and what was the best way to arrive. We left the ANAM office with a bag full of free Panamanian National Parks posters and headed on our way. After an hour
driving west we headed up into the mountains towards El Cope and entered
the Park. I could see the clouds were rolling in and that there was no
way that we would be able to see both oceans but we drove up to El Mirador
anyway. There was a cross at El Mirador; the place was enveloped in clouds.
As we looked around and wondered whether we would see both oceans, we could
hear in the distance the sound of a horse or donkey coming towards us.
Through the cloudy wet mist came a farmer on the back of his donkey with
his machete and bags; he had been working his land. He told us that it
was hard to see both oceans at this time of year because clouds were always
obscuring the view. He was right. He said the best time to come was during
the wet season (September to November) after it had just rained and the
air cleared and the sun came out: that was what it looked like the first
time I came. You could see 30 miles in every direction and you could see
both oceans as clear as day. Cef began asking the farmer some things about
his life: his wife had left him 30 years before – she lived in another
village – and he owned 40 hectares of land and paid $400 for his donkey.
He told us it was a 2-day walk from El Mirador to the Caribbean. That there
was a school on the way and small groupings of houses in the jungle. The
clouds kept rolling in. It was clear to Cef and I that we were not going
to see anything so we left and decided to check out the town of El Valle.
On the ride down we saw small farms and streams and small walk-bridges
that crossed fast-moving streams. There is an organization known as the
Mesoamerican Biological Corridor which is a stretch of protected land that
runs like a path from Mexico through Central America. They were working
in the area: there were signs. That was why the communities seem so organized
and the agricultural land so well managed.
My George Bush Story This story goes back to the fall of 1986: my first year in college. I went to a small college in Delaware, the college was very good in the sense that it wasn’t an ideological hotbed and we weren’t indoctrinated into any school of thought. And it was in Delaware: the strangest state and also the first state, though the history especially in the south of the state is overshadowed by colorless strip-malls, diners, an air-force base and a very ugly and foreboding countryside. I met in that first semester a guy by the name of David Lindsay: he was from Texas, maybe Arlington: I don't remember. He told me he had gone to school in Arkansas but had transferred out and he was now in Delaware. I never had the impression he was going to be around long and he wasn’t. I remember he always wore cloths that looked as though they had come straight from Neiman Marcus, which to me at the time was a very exclusive shop, at least in my imagination. He wore a black sweater with a Texas riding jacket, long and olive tan. David told me he knew the Bush family from Texas. His family knew the Bush family. He told me that George Bush knew how to “get wild”. David had been to their ranch and they knew how to have a good time – a very crazy time was what he described to me. When he told me this I half ignored it and thought at the same time you mean George Bush, the vice-president of the U.S., is blasting away in the style you are describing. He told me no, not the father, I mean George Bush the son. That didn’t mean anything to me at the time and I said to myself this guy is full-of-shit. But he then pulled out some pictures of him with vice president Bush and some other people, one was George Bush junior: I remember saying to myself that he looked like his father; he was trim with darker hair; Jeb Bush was also in the photos and didn’t look like his father, and not as trim as his older brother. Looking at the photo was in a way shocking to me because seeing a person that you would normally see only on television, but then see in a home photo, is strange especially at that age: I was 18. He told me a funny story about how when he was at the Bush family ranch, he and some others people had gone out hunting. Before they left they were told not to shoot some kind of special bird that lived on the property: they shot the bird and tried to cover it up. That was it. David disappeared after a semester or two and I remembered the photos when Bush won the presidency in 1988 and when his son won in 2000. Hotels In Panama Medium-priced hotels El Parador
Restaurants Affordable restaurants Wine
Bar - Italian
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