There is something about this picture that, well, we can't quite put our finger in on.

Okke Ornstein - I wrote Sam Taliaferro over at the PrimaPanama blog last week after I had found a new video on YouTube from Ruben Blades' IPAT promoting Panama. After watching it a couple of times, I wrote to Sam:

"I don't know what you think but I don't see anything in these spots that could not have been shot ANYWHERE in the region/Caribbean. There's nothing specifically Panamanian in them. It's just a bunch of almost random steadicam shots jammed together on - whatever that music is they used."

(The SteadiCam, by the way, is a camera mount with a gyroscope fixed to your body that allows you to make smooth walking shots. In Panama they aren't available to the best of my knowledge, you need to rent one in the US plus a good operator and it takes FOREVER to get these shots done.) Well, before we continue, let's watch the video:

 Am I right or am I right? This could, for all practical purposes, have been shot in the Ardennes and Antwerp, in Belgium! Some You Name It, We Frame It outfit has obviously been paid a scandalous amount of money for this monstrum.

 I suggested Sam T. that we get together and figure out a way to do this better, get the tourism industry lined up and do a real campaign. I haven't heard from him about it other than that he's talking on his blog about the ads, but eventually the tourism sector in Panama will need to do something to offset the ineffective wasting of money by IPAT. Any ideas?

Instant update: Maybe they can ask the James Bond crew to shoot some decent promotion footage? 

US visa restrictions in particular and hostility to foreigners in general are again making it easier to travel to and from Europe without dealing with the Americans. There is now Air Caraibes air service between Panama and France that consists of Wednesday and Friday Panama to Guadeloupe flights, connecting to flights from that French Caribbean island to Paris.

The bidding to build and run a "mega-port" at Farfan, a former US Navy housing area adjacent to the former Howard Air Force Base, may be off. One of the three qualified bidders, Singapore PSA Corporation, which is already developing a commercial port at nearby Rodman, has dropped out of the competition. The other two companies, the partially Chinese state-owned China Overseas Shipping Corporation (COSCO) and the San Francisco-based Marine Terminals Corporation, are, according to La Prensa, considering teaming up to present the Panama Maritime Authority (AMP) with a joint proposal. Many economists are predicting that the US economy is going to be in recession and that US imports from China will stagnate or decline for awhile, notwithstanding the Panama Canal Authority's referendum campaign predictions of a constant and steep growth over the coming 20 years. This is already reflected in a slight decline in US-bound containers going through the canal so far this year. That, plus the thawing of the Northwest Passage long before anyone had expected it, have the world maritime industry hedging its bets about the Panama Canal's importance. The bottom line may be that Panama won't get as good a mega-port investment deal as had been contemplated.

All across Colombia on February 4, huge crowds held marches and rallies to denounce the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), a leftist rebel group that, counting its precursor groups, has been waging a guerrilla campaign since the 1940s. FARC holds hundreds of hostages, including soldiers and police officers captured in battle, politicians and public officials abducted for political propaganda reasons, and people thought to come from families wealthy enough to be coerced into paying ransom.

Colombian communities abroad, including the one here, joined in the protests.

FARC operates mainly in rural areas of Colombia and is very strong along the Panamanian border adjacent to the Darien. However, even though FARC operates in large, sparsely populated geographical areas, the group has relatively little public support among Colombians. Especially unpopular is the rebels' industry of kidnapping people for ransom or, more rarely, as a political statement.

The issue has come to a head recently, with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez offering to mediate a hostage release, being rebuffed by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, and then despite the opposition of the Bogota government arranging the release of two high-profile FARC hostages whom the group had held for years. Especially annoying to Uribe and many Colombians was Chávez's subsequent call for governments around the world to remove FARC from their lists of terrorist groups and recognize them as belligerents in a long-running civil conflict. That suggestion has garnered little support anywhere.

Even a lot of human rights activists who are as critical or more of the Colombian government and the paramilitary death squads with which it is linked as they are of the FARC have joined in the outcry against FARC and its kidnappings. Thus, although some particularly thuggish Colombians --- including backers of paramilitary groups that have on several occasions attacked Panama, stealing aircraft, assassinating Panamanian public officials and Colombians against whom they held grudges, and vandalizing churches, schools and health clinics here --- were supporting the anti-FARC protests, most of the protesters probably can't fairly be described as partisans of the other sides' violence. (FARC, by the way, has also occasionally attacked Panama, and in 1993 kidnapped three American missionaries from a village in the Darien, and killed them several years later after fruitless attempts to extort money for their release.)

Shown here are protesters, mostly Colombians, who marched in Panama City streets that on February 4 were largely devoid of traffic as many city residents were in the Interior for Carnival celebrations.

There is a strong current in Panamanian public opinion, actually one of the motives for Panama's existence as an independent country, that we don't want to have any part in Colombia's incessant internal warfare. Colombians by far comprise the largest group of non-citizens living in Panama, some legally, some illegally. To many a Panamanian, the concept of "Colombian" is largely synonymous with "thug" and the conflict between FARC and other leftist rebels on one side and the government and the right-wing paramilitaries on the other is seen as something of a war among ruthless gangsters, with one of the main prizes at stake the ability to collect payoffs from the drug cartels. It's surely an unfair stereotype to apply to most of the Colombians here, but the fact that so many people adhere to it is a powerful fact that lurks under the surface of Panamanian political, social and business life.