Let's see how they spin this one. Yes, dear readers, ANOTHER construction worker died, that's two within 24 hours. Jolly Sobalbarro got crushed between the freight elevator and the H2O tower being built on Avenida Balboa yesterday.

Doesn't it strike you as odd too, that all these construction workers die while working on towers we don't even really need in Panama? These narco money fueled projects for condo flippers? You heard of construction workers dying on the job building social housing or even low cost housing? No, we neither. The risk of getting killed at some rabiblanco drugfund dream is substantially higher than at normal construction projects being built for normal people. Why would that be?

Borge, drug kingpin

Every once and a while Torrijos delivers a speech, usually not longer than about 4 minutes for obvious reasons. Yesterday at the PRD congress (chaos, garbage everywhere, no light, and out of that mess Balabina came victorious of course) it was one of those rare occasions. First, he said, the PRD has a new way to deal with opposition: Put them in a freezer! A sort of iceboarding. Then, he said that he was doing all these progressive things, like fighting poverty. Poverty levels remain unchanged during his term and spending power is down, but that's not the point. Being "progressive" and "left" is the hip thing in these Latin American times even if your policies are firmly right-wing or even fascist. Torrijos wants to keep the left inside the PRD, and those who don't obey he shoots. Exactly like his father, the celebrated drunken putschist Omar Torrijos, did.

And then there are the usual idiots who buy that crap. We know already that Chavez is gambling on the supposed "left-wing" of the PRD (and indeed the Torrijistas and Noriegistas won), but that's just the beginning. The Salvadoran FMLN was there, saying that yes, the PRD is left. And then there was this geriatric narco kingpin, Tomás Borge, from Nicarajo's Sandianistas, also endorsing the PRD as a progressive leftist party. The future once again looks bright in our little Canal nation.

Very strange. A major drug lord is in jail, declares he did business with the CIA and the DEA, and now he is receiving threats!

He says that persons connected to the government are making him offers he can't refuse to sell his island in the Pacific for six million dollars.

He also says he didn't really know Rayo Montana. That reminds us. His colleague on nearby Contadora. Carlos Arango Duque, owner of Hotel Contadora and subject of a DEA investigation until his plane blew up. He didn't know him either?

And, we wonder, who owns the Contadora hotel nowadays? Any tips?