For those tourists and business travelers lucky enough to arrive after 6 PM at our well-organized international airport where everybody is friendly and speaks English, our innovative authorities have a special attraction to further enhance the Bananama experience.

Say, you get here and rent a car. After having gone through endless security checks, passport control, X-ray machines and what not at the various airports, you get to be received by a welcome committee of our National Police! Between the airport and the highway to town this institution, headed by a wannabe Kojak whose only experience vaguely related to police work is that he knows everything about drawing a line of coke, sets up a checkpoint every single night to check your drivers license. Or maybe that other genius in our government, tourism minister Ruben Blades whose only experience in tourism is having been a tourist, thought this one up? Whichever it is, with some luck, you get to wait about 20 minutes before being greeted by one of those fearless police officers or - with even more luck - shaken down for a bribe. Isn't this just awesome? You were already tired of traveling, now you can get even more tired because of Bananama's proverbial hospitality. Panama, it will never leave you!

Here's another crazy insight into the wicked minds of Panama's ever expanding tourism sector. First they want beachfront land. They've been buying and driving up prices everywhere. Beach is nice, beach is tropical, beach it had to be. But then it turns out that they don't want to actually use the beach. Sand in your ears, creepy animals, dirty water. How to solve this problem without relocating the whole resort? Simple. Build a new beach behind the other one!

The picture is from Chile, but this is what the Playa Blanca resort is planning on the Pacific coast, reports Casey Halloran, who is one of the few tourism entrepreneurs not living in Lalaland:

Panama never got the memo: giant hotels are out, boutique hotels and eco-projects are IN.

In yet another move that supports the common belief here in Panama that when it comes to beach projects, “gaudy-is-good”, the Playa Blanca resort project is promoting plans to construct the second largest swimming pool in the world.

(...)

Three cheers for Panama — the new, 1970’s Hawaii!

I thought Panamanian tourism minister Ruben Blades contracted fancy studies and engineered a “Tourism Master Plan” to prevent this type of schmaltz?

Read the whole post, here.

We knew it. Ruben Blades is a human rights violator and so are these tourists in their Hawaii shirts and baseball caps. Tourism projects (and other projects by friends of Torrijos et al such as mines and hydroelectric dams) mushrooming all over the country cause displacement of citizens and violate their right to a place to live. It also damages the environment, as we're seeing in Tonosi today. We don't make that up, it's in a new report published by the Panamanian Human Rights Network which unites about 32 civil organizations and groups. They made the report because the government doesn't comply with its obligation to file annual reports with the UN about Human Rights. We the People!

The report spans the period from 1992 to 2008 and lists numerous other creative ways the Bananama officials have developed to trample our rights. They don't protect refugees. There is discrimination against the handicapped. Children rights are violated. And of course the famous prisons system. The human rights situation in Panama is, in short, a big fucking mess and they haven't even listed everything. Does anyone in the government care? Ruben Blades has a new album out, did you know that?

In Europe the economy is better. The EURO continues to dwarf the dollar. European children are the happiest in the industrialized world. Everybody has health care. There is no crazy cancerous construction everywhere. Quality of living ranks highest in the world. Keen regulation and planning have made Spain and France the world's biggest tourist destinations.

So, we would want all of this for Panama, right? Of course not! SOCIALISM! Yikes!

Most of us have seen the new TV ads from Ruben Blades' IPAT praising Panama as a cheap destination if you, say, go on vacation to buy a flatscreen TV. No, of course that makes no sense, but he doesn't listen. The Argentineans are much smarter and understand what the American tourist wants. Nada de cheap TV's, cheap coke is what makes them fly south!

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