The Atlantic Coast could use a boost of economic stimulus to this area and “negotiations” with the US for payment of use of Panamanian land would be in Panama’s interest and not a permanent but temporary “lease’ with renewals (to be negotiated)

Think about it!!

Well, how ludicrous?

For many years the AUC paramilitary was an unofficial extension of the Colombian Army and it repeatedly attacked Panama. Now that the AUC is more or less formally disbanded that option isn’t readily available, and it’s precisely the moment that Uribe proclaims some right to go across neighboring countries’ borders after FARC. It wasn’t just Ecuador that Uribe was threatening, but Panama, Venezuela and Peru too. (Uribe knows better than to take that tack with Brazil, and in its own way FARC knows better that to treat that country as it does Colombia’s other neighbors too.)

The great majority of Panamanians view all combatant factions in Colombia as bunches of thugs, and one of the few unifying principles about who we Panamanians are is that we are not Colombians and not part of their never-ending civil wars. When US diplomats or SouthCom brass come here to convince Panamanians that we have some sort of vested interest in seeing the FARC rebels defeated, it really is a nonstarter that goes against the grain of one of the key reasons why Panama separated from Colombia in the first place, on the heels of the disastrous 1900 – 1903 Thousand Day War.

Now this does become a problem when either FARC or the Colombian Army (or the AUC, in its time) could beat our National Police, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that bringing in the Americans or building a large and expensive army are our only options here. (One other option, which is provided for in the Panamanian constitution we inherited from the dictatorship, is a militia commanded by the police — something that has never been organized.)

The authenticity of the FARC threat is disputed, and I would suspect that the guerrillas have back channels to the Torrijos administration and that when all the furor dies down the captured FARC people will be quietly released.

And then will Panama be the new FOL? Well, it already is in a sense. The Evergreen Air mercenary airlift wing for Plan Colombia operates out of Albrook airport in Panama. US SouthCom contractors maintain a hanger full of equipment at the former Howard Air Force Base and ground crews on call “just in case.” It’s just that in these days of privatized war, unlike Manta the ongoing US military support operations working out of Panama are made opaque by corporate veils.