1999 – By Pata de Perro

The eastern entrance of the Panama Canal.
The world’s second most important duty-free zone.
Last stop going south, first stop going north on the Pan-American Highway.

As my friend, an immigrated Colombian journalist put it “This is the place where F.A.R.C (Colombian guerilla group) and C.I.A agents meet and have a couple of beers.”

Colon is an unstructured meeting ground, a crossroad with no traffic lights. Immigrants traveling north, tourists traveling south, drug trafficking, weapon trafficking, money laundering, merchandize passing, being bought, being sold, Arabian, Chinese, American, Hindu businessmen, sailors, prostitutes, all fusing together to create a unique atmosphere of corruption and economical contradictions. It’s a place where international trade looses its pretty face, where it ´s plain to see what it’s really all about.

The city of Colon is an impoverished interpretation of the capitalist dream. Its architecture, brightly painted French baroque buildings and Caribbean wooden houses is beautiful, but it is crumbling and overgrown by a dense layer of decaying capitalism and self inflicted propaganda. Merchandize pours out of the ships and seems to convert itself immediately into garbage, its piled on the corners, strewn about or floating in the gutter; the buildings are covered with crumpled posters, graffiti and hand painted frescos that serve as advertising for the businesses, anything from the statue of liberty to Nintendo characters are depicted. The buses are elaborately decorated with Swiss landscapes, bright letters in English and portraits of the driver’s favorite musicians.

The inhabitants of Colon are mainly Panamanians and Colombians. Most of the Colombian emigrants live in extreme poverty, in abandoned house complexes in the old US zone, which was off limits until recently and is now a sort of no mans land. I witnessed there a rotten 10-meter long overhanging roof fall two stories. The Panamanians are more integrated to the capitalist environment; dazzling young afro men and women in fine clothes and gold jewelry, big earrings, golden teeth with stars. The indispensable cellular phone dangling from ones hip with its red light flashing; Look at my watch it glitters in the sun and my shoes are Tommy Hilfliger-red, white and blue, like America, the great America.

The entire city pulses erotically, its loud, dangerous, wild and tropical, that is until you cross the gates of the duty-free zone, you are immediately transported to a foreign land. Symmetrical buildings are lined up between wide clean streets. It’s where all the leftovers of the first world market come to wait distribution back to third world shops. The end of the international economic circle; merchandize made in the third world, exported to the first world then once again shipped back to the third world at costs as high as all this shipping implies.

At the end of the main avenue, in the park in front of the sea, there are little stands shaped like shells. Arabian women, all veiled, jog by....The sun is setting, there are about 70 to 100 cargo ships within my field of vision. The entrance to the Panama Canal to the right, lights’ flickering endlessly as world trade continues... Every fifteen minutes a great ship passes. The gates of the enclaves open and close and the water, like the stock market rises and falls. A thousand containers of useless goods travel.

This tropical paradise witnessed the deaths of thousands digging this canal for world control in a malaria-infected zone. A canal that is now very old and narrow, in fact ships are built according to the exact size of the enclaves. Many wonder and worry - where will the next canal be digged up? As is known certain governments will create all kinds of schemes and wars to control such important areas... Panama used to be Colombia…….

I travel from north to south, my skin is white, I have money, insurance and passport that doesn’t need a visa in most of the world. If I have a problem, I can go to the nearest embassy or make a phone call. There are others that travel who have dark skin, no money, no insurance and a passport that they might as well throw away, they come from the south and travel north. They don’t know how far they will get, or if they will ever return. Here in Colon I meet these people, share their food, the same improvised showers, friendship, and have an opportunity to reflect on how impossible it is for me to ever see the world as they do. This is their first stop after risking their lives on cargo ships from South America and sometimes Africa. The Pan American highway doesn’t run from Canada to Chile as most people think. It stops in Panama, beyond there are 500 klm of jungle leading into Colombia, it’s called el hueco de Darien (the Darien hallow), the first US border.

Borders, taxes, wages, visas, logos, publicity; nasty tricks to maintain a lethal world economy running for the benefit of a few humans. Here in Colon between the unhidden piles of garbage and the passing Adidas trucks, it ranks. I sit aloof in a quiet port of leisure and drink a Balboa beer, blue eyes all around.