One Memorable Day in Panama 

I traveled from tourist-infested Taboga Island, Panama to Panama City yesterday. I walked the 5-10 minutes from my basic but adequate room down to the island’s principal waterfront, and took the passenger boat to the mainland, and then got a free ride to my Panama City hotel. Free because on the boat I fell into conversation with a very colorful American guy who goes by the name of Skinner, a pseudonym. I had seen and heard Skinner speaking English with a waitress in a Taboga place where I had eaten 2-3 times, and he knew the waitress by name. He had a kind of expat, island-life look to him, so I thought he might live on the island, and that’s why I struck up a conversation with him, to see whether I could learn a thing or two about the local scene.

As soon as Skinner sat down on the boat, he called out to one of the young men working on the boat, and said something like, “The usual,” and soon a can of cold beer appeared – and it proved to be the first of two that Skinner would consume on the 45-minute ride – at 10:15 in the morning.

Skinner said he was a mechanic and he fixes ships, and, as I would have guessed many times over, he has no shortage of business, here in what is perhaps the world’s greatest crossroads and chokepoint of commercial shipping – the Panama Canal. In fact Skinner complained that his phone never stops ringing, and I believe it. No phone of his rang once during our conversation and journey, but for all I know he has an office and secretary somewhere. Besides, he was busy drinking his breakfast.

Indeed, he had the complexion of a man who drinks his breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. Ruddy scarcely begins to describe it. In fact, his cheeks sported at least one Grand Canyon-like scar, and he looked like he hadn’t had a proper shave in years.

There is a lot to tell of what he said in those 45 minutes. He said he’d been living on the island for 20 years and loved it (though I don’t think I would). He said he was an independent contractor and earned something like $2,500 a day, but had quite considerable expenses, such as tools and administrative help. He said he’d kind of like to retire but couldn’t afford it, even at $2,500 an hour and living in the relatively cheap Latin American tropics. I don’t know how old he was – it’s hard to tell with seaside expat heavy drinkers.

But Skinner also hinted that he didn’t want to stop working, because he had nothing else to do.

He knew all the boat workers by name. I asked him whether the maybe 20 or so boats waiting to enter the canal was a high number, and he said no, that it sometimes gets up to 70, or even more. That surprised me, given recent reports in the U.S. media to the effect that canal traffic was backing up because of a lack of freshwater needed to run the canal – a result of the considerable drought that has been slamming Panama, and more specifically Lake Gatún, which supplies the canal’s freshwater needs (and under which my maternal great-grandmother is buried).

But Skinner said no, no, the backup wasn’t caused by that – it was caused by ships not wanting to go through the new, bigger and more expensive canal.

I don’t know that that is in fact true, but that’s what Skinner said, and he presumably knows one hell of a lot more about the canal than I do.

I asked Skinner about Trump’s recent threats to take back the canal, and he said that was nonsense, that Trump was just throwing red meat to his base, and that it would never happen. He said there’s no reason for it to happen, there is no advantage to it for the U.S., that it wouldn’t reduce the cost of maintaining the canal, and thus wouldn’t reduce the cost of, or charges to, individual ships traversing the canal. And he called Trump a fool, or something of that nature.

Skinner also said there was a backlog because ships over a certain weight can’t traverse the canal, so the area outside the canal entrance was populated, at least somewhat, by Chinese vessels in the process of lightening their loads by dumping some of their heavy, highly polluting, tar-infested fuel straight into the Pacific so they could meet the canal’s weight restrictions.

I asked Skinner whether such considerable pollution wasn’t policed, and he kind of threw up his hands and smiled. In other words, no. “We aren’t the only place (where this kind of thing happens),” he said.

Then our conversation turned to the very tall and quite impressive skyscrapers that have sprung up all over Panama City, like so many massive mushrooms, since I was last here a number of years ago LINK ITT PIECE.

Skinner said most of the skyscrapers are nominally condo buildings, but are mostly uninhabited and were built for the sole purpose of laundering money, principally drug money, principally from Colombia, but from elsewhere as well. He said that many of the buildings have shops, offices and storage areas in the first few floors, but are then vacant all the way to the top. He said one can look at the building at night and see lights only on the first few floors and then nothing but darkness all the way to the top.

Skinner said rent for the condos runs about $80,000 a month – for one condo. Do the math. Not that it is necessarily a money-laundering operation, but Panama City’s tallest building, the JW Marriott building, a hotel-condo operation, is 70 floors, with, according to Wikipedia, 2,710,000 square feet and 997 units. If condos do in fact rent for $80,000 a month, that could launder one hell of a lot of Colombia pesos.

Opened in 2011, The JW Marriott was at one point the tallest building in Latin America, before it was supplanted by the Gran Torre in Santiago, Chile, and it is still the tallest in Central America.

The building has an interesting history.

According to Wikipedia, Ivanka Trump at least used to claim that her father built the building, but in fact he merely sold his name to it, for a punky $1 million. But since then his profit from the building has somehow risen to $30 million.

After my memorable boat ride with Skinner, he gave me a free chauffeur-driven ride to my hotel, and later that day, two taxistas more or less confirmed to me that Panama City’s ubiquitous skyscraper towers are indeed largely unoccupied and may in fact be vehicles for laundering money, and even drug money. But both cabbies downplayed this a bit, in what seemed to be an effort to salvage some of their country’s image and reputation. “This kind of thing happens everywhere,” one of them said. “Even in the United States. This money didn’t come from feeding drug use in Panama, a country of four and half million.”

No doubt.

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