With Quarreling Neighbors and its Own Guerrilla Camps, Panama Is In a Tough Spot… and US Involvement Threatens to Make Things Worse

By Okke Ornstein
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

March 7, 2008

PANAMA CITY: In 2001, I wrote on these pages that the Darién jungle province separating Panama from Colombia was a ticking time bomb. Over the years, however, I started to wonder if I had been wrong on that. All seemed quiet on Panama’s eastern front. But today, the time bomb can be heard ticking again and may be ready to go off.

Panama will not break diplomatic ties with its neighbor Colombia – as Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua have already done – in response to the Colombian attack on Ecuadorian soil against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC in its Spanish initials).

Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa visited Panama yesterday and met with president Martín Torrijos. At a press conference afterward, Correa again sharply denounced the Colombian attack, but Torrijos did not follow suit.

The official position is that Panama’s ambassador at the OAS, Aristides Royo, is trying to play a mediating role between the different parties. Yet, other news suggests that there is more at stake.

Read the rest of the story at the Narco News Bulletin.