Panama

The economic downturn has stalled big construction projects across the globe, but here in Panama, smoke-belching steam shovels and dredges work around the clock on what people here call simply la ampliacion, or the expansion. This month, officials will award the principal contract for the $5.25-billion expansion of the landmark Panama Canal, a project that will probably alter global shipping patterns and cement this Central American nation's place as a center of global logistics.

The heavily armed rebels usually show up in groups of 20 or more, dressed in green fatigues and seeking food. "Of course you have to give it to them," said one resident of this isolated village 35 miles west of the Colombian border. "People don't like that they're here, but with few police and many informants around, they keep quiet." Then just as suddenly, the rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, melt back into the jungle.

The explosions that shatter the early morning quiet here are perfect metaphors for another kind of boom, the economic one transforming Panama's capital. The blasts a few miles north of the city are part of the first phase of the $5.25-billion Panama Canal expansion project. They are clearing a path for new locks that will modernize the historic waterway and, in 2014, enable bigger ships to traverse the isthmus.

The body of a popular Santa Monica High School teacher washed ashore Sunday at a Panamanian beach, three days after a wave swept him away while he waded in shallow water, his mother said. A fisherman found Joey Lutz at Playa Wizard, a beach town in the Bocas del Toro islands in northern Panama, where Lutz had been vacationing. The discovery ended the diminishing hopes of family and friends that he had survived Thursday's freak accident.

A nosy reporter can't avoid being drawn to the bulletin board hanging in the sparsely decorated office of Ruben Blades, the salsa star-turned-tourism czar for his native Panama. It's a humbling "wall of shame," with critical cartoons and newspaper clips blasting Blades for his performance in public office after being appointed to the Cabinet-level post in 2004. Blades waves off an aide who considers diverting the reporter's attention.

Twenty tons of cocaine seized off the Pacific coast of Panama over the weekend were believed headed to a Mexican port for delivery to the notorious Sinaloa cartel, U.S. officials said Tuesday. The seizure Sunday of drugs valued at more than $275 million wholesale was described by the officials as the largest recorded maritime cocaine bust. The drugs were believed to have been purchased by Ismael Zambada, a suspected leader of Mexico's so-called Sinaloa cartel, officials said.

Call them "the not ready for prime time traffickers." That's how Panamanian and U.S. authorities are describing alleged functionaries of a Mexican drug cartel that lost a $270-million load of cocaine in a colossal bust off Panama's Pacific coast last month.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), joined by congressional leaders and two Bush administration officials, announced a new bipartisan trade policy Thursday that will ease passage of pending trade agreements with Panama and Peru and could pave the way for renewal of the president's authority to "fast-track" trade agreements through Congress. "Today marks a new day in trade policy," Pelosi told a news conference, standing between Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and U.S.

A proposal by Occidental Petroleum Corp. to build a refinery on Panama's Pacific Coast moved closer to reality this week with the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Qatar's state oil company to form a partnership to build the $7-billion project if feasibility studies prove positive. In a signing ceremony Tuesday in Panama City attended by Panamanian President Martin Torrijos, executives of Westwood-based Occidental and Qatar Petroleum Co.

When 4-year-old Allan Gutierrez died a year ago, the symptoms he displayed, including severe nausea, violent heart palpitations and "ascending" paralysis, baffled doctors. Since then, his condition has become known only too well to Panamanians who have friends or relatives among the hundreds of identified victims.