A farewell to Noriegaville

All of Panama’s favorite/hated Dutch shit stirring journalist Okke Ornstein has just announced that he’s stopping Noriegaville . This is kind of sad news, but will be pleasing for many politicians in Panama.

In other words, Noriegaville has reached the ceiling of what such a publication can be in Panama today. And since banging ceilings is not this journalist’s favorite hobby, it’s time to call it quits. This is - in the absence of any miracles - the last article to be published on this site. Your reporter is preparing for other projects in other countries. First, I can now reveal, will be a couple of weeks in Afghanistan for a US magazine. After that, who knows. But it won’t be Panama.

I know Okke pretty well and we’ve had many a coffee together in the past, so I’m pretty sad to see him go. That said, I am in disgreement with Okke on too many things to list. Okke started his time in Panama as a friend of Marc Harris, who is now serving time for fraud in the US. He made his name in the country on outing a series of US fraudsters stealing money from US retiries investing in Panama. This was great.

However then he started messing with local politics. In Panama, democracy is about 15 years old and there like just about anywhere in the region is lots of corruption. Thankfully the corruptos still more or less let the country operate and are more interested in taking money out of government coffers.

Okke is Dutch and likes a story. In Panama there are lots of stories in politics and good ones as well. But therein lies the problem. Most ordinary Panamanians already know their politicians are corrupt. Ask anyone on the street. I think this is pretty healthy. Here in Denmark the Danes think their is no corruption, which is less healthy.

People got tired of listening to the same stories of cronyism and petty corruption. Okke also carried out and out media war against the previous president Mireya Moscoso. Mireya liked to use ancient press gag laws to harass journalists and Okke was pushing and pushing her. It was quite fun to see, even though at times I was nervous to be seen at Manolos with Okke.

When the new president Martin Torrijos came in Okke carried on the same way but rather than focusing purely on corruption he started on all the links of the current government to the old military regime. These were of course all true, but everyone already knew them.

Panamanians are straightforward and business like in this respect and don’t care. They don’t hold grudges like other people do, so to them it is really no big deal. In reality most Panamanians would rather just forget the whole Noriega period and have a good memory of the General Omar Torrijos (Martin’s dad) period. This whether or not he really was a saint (he wasn’t).

His latest battle and were I really am not in agreement with him was against the Canal expansion project. He was/is vermently against the expansion. While I still haven’t been able to assertain why from his articles I think he thinks that it is just another great excuse for the politicians to extract money from the government. He is probably right about this, yet that in some respects if you want to be pragmatic is the cost of doing business in Panama. As Rob Rivera put’s it so eloquently

Who gives a shit if the government already made up their minds about what’s best for the Canal? Who cares if they’re going to steal the money? They can’t do it even if they tried; the eyes of the world will be all over us if this project gets the green light. Hell, I think the government is just as incompetent as the last (though for a whole different set of reasons) but that doesn’t mean I’ll vote “NO” out of spite… that’s quite possibly the most moronic thing anyone can do at this point. They all piss me off. The idiot workers unions that have no room for negotiation (or better yet, their definition of “negotiation” is that of sitting down and if the outcome is any different than what they wanted before the meeting then it’s been a failure. Assholes) nor vision to realize how much moronic they seem when they go speak on TV and radio and the government who I believe is operating as a totalitarian state when they’re working with a democratic system, which sounds about coherent considering that Martin Torrijos’ dad was, as great as he may have been for the country, a dictator. All of these people are scumbags, all of them… why would anyone believe a word any of them say? If you’re gonna vote, please do so because you believe in the choice you’ve made and, if possible, are able to back it up. No politics, no unions, ono outside opinions… nothing. Just you and the ballot. We’ll just see what happens on October 22nd when we have to go out and put an end to this once and for all.

It is necessary with someone stirring the shit and Okke was good at it. But I think he fundamentally failed to understand that Panama will not ever turn into Holland and definitely not overnight. That said he did receive a bit of a following on the popular news/forum sites Dealante and ElCuara, where people were fighting it out if he was a saint or if they should ship that loco out of the country.

I think in many ways Okke will be missed in Panama if not because you loved him, because of the way he made people get heated up over his articles.