home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text id=89TT1365>
- <title>
- May 22, 1989: From The Publisher
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- May 22, 1989 Politics, Panama-Style
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 8
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Covering the bloody eruption in Panama's streets last week,
- Central America bureau chief John Moody had a powerful sense of
- deja vu. He had spent ten weeks in Panama last year reporting
- on the riots that accompanied the Reagan Administration's
- efforts to bring down the country's dictator, General Manuel
- Antonio Noriega. On both occasions, Moody felt a shiver of
- physical danger. Last year Moody was chased by several of
- Noriega's riot police, called the Dobermans. "When they finally
- cornered me, I figured my time had come," he recalls. "I was
- more than a bit surprised when the head man pulled up short and
- asked me with a smile if I had a cigarette. Never have I been
- so nervous about admitting I don't smoke."
- </p>
- <p> Moody, who joined TIME as a correspondent in Bonn in 1982,
- is no stranger to social unrest. As TIME's Eastern Europe bureau
- chief from 1983 to 1985, he covered protests by the then
- illegal Solidarity union. Says Moody: "The riot police in
- Poland, the ZOMO, can be tough, but at least both they and the
- demonstrators knew they were Poles, fellow countrymen. In Panama
- I sense an alienation between the police and the people that may
- take a long while to overcome."
- </p>
- <p> Moody became Central America bureau chief this year,
- following a two-year stint in Mexico City. From his new base in
- Costa Rica, he will be visiting Panama often -- eventually, he
- hopes, under more pleasant circumstances. "Covering violence in
- Panama is like observing a brawl in a ballroom," he says. "It's
- a shame that a place so beautiful should be exposed to such
- goings-on."
- </p>
- <p> Journalists usually report the news, not make it, but every
- so often a story helps make history. Last week TIME received
- the Overseas Press Club award for the best general-magazine
- article for its interview last October with P.L.O. Chairman
- Yasser Arafat (in the judges' view, "almost surely one factor
- in the opening of a new U.S.-P.L.O. dialogue") and for the cover
- story seven weeks later on the start of that dialogue. Also
- honored was photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, who received the
- Robert Capa Gold Medal for capturing "the chaos and panic
- provoked by a terrorist attack on a Catholic funeral in Northern
- Ireland."
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-