Please enjoy this article from The Times & The Sunday Times archives.

Panama: paradise is open for business

Until recently, the central American country was a no-go zone - but now its sensational beaches and rainforests are open to all

Paul Croughton

Livingstone was a big man with a little boat. He had a big smile, too, but you wouldn't know it, because Livingstone wasn't smiling. He was getting cold. "Me and coldness are not friends," he moaned. "When it like dis, I have to wear blankets or I freeze up and die." Then, as if to make his point, he sneezed.

He sneezed loudly and often, and when he sneezed, he swore. "Atchwooagh... Shit!" He wasn't likely to die, though. It was 75 degrees. But to be fair to Livingstone, the sun had gone in.

Livingstone lived on one of the islands in the Bocas del Toro archipelago, on the Caribbean coast of Panama. I'd spent nearly two weeks in the country, fitting in about two months of adventure, and I needed a stretch of sand and nothing to do in order to get my breath back. Fortunately Livingstone had a plan.

He'd been telling me about a place called Starfish Beach, a short boat ride from Bocas town. "Reel pretty, plenty starfish," he assured me as we sped along, and as the sun came out, so did his smile. And so it should have: he knew what was coming.

Starfish Beach was named by a recent graduate of the Say What You See school of place names. They were there in their hundreds: big ones, small ones, red ones, orange ones, green ones, brown ones, just lying in the shallows, waiting for something to happen. So I lay down next to them in my ocean bath, gazed at the golden sand and waving palms, wondered if getting any closer to heaven while wearing only swimming shorts might not be a bit indecent, and waited too.

Panama, the southernmost country of central America, is a sliver of land smaller than Scotland, set between Costa Rica and Colombia. To the north, the Caribbean; to the south, the Pacific. There's prodigious rainforest at either end - the Volcan Baru National Park is to the west, containing Panama's long-dormant volcano, with its seven craters, and on the Colombian border lies the dense jungle of Darien province.

There's a fair bit in the middle, too: more bird species than America and Canada combined, 16,000 types of butterfly and enough animals to make Noah's head spin.

Dotted along each coast are hundreds of desert islands, many uninhabited, some, such as those in the Bocas del Toro chain, full of bountiful beaches and shacks in the sand serving fish and beer. Others, including the San Blas archipelago, on the Caribbean side, are part of the Kuna Yala, an autonomous territory that's home to one of the country's fascinating indigenous tribes, the Kuna.

The capital, Panama City, is a mix of heritage sites, old colonial quarters and fresh, modern neighbourhoods with outstanding restaurants and five-star hotels with seaside views. Sounds good, doesn't it? So why haven't we all been coming here for years?

The answer is simple. We weren't invited. Panama has had a turbulent history, marked by dictators and foreign forces attempting to rule this influential stretch of land for the past 500 years. The Spanish started it, when the conquistador Pedrarias founded Panama Viejo, the first European settlement along the Pacific, in 1519. Since then, much of the ebb and flow of Panama's fortunes has been linked to the discovery that it was the narrowest point between those two great trade routes, the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Charles V of Spain first had the hunch that ploughing a ship across the isthmus might be good for business, in 1524, but it was the French, fresh from their Suez triumph, who finally got the nod to build the Panama Canal in 1878. They made a pig's ear of it, losing 22,000 workers to malaria and yellow fever in a decade before admitting defeat.

The next hundred years involved a lot of toing and froing between America, Panama and Colombia (which had laid claim to Panama in 1821, and didn't recognise it as an independent country until the USA paid it $25m to do so in 1921). In amongst all that, construction began again in 1904. The first ship successfully navigated the canal 10 years later. America maintained a close interest in Panama's affairs until the late 1970s, but the country's recent troubles were, sadly, the fault of one of their own, General Manuel Antonio Noriega.

For more go:Sunday Times

Panama Real Estate: Hopes Run High for the New President

Published on: Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Written by: Yemisrach Kifle

Panama's most recent election was full of surprises. For one thing, Ricardo Martinelli, who in his first presidential bid in 2004 only got 5.3 percent of the vote, won the contest. Equally striking is the fact that Mr. Martinelli won 61 percent of the votes, making him the first president in the country's modern history to be elected into office with an absolute majority.

So, who is this man that has caught Panama's ruling party, the PRD (Revolutionary Democratic Party), by complete surprise? The 57 year old Ricardo Martinelli is a conservative tycoon who owns a spectrum of businesses including supermarkets, banks, and agricultural companies, according to Time magazine. The U.S. educated candidate campaigned promising change and voters decided he is the man that can deliver. "The Martinelli victory breaks the Latin Left's 2009 electoral winning streak of Venezuela, El Salvador, and Ecuador," said Ray Walser, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative American think tank.

The fact that the ruling party's candidate had to fight accusations of corruption during the campaign is sure to have helped Martinelli. It probably also made a difference that he was once the chairman of the board of directors at the Panama Canal. The Canal is often cited as an example of the kind of efficiency Panamaians want from their government. Martinelli was also the Minister of Canal Affairs when, in 2006, voters said yes to a $5.25 billion investment into the sector. This canal expansion project, which will be finished in 2014, has generated over 2,000 new jobs with many more expected to follow.

Martinelli and his party, Democratic Change, hold the majority of seats in the National Assembly. For more read: The Complete Article at NuWire Investor

Recommended books on living, doing business and investing in Panama:

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Central American banks: results and perspective.

The banking systems of Panama and El Salvador remain the most firm

The complex economic situation of the region begins to affect the performance of the Central American banks. The results for the first half of 2008 indicate that the decreased vigor of the economy and the increase in inflation have debilitated the asset quality of the banks. In general terms, the levels of default in their loan portfolio has been increased at a rapid pace in the last months, particularly with those organizations which aggressively expanded their personal loan portfolios with during the last few years. Possible increases to the international and local interest rates which look to control inflation would complicate this situation. Facing this panorama, the capacity to absorb economic losses displays important disparities between the different banking systems of the region. For more read: The Panama Post