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For Panama, the end of the millennium should be a time of celebration. After all, when Old Glory slides down the Panama Canal Commission flagpole for the last time at noon on December 31, the US will complete the most significant territorial concession in its history – the surrender of 430,000 acres of prime real estate straddling the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Finally gone will be 11,000 US armed forces personnel based at the headquarters of the US Southern Command. This will make it the first time since the 1800s that the US doesn’t have a military presence on the Panamanian isthmus. read more

On June 5, between 12,000 and 15,000 protesters marched from the Washington, DC, Veterans Memorial Wall to the Pentagon, calling for an end to the bombing of Yugoslavia and nearby areas. But neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times carried a word about it. On the other hand, C-SPAN broadcast everything.

Reaching DC on the evening of June 3, I learned that 25 people had committed civil disobedience (CD) at the White House that day, including Bishop Thomas Gumbleton and Rev. John Dear, executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. I couldn’t be there because I’d been meeting Vermont high school students who, among other things, had eagerly asked my wife Elizabeth and me about the gains that could be made with increased CD. On Friday, June 4, however, I discovered that no CD was planned for the weekend. read more

When Colombian President Andres Pastrana Arango took office in August 1998, many  Colombians thought that their country might be headed for better times. Gone was Ernesto Samper Pizano, whose four-year presidential tenure was marred by charges of drug money corruption and the worst diplomatic relations with the US in Colombia’s history. During this period, Colombia’s guerrillas had become a formidable military force, taking control of about fifty percent of the country and making it almost ungovernable. read more

It’s a community only dreamers could visualize, and only outcasts could build. Surrounded by rebel-infested llanos (savannas) and vast coca plantations in Colombia, the presence of its peaceful rhythms and homegrown technologies is as hopeful as it is unlikely. A super-efficient pump fills water cisterns every time children play on the teeter-totter. Innovative solar collectors have been designed for refrigeration. Ostracism, not jail, punishes criminal behavior, but is rarely needed in this society of no police and no politicians. read more

Augusto Pinochet, ex-dictator of Chile, was detained by British authorities during the first week of October 1998 and Chile will never quite be the same. Nor will international human rights law, for that matter, which has been rocked by this precedent-setting case.

In Chile, we were all taken by total surprise when a British judge, acting on a warrant issued by Spanish courts investigating the deaths of Spanish nationals in Chile during Pinochet’s rule, ordered the former dictator held under guard as he recovered from back surgery. read more

Echoing the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, Winston Churchill once declared, in his inimitably authoritative voice of empire, that how a society treated those it imprisoned was the surest indication of how civilized it was. Churchill himself had been incarcerated in South Africa when he was a young reporter covering the Boer War. And although conservative in much of his thinking, when it came to prisons, his underlying humanity and progressive instincts always shone through.

Unlike most Euro-establishment politicians of his generation, Churchill was also fairly sympathetic to the concept of the United States. He understood all too well that the cultural and political momentum was shifting irreversibly westward across the Atlantic, and at least partially reconciled himself to the notion that, perhaps, such a movement wasn’t an altogether bad idea. read more