In college I remember watching a video about economic development in third world countries. It was a grainy video, probably from the 60s, that had decided to portray Latin America as a smoky, crowded, Spanish-speaking cesspool in which economies thrived, but only under certain circumstances.

The movie begun with a cheesy rendition of a famous mariachi song while the camera tooled through a public market in somewhere-Mexico: bumping into strings of chili ristras and stray chickens. It may be silly, but I remember coming away from the classroom less excited about economic progress, and more so about getting my hands on one of those juicy looking tamales.

The video, along with a string of others I was shown in school, formed a vivid picture in my mind as to what it was like in Central and Latin America. I envisioned a land where everyone sold avocados on the street and tequila was served for breakfast and lunch on a regular basis. It was a polluted land where government bribes were common and wild parrots roam freely.

But in truth, upon first visiting Panama, much of this third-world picture I had conjured up disappeared with the emergence of large modern buildings and spas charging $100 per massage. Panama City’s high end restaurants didn’t stand a chance against my little avocado men and the only place people were drinking tequila was in the fancy bar where a shot cost five bucks!

But there were indeed still facets of life in Panama City that nostalgically brought back into focus that vision I once had. On the roads for example, with a team of Panama’s national police force they call the lynx.

The lynx (or ‘linces’ in Panamanian Spanish) are the motorcycle soldiers who ride around in the city, one piggybacking the other, on government issued dirt bikes. They swerve in and out of traffic, give mean eyes to anyone who’ll look, and the guy in the back always holds a shotgun, ready to fire at any moment. They are exactly the type of people I would have expected to see in one of my videos: this rebellious third-world police force who doesn’t take no crap from nobody.

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Filed under: Culture on May 29th, 2008