Colon Today, and How it Became Neo-Classical Ruins
Posted by Mike | Under Colon PanamaToday, the city of Colon is not a safe tourist destination. But the government of Panama has big plans that will change that, soon. For now, there is a good reason Colon was chosen as the site to represent war-torn Haiti for the latest ‘Bond’ film. The Caribbean port of the Panama Canal has been compared to some of the world’s most rundown cities.
The current condition of Colon makes a kind of weird sense, when you understand some of the reasons the people of Colon have never developed a sense of community. Primarily, because of a century and a half long parade of huge numbers of people from all over the world, who lived, worked and died in Colon; while planning on going somewhere else. Leaving in Colon a composite society made up of people from all over the world, who had very little in common.
Today Colon suffers from a long-term combination of crime, poverty and unemployment. Of those 200,000 residents who remain, only one in three have a proper job. But it wasn’t always that way. Front Street in Colon is about six blocks of once elegant French Colonial style buildings that are disintegrating, primarily since many of them were built in the late 1800’s. At that time, enterprising businessmen brought work to Colon, and the laborers to do it, constructing buildings on the then Island of Manzanillo with lovely turn of the century buildings designed for use as hotels, restaurants and other businesses.
Now, amid the neo-classical ruins, older residents fend off afternoon boredom with booze and playing dominoes, while the younger residents entertain themselves with gang violence, petty theft and high divorce rates. Yet the ebb of fortunes in the life of this city are shifting, enterprise has found Colon, again. How can the residents of Colon be encouraged to believe in the flow of fortune and to have enough hope to become partners in enterprise, when enterprise has abandoned them repeatedly in the past?
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