Baseball waves Panama’s flag
By James Breig
Mariano Rivera, the storied relief pitcher for the New York Yankees, has retired after 19 years on the team. He set numerous records, appeared in several World Series and is a sure-thing for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
To celebrate his career, the Yankees honored his achievements during a recent pre-game ceremony. Retired players were brought back, gifts were given to him and the rock band Metallica was brought to the stadium in the Bronx to play “Enter Sandman,” the recorded song used to herald every entrance of the hurler into a game.
After the ceremony, reporters wondered what surprised Rivera the most. He replied, “To see my ex-teammates and the whole stadium packed with a lot of flags…from Panama,” his native country.
The flag of Panama was adopted in 1903, when the nation declared its independence from Colombia. An American newspaper headline read: “A New Republic Has Been Born/The Tri-Colored Flag of Panama Now Floats Over the Isthmus.”
The Panamanian flag is made up of four rectangles. As The World Factbook notes, the top left is “white with a blue five-pointed star in the center.” To the right is a red rectangle with no image. The lower part of the banner has a blue rectangle and a white one with a red star in the center.
The Factbook notes that “the blue and red colors are those of the main political parties (Conservatives and Liberal respectively).” The use of white symbolizes amity. The blue star “stands for the civic virtues of purity and honesty,” and the red star represents “authority and law.”
The use of red, white and blue also links that nation to the United States, which backed its independence movement and sliced the Panama Canal through the isthmus to make the small country globally significant.
Panama has its own Betsy Ross. She was Maria Emelia Ossa de Amador, who labored in secret as the revolution was under way to sew the first banner for the new country. It was designed by her stepson, Manuel.
Panama’s 110th anniversary of independence is coming up on Nov. 3, and its flag day is celebrated on Nov. 4. Mariano Rivera’s birthday is Nov. 29.