Mark Heyer's suggestion

[Louise Orr]

As always, Mark, your comments are thoughtful, as well as proactive. I would be willing to help in any way I can. Perhaps an outreach to innkeepers, hostel owners, restaurants and bars, language schools? These are the places where ALL visitors to Boquete will have contact during their stay. Make a list of responsible tour guides, hiking guides, escorted bird watching groups, and reliable taxi drivers available to share with these tourist service personnel to assist their guests make informed decisions regarding their daytime and evening activities.  It need not be intimidating; just a united effort to lend a safe and enjoyable experience to our visitors, with options at different prices.

I suspect the long-time and upcoming tourism personnel in Boquete would be more than happy to participate in making their responsible services available for consideration by visitors. In particular, the young backpacker adventurers (with their outdated Lonely Planet Guide to Panama) would find this sort of community-based, up-to-date informational data useful. And such a "guide" or information sheet should be bi-lingual to help the many Spanish speaking tourists who visit us during holidays.

Boquete could set an example of committed community involvement to help safeguard the visitors who are so important to tourism in this place. More importantly, we would honor the missing young women, and insure that this little mountain town still welcomes those who help make it so special.

[Jim Tosch]

I can't stop myself. If you find the idea of a university intimidating think of this. In one month Boquete will have two ex-presidents of Panama with investments here. Panama has incredible transportation with the canal and cheap energy with hydro electric. It has one of the largest banking centers in the world. A free trade center. What's missing? A high skilled work force. If you were a kid in Panama where would you want to go to college. Panama City, Colon. David or Boquete?

[Jim Tosch]

Has Anybody in this discussion ever had a business in a tourist town? Be very careful of what you wish for. If you want to use your time and energy for a high value endeavor, this country and this province need a first class school of higher education. Retired people and college students, oddly enough, merge perfectly together. They want good restaurants, parks, quality entertainment and the students provide a labor force. Tourism always sounds wonderful until it takes over your town and leaves everyone broke trying to pay rent and employees in the off season. I will be glad to sit down and talk about it all . Just answer these two questions. Who is your target market and what are you going to offer them that they can't get elsewhere.?

[Lee Zeltzer]

Several of the candidates for Alcalde made the concept of a tourism center an important part of their plan for Boquete. In addition all of them recognized the need for a checkpoint at least at Caldera that could have closed the highway to inspect cars for hostages. It might not have helped in this case if they were abducted because the alarm was so late in coming. 

As always responsibility is on the individual. People need to leave a trail at least by telling someone where they are going and when they plan to return. Without that basic information missing people can be missing a long time before anyone sounds an alarm.

[Carol Cardinale-Santana]

Louise, I am on board to  help you in this mission. I think we can get Habla YA to work with translation etc

Carol