From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Covering the bloody eruption in Panama's streets last week, Central America bureau chief John Moody had a powerful sense of deja vu. He had spent ten weeks in Panama last year reporting on the riots that accompanied the Reagan Administration's efforts to bring down the country's dictator, General Manuel Antonio Noriega. On both occasions, Moody felt a shiver of physical danger. Last year Moody was chased by several of Noriega's riot police, called the Dobermans. "When they finally cornered me, I figured my time had come," he recalls. "I was more than a bit surprised when the head man pulled up short and asked me with a smile if I had a cigarette. Never have I been so nervous about admitting I don't smoke."

Moody, who joined TIME as a correspondent in Bonn in 1982, is no stranger to social unrest. As TIME's Eastern Europe bureau chief from 1983 to 1985, he covered protests by the then illegal Solidarity union. Says Moody: "The riot police in Poland, the ZOMO, can be tough, but at least both they and the demonstrators knew they were Poles, fellow countrymen. In Panama I sense an alienation between the police and the people that may take a long while to overcome."

Moody became Central America bureau chief this year, following a two-year stint in Mexico City. From his new base in Costa Rica, he will be visiting Panama often -- eventually, he hopes, under more pleasant circumstances. "Covering violence in Panama is like observing a brawl in a ballroom," he says. "It's a shame that a place so beautiful should be exposed to such goings-on."

Journalists usually report the news, not make it, but every so often a story helps make history. Last week TIME received the Overseas Press Club award for the best general-magazine article for its interview last October with P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat (in the judges' view, "almost surely one factor in the opening of a new U.S.-P.L.O. dialogue") and for the cover story seven weeks later on the start of that dialogue. Also honored was photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, who received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for capturing "the chaos and panic provoked by a terrorist attack on a Catholic funeral in Northern Ireland."