Draft bill 88.

Summary.

The draft bill declares Spanish-language reggae that originated in the Republic of Panama (República de Panamá) between the decades of 1970 and 1990 part of the Panamanian Nation’s intangible cultural heritage. It links that declaration to the genre’s historical, identity-related, and social value. Its aims include protecting and safeguarding the musical expression, researching and disseminating it, encouraging community participation, and preserving historical memory. It also calls for action to conserve and ensure the transmission of its knowledge, techniques, manifestations, and pioneers between generations.

The Ministry of Culture (Ministerio de Cultura) would enter Spanish-language reggae in the National Intangible Cultural Heritage Register (Registro del Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial de la Nación) after compiling an audio, audiovisual, and documentary inventory of Panamanian Spanish-language reggae. The inventory would serve to collect, digitize, catalogue, and preserve original recordings, interviews, photographs, and other materials related to the genre and its pioneers. Recovery efforts would give priority to sources at risk of deterioration. Registration would therefore follow the identification and preservation of materials documenting this musical expression.

The bill establishes the Panama Spanish-Language Reggae Festival as an international event to be held in January each year. Its purposes would be to preserve, conserve, protect, disseminate, and strengthen Spanish-language reggae’s musical expressions. It would also celebrate the genre and the Panamanian artists, composers, producers, and performers whose contributions to its initial creation, promotion, and dissemination are documented. The annual event would provide a setting for presenting those expressions and recognizing people involved in the genre’s early development.

The Ministry of Culture would organize the festival and related cultural, musical, and outreach activities in coordination with the Ministry of Tourism (Ministerio de Turismo), local governments, other public and private sector bodies, musicians’ and singer-songwriters’ associations, people with cultural ties to the genre, and other bearers. Activities would highlight its Panamanian origins, history, global influence, musicians, authors, and other pioneers. They would also promote the “Spanish-Language Reggae Route,” comprising neighborhoods, places, and emblematic physical spaces in the country where the genre originated, together with cultural tourism.

The draft bill provides that the proposed law would take effect upon promulgation. Its provisions concern the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Tourism, local governments, and the National Intangible Cultural Heritage Register. They could be of interest to or affect artists, composers, producers, performers, musical associations, bearers of the genre, communities in places connected to its origins, and cultural tourism activities in Panama (Panamá).