Tropical decay blights McCain's Panama birthplace

By Andrew Beatty

COCO SOLO, Panama (Reuters) - John McCain's birthplace in Panama was an idyllic tropical posting for U.S. sailors that the Republican presidential candidate speaks fondly of but the Caribbean port has crumbled into poverty and decay.

McCain was born in 1936 on the Coco Solo submarine base in a U.S.-run territory in Panama where his father was a Navy officer.

Now, children play next to open sewers in the town that was built around the base and large homes once inhabited by American service families lie abandoned and strewn with debris.

Bored young men stroll around topless, sporting gang tattoos that boast of the number of people they have killed. Areas that were once softball fields have been taken over by rough saw-grass.

The Coco Solo area was part of the Panama Canal Zone where American laws and culture prevailed for decades.

Panama gradually took back control of the base and the rest of the Canal Zone after a 1977 treaty with the United States, and Coco Solo has since been converted into a huge container terminal known as Manzanillo. Washington handed over its last remaining Panamanian outposts in 1999.

Former U.S. residents recall an easy life in the Canal Zone, where Americans enjoyed both imported comforts of home like Hershey chocolate bars and plucked exotic fruit from trees at the road side.

"It brings back memories of a simpler time," McCain recently told Reuters on the U.S. campaign trail.