Gang Members Find a Future in Historic Panama City

The old and the new exist alongside one another in Panama City’s Casco Viejo, the historic city center founded by the Spanish in the late 1600s. Colonial-era buildings and decrepit homes claimed by squatters stand near new hotels in a neighborhood where trendiness and exclusivity portend gentrification. But the tug between the present and the past could just as easily apply to the area’s young gang members torn between old and new ways of survival while wondering if the remade district will have any room for them.