The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  The American Zonians, the canal workers and their families, were shaken by the giant rally, which had also set off alarm bells in Washington. Concerned Zonians wrote to their congressmen, and back in the United States an emotional anti-Panama Canal Treaty campaign began to gather steam. For the Americans working and living in the Canal Zone — an insular enclave and quaint relic of the days of US gunboat diplomacy — the barbarians were at the gates. The canal and the Zone must be saved.

  On the Panama side of the fence, General Torrijos had promised that gaining sovereignty over the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone was no longer a Panamanian pipe dream. It was a matter of sovereignty, pride and dignity.

  The helicopter was buffeted by the storm, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. The green jungle canopy suddenly appeared perilously close to the chopper’s window. We were in the full embrace of a heavy tropical rainstorm. Visibility was near zero. Some of my journalist colleagues suggested General Omar Torrijos, who was bounce-dancing in his seat in front of me, was crazy — a real nut. That Monday morning in early October 1972 I was wondering whether they might be right. We were swinging about in the thunderstorm’s blind fury, almost grazing the jungle roof. The very nature of the General’s authoritarian profession would normally have made security the highest priority. Not for this fellow. The chopper had no escort. The pilots didn’t fiddle with the radio to report our position to the Comandancia, headquarters of the National Guard in Panama City. They didn’t know where they were anyway. The Comandancia, I later learned, usually had no idea of their commander’s whereabouts.

  With nature in command, the General appeared in high spirits. A woman from one of his embassies abroad occupied the seat beside me. Occasionally the wild gyrations of the chopper brought us together; the ride had its pleasant moments. Besides a pistol the General carried a water bottle on his hip which some suggested was filled with vodka. Unlike his caudillo counterparts who fussed over their dress, often bedecking their chests with medals (usually bestowed for diplomatic victories), the General’s only distinctive accessory was his bush hat, which he wore at a cocky angle.

  Tapping him lightly on the shoulder and giving him the ‘What’s up, Doc?’ gesture with the outstretched palms of my hands, I wanted to know what was making Torrijos dance in his seat. He smiled and shared his earphones with me. I received a blast of Panamanian music. He unveiled his secret: a cassette player with his favourite Panamanian and Colombian boleros. As he savoured my surprise I shouted over the engine’s roar, ‘General, estamos perdidos?’ (‘General, are we lost?’) He shook his head and laughed as the pilot locked on to a swollen stream and began bucking down towards the Atlantic coast. Not to worry, the General assured me, still grinning. ‘If we crash I’ll get you out of the jungle. I graduated from the gringo jungle warfare school.’ I strained to hear his heavy country-accented Spanish.

  I had visited the Jungle Operations Center near Fort Sherman in the Canal Zone, which was part of the multifaceted military curriculum at the US Army School of the Americas. They had created a replica of a Vietnamese village and called it Gatun Dinh for training purposes (after the Canal’s Gatun locks). The trainees’ lunch featured barbecued snake. The Bolivian Army Rangers who tracked down and killed guerrilla icon Che Guevara had been trained at the School of the Americas. Leftists throughout Latin America called the School of the Americas many things, from ‘The Coup d’Etat Factory’ to ‘Gorilla University’ to the ‘School for Dictators’, implying that the institution taught Latin officers to usurp civilian power. ‘I am not comfortable with such a school in my parlour. Who would be?’ Torrijos asked me this question between jolts of the helicopter.

  A squad of the General’s Red Berets — special forces — had picked me up at dawn from my little hotel in downtown Panama City, and when the General arrived on the helicopter pad behind the house on Calle 50 we flew off into stormy weather. What kind of strongman was Omar? Based on my observations, he didn’t crave the usual trappings of power. He was essentially a shy sentimentalist who detested public and social functions, preferring the company of a small group of friends who did not always share the same ideology. He detested the protocol that went with his job and left most of such chores to his friend, engineer Demetrio B. ‘Jimmy’ Lakas, a huge US-educated man of Greek descent who had been involved with Omar in the 1968 coup that brought him to power and who remained a loyal friend.

  It was obvious that Torrijos was trying to avoid the image of a caudillo dictator. Three of his closest international associates were from the short list of the region’s democratic leaders. There was much of Fidel Castro’s style of now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t in Torrijos’s personal performance. Like any head of state in those latitudes, he had a practical interest in disorienting aspiring assassins. His ministers and colonels had trouble firming up appointments. They came to understand that the fellow himself was a creature of the spur of the moment. In a little country like Panama, with a helicopter and plane, he could be anywhere in the nation in an hour or so at most, on a whim, at any time. That was his spontaneous unprogrammed style.

  Our helicopter had emerged from the rainstorm, and the pilots were ordered to set down the Vietnam-vintage ‘Huey’ in a soggy Atlantic coastal village. The chopper’s rotor backwash had shredded several thatched roofs. Out bounced the General in his olive-green fatigues. Wading through floodwater that covered his jungle boots, he adjusted his familiar bush hat and called out, ‘What village is this?’

  ‘Santa Isabel, mi Colonel,’ replied a village elder, not realizing the visitor’s true rank. The General was in his element. He was happiest in the boondocks with his own rural people. This was the last day of a gruelling two weeks of travel to sixty-four pueblos, from the isolated Darien jungle bordering Colombia to Atlantic Coast fishing villages, mostly by helicopter and mostly at tree-top level. At each stop the people would gather and Torrijos would make a speech extolling his new ‘revolutionary democracy’, which he explained as a new kind of participatory government designed to bring the marginal classes into the process of economic development.

  Lighting up his fourth cigar of the day, he told me, ‘This is the first experience of this kind in Latin America. I want to bring up those who are down. This revolution is being made without blood or paredon (the wall) executing people. Our main task is to change the people’s mentality.’ He strode through the adjacent village. Passing a cemetery overgrown with tropical weeds he exclaimed, ‘Look at that!’ Minutes later he was chastising the villagers, lecturing them, ‘If you can’t take care of your dead, how the hell can you expect to take care of the living?’ When the villagers for their part complained that the government hadn’t kept up deliveries of cement to complete their new school, he took note.

  He strode through village after village without bodyguards or an official entourage, like some tropical Pied Piper of Hamlin, with scores of shouting and laughing children running at his heels. At Portobelo, amid the ancient Spanish fortifications, he swore in the newly elected town councillors, telling them, ‘You must work with the people. We must make our revolution Panama-style. Things from the outside don’t grow here. I brought some eggs from the Dominican Republic that were supposed to give me great fighting cocks. They didn’t hatch. It’s the same with fruit from Europe — it doesn’t grow here. In the same manner we must grow our own revolution.’

  He added, ‘No one is being persecuted in Panama, nor will anyone be persecuted in the future. I want no one in jail because of their ideas.’ Those statements, however, could be challenged. Under General Torrijos, Panama’s political parties had been banned and the press effectively muzzled or co-opted. For all his charisma, he was a strongman none the less. Now, with his rule secure, he could afford to speak magnanimously. Leaving one village, visibly upset, he told the people he would not return until they stopped arguing among themselves.

  The General stopped for lunch in a little jungle village. We sat down to an exotic meal. Watching as I navigated
my plate heaped with yucca, gallo pinto (rice and beans) and an unknown meat, he identified the last-mentioned delicacy for me. ‘It is tigre,’ he explained. After the meal the villagers, armed with their customary ancient shotguns, asked their celebrated visitor to do what he could to bring down the high cost of shotgun cartridges. He said he would, and several raised their old shotguns to cheer him. Was it right to encourage hunting jungle animals?

  ‘What about conservation, General?’ I asked.

  ‘Living comes first,’ he replied. ‘These people have lived in the jungle as long as the animals.’

  Back in Panama City that evening, in the modest but over-furnished house of his long-time friend, businessman Rory Gonzalez, the place he said was his favourite residence in the capital, Omar Torrijos came to the point. He didn’t like being interviewed. In fact, he hated it. But talk he did, encouraged by liberal slugs of Johnny Walker Black Label, his favourite whisky. The conversation in Spanish was wide-ranging. He talked about his early assignment as National Guard commander in Colon. During Panama’s January 1964 riots he had been ordered back to take charge of the Caribbean seaport. Three US soldiers had been killed there and fifteen American soldiers and three civilians wounded, while on the country’s Pacific Coast nine US military personnel and three civilians were wounded and a total of 126 Americans were hospitalized. (The total death toll on the Panamanian side during the riots was twenty-four dead and more than a hundred injured.)

  The act that had set off the riots was the flying of the US flag at the Canal Zone’s Balboa high school. For both Panamanians and Americans this was a matter of sovereignty, and the riots left deep scars on both sides of the fence. Had Torrijos been asked whether he was a Communist? ‘Yes.’ It was often the first question posed by an American. ‘When they ask me if I’m a Communist, I say much less than Jefferson, less than Lincoln and just an inch less than Kennedy.’ He recounted how he was wounded in 1959. ‘The guerrillas had won in Cuba, and all of the youth in Latin America, it seemed, wanted to duplicate Castro; at least his victory inspired them. Just sixty miles from Santiago, in the Panamanian province of Veraguas, my hometown, forty young men went into the hills as guerrillas. I went up there with forty National Guardsmen. After five days we had our first encounter. There were two killed on our side and four on their side. I was wounded, not seriously. I had a bullet in my arm, and I cannot move the index finger, and I recently took the lead from a bullet out of my leg.’

  As for Panama’s relations with Uncle Sam, Torrijos said he didn’t want any more shooting, but he frankly didn’t know how his country’s struggle for a new treaty would end. What he hated most in the 1903 treaty that gave the United States control over the waterway and 550 square miles of Canal Zone was the phrase ‘in perpetuity’. The Canal Zone was a ‘knife cutting through the heart of Panama, dividing the country in two’, he said, adding, ‘What people would tolerate a foreign flag planted in their own heartland? The American people would not tolerate a foreign colonial enclave across the river from Washington, DC.’

  Torrijos believed he was thrown into his leadership job by fate. On 10 October 1968 he had been among a group of officers who ousted the master Panamanian populist President Arnulfo Arias from power. This was hardly an unexpected event. Arnulfo, or ‘Fufo’ as he was nicknamed, had been overthrown on three previous occasions. His latest presidency lasted only eleven days after he broke a promise not to meddle with the National Guard. As executive officer of the Guard, Torrijos had been among the officers Arias had unwisely decided to move out of the country by sending them to diplomatic posts abroad. The Guard officers had failed to get their commander, General Bolívar Vallarino, to take over the country and dispatch ‘Fufo’ once again into his near-perennial exile. It fell to Torrijos to lead the coup in Panama City. He mobilized much of the Guard’s 3 ,500-man force, took over the radio stations and closed down the airport, quickly completing a bloodless overthrow.

  Unlike his fellow countrymen, Torrijos was not a gambler or fan of horse-racing, Panama’s major sport. Yet he had been persuaded to visit Mexico City by Panamanian businessman Fernando Eleta, who had two horses running in the December 1969 Clasico del Caribe in the Mexican capital. Taking advantage of Torrijos’s absence, two Panamanian National Guard officers declared a pre-Christmas coup and advised Torrijos to stay in Mexico — he had been overthrown. Torrijos simply smiled. He managed to get word to his wife Racquel and instruct her to go with their two sons to the American Zone, to the house of an American friend who Torrijos believed was working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Then he arranged a flight from Mexico City that dropped him off in the northern Panama town of David, near the Costa Rican border.

  There he was greeted by the local commander, Manuel Antonio Noriega (a major at the time). Torrijos’s return caught the imagination of Panamanians. With loyal troops joining in as he travelled down the isthmus, General Torrijos’s motorcade took on the appearance of a carnival parade. Thousands lined the Pan-American Highway to cheer him on. The gates of the American-controlled Canal Zone remained wide open, and the ‘Bridge of the Americas’ over the canal (also known by the Americans as the Thatcher Ferry Bridge) leading into Panama City was lined with cheering Panamanians. The leaders of the counter-coup, who had no popular support, were arrested and jailed. They eventually escaped from prison, into the Zone, and went into exile.

  It was only after he returned, Torrijos said, that he learned that his American friend, who was indeed an agent of the DIA, had been in touch with the plotters before the coup. This revelation brought a change in his attitude towards the US military, along with a deep suspicion that the United States could not be trusted. It ended a friendship with Washington. He ordered his officers to keep their distance from the US military and personally broke off his informal contacts with American military officers, delegating such contacts to Major Noriega, who became his intelligence chief. This suspiciousness remained with Torrijos for the rest of his life.

  The conversation during our Scotch-fuelled interview session in Panama City unexpectedly turned to writers. Torrijos praised ‘Gabo’ (Gabriel Garcia Márquez), the noted Latin American author from neighbouring Colombia. I was surprised. Dictators aren’t usually known for reading books. Torrijos, born to schoolteacher parents, the seventh of twelve children (three of his sisters also became teachers), said he read at night and recommended García Márquez to anyone who wants to ‘understand us’.

  The literary turn of the conversation gave me the opportunity to introduce Graham Greene. Torrijos seemed not to recognize the name, so I went on to describe the writer whom some in Latin America now referred to as the Viejo Ingles (‘Old Englishman’), telling him of Graham’s politics and sympathy for Haiti and Latin America. In military terms, I explained how his novel on Papa Doc Duvalier had been more powerful than a fully equipped exile army.

  The conversation switched to Haiti. Torrijos was well acquainted with the Duvalier dynasty. Papa Doc had been dead for less than a year and Torrijos had already considered aiding the Haitian exiles who were trying to overthrow his son Jean-Claude. He said he had agreed to meet the exiled Haitian army lieutenant François Benoît. They had discussed a plan that included assistance from Costa Rica and Venezuela, but the Haitian exiles, in Torrijos’s words, had been too disunited.

  When Omar said he would like to meet this Englishman I cited as an endorsement Graham’s literary friends, naming the poet Victoria Ocampo of Argentina as well as the novelist Jorge Luis Borges. The fact that Graham had only recently visited President Allende in Chile, a visit arranged by the poet Pablo Neruda, who was Chile’s envoy in Paris, clinched the deal.

  It had been a long day, and as we parted Torrijos said, ‘Now I want to meet your friend the Englishman.’ But it would take four years before the meeting would take place.

  The following day I was forced to move into the bathroom of my room in Panama City’s Hotel Executivo, and I sat on the toilet with my Olivetti portable typewrite
r in my lap. I had picked up a serious case of diarrhoea either from eating too much tigre with the General in the jungle or drinking too much of his Black Label Scotch.

  As I looked over my notes I wondered about the scepticism I had shared with my collegues about the ‘nutty’ Panamanian dictator. For all his Latino strongman characteristics, the General seemed sincerely dedicated to the dignity and development of his small country — created, shamefully in the eyes of many historians, as an offshoot of US imperialism. (Panama, once a province of Colombia, had gained independence in 1903 with the heavy-handed support of the United States, which then proceeded to build the canal under a ‘treaty’ with the new nation.)

  Searching for the right words to best describe the good-natured, part-romantic, part-pragmatic and only slightly Machiavellian strongman was not easy. Moreover, on my return to Mexico City a few days later that October I learned that my Panama story had been ‘outspaced’ from Time magazine by more immediate news during the week. US presidential elections were coming down to the wire. Henry Kissinger was engaged in secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese, and Chile’s President Allende was being destabilized by his right-wing opponents. The bloody coup ending the Allende government was less than a year away, but I knew Panama, too, would soon be a major world story.

  In Mexico I found a letter from Graham, dated 12 October 1972, in which he once again politely declined my offer to use our house in Mexico during my wife Ginette’s and my absence on holiday in my homeland of New Zealand with the children.