Getting to Know the General
Page 18
* In the past six months, Panama has been expressing its displeasure on a number of issues related to perceived grievances linked to the implementation of the treaties.
* General Torrijos is in a position to assert control over two key tactical resources in any direct US military operations in the region: the canal and the bases.’
Another document issued a month earlier by the Council of Inter-American Security at 305 4th Street, Washington, speaks of ‘the brutally aggressive extreme Left dictatorship of Omar Torrijos’ and criticizes President Carter’s friendly relationship with Torrijos. Neither of these reports would have affected that relationship – Carter would have known with what bias and inaccuracy they had been written, but by the end of the year Reagan had come to power.
So it is that I begin to wonder whether the rumour current in Panama of a bomb concealed in a tape recorder which was carried unwittingly by a security guard in Omar Torrijos’s plane is to be totally discounted. I cannot but remember the explosive EverReady torch and Walt Disney picnic box which I saw in Managua. The plane was a Canadian plane and Canadian experts examined the wreckage. I would much like to read their report. I am told that they found no sign of engine trouble which leaves us with the alternative, a pilot’s error or a bomb.
Footnotes
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Part IV
* As a slow writer I find it difficult to keep up with the changing events in Central America. Even a footnote written in November 1983 will probably be out of date when this book is published. Pastora proved for a time to be a more dangerous figure than I thought. After establishing his headquarters in Nicaragua dose to the Costa Rican border he even acquired some small planes. One was shot down over Managua where it was trying to bomb the home of the Foreign Minister, Father D’Escoto, and another bombed the small Pacific port of Corinto. But then, clinging to the last shreds of his promise, he refused the demand of the CIA that in return for their support he should join the main counter-revolutionary organization which contained members of the old Somoza National Guard, and he withdrew – for how long? – from the scene of action.
Epilogue
* Chuchu was with him when he saw the Pope, and he introduced Chuchu as ‘my Minister of Defence’.
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