Chuchu drove them to a small suburban house owned by Rory González, an old friend of the General and something of a power-broker. He was the head of a group of newspapers that had been seized by a bank from the Arias clan after their downfall.24 He was also the director of a huge copper mine in a remote area north of the capital, which was expected to make Panama wealthy. Changing hands several times, it did not produce any copper until 2019; the slow development of the open-pit mine did create thousands of jobs, but also led to claims by critics of environmental damage.25 The forty-seven-year-old General liked to move about the country impulsively, and regarded this house as a safe and discreet stopping place. He certainly relaxed there. He and González met Greene in their bathrobes and underwear, and Diederich guessed that the General was struggling with a hangover.26 Once dressed, Torrijos took them to an airfield where a propeller plane was waiting to take them to the island of Contadora.
Conversation was slow starting, and perhaps out of a certain unease Torrijos challenged Greene: ‘Intellectuals are like fine glass, crystal glass, which can be cracked by a sound. Panama is made of rock and earth.’ Despite his standing as a writer, Greene would never let himself be called an intellectual, which to him meant a purveyor of abstractions and a bore – it was as bad as being called a sociologist. But he could see that there was more to Torrijos than the plain man of action; with Diederich translating, Greene won his first smile by remarking that the General had only been saved from being an intellectual by running away from school in time.27 Torrijos met constantly with groups of ordinary people, and encouraged them to speak about their concerns; he had a gift for listening much as Castro had one for oratory. Torrijos had a deep fund of peasant wisdom and proverbs. He felt, for example, that if the grass was uncut in a village cemetery it was a bad village: ‘If you don’t look after the dead you won’t look after the living.’28
In the following days, Greene and Diederich took a train through the Canal Zone and attended a small demonstration of hardliners who felt that all negotiations with the Panamanians were a betrayal. Greene was amused that they referred to the American president merely as ‘Gerry’ and the Secretary of State as ‘Henry’.29 Since 1971, the Nixon and then Ford administrations had shown themselves open to a new arrangement for the Canal Zone; the discussions had been energized when Panama hosted a meeting of the United Nations Security Council in March 1973 and won international support for its position. In 1975, Kissinger advised Ford: ‘If these negotiations fail, we will be beaten to death in every international forum and there will be riots all over Latin America.’ But Kissinger also insisted on the right of the United States to defend the Zone indefinitely. The presidential primaries saw Ford supporting a new treaty and his opponent Ronald Reagan opposing it, while the Democrat Jimmy Carter seemed likely also to oppose it.30
In December 1976, while Greene was visiting the country, the diplomat Ellsworth Bunker came to Contadora to conduct another round of negotiations. Greene distrusted Bunker owing to his having been American ambassador to South Vietnam through much of the war. Greene learned that the least Torrijos would settle for was neutralization of the canal, control of it by 2000, a fairly prompt adoption of Panamanian law in the Zone, and a reduction of the American military presence31 – terms that would barely satisfy the demands of Panamanian nationalism, but might just secure an agreement. Bunker did not stay long, and Greene could see that there had been no breakthrough.32
The General gradually became more confidential with Greene, revealing to him the troubles of his marriage and private life, and describing his nightmares and premonitions of death. He even remarked that the two of them had in common a ‘self-destructive’ quality. Greene accepted this, but added that he was not himself suicidal,33 which by this time in his life was a fair claim. Greene began to see in this man, in whom he discerned the ‘charisma of near despair’,34 a kindred spirit.
Torrijos was unquestionably self-destructive – successfully so, as it turned out. Some journalists thought him impulsive to the point of madness: Diederich had once described him as ‘a delightful madhatter-type modern caudillo’.35 A part of Torrijos yearned to launch a guerrilla war against the Americans. Like Greene, he could not sit still, so he flew about the country in small planes and helicopters. He preferred pilots who were young and easily cowed, as they would attempt to fly through storms, fog, and high winds if he gave the order.36 Greene somehow survived all the risks he took. Torrijos did not.
Diederich left Panama on 8 December 1976, and Greene remained until the 21st, mainly in the company of Chuchu. They spent a good deal of time on the road, and even made three visits to a supposedly haunted house, which was locked. On his visit the following year, Greene finally got into the vacant house by posing as a medium, and found it not haunted by a ghost but full of objects and photographs from another age.37
Of course, there was nothing amusing about most of what Chuchu showed Greene. Indeed, Greene visited the slums and saw some terrible poverty. They met a group of indigenous people whose village had been flooded by the recent construction of the Bayano hydroelectric dam in the eastern part of the country. They told Greene that the government had not kept its promises of compensation and aid after their resettlement. The next day, he took their concerns to Torrijos, who assured the novelist that the problem would be seen to.38
Chuchu was getting as much of a grip on Greene’s imagination as had the General. After a week in the country, and a reading of Heart of Darkness for the first time since his sojourn in the leproseries, Greene suddenly had an idea for a novel to be entitled ‘On the Way Back’. He asked Chuchu’s permission to make a character of him, and to have him killed. Delighted, Chuchu agreed. In the story, a French journalist is commissioned to write about Panama. She travels about with the Chuchu character, much as Greene was doing, and they come to a series of things such as the haunted house to which they cannot get access, so they speak of seeing them on the way back. The Chuchu character is given some real phrases from his conversation, such as ‘a revolver is no defence’. It is not a standard love story, but by the end they are about to go to bed together. However, Chuchu’s character dies in a car bombing39 – just before Greene’s arrival, Chuchu’s car had actually been bombed.40 What the couple hoped to do on the return journey proves an illusion, a metaphor for the failure of a revolution. At times Greene considered having the General die instead, or merely having Chuchu disappear in pursuit of a lost dog.
The novel proved impossible to finish. Greene felt the problem was that by basing the story so closely on real people and places his imagination could not get airborne. Meanwhile, he wrote a similarly structured Monsignor Quixote, a road novel in which two characters set out through dangerous territory and one is eventually killed. In the end, he abandoned ‘On the Way Back’, publishing only the first chapter, ‘An Appointment with the General’, as a short story. One of the reasons to regret his not finishing this novel is that it portrayed a woman pursuing her profession in the face of toxic masculinity among both editors and soldiers – not a subject Greene had ventured on before.
Leaving Panama just before Christmas 1976, Greene got to work on ‘The Country with Five Frontiers’, a long article in which he claimed that the country’s real importance had not to do with the canal itself, as the tonnage of freight that passed through it was steadily diminishing, but ‘as a symbol of colonialism’. He dismissed the deposed Arias, not unreasonably, as an oligarch, but made a weaker case that ‘other forms of democracy even under a military chief of state’ could be made to work in an adequate way, especially with a leader, like Torrijos, so dedicated to consultation. He spoke of 1977 as the decisive year, after which there might be a turn to guerrilla warfare. Even though the General was ‘bored with prudence’, he stood between the hard left and a group of corrupt military officers who might overthrow him simply for greater opportunities of graft. Accordingly, the United States should see him as someone to deal with.41
The
article appeared in the New York Review of Books on 17 February 1977, and created a sensation: here was arguably the most important writer in the English language explaining the perniciousness of American involvement in Panama. Of course, many people disputed his views, including one of his closest friends. Victoria Ocampo wrote him a somewhat angry letter, pointing out that Torrijos had had a longstanding personal connection with the now deceased Juan Perón, whom she knew to be a tyrant. This took Greene rather by surprise; he suggested that Torrijos was more like Tito than Perón, and promised to go into the matter with him whenever he saw him next.42 Hugh Greene was more conservative than his brother and thought Graham was being naive about Torrijos, musing on one occasion: ‘How can he like him?’43 Oddly enough, Chuchu was against the writing of the article on imaginative grounds, thinking it might damage the novel Greene was hoping to write. Greene thought this a very ‘sensitive’ observation, but felt he needed to get something on paper right away.44
Working in Capri, Greene got about six thousand words of the novel written, and despite the urging of both Diederich and Chuchu, did not want to go to Panama again, as he had already committed part of the summer to a second journey with Father Durán.45 A telegram from Torrijos in early July broke down his resistance. The situation there was coming to a boil. Jimmy Carter had taken advice from Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, and others before deciding to press for a new treaty. Rather than insisting on language about a guaranteed military presence in the Zone, Carter accepted ‘an assured capacity or capability’ to keep the Zone neutral and open once it was in Panamanian control. Moreover, the United States was prepared to grant new revenues from the canal to Panama, and to provide a great deal of direct financial aid to the country, which had experienced an economic downturn.46
On 10 August 1977, negotiators for both countries held a news conference at the Holiday Inn in Panama City. They announced an agreement allowing for the transfer of the canal to Panama by 2000. What they had come up with was actually two treaties. The Panama Canal Treaty abolished the Zone and allowed for a transition to Panamanian control. The Neutrality Treaty gave the United States its military assurances. Carter faced a grim struggle to get two-thirds of the Senate to vote for ratification, with the likes of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina digging their heels in against the supposed communist Torrijos, who did have one unlikely supporter on the American right; the actor John Wayne was a personal friend and came out in favour of the treaty, but since he had never auditioned for the Senate he could not really help the cause.47 In his own country, Torrijos had to assuage nationalists who wanted an immediate transfer; in particular, he was likely to lose the support of students and the left. He said ‘the treaty is like a small stone in a shoe which one must suffer for 23 years in order to remove a nail from one’s heart’.48
Greene arrived in Panama on 21 August 1977, just as Diederich was leaving, since he had a rare opportunity to visit his old home in Haiti. Chuchu met Greene at the airport and soon told him that the General was unhappy about the terms of the treaty; he was not sleeping and had stopped drinking at weekends, ‘a bad sign’. Greene wrote in his journal: ‘The big question – is the General moving to the right?’ If so, there was a risk of him becoming just another military dictator like all the others in the region.
The following day, he had lunch with the General and learned that he was very happy with ‘The Country with Five Frontiers’. They travelled to the General’s home town and met his family and childhood friends. The next day they went by helicopter to David and then to some villages. In each place Greene asked whether the treaty should be ratified, and learned that it did have support. He asked what should happen if the treaty failed and received everywhere the answer that they should fight.
Chuchu introduced him to some of the people who sheltered in his ‘pigeon house’ for political refugees. One couple had been present in Chile at the time of the coup against Allende, and the husband had recently been detained by Noriega’s G-2 as an ‘ultra’ left-winger. What happened next demonstrates how divided the regime actually was. With the connivance of Torrijos, Chuchu got this man out and went through a pretence of house arrest to save him from torture. Greene and a very drunk Chuchu went with the couple to a restaurant and learned that Noriega was actually there too, in a private dining room. Chuchu proposed, as a joke, to introduce Greene to him, but this terrified the couple, who had had quite enough of G-2.49
Chuchu also introduced Greene to a woman who had been tortured with electric shocks to her legs and another who had been sexually assaulted with a bayonet – both by the security forces in Argentina.50 These sobering conversations, and others like them, led Greene to consider writing an article solely about the pigeon house, and he would later describe it in Getting to Know the General.51
Part of Chuchu’s work for Torrijos was to harbour fugitives and to give discreet aid to rebels in neighbouring countries. He took Greene to meet some Nicaraguan exiles, including Dr Ramiro Contreras, who swore to drink the blood of Anastasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator, in revenge for the death of his brother.52 That brother, Eduardo Contreras, was the original Commander ‘Cero’ or ‘Zero’, who in a spectacular raid on the house of a cabinet minister on 27 December 1974 had taken many politicians and relatives of Somoza hostage, so winning the release of Daniel Ortega and other political prisoners, and many political concessions. Commander ‘Cero’ was later killed in action, and his widow had married Ramiro.53
Meanwhile, Chuchu’s drunkenness was becoming a problem. He vanished entirely for a day, leaving Greene to cool his heels. The novelist wrote in his journal: ‘Counting the days before I could escape from Panama.’54 He was in a bad mood when Chuchu then presented him with a request from the General that he should come to Washington for the signing of the treaty. He said no because it would complicate his route back to France, but accepted after Chuchu proposed to send him home from Washington on Concorde. As his humour returned, he also put in a joking request for a diplomatic passport, only to discover later that Chuchu had taken him seriously and obtained one – they were fairly easy to come by. Within a few days Greene found that he ‘cherished’ it.55
There was another famous addition to the Panamanian delegation: the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, whom Greene found ‘very cordial, very vain’ over glasses of whisky.56 ‘Gabo’ later claimed that their presence in Washington was part of a joke Torrijos wanted to play on Carter, bringing into the country two authors who had, in the past, been forbidden entry.57 However pleasant these ironies – the Secretary of State and a Marine Honor Guard met their plane at Andrews Air Force Base58 – the General’s purpose was to borrow the prestige of the great authors and to set his delegation apart from all the bemedalled dictators coming north for the signing, among whom he felt vastly outnumbered.
Once asked about what place he wanted in history, Omar Torrijos had replied: ‘I don’t want to go down in history, I just want to go into the Canal Zone.’59 He was now on the verge of doing both, and he found it daunting. He would have to speak at the signing, so he asked Greene for help. The novelist added a sentence to the text of his five-minute address and slightly reorganized it, and both men were content. Torrijos told Greene he did not like having all the tyrants at the ceremony, and said he was nervous, ‘but Carter’s more nervous & that comforts me’. He then spoke of a Bolivian officer who found his feet trembling before he went into action and said: ‘You sons of bitches, this is nothing to what you are going into later.’60
Carter had invited all the heads of state in the Organization of American States and each one had a private meeting with him. Fidel Castro was the only leader denied an invitation to Washington. Carter needed this show of unity in the Americas to help with ratification, but even so, he was welcoming some monsters to the White House. Worst of all was the presence of Augusto Pinochet, and in a sign that the Carter administration actually saw him as a criminal the Department of Justice leaked information from the FBI
linking him to the murder by car bomb of Orlando Letelier, a former member of the Allende government, and his secretary in Massachusetts the year before.61 Back in Panama, left-wing students, once supporters of Torrijos, were rioting against the treaty; being seen in such company would cost him support on the left and make him more vulnerable to a coup by ambitious military officers.
As Torrijos had hoped, Graham Greene cut a considerable figure in Washington. At a large reception at the OAS headquarters for heads of state and their delegations, Greene spent much of his time giving autographs; many guests came over to him specifically to praise The Honorary Consul. He could see in the room General Jorge Rafael Videla, the military ruler who was then presiding over the killings of tens of thousands of people in Argentina’s Dirty War. Greene was standing close to Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, but could not actually approach him as he was surrounded by flunkies. When he was introduced to a Paraguayan minister, the man withdrew his hand and glared, before saying: ‘You once passed through Paraguay.’ Greene was ‘pleased’.62
The treaty was signed the next day in the Hall of the Organization of American States. Greene saw it all as theatrical and wrote of it in ‘The Great Spectacular’ for the New York Review of Books, remarking on how it was attended by all the ‘actors’ – Henry Kissinger and Lady Bird Johnson and Nelson Rockefeller. Some of the actors were torturers and dictators, notably Pinochet looking like ‘Boris Karloff’. Greene found Carter’s speech ‘banal’ and ‘inaudible’. Torrijos spoke in a clearer voice, and without preliminaries began, ‘The treaty is very satisfactory, vastly advantageous to the United States, and we must confess not so advantageous to Panama.’ He paused and added, ‘Secretary of State Hay, 1903’. Greene enjoyed the joke, but then, he may have been responsible for it being there.63
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