Omar pledged to aid the congressmen, if they supported ratification, by allowing political parties to function again in Panama and permitting exiles to return. Freedom of speech would be guaranteed. But he warned one group of US senators he was escorting, hopping around the country in his twin-engine Otto plane, ‘You are our friends. We know you are our friends. Please do not carry out justice with a shotgun.’
In Washington during the spring of 1978 it was touch and go. Anti-treaty senators took delight in insulting Torrijos and exaggerating labour disturbances in Panama. Kansas’ Republican Robert Dole, perennially cast by much of the media as a ‘hatchet man’, led an attack on the treaty and tried unsuccessfully to sabotage ratification by dragging drugs into the debate, which, as Time pointed out, ‘was a bust’. US narcotics agents found no evidence to support Dole’s assertion that Torrijos was soft on drugs.
Torrijos, for his part, was losing his patience. Opposition by the anti-treaty bloc in the US Congress was having its effect. US intelligence sources reported that Torrijos was seriously considering sabotaging the Canal if ratification were lost and that he had imported a team of Israeli demolition experts to do the job. He later hinted to both Graham and me that it was no idle threat. Finally on 18 April, with sixty-eight for ratification and thirty-two against, one of the most emotional and controversial treaties to go before the US Senate managed to squeak through with all the help it could get from the Carter White House. To the treaty’s foes Jimmy Carter went down in history as the man who ‘gave away the Canal’.
Exhausted and smarting from all the insults from Washington, Omar retired to Coclesito. On 16 June he returned to Panama City to join President Carter in officially signing the treaty in the crowded colosseum. The public ceremony during which Carter and Torrijos spoke drew a record crowd of more than two hundred thousand to Plaza Cinco de Mayo and adjacent streets. Carter spoke in Spanish, telling the jubilant Panamanians, ‘This day marks the beginning of a new partnership between Panama and the United States.’ It was still not over. Implementing legislation had to be voted into law, and the political battle in Washington was to continue until 27 September 1979.
Across the Caribbean, in the Dominican Republic, the generals had halted the vote count in the presidential election on 16 May 1978 when it appeared that their candidate, Joaquín Balaguer, was losing. The count resumed only after Venezuela threatened to cut off petroleum shipments and President Carter threatened to cut off US aid. The durable old Balaguer’s monopoly on the presidency had been broken (temporarily, as later history turned out). Opposition candidate Antonio Guzmán’s victory was recognized. In case the generals hadn’t got the message, Carter sent an impressive 27-member delegation to President Guzmán’s inauguration. The delegation was headed by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and included UN Ambassador Andrew Young and Lieutenant-General Dennis McAuliffe, commander of the US Southern Command based in the Panama Canal Zone. Also prominent among the invited guests: Panama’s Omar Torrijos. He was there as a show of support for his friends in the Socialist International, the victorious Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD).
Carter’s policy was a radical departure from that of his predecessor, President Lyndon Johnson, who thirteen years earlier had sent in US Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division to halt a popular uprising demanding the restoration of the PRD’s ousted President Juan Bosch as the country’s constitutionally elected leader. Johnson feared ‘another Cuba’. Carter supported the PRD’s triumph at the polls, fearing the loss of democracy. The United States was not the only one to have changed. Panama’s Torrijos was on his best behaviour vis-à-vis Uncle Sam and in good humour. The irony of the situation was not lost on him since he himself had ousted a constitutionally elected civilian president from power a decade earlier. I had been covering the Dominican election and transfer of power, and Omar invited me to accompany him back to Panama. We would arrive before Graham.
Omar’s bodyguards had been engrossed in reading the Spanish translation of my book on the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. ‘Either they are reading it to learn how to protect me or to kill me,’ Omar joked. I asked him whether he felt safer now that the US Congress had placed a ban on CIA-sponsored assassinations. The ban followed Senator Frank Church’s investigation into the agency’s involvement in past ‘eliminations with extreme prejudice’. Omar chuckled and said that an article in Newsweek on 11 June 1973 had reported that according to President Nixon’s White House counsel, John Dean III, the infamous Watergate ‘plumbers’ had been given a contract to assassinate him in 1971. Dean said Torrijos had an uncooperative attitude towards the Panama Canal Treaty negotiations. The plan was said to have been aborted before the assassination team reached Panama.
Graham arrived in Panama on a KLM flight on 19 August, the day after the General and I returned from Santo Domingo. Graham was happy to be back, even though, like the General, he had a cough. There had been a goodly supply of Bols gin during the fifteen-hour flight from Amsterdam, Graham said, but he was in need of one of good-looking and friendly barmaid Flor’s rum punches. Chuchu drove him from the airport to the Señorial Bar on a quiet tree-shaded downtown street in Panama City, where I met them. Holding high his first planter’s punch and saluting Flor, Graham pronounced it a ‘marvellous laxative after such a long flight’.
At the bar Flor looked on sympathetically as Graham regaled us with his adventures in trying to reach Panama. The origin of his cough, he explained, was the London Ritz Hotel. Pausing to savour the punch and to receive our undivided attention, Graham declared that things had a habit of going wrong at the Ritz, and for that reason he liked to stay there. During the night he had awakened coughing to find his hotel room filled with a most unpleasant acrid smoke. After a struggle, he said, he had managed to open the window, noting, ‘Of course it is the wrong thing to do in a fire.’ A plastic tarpaulin covering a neighbouring building under construction had caught on fire. It was, he continued, ‘an awful morning’.’Sautéed by the fumes and particles of the burning plastic, I boarded the wrong plane at Heathrow Airport, and ended up in Rotterdam instead of Amsterdam.’ He finally made his airline connection by taking a taxi to Amsterdam. Having not a guilder in his pocket, he convinced the Dutch cab driver to settle for his fare in American dollars. Then on arrival in Panama he had had to wait endlessly for Chuchu.
‘But, Graham,’ Chuchu protested, ‘your goddamn Dutch plane arrived an hour early! The crazy Dutch have the only airline in the world that can arrive so far ahead of schedule.’
‘I want to live until Christmas,’ Graham further declared enigmatically in the dimly lit Señorial. It seemed a simple enough request, and he had our full attention as we sipped our second rum punch. ‘I have a play, a new play. It’s a bit of a farce, but I like it. I don’t know whether it will go over …’ he went on seriously. Graham was now looking directly at Chuchu, waving his arms about like the wings of a plane.
Chuchu got the message and was profusely reassuring. ‘Don’t worry, Graham. My plane is OK. I am the best pilot. Yes, Graham, yes, you’ll live until Christmas — and for many more Christmases, I guarantee you.’
Graham went on to confess that he wished he had begun writing plays earlier in life. They seemed to be his new passion.
Chuchu talked of his success with his play La Guerra del Banano. Then he abruptly asked Graham about the title of his 1957 play The Potting Shed. ‘What the hell is a potting shed, Graham? Is it a toilet?’
When the laughter died down Graham explained: ‘It is a little shed in which the gardener keeps his implements, bulbs and that sort of thing … They don’t have them in America. They are a very old English tradition, and when we were children they were a place of mystery and romance.’ He added archly, ‘The play got rather good reviews in New York.’
When Graham registered at the El Panama Hotel he drew our attention to his departure date, which he had written down as 3 September. ‘This is the official end of the summer holidays
in Europe, and the tourists go home,’ he explained with glee. He added that during the off-season his friend Yvonne could reach his place in Antibes in just five minutes from her home in Juan-les-Pins, but in the summer the crush of traffic was such that it took twenty minutes or more.
‘Do you drive?’ Chuchu asked.
‘No, no, I don’t own a car. Yvonne has a car and is a very good driver.’
That evening we dined under the stars at the seaside Panamar restaurant. There was hardly a ripple in the Pacific Ocean, which occasionally came alive with dancing phosphorescence that rolled in with the wake of returning fishing boats. Relaxed and happy, Graham extolled the beauty of a balmy Panama night.
Chuchu, however, was not his usual bouncy, expansive self. He admitted he was preoccupied. In fact, he was deeply concerned about the General’s ideological compass, which Chuchu claimed had literally gone out of whack. Torrijos, he feared, was opting for social democracy.
Graham fussed with the waiter, making sure the bottle of white Chilean wine he had ordered was not post-Allende. Each time he ordered wine he took pleasure in announcing his boycott. ‘I don’t give any money to General Pinochet!’
Returning to our conversation, he suggested jokingly that Chuchu had fallen down on his job of proselytizing. ‘You’ve lost the General to the opposition,’ Graham chided.
Chuchu, ever the loyal Marxist, took it as a serious reprimand and launched into a tirade against what he claimed were the many wicked weaknesses of the social democrats. Graham, enjoying baiting Chuchu, said he thought the General had made a wise choice and that he himself was beginning to believe social democracy was the best political choice.
Stunned, Chuchu kept repeating, ‘But, Graham, Graham, you’ve got to know those corrupt goddamned social democrats!’
It was a long, agitated evening for Chuchu, but it ended on a happy note as he announced that the General had instructed him to fly us up to Torrijos’s beach house at Farallon the next day. The General was recuperating from a cold he caught in Santo Domingo. Graham looked at me and shook his head, once again pretending that we had more confidence in Chuchu’s poetry than his piloting.
Chuchu protested, ‘Graham, I promised to keep you alive till Christmas.’ Then he asked, ‘What is the name of your new play?’
’For Whom the Bell Chimes,’ Graham replied.
Chuchu laughed. Then he learned it was no joke but the real name of Graham’s play.
At breakfast the following day Graham announced with a certain dignity the good news that Flor’s punch had been grandly successful. Only Englishmen, it appears, find the subject of bowel movements agreeable news to share over breakfast.
At the little Paitilla airport Chuchu showed off his little Cessna with pride. It was painted Panama’s national colours of red, blue and white with the country’s flag embossed on its tail. ‘I’ve done thirteen hours in it since it was fixed up. I gave it a good overhaul,’ he said proudly, patting the wings. I insisted on taking some colour photographs of Graham and Chuchu with the little plane, noting that the pictures could be for our families, just in case.
Graham shrugged. ‘You can only die once.’
We flew the seventy drowsy miles along the Pacific coast to Farallon, Chuchu at the controls, Graham sitting next to him while I sat behind them. The baking sun streamed in through the side window, making it difficult to stay awake even in the noisy cockpit. Years later Graham would marvel at the fact that Chuchu had managed to transport weapons and ammunition in this small plane to his Sandinista and Salvadorean rebel friends.
With Graham’s arrival Omar’s cold seemed to improve. Torrijos turned his back abruptly on members of his government team, including the vice-president, with whom he was meeting on the terrace, and ushered us into the interior of his house. It was as if he really wished to turn his back on politics. We watched through a window as the government officials gathered up their papers and quietly departed. Once the terrace was vacated Omar suggested the sea air was better for his cold. He relaxed in his hammock on the terrace and appeared happy to see Graham again. With the birth of the new Canal Treaty, after such a long pregnancy, Torrijos said, he was ‘suffering the blues’.
Chuchu identified his illness as ‘postpartum psychosis’. We all laughed.
Omar confessed to a feeling of emptiness.
‘It’s not a fatal illness,’ Graham assured him. ‘It is the same after completing a book.’
We had lunch on the terrace, and the conversation turned to Panamanian politics. Omar allowed me to record it on my tape-recorder. I later furnished Graham with a translated transcript, and he faithfully recounted extracts of the conversation in Getting to Know the General. ‘I’m going to give the politicians a big surprise,’ Omar said. ‘I’m designing a system — a political party — in order to get out. They think I am designing a system to stay in. The politicians are aiming their guns in the wrong direction. They will waste their ammunition and then they will say, “but the son of a bitch is unpredictable”.’ Then he looked at Graham, as if for approval, and added, ‘All I want is a house, rum and a girl.’ Chuchu couldn’t have agreed more.
Graham saw the down side to such a withdrawal into self. ‘You would soon get fed up with such a boring existence, as well as the girl,’ he predicted. Graham didn’t believe in the archetypal dream of getting away from it all. To him boredom was a cause of depression. The way Graham explained it, he needed stimulus, at least his creativity did, and travel helped. Graham had to recharge his batteries and rejuvenate his senses in order to write.
Chuchu said he recharged his batteries by going out with women.
As Graham talked, I realized that the General seemed to be growing old before our very eyes. He was much more contemplative and nostalgic than in the past. ‘I haven’t even decided whether I have done good or bad,’ he muttered. ‘It’s like going to the petrol station. You pay and the pump returns to zero. Every time I wake up I’m back to zero.’
Graham and I could not understand the General’s pessimism. In addition to negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty, Torrijos could take credit for some impressive infrastructure projects — a hydroelectric dam, schools, health clinics. He had lifted his people up more than any other Panamanian leader and was prepared now to give them participatory democracy.
Chuchu, sensing that the discussion was leading towards a philosophy with which he completely disagreed, stood up and transformed himself back into Sergeant Martínez. ‘General,’ he said, ‘permission to check the aircraft.’
Torrijos nodded and gave him a military salute. Then he smiled as Chuchu disappeared in the direction of Hato Rey airfield. ‘To fill the political void,’ he said — referring to a void he had helped create with his 1968 coup, and the outlawing of what he termed the corrupt, parasitic political parties — ‘we are forming a new kind of political party.’
After a pause he climbed back into his colourful blue, white and red hammock. He could have been Colonel Aureliano Buendía in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude returning to Macondo from his wars. Omar made no secret of his distaste for what he described as the ‘ridiculous ritualistic rules’ and ‘pompous and pedantic protocol’ that went with governing a country. He preferred the isolation of his rustic ranch house at Coclesito, his Macondo. Farallon, he told us, was far too ostentatious.
There were indeed similarities between Coclesito and García Márquez’s mythical village in One Hundred Years ofSolitude. The General had found Coclesito by accident, dropping down from the sky one day in his helicopter and being shocked by the poverty of the area’s subsistence farmers, who were isolated by mountains and ignored and neglected by their government. Coclesito’s river flooded regularly. To help the forgotten community the General built his rustic home and a small airstrip and had helped launch a cooperative to import water buffaloes that could thrive in the region’s wet climate. The idea of a pineapple plantation was understandable to Graham and me, but a water buffalo co
operative was a puzzle. Neither of us got a satisfactory explanation about the water buffaloes. For the General, Coclesito was the closest place to heaven. He often dragooned his visitors there and led them on rugged hikes into the hills.
As his soul-searching continued, Omar’s words came slowly with each gentle sway of the hammock. Panama was now a much more mature nation, he asserted. An anomaly among nations, it had been born as little more than a simple crossing path from one ocean to another. Now the possibilities for Panama were enormous, he declared. After a long pause he stirred again. ‘We must organize a political party for elections …’ The party would be officially founded in October, the tenth anniversary of the coup that brought the General to power.
‘I’m too old to talk about the future,’ he said. ‘The future belongs to the youth, to our young technocrats. A political party, democracy, is necessary.’ He said the country had been in great need of change, and he believed that he had brought about that change and pre-empted the ultra-left, and ‘stolen the ammunition they needed for a revolution. We are too small to have a bloody revolution — and for what? Panamanians need to own their land, have pride in their country, their own national identity, and not be simply a fresh water and vegetable market for foreign vessels transiting the Canal, or servants of the gringos and the rabiblancos (upper-class Establishment) of the Union Club.’
As for himself, it was evident that Omar was experiencing political exhaustion. ‘When people find a leader,’ he said, ‘they work him to death like a peasant works a good ox to death. The peasants speak to me frankly, and the peasant knows when you have to limp even when you may be curled up in a hammock.’
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