The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Chuchu had stayed at home to translate key passages of French President François Mitterand’s book into Spanish, since Torrijos was planning a visit to France. Then an officer telephoned, reporting that the General was missing. Chuchu immediately suspected a plot.

  The next day, Saturday afternoon, a farmer appeared at a National Guard post near Coclesito and reported that he had heard an explosion on a nearby mountain. He led a rescue party to the site, which turned out to be where Torrijos’s plane had crashed. By then US Air Force planes had joined the Panamanians in their search for the General. Major Domingo Ocalagan, the National Guard public relations chief, finally confirmed that Omar’s plane had crashed and announced, ‘There are no survivors.’

  Normally it was a fifteen-minute flight to Coclesito from Penonomé. At the controls of the De Havilland Twin Otter 205 carrying Torrijos were a veteran pilot and co-pilot. The mountains had suddenly become cloaked in a storm. It was the rainy season, but storms didn’t ground the General, and his pilots were far too macho to admit being defeated by the weather. The General’s awful flying habits were legendary. He could unnerve visiting US senators by changing their destinations in mid-air. One night the US Ambassador, Ambler Moss, was visiting Omar at Coclesito. The General, relaxing in his hammock on the veranda, suddenly remembered he had to go somewhere. It was 9 p.m. Ambassador Moss asked him, ‘How?’ The airstrip had no lights. Simple, Torrijos explained. ‘We place a truck with its lights on at one end of the runway as a guide, and if we don’t hit the truck we are airborne.’ And off he flew without hitting the truck.

  That fateful Friday morning poor visibility had forced Omar’s pilots to abort a second try at landing on Coclesito’s dirt airstrip. The plane was gaining altitude as the pilots intended to circle again to make a third try. As the Canadian-built aircraft ascended, the right wing clipped a tall tree, sending the Otto crashing into Cerro Marta only a few feet below its summit. The National Guard blamed the crash on bad weather. Along with Omar, six others aboard the aircraft perished. It was not until the next afternoon, 1 August, that rescue workers finally reached the crash site and removed the remains of the General, two other passengers, the crew and two guardsmen.

  It was as if Omar had chosen the place and manner of his death: the rural Panama he loved, high above Coclesito. His friend, Gabriel García Márquez, in his tribute to Torrijos, whom he had visited only two weeks before the fatal crash, noted they had flown together in mid-July in the same plane. Omar, knowing García Márquez’s fear of flying, made sure that the Colombian novelist flew with a glass of whisky in his hand. In the ‘ultimate instance’, García Márquez later wrote:

  Torrijos trusted his good, mysterious and true intuition! It was his only orientation in the darkness of fate! … He didn’t realize that servitude to his supernatural intuition, which perhaps saved his life many times, ended in the long run being his most vulnerable side since at the end he gave as many opportunities to fate as to his enemies. [Torrijos] had reserved for himself the privilege of choosing his time and method of death. He had reserved it for his last and decisive card of his historic fate. It was the vocation of martyr which was perhaps the most negative aspect of his personality but also the most splendid and moving. The disaster, accidental or provoked, frustrated this design, but the sad mourners who attended his funeral were without a doubt moved by the secret wisdom the impertinent death without grandeur, one of the most dignified forms of martyrdom.

  In Washington the White House announced that President Ronald Reagan, who had once called Torrijos a ‘tinhorn dictator’, had sent ‘most sincere condolences’ to Omar’s family and the people of Panama: ‘General Torrijos is one of the outstanding figures in Panama’s history,’ a White House statement said.

  Former President Jimmy Carter issued a statement from his home in Plains, Georgia, declaring, ‘The untimely death of General Omar Torrijos is a tragic loss for the people of Panama and for all who admired him as a wise and effective leader. I knew him personally as a dedicated and unselfish man committed to a better life for those who looked to him for leadership.’

  The news hit me hard. It was like a death in the family. I had lost a good friend. That fateful Saturday I telephoned Graham to break the news. There was no answer at his Antibes flat. I finally reached him on Sunday. By then he had heard the reports of Torrijos’s tragic end. We talked a long time about Omar. I could hear, in Graham’s voice and the way he spoke, that Omar’s death had affected him, too.

  Three years later, on the eve of Graham’s eightieth birthday, he told the author Martin Amis about it. Amis recounted it in a magazine article entitled ‘Encounter in Paris’. ‘One is shocked when a bit of one’s life disappears. I felt that with Omar Torrijos. I think that’s why, in the case of Torrijos, I embarked on what I hoped would be a memoir but what turned into a rather unsatisfactory blend of things. I felt that a whole segment of my life had been cut out.’

  I was not able to attend the funeral. But afterwards I talked by telephone with Chuchu. ‘Why didn’t Graham come to the General’s funeral?’ he asked with a hint of reproach in his voice.

  I explained as best I could that the General’s death had affected us all but that we each mourn in different ways and funerals were only part of the mourning process. One didn’t have to fly to Panama to attend the very public mourning in order to pay one’s respects. I also reminded Chuchu that Omar himself would have hated his own state funeral, so filled with the pomp and protocol he detested. Likewise absent, along with Graham, was García Márquez, who said simply, ‘I never had the heart to bury friends.’ But thousands of other mourners were there. The public outpouring of grief throughout Panama when word came of Omar’s death was something the country had never witnessed.

  ‘I imagine when we were trying to telephone Chuchu he was off identifying the bodies,’ Graham wrote in a letter dated 26 August. ‘I very much feel the loss of Omar. It seems to have brought an end to my Central American life, though I received a telegram of invitation from George Price to the independence celebration in Belize. However things here are difficult and I won’t be able to get away there. I suspect that the celebrations may be a bit riotous … ?’

  ‘It was a bomb,’ Chuchu said with finality when I talked to him again on the phone. Farmers in the region, he said, had heard the General’s plane and then an explosion. No one would dissuade him: in his adamant judgement, it had to be the work of the CIA. Who else would want to kill the General? Chuchu would not entertain any other suspects although bolas (rumours) in Panama encompassed a long list of potential perpetrators, including Chuchu’s own friends within the ranks of the Sandinistas. There was concern in Managua that Omar was about to lend support to Edén Pastora, who earlier that month had quit his post in Managua and driven across the border to Costa Rica and then all the way to Panama. It was known that Pastora and his wartime fighting friend, Panama’s Dr Hugo Spadafora, were spending a great deal of time at Farallon and Coclesito with the General, happily discussing a grand plan to bring social democracy to Central America. There was speculation that Pastora was supposed to have been on the plane along with Omar but had been late for his rendezvous. (Indeed, Pastora himself narrowly escape a bomb on 30 May 1984 when he had mounted his own offensive against the Sandinistas from the border with Costa Rica. Seven people were killed and twenty-eight wounded along with Pastora.) In fact Pastora was with Spadafora, in his Panama City apartment, when they heard the first news of Omar’s disappearance. Fearing it might be a night of the long knives, they sped to Farallon believing it was the safest place to be until the situation cleared. Spadafora later claimed that spy chief Noriega had kept them for days as ‘virtual prisoners’ at the Farallon compound. Others suspected that the placing of a bomb on Omar’s aircraft could only have been Noriega’s handiwork. Thus there was no shortage of suspects or motives. But there was not a shred of evidence to support any of the plethora of stories.

  Rory Gonzalez said he didn’t believe the
bomb theory at first, but after what happened in the years following he had to wonder. There had already been infighting in the Panamanian National Guard, and Torrijos had sent Gonzalez to tell Noriega and Rubén Darío Paredes to stop their power plays. The two were positioning themselves to be Omar’s successor even before the fateful day.

  Few among Panama’s political establishment listened when an expert for the Canadian manufacturer of the General’s plane examined the wreckage and concluded that a combination of bad weather and pilot error was responsible for the crash. There was, the expert declared, no evidence of a bomb explosion. Still, Chuchu stubbornly held to his theory that it was the work of the CIA, even though such a view flew in the face of the evidence. Not only had a 1977 Act of the US Congress placed a ban on the CIA’s participation in the assassination of foreign leaders; there was seemingly little reason for the CIA to target Torrijos at this juncture. The Panama Canal treaties were a fait accompli and the General was doing his best to bring peace to Central America. He had moved to the political centre himself, and it should have been obvious to even the greenest Washington spook that Omar’s death would touch off a dangerous power struggle within the Panamanian National Guard — which in fact occurred.

  In Getting to Know the General Graham wrote that he had been struck by Torrijos’s aura of near despair. ‘You and I have something in common,’ the General told Graham. ‘We are both self-destructive.’

  Graham once asked Omar what he dreamed about most, and the reply was almost predictable: ‘La muerte.’ An awareness of death ran through many of the General’s conversations with Graham, so when death finally came, Graham wrote in Getting to Know the General, ‘it was not so much a shock that I felt as a long-expected sadness for what has seemed to me over the years an inevitable end’.

  Particularly ironic to me was the fact that one of the first and last groups of exiles Omar sought to help were Haitians. Shortly before he died, the General had given his blessing to a ‘Continental Solidarity Conference with Haiti’, an effort to unite the fragmented Haitian opposition to the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Among the members of the conference’s International Committee were Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, the widow of Chilean President Salvador Allende and former Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez.

  Now there would be no more such humanitarian gestures from the General. The charismatic populist who had dreamed and talked so often of death had finally met death at fifty-two. In his thirteenth year as Panama’s strongman, the young officer from Santiago de Veraguas had changed the face of his country. To be sure, he himself was a dictator whose regime suffered from some of the trappings of a Latin American dictatorship. His failings are perhaps best described by author John Dinges in his book The Underside of the Torrijos Legacy. Dinges wrote of

  a National Guard that was unchecked and unmonitored, that was run for the personal benefit of those who comprised its upper echelons. In sweeping away the old-style cronyism of the Union Club, Torrijos had left the country in political adolescence. By repression and exile, he had emasculated the political parties, rendering them incapable of governing or even mounting an effective campaign for honest government. It may not have occurred to Torrijos to challenge Panama’s ingrained tradition of influence peddling and payoffs — the idea that the time of rule is a time of enrichment. Common parlance in Panama lacked even the terminology to express such concepts as conflict of interest and ethics in government.

  Instead, Torrijos attempted to channel the fruits of corruption to promote his revolution, to serve both his selfish and his enlightened purposes. The system was disarmingly simple: Torrijos bought or gained control of businesses and arranged for them to have a monopoly or to receive other kinds of preferential treatment. The companies provided second salaries for National Guard officers and their profits were available for special projects not covered in the national budget.

  Nevertheless, Torrijos, above all, wanted his people to take pride in their small but strategic country — to see it no longer as just an international crossroads serving the world’s shipping but as a nation with its own culture and interests. He had broken the upper-class rabiblancos’ monopoly on power and by so doing pre-empted the Marxists.

  As Dinges also writes:

  As if by accident, without the oratorical or ideological flourishes of a Fidel Castro, his military revolution had wrought enormous social, racial, even psychological changes in the lives of the vast majority of Panamanians. More than the reforms in land distribution, health care, education, the essence of ‘Torrijismo’ was the inchoate national pride he instilled in a people who had been more servants than slaves, more bought-out than downtrodden. By peaceful settling of Panama’s historic score with the United States, he gave concrete reality to Panama as a country; by imposing a government that flaunted its middle-class, multiracial character, he had halted social polarization and short-circuited the appeal of Marxist radicalism.

  With such achievements the General became a hero not only in his own country but also to others. In Nicaragua a group of poor people in the city of Estelí rechristened their barrio ‘Omar Torrijos’.

  After our last meeting with the General, Graham had mused about his failed Panama novel On the Way Back. He said it featured the failure of a revolution, which would be the book’s main raison d’être. But while he had a villain he couldn’t handle Chuchu. The problem, as I saw it — and it was the only time I offered my opinion on the subject — was that there was no room for the exuberant Chuchu in Graham’s subconscious because Chuchu already so resembled a fictional character. I had observed Graham crafting characters from real life into The Comedians, but Chuchu seemed far too much for Graham’s creative imagination to handle in a novel. Moreover, at times it seemed as if Chuchu was trying to micro-manage Graham’s novel. I knew all about the futility of this because I had tried the same tactic with Graham and The Comedians. In writing, as in many other areas, Graham marched to his own drum.

  Chuchu had other irritating qualities. He had a propensity for uttering fatuous phrases, some hyperbolic, others simply nonsensical. ‘I believe in the Devil, I don’t believe in God,’ he used to say, as if such a sacrilegious declaration would shock the world about him. He was unabashedly excited about the prospect of being a fictional character in ‘Greeneland’, a name-place that Graham had grown to detest thoroughly. On their first trip together into the Panamanian hinterland Graham had made the mistake of revealing that he was thinking of a new novel. For Chuchu this was like an open door, and he stepped right in. When Graham asked him whether he would mind being killed off in the book Chuchu accepted the offer of literary martyrdom with pleasure but then warned, ‘I am never going to die.’

  In a letter to me after returning to Antibes from that first visit to Panama Graham wrote on 30 December 1976, ‘I even got an idea for a novel when I was in the country with Chuchu and, if it does seem to take root, I shall go back to Panama in July.’ Three weeks later he wrote, ‘I really believe a novel is emerging into my self-conscious as the result of Panama with Chuchu as the main character.’

  The book he had been carrying around for all those years was ultimately published in 1978 as The Human Factor. It was to bring Graham’s career as a novelist full circle. Despite his own misgivings The Human Factor was one of his best novels and the last of the best ones, a masterful work. Graham had revealed to me earlier in Panama that the novel dealt with a British double agent, Maurice Castle, who married a black South African (Sarah). Graham had feared that critics might believe he was writing about Kim Philby because Castle, like Philby, ends up marooned in Moscow — a sorry finale — but does not receive the numerous perquisites provided by his Soviet handlers that Philby enjoyed. (Philby actually objected to Graham’s portrayal of Moscow’s bleakness — at least as experienced by the fictitious Castle.) His double agent Castle, Graham assured me, was in no manner or form based on Philby.

  He had let the novel languish, without even a worki
ng title, for all those years. When he finally published The Human Factor he sent a copy to Philby. I read the book with anticipation and was not disappointed. I later told Graham that I agreed that no one familiar with Kim could possibly confuse Graham’s character Maurice Castle with Philby, that Castle was the antithesis of Philby.

  The title, The Human Factor, is well chosen. Again Graham treats the phenomena of betrayal, espionage, conspiracy and clandestine behaviour. There are also love, pain and anguish as well as a marked tenderness and compassion. The protagonist, Castle, who is the loneliest of spies and double agents, has a moral debt to pay to those who helped him spirit his black wife Sarah out of apartheid South Africa, which ultimately places him alone in the stark isolation of Moscow pining for the ones he loved.

  (In Ways of Escape Graham had written: ‘Perhaps the hypocrisy of our relations with South Africa nagged me on to work too. It was obvious that, however much opposed the governments of the West Alliance might pretend to be to apartheid, however much our leaders talked of its immorality, they simply could not let South Africa succumb to Black Power and Communism. If Operation Uncle Remus [a top-secret contingency plan for the defence of South Africa by the Western alliance that Castle learns about] did not exist, it would certainly come into existence before long. It was less an invitation than a prediction.’)

  As a book The Human Factor was a success, but, Graham reported, unfortunately Otto Preminger’s film was not. Preminger, Graham added, had had problems financing the production and he was forced to do it ‘on the cheap’.

  Through 1977 Graham continued to struggle with his Panamanian novel. It often seemed that the key to unlocking his writer’s block was to remind him of Bocas del Toro, the ancient dilapidated Panamanian banana port of which Graham had read in The South American Handbook, ‘No tourist ever goes there.’ Precisely for that reason he wanted to go there, literally to follow Columbus’s footsteps to the ‘Mouths of the Bull’. After several false starts, on his 1980 trip Graham finally got to fly — through a tropical thunderstorm — to Bocas del Toro. He found it a dismal place, with the cats in his decrepit hotel too busy having sex to bother chasing the free-roving rats. He wrote that he had awakened in Bocas del Toro after a long night’s discussion with an independent political candidate, an impressive black Panamanian, with a new book in mind. No longer would Omar or Chuchu be characters in the novel, and instead of Panama it would all happen in an imaginary Central American country. A year later not only was the General dead but so was this latest inspiration for a novel.