Getting to Know the General (14 page)

‘As if the wickedness and infamy of the principal traitor were not enough’ – it was ex-President Arias who now was speaking in my memory – ‘he has sold the fatherland for a few coins just as Judas sold Our Lord Jesus Christ and, like Judas, he tries in his ignorance to flee his own conscience, putting himself to sleep with alcoholic beverages’ (perhaps he should have added ‘Black Label, usually at weekends’) ‘and narcotics’ (these were presumably the good Havana cigars sent to him by Fidel). ‘Do not be surprised when he is found hanging from some tree in his own back yard.’

Omar rocked himself to and fro in the hammock with one leg. He said, ‘I don’t even know whether I have done good or bad. It’s like going to the gas station. You pay and the pump returns to zero. Every time I wake up I’m back to zero.’

Again I was listening to Arias. ‘For almost ten years we have been in exile, looking from our humble patio in Florida towards the south, towards our beloved Panama, reflecting and meditating, with a single hope and a single prayer . . .’

I asked Omar what he thought of Arias. ‘He’s a political archaeological piece,’ Omar said. ‘You look at it once in the museum, but you don’t trouble to look twice.’

He went on, ‘There is a political emptiness here. The struggle for the Canal Treaty has left us with this feeling of emptiness. To fill it we must turn to the internal front. We must organize a political party for the elections we are going to hold. I am for social democracy. I’ve talked with Felipe González in Spain, with Colombia and the Dominican Republic. I caught this damn cold there at the inauguration of Guzmán. Of course, if Arias and the oligarchy return to power we are in a bit of trouble.’ He laughed. ‘We have broken all the laws of the constitution –
their
constitution.’

His new party was to be called the PRD – the Democratic Revolutionary Party. Its foundation would be announced officially on 11 October, the tenth anniversary of his military
coup.
At the same time the ban on the other political parties would be lifted, but the ban had never been a complete one. It had only meant that every candidate during elections, whether he were conservative, socialist, liberal or Communist, fought as an individual candidate without a party label.

He went on, ‘I feel too old to talk about the future.’ (He was still a man in his forties.) ‘The future belongs to youth. A party is necessary to me now because I’m tired and bored with politics – internal politics. You see, when people find a leader they work him to death like a peasant works a good ox to death. The peasants speak to me frankly, and the peasant knows you have a limp even when you may be curled up in a hammock or lying down with a sheet over you.’

I asked him about the Treaty. I knew he was bitterly disappointed by the amendments made in the Senate and that he was criticized by his own left. He said, ‘My idea of the ultra-left is this: when they face the impossibility of making
their
revolution, they make a cowardly escape by planning a future revolution which never becomes a reality. In this country we don’t even have two million inhabitants. There is no reason to pay a high price for social change. If it is not necessary, why do it? I don’t support a radical position in this little country.’

He referred to the American fear of Communism in Angola. He said, ‘I told Andrew Young that Africa is more a danger to your vanity than to your security. There is no danger in Africa. It’s a continent which still hasn’t found a personality. Fifty years from now people in little Volkswagens will cruise happily down the highways and observe the beauty of the jungle and forget the tractors that the jungle swallowed up.’

He had digested his disappointment over the Treaty and had even begun to minimize its importance. He said, ‘In fourteen months from now they will give us two-thirds of the land in the Canal Zone, and we will receive thirty cents – a notable increase – for every ship using the Canal until we take control in the year 2000. But more important than the Canal is our copper development. Until now we’ve only exported bananas and sovereignty.’ (By sovereignty he meant the Panama flag and the tax-evading international companies.) ‘We will export copper by 1983.’ (This was a prophecy that failed to come true.) ‘Then there is our hydro-electric capacity. Soon we will have one kilowatt per inhabitant.’

He went back to the question of the Canal. ‘The Canal began with fourteen thousand workers and it still has fourteen thousand. We have no ports and because of this it costs us seventeen dollars a ton to export our products. When we have the Canal we can export more. We have a new cement factory which is penalized because we can’t export. We can’t put up the Canal tolls further, ,so it’s on the flanks of the Canal that we must develop.’

I remembered what he had told the schoolchildren the year before, that he was not going to exchange white landlords for coffee-coloured ones. I asked, ‘Is there going to be a land grab?’

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘we are going to be careful of the Zone resources. We can’t change the land much. The forests are needed to provide the watershed for the Canal.’

I went back to my room in Panama City and I reread President Arias’s speech. ‘11 October 1968, a fatal day on which Satanic treason, inspired by lasciviousness, covetousness and envy swept our beloved land, covering it with groans, pain and blood . . .’

I thought of ‘the monster’, of the ‘Judas’ in his hammock and I thought also of the fisherman who was in the habit of walking regularly up the beach at weekends past the guard and shouting drunken insults at Omar sitting on his verandah, but on the return journey, sobered by his walk, he would go by in silence. Omar was delighted by this weekend ritual, especially when it was performed in front of such serious and important guests as Mr Bunker and the American delegation. I wondered how President Arias would have reacted in his days of power.

3

In the evening I went to a bad Nicaraguan meal with my Sandinista friends and I met for the first time the poet, Father Ernesto Cardenal, who is now the Minister of Culture in Nicaragua. I thought him perhaps a trifle consciously charismatic with his white beard and his flowing white hair and the blue beret on top, and he seemed a little conscious of his own romantic character as a priest, a Communist and a refugee from Somoza, who had destroyed his monastery on an island in the Great Lake. Next evening we met again at the house of Camilo and María Isabel at a birthday party for one of the Sandinista guerrilla leaders, Pomares, whose life had been saved by Omar. He had been captured in Honduras and was about to be deported to Nicaragua and certain death when the General intervened.

It seemed an oddly juvenile party for a guerrilla leader: there was a birthday cake and everyone sang ‘Happy birthday to you’, and the faces were nearly all as familiar to me now as family faces, and old Father Cardenal beamed from the background like a grandfather and the guerrilla extinguished two sets of candles, each in one blow, and I thought he was a little embarrassed by the cake and the candles. He gave me the impression of a genuine fighter surrounded by amateurs. A few days later he returned to Nicaragua and was killed in action. Now in Managua Somoza’s former headquarters, known as the Bunker, is named after him.

Father Cardenal tried to persuade me to go over to Nicaragua, but I couldn’t help feeling that my death there would prove a too-easy gift for propaganda. Either side would be able to blame the other and my death would be more valuable than any other service that I could render, and quite possibly it might be rendered to the wrong side. Anyway, I knew the General was against my going. He believed that the civil war was reaching a climax. So I preferred to be a tourist and went off next day by helicopter to the legendary city of my imagination, Nombre de Dios: a small clearing, too small for a plane to land, and an Indian village of a few dozen huts. Not even a piece of ruined wall marked what had once been a greater port than Vera Cruz, one which had been named by Columbus Puerto de Bastimentos, the Harbour of Provisions, and which had been sacked by Francis Drake – he mistakenly left a lot of silver ingots behind.

When we got back to Panama we found that the General’s forecast of the war in Nicaragua had been in some sort confirmed. There had been an outbreak in Managua, the capital, and the National Palace had been seized by a small group of a dozen Sandinistas, who were holding a thousand deputies and officials hostage and demanding the release of their comrades in prison.

A dream that night depressed me so much that I woke bored and unhappy. I wanted to be back in Europe, I didn’t know why. However, one thing remained to be done before I went home and that was the long-delayed trip to Bocas del Toro, so uninvitingly described in the
South American Handbook
, and Chuchu agreed to come with me the next day. But it was not to be. All our plans were changed and at the same time our spirits were raised by Omar, who had tracked us down to where we were having dinner in an Italian restaurant which we had never visited before. Somehow he had discovered our whereabouts. Chuchu was wanted on the telephone.

He came back excited and, like me, a little drunk. The General was sending an army plane to Managua early next morning – probably at five – to pick up the Sandinista commando, the released prisoners and some of their hostages, and we were to go in the plane. We should be at the airport by four. Life had become interesting again.

Next morning we arrived just on time, but the plane had left an hour before, for Chuchu had failed to understand, or else the telephone had failed to communicate, the General’s advice that we spend the night at the airport. Chuchu found himself in disgrace. He was told firmly to hold himself ‘on disposition’ – which presumably meant staying at home by his telephone in a sort of house arrest. As for me I tried to kill a long day with reading and sleep, until he finally rejoined me, as depressed as myself. We had been summoned by the General to Rory’s house.

We thought it best to have some rum punches first, made by Flor at the Senorial bar, for we expected a reprimand. But not a bit of it. Omar was in great good humour. He had decided to send me with Chuchu on a mission to Belize to see George Price, the Prime Minister. This was part of his determination to be my tutor in the affairs of Central America, not only in the affairs of Panama. He had become fond of Price – a strange friendship, for the two men could hardly have differed more in character, though in politics they were both moderate socialists. The friendship began when Panama supported Belize against its enemy Guatemala at the United Nations and persuaded Venezuela to do the same – the only two Latin American countries to oppose Guatemala.

The Foreign Minister was with the General and he sketched out for us the situation in Belize, where the Conservative opposition were opposed to the independence which Price sought, since they believed that it might involve the removal of the sixteen hundred British troops serving as a trip wire against a Guatemalan invasion. Price wished to remain inside the Commonwealth, but he would have preferred to substitute Commonwealth troops for British. Guatemala might be satisfied with a small surrender of territory giving access to the sea, but then would Mexico on her northern frontier demand the same? In which case what would be left of Belize?

‘You will like Price,’ Omar told me. ‘He’s a man after your own heart. He wanted to be a priest, not a prime minister.’

In the morning, before the usual Panamanian muddle started over our journey, I went to see the Sandinista commando and the released prisoners, who included Tomás Borge, who is now a good friend to me, at the military base of a unit called the Tigers. The leader of the commando, Eden Pastora, had the handsome face of a film star, and he was being interviewed for American television by a particularly stupid journalist. ‘Is it true that Carter wrote you a letter? When will you be going back to Nicaragua?’ The lights flashed and the cameras clicked. Perhaps it was at that moment, when he became aware of an audience of millions, that Pastora’s corruption began, so that four years later he turned against his fellow Sandinistas. After their victory they were to appoint him commander of the
milice
, the villagers who were being trained in self-defence, a sort of home guard, but not commander of the army; he was appointed the Vice-Minister of Defence and not the Minister, and yet his extraordinary exploit in capturing the National Palace with a handful of men had made him more famous outside Nicaragua than Daniel Ortega, the chief of the Junta, Humberto Ortega, the head of the army, or even Tomás Borge, now the Minister of the Interior.

There must inevitably have been many wounded vanities when the civil war ended, and the two vanities which did most harm to the Sandinista cause proved to be those of Pastora and Archbishop Obando. (The Archbishop had negotiated the terms of the hostages’ release with Somoza and he was on the same plane to Panama as Pastora so as to guarantee the safety of the commando.)

Now, as I half-expected would happen, everything which had been arranged for our visit to Belize began to go wrong. Camilo telephoned me in the evening to tell me that Chuchu after all couldn’t go with me. Some Frenchman whom I didn’t know would take his place. I got angry (I suspected unjustly some Sandinista interference) and I told Camilo that I would prefer to go back to Europe. I had been long enough away. Camilo seemed to agree and said that he would pick me up next morning and take me to KLM for my ticket, but next morning it was Chuchu who telephoned me.

‘What happened last night to change our plans?’

He said he had been a bit drunk and could remember nothing.

‘And this Frenchman they want to send with me?’

A Frenchman? He knew nothing about a Frenchman. The General proposed to send me that day in a special plane with a woman who had once been a consul in the United States. I had met her during the boring lunch at the yucca farm in 1976 and had particularly disliked her.

‘I won’t go to Belize with her. I’ll go back to Europe.’