Getting to Know the General (20 page)

I had not wished to return to Panama. Panama without the presence of Omar Torrijos would, I felt sure, seem a country painfully barren. It was January 1983 and I had come to Panama first in 1976, nearly seven years before. When I had heard of Omar’s death in August 1981, it was as though a whole section of my life had been cut out. It was better, I thought, not to revive memories. Chuchu had been frequently on the telephone from Panama trying to persuade me to return. My ticket, which I had failed to use in 1981, he told me, was still there waiting for me in Amsterdam, the President was anxious for me to come, Omar’s family wanted me to come, and I could be ‘of use’. He never explained what use . . . and I stubbornly said ‘no’. I had a good enough reason. My war with the character in Nice still dragged on, and there were three legal proceedings pending against me in France.

‘The Nicaraguans want to see you again,’ Chuchu’s voice said. That I didn’t in the least believe, so ‘no’, I said again and again, ‘no’, and I can’t remember now what it was that at last forced me reluctantly to say ‘yes’.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘For two weeks only. I can’t leave France for longer.’

2

As the KLM plane from Amsterdam turned away from the Atlantic and began to pass over the great Darien jungle towards the Pacific, I felt a great depression which I tried to diminish first with two glasses of champagne and then with a Bols gin. They didn’t raise my spirits.

The name Omar Torrijos stood out over the new international airport and I was more sad than happy to see him commemorated in the great dead letters. Chuchu of course was there to welcome me. He drove me to a huge luxury hotel which was new since my last visit.

‘Couldn’t we go to the Continental? I always liked the Continental.’

‘This is easier for parking my car.’

My heart sank as we were shown into the presidential suite on the fourteenth (really the thirteenth) floor: a sitting-room and bar larger than my whole flat in Antibes, with a bedroom almost as big and three doors to the passage.

‘Did you see the fellow I spoke to in the hall?’ Chuchu asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s your armed bodyguard. Colonel Diaz, the head of security, has put him on twenty-four-hour duty to look after you.’

I felt less than ever at home. When Omar was alive I had never been so luxuriously lodged nor had I ever been in the care of a G-2 guard – Chuchu and his revolver had been enough, and as Chuchu had remarked to me in the motel at Santiago so many years before, ‘A revolver is no defence.’

After more than twelve months of separation we talked and talked and talked, first in the presidential suite, which seemed a little less overpowering after a couple of whiskies, and afterwards at the Basque refugee’s restaurant, the Marisco – this at least had not changed, and the security guard who accompanied us everywhere proved to be a pleasant companion.

Chuchu was convinced that Omar had been murdered, that there had been a bomb in the plane, and he spoke of mysterious events which had preceded his death, but he gave as an example two articles which had been published containing attacks on Omar by President Reagan, and it seemed flimsy evidence. I was not convinced. Omar, who had been on good terms with Carter, was a very useful intermediary for the Americans in spite of his social democracy – surely the only people who might have desired his death were the military in El Salvador and perhaps some conservatives at home. But there was certainly one mystery, which I learnt later from his friend Rory González (who told me also that he disbelieved in the bomb): the last four nights before Omar was killed he had spent with his wife. It was as though he had felt some sort of premonition of his end, and wanted to show his kindness and his consistent loyalty to the past which went so much deeper than his infidelities.

As I talked with Chuchu and later with the President, with Rory González, with Colonel Diaz, I began to realize how in a strange fashion, Omar Torrijos was still very much alive in Panama. Chuchu told me that since his death he had dreamt of him every night, and young Ricardo de la Espriella, the President, whom I had met and liked two years before when he was Vice-President, spoke too of his dreams of Omar. (‘At his death,’ he told me, ‘I lost a father and a brother.’) His dreams all took more or less the same form – there would be a serious disaster with which as President he felt unable to cope and at the moment of his deepest despair Omar would arrive on the scene. In one dream two trains had crashed head on. There were a great many casualties and the President was at his wits’ end what to do when Omar appeared and told him, ‘Don’t worry. You can manage all right,’ and then added as he walked away, ‘I am going off to rest.’ The President told me that one night he was woken by someone coming into the bedroom, and his wife whispered to him, ‘There’s someone in the room.’ She too had heard the movements, but she did not see the image as he did, of Omar sprawling with one leg crossed easily over the arm of a chair.

Certainly in Panama I found little of the sense of emptiness which I had feared, and yet there were real problems which Chuchu described to me on that first morning, and perhaps the biggest of all was the attitude of the new head of the National Guard, General Paredes. Paredes, who had quickly taken over from the gum-chewing Flores whom I had so mistrusted, was a man of the Right. Apparently he was a friend of General Nutting, the head of the American base in what had been the Canal Zone, he intended to stand for the Presidency in 1984, and he was no friend of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The Torrijos dream of a social democratic Central America, independent of the United States but representing no menace to justify intervention, was unlikely to be achieved with the help of General Paredes. Yet another dream too had faded. Work on the great copper mine had ceased – at any rate for the time being.

That first evening Chuchu and I spent with Colonel Diaz, the chief of security, talking until dinner at ten and afterwards till midnight: a man gentle and modest in manner, but I thought I detected in him a disguised firmness and a strong determination to follow the road laid down by Omar. He was more moderate in his assessment of Paredes than Chuchu. It was true, he said, that Paredes had moved towards the right, but he believed that his strain of African blood had not made it easy for him to get on with the conservative oligarchy of the rich and a change of course was still possible.

Diaz was finding his own position difficult. With the signing of the Canal Treaty and the death of Omar the heroic days seemed over for little Panama; there was no one now who could talk like an equal with the world leaders as Omar had talked to Tito, Fidel Castro, Carter, the Pope, and all the heads of state on his tour of Western Europe in 1977 after the signing of the Canal Treaty.
^*
We spoke too of El Salvador: Diaz had little belief in a guerrilla victory, only in a stagnation which might possibly prove to be more valuable than a victory.

Colonel Diaz told me of the four hours which he had recently passed with Fidel Castro. ‘I liked him,’ he said, ‘but I was surprised by one claim which he made, that he had intervened in Angola without the consent of Russia.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I told Colonel Diaz. As I had always seen it, Castro had embarked first on a revolutionary adventure in South America against the wishes of the USSR, who at that period had no desire for trouble in Latin America, with the result that Che Guevara was betrayed to his death by the Communist Party in Bolivia. I believed, and I believe still, that the Angolan adventure was an attempt by Castro to demonstrate a measure of independence, and it was only when his action proved to be at least partially successful that the USSR came to his support. He had another motive too: there is a very large black population in Cuba and to aid a black government in Africa was a way of separating himself spectacularly from the racialist Cuba of Batista where intermarriage was forbidden and even the bars in Havana were closed to blacks by calling them clubs to which only white men were welcome. There is an odd irony about the situation in Angola. The United States complains of the presence of Cuban troops, but it is the Cuban troops who protect the Gulf Oil installations from being overrun in the civil war with Unita.

Diaz had three plans for me. He wanted me to return to Nicaragua, where the Sandinista leaders knew of my friendship for Omar, as a signal to them that the Torrijos spirit was still alive in Panama. Afterwards I was to visit Cuba and see Fidel Castro for the same purpose. (The Cuban Ambassador in Panama, he said, would be inviting me.) The third plan was for me to visit the jungle village, known as Ciudad Romero, which had been built by refugees from El Salvador, who had been rescued from their perilous exile in Honduras by Omar. Chuchu at once volunteered to take me to all three places in his little second-hand plane and I hadn’t the courage to say no, so I was glad when Diaz said that I must have an army jet to take me to Nicaragua, so as to give my visit an official tone, and as for the village, only a helicopter could reach it.

3

But it was Chuchu who made me feel more than anyone else that the Torrijos spirit was still very much alive. One morning he seemed to be spending an unusually long time in the garage where he bought his petrol. When he returned I asked him what he had been doing. ‘Taking photographs,’ he said.

‘Photographs?’

‘Yes. Eden Pastora has bought a boat in Panama. I was able to photograph it where it lay from inside the garage. I Want to take the photograph to Nicaragua.’

Another evening after dinner he wanted to go to someone’s house. ‘I’ve got something to give him.’

‘What?’

‘There are two machine-guns in the back of the car.’

‘Why does he want a machine-gun?’

‘It’s not that
he
wants a machine-gun. It’s
I
that want a thousand rounds of small-arms ammunition. We are doing a swap.’

‘For the Sandinistas?’

‘No, no, they have all they want. For El Salvador.’

I was overjoyed at this glimpse of Professor José de Jesús Martínez, poet and mathematician, at his proper job.

4

Next day, I met for the first time the Foreign Office official, Señor Blandón, in charge of organizing what was later to be known as the Contadora group – the diplomatic offensive which it was hoped would prevent war in Central America. The group still works for peace, but the plan was more ambitious in those days. For in addition to Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico it was even hoped to include Cuba and the United States in the group. Did he really believe, I asked Señor Blandón, that Reagan would agree to join any organization which included Cuba? Yes, he said, with the American elections approaching it was possible that Reagan might feel it desirable politically to join them. He hadn’t the support of Congress in his covert operations, and as for open war between Honduras and Nicaragua he must know that there was some unrest among the junior officers in the Honduran army; the El Salvador guerrillas too were strong enough to make a diversion on the borders of Honduras: and the air and tank superiority of Honduras had small importance in the kind of terrain where they would have to fight. It was true that the diplomatic plan was not liked by General Paredes, but it had been approved by the President and the Cubans would be arriving next day to discuss it. He repeated that Fidel Castro had invited me to go to Havana, so it was important for me to see the Cuban Ambassador.

When I visited the Ambassador I had not believed in Castro’s invitation, which turned out, as I had thought likely, to be an invitation from the Casa de las Américas to some sort of cultural jamboree in Havana. I told the Ambassador that I was only interested in the political situation. I hadn’t time on this visit for culture.

The President later talked to me of my Nicaraguan visit – which seemed to resemble more and more a mission. The message he wanted to convey to the Junta was: don’t talk aggressively, but appeal to the Security Council for a United Nations force on the Honduran border. Panama, a member of the Council, would support such an appeal and if the United States should use her veto Nicaragua would gain a propaganda victory. It seemed a reasonable idea.

After seeing the President I had drinks with Colonel Noriega, the Chief of Staff. He too was keen on my visit to Nicaragua. It was obvious that the right-wing slant of General Paredes embarrassed him as much as the President, and he was disappointed when I told him of my reception at the Cuban Embassy. He said he would take the matter up with the Ambassador. He was sure the invitation had not been a cultural one.

Before leaving for Nicaragua there was for me a rather embarrassing party at the Presidencia at which I received from the President the Grand Cross of the Order of Vasco Núñez de Balboa. (Keats, it will be remembered, in his famous sonnet had confused Balboa with Cortés, who had never gazed at the Pacific with a wild surmise, silent, upon a peak in Darién.)

I had done nothing to justify such a decoration, and my sense of embarrassment increased when I became tangled up in the ribbon and the stars. I felt like a Christmas tree in process of being hung with presents. My only merit was that I had been a friend of Omar Torrijos and I could well imagine how he would have laughed at my situation, as I struggled with the ribbon and tried to get the stars into place. All the same there may have been a tactical reason behind the ceremony; the President was perhaps signalling to the Sandinista leaders that they could trust me as a messenger. Whatever the reason and whatever my embarrassment, in the end I had a certain sense of happiness because the kindly gift made one feel a little closer to the country which had produced Omar Torrijos.

There were many in the United States, I was sure, who would consider that I was being ‘used’, but that thought didn’t worry me in the least. They could say that I had been ‘used’ too in Cuba in 1958 when I carried warm clothes to Santiago for Castro’s men in the Sierra Maestra and, through an Irish MP, a friend of mine, I had been able to question the Conservative government in the House of Commons on the sale of old jet planes to Batista, but I regretted nothing then and I regretted nothing now. I have never hesitated to be ‘used’ in a cause I believed in, even if my choice might be only for a lesser evil. We can never foresee the future with any accuracy.