Authors: Graham Greene

Getting to Know the General (23 page)

BOOK: Getting to Know the General

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One girl among the villagers held my attention because of the melancholy beauty of her eyes. She looked about sixteen and I thought her to be the young mother of the child whom she held between her knees, but when she stood up to go when the song was over I realized that she was only a small child herself, no more than twelve – it was fire, bombs and death which had given her a too-early maturity.

The meeting in the school area over, there was something the peasants urgently wanted to show us. I heard the world ‘altar’, ‘altar’, often repeated as they led us to the outskirts of the village, and there sure enough was an altar which they had built and it bore the photograph of the murdered Archbishop in the centre and photographs of Omar at each side. I remembered the abandoned church I had seen in Coclesito with the hens pecking in the aisle and I remembered too what Omar had said about village cemeteries on the first day that we met nearly seven years before: ‘If the people don’t look after the dead they don’t look after the living.’ These people without a doubt were looking after their dead.

The time had come to say my goodbyes, but first there was an obligation I had to fulfil. General Paredes was certainly not one of those who had tried to keep alive the ideas and ideals of Torrijos, but I could hardly leave Panama without seeing him and thanking him for the plane to Managua and the helicopter to the village of Romero. He invited me to lunch at a new restaurant, named the Charlot in honour of Charlie Chaplin, and I accepted, but then a warning reached me from the owner of the restaurant. One of my fellow guests would be a Cuban refugee journalist who had come from Miami in Kissinger’s wake. No journalist in my experience is wholly trustworthy, but a Cuban refugee . . . what a story this man might invent of my visit to Fidel Castro. I sent a message back that I was sorry, but I wouldn’t be able to lunch if the journalist were there, and the General altered his guest list. To his credit he showed no resentment at my interference.

It was strange finding myself back for apéritifs in the house which Omar had shared with his friend Rory González and which was now occupied by General Paredes. There were not many obvious changes, but inevitably there was a great sense of emptiness, and I looked around in vain for Omar’s budgerigar. No Omar and no budgerigar. Colonel Diaz was there and Colonel Noriega, to whom I was able to pass on an invitation to Nicaragua from Lenin Cerna. To Paredes I gave Fidel Castro’s good wishes for the presidential election. Paredes seemed to take these wishes at their face value with a smile of gratification.

Had Castro’s good wishes even affected his ideology? I was surprised at lunch to hear him criticize Reagan’s policy in Central America and he even had some kind words for the Sandinistas. He seemed anxious to show me that he was following the Torrijos line and in the middle of lunch he presented me with an extravagantly expensive watch inscribed ‘To an English brother of General Omar Torrijos from General Paredes’. To refuse the present was impossible, but it was an embarrassing gift. I couldn’t help being aware of the cynical amusement of the other guests who knew what my mission had been.

General Paredes did not follow the Torrijos line for very long after the lunch. A few months later I read of how he had paid a visit to Costa Rica where he spoke against the policy of his own President and against the peace-making activities of the Contadora group, and later a certain mystery surrounded him, for a few months after retiring from the National Guard in order to begin his campaign for the presidency it was announced that he had retired from the conflict. Then weeks later the puzzle became more complex. It was reported that he was not standing in the election for the presidency because if he were defeated it would reflect on the National Guard. Had he realized what lay behind Castro’s good wishes, and was there now a danger of the result Castro feared? However, I was reassured by Chuchu on the telephone the other day – Paredes, he said, was
kaput
.

That night I gave a farewell dinner in the Peruvian restaurant to my friends, to Chuchu and Silvana, Rogelio and Lidia and, inevitably, the Colombian refugee who had not yet obtained the papers he needed and who still wore a hat and trimmed his nails at the table. Nineteen years of humid jungle life perhaps make the nails grow fast.

Next day, while I waited for my plane in the diplomatic lounge at the airport, Kissinger entered to a barrage of flashlights. I would have liked to ask him whether he had my gold tie, but I wanted to escape quickly, for the Cuban journalist was on the same plane to Miami and he had spotted me. My old bodyguard was drinking coffee by the door, so there was another goodbye to be said. I got the impression that he preferred the more convivial life he had led with me and Chuchu to life in the shadow of Kissinger.

It was a goodbye also to Panama, a little country for which after seven years I had formed a great affection. Five or six times since I began to write this last chapter the telephone has rung and brought me the voice of Chuchu urging me to return. ‘The Nicaraguans want you,’ he always adds as an inducement, which I take with a big grain of salt. But all the same I find myself unable to give him a firm ‘No, no, I can’t come again.’ Although Panama belongs to the past, to a section of my life which is over, I hedge, I prevaricate. Perhaps in three months, I say . . . or four . . . perhaps next year it will be possible, for to pronounce a final ‘no’ to Chuchu would be to dose finally the pages of a book and relegate to a shelf all the memories which it contains of a dead man whom I loved, Omar Torrijos.

POSTSCRIPT

I have been perhaps unduly sceptical of any part played by the CIA in the death of Omar Torrijos. Since writing this book a document has reached me which is apparently a minority report dated 11 June 1980 addressed to the State Department in Washington.

The writer, or writers, speak of the vital importance of Panama for the United States in connection with El Salvador. ‘General Torrijos, who continues to exercise control over the armed forces and veto power over government policies, is described in our character profiles as “volatile, unpredictable . . . a populist demagogue with a visceral anti-American bias . . . and a penchant for the bottle”, hardly the description of a reliable ally. Our precarious situation in Panama was recently evidenced by President Royo’s public condemnation of our training programme for the Salvadoreans.

‘Consider the following additional bonds between Panama and El Salvador:

*
Although initially supportive of the 10.15.79 coup, General Torrijos – and the Panamanian Government – have improved ties with the FDR/DRU moderates [on the left].

*
Panama’s economic difficulties and its dependence on the US banking community make it potentially responsive to our pressure. However, the same factors, combined with our tendency to act heavy-handedly, may encourage a resurgence of “anti-Imperialist” sentiment.

*
In the past six months, Panama has been expressing its displeasure on a number of issues related to perceived grievances linked to the implementation of the treaties.

*
General Torrijos is in a position to assert control over two key tactical resources in any direct US military operations in the region: the canal and the bases.’

Another document issued a month earlier by the Council of Inter-American Security at 305 4th Street, Washington, speaks of ‘the brutally aggressive extreme Left dictatorship of Omar Torrijos’ and criticizes President Carter’s friendly relationship with Torrijos. Neither of these reports would have affected that relationship – Carter would have known with what bias and inaccuracy they had been written, but by the end of the year Reagan had come to power.

So it is that I begin to wonder whether the rumour current in Panama of a bomb concealed in a tape recorder which was carried unwittingly by a security guard in Omar Torrijos’s plane is to be totally discounted. I cannot but remember the explosive EverReady torch and Walt Disney picnic box which I saw in Managua. The plane was a Canadian plane and Canadian experts examined the wreckage. I would much like to read their report. I am told that they found no sign of engine trouble which leaves us with the alternative, a pilot’s error or a bomb.

Footnotes

To return to the corresponding text, click on the asterisk and reference number

Part IV

^*As a slow writer I find it difficult to keep up with the changing events in Central America. Even a footnote written in November 1983 will probably be out of date when this book is published. Pastora proved for a time to be a more dangerous figure than I thought. After establishing his headquarters in Nicaragua dose to the Costa Rican border he even acquired some small planes. One was shot down over Managua where it was trying to bomb the home of the Foreign Minister, Father D’Escoto, and another bombed the small Pacific port of Corinto. But then, clinging to the last shreds of his promise, he refused the demand of the CIA that in return for their support he should join the main counter-revolutionary organization which contained members of the old Somoza National Guard, and he withdrew – for how long? – from the scene of action.

Epilogue

^*Chuchu was with him when he saw the Pope, and he introduced Chuchu as ‘my Minister of Defence’.

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