Getting to Know the General (3 page)

The stations at both ends of the track were in the American Zone and the railway had a nostalgic appeal. It seemed to belong to an innocent American past. The railway officials wore wide-brimmed hats which might have dated from the Civil War, and during a leisurely progress in a steam train through the Zone from the Pacific to the Atlantic, with glimpses of lakes and jungle, we had the impression of going backwards in time. For a little while we belonged to the unhurried age of Victoria, and when we left the station at Cristóbal and, by passing from one side of the street to the other, left the Zone and re-entered the Republic at Colón, we were still in the nineteenth century, walking under the beautiful balconied wooden houses which the French built at the time of de Lesseps. They had degenerated into slums without losing their beauty.

We had made a rendezvous with Chuchu for lunch at the Washington Hotel, for we wanted to go back by car through the Zone, where a small section of the old gold trail still exists. Diederich had need of film and we stopped at a photographic store and asked the way to the hotel. ‘You have only to go straight on to the end of the street,’ we were told.

It was a very long street and a very empty one. Only an occasional lounging figure broke the solitude at a side street corner, and we had walked perhaps a few hundred yards when we came on a group of Panamanian police standing beside a police van. One of them asked us peremptorily, ‘Where are you going?’

I wanted to give a rude response, but luckily Diederich spoke first. ‘The Washington Hotel,’ he said.

‘Get in the van.’

A policeman sat down beside us. I had the impression that we had been arrested, but why? We drove off down the long street.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘To the Washington Hotel, of course.’

Only then did the officer explain. ‘You shouldn’t be carrying your camera like that,’ he told Diederich. ‘This is a very bad street for thieves. They are armed with knives and they are on the look-out for tourists with cameras. You wouldn’t have got to the hotel.’

‘Why didn’t they warn us at the camera shop where we bought film?’

‘Oh, probably they expected to get your camera very cheap from the thieves. We’ve had to kill one or two of them this week.’

I felt that, like Secretary of State Vance, we were learning a little about Panama, though I had been warned in advance by that best and frankest of all guide books,
The South American Handbook
: ‘Mugging, even in daylight, is a real threat in both Colón and Cristóbal.’

The Washington Hotel looks out over the Atlantic with the classical beauty of its age – it was built in 1913 – the year when the American Canal was completed though not yet opened. I couldn’t help feeling a little ashamed when we were delivered at the door by a police van, but shame soon passed with the help of an excellent planter’s punch, for we were now on the Caribbean side of Panama, in the company of Chuchu.

Over lunch we learnt a little more of Chuchu’s past. In 1968, when the
coup d’état
took place, he began to feel that as a professor of Marxist philosophy he might be in some danger, so he departed for France where he gained a degree in mathematics at the Sorbonne. When news reached him that the fascist colleague of Torrijos had in his turn been put on a plane to Miami, he returned to Panama. They would no longer accept him as a Marxist professor, but they made him a professor of mathematics instead. On a later occasion he showed me a short book he had published with the title,
The Theory of Insinity
.

‘What on earth is insinity?’ I asked.

‘Oh, well, you see, I had lost a front tooth and when I was lecturing I found I was saying “insinity”.’

But how, I asked, had he become a sergeant in the General’s security guard?

The square Mayan features lit up with the pleasure of memory: he had told us with gleeful satisfaction that he was 50 per cent Mayan Indian, 30 per cent Spanish, 10 per cent Negro and a bit of a mixture for the 10 per cent which remained. He was interested in photography, he said, and he went once for a night to visit the camp of the Wild Pigs, a force specially formed by Torrijos for guerrilla fighting in the jungle and the mountains, to take some pictures of them. He was woken at five in the morning by the tramp of the new trainees, a thousand strong, who were singing a defiant song against the United States. No one man had written the song. It was improvised a little by every new squad to go with the beat of the feet. The theme was this:

I remember that 9 January when they massacred my people, students armed only with stones and sticks, but I am a man now and I carry a gun. Give the order, my general, and we will go into the Zone, we will push them into the water, where the sharks can eat
mucho Yanqui, mucho Yanqui
.

He had recorded the song on a cassette which he now played to us. He was so exhilarated by the song that he went to the commanding officer and told him that he wanted to join the Wild Pigs. The officer said he was too old to stand the rigorous training, but that morning the General happened to visit the camp from the house he had nearby at Farallón on the Pacific shore and the officer said to him as a joke that a professor was there who wanted to enlist. The General spoke to Chuchu ‘in a very mean way’ and then gave orders to the officer, ‘Let the old fool try.’

Try he did and survived the severity of the training. They wanted to make him an officer, but he refused – so the General appointed him as a sergeant in his security guard to be on duty out of the university term. I was soon to realize the great trust in which the General held him, a trust he didn’t feel for his Chief of Staff, Colonel Flores. The General had a respect for literature and it helped that Chuchu was a poet as well as a mathematician and a professor. Torrijos even gave Chuchu permission to draw on his account, so that without openly involving the General he was able to help many a refugee who had escaped from Somoza in Nicaragua, from Videla in Argentina, or from Pinochet in Chile.

Chuchu remained faithful to Marxism, but his first fidelity was always to Torrijos in spite of the General’s belief in social democracy which to Chuchu must have seemed a cup of very lukewarm tea. Once that year when the three of us were together and the eternal question of the Canal negotiations came up, Chuchu burst out, ‘I want a confrontation, not a treaty,’ and then looked nervously across at the General, where he lay resting in his hammock, as though he had suddenly remembered that he was in uniform with only a sergeant’s stripes. The General replied quietly, ‘I am of your opinion,’ for the General’s social democracy was never lukewarm. It was a dream, of course; if you like, a romantic dream.

5

There is a charisma which comes from hope – a hope for victory against odds – Castro and Churchill are obvious examples. Torrijos was totally unaware of his very different charisma – the charisma of near despair. To be only forty-eight and to feel time running out – not in action but in prudence: to be establishing a new system of government: to be edging slowly towards social democracy by means that required infinite patience (and yet in his travels he hadn’t even the patience to take a canoe or wait for a bridge over a river – he would jump in and swim across): to live day by day with the Canal problem, dreaming, as a soldier, of the simple confrontation of violence and yet to act all the same with that damnable long-drawn-out prudence which Fidel Castro advised . . . it wasn’t easy. He said to me once, ‘And I thought when I had the power I would be free.’

Would he, I often wondered during the next four years, have the time to establish his social democracy? In England, I think, more than ever before, we are prepared to recognize other forms of democracy, even under a military chief of state, than our parliamentary one, which worked satisfactorily for about two hundred years in the special circumstances of those two hundred years. Panama had already evolved a very different form of democracy.

In the Assembly of the Panama Republic there were 505 representatives elected by regional votes. In order to stand for election a candidate had to have at least twenty-five letters of support. The elected representatives met only once a year for a month in the capital to report on their regions and to vote on legislation. The rest of the time they had to live with their constituents and their problems. (No mere weekend ‘surgery’ in the English fashion for them. I had an impression that there might well be a bigger turnover of representatives than of our MPs.) A Legislative Council of about fifteen members toured the regions during the year and discussed with the representatives the legislation on which the Assembly would vote. The representatives could belong to any political faith, but each one was meant to represent his region and not his party.

Ministers were appointed by the chief of state – Torrijos smiled when I said to him that a man could choose his enemies but not his friends, for he had a number of reactionaries among his ministers, chosen for tactical reasons. The General, like the members of his Legislative Council, was constantly on the move, listening to the complaints, taking with him the ministers concerned who had to reply to the people. The system might well work in Panama, a small country. It was closer to the democracy of the Athenian
agora
then to the democracy of the House of Commons, and not for that reason to be despised. It may even have been a step away from true democracy when, after the signing of the Treaty, to please the United States, the General formed his own party to fight an old-style parliamentary election with the old labels, Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, Communists.

After we returned from Colón, I went to a typical meeting between electors and representatives in El Chorillo, one of the poorest sections of Panama City. The representative of El Chorillo spoke at inordinate length, and the electors’ complaints reached down even to petty details like the slack behaviour of the man in charge of the local swimming baths. You could see how bored the General was by the way he twisted the cigar in his mouth – one of the good Havanas provided for him by Castro. I thought of all the hours of meetings like this which he must suffer as he moved around the country. Propaganda posters hung on the walls – ‘Omar has his ideal – total liberation. They have not yet launched a projectile which can kill an ideal.’ ‘The country with a fifth frontier.’ ‘El Chorillo – the Avenue of the Martyrs.’ (I remembered that it was in El Chorillo, which abuts on the Canal Zone, that eighteen students lost their lives in 1964.)

Everyone in the crowded hall was glad when the representative left the podium. The meeting sprang to life. A coloured girl, dragging an old silent woman in her wake, shrieked like a voodoo-possessed dancer and flung her arms around her head – the old lady, she told us, was seventy-six and still working for the government and she had no pension. The points of the speeches now were underlined by the drums of supporters and that made the scene even more like Haitian voodoo. A Negro speaker talked with great dignity and confidence: ‘We have the moral authority of those who work for low wages.’ Again and again the Zone cropped up in the speeches – ‘We are waiting to go in, we are with you, you have only to give the order,’ and all the drums rolled. The General no longer twisted his cigar.

An important complaint emerged. A number of high-rise flats had been built with the inevitable sabotage of lifts and windows that we have experienced in England and France. High-rise flats are for the rich who can escape to theatres and restaurants and parties, not for the poor who are condemned to live in isolation. Moreover, the charge for these flats was beyond the tenants’ means, so that they were in debt. The General told his Minister of Housing to reply and a very bad job he made of it. The General asked for more information. A girl spoke up with anger, a woman had hysterics, the drums beat.

There were complaints next about the health service – the Minister of Health indignantly defended his doctors. He made a better impression than the Minister of Housing. A young magistrate demanded better security in the streets. The hours passed.

The General took his turn to speak, but not from the podium. He balanced on the giddy edge of the platform, a glass of water in his hand, a swim of faces dose below him – not much security there. An officer of the National Guard sat immobile on the platform chewing gum like an American colonel.

The untrustworthy journalist who had joined us on the island elbowed his way to my side, and I asked him, ‘Who is that officer?’

‘He is Colonel Flores, the Chief of Staff. A very loyal man like his father before him. He too was very loyal.’

But loyal to whom, I wondered? Loyal to President Arias?

It was the General’s first meeting in the slums of El Chorillo and El Chorillo was going to have its say. The faces might appear fierce and fanatical and angry but they were friendly. ‘We know you very well, here, General. We see you driving by every week to buy your lottery ticket.’ Laughter and the drums laughed too.

Afterwards a rumour was spread, by one who had attended the meeting and knew it was a lie, that the General was drunk with vodka (not his choice of drink) and had fallen off the platform. One chooses one’s enemies . . .

That night I dined with Chuchu and one of his refugees – an Argentinian woman who had fled from the regime of Videla to the security of Panama. We had a not very good dinner (good meals were not common in Panama) beside the Pacific under a sky of stars with a bottle of Chilean wine. ‘It has to be of the years before Pinochet, an Allende year,’ Chuchu demanded of the waiter, and I felt happy and at home, and my happiness was only a little diminished by the thought of how brief my stay was to be. I little thought that I would be returning and returning and returning . . .