Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement Read online

  It was as though I had opened a door to the General’s confidence. His whole manner eased. No one with a great-uncle like that could possibly be an intellectual.

  My grandfather, after he had returned home to Bedfordshire, I went on, never shook off his memories of St Kitts and finally in old age he left his wife and children to return there and die. I described the two graves side by side which I had visited and the church which resembled an old English parish church.

  Perhaps the General was thinking of my story when later that afternoon he remarked to me of his own country, ‘When you find grass uncut in a village cemetery you know it is a bad village. If they don’t look after the dead, they won’t look after the living.’ I think it was the nearest he ever came to a religious statement, unless one counts the dream he told me two years later. ‘I dreamt I saw my father on the other side of the street. I called out to him, “Father, what is death like?” and he started to cross the street in spite of the traffic and I shouted to warn him and then I woke up.’

  The whole atmosphere had indeed changed. When I told the General that Señor V’s chauffeur could speak no English he at once appointed Chuchu as my guide. ‘He will take you anywhere you want. Forget Señor V.’ And so during the next four years Chuchu was always there at the airport to meet me, and we did indeed literally go wherever I wanted, whether in Panama, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, whether the trips entailed a plane, a helicopter or a car.

  That morning, however, Torrijos made the choice. He wanted to spend some hours in Contadora, one of the Pearl Islands, where the Shah of Iran was later to be held in a kind of house arrest with Chuchu as his guard before he was dispatched to Egypt and his death. At the airport we had to wait while the General’s plane was prepared and two small children insisted on playing with Torrijos. I was to notice later that he had an odd attraction for children. They were going with their mother on the commercial flight, but, perhaps because she was a pretty young woman, Torrijos invited the three of them to join our party.

  At the hotel where we were to lunch the General left us for a rendezvous, which I suspected, perhaps wrongly, to be an amorous one. After eating we drove round the island, of which a large part was still virgin forest, and presently Torrijos rejoined us. He seemed relaxed and I felt reasonably sure that I detected in his face ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’. He was no longer on his guard against intellectuals. He even expressed his admiration for the novels of García Márquez and the poems of a certain romantic, but in Chuchu’s eyes inferior, Spanish poet.

  At that moment a beautiful Colombian tourist came up and spoke to him, telling him that she was a singer, and she acted on him like a glass of his favourite whisky, which I was to learn was Johnnie Walker’s Black Label. I was not surprised when he told me a few days later that he had taken his plane to Colombia for a date with her at the airport at Bogotá.

  After she left yet another child came up and thrust his father’s visiting card into the General’s pocket and demanded one of his in return and the General let him have his way, just as he allowed a fat journalist, whom I recognized from Diederich’s description as the suspect survivor from the days of Arias, to intrude on our party. I could see the dislike on Chuchu’s face, but the General continued to talk frankly, as though there were no potential spy present, of the negotiations with the United States. ‘If the French had built the Canal as planned,’ he said, ‘de Gaulle would have returned it. If Carter does not restart the negotiations promptly, measures must be taken. The year 1977 is the year when our patience and their excuses will be exhausted.’ He spoke as though Panama and the United States were equal powers, and in a way he believed it.

  The General had good reason for impatience. He referred to the riots of 1964 when the National Guard stayed in their barracks and left the students in charge. The young officer Torrijos had watched the guards’ inaction with a sense of shame. ‘It is a good thing,’ he said, ‘that Vance is Carter’s Secretary of State. He was in Panama City when the rioting began and we had to smuggle him out of his hotel into the Zone, so he knows what a Panama riot can be like. He was a very frightened man.’ He added, ‘If the students break into the Zone again I have only the alternative of crushing them or leading them. I will not crush them.’ Then he made a remark which he was fond of repeating: ‘I don’t want to enter into history. I want to enter into the Canal Zone.’ Well, he did enter it, though on terms not as satisfactory as he had hoped, and it is possible that he paid for his success with his life.

  We are too apt to class together the generals of South and Central America. Torrijos was a lone wolf. In his diplomatic struggle with the USA he had no support from Videla of the Argentine, Pinochet of Chile, Banzer of Bolivia – the authoritarian generals who held their power with the aid of the United States, and who only existed at all because in the eyes of the Americans they represented anti-Communism. Torrijos was no Communist, but he was a friend and admirer of Tito and he was on good personal terms with Fidel Castro who kept him supplied with excellent Havana cigars, the bands printed with his name, and gave him advice to be prudent, unwelcome advice which he followed with reluctance. His country had become a haven of safety for refugees from Argentina, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and his dream, as I was to learn in the years that followed, was of a social democratic Central America which would be no menace to the United States, but completely independent. However, the nearer he came to success, the nearer he came to death.

  That sunny afternoon on Contadora, after the rendezvous in the hotel, he was happy and reckless in his conversation. It was only later that I thought I could read the premonition of death in his eyes – a death which was not only the end of his dream of moderate socialism but perhaps the end of any hope of a reasonable peace in Central America.

  It was here on the island of Contadora that negotiations with the United States had for years dragged along their slow length. Once again a delegation was about to arrive for talks, as usual led by old Mr Elsworth Bunker, a former ambassador in South Vietnam: they were to stay for a week on this pleasant tourist island, where it had become a habit to hold the parleys, and then they would go home for another year. Not much was expected of them. Gloria Emerson in her admirable book on Vietnam wrote of Bunker, ‘For seven years he had never faltered in supporting and augmenting American policy in Vietnam. He was thought of – in the kindest terms – as a fierce, cold, stubborn man. To the Vietnamese he was known as “the Refrigerator”.’

  4

  Next day Diederich and I took the train which joins Panama City to Colón on the Atlantic side. The gold rush in the Forties to California had created the railway, which was built at the cost of thousands of lives.

  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.

  Los botaron

  De Vietnam

  Los tenemos

  Ahora en Cuba

  Dalés Cuba

  Dalés duro

  Panamá

  Dalés duro

  Venezuela

  Dalés duro

  Puerto Rico

  Dalés duro

  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 cou
ntry. 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.