Omar Torrijos
Omar Efraín Torrijos Herrera (February 13, 1929 – July 31, 1981) was a Panamanian army officer and the de facto leader of Panama from 1968 to 1981. Torrijos never held elected office in Panama, and was never president. He did hold the title of "Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution" during a period in the late 1970s.
Torrijos is best known for negotiating the treaties that eventually gave Panama full sovereignty over the Panama Canal, in 1978.
His illegitimate son, Martín Torrijos Espino, won the presidential election on 2 May 2004 and took office on September 1, 2004.
Background
Torrijos was born in Santiago in the province of Veraguas, the sixth of twelve children. He was educated at the local Juan Demóstenes Arosemena school and won a scholarship to the military academy in San Salvador. He graduated with a commission as a second lieutenant. He joined the Panamanian army, the National Guard (Guardia Nacional), in 1952. He was promoted to captain in 1956 and studied further at the School of the Americas.
Career
He had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel by 1966 and in 1968 he and Major Boris Martínez led a successful coup d'état against the democratically-elected president, Arnulfo Arias (Arias himself had led a coup in 1931). Although a two-man junta was appointed, Martinez and Torrijos were the true leaders from the beginning. Soon after the coup, Torrijos was promoted to full colonel and named commandant of the National Guard. They barred all political activity and shut down the legislature. They also seized control of three newspapers owned by Arias' brother, Harmodio and blackmailed the owners of the country's oldest newspaper, La Estrella de Panama, into becoming a government mouthpiece.
In the internal power struggle that followed Torrijos emerged victorious — he exiled Martínez in 1969 and promoted himself to brigadier general. The move came with the tacit backing of the United States, which shared the concerns of many officers that Martínez was too radical. Torrijos consolidated his power by persecuting leaders of student and labor groups and conducting a ruthless anti-guerrilla campaign in Western Panama. In 1972, the regime called for controlled election of an assembly with a single opposition member. The new assembly approved a new Constitution and elected Demetrios Lakas as president. However, the new document made Torrijos the actual head of government, with near-absolute powers for six years.
Torrijos was regarded by his supporters as the first Panamanian leader to represent the majority population of Panama, which is poor, Spanish-speaking, and of mixed heritage (of indigenous, Hispanic, and African descent) — as opposed to the light-skinned social elite, often referred to as rabiblancos ("white-tails"), who had long dominated the commerce and political life of Panama. He opened many schools and opened job opportunities for the less fortunate. Torrijos instituted a range of social and economic reforms to improve the lot of the poor, redistributed agricultural land and persecuted the richest and most powerful families in the country, as well as independent student and labor leaders. It is also well known that when "El General" walked into a bank men would hide their wives and daughters from fear of having the general take them away. In one case he asked a famous designer to decorate the palace, raped her and after her disappearance, her husband mysteriously commited suicide. The reforms were accompanied by an ambitious public works program, financed by foreign banks, and plagued by corruption and nepotism, which turned Panama into one of the countries with highest per capita public indebtedness.
On the debit side, Torrijos was extremely intolerant of political opposition. Many opponents were imprisoned, exiled and killed. It was very common for opponents to be flown in a helicopter over the Pacific Ocean, where they were pushed into the water. Two such well-publicized incidents are the 1971 kidnapping and disappearance of Héctor Gallego, a populist Catholic priest and the disappearance of leftist Floyd Britton. Like many other political prisoners and "enemies" of his regime, Britton was imprisoned under extreme conditions in the Coiba penal colony and beaten to death, according to numerous witnesses. His remains have never been found.
Torrijos also negotiated the Torrijos-Carter Treaties over the Panama Canal, signed on September 7, 1977. These treaties passed United States sovereignty over the canal zone to Panama, with a gradual increase in their control over it, leading to complete control after the year 2000. The United States however, retained the permanent right to protect what they see as the neutrality of the canal.
In 1978, he stepped down as head of the government, but remained de facto ruler of the country while another one of his followers, Aristides Royo was a figurehead president. He also restored some civil liberties; U.S. President Jimmy Carter had told him that the Senate would never approve the Canal treaties unless Torrijos made some effort to liberalize his rule. He planned to return the country to full civilian rule by 1984.[citation needed]
Death
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General Torrijos died with several others when his aircraft, a DeHavilland Twin Otter (DHC-6), exploded during its flight. The aircraft disappeared from radar during severe weather, but due to the limited nature of Panama's radar coverage, the plane was not reported missing for nearly a day. The crash site was located several days later, and the body of General Torrijos was recovered by a Special Forces team in the first few days of August. Following a large state funeral, Torrijos was briefly buried in a cemetery in Casco Viejo (the Old City of Panama), before being moved to a mausoleum in the former Canal Zone near Panama City. He was succeeded as commander of the National Guard and de facto leader of Panama by Florencio Flores Aguilar, who later gave way to Rubén Darío Paredes.
Torrijos' death generated charges and speculation that he was the victim of an assassination plot. For instance, in pre-trial hearings in Miami in May 1991, Manuel Noriega's attorney, Frank Rubino, was quoted as saying "General Noriega has in his possession documents showing attempts to assassinate General Noriega and Mr. Torrijos by agencies of the United States." Those documents were not allowed as evidence in trial, because the presiding judge agreed with the U.S. government's claim that their public mention would violate the Classified Information Procedures Act. More recently, former businessman John Perkins [1], alleges in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that Torrijos was assassinated by American interests, who had a bomb planted aboard his aircraft. The alleged motive is that some American business leaders and politicians strongly opposed the negotiations between Torrijos and a group of Japanese businessmen led by Shigeo Nagano, who were promoting the idea of a new, larger, sea-level canal for Panama. Manuel Noriega, in America's Prisoner, claims that these negotiations had evoked an extremely unfavorable response from American circles. Torrijos died shortly after the inauguration of US President Ronald Reagan, just three months after Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós Aguilera died in strikingly similar circumstances.
Famous quotes
Omar Torrijos is well known in Panama for his famous quotes. Here are some examples:
- "I don't like Communism because it hands out wealth through rationing books.” [2]
- "You may rest assured that in our negotiations with the U.S. you will always find us standing on our feet and never on our knees. Never! Torrijos." [3]
- "I don't want to go into history; I want to go into the Canal Zone.”
- "If I fall, pick up the flag, kiss it, and keep on going.”
- "Those that consult more, make less mistakes"
- "the (Panama Canal) treaty is like a little pebble which we shall be able to carry in our shoe for 23 years, and that is better than the stake we have had to carry in our hearts." [4]
- the Canal Zone is "a tumor that must go through the operating room." [5]
- satisfying all parties (on a new Panama Canal Treaty) would be about as difficult as pleasing the "princess who had big feet and asked a shoemaker to find her a shoe small on the outside and large inside." [6]
External links
- "Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Panama", by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 1978, describes human rights violations by the Torrijos regime.
- An assessment of the career of Omar Torrijos in the context of Panamanian history
References
- Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2004. See pages 156-157 regarding Roldós's alleged assassination.