In the Time of the Tyrants

...That is why so little news appeared about the Cuban soldiers killed in the Canal Zone after attacks on U.S...

...Greene, who knew but a very few words of Spanish, was brought to Panama at the people's expense and filled like a sausage with foolishness by Jose de Jesus Martinez—to the point where he saw Torrijos as a Graham Greene character...

...IN THE TIME OF THE TYRANTS: PANAMA, 1968-1990 R. M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez/W...

...The charges were dropped, but he was charged again a few weeks later and sent to La Modelo prison in Panama City: Everyone in the cell had murdered someone . . . a man who'd been reading a newspaper lifted his gaze and said, "He's Sanchez BorbOn...

...In 1982, they closed the paper, booby-trapped the pressworks, and poured acid into the computers...

...If Carter had notgiven the Canal away, it would not have been given away at all...

...Since Seymour Hersh stumbled upon the My Lai massacre and wrote The Great Vietnam Story from New York City,' major foreign correspondence has come largely from U.S...

...Their assertion that his mass support was largely factitious has been borne out by the way Panamanians have dropped him like a hot potato since Operation Just Cause: Torrijos International Airport was given back its old name—Toctimen—faster than you can say golpe...

...his collection of ceramic toads...

...The United States is lucky it had Torrijos, and very THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 37 lucky it "gave away the Canal...

...Ceaselessly...

...the un-Homeric "all too" lends a cynical note to the description of war and heroism...

...I wish to enter the Canal Zone...

...The vandals got everything—the old uniforms, the Canal treaty documents, the machine guns given as presents by Fidel...

...Across the aisle was La Galera de los Locos (the Gallery of the Madmen)—as if Sanchez's cellmates didn't qualify—where crazies sang and begged and shouted insults...

...22.95 Christopher Caldwell 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 By 1985 Panama had in place a "calumny law" which mandated that anyone charged with bringing disrespect on the PDF could be jailed for five years without trial...

...Despite the fact that Sanchez is a soi-disant "born-again Marxist" and Koster a Democrat, both wholeheartedly supported the December 1989 U.S...

...Sanchez and Koster, while admitting room for speculation, lean towards the most common explanation: that the plane simply hit a mountain during a thunderstorm...

...But Sanchez and Koster never adequately explain how someone of the intelligence and honesty of Hugo Spada-fora could be such a wholehearted torrijista, and they minimize Torrijos's role in the Canal treaties...

...Other prisoners taunted them to see their lunacies, or had them commit perversions for a piece of bread or cigarette in reward...

...Koster and Sanchez are probably correct that keeping the Canal was not in the interests of the United States, but wrong that North Americans would eventually have recognized as much...

...Needless to say, from the moment of its founding, La Prensa was under attack...

...Both, in their confusion, believed Torrijos's fake revolution authentic and supposed him a painful thorn in Uncle Sam's paw...

...It was a preparation for a gang rape...

...Having gone through enough suffering in their opposition to Torrijos and Noriega to fill up a month-long PEN conference, Koster and Sanchez brook no appeasers...

...There is thus a 'Hersh also wrote The Great Panama Story, which appeared in the New York Times on June 12, 1986, detailing Noriega's drug and arms trafficking, his growing personal fortune, and his involvement with the CIA and the intelligence agencies of other countries...

...Tis true I perish, yet I perish great...

...Both despised the United States of America...

...Roberto Diaz Herrera, a disgruntled fellow-thug of Noriega...

...The generals who bled it over two decades of dictatorship—Boris Martinez, Omar Torrijos, Ruben Dario Paredes, and Manuel Antonio Noriega—were a shocking departure...

...his CIA connections and his role as Castro's double agent therein...

...defense of its appeasement of Noriega as being based on ignorance or naivete can be dismissed as cynical or dishonest...

...Sanchez, novelist and author of the "En Pocas Palabras" column in the Panama City daily La Prensa, is the most popular and informative political columnist in the country...

...Later he learned what it signified in La Modelo...

...Those who favor the assassination theory point to the fact that the pattern of debris found at the crash site points to a mid-air explosion, not a crash...

...Noriega foe Hugo Spadafora Franco, the other on the revelations of Col...

...By then, Sanchez's coverage of the Spadafora killing that had got him into big trouble, and he was living in exile in Miami...

...Sanchez and Koster are fairly certain that he organized the abduction and murder of liberation theologist Father Hector Gallego in 1971, and that Noriega killed him personally, by pushing him out of a helicopter while he was still alive...

...The story of how completely it turned a unique and civilized American nation into a shoddy excuse for a country has not...

...W. Norton/430 pp...

...Sanchez, tipped off by a neighbor that the PDF were waiting to arrest him at his house, fled and became the first person to take refuge in the Papal nunciatura, where a far more famous fugitive would repair some four years later...

...Another offered Sanchez the services of his personal catamite, and grew furious when Sanchez refused the offer...

...North American readers will feel like they're in the middle of One Hundred Years of Solitude or a Latin American novel not unlike some of Koster's own, in which two prime ministers can be overthrown in a single afternoon, and dictators are executed by being thrown to sharks...

...invasion in December 1989...

...Koster, a Brooklyn-born novelist who has lived in Panama for over three decades, has been involved in human rights monitoring and Democratic party politics in the United States...

...He writes 'En Pocas Palabras.' I read it whenever I get the chance...

...Perhaps the fault lies not in the translator but in ourselves, a generation that shies away from nobility...

...It tastes great, but it's less filling...

...A ctually, everyone at La Prensa was in big trouble...

...Its existence owed much to Republicans in the U.S...

...That is why one heard so little about the large-scale involvement of Torrijos's brother Moncho (who died last December) in heroin smuggling in the late seventies, and about the Taiwanese who were being allowed to enter Panama at $10,000 a crack in the late eighties...

...The authors put most of the blame on a colorful pantheon of Isthmian villains, and keep anti-American sentiment in check to the extent that one begins to worry that they're being unfair to Panama...

...Signed by Sanchez but written largely by Koster, they were published in Harper's in 1987 and 1988...

...Until that happens, it will be hard to find a better account of Panama's twenty-one years in purgatory than this brave, intelligent, and honest book...

...And the house that Graham Greene visited (along with a veritable battalion of mistresses), which was rechristened the Casa de Recuerdos ("House of Memories") after Torrijos's death, was among the first buildings to be looted in the days following the invasion...

...winning my father great glory, glory for myself...

...Then Sanchez's self-styled protector, whom Sanchez didn't know whether to trust or not (but who, he learned later, was used by the prison guards for their filthiest errands), rummaged in a corner of his cell and in his pockets, and at once there appeared four or five little straws and a small paper plate and on it a mound of cocaine, which his cellmates partook of in quick snorts...

...role in any foreign conflict...

...According to Koster and Sanchez: . . . Graham Greene and Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . . as was their right, were on the left...

...Torrijos, as much the villain of this work as Noriega, is depicted as a whoremonger and boozebag of limited intellect and vision, lazy, a liar, a drug smuggler, and a coward of the worst ilk...

...It was a strange coincidence that brought together a feckless President and a dictator who looks in retrospect like the only person who could have galvanized international support in turning the Canal treaties into an issue of imperialism—for, even if the Torrijos revolution was bogus, the international upshot of it was not...

...Two Panama books that rely heavily on the method have already been published: the excellent Divorcing the Dictator by the Wall Street Journal's Frederick Kempe, and Our Man in Panama by NPR's Dinges...

...As such, it marks a cut-off point after which any U.S...

...Nor was the CIA or Castro, as some have alleged...

...The authors have a weakness for a particularly Latin American type of relentless caricature...

...Had certain figures in the Nixon Administration had their way, it would have been Noriega, not Father Gallego and others, who got "immobilized...

...In fact, the CIA and other agencies are generally less concerned about covering up their involvement than in covering up their incompetence...

...In 1979, one of its left-leaning journalists, Miguel Antonio Bernal, was beaten by agents of the Panama Defense Forces (PDF) until he hemorrhaged...

...All it will take for a complete history of Panama since 1968 to be written will be a full confession by Manuel Antonio Noriega, the files of several dozen intelligence agencies, the ledgers of organized crime syndicates from Tripoli to Taipei, and the resurrection of Omar Torrijos, Hugo Spadafora, and Father Gallego...

...government sources...

...It has proved essentially true in all its details, and all articles written on Noriega since can be seen as mere embellishments on Hersh's central revelations...

...Well let me die...

...On the eve of the coup, Panama was an extremely fortunate country: peaceful, stable, cosmopolitan, democratic, with a free press and an economy growing at eight percent a year...

...tendency to exaggerate grotesquely the U.S...

...The book arose from two articles, one on the torture and beheading of Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...The problem with this kind of writing—ignoring that those who practice it tend to write in the same white-paperese as their sources—is that Libya and Cuba do not have the Freedom of Information Act, and the Medellin cartel is not the world's most talkative multinational when it comes to sharing trade secrets...

...Then another came up, a man in a cap, and began explaining his extraordinary sexual gifts, which were mainly going to waste now with his caging...

...Much of the writing that came out of the Panama crisis was excellent, though...

...It was the first time Sanchez had witnessed that sort of ritual...

...What people on earth puts up with the humiliation of a foreign flag nailed through its heart...

...An unnamed writer, certainly National Public Radio's John Dinges, who has questioned their description of the torture and killing of Spadafora, is "either an apologist for General Noriega or poorly informed or both...

...During the 1968 coup, Torrijos was so frightened of advancing on guardia headquarters that his friend, mafioso and future president Demetrio "Jimmy" Lakas, had to pull a gun on him to keep him from fleeing to the safety of the Canal Zone...

...Koster and Sanchez mention with irrepressible glee that the only war wounds suffered by the Maximum Leader were in the gluteus maximus: a few shotgun pellets in the buttocks sustained while fleeing a handful of ill-armed student protesters in Veraguas province in 1959...

...his opening of the $5 million cocaine refinery in Darien province and the outrage of the Medellin cartel when he had to arrest a few of their operatives to impress the DEA...

...But Graham Greene also spoke highly of Diaz in Getting to Know the General, his "Torrijos memoir" in which Torrijos appears for a total of about five pages...

...The story of the dictatorship has been told before...

...This is great journalistic legwork, which other journalists have been inexplicably unwilling to do: last December, for example, USA Today bragged that an article it had published by one Sam Meddis "demonstrates, for the first time, that Noriega had amassed a fortune of at least $31.5 million...

...Senate, who argued in the late 1970s that, if Panama were to take over the Canal, it ought to have some of the trappings of liberty —a free press, for example...

...How different is this same passage in Pope: " . . . Then welcome fate...

...Way to dig, guys...

...This seems fair, given that Dinges saw fit in his book to describe Torrijos's cousin Roberto Diaz Herrera —by the most charitable estimate a crank and a sadist—as "the sharpest political mind in the Panama Defense Forces...

...Then they burned the place to the ground...

...They do not believe Noriega was responsible for the plane accident that killed Torrijos in 1981...

...In 1981, plain-clothes goons broke into the plant and destroyed all the typewriters and smashed all the windows...

...The paper had been founded by Roberto Eisenmann in 1980, scion of an old Panamanian Jewish family...

...Further, as David Brock has been the only American writer to point out, in an article that appeared in Commentary last June, "Noriega's rise in the middle-1970s was not a function of CIA complicity but rather coincided with the CIA's decline...

...installations in March and April 1988 and during the December 1989 invasion...

...All the Noriega stories are here: his acne, which left his face looking "like the landscape at Verdun...

...When Hector sees that the gods have deserted him and death approaches, Fagles's translation makes his words seem more resigned than they need be: "So now I meet my doom...

...The Parque Omar is now a conspicuously nameless adjunct to the Parque Porras...

...his bisexuality...

...Fagles has given us a translation appropriate to an unheroic age...

...his rape and near-murder of a Peruvian prostitute in the late 1950s...

...invasion, although they add that "if the annals of human stupidity ever come to be written, the CIA's involvement with Manuel Noriega will surely figure prominently in them...

...The authors do a meticulous job of accounting, and come up with an estimate of Noriega's net worth that is far higher than even the most astronomical figures bandied about by the Panamanian opposition: no less than $772 million and probably closer to $1 billion...

...Are they too hard on Torrijos, for example...

...In short, Greene took the precaution of fooling himself before going on to fool others in the New York Review of Books...

...W hat moderate North Americans will fmd newest in this book is its reappraisal of the Torrijos "revolution," a hazily defined program of agrarian reform, deep foreign borrowing, and top-down labor organization, couched in the dulcet rhetoric of Torrijos, which titillated liberals from the Beltway to the Bundestag: "I do not wish to enter history...