WINNING THE CANAL BUT LOSING THE COUNTRY?: Introduction: Torrijos and his Populist Alliance
The regime of Omar Torrijos has been applauded by many within and outside Panama as "revolutionary." Torrijos himself indulged in flirting with this image. Being, or at least seeming,...
...2 In the case of Torrijos this alliance was dominated by transnational finance capital and took the form of a civil-military regime...
...Unlike Peron in Argentina who counted primarily on the urban workers and masses in his bid to undermine the political power of the landed oligarchy, Torrijos relied largely on the rural masses themselves...
...By the late 1960s this oligarchy had failed to meet the economic needs of a rapidly increasing urban population, to modernize the agrarian sector or to address the middle class quest for more political participation.' Even more important, in 1967 it failed in its efforts to secure a treaty with the United States which would decolonize the Canal Zone...
...In fact he soon emerged as a populist leader from a fairly classic mold, willing only to push for certain reforms in the areas of labor, land tenure, education and politics which would in no way threaten the foundations of the existing social relations of production or give real political power to the masses...
...The Panamanian military, under then Colonel Torrijos, took power in October 1968, following a crisis of the political rule that had been traditionally exercised by a few related families in Panama...
...domination over both the private an public sector of Panamanian society, an more importantly by the dependence of th regime on transnational finance capital...
...This difference is of course due to important differences in the economic structures of the two countries...
...These projects, financed by the World Bank and funneled through Panama's Agricultural Development Bank, served to deepen capitalist relations in the agricultural sector...
...The rural sector, with more of the population working as small farmers, rural proletariat or landless peasantry has been dominated by the latifundists (the large, usually backward, landholding elite), primarily through their control of credit and distribution...
...After more than ten years of governing Panama, and particularly after Torrijos capitulated to a neo-colonial solution to the Panama Canal question, it has become clear that there was nothing revolutionary in Torrijos' approach to the pressing social, political and economic questions that confronted him when he took power...
...One is the heterogeneous nature of the class alliance that supports it, including labor, urban masses, peasantry, middle classes and the more advanced fraction of the bourgeoisie...
...Decolonizing the Canal Zone and controlling the Canal administration were the new regime's most important political objectives...
...Torrijos, in an effort to break the political control of the latifundists, sought to organize the various fractions of the rural sector into state-sponsored rice production collectives (Asentamientos Campesinos), agrarian production teams (Juntas Agrarias de Produccion) and cooperatives...
...5) promoting Panama as an international financial center based on existing national and foreign banks...
...While 48% of Panama's 1.75 million population is urban, they are largely service workers, underemployed and unemployed...
...4) exploitation of mineral resources recently discovered on the Atlantic zone...
...A second aspect of populism is the relative weight of the various classes, fractions of classes or groups within that alliance...
...The new production units, together with several state-owned sugar mills, were aimed at cheapening food staples and increasing sugar exports...
...Being, or at least seeming, revolutionary has been an asset during certain moments of his regime's history...
...I 20SeptOct 1979 Torrijos' acceptance of a Canal treaty th2 contains far less than he had hoped for can b explained by examining the scope and dept of U.S...
...Its economic objectives were outlined five weeks after seizing state power: ') the vigorous broadening of the Colon Free Zone operations...
...But more immediately, they displaced the latifundists as the political brokers in the rural sector, replacing them with the Torrijos regime as the primary source of credit, transportation and marketing facilities...
...POPULISM IN PANAMA There are two important aspects of populism as a political phenomenon that are particularly relevant to the Torrijos regime...
...3) tourism...
...6) rational and prudent continuation of the import substitution policy...
Vol. 13 • September 1979 • No. 5
