Taking Note
MF
Henry Morgan II, or The Preppie Pirate AT APPROXIMATELY 4 P.M. ON MAY 1, A crypt containing the remains of Panama's national hero, Gen. Omar Torrijos, was opened and his ashes were stolen. In an...
...Her tireless dedication to the struggles of Third World women raised the consciousness of the North American Left...
...Torrijos is closely identified with the nation itself...
...The El Paso businessmen are convinced Villa's head lies in this trophy room of the old Yankee oligarchy...
...Torrijos' body was placed in a monument-like mausoleum on Fort Amador, the joint U.S.-Panamanian military base at the mouth of the Canal...
...Many of the original OSS and CIA operatives were recruited from its ranks...
...Southern Command, however, conceded in March that only 50 of the dead were actually military personnel...
...Skull and Bones is open only to the elite of the elite...
...The head was given up for lost until recently, when a group of retired businessmen in El Paso discovered the unpublished memoirs of a deceased local rancher...
...When he tired of the killing, he burned the city to the ground...
...others had been mutilated beyond recognition...
...The U.S...
...After identification the cadavers were placed in coffins and returned to the earth...
...He guided Panama out of the thinly veiled colonialism in which it had languished ever since Washington engineered the country's independence from Colombia in 1903...
...They had been buried hastily by U.S...
...They hope to convince Bush to return the head as a gesture of good will toward Mexico...
...Many Panamanians attribute his death to the CIA, and to the Agency's primary contact in Panama, Manuel Antonio Noriega...
...George Bush is a member...
...And his home in downtown Panama City was turned into a museum with all the characteristics of a patriotic shrine...
...Thanks to her, our understanding and our lives are incomparably richer...
...The precision of the attack left little doubt as to the intended target...
...Most importantly, he convinced the United States to return the nation's only significant resource: the Canal...
...In an arm's-length account characteristic of Panama's post-invasion "free press," the daily La Prensa reported: "It was known that the person who looked after the Torrijos remains made a statement to the effect that the theft could have been committed by two white-skinned persons with a foreign accent...
...FEW DAYS BEFORE TORRIJOS' GRAVE WAS defiled, Panamanian judicial officials opened another grave at a cemetery across town...
...And it would certainly be in keeping with his cavalier devastation of Panama...
...There is something terribly preppie about the theft of Torrijos' remains, somehow appropriate for the president's persona...
...T ORRIJOS WAS NOT THE FIRST ENEMY OF the Empire whose remains were disappeared...
...Guillermo Endara, the corporate lawyer who began his term as Panama's president at the U.S...
...The attorney general refused to allow autopsies to be performed...
...According to the Association of Families of the Dead and Disappeared, which requested the exhumation, there are at least 14 other common graves, which the Association claims could contain as many as 3,000 bodies...
...invasion the Torrijos Museum was bombed from the air...
...Some bodies had name tags...
...The Apache Tribe waged a long and ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit to retrieve the skull of their legendary leader Geronimo from the Society's headquarters on the Yale campus...
...others bore identifying signs-a piece of clothing, a tattoo, a gold tooth, a ring...
...troops in the days following the invasion...
...During the first hours of the U.S...
...But like with all of Bush's adventures, we'll never know for sure...
...Then relatives of the general began receiving phone calls from persons who threatened to desecrate his tomb...
...But as with so many things, the president may know more than he lets on...
...As Mark Singer reported in The New Yorker last fall, the rancher claimed to have known the man who robbed Villa's grave...
...Neither did George Bush...
...For many if not most poor Panamanians, the figure of Gen...
...Officially the United States insists that a total of 203 civilians and 304 soldiers died in the invasion...
...the homes and gardens on either side were left untouched...
...Endara personifies the return of that oligarchy on the coat-tails of the U.S...
...The operation, the man told him, was financed by a 150-year-old secret society at Yale University, the Skull and Bones Society...
...Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa's grave was pillaged a few years after his assassination in 1923, and the head removed from his body...
...Torrijos' 1968 coup d'etat brought an end to decades of white minority rule...
...B OBBYE ORTIZ, A MEMBER OF NACLA'S board of directors, died on June 15...
...Nearly all of the faces had been destroyed...
...Our twentieth century Morgan is a kinder gentler buccaneer...
...On February 17, his family exhumed the body, had it cremated, and deposited the ashes in a crypt in the National Cemetery, from where they were ultimately stolen...
...Army's Fort Clayton on the eve of last December's invasion, was in Washington at the time and had no immediate comment...
...This one was a common grave, 100 feet long by 20 feet wide and ten feet deep, containing 123 bodies in green plastic bags...
...Torrijos was influential in helping the Sandinista Revolution reach victory...
...The bodies were removed one by one, so that the hundred-odd family members gathered under the hot sun could identify their loved ones...
...Army...
...Bobbye's wise counsel will be sorely missed...
...N 1671 BRITISH PIRATE HENRY MORGAN captured Panama City for 28 days of looting and pillaging...
...Torrijos often said he did not want to enter the history books, only the Canal Zone...
...Torrijos died in a mysterious plane crash in 1979, a year after he retired as head of state...
Vol. 24 • June 1990 • No. 1
