Bombing Out in Panama
KOROCHENKO, M.
THE UN ROAD SHOW Bombing Out in Panama BY M. KOROCHENKO Panama City The mise en scene provided by "strong man" Omar Torrijos Herrera and his ubiquitous national guardsmen struck just the right...
...While the Third Worlders were working frantically to bring the U.S...
...Or the newsmen were short of copy: The story that Torrijos threatened Scali with violence in the event of a U.S...
...Meanwhile, the sideshows were in full swing...
...The David and Goliath scenario ought to have been a natural: pitiful-giant U.S...
...The opening act was promising enough...
...the veto threat had already been made, outside the Council chamber...
...it could be worse next time...
...With the session approaching its close, a strange schizophrenia afflicted the Council's proceedings...
...The French and British, exhibiting their respective flairs for pomposity and polite distaste, managed to give the same impression...
...The strip is not even a colonial enclave, as the Panamanians keep calling it...
...Indeed, Malik admirably conveyed the benign indifference of a great power whose heart is in the right place but whose interests are not involved at all...
...In the end, the Panamanians seemed to lose their heads...
...As the speeches droned on and the indifference of the great powers became unmistakeable, the Panamanians began to show signs of desperation...
...China was the first permanent member to come down off the fence, passionlessly repeating the standard line: the valiant struggle of the heroic Panamanian people against U.S...
...Scali himself was carefully noncommittal...
...Draft resolutions calling for abrogation of the 1903 treaty were feverishly canvassed...
...veto, the explanations of vote, the statutory skirmish between Malik and Huang Hua of China, and the approval of the President's summary statement (10 pages of careful oratio obliqua: some delegations felt . . . others expressed the view . . .), the Council headed out into the humid night for the last time...
...delegation...
...The sole object of interest in Panama being the canal, the entire company was packed aboard a yacht loaded with booze, dancing girls in native dress, and a band whose spastic thump-thump was to haunt the delegates everywhere they went...
...in the dock arraigned by this tiny country, backed by a Greek chorus of Latin Americans intoning that special South-of-the-border litany about Bolivar the Liberator and unswerving-devotion-to-the-norms-of-international-law...
...veto is hard to believe...
...Again and again the Council was suspended for "consultations" that went nowhere...
...This presumably accounted for the—to some—surprising truculence of the U.S...
...Foreign Minister Juan Antonio Tack threw diplomatic niceties to the winds and delivered a gloves-off address detailing U.S...
...Which, in due course, it did...
...Panama has a strong argument...
...the question of who owns and operates the canal, and more particularly who exercises sovereignty in the 10-mile-wide zone, is primarily symbolic...
...After the U.S...
...It may be significant that Brazil, the single Latin American country with great-power ambitions, stayed away...
...Inside the Palacio Legislativo, TV cables snaked underfoot, and you couldn't go to the John without passing a security check...
...Macdonald's Hamburger joints and branches of First National City are everywhere...
...Fierce Panamanian applause...
...and Panama close enough for compromise, the permanent members were mainly concerned about rigging up some kind of summary statement that would allow them to go home without looking silly...
...This orgy of talk pointed up the interstellar gulf between vociferous small fry and laconic great powers, and the latter's complete indifference —especially marked in the case of M. Korochenko, a previous contributor, is a veteran UN observer...
...Yet the Council definitely bombed in Panama...
...Only the Chinese seemed real...
...The U.S...
...Strategically, too, the waterway is said to be less vital than it once was...
...Was his espousal of Cuba and Chile a purely tactical alliance, his quotation from Amilcar Cabral (recently assassinated leader of the independence movement in Portuguese Guinea) simply a rhetorical flourish...
...Today the locks are not wide enough to accommodate hundreds of the world's largest vessels, making its commercial importance debatable...
...imperialism, resolute support, final victory, etc...
...The canal was completed in 1914, and its operation is robustly primitive...
...delegation stayed impassive while the tides of rhetoric ebbed and flowed in the Council, Scali breaking his dour silence only to brush off Cuba's Raul Roa: We're making friends with your friends, watch out, you're being outflanked...
...Soon the boat chugged into a lock, which obligingly went through its paces...
...iniquities, as if determined to read these things into the record before the ship went down under him...
...State Department agrees that it is high time for a new canal treaty...
...As headquarters for the U.S...
...Even the U.S...
...In 1964 about 20 Panamanian students were killed in a clash over the flag...
...THE UN ROAD SHOW Bombing Out in Panama BY M. KOROCHENKO Panama City The mise en scene provided by "strong man" Omar Torrijos Herrera and his ubiquitous national guardsmen struck just the right note of shabby theater for the courtroom drama that unfolded when the UN Security Council met here last month...
...it is part of North America and, barring some spectacular change of heart in Washington, is likely to remain so...
...To both Panama and the U.S...
...The U.S...
...Emissaries from the UN's Decolonization Committee, the Committee on Apartheid, the Arab League, and the Organization of African Unity all put in their two cents' worth, talking earnestly of Third World solidarity and other elevating myths...
...the USSR and China—to Panama's affairs...
...Under the battery of TV lights, General Torrijos (not in uniform, for a change) presented Panama's case forcefully but courteously...
...Scali, as close-mouthed as his boss in the White House, was finally prevailed upon to give a proper press conference, where he made several things perfectly clear...
...John Scali, President Nixon's new UN appointee, was typecast as the wicked uncle, wearing a fixed Dick-ensian scowl and peering over his hornrims with unabashed misanthropy at this lamentable display of anti-Americanism...
...The Canal Zone is heavily Americanized in a honky-tonk, lower Queens Boulevard kind of way...
...Rather than review the history and let the facts speak for themselves, however, the foreign ministers of a dozen or so Latin American republics attending the sessions swamped the issue in the most self-indulgent sort of Hispanic rhetoric...
...As the water rose, tipsy second secretaries found themselves gazing at the sheer wall of some huge freighter that lay alongside, blazing an improbable Antonioni red amid the placid green countryside...
...The gigantic billboards proclaiming Panama's grievances, the portentous fuss of motorcycle escorts with wailing sirens and flashing lights, and the amplified crackle of walkie-talkies in the 90-degree heat whipped up a fine mix of ceremony and near-hysteria...
...engineered its "independence" from Colombia in 1903, when that country dragged its feet on Washington's terms for the construction of an isthmian canal...
...Southern Command," the Canal Zone is a training ground for Latin American counterinsur-gency forces, but this could be relocated with relative ease...
...discrimination against the local inhabitants in every area of life...
...The USSR was next, with a canonical script making much of the Treaty of Tlatelolco (denuclearization of Latin America) and pet topics like the Soviet-inspired Declaration on the Strengthening of International Security, and very little of the Panama Canal issue...
...and the grossly inequitable treaty that President Theodore Roosevelt promptly concluded with the new Panamanian government has been in force ever since...
...If there was no progress in the negotiations with the U.S...
...Immediately after each session, everyone raced back to the hotel through a traffic corridor imperiously cleared by wailing motorcycle cops, and emerged 20 minutes later in tropical playboy gear: shades, body shirts, flared cotton pants, sandals, cameras...
...Facing deadlock, the Panamanian ambassador delivered at breakneck speed one last recounting of U.S...
...for a new canal treaty soon, he suggested, violence was inevitable...
...There remains the intriguing question of what General Torrijos will do now...
...Comparable self-parodies were offered by the wearily patrician Sir Colin Crowe of Great Britain (known to his delegation as "Big Bird"), the tailor's-dummy-correct Louis de Guiringaud of France, the sinisterly genial Yakov Malik of the USSR...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 8
