Omar Torrijos
Omar Efra?n Torrijos Herrera was a
Panamanian army officer and the 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. A son of Torrijos, Mart?n Torrijos Espino, won the presidential election on 2 May 2004 and took office on September 1, 2004.
Encyclopedia
Omar Efraín Torrijos Herrera was a
Panamanian army officer and the 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. A son of Torrijos, 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 , 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 colonel Boris Martínez led a successful
coup d'état against the democratically-elected president, Arnulfo Arias . In the internal power struggle that followed Torrijos emerged victorious — he exiled Martínez in 1969, made himself a
brigadier general and survived an attempted coup from his junior officers. Torrijos further consolidated his power by taking authoritarian measures such as persecuting leaders of student and labor groups, dissolving all political parties and the legislature, closing down independent media outlets, and conducting a ruthless anti-guerrilla campaign in Western Panama. Under these conditions, the regime called for controlled election of an assembly with a single opposition member, which approved a new Constitution that granted Torrijos absolute civil and military powers in 1972.
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 — as opposed to the light-skinned social elite, often referred to as
rabiblancos , who 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. 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. He was intolerant of political opposition and many opponents were imprisoned, exiled or even killed. One such well-publicized incident was the 1971 kidnapping and disappearance of Héctor Gallegos, a populist Catholic priest.
He 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 1997, General
Manuel Noriega revealed in his book,
America's Prisoner, that Torrijos planned to sabotage the canal, in the event that the US Senate failed to ratify the treaties..
In 1978 when his term as Chief of Government ended he did not seek its extension but retired and planned for a return of full civil authority by 1984. He remained commander of the powerful National Guard while his follower Aristides Royo was a figurehead president. When Torrijos was killed in a plane crash, he was succeeded by Florencio Flores Aguilar who assumed command of the National Guard but he was soon replaced by Rubén Darío Paredes.
Death
General Torrijos died with several others when his aircraft, a DeHavilland Twin Otter , crashed into Cerro Marta, a jungle-covered mountain in Panama. 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 , before being moved to a Mauseleum in the former Canal Zone near Panama City.
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, 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 , alleges in his book
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is an auto-biographical book written by John Perkins [i] and publ...
, 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, confirms 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.”
- "Regarding the Panama Canal Treaty negotiations, they will find us standing up or dead, but never on our knees; NEVER!”
- "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"
External links
- , by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 1978, describes human rights violations by the Torrijos regime.
- in the context of Panamanian history
- , Democracy Now, February 19, 2006. Refers to Omar Torrijos in the 17th paragraph.
References
- Austin American Statesman, May 1, 1991, "U.S. agencies tried to slay Noriega, lawyer tells court."
- Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2004. See pages 156-157 regarding Roldós's alleged assassination.
