The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panamá 9780226342597

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The Singer ’ s Needle …

The Singer ’ s Needle …

An Undisciplined History of Panamá …

Eze r Vi e rba

The U n i v e r s i ty o f Chi cag o P r ess Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­34231-­3 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­34245-­0 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­34259-­7 (e-­book) DOI: https://​doi​.org​/10​.7208​/chicago​/9780226342597​.001​.0001 This book is a palimpsest of fiction, nonfiction, and other kinds of writing. Any resemblance of fictional characters to real people with similar names is coincidental. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vierba, Ezer, author. Title: The singer’s needle : an undisciplined history of Panamá / Ezer Vierba. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020020733 | ISBN 9780226342313 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226342450 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226342597 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Panama—History. | Panama—Politics and government. Classification: LCC F1566 .V54 2021 | DDC 972.87—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020733 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Conte nts …

Editor’s Preface / vii Part I : Coiba An Introduction to the Panamanian Subject 1. Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty: Porras and the Liberal Reforms, 1912–1924 / 3 2. Punishment and Subject Formation / 49 3. The Singer’s Report: Text and Critique in Coiba, 1920–1935 / 94 Part II : Theaters of Authority 4. The Remonato, a Hybrid State: 1947–1955 / 151 5. Trials of Authority: Legal Consciousness and Formal Struggles in the Postwar Era / 193 Part III : On the Way to Chumumbito 6. Héctor’s Hermeneutics: Radical Readings and Christian Liberation in Santa Fe de Veraguas, 1968–1971 / 251 Acknowledgments / 307 Bibliography / 309

Editor’s Pre face …

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Walter Benjamin

La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios. Gabriel García Márquez

I. In the Field Again hree days before Carnival, a happy belly-­sticking-­out friend of a friend showed me a decaying stack of papers that looked like it had been left underground for half an eternity. It was at the time of year when the weather in Panamá is still tolerable, but the room was so warm and humid that it felt like we were floating in some liquid. Now, I am not one for nonsense. I like things to be neat and organized, and I had to resist the instinct to leave that warm amniotic chamber whose floor was covered with decaying shreds of paper. The pile reminded me of an image of an embalmed baby I had once seen in an old National Geographic, a being sealed before life and after it. An old clock of the type you presumably see in northern Europe hung on the wall, a bit tilted, making an odd sound. I imagined that someone had shot it during some coup, but I was later told it worked on occasion. Distracted, I tucked my wings in, put on a pair of latex gloves, and then took the stack of papers into my hands. A few months later, having decided to translate and edit the work, I made an effort to locate its author. The trouble was that there were no clear marks of identity left in the text that did not clash, at the same time, with other signs that contradicted them. I quickly found out that the text deals with the historical past and is based on archival material, but the author never indicated where the material had come from. Whereas in

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most scholarly works, the narrator is a kind of ghostlike stand-­in for the real, sentient author, I saw that here, each narrator was a fully formed character. At first glance, it seemed to me as though Tali Del Valle, who conducts the interviews in the text and is the voice behind the last chapter, was a kind of stand-­in for the author. Then it became clear to me that she is a fictional character like the others, and that her voice, as well as her occasional edits and notes on other characters’ work, is simply another layer of this text. An odd experiment. Suddenly, I realized that my footnotes—and indeed, this preface—rather than clarifying everything, securing the meanings in this text, ended up adding yet another textual layer: one that the wise reader will approach with some caution. I had thought I would have the ultimate word here, if only as the translator and editor of the work, but now I realized I had been played. Then I recognized the negative image of my soul in the eccentric writer behind this text: a mystical spirit for my classificatory impulse, an elusive anonymity for my naming-­craving footnoted anxiety. I speak clearly, with straight-­shooting theses, and I begin to sense this author somewhere around me . . . the Panamanian language games, reversed words, severed phrases sworded by double, triple ironies, spreading angular arguments, refracting through the damp morning smog. This was not the first time an author writing about Panamá had done so anonymously, and there were various examples in Panamá of texts that mixed history and fiction. (One journalist complained to me that people were citing fictional accounts as though they were real.)1 Truly, in this country, they do not have a very good sense of organization. It is quite odd, really, because on the one hand Panamanians love formalities, honorary titles, signed declarations, and so forth. But on the other hand, the most important days of the year are Carnival; and one can perhaps even say that in many ways, the smell of firecrackers and beer lingers here throughout the year. Still, one expects more of an academic work, and academic texts in Panamá generally adhere to our Western standards. So this text stood out. It did not “fill in” where the historical 1. The political history now known to have been written by Humberto Ricord was published anonymously, for example. Humberto Ricord Donado, Cinco ensayos sobre la revolución panameña (México, DF: Editora Vanguardia, 1962). For works mixing fiction and history cited in this text, see María López Vigil, Héctor Gallego está vivo! (Panamá, RP: Pastoral Social-­Cáritas, 1996); and Luis Alberto González Suárez, Coiba, la isla del olvido (Panamá, RP: Editorial Lagos, 1995).

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record was inaccessible, as do some popular histories here, or provide counterfactuals, as in the case of some recent academic works. But I could not help feeling that its method of interpretation was sleazy, and that it was purposely going around in circles. I have a warm place in my heart for eccentrics and eccentricities, and I imagined that the text’s shameless disregard for objectivity could be forgiven too, but I would not accept its opacity, its lack of rigor. While the Panamanian National Archives are disorganized, I quickly located most of the material on which the work is based, and I began to imagine that, with my help, the text could become more organized, and perhaps represent the past as it really was. But I noticed that the more I cleaned up the text, the more agitated I became. In hindsight, I was going through a difficult time. My marriage had dissolved the year before, and our kids were starting and finishing college, respectively. Panamá came after a sullen year, and here I was, living alone in an apartment on Vía Argentina, with wide windows and no plants. The only things alive in this space were the breeze that flew right in, the smell of coffee coming from the industrial roster on the Transístmica, and the loud parrot calls before sunset. The bundle of papers stood on my cheap working table, taunting me with its cryptic demeanor. When it became hard to ignore the torments, I had to tell myself that there was some rational reason for my irritation. A text is just a text, an assortment of opinions, organized on a piece of paper . . . or was I playing some strange role I was unaware of, in someone else’s story? A voice inside me almost liked the fellow who wrote the damn thing, and I wanted to take the writer for a short walk, to get him to drop the nonsense. At other times, I began thinking that it was the other way around—I did not understand the deeper levels of his work, but he understood me quite well. This made me indignant, and I developed a subtle aversion to the text, a tightening of the forehead and eyes. As happens in such cases, feeling myself irrational—cornered, as it were—a kind of dissonance began to emerge. (Having had one drink too many on a friend’s balcony, I suddenly confessed that my entire relation with the text was vain, and then blushed deeply. I was talking loudly, and a line from a Russian novel got stuck in my head. “I’m vain!” I suddenly announced, just like the character, almost shouting, “I’m vain! I’m vain!”) A month or so later, I got involved in an enigmatic relationship with an Argentinian psychologist, an ex-­hippie who wore beautiful shawls ix

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and had a good eye for physical cues. She pointed out that my shoulders crouched inward as I was deciphering the text, that there might be tension in my upper back. I looked at her ironically when she suggested that some “somatic technique” would help me get along with the reading, but I eventually gave in. She had me sit on the couch, with my feet flat on the ground, and then her voice slowed down, becoming gentle and warm. A breeze ran through the apartment, and as she began speaking, I stopped thinking, and I could feel the wind touching my skin. Her voice was now calm and very soft. You are seeing me now, she said. Are you aware that seeing is happening? Make a mental note of it: seeing. Experiment with it, she said, just try it out. Are you thinking something? Instead of thinking the thought, try to observe it from the outside, saying to yourself silently, “thinking.” As you become aware of these words, feel the muscles in the head, the flesh and skin around them, and make a mental note: calming. We did this for a while, and then she said, if it’s possible, notice what the awareness itself feels like. Is there tightness there, a kind of resistance? Or maybe a more spacious feeling . . . see if you can notice how the awareness encounters these very words . . . does it leap out of the mind to encounter them, wherever they are? Or are the words touching the awareness like shooting stars in the sky of the mind? Is it the same awareness that it was three minutes ago, or is the awareness a bit different now, in this moment? I practiced for a while before I could loosen the tension in my shoulders, and then I noticed that the reading changed slightly. What was really there had not changed, but a strange sensation settled in, as though a different part of my mind was reading the text. I tried to go back to the old reader, but this reader was now aware that a second kind of reader was also there, and the mutual knowledge made each reader a little different. You see the point—if one is to give a simple account of the text below, one must be perfectly honest and admit that what is there is a bit unstable. And if I told you I were sure precisely what the text holds, you would be right to ask, well, which you? This is a problem with immediate consequences for historians, some of which I will deal with shortly. The standing order of prefaces, introductions, and prolegomena of every sort is that the author cuts down the body of the work to manageable pieces, hanging the main arguments for all to see. You are right if you demand that I summarily execute this order, but the text calls into question the unity of authorship x

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and the unity of readership that provide the basis for such textual operations. Thus, we should keep in mind that the scaffold and gallery here are made of letters, and that spectators and actors alike float in a fragile theater of words. II. Historical Problems hen it won its independence in November 1903, Panamá did not gain full sovereignty. The rebellion that separated the province from the rest of Colombia could not be carried out only by the coalition of elite and middle-­class citizens of the Liberals and Conservatives. The organizers had to rely on US backing if they were to have any chance against the Colombian Army; and as the dust settled and the new country became a political fact in 1904, the consequences of the deal with the Northern Colossus became clear. First, the Hay–­Bunau-­ Varilla Treaty was forced on the Panamanians. It sanctioned a ten-­mile-­ wide US Canal Zone, a virtual state within the state, right at the heart of the new country, operating its most important asset. This asset, the Panama Canal, would be built between 1904 and 1914, and would connect the Pacific and Atlantic seas. For the new state, the treaty would also mean that significant parts of its largest and most important cities, Panama City and Colón, would be under the direct control of the United States. To add insult to injury, Panamá was forced to write into its new constitution an article that would allow the US to deploy its forces in any part of the new country if it felt that the canal was in some way threatened, or, even more broadly, if it wanted to restore “public order.”2 Starting in 1912, Dr. Belisario Porras and the Liberals energetically promoted a plan to regain the country’s full independence. They thought that confronting the US was impossible, however, before Panamanians became more productive, educated, and disciplined. And so the Liberals used funds from the new canal for an ambitious state-­building

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2. Panamanians refer to Panama City most often simply as Panamá, as they do to the province of which this city is the capital, and the country. They also use the terms Ciudad de Panamá and La Capital. When speaking about Panama City and Colón, scholars often refer to the two as las ciudades terminales (“the terminal cities,” meaning the gateways to the canal). I use the English Panama City where a different name would be confusing to the English reader. In citations, I have used the Panamanian convention Panamá, RP (the first referring to the city, the second short for República de Panamá).

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project, building roads and railways to connect the “savage” rural areas to the “terminal cities,” Panama City and Colón, and undertaking projects to “civilize” the urban masses. Within a decade, they increased the student population threefold and constructed the basis of the Panamanian public education system. At the same time, they rewrote the legal code, established archives and hospitals, promoted programs to attract European settlers to the interior, and constructed agricultural schools for peasants. As part of this larger effort, a penal colony and an urban penitentiary were constructed, and local jails were reformed. To build a nation, in other words, a strong state had to be established in the national territory. To achieve independence and modernity, the Liberal government had to replace a foreign colonialism with a national colonial project. In opening with a discussion of the establishment of the penal colony, in part I, the work focuses on the project that symbolized the connection between discipline, civilization, and sovereignty. While this is the first serious scholarly work on this penal colony (and on the Panamanian penal system generally), the historical intervention here has larger stakes. The implied author shifts from a critique of the Liberal state-­ building project, its discourse, and its projects (chapter 1) to an analysis of its main goal, the transformation of the Panamanian subject, in the historical reality of the penal colony (chapter 2). In order to analyze the struggles that inmates carry on against the institutional “subject machine,” the work suggests a different theory of subjectivity. This theory is further developed within the discussion of the possibility of critique—of a specific institution like Coiba, but also of larger political programs (chapter 3). The result is an account not only of the state-­building project during the protectorate (1904–31), but also of the possibility—­ historical and theoretical—of its critique. By the postwar era, most Panamanians felt that the democratic dream was giving way to a thoroughly corrupt, dependent regime. In the political stalemate of 1947–51, the chief of police, José Antonio Remón, gradually took hold of the political system. Since Panamá did not have an army, and since the political class, thoroughly unpopular and petty, could not resolve its own disputes, he became a kind of kingmaker. Remón began nominating presidents from his barracks; then he was emboldened to run for president in 1952, utilizing his institution and the profits he had made from illegal activities to launch a successxii

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ful populist campaign. As president, Remón was no more popular than most other politicians. The discussion of his regime in chapter 4 shows that by maintaining firm control of both the bureaucracy and the newly named National Guard, Remón managed to stabilize the state. He personally arrived in the morning to ensure that ministries were open on time; he intimidated rivals and censored the press, reformed the tax system and cut political deals. In January 1955, Remón was assassinated. It was the first murder of a Panamanian president, and although Remón had not been especially popular, the judicial-­political drama that followed the event mesmerized the nation. Almost as soon as the trial began, the public started to voice its discomfort—not with any protagonist in the drama or with the content of any specific claim, but with the entire procedure. The US embassy commented: “Panamanian Justice is itself, in a sense, on trial.”3 When, after three years of judicial proceedings, appeals, conspiracies, killings of witnesses, and sensational revelations in the press, all the accused were set free, the masses went out to dance in the streets. Chapter 5 argues that, as odd as it may sound, the masses did not care for any specific character in the drama. Rather, as the public perceived it, the system failed yet again to provide the rights and the due process that it promised. What mattered was not content but form. Indeed, the crisis that followed the trial (1958–60)—perhaps the longest the country had ever seen—was not animated by one set of themes. Riots broke out on several occasions, for different reasons; a rebellion erupted in the countryside; strikes and worker protests followed. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the stakes were now high, and the text suggests that the crisis of the oligarchic regime would eventually lead to its fall, in 1968. The struggles of the regime’s last decade, which were waged by different actors and for different reasons, nevertheless had a new and radical common denominator: they all denied the basic legitimacy of the oligarchic regime. But it was the regime itself that had enabled this radicalization by enacting the long, public display of its own injustice. Indeed, a central notion in this work, which the implied au3. R. Austin Acly, councilor of the U.S. embassy in Panamá to State Department, September 30, 1955, file 719.00/9-­3055, page 5, Central Decimal File 1955–59, Records of the Department of State, record group (RG) 59, National Archives at College Park, MD (NACP).

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thor arrives at only by a long, indirect path, is that a crisis of hegemony is also an aesthetic crisis, a crisis of and in “form.” This in no way implies that a radical challenge, and the crisis it brings about, necessarily lead to a more just or free society. Partly because the oligarchic pseudolegality had gradually dissolved starting in the late 1950s, the military regime, consolidated by the populist General Omar Torrijos in 1968–69, could dispense with legality altogether. While in later years the Torrijos regime would come to be associated with its center-­left economic policies and its successful renegotiation of the Canal Treaty, in its early years it struggled to define itself. It had no obvious base of support, no clear agenda, and very little by way of an official discourse. In its first year in power, the National Guard nominated bureaucrats and ministers, quickly repressed the armed and unarmed groups that resisted it, and disregarded the law openly. At the time, a young priest was working in the mountainous region of Santa Fe in the province of Veraguas. Heavily influenced by the radical forerunners of what would become liberation theology, Father Héctor Gallego created a popular movement that challenged the firm rule of the local families. The peasants—poor, often illiterate, and disempowered—were not organized. Gallego encouraged them to take leadership roles in their hamlets, establish Bible-­reading circles, and form a multiservice cooperative. The cooperative began undermining the monopoly of the ruling families, while the reading circles created a new hermeneutic—the present and the recent past were now read within the framework of the Bible. The regional elite, with direct family relations to Torrijos, attempted to intimidate and coopt this popular movement, at the same time as it pressured the government to intervene. After the “disappearance” of Gallego in 1971, the church no longer commanded a leading role in the Santa Fe movement. But the new interpretative framework, which posited Jesús fighting alongside the poor, could not be undone. The movement—with its peasant leadership, emerging knowledge, praxes, and institutions—destroyed the rule of the wealthy families and transformed the political economy of the Santa Fe region. The implied author closes the work (chap. 6) with the parable of the liberationist movement, suggesting that a challenge to a regime may very well be especially radical if it is not only political, economic, and social, but also aesthetic. That is, if the challengers, aside from making material and political dexiv

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mands, also call for a new subject and new subjectivities; if they articulate a different framework of interpretation of the past and present, and propose alternative notions of what is seen, valued, and fought for. III. The Power/Knowledge Problem ichel Foucault opens Discipline and Punish by opposing two distinct forms of punishment, which, he claims, spelled a larger transformation in Europe. A ritual of public torture is juxtaposed with the rules drawn up for a juvenile prison in Paris some eighty years later: a tedious list of minute instructions outlining when prisoners should wake up in the morning, how they should study, work, and pray. Foucault’s point is not about any of the details—the two texts he cites deal with different kinds of punishment—but that “they each define a certain penal style.”4 According to Foucault, the European system of power in its totality changed dramatically between about 1750 and 1830. A new “economy of power” was formulated—with a new form of punishment. The penitentiary, according to Foucault, epitomized a shift from grand spectacles of torture to quotidian corrective measures, a new “micro-­physics” of power. These subtle interventions Foucault considers under the title of “discipline”—“a political anatomy of detail.”5 As part of discipline, Foucault analyzes a variety of techniques and procedures to control people in prisons, barracks, schools, and hospitals: ways of determining how people would be organized spatially, how their work would be coordinated and supervised.6 New methods were developed to organize training—no longer an isolated, personal relationship between master and apprentice, but rather a rationalized plan of successive stages of development, which could be subject to scrutiny, examination, and correction. As discipline was to be precise, new methods of observation and evaluation needed to be developed. Thus, “hierarchical observation,” “normalizing judgment,” and modern forms of the exam were created in the developing institutions (workshops, boarding schools), and often borrowed and transformed in others. And while these new methods of systematic observation could be harsh, they were

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4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 7. Emphasis mine. 5. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 139. 6. Foucault, 145–46.

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not, in Foucault’s view, only oppressive. Rather, they indicated that power more broadly “produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.” 7 In sum, whereas in both the liberal and Marxist traditions power was something that could be taken, held, or used, in Foucault’s view, power—a relation—is exercised everywhere and at all times; it operates in techniques and fields of knowledge; and it is not exercised on subjects that are already there autonomously and irrespective of its effects. Rather, power produces subjects and subjectivity. Foucault’s emphasis on the penitentiary generally, and his detailed discussion of the panopticon specifically, draw attention to the increased shrewdness of European institutions in their control of their urban masses, and to their increasingly sophisticated and fine-­tuned “corrective” techniques.8 However, we would be wise to keep in mind that, according to one estimate, 1.3 million people were punished by trans7. Foucault, 194. “Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass,” Foucault writes, “it [disciplinary power] separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units. It ‘trains’ the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individual elements—small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its existence” (190). 8. Historians have criticized the accuracy of Discipline and Punish on a number of grounds. The work below does not do so directly (it does not deal with European history), but by focusing on a penal colony, it draws attention to a side of the story that Foucault did not elaborate. For a good summary, see Michael Ignatieff, “State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment,” Crime and Justice 3 (1981): 153–92. In Latin America, historians have found the Foucauldian framework very useful, and indeed, the first anthology to deal with punishment was devoted to the penitentiary: Ricardo Donato Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996). However, both in this anthology and in other works, authors emphasize state weakness in opposition to Foucault’s “carceral archipelago.” For the most direct critique of this aspect, see Jonathan Ablard, María Silvia di Liscia, and Ernesto Lázaro Bohoslavsky, Instituciones y formas de control social en América Latina, 1840–1940: Una revisión (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de La Pampa / Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento / Prometeo Libros, 2005).

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portation in the nineteenth century alone.9 Transportation was used in the British colonies in America, in the Andaman Islands, in Mauritius, in New Caledonia, and in New Guinea. Convicts were shipped off to Australia too, and hundreds of thousands were sent to Russian Asia, as well as to islands off the coasts of Chile, Perú, Costa Rica, México, and Brazil. Penal colonies were likewise established in Patagonia, Venezuela, and Colombia.10 Everywhere, it was its colonial aspect that made transportation of convicts so attractive to European and Latin Ameri9. Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, “Transportation as Global Migration,” in Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 28–39. 10. Good examples of discussions of penal colonies in the world include Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); Alice Bullard, Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). On transportation generally, see Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press / Oxford University Press, 1987); Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (London: Collins Harvill, 1987); Bob Reece, The Origins of Irish Convict Transportation to New South Wales (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2001); John Hirst, “The Australian Experience: The Convict Colony,” in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 235–65. A good discussion of the role of penal regimes in the expansion of Western empires is Clare Anderson and Hamish Maxwell-­Stewart, “Convict Labour and the Western Empires, 1415–1954,” in The Routledge History of Western Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich and Kirsten Mckenzie (London: Routledge [Taylor & Francis], 2014), 102–17. Discussions of penal colonies in Latin America can be found in Steven Palmer, “Confinement, Policing, and the Emergence of Social Policy in Costa Rica, 1880–1935,” in The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940, New Interpretations of Latin America Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 224–53; Lila M. Caimari, Apenas un delincuente: Crimen, castigo y cultura en la Argentina, 1880–1955 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2004). See also Jane M. Rausch, “Using Convicts to Settle the Frontier: A Comparison of Agricultural Penal Colonies as Tropical Frontier Institutions in Twentieth-­Century Colombia,” Secolas Annals 34 (2002): 26–48. The newest and perhaps best example of a discussion of a penal colony in Latin America is Peter M. Beattie, Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights, and a Nineteenth-­Century Brazilian Penal Colony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

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can elites. The same elites who applied subtle coercive techniques in the urban centers sent marginal social agents to the far corners of their territories, extending the reach of their power. The two tendencies were part of the same conception, as the cases of the Cárcel Modelo in Panama City and of the Penal Colony of Coiba show.11 Speaking about colonial punishment allows the implied author to connect the discussion of punishment with the debate about national projects after colonialism. Is it true, as Partha Chatterjee has it, that nationalism, a “derived discourse,” far from enabling colonized nations to liberate themselves, would ultimately guarantee their continual subjugation? In the context of India, Chatterjee’s argument is damning: it is the very nationalist discourse, developed in Europe, that ensures the subjugation of the colonialized world after it has won its independence. And neither conservatives nor liberals “can pose the problem in a form in which the question can be asked: why is it that non-­European colonial countries have no historical alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes of modernity when that very process of approximation means their continued subjection under a world order which only sets their tasks for them and over which they have no control?”12 Here, the question is not brought up directly. The Liberal Party’s nationalist state-­building project is discussed with a postcolonial framework, and many of its contradictions will be apparent to the student of nation-­states in comparable circumstances, in Latin America and elsewhere. But in other ways, the structure of the text seems to suggest that 11. In some cases, the techniques Foucault describes were used in penal colonies, assuming special characteristics there. See Sen, Disciplining Punishment. In other cases, European regimes made only halfhearted efforts to apply penal techniques to colonial settings. Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). In still other cases, colonial elites tried reforming their penal regimes according to the new European models, but then decided that the populations they were governing, being racially inferior, were not malleable to the sorts of interventions European reformers had in mind. Diana Paton, “The Penalties of Freedom: Punishment in Postemancipation Jamaica,” in Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times, ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore, Carlos A. Aguirre, and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 275–307. 12. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books for the United Nations University, 1986), 10.

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Chatterjee should answer the same questions he asks the nationalists. Do you “pose the problem in a form in which the question can be asked”? Or do you, like others who wish to “provincialize Europe,” in one way or another still adopt the “Enlightenment view of rationality and progress, and the historical values enshrined in that view”?13 In what ways do you go beyond a recognition (and resigned affirmation) of the Enlightenment’s discursive rules? Do you not join the Euro-­American debate on its terms? Do you not, developing the cutting edge of its epistemic knife, guarantee the continued subjection of those whose voice you wish to rescue? In what form, ultimately, do you pose the question?14 To appreciate how the two problems are connected, keep in mind the larger framework of Foucault’s critique of the Enlightenment and its idea of knowledge: Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without a correlative constitution of a field 13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). There is no doubt that Chakrabarty’s superb scholarship, like that of many of his colleagues of Subaltern Studies, complicates the European story and criticizes its categories. As he admits, however, awareness and analysis do not make the problem disappear (28). The question remains, of course, whether by “analysis” Chakrabarty does not actually mean an application of a series of critical discursive practices, which originated in Europe and are now modified and applied by scholars like himself. 14. Lest there be any doubt, I am not suggesting that this text works against postcolonial critiques. Indeed, it seems to assume a general awareness of the issues that postcolonial writers have raised. For example, it does not delve into the problem of the archive. It mentions this issue but apparently assumes a general awareness of these problems today. For a broad critique of historians’ simplification of the problems of the archive in Latin America, see Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

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of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.15 The Enlightenment promised liberation through rational thought. Foucault argues that the fields of knowledge that the reformers thought of as liberating were the blocks that held its new institutions of social control: criminology and penology, psychology, the science of man more broadly, and all those fields of administrative knowledge that made control of populations, governmentality, and biopolitics possible.16 But perhaps Foucault’s view of the Enlightenment is too grim. Can we not reform our institutions, after all, by looking at them critically? Foucault was not optimistic. He did not think it likely that an academic intervention would finally criticize the prison into oblivion, for example. Quite the contrary, he insisted that we keep in mind that the movement for reforming the prisons, for controlling their functioning is not a recent phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. Prison “reform” is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme. From the outset, the prison was caught up in a series of accompanying mechanisms, whose purpose was apparently to correct it, but which seem to form part of its very functioning, so closely have they been bound up with its existence throughout its long history.17 One needs to appreciate the audacity of this view, coming from a professional intellectual, and recognize the sheer novelty and genius of this critique. But we must also ask Foucault: how is your criticism different from the criticisms that have, as you say, followed the prison from its beginning? Is it even possible to critique an institution like the prison without contributing to the field of knowledge “that constitutes, as it were, its programme”? The influence of Foucault’s work in the last decades is owed in part to 15. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27. 16. In a set of fascinating lectures that he gave at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro in 1973, Foucault discussed the relation of modern scientific inquiry to the judicial inquiry that developed from the end of the Middle Ages. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Judicial Forms,” in Power, ed. James D. Faubion, vol. 3 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 2000), 1–89. 17. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 234–35.

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the recognition that there is no simple workaround to resolve this tension. And in fact, since the Frankfurt School, many of the writers who have critiqued the Enlightenment and its Reason have struggled with this same set of questions. Critique itself, after all, was what the Enlightenment prescribed for every malady. But when critiquing the Enlightenment and its power-­knowledge matrices, how is it possible not to use its very tool kit, reinforcing the very relationships we are trying to change? IV. Omniscient, Confessional, and Polyphonic History ​s I became immersed in the text I was editing, I began to think more deeply about narrative structure; and it was then I noticed that in most history books the reader encounters one of two possible modes of narration. First, in most histories, the voice of either an omniscient or a limited third-­person narrator is employed. This voice tells the reader what really happened in the past in a no-­nonsense tone. Very little is said about who the historian is, how the written account of the past has been at all conditioned by this mysterious observer, how the interaction between observer and observed took place, and so forth. Often, some representative of the author makes a quick appearance in the acknowledgments, after which he leaves his initials and vanishes. This omniscient narrator is presumably the voice of the real-­world historian. And truly, even a brief reading of reviews of monographs in the field will show that works of history are read and interpreted in this way too. But whereas most living historians have doubts, anger, desires, and fears, the omniscient narrator is usually a rather secure and unmoved character. Often, the narrator imagines himself to be addressing a crowd—of students or colleagues, perhaps. Phrases like “as we have seen in our earlier discussion” or “as we shall see” are common. As a historian, I have often written with the voice of an omniscient narrator. I did not think too much about it, and of course I find no inherent fault in this narrative device. Nor do I think that historians who use an omniscient narrator are necessarily unaware of the question of narrative structure. It is true that in some of the books written in this way, there is a good dose of realism (naive or sophisticated), and there are many positivists too. But there are also many theoretically conscious historians who use the omniscient narrator for clarity or convenience. Moreover, almost all the historians whose work was once clas-

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sified under the title of “the new narrative history” employ omniscient narrators in at least some of their works.18 In the other option, which is perhaps a little less common, the reader encounters a narrator who speaks in the first person singular. The historian goes to the archives, encounters certain people in the field, and returns with conclusions, which are communicated to the reader sotto voce, in a kind of confession. There are, perhaps, examples of bad confessional writing, but in our field of Latin American history there are quite a few that are extraordinarily good, and it is to them that we should pay attention. Courage Tastes of Blood, for example, combines archival and oral sources to describe the lives and struggles of a Mapuche community in Chile, in what its author, Florencia Mallon, calls a “dialogic method.” 19 The historian does not skip traditional research—Mallon shows a spectacular knowledge of secondary and primary material on the community, its struggles, the larger questions of Mapuche–­state relations, national issues, and so forth. She does not treat the people of the community as “sources”—depositories of raw data to be extracted. Rather, she engages in dialogue with subjects who have their own interpretation of the past, and who are quite ready to defend their version, to teach her and to learn from her, and to generally change the orientation of her research. Mallon builds on traditions of representation devel18. On this aspect, it seems there is little to distinguish earlier generations of narrative histories from more recent ones. Compare, for example, the following titles with the best-­known historians of the nineteenth century: Paul J. Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-­ Century New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1970); C. L. R James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Luis González, San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition, trans. John Upton (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982). Arguably, the differences between the historians of the 1960s and 1990s, as well as between both groups and those of the nineteenth century, have more to do with methods, themes, and subject matter than with any formal innovations. 19. Florencia E. Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

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oped in the testimonial literature of the left, as well as research methods of oral historians and ethnographers.20 Furthermore, she follows the practice common in anthropology today, in which the scholar brings the community her early draft for discussion and people comment on her version, add to it, or criticize her mistakes. In this way, Mallon can rightly assert that the final product is not hers alone, but that it also belongs to the community. When researching the community of Santa Fe de Veraguas to prepare the footnotes for this work, I learned from works such as Mallon’s. I lived in Santa Fe for a few months, volunteering in communal projects and immersing myself in the village. Apart from the recorded interviews, I also spent long hours in conversation with people of the community, and I was obviously influenced by their interpretation of history. In the case of Santa Fe, moreover, people’s memory of details are especially important, since the US still holds the vast majority of secret Panamanian state documents about the Popular Christian Movement, and is not allowing public access to them.21 In short, I find engagement 20. It is possible, of course, to draw a much longer history of the testimonial, perhaps stretching as far back as Bartolomé De las Casas. It is nonetheless clear that this form of writing expanded and gained force as part of a purposeful effort of intellectuals and activists on the left after the Cuban Revolution. See, for example, Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet, Biografía de un cimarrón (La Habana: Instituto de Etnología y Folklore, 1966). In another approach, sometimes referred to as “horizontal authorship,” a historian or journalist collaborates with a subject—typically an activist—who speaks about her experience firsthand. The work of Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef and Florencia Mallon is an excellent recent example in this genre. Many of the arguments below about the naive connection presented to the reader between the implied author and the living author stand in this case too. It is nonetheless clear that the power equilibrium presented in such testimonios is more egalitarian than in common histories. Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef, When a Flower Is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist, ed. Florencia E. Mallon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). The work that brought worldwide attention to the Latin American testimonial is Rigoberta Menchú and Elizabeth Burgos Debray, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1985). The polemic surrounding this work reached unexpected heights after American anthropologist David Stoll published his critical work on Menchú: Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). See also Arturo Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 21. I have followed this research with a series of declassification petitions to US intelligence agencies. I was part of a small group of Panamanians and Americans who

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with a community a fascinating method for researching the recent past; and while I was well aware of the difficulties involved, I came out of Santa Fe thinking that without this part of the research, I would have known very little about the history of the region. The problem is not with oral history or with deep dialogues with the community, but with writing. No doubt, the confessional style allows the researcher to discuss subject positions in the field, and to interrogate the power relations that exist between writer and subject. But is the confessional narrator a reliable textual representation of the historian? As I was editing this work, I realized that the narrators I had been deploying in my confessional writings had little to do with the gray zones of my life; that they, who were supposed to be my public faces, were not quite “me.” Have I ever let a reader into my apartment to see the clothes piling up on my armchair? Have I ever made a narrator confess fears about my son’s career choice, or talk about the feeling of alienation I had in departmental meetings? Little wonder, then, that when I read the text below I felt exposed, as though the narrators I had been deploying were a cover for something. It had been twelve years since I had written anything original, and yet I was extraordinarily attached to my own methods. All that theory, please, enough with all the Foucaults and the Bakhtins! And if I see one more Walter Benjamin epigraph I’m going to cho—I admit, in retrospect, I felt so threatened that I took the work’s textual games as an attack on my authenticity. Were there no facts anymore? Latin America has a troubled past, a lot of disinformation, censorship, lies . . . facts are what we had on our side. Sometimes, the only thing left was truth. And in the end of the day, one has to take a side. Was the writer hiding his real opinions? And yet for some reason I felt so exposed by his trick that a strange anger arose in me. No wonder I came close to throwing the entire project out—it threatened my methods, my way of making sense of the world, the core of my identity. Well, although most professional historians do not consider them works of history, there are texts that need to be kept in mind when made a systematic effort to repatriate the millions of stolen Panamanian documents. Douglas Cox, “The Lost Archives of Noriega: Emancipating Panamanian Human Rights Documents in U.S. Military Custody,” Boston University International Law Journal 32, no. 1 (2014): 55–88.

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thinking of the field’s current status quo. I do not know of any examples of historians using unreliable narrators, but many nonacademic works use a broader spectrum of narrative devices. In Maus, Art Spiegelman tells the story of his father’s survival of the Holocaust in cartoon form, depicting the Germans as cats and the Jews as mice. (Later it becomes clear that the characters, while human, are wearing masks that they cannot take off.)22 After Spiegelman won international acclaim, more writers began experimenting with the graphic novel, and in recent years, many personal narratives and journalistic accounts of historical events have been written in this form.23 Of course, works of fiction that deal seriously with the past and that are even based on archival or oral research are nothing new.24 Quite the contrary: it is well known that the novel was characterized by its presentation of a historical setting, rather than a mythical past (as in the epic).25 Curiously, the corpus of theoretical writing that has critiqued academic history since Hayden White’s Metahistory has stimulated only a small number of adventurous experiments in historical writing.26 By 22. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). 23. Examples include Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007); Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992– 95 (Lake City Way, NE: Fantagraphics Books, 2000); Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 24. It has also been noted that the Latin American novel is especially prone to dealing with history as well as with myth. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 2–3. 25. There are other examples of nonacademic works that cross disciplinary and genre boundaries; see, for example, Francis Spufford, Red Plenty (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012). The work below shows ways in which nonhistorians grapple not only with interpretations of the past, but also with questions of methodology, arguing that such debates can become important politically. However, it is just as true, as Jerome De Groot argues, that nonhistorians deal with the past in many other ways, and indeed that contemporary culture has seen a proliferation of representations, productions, and enactments of the past. Jerome De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009). 26. Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). White wrote profusely, but perhaps the most obvious book complementing Metahistory is his Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). The journal Rethinking History publishes one issue

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the end of the 1990s, it was no longer subversive to claim that historians “enlist the same narrative conventions as fiction writers [. . .]: inventively imposing the time frame of beginning, middle and end, organizing sequence to convey the sense of consequence, characterizing, scene-­ setting, emplotting, crafting the ‘reality effect’—all in the voice of the omniscient narrator speaking from a single unified point of view.”27 Few historians, however, have seen such claims as a license to undertake anything like Spiegelman’s formal experiments. Already in the 1960s and ’70s, Cuban films like Memorias del subdesarrollo and De cierta manera experimented with the juxtaposition of documentary and fictional material, attempting to find new forms to represent postcolonial reality.28 These experiments passed censorship even as Cubans were increasingly called to correct their views on everything.29 Decades later, the historians of the free and tenured world proved much less daring. If anyone expected Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties to open the creative floodgates of history departments, the book seems to have been shrugged off as a a year devoted to creative forms of historiography. Some of the more creative historians associated with the journal include James Goodman, Robert Rosenstone, and Marjorie Becker. See also James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); James Goodman, Blackout, 1st ed. (New York: North Point Press, 2003); Robert A. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine: American En­ counters with Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Mar­ jorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Other historians, like John Demos, have written narrative histories meant to connect a broader audience with sophisticated, scholarly histories, but without embracing very e­ xperimental narrative techniques. See, for example, John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1994). A good summary of the historical works engag­ ing in formal innovation during the height of the linguistic turn is Karen Halttunen, “Cultural History and the Challenge of Narrativity,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 165–81. 27. Halttunen, “Cultural History and the Challenge of Narrativity,” 166. 28. Sadly, these masterpieces are not well known in the English-­speaking world. See Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Edmundo Desnoes, Memorias del subdesarrollo (Cuba: ICAIC, 1968); Sara Gómez Yera, De cierta manera (Havana, Cuba: ICAIC, 1974). 29. “Correcting one’s views” refers to Leszek Kolakowski’s reply to an open letter by E. P. Thompson: Leszek Kolakowski, “My Correct Views on Everything,” Socialist Register 11 (1974): 1–20.

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kind of anecdote or cautionary tale—a signal that the linguistic turn had gone too far.30 Dead Certainties is indeed experimental: the narrative is not ordered chronologically, and it contains recreations of historical events in the tradition of the documentary. But even Schama’s narrative makes no attempt to characterize the narrator within the work; the use of metaphoric devices is timid indeed; and there is only cautious stylistic experimentation. And in the end, Schama disqualifies his work from the field altogether, when he writes that the different parts of his narrative are “works of the imagination, not scholarship.”31 As the work below suggests, however, the imagination plays a central role in every discourse about the past—academic, bureaucratic, popular, oral, written, or performed. The text below can be called a “polyphonic history.” The term is derived from the work of M. M. Bakhtin on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and from the notion of a polyphonic novel more broadly. Bakhtin argues that “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. Dostoyevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse.”32 Of course, every character in every novel, play, or short story has opinions, and to achieve dramatic effect those opinions are commonly put in con30. See Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Knopf, 1991). 31. Schama, Dead Certainties, 320. 32. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6–7. Italics in the original. Bakhtin adds that in Dostoyevsky’s fiction “appears a hero whose voice is constructed in the same way that the voice of the author himself is constructed in the usual novel. The hero’s word about himself and about the world is every bit as valid as the usual authorial word; it is not subordinated to the objectivized image of the hero as one of his characteristics, nor does it serve as mouthpiece for the author’s voice. It possesses an exceptional independence in the structure of the work, standing as if alongside the author’s word and in a peculiar way combining with it and with the full-­ valued voices of the other heroes” (7).

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flict with one another. But in polyphony, the richness of the characters’ interpretative schemes is entirely meshed with their respective ideological, social, psychological, and discursive worlds, giving them as much, or nearly as much, power as the implied author in the text.33 Obviously, polyphonic history is quite different from the polyphonic novel. The goal of polyphonic history is to shed light on the historical past; what it juxtaposes are various interpretations of the past. Conceptions of the past, however, are not dead logical structures, but living sets of beliefs, arranged in characters’ consciousnesses, within their living social worlds. In history, as in the novel, characters’ discourse—their peculiar ways of expressing themselves—is neither coincidental nor anecdotal. It represents their social world, itself a product of historical forces. This is why Bakhtin insists: “Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon— social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning.”34 Narratives of the past carry enormous meaning for people, and, as the text below shows, have huge political importance. But polyphonic history denies the notion that the infinity of past experiences on which historical narratives are based has an essence; the monologic truth which tries to capture that essence of the past is therefore doomed in advance. Moreover, polyphonic history questions the notion that a human being is a coherent, stable entity, which is wholly knowable to itself. For that reason, the engagement between the historian and the people in the “field”—if it is to be truly called dialogic—cannot make do with exchanges of information. This is not to deny that dialogue is absolutely necessary if one is dealing with the recent past. Rather, dialogism as33. In later works, Bakhtin developed his concept so as to include, to varying degrees, all novelistic discourse. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 259–422. Interestingly, Bakhtin seems to have understood early on that polyphonic discourse can be applied in essays as well. He confesses: “We have advanced a thesis and given a rather monological (in light of our theory) revue of the most pertinent attempts to define the basic features of Dostoevsky’s art.” Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1973), 38. 34. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 269.

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sumes that much of people’s subjectivity will remain hidden from view, and that people’s understandings of themselves, as well as their ideas of their role in the historical process, may remain opaque, or be revealed in unexpected moments. In a different way, this is a central theme of polyphonic fiction as well. To recall, several of Dostoyevsky’s characters rebel against the notion that someone will pass a finalizing judgment on them, or will understand them fully, as it were, from the outside. This is a rebellion against the “disciplinary power” that Foucault speaks of, which uses observation and normalizing judgment to “understand” the character and fit him into a larger “economy of power.” Dostoyevsky’s characters carry on long polemics with representatives of these fields of knowledge, including the author of the work of fiction. They always seem to have a hidden “surplus humanity,” a part of their being that no one suspects and that no panoptic vision can penetrate. Only in those rare moments of profound, radically challenging dialogues—Dostoyevsky’s fictional symposiums and Héctor Gallego’s real Bible circles are two examples—will a character be brought to a radical investigation of his innermost beliefs. It is in those special dialogues with others and with one’s historical reality that a fuller understanding of oneself arises, and new sources of subjectivity arise. Why should a historian, then, pretend to represent himself to the reader in any finalized way? How would he so easily penetrate the deepest places in his own soul, and why would he reveal those private places to his reader? The author here seems to answer that historians in fact do not reveal themselves at all. Instead, in confessional forms of writing there is a narrator who is posited, just as the narrators of this work are—an important element of the textual whole. But unlike the narrators of this work, the narrators of most works of history appear in their respective works as the real human researcher who went to the field and came back with conclusions. What is the consequence of presenting oneself as a unified, coherent agent who, let us admit, always seems to confess the same useful and contained story of privileged guilt and nuanced support for the righteous subaltern? How is this confessional narrator human? Does he ever admit that he has failed to answer the question at hand? Does he ever admit uncontrollable desire, lies, spiritual discoveries that are abandoned? Does he say that he has been depressed these xxix

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last months? That the language in which he is writing these words will always be alien and cold to him?35 V. ​s for me, the more I came to see this balance of problems and advantages clearly, the more I grew irritated by its central aspect. I had no problem with the fact that the author wanted to juxtapose various interpretative voices. I recalled Ronald Fraser’s Blood of Spain with much warmth, and did not think there was anything very subversive in that book.36 I began to suspect, moreover, that there was something about our current historical moment that made it uncomfortable for me to read this text. I mean that at some point in the second half of the last century we were supposed to have matured out of modernity: cities could no longer be constructed in the shape of airplanes; Rea-

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35. A few works do challenge this picture. In history, for example, see Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine; Marjorie Becker, “Talking Back to Frida: Houses of Emotional Mestizaje,” History and Theory 41, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 56–71. In anthropology, see Renato I. Rosaldo, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage: On the Cultural Force of Emotions,” in Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society 1983 (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1984), 178–95. I do not know of a writer who questions the unity of his own self. 36. See Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). Fraser had written fiction and journalism, and his interests are truly interdisciplinary. However, the wonderful amalgam of oral accounts of the Spanish Civil War does not aim to create a polyphonic history. As he explains, “For eighteen months of the two years I spent writing the book, the witnesses dominated it so totally that I couldn’t get a form and a structure that was satisfactory. I thought that was where they ought to be, up front dominating. And then I realised that if I didn’t dominate them the book was never going to have a form that was accessible to a reader and that came to grips with the totality. And so it was a struggle between them and me in an odd sort of way which I had to win. So I began to reduce the direct quote and use a lot of indirect quote which I could handle and liaise more easily. At the same time I had to develop some form of narrative to link together the experiences. The book was not going to be just a factual history of the war, rather its aim was to concentrate on the experience of civil war and on certain theoretical problems arising out of that which I thought were of relevance today. There were certain things I wanted to say, certain discoveries or positions that I’d developed through this work which I thought were important or relevant to these theoretical problems and which ought to be put in.” Ronald Fraser, “An Interview with Ronald Fraser,” interview by Jim Kelly, Oral History 8, no. 1 (April 1, 1980): 56.

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son, it was discovered, was the costume of an old white man; narratives were suddenly fragmented and clocks began to melt. And then we got tired of this post-­modernity too: data became big again, and, facing new crises—environmental, political—the humanities dropped the language games, returned to the facts, turned digital . . . few seem to recognize today that we have remained in the same juncture since modernity’s supposed demise—that defaulting back to naive realism as our mode of representation after critiquing it for decades is not a way to take a stand against post-­truth politics but an unwitting participation in it. But as I saw it, the author has gone too far here. On the one hand, by creating this clash of interpretative frameworks, the writer was avoiding taking responsibility for his text, and failing to give me the correct interpretation, or at least the best one. On the other hand, he was creating an even larger omniscient authorial voice—a perfect creature of the Enlightenment after all! Well, I cannot deny that there was some strange seduction in this pastiche. I became convinced it was not written by a Panamanian, and yet there was something that revealed a Panamanian intelligence in it. I began to like the quick shifts, the refractions of others’ speech, the eccentricities . . . could it not be changed a little, organized, so that it could be a little more constructive? I caught myself looking with the author at the country around me, laughing with him, at him, at myself. I even began to notice a gentle sense of longing developing in me. Still, I could not resolve the issue of the relation of the real historical author to the text. I imagined that if I were to find him I would just make him give me straight answers for the issues that came up. Early attempts to identify this person in Panamá failed, and I began to speculate . . . it became a kind of fetish, and one time when I was ill with the flu, somewhat delirious, I was sure I saw him on the other side of a closed toiletry shop on Vía España. It had started to rain and I was afraid a storm was coming, but I looked at the faint image flickering in there. The lights of the cars on the road reflected on the glass and played with my own shadow, and for a moment I became convinced he was just behind the glass. Such was my state at the time that it was crucial for me to show him my editorial work, to ask if this or that was what he truly meant—in a word, to appeal to his authority. I finally gave up on the entire pursuit, but it bothered me, and I confess that I could not help thinking that the author had avoided responsibility in a way that is rather typical, and, xxxi

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well, not quite dignified. (I am ashamed to say that this feeling was nurtured by the fact that, subconsciously, I felt as though the author was yet another person who had made an appointment to meet me and canceled without notice. How often it has happened to me in Panamá! Why bother making an appointment if you are not planning to keep it? Just tell me, and I will not meet you! Come now, we are adults, are we not? I am a rational person—I am quite prepared to accept it, if you do not want to meet me!) And even now, as I understand the arguments made here, and as I have come to respect the author’s maneuver, I cannot help feeling cheated. I want to understand what it all means even more now, to organize my own thoughts about the damn thing, to finally clarify it all. Sitting in the apartment, I cannot get rid of these thoughts, and I try practicing that somatic exercise. I try relaxing my body, and moving my awareness downward . . . distracted, I cannot concentrate, and I notice the wind is picking up. Who can I turn to, to make sense of it all? From my window, I can see Panamá in its moment of glory, its new skyscrapers and metro, the widening canal . . . and the city, sure of itself, ready to launch itself into the future. A heavy rain starts outside, and I look around for my crystal paperweight. The stack of papers begins to tremble, and then I see the stone on top of the television, holding down some bills. I go to grab it, but I am too late—the wind forces its way inside. From where in hell did this tormenta come? It tosses the clothes that had been left to dry on the line, getting a hold of me too, and the text, the storm has it: the pages are in the air. I try to see something, to recall the crucial point out of the storm, but the wind has gotten hold of it all; it is spreading the paper across the world. In the tumult, a thought flashes in the mind: who am I, whose job it is to grab the paperweight? Everything is violent movement; if I had wings, I could not close them now. Am I imagining? The pieces of paper, up in the air, above the Bolivian embassy, the park—the storm scatters the text over old railway tracks, across skyscrapers, roads, old factories, and into the distance . . . right up to heaven. Is this storm that which we call progress? K. B. W.

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Part I : Coiba

An Introduction to the Panamanian Subject …

1 Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty Porras and the Liberal Reforms, 1912–1924 …

I. Carpintero, Universidad Nacional, December 17, 2003 t’s raining hard and the guards are standing in a semicircle, getting drenched. I can see it fairly clearly, as though I’m standing a few steps behind them, looking at the backs of their raincoats. They’re standing around a corpse that had been tied to a tree—a small palm tree—whose roots are sticking out from the ground, like veins. The body’s been tied so that the arms are stretched sideways, but now some parts are gone and it looks like it’s disintegrating. Not in a bad way, mind you; there’s no smell or anything. Capitán Soler is inspecting the corpse more closely, looking at it from the side. His face looks . . . I think it’s peaceful, curious. None of the others are holding their noses, because the only smell is of the jungle, the rotten leaves, fruit trees, that sort of thing. The termites ate what they ate of the corpse, and I can’t remember if at this point they’re still there. The image is very clear, but somehow uncertain—you know when that happens? I can see the corpse, very clearly, the remains of its arms, the bones, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a human being lived in that shell at all, and to tell you the truth, now when I recall the image, it doesn’t make me feel anything in particular. It’s as though some sort of a toy or a machine was broken, rusting there in my memory. Oh yeah, they’re talking, Capitán Soler is. He’s describing the scene, and his secretary, a rectangular meaty guy, is taking notes. It’s raining lightly, so one of the other guards is shielding the paper with his jacket, but it still gets a bit wet. Everything is gray, except there are some white flowers growing at the corpse’s feet. The white flowers seem too cinematic to be real, so maybe that’s a kind of memory phen—what do you call it? There must be a psychological term for it . . . but they appear very strongly in the image, so do what you want with that information. Later, at some point, one of the guards, Gagarin, calls the captain. They’d been standing on the riverbank and he noticed a small carved log that got stuck between the rocks. The place they’re standing is just

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up from the river, so I suppose the captain had to have told them to wander off and look around. Yeah, that must have been what happened, because the carved log was some way from the corpse. The squad sees the log and, sure enough, there’s another carved log and a piece of shirt. The rain’s stopped, and the captain goes down to observe everything. In the end, he dictates, CONCLUSION: A prisoner tried to leave the group; possibly due to hunger or fear; may have attempted to return to the Rio Blanco Camp. Was tied to tree, estilo pan con miel, and left there: executed by his friends. At least one raft shipwrecked. No survivors found; prisoners presumed dead. Director of the Penal Colony of Coiba, Cap. Artemio J. Soler. Signed, (and so forth). II. week before we were summoned to the director, I was standing in line, in front of the dining room. You stand there, you have to hold your hands like this, and you can’t get out of line. Well, two dogs started to fight (lots of stray dogs over there). One of the dogs, Pulga, used to be the pet of a prisoner, but when the prisoner was released there was no one left to take care of him. He had been a strong dog back in the day, a very intelligent one, that never looked for trouble and mostly kept to himself. But now he was getting old and he couldn’t defend himself very well, and the other dog was destroying him. I think some of the others felt bad too, but no one dared step out of line. Most people just glanced a bit, without moving their heads too much. I could see the other dog standing on top of Pulga and I thought he was going to kill him, so I pulled out of line, took a stick, and drove this dog away. I noticed a guy named Wilson, a tall black prisoner who was working in the kitchen. He had been cutting ñame, and he watched as I went to help Pulga. I thought I noticed in the way he looked at me, what—a kind of approval. The rest hardly moved, and then in maybe twenty seconds I returned to the line. But a guard named Medina saw me and ordered me to stand aside. He hit me behind the kneecaps with his baton so that I fell on the ground, and then he and another one, Nadino, went at me for a while with their batons. I don’t remember any of it very well, just that after the beating, this Medina put his boot on my neck and said, “Some revolution you have going here, Che!” When I was allowed to get back into the line, I saw the guy in the kitchen again, Wilson. Only now he wasn’t looking anymore. I could see

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Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

Central Camp prison, Coiba, 1956. The prison in the image was built in 1919. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives [SIA2009-­4263].)

his enormous hand as he was grasping the knife: he almost crushed the handle of that knife, that’s how hard he held it. A week later, I was in the Casa Blanca—the director’s residence. And there was this Wilson again, and another prisoner who I knew vaguely, Del Valle, your father. We were told to sit at ease, but none of us moved. We didn’t move because we were sitting in front of Captain Soler, and that made us tense, if I may use an understatement. He doesn’t cut a very imposing figure, Soler—thin, tanned, receding midline. But before this meeting in his office, the last time I heard him speak, he had a bunch of us prisoners standing in a half circle, and he told everyone that whatever we should do, we shouldn’t piss on the devil because the devil has a long tail. And that was a message that what—that beyond the guards, there were informers, and that nothing you said over there was a 5

Chapter One

secret. Anything and anyone was suspect, Soler could know everything, and the punishment—better we shouldn’t get into that. Girl, what these monsters could do to a human being . . . and they wouldn’t even need to try very hard. We’re very fragile in the end, see? So you can imagine us sitting there, Del Valle, Wilson, and me, in the White House, in front of the director. III. hen the new man arrived, I was working on the Singer, so I didn’t meet him until later. I’d been working all day, and when I finished the last test and came out, the sunlight almost knocked me off balance. Wilson must have told the whole world I was running a test: a crowd was standing outside. I remember looking at the cryptic letters on the roll of paper in my hand, but the light was so strong, and the Singer’s noise, still in my ears . . . omm, shh, omm. Later they told me that my eyes looked as though they were made of bronze, and I remember picking little copper chips from my hair that evening. I couldn’t make any sense of the questions everyone was shouting at me: Oye, Carpintero, qué xopá con este—oye fren . . . but I’d been in the belly of that machine for so long that now my senses were taking everything in: the warm air, the hue of the sea in the distance, the barks of a few dogs, the smell of garbage; the people around me, some in prisoners’ rags, others in guards’ khakis, with questions, mixed, and my ears still: omm, shh, omm. Your father told me that at this time, he was sitting in our shack, and then someone knocked very gently on the door. He said he raised his head a little, unsure if what he had heard was—and there it was again, tip-­tap-­tap, barely perceivable above the light breeze. So he says, “Who’s there?” and then he sees this thin figure—“Yes, come in, the new guy from Playa Blanca? Don’t be shy, come in. What’s your name?” “Jonás, but they call me Luna-­Icaza, so properl—” “Good, Luna-­Icaza, me they also call by my last name, Del Valle, no relation. Sit down, that’s your bed here. Sit down, don’t be afraid, you seem like a good man. Didn’t think a prisoner can live this nice, ha?” “No, it’s, what’s the word . . . very interesting. And this, is that like a—” “It’s your private box. You need to find yourself a lock somehow, but maybe Wilson can help. Has his connections in the kitchen, that one.” I’m making some of this up, of course, I can’t remember it because these

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are things your father told me. But I know these people very well, so, it’s more or less how it was. I’m doing your father about right, no? Ha ha. “But please relax,”—like that. “Please relax. We’ll have a lot to talk about when everyone gets here. Or if Carpintero makes any progress, we’ll go run the Singer.” “Who’s—” “We have Santo Wilson, he works in the kitchen, and Carpintero is trying to fix the Singer now. That’s our committee.” Del Valle said that the new man opened the old American ammunition box carefully and put his second shirt in it. Then he felt something in his pocket, but decided not to put it in the box just then. He looked around the simple wooden cabin, at the windows [with] their thin metal screens. A smell of turpentine and oil seeped in from the mechanic shop outside, and besides that there was only the scent of the wood, slowly decomposing in the humidity. You don’t know Luna-­Icaza, but just imagine a thin, short man, bronze skin, by this time not very healthy, extremely fragile. [He] would stutter at certain words sometimes, [and he] had no self-­confidence, at least not in the normal sense of the term. As he was standing there, he needed to hold his pants with his left hand so they wouldn’t fall. He looked like a child. Before Santo Wilson and I got there, Del Valle explained to him what had taken place. He started where I just got to: the three of us at the Casa Blanca, sitting in front of a director with a long tail. Director Soler started by saying the island was cursed. He said it could even be that it was the last Indian chief, Cohiba—after they beat him, enslaved his people, he cursed the place. Some nonsense like that— you’d be surprised what some of these officers believe in. There was a curse, and that’s why the island has never managed to prosper. Look around you, he said, trees of every kind, parrots, deer, all the fish in the water; even crocodiles, iguanas, coconuts. It was like Genesis (what an idiot). And how much cattle the government has bred! Well, you have the prisoners—many good workers, he said, despite their unfortunate condition and ignorance. So why have governments since Dr. Porras not been able to make this place profitable? (We kept quiet and pretended to be gaining enormous insight from his profound words.) He declared, the island was supposed to reintegrate [the prisoner] into society. And what positive work has been done? Nothing! The prisoners leave as dumb as they come. And the staff—he was practically whispering this— 7

Chapter One

some are good, but some are no better than the prisoners. He had been there for a full year, but he blamed past administrations for the failure, and claimed he was committed to finally heal the island of its ills. At this point he was silent for a moment, [and he] looked at us like he was letting all this sink in. Then he put his hands together, with his thumbs facing upward, as if to imply his complete frankness. This is why I brought you here, he said . . . [inaudible] He declared us the Committee for the Scientific Development of Coiba, and said it was only fitting to name our team after the Liberal Indian cacique. And so we were the Comité del Desarrollo Científico de Coiba, Victoriano Lorenzo, CDCC-­VL. Del Valle and I were sent to the National Archives for a couple of months, and when we got back we started discussions and writing. We had some more people sit in on the discussion, some common delinquents who didn’t understand everything that was said. This was Captain Soler’s idea—to educate some of the prisoners in this way. Who, us? The committee? Oh, I suppose we were—we became confiados—prisoners of confidence. We had a separate shack; Del Valle and I got a trip to Panama City (I keep calling your father Del Valle, as I’ve always done). These monsters didn’t allow us to make any contact with our families, but we passed some notes with the archivists, and that was of course a great thing. Still, we didn’t dare defy the militares or try and bribe our way to meet our families. It was very hard for everyone, because they all knew we were here in the city. (I know it was very hard for your mother.) But on the whole we knew we had been granted an opportunity, an enormous opportunity—and not just from the point of view of the conditions of our imprisonment. I mean, we got a chance to critique the system that was oppressing us. That’s every prisoner’s dream, and for us, as politicals, it’s the central point. No, it’s not just that you want to rationalize what’s happening to you. You want to show that morally and intellectually, it’s you who has the upper hand. Well, here comes a prison director who either doesn’t understand this at all, or is too straight to be a militar, or—and we were afraid of this—was somehow setting us up. [But we] had no choice in the matter, and that’s how we signed our contract with the devil. Just before I came back to the shack and met Luna-­Icaza for the first time, your father finished briefing him, and I suppose the new guy won his confidence completely, because Del Valle told him everything, and that wasn’t typical. [inaudible] You have to understand we had a very 8

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

delicate situation there, and the last thing any of us wanted was that some spy would pass the details of it to the director. Anyhow, the new man was glad to be part of the committee, to participate in the public discussions, all that. But he had a kind of physical reaction to the mention of the machine we had built, though your father couldn’t explain it very well. His delicate muscles, I mean, Luna-­Icaza’s muscles, looked [like they had been] electrocuted, and Del Valle made a mental note of it. But he assured the new man that the Singer was the kind of machine you just have to tweak a bit until it works right, and that any day we would finish the process, absolutely any day now or possibly, in fact, after Carpintero finishes fine-­tuning today, we can run it and see where we are and I have no doubt that soon everyone in the country will be talking about the scientific progress we have made, and of course, it should not surprise anyone that prisoners can attain the highest forms of humanity, the scientific invention, because, as you well know, we are unjustly imprisoned, prisoners of conscience if not consciousness, and if you allow us a measure of liberty, there we go, unleashing our rational powers. (I’m making this up of course, but that’s how he would speak, and either way, you’ll see, I’m creating the setting, as it were, so as to plant the main thing.) “Of course the situation is not good now,” Del Valle admitted a bit later, “but we will worry about that when Carpintero gets back from the Singer.” “They might take away your—what’s the word, eh pr—?” “They might take away our privileges, and your privileges, and some other things that human beings need. If the Singer doesn’t work now, the captain will get angry.” A valve inside Luna-­Icaza tightened violently, and [he could feel] the blood pumping in his arms and legs. “Take a look at the letter of authorization there if you have your doubts, though I see you’re quite a nice fellow. You need to sign down there. You can see the documents there too, in those boxes. In the ammunition box over there. Yes, all that, and we have some more that we do not—see that? What could anybody have said?” 1. The COMMITTEE FOR SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT OF COIBA, VICTORIANO LORENZO (Comité del Desarrollo Científico de Coiba, Victoriano Lorenzo, CDCC-­VL) will investigate the history of the Penal Colony. 9

Chapter One

2. The CDCC-­VL will publish its findings in a SPECIAL REPORT, to be submitted to the Director of the Colony, Cap. Artemio J. Soler. 3. Members of the CDCC will be afforded certain privileges, in accordance with the directives of Cap. Soler, to be given in person. 3.b. Failure to submit the said SPECIAL REPORT will result in ■■■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■■■ 4. The Historical REPORT will adhere to the scientific standard, and if called for, Committee Members will contribute to the intellectual development of the said colony in other ways deemed necessary. Such activities as drawing up signs, teaching classes, alphabetizing in accordance with Revolutionary decree, may be ordered from time to time.1 [etc.] Luna-­Icaza wasn’t sure if it was meant to be taken quite literally, or if a few of the points were written to give a more ceremonial feel. He later said that what was missing was a second document instructing the reader how to read the first one. “And this is a kind of—I’m not sure what the precise term is—a kind of ‘chapter’ you wrote, ove—” Yes, yes, and your father explained how we worked. What? Oh, well, before the Singer was fully functioning, the way we worked is, see—we would chop up what we eventually wanted to cover into smaller components, and then we each started writing a piece. Then we came to put it together, and [that was when] the fights began. Which one do you have? Show me that . . . I don’t know exactly, what—although I think, yes, that’s the first part your father wrote. We revised it a bit, if I remember correctly, the [parts that speak about] structural changes were probably my inputs. But it remained more or less his, and represented his thoughts at the time. I hated it, of course, being a Marxist. IV. Excerpt from CDCC Report Dr. Porras and the Rise of the Liberals n the half century that preceded Panamanian independence, the society of the terminal cities was caught in a social and economic flood. The old Hispanic society stood behind its walls, while the wild boom and bust of economic cycles tore at its core and the massive waves of

I

1. The document is most likely fictional.

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Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

transport and immigration changed everything it had known. First it was the Californian Gold Rush in 1848: an unprecedented number of travelers passing by dugout boats and mule trains. Already in 1846, the increasing influence of the United States over the Isthmus was codified in the Mallarino–­Bidlack Treaty it signed with Colombia. Soon afterward, troop deployments and private acquisitions made good on this opening, and the terminal cities came under effective US patronage. The construction of the railway created enormous economic growth on the Isthmus; with its completion, the local economy took a hit just as foreigners began reaping the rewards on their investment. With this contraction, and with increased foreign presence, anti-­American sentiment rose—the Watermelon Slice Incident in 1856 was the most dramatic eruption.2 But after the completion of the Pacific Railroad in the US in 1869, little was left of the enormous waves of transportation and business. In 1880, another bonanza: Ferdinand de Lesseps brings the French to dig a canal. Tens of thousands of workers are brought from around the world, mostly from the Antilleans (twenty-­two thousand die of disease). Finally, the slow death of this project, which caused a political earthquake in France, brought another economic slump. In short, the era was one of international economic activity, immigration, and foreign influence on a scale previously unknown in the Isthmus. During the period, parts of the urban elite went through an ideological shift. As Hernán Porras’s rough outline suggests, traditionally, the Isthmian urban elite had been rather eclectic. [It] took from conservatism its aristocratic social ideal and oligarchic politics. Its leadership was principally civilian. As for religion, it as2. The Watermelon Slice Incident took place in Panama City on April 15, 1856. After Jack Oliver, an American traveler, refused to pay for a watermelon, an incident developed that escalated into a full riot. Estimates of casualties varied; eighteen had died, according to one account. Mercedes Chen Daley, “The Watermelon Riot: Cultural Encounters in Panama City, April 15, 1856,” Hispanic American Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1990): 85–108. The best discussion of the period is Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). For information on early US policing of the Isthmus, see David C. Humphrey, “The Myth of the Hangman: Ran Runnels, the Isthmus Guard, and the Suppression of Crime in Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century Panama,” Latin Americanist 59, no. 4 (December 1, 2015): 3–24.

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sumed an attitude of indifference, as can be noted by the shortages of religious vocations and the lack of backing of Church interests. Of this ideological current [conservatism], [the white urban elite] rejected, however, its physiocratic economic thought, its xenophobic international attitude, and its ethnocentric cultural attitude. The Capital’s white man, on the level of politics, was for free-­trade, was a xenophile, and cosmo-­centric; that is, he took three conservative elements, three liberal, and he eliminated one, religion.3 This was the traditional elite; the picture had changed by the time Panamá became independent. Liberal elites mingled and exchanged ideas with foreign technocrats and experts much more often at the turn of the century than at any point before. This, together with the fact that they had all been educated abroad, accounted for their intimate knowledge of European and American states. Both party elites and the black liberal grassroots of the Arrabal, moreover, vigorously advocated for a central role of the state in social and economic affairs. Building on this ideological transformation, the Liberal Party in the Isthmus would soon after independence fashion the only convincing national agenda.4 The man who would become the leader of the Liberal Party in the Isthmus, Dr. Belisario Porras, never envisioned Panamá as a nation before 1903. Porras was the son of a Conservative politician of some standing in Isthmian politics, and was raised in the interior province of Las Tablas.5 He studied law in Bogotá and continued his studies in Brussels, 3. Hernán F. Porras, Papel histórico de los grupos humanos de Panamá (Panamá, RP, 1980), 30. 4. More on the formation of Panamanian liberalism in the early twentieth century can be found in Peter A. Szok, “La Última Gaviota”: Liberalism and Nostalgia in Early Twentieth-­Century Panamá (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001). 5. Belisario Porras’s most elaborate biography is Manuel Octavio Sisnett Cano, Belisario Porras; o, la vocación de la nacionalidad (Panamá, RP, 1962). This work is reverential, however, and does not discuss the material critically. Porras’s own writings serve the implied author here, and I will indicate where an obvious reference is made. A useful summary of Porras’s works can be found in the introduction to Patricia Pizzurno de Araúz and María Rosa de Muñoz, La modernización del estado panameño bajo las administraciones de Belisario Porras y Arnulfo Arias Madrid (Panamá, RP: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Archivo Nacional de Panamá, 1992). Other valuable sources are Celestino Andrés Araúz, Belisario Porras y las relaciones de Panamá con los Estados Unidos (El Dorado, Panamá, RP: Ediciones Formato Dieciséis, Exten-

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where he was named consul for Colombia. Between diplomatic posts, law practice, and teaching positions, Porras also lived in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Brazil, Paris, and Washington. His early book on legal and administrative matters shows he knew liberalism systematically and thoroughly, and, years before exercising administrative power, he understood the theory of the state superbly.6 The vision that animated him was that of a modern democratic Colombia— a country he believed would be strong enough to withstand the pressure of Western powers. This dream was destroyed in the Conservative restoration of 1885, which to the Liberals seemed an enormous step back toward a primitive past. In the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902), they tried to reverse their country’s fate, and Porras led the two campaigns that the Liberals lost in the Department of Panamá.7 Soon after the devastating civil war, Colombia turned down a North American offer to build an Isthmian canal through the Department of Panamá. Seeing the prospect of wealth and progress disappear before their eyes, the Panamanian elite was outraged. Thus, with the vision of the canal in mind, the urban elite began planning secession. It did not take a leap of the imagination to think of an independent Panamá—­ different coalitions had fought for independence on five occasions in the nineteenth century; and during the second half of that century, US soldiers helped guarantee Colombian order on the Isthmus. It was only natural, therefore, that the elites who organized their independence movement would, understanding the political opportunity, seek US sión Universitaria, Universidad de Panamá, 1988); J. Conte Porras and Belisario Porras, Belisario Porras: Pensamiento y acción (Panamá, RP: Fundación Belisario Porras, 1996); Fernando Aparicio, “Significación, alcance y limitaciones de la experiencia porrista: 1912–1924,” Revista Humanidades, tercera época, no. 1 (1993): 149–54; Diógenes De la Rosa, Ensayos varios (Panamá, RP: Editora Istmeña, 1968), 103–8. 6. This is a reference to Belisario Porras, Derecho administrativo, lecciones dictadas por el preclaro hombre público doctor Belisario Porras, siendo catedrático de la materia el año de 1904 en la Escuela de Derecho de El Salvador, ed. Victorino Ayala (San Salvador, El Salvador: Tip. “La Unión,” 1912). Porras’s anecdotal writings on his life and presidencies appear in Trozos de vida (San José: Imprenta Alsina [Sauter, Arias], 1931). 7. On the Liberal efforts during the War of a Thousand Days, see Belisario Porras, Memorias de las campañas del Istmo, 1900 (Panamá, RP: Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Deportes, 1973).

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Chapter One

backing. Their plan worked: on November 3, 1903 a bloodless coup created a new state, and US gunboats ensured it would survive. Philippe Bunau-­Varilla, the French engineer of the French canal company who had an enormous vested interest in securing a deal between the two sides, negotiated on behalf of the Panamanian elite. Three weeks after the coup, and without Panamanian authorization, he signed the Hay–­ Bunau-­Varilla Treaty. In Panamá it is to this day known as “the agreement that no Panamanian signed.” In exile in Costa Rica, Porras heard the news from his friends. Various Liberals participated in the coup, and Porras did not admonish them for doing so or suggest that they withdraw their support. But even those who had participated in the conspiracy were outraged when they became aware of the conditions Washington had imposed. There was little to do—if not for the Marines, the Colombian Army would return. And so the United States managed to secure a Panamanian state in which it could intervene legally at whatever point in time it chose. Worse for Panamá, the strip of land where the canal would be built was to be a North American state within a state. In the aftermath of 1903, we had indeed won our independence, but we would have to negotiate the terms of our sovereignty in the decades ahead.8 Porras was a nationalist, but the question was, what nation would he be part of ? As romantic as he was, this gentlemanly lawyer, who spoke tirelessly about honor while enduring our unbearable humidity in a European suit, well understood realpolitik. He believed in large nation-­ states and comprehended the dangers that a small nation faced, sitting as it did, on such a strategic route. A few months before independence he warned: “Those who think that the North Americans will build this work for our benefit need to moderate their calculations and remember that they [the North Americans] have not been able to respect their 8. The negotiation took place between Bunau-­Varilla, of the French company that had failed to construct the canal, and the US State Department. Bunau-­Varilla had an interest in closing a deal under any circumstances, because it meant that the French rights and equipment could be sold to the US. The Hay–­Bunau-­Varilla Treaty and the relations between the US and Panamá have been the subject of much Panamanian writing. For a general, if somewhat dated review of the literature, see Michael L. Conniff, “Panama since 1903,” in Latin America since 1930: Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, vol. 7, The Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 603–42.

14

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

contractual obligations since 1849, and that the security of the Isthmus has been threatened and controlled capriciously by that country since then.”9 Porras understood what was in the making: independence without sovereignty, social and political life in the shadow of an empire. The half century that preceded independence had been dramatic. But the country’s first decade, during which the canal was being built, was wholly transformative. Waves of foreign laborers had come in the previous decades, but the scale of the North American canal project was different. In 1913, the canal employed a record 56,654 laborers, and in the entire decade of construction, some 150,000 workers are said to have arrived.10 About three quarters of the employees came from the Caribbean, but there were also many Europeans, as well as North and South Americans. Between 1896 and 1911, the population of Panama City grew from 24,159 to 54,816.11 In the American construction effort, as in the French canal and railway projects that had preceded it, more affluent newcomers, who saw the rich business opportunities of the Isthmus, followed the influx of poor laborers. Evidently, many of those were quick to take the initiative, because within a few decades, some of the wealthiest families in Panamá were the product of this immigration wave.12 The white elite, however, felt ever more isolated. It was not only that the masses had doubled in numbers, but that those who arrived seemed so different. The Hispanic elite viewed Jewish, Arab, and Chinese immigrants with suspicion; but its great fear were the black, English-­ speaking, Protestant workers. An icy tension also developed between the Afro-­Antillean newcomers and the Isthmian black and mixed-­race 9. Belisario Porras, “Reflexiones canaleras o la venta del istmo,” in El pensamiento político en los siglos XIX y XX, ed. Ricaurte Soler, vol. VI (Panamá, RP: Universidad de Panamá, 1988), 189–94. The text originally appeared in Constitucional, July 18 1903, San Salvador, El Salvador. 10. Omar Jaén Suárez, La población del Istmo de Panamá: Estudio de geohistoria (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1998), 321. See also Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin, 2009). 11. Jaén Suárez, La población del Istmo, 321. 12. For a detailed description of the oligarchy in the 1950s and 1960s, see Marco A. Gandásegui, “La concentración del poder económico en Panamá,” in Panamá, dependencia y liberación, ed. Ricaurte Soler (Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1974), 151–83.

15

Chapter One

workers: the local working class was suspicious of those it perceived as its new foreign competitors.13 Construction changed the terminal cities in other ways too. The North Americans were persuaded that one of the main reasons the French had failed before them was that so many of the laborers under their command had died of disease. Dr. William Gorgas, reputed by many at the time to be the foremost American expert on tropical disease, was chosen to meet this challenge. Basing his work on discoveries by British and Cuban doctors, Dr. Gorgas had managed a campaign against yellow fever in Havana in 1901. That campaign was an unequivocal success, but it was not widely known outside medical circles, and few believed the theory that mosquitoes were the carriers of yellow fever and malaria. Hence, the enormous effort that Gorgas now demanded in Panamá seemed entirely wasteful. But in 1905 he finally got the full backing of a new chief of construction, John Stevens, and organized an unprecedented sanitation campaign in the terminal cities and digging zones. Since Stegomyia fasciata (later named Aëdes aegypti) and Anopheles were identified as the vectors of yellow fever and malaria, respectively, Gorgas’s team studied them in detail. This research indicated that both species needed standing water to breed; that their life cycles were rather short; and that in both cases the disease itself had an incubation period, before which the mosquitoes’ bite could not infect. Canal workers under the command of the Isthmian Canal Commission therefore built a water system, supplying potable water to houses in the terminal cities, and eliminating the need to keep household water reserves. Hundreds of people were involved in the effort to inspect and fumigate every house in Colón and Panama City, and inspectors assessed fines for any water container left open. A person identified as having yellow fever was quickly isolated in a room with metal screens; thousands of screens were distributed to the houses of the Zone. The results were remarkable. Before Gorgas began his campaign, panic among laborers of 13. For works on the Antillean community in Panamá, see Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal; Greene, The Canal Builders. The first essays about this community were written by one of its teachers and leaders, George Westerman, and remain highly valuable today. George Westerman, Toward a Better Understanding (Panamá, RP, 1946); George Westerman, Los inmigrantes antillanos en Panamá (Panamá, RP: Impresora de La Nación, 1980). On reactions to the transformations that the building of the canal brought about, see Szok, “La última gaviota”, 37–65.

16

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

the US had made thousands quit their jobs and return north, but within months after the beginning of his campaign, confidence was restored. Whereas during the French Canal digging, up to 7% of the workforce died in any given year, the public health campaign managed to lower the death rate to a total of seven in the last year of the digging.14 This dramatic victory of modern science was extremely important for the success of the digging operation itself, but it also changed the daily lives of Panamanians in the terminal cities. The Liberal Party watched attentively: a few months of energetic government work, discipline, and cutting-­edge science defeated yellow fever and malaria and made our cities livable.15 More generally, the relations with the United States in the nine years since independence had proved that Porras’s suspicions were well founded. About the capabilities and ambitions of the Northern Colossus, no one had any more doubts. And the Liberals had no qualms about learning from the world-­class experts who were sent to the Canal. Wealthy or powerful white men were welcome in the new Club Unión, and information about internal political matters, as well as on the opinions of the day, were regularly exchanged. The problem was that there were few North Americans who had the gentle generosity of Gorgas. Most of those who exercised power in the Isthmus alternated between rare moments of admitting to the brutality of their imperial order and 14. Jaén Suárez, La población del Istmo, 505. 15. This is the common narrative, which most Panamanians accept. More recently, environmental historians and anthropologists have complicated the story. Paul Sutter, for example, has pointed out that entomologists were already becoming aware at the time of the digging that at least some mosquito species were proliferating because of the digging itself. Just as important, imperial aesthetic notions were often at odds with the demands of public health officials. Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Isis 98, no. 4 (2007): 724–54. The classic depiction of the US public health campaign in Panamá can be found in David McCullough, The Path between the Seas; The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 405–68. In Panamá Gorgas is to this day considered by many to be a true hero, as he was considered by President Porras, who said in his inaugural address in 1912 that “the American presence here, close by, has familiarized us with the advances of modern hygiene and assured our local liberties.” Belisario Porras, “Discurso en el Teatro Nacional el 1 de octubre de 1912 al inaugurar su gobierno,” Revista Lotería 454–55 (May 2004): 45–53. It was Porras who, in 1923, placed the first brick in the new Gorgas Institute for the study of tropical disease, and emotionally eulogized the doctor.

17

Chapter One

the more common stance of paternalistic, romantic praise of their role in advancing civilization and progress among the local inhabitants. It was a curious mix. The soldiers brawled in Panamanian bars while their officers preached. Theodore Roosevelt bragged that he “took the Isthmus,” but to defend himself against criticism in 1903, he flung around notions of progress and civilization.16 In this spirit, in the next three decades, Americans took on the pretensions of tutors and preachers, and were bent on strong-­arming Panamanian politicians and intervening outside the Canal Zone wherever and whenever they chose. The treaty they had forced down the throats of Panamanian elites allowed the Empire to do this legally. It was thanks to the North Americans that the Conservative Party held power during the first nine years after independence. And there were specific incidents in which US soldiers intervened to fix the situation as they saw fit. In 1904, for example, President Manuel Amador Guerrero wished to disband General [Esteban] Huertas’s force, which had functioned as the national army until then. Though Huertas had played along with Amador and his junta in November 1903, the president now thought that Huertas could not be trusted. The North Americans backed Amador’s move, and the army was disbanded.17 Much more serious was the intervention by the young US diplomat Richard O. Marsh, which forced the Liberal Carlos Mendoza to give up the presidential seat in 1910 because of his race.18 16. McCullough, Path between the Seas, 384. 17. Thomas L. Pearcy, We Answer Only to God: Politics and the Military in Panama, 1903–1947 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 39. 18. The Marsh incident was in fact more complex for the simple reason that, as it appeared later, the young R. O. Marsh, who had been left as charge d’affaires in the US embassy in Panamá, had acted without authorization to effect Mendoza’s resignation. The embassy did not apologize or act to reverse his actions, but Marsh was later dismissed. For Marsh’s correspondence with the State Department, see R. O. Marsh, charge d’affaires, to Philander Knox, secretary of state, July 28, 1910, disp. 26, vol. 26, Panamanian Embassy Dispatches to the Department of State, 1910–12, RG 84, NACP. (Various other letters in July and early August are relevant too.) For the embassy’s internal investigation of the affair, see T. C. Dawson, minister plenipotentiary, to Philander Knox, secretary of state, September 28, 1910, disp. 2, vol. 26, Panamanian Embassy Dispatches to the Department of State, 1910–12, RG 84, NACP. The best discussion of Marsh can be found in James Howe, A People Who Would Not Kneel: Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).

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Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

Even worse was to come after the Liberals assumed power. A few months before Porras took office, on July 4, 1912, Panamanian police confronted American soldiers who were raucously celebrating their national holiday in Panama City’s bars. One American civilian was killed and sixteen others were injured, while, on the Panamanian side, three policemen were injured. Each side had its own account of the bloody incident, but there was no denying that the American off-­duty soldiers had been unarmed. After interrogating both their own soldiers and Panamanian civilians who wished to give information, the North Americans placed the blame entirely on the Panamanian police. Thus, when Porras became president he would have to deal with the firm American demand that the Policía Nacional give up its rifles in the terminal cities and remain there only with side arms and batons. The US insisted, moreover, that a US citizen be named chief inspector of the Panamanian police. From Panamanian independence on, Porras maneuvered with great care. After nine years of Conservative rule, in 1912 he received American observation of the elections, which, for the first time in the new republic’s history, were not rigged. Porras won by a landslide.19 Socially, Porras’s broad alliance, which included all the factions that had in some measure contributed to the Liberal campaigns during the War of a Thousand Days, replaced the rule of the old families. It was the first truly nationalist government, which was made up of every race and class: the followers of the indigenous cacique Victoriano Lorenzo, who had fought alongside Porras; the friends of Rodolfo Chiari, the rich Italian who had modernized the sugar and cattle industries; the devotees of Dr. Carlos Mendoza, the black leader of the working-­class arrabal; small farmers from the Azuero; and the growing white middle class of the city. The Liberals represented the vast majority of the Isthmian population.20 19. On the elections, see Henry Percival Dodge, US ambassador to Panama, to Philander C. Knox, U.S. secretary of state, June 8, 1912, disp. 141, vol. 29, Panamanian Embassy Dispatches to the Department of State, 1910–12, RG 84, NACP. See also various other letters in vol. 29. 20. A good scholarly analysis of the formation and dissolution of this coalition has not yet been written, though the works cited above about Belisario Porras can give some information on the matter. The vast majority of Dr. Porras’s personal and public documents can be found in the Archivo Belisario Porras in the Biblioteca Simón Bolí-

19

Chapter One

Nine years after the separation he did not support, Porras became the new republic’s first popularly elected president, and with broad popular support, he could apply himself fully to the construction of the new state. Thus, his government used the payouts from the canal to lay down infrastructure, build institutions, sanitize, educate, and organize. After twelve years and three presidencies (1912–1916, 1918–1920, and 1920– 1924) as the dominant politician of the country, Dr. Porras could look back and take satisfaction in the projects he had promoted: the legal reform that transformed the old Colombian laws into a new Panamanian legal code; the creation of the Registro Civil and the Registro Público; the many roads and the paving of streets in the cities; the building of bridges and the Chiriquí Railroad; the extension and overhaul of the telephone and telegraph systems; the construction of the Santo Tomás Hospital and smaller medical facilities throughout the country; the National Archive; the Gorgas Institute for the research of tropical disease; the establishment of the public educational system, along with its specialized professional schools and the National Institute; the new libraries; the reform of the National Police and the creation of new penal institutions, among which were the Cárcel Modelo and the penal colony on the Island of Coiba. V. Carpintero, Etcetera Books, December 21 said last time that we couldn’t get past the arguments. Well, we thought the Singer would solve the problem. It might seem strange to you that we would argue about method—as prisoners, that is. But this report . . . what else did we have there? Your father had his bourgeois interpretation, and you can see this in the piece we just looked at—this was his writing. He kept bringing up these wonderful bourgeois men (Belisario Porras was his favorite, but he had a curious reverential attitude even for the odd North American general, not to mention Dr. Gorgas—a saint). I would use a structural analysis, and he would say it was teleological. How can one look at this state-­building project and not analyze the class relations that underlay it? How can we talk about the construction of the canal as though it was a great service to the world,

I

var in the Universidad de Panamá in Panama City. The archive contains thousands of documents relating to Porras’s political machinations.

20

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

without talking about the ways in which it impeded movement here?21 Or discuss the concrete measures that were taken to divide the working classes under US and under Panamanian bourgeois rule?22 Well, your father would say something about the Liberal plan to develop the interior, and I would correct him: it was the bourgeois plan to colonize the peasants and expand the market . . . and on and on it went. From the outside, you might be thinking, what are these silly men arguing about? All I can say is that at the time I thought, well, this may be the last thing I ever write, and who knows who was going to read it. I thought for some reason that my friends outside would be bound to read it and call me a traitor—I wouldn’t have my name put on some crypto-­positivist history that celebrated liberal policies as though they were heroic victories. [In response to question:] Sí, claro, después sí cambió. Your father was a liberal to the day he passed away, but later it was a much more mature liberalism. When I looked at the things he wrote in the last few years, I couldn’t believe it. But you know, people change. I’ve changed too. The arguments? I don’t remember them so much—that is . . . though there was one just after I read this first piece. That one I remember well, because of the way it ended. I’d been sitting outside our shack, watching the sea . . . it had rained all morning, but now it was all heat and humidity again. I tried to relax but my body was anticipating, anxious—you know when that happens? You feel your body is in one place, but it needs to be in three others. Del Valle was putting the last touches on the first part, and there was supposed to be a kind of committee discussion of it. I should say that I was most involved in the writing of the second part, the sec—that is, of chapter 1. I mean, look, Tali—well, let’s see. Yes, the first part you showed me, that was basically what your father wrote; the second part was mostly just me. See that? Correct. We 21. As a consequence of the large artificial lakes that were constructed in order to feed the canal, entire villages were sunk and their inhabitants relocated; other populations were cut off from the routes that had been used, and forced to use small boats in order to reach destinations that had earlier been close. Anthropologist Ashley Carse is certainly correct that to see the canal as a project that facilitated traffic and shorted routes is misleading if we consider the experience of these populations. Ashley Carse, Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 22. Carpintero develops this argument in chap. 3 below.

21

Chapter One

needed to make it stick, and so we sat there [illegible]. That is, I would try to write it during times that others were not in the shack, and then I presented them with the result, and asked if they had any comments. So Santo Wilson: not really, except that something else needs to be said about God (or miracles or something like that. He was deeply religious . . . a very contradictory personality). Now Del Valle went over my part of the chapter, and—“and I’m supposed to give my good name to this Bolshevik propaganda? What is this?” Well, I thought, no way I’m going with that bourgeois crap again, so that’s that. Voices were raised, then there was shouting, and Pulga got so scared he stood in the corner of the shack and barked. I don’t know what we said exactly, but we were on the verge of breaking up the committee, and we all knew that wasn’t an option. It all happened so fast, I’d be lying to you if I told you exactly what I felt or what I thought . . . it was just a big mess of fear and stress, of us not seeing a way out of what we had gotten ourselves into. Him: Class this, class that! This was a democracy! And me: What are you defending, the bourgeoisie, that sold us to the Empire? So he shouts: And what are you defending, Mr. Lenin? We were standing at arm’s length, facing each other, and then Santo Wilson, who had been sitting on his bed, staring at us, suddenly jumped between us. He grabbed me with his enormous right hand, and his fingers completely surrounded my neck. The guy is huge—just imagine an enormous man, quick, pure muscle—a guy who can tear any of us to pieces. He held me with one hand, and with the other hand he tapped on your father’s chest. Tapped, I mean like, tap-­tap-­tap with his index finger. He tapped on his chest, shouting, “You shut up now,” and then tilting me, repeated, “You too, shut up now.” From the corner of my eye I could see how Del Valle had moved back, startled at how Santo Wilson’s finger had tapped him. Haha—I suddenly realized that if that guy killed me, it wouldn’t be the first time and it probably wouldn’t be the last time he killed anyone. I had nothing else to say; I just concentrated on breathing. And apparently no one else had anything to say either. We all sat on our beds again, and pretended to read the notes. Out of fear, we wrapped up that chapter pretty quick—an introduction to the penal colony, by way of analysis of the liberal project in the interior. Somehow, we managed to compromise. But everyone was depressed, and felt that we had compromised truth itself. At the time, we were disheartened, and later I realized that was partly 22

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

because we were only looking at one another. When Luna-­Icaza joined us, he very quickly began doing things differently. He would sit in the library, see, and read a book there, in the evening, between the classes he had to teach. I forgot to say, one of our duties as the committee was to run a literary program for the prisoners. A farce, really, we announced classes and no one came, and it would be hard to blame them for it because after you work over there from 6 a.m., the last thing you want is to learn to read. But we decided, what the hell, we’ll sit there so that everyone sees us, and Wilson even hung a little sign he made, uppercase letters on an old carton: CLASES DE ALFABETIZACION. I only remember giving some guy one class, and I don’t think any of the others did more than that. But one day I pass by the library just before dinner, when Luna-­Icaza is there, sitting at the table, with a book closed in his hand (you can imagine, the building itself was made of wood and it was falling apart. There was only that one little table, a few chairs like they have in public schools, for kids). There were maybe a dozen people surrounding the little guy, or maybe more, fifteen, the place was filled, with most people crowded outside. I wanted to see what was going on because it crossed my mind that maybe that crazy director had forced all the illiterates to show up to class. Girl, it was nothing like that! They were all sitting there, half mesmerized, chipping in, throwing in their own bits, giving advice, shouting comments. The new man was telling them a story about the invention of the alphabet. An elaborate tale—the Egyptians, Hebrews, and Phoenicians were involved, if I’m not mistaken—with parenthetical comments about which parts of that tale were made up and which were based on evidence. But the thing about the story, it was a bit strange. Luna-­Icaza would ask the other prisoners all kinds of questions about the plot, and they would basically tell him the plot turns. Yeah, it was odd, I didn’t quite understand how he did it, but the fact was, he would ask them something like—and then, what did the woman do? And they would say, she slept with him and then she killed him with a hammer! And he would say, yes, most people agree, that’s right, she had a large hammer she used every now and then to mend the goats’ fence, and when the fugitive came, she made dinner for him, washed herself, put on some perfume, and then they . . . you get the point. So one thing led to another in the plot, or maybe it was a different story, but in any case Luna-­ Icaza got to a point where a robber was going to be punished—they were 23

Chapter One

going to cut his hand off—and he asked to be brought to the prince so that the prince could pardon him. They told the robber, look buddy, this prince, he might pardon you, but if he thinks you’re guilty he’ll chop off your other hand off, and your legs. The robber took his chances and was brought to the prince who listened to the account with a dismayed face, getting up in the middle of the testimony to walk around the room. Things didn’t look good for the thief, but finally the prince said, you know what, I’ll ask you a riddle, and if you can answer it, you get to keep your eyes. And so Luna-­Icaza told everyone the riddle, which for the life of me I can’t remember, but it had something to do with the letters, you had to write them all down, all the letters, and you had to play around with them on the paper. By this time our new man was so engrossed in the story, he got up and pretended to have a giant sword, and he shouted, let’s see which of you would have kept his eyes! Haha! He was going at it, our Lunito. Of course the next day there were twice as many prisoners, and they all knew all the letters quite well. They’d even come up with the answer to the riddle, which may or may not have been the answer Luna-­Icaza was aiming for. And that was more or less his approach to research and writing too, only perhaps with a more melancholic tone there. The thing I noticed was that when he was giving these classes, Luna-­Icaza wouldn’t stutter. [He was] a fragile creature . . . on a normal day he could barely look you in the eye, but when he told them these stories, he would get a little red in the cheeks. I swear it looked like he’d gained some weight too, because over there he looked much stronger and happier. VI. CDCC Report Coiba and the Progress of the Interior hen the Liberals came to power, they had to build their nation-­ state under the conditions of a North American protectorate. Their discourse and policies reflect this situation in a way that, although strange, will be recognizable to the student of national movements in postcolonial settings. The Liberals protested the injustice of the Panamanian condition, but they neither mobilized popular forces to storm the Canal Zone nor tried very hard to pressure the US in other ways. They did not consider these options because they did not believe that their nation could deal with the Empire before making substantial progress. This nationalist elite was, in a way, radical: it aimed for a social

W

24

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

transformation that would bring about the creation of a new Panamanian subject. The new state institutions the Liberals built—the public school system, the archives and libraries, the hospitals, and the prisons—were to lead the nation into something called “progress.” To get there, the state was to simultaneously expand “civilization” outward, using colonial methods, and inward, changing the technological capabilities and cultural aptitudes of the lower classes. The end the Liberals envisioned to this process was a strong and united nation, with high productive and technical capabilities, that would “stand up” and demand full sovereignty. The reform involved a dramatic discursive move—a drawing up of a new problematic. Scientific progress and Euro-­American culture were seen as part of the same whole called progress; and the questions the Liberals posited revolved around how the state would bring about the nation’s progress, and how progress would restore sovereignty. Modern critics may see a contradiction in the Liberal discourse. The set of presuppositions that supported the Liberal plan—its thematic—was colonial. Its key opposition, civilized/primitive, was derived from the colonial discourse. The colonial discourse supposed the superiority of the “white race” over other races, of European cultures and religions over all others, and of Euro-­American science, technology, and administrative techniques over all the rest. Would not the Liberals, by adopting the opposition between civilized and primitive, by embracing the story of conquest over nature, effectively build their entire plan for national independence on a thematic that ensured their continued subjugation?23 Quite likely. But it is worthwhile to consider that in the way the Liberals understood their own project, no contradiction existed. While some of the white Liberals surely believed the racism that was such an important part of colonial discourse, the Liberal Party as such was multiracial. One of its strongest leaders was Dr. Carlos Mendoza, and many of its local leaders were black too. (To the horror of US observers, Porras’s political nominations included many black judges and other officials.)24 The Liberals believed, rather, that Western culture, science, 23. The implied author is probably referring to Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books for the United Nations University, 1986). 24. US diplomats took this as an issue with Dr. Porras already in his first month in office. See, for example, U.S. Embassy to State Dept., July 6, 1912 (National Archives

25

Chapter One

and administrative methods were more advanced than others, and that through education, people of primitive cultures could advance to the highest state of civilization and compete successfully in a glorious world contest. The difference seems superficial, but it has crucial political implications. From the point of view of the Liberals, science and culture constantly advance, and anyone can learn and practice them. And this was held equally true for agricultural methods, administrative techniques, business, and law. If a man was not cultivating his land properly, he could be taught how to work it scientifically so as to get a better yield; once the vector for malaria was found, anyone could learn how to rid a city of the disease; and if the masses could not spell properly, they could be taught. The general idea was that the nation, which in the Liberal view was still primitive, could be civilized. Once it attained a high enough level of civilization, it would stand up and demand its full sovereignty. So while they resented imperial impositions and fought them on a diplomatic level, the Liberals believed that the only effective way to recover sovereignty was to catch up with the Empire.25 Of course, like other politicians of his time, Porras often acted in ways that contradicted this general line, for political contingency or for other reasons. Nonetheless, if we are to understand the Liberal project in its concreteness, we must look at the totality of its policies and analyze Microfilm Publication M607, roll 25, frames 0109–25), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1912, RG 59, NACP. Porras, for his part, does not seem to have rebuked the embassy for its racism, but continued nominating black Liberal Party members to all levels of government. On this issue, there does not seem to have been a big difference between Porras and his party’s radical left flank. Compared with the so-­called Progressive Era in the US, Panamanian liberalism was progressive indeed. 25. The view that neither the Liberal Party nor Panamá in its first three decades was inherently racist is common in Panamá, but is not accurate. It is true that the Liberal Party was multicultural, and that Porras relied on a black party cadre, as well as black voters, even after his break with Carlos Mendoza. But as early as 1913, Ley 50 established that immigrants of Chinese and Middle Eastern ancestry be registered separately. Szok, “La Última Gaviota”, 110. The racism animating the assault on the Kuna is mentioned below, and it is hard to see the attitudes that developed in the beginning of the century against the Antillean workers as anything but racist. It is true, of course, that most countries in the Americas—from Canada through Central American and down to Chile and Argentina—displayed more extreme and more deadly racist policies.

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Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

them with this discursive framework in mind. In this report, however, we only have room to open up the main issues by discussing one specific institution: our penal colony on the Island of Coiba. The penal colony seems at first to have been a strange institution to build. If scientific progress was what the Liberals were after, why build, at such cost and effort, an institution whose logic ran against the penological theory of the time? There was no surveillance on this island during the period, nor much isolation of inmates—both of which penal theory prescribed. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, penologists and criminologists repeated that what was needed was a penitentiary, not a penal colony. After a North American penologist surveying penal institutions in Latin America visited the island, he declared that “there can be only one recommendation to the Panamanian officials so far as the Coiba colony is concerned and that is its total elimination.”26 The Liberals took keen interest in the ideas of these experts, and so the colony’s persistence needs to be understood within a much larger framework. It is our thesis that the colony was to answer the need for colonial expansion, “connecting” the interior to the terminal cities; to “civilize” both the delinquent lower classes and nature itself; to serve as a field for experimentation and development of scientific agricultural techniques; and to increase the agricultural production of the nation. A penitentiary had already been built in Panama City in 1924, answering the narrower dictates of penology more adequately. But it was not for nothing that Porras insisted on reading the biweekly reports from the colony, and so often personally directed its officials. Coiba fit the larger Liberal plan perfectly—it answered almost all the goals of the Liberal project at once. Hence, the fascination and continued support of a project that contradicted penological theory and never lived up to its goals. As its name suggests, the penal colony of Coiba was conceived as a colonial project. This meant different things. The Liberals felt that the interior was “disconnected” and needed to be tied into the world economy. In economic terms, the Liberals argued that if Panamá focused only on the trade passing through the canal and the terminal cities, it would be entirely dependent on the fluctuations of the world economy. This reflected the historical problem of the Isthmian economy, and one 26. Negley K. Teeters, Penology from Panama to Cape Horn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for Temple University Publications, 1946), 55.

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Chapter One

that would continue to trouble it for the remainder of the century: our economy was extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in world trade.27 So the Liberals wanted to convert the subsistence agriculture of the interior into large-­scale, export-­oriented farming, reasoning that this would diversify and strengthen the economy, and reduce the country’s dependence on imports of food. One way to do this was to invest in land transportation, which up to that time was not the preferred way of travel. Roads, bridges, and railways were built, at enormous cost, often utilizing prison labor or mobilizing local forces. The endeavor had the extra advantage of breaking the Conservative families’ monopoly on coastal ferry transportation.28 But the Liberals emphasized this essentially economic idea because for them it was tied to the nation’s sovereignty. If we are to understand what Porras meant when he claimed in a speech that the Chiriquí Railroad would “ensure our true independence,” we have to contemplate the idea that a nation whose economic situation depends on international market fluctuations is not fully independent.29 But, more generally, the Liberals wanted to reinforce the links of the terminal cities to the interior because the latter was primitive and needed to be civilized. To this end, several policies were used, all under the same discursive rubric. Liberal governments in the next two decades after Porras encouraged immigration from European countries. The government allocated land free of charge for colonias agrícolas in which Europeans would farm according to Western techniques. The idea was that while the European farmers would increase the production of the country simply by cultivating more land, the local peasants 27. The analysis of the economic issue is, as will be argued below, often mixed with a call for Panamanians to work the land with more energy. See, for example, Porras, “Discurso en el Teatro Nacional,” 50. 28. Porras, Papel histórico de los grupos humanos. On coastal navigation in Panamá more generally, see Jaén Suárez, La población del Istmo, 141–42. 29. Belisario Porras, Mensaje dirigido por el Presidente de la República de Panamá a la Asamblea Nacional al inaugurar sus sesiones ordinarias el 1 de Septiembre de 1916 (Panamá, RP: Imprenta Nacional, 1916). Public debates about the issue echo the discursive connection between railways, the connection of the national territory, and independence. See, for example, “Ferrocarril de Panamá a David y a la Provincia de Los Santos,” La Prensa, January 18. 1911, 1. The article compares the length of railroads paved in most Latin American countries.

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would also be able to emulate the modern techniques used by their new neighbors—again, increasing production in the process.30 In this sense, it is not hard to understand why a prison was constructed as a penal colony. The guards assigned to this prison island were not police agents but agentes coloniales, the same name utilized for the government forces that tried to colonize the San Blas Islands and their Kuna inhabitants. The fact that in his 1924 inaugural speech Porras addressed the colonization of San Blas immediately after explaining the situation of the penal colony needs no comment.31 For the Liberals, these two projects were similarly conceived as colonial projects, in which the state, the agent of civilization, conquers the primitive interior. In a speech before the Assembly, Secretary of Government and Justice Ricardo J. Alfaro put it in the following terms. There is, he explained, a necessity of implementing the nation’s authority on the Island of Coiba, which constitutes a considerable portion of the national territory, and in which the action of its governments has not yet been felt. With its colonization by means of the prisoners, the said island can in a brief period be incorporated into civilization and become, with our modest efforts, much like Australia and New Zealand are today, having been populated by the British Government in an equivalent way.32 30. Laws incentivizing European immigration to the interior of the country had in fact passed already in 1908 and 1910, under Conservative leadership. Agricultural colonies were also called for in legislation in 1919, and in 1921 a commission studied the possibility of bringing Austrian families specifically for this purpose. It is important to note that the thousands of Antillean workers who became unemployed following the completion of the canal, were never included in any plan to populate the interior. Despite questions about the suitability of Europeans to the tropical climate, Panamanian governments pressured Canal Zone authorities to deport Antilleans back to their homelands even while devising schemes to bring Europeans to the interior. See Alfredo Fernando Reid Ellis, “Las causas y las consecuencias de la migración económica, política y cultural en el área del Caribe y de América Central durante el siglo XX” (PhD diss., Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), 241–45. 31. Belisario Porras, “Mensaje dirigido por el Presidente de la República de Panamá a la Asamblea Nacional al inaugurar sus sesiones ordinarias el 1 de Septiembre de 1924,” in Pizzurno de Araúz and Rosa de Muñoz, La modernización del Estado panameño, 128. 32. Ricardo J. Alfaro, speech to the General Assembly, February 19, 1919, fol. 302–4, ser. 5–02, tomo XX A (Secretario de Gobierno y Justicia), ABP.

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What Alfaro fails to mention is that there were around 120 people living on the island permanently, who had to be displaced for their own security in order to make room for the penal colony.33 If this sounds strange, we should keep in mind that the Liberals were not interested in just any form of human settlement. After all, the villagers on the island were “barely producing enough for their own subsistence.”34 Now, the waters around the island were benefiting the pearl diving businesses of the Piza, Podolski, and Martinelli families, which during the season occupied some three hundred pearl divers.35 Not only were these people and commercial activities displaced, but a little later, for security reasons, a law was passed that prohibited any entry to the island and its surrounding waters without a permit. So the broader Liberal plan was to tie a modern agriculture to the mercantile center of the economy; and for this to happen, the Liberals believed that the government needed to take a leading role. But with the construction of the penal colony, none other than a liberal government effectively decreed the nationalization of a small private economy. In Coiba we have, then, a perfect example of the internal contradictions of capitalism. Colonization meant the victory of civilization over nature. Alfaro explained this act of civilization in a peculiar way: From the point of view of the correction of the delinquent, the advantages of agricultural penal colonies like Coiba are evident in the results which have been gained in the countries of America, Europe and Oceana, in which these colonies have been established. In ours, inmates will be able to work the land in the open [en el aire libre], not 33. For conditions prior to the establishment of the penal colony, see Noberto S. de la Guardia to Belisario Porras, April 8, 1919, fol. 196–202, ser. 5–02, tomo XIX-­A (Secretario de Gobierno y Justicia), ABP. 34. De la Guardia to Porras, n.p. 35. De la Guardia to Porras, n.p. The Martinelli family eventually came to dominate much of the southern Azuero Peninsula, using police as private mercenaries to displace the peasants. There is no documentation of any compensation given to any of the parties involved. Porras later refused a request that the colony begin diving for pearls, but suggested that the government might at some point organize such a venture. Belisario Porras, president, to Rodolfo Chiari, secretary of government and justice, February 9, 1922, fol. 205, ser. 5-­01, tomo X, ABP. While the nationalization is perhaps surprising in this case, it is unlikely that Porras would have authorized it had any of the families mentioned above been political supporters of his.

30

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so much so that they pay back part of what they had cost society, but also to avoid the bestial conditions into which inmates in prisons fall; and so that, exercising at work and under a more or less strict penal regime, they regenerate morally and are prepared, in stages, for their reentry into social life.36 There is mention here of the positivist notion that “aire libre” has a healing effect, in contrast to urban, polluting, corrupting air. The Liberals, readers of Andres Bello, tend to speak of agriculture in spiritual, educational terms—as something transformative, or more accurately, civilizing. That is, of course, so long as it is modern agriculture, rather than “nomadic agriculture” (the shifting cultivation common in our interior). Alfaro mentions the bestial conditions, which must be avoided—the desired transformation is from beast to man. So men who are not civilized are to be “regenerated” by a penal regime and by the open air, so that they can return to civilization. But Alfaro is saying that in the penal colony the prisoners are agents: they are to establish the authority of the government. A fascinating idea. The prisoner, who himself is either not quite civilized or fallen from a state of civilization, is to be the agent of civilization in its conquest of nature. This, then, is a double civilizing act: first, of nature; and second, of the prisoner. And if we keep in mind that it is the “open air” that is supposed to heal the inmate, then we can say that nature (and government) civilizes the prisoner at the same time as the prisoner (guided by government) civilizes nature.37 Colonization meant that the government would take over new territory, but it also implied the personal transformation that every Panamanian of the lower classes had to undergo. If the expansion into new lands constituted the one side of the process of conquest, the other was an internal process in which the government civilized its own citizens, be they in the terminal cities or in the interior. The best example of this was the enormous educational campaign Porras launched, believ36. Transcript of the speech included in Ricardo J. Alfaro, secretary of government and justice, to Belisario Porras, February 19, 1919, fol. 302–4, tomo 5-­02 XX A (Secretario de Gobierno y Justicia), ABP. 37. This is very similar to the double civilizing act that Alice Bullard observes in the case of the French transportation of Communards to the South Pacific. Alice Bullard, Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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ing that an enlightened liberal education would bring about a process of civilization. When Porras came to power in 1912, there were 323 primary schools, in which about 15,000 pupils were enrolled. By 1914 there were 22,256 pupils in 518 schools. In his speech to the Asamblea Nacional in 1924, President Porras proudly asserted that the number of pupils had reached 48,248.38 By the end of his third term, the president could also boast of an increase of more than 50% in the number of professional teachers, and similarly impressive increases in the numbers of secondary schools as well as secondary teachers and students. Education of various groups in the interior fit this general framework. The Liberals had high hopes that their new schools would educate the Kuna in San Blas. The government established a “vocational school” in the capital, dedicated to teaching poor young girls domestic economy, needlework, commerce, telegraphing, and other skills. As for the peasants, they too were to be schooled. President Porras, in his speech in the National Assembly in 1916, had to admit: The Experimental School of Agriculture has now been permanently installed in its place, and functions regularly in spite of the indifference with which parents have received it. Of 30 stipends available for study in the school, only 15, almost forced [on the students], were taken, and even those without any enthusiasm. The country seems unwilling to awake to the necessity of working the land in order that we may gain economic independence, and is still misled by the illusion that our [geographical] position and abundant natural resources will suffice us to live. It is clear that the aspirations of the youth are not at the present time well defined or well guided. Few understand that our mission upon birth is to be happy, and to this end, like in Rome, one gets by different roads. What is necessary is to produce with as little effort the largest amount of goods.39 Most of the Liberal leaders spoke in this tone about the peasantry. The secretary of agriculture and public works told a reporter nine years 38. Porras, “Mensaje dirigido por el Presidente [. . .] el 1 de Septiembre de 1924.” Notice that the numbers Porras cites are conspicuously exact—his new Registro had to supply such figures. Since the only numbers available thus far are the official ones, the implied author relies on them. Accurate or not, the trend is clear. 39. Porras, Mensaje dirigido por el Presidente [. . .] el 1 de Septiembre de 1916.

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later, “Our farmers are still in a very early stage [están aún en mantillas: literally, they are still in babies’ clothes—Ed.]: we must try to convince them by reasoning and practice of the necessity and obligation of working the land. Not only “slash and burn,” as is usually done today, being the easiest method, but by plowing, to really make the land produce.”40 There was no question about the lower classes being slothful, but now the new idea was that through formal schooling they would change their farming techniques and become at once more productive and diligent. Indeed, officials often claimed that the peasants were using a “nomadic system” of farming, by which they implied that, rather than being a system well adapted to the conditions the peasants were living in, shifting cultivation was an indication of barbarism.41 This hostility toward shifting cultivation, and toward subsistence farming generally, follows the trend of modernizing elites in Europe and in the rest of the Americas. European liberals, however, often passed laws that made it impossible for their peasants to sustain themselves, purposely forcing the peasantry into the labor market.42 The Liberal Party in Panamá neither spoke in this vein nor took direct measures 40. “Primer año de la administración de Rodolfo Chiari” La Prensa Ilustrada 1925 (In the bound edition, p. 37). 41. It is not entirely clear what, if any, research was available to the Liberals on agriculture in Panamá, and on shifting cultivation in particular. The earliest study in the Isthmus seems to have been a report on the agriculture of the Canal Zone, written in English, by American experts. The study severely criticizes shifting cultivation but still recognizes some of its benefits, like the reduction of land erosion. See Hugh H. Bennett and William Alton Taylor, The Agricultural Possibilities of the Canal Zone (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912). The Liberals, by contrast, admit no advantages. The first study in Spanish appears only in 1937, and is typically dismissive of shifting cultivation. See Glaister Baxter, El problema agrícola de Panamá (Panamá, RP: Imprenta Nacional, 1937). 42. From a leftist position, economic historian Michael Perelman describes the centrality of the attack on subsistence agriculture to the early European political economists. Whether or not this argument is true in the European case, the implied author apparently cautions against applying it in countries in which there was an oversupply of cheap labor, and in which politicians relied on peasant support in elections (as in the case of Panamá after 1914). Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Notice that Carpintero’s position is much more supportive of swidden agriculture than Marxists in Latin America usually have been.

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Chapter One

to make wage laborers of the peasants. Porras initiated a land reform, which was meant to simplify the process of registering, buying, and selling lands, and this may have helped some large agricultural operations displace and proletarianize peasants. But more direct measures were never taken, for a number of reasons. First, the largest commercial projects, which required massive labor supplies, found it easy enough to bring cheap labor from other countries. The US recruited laborers from across the globe for the digging of the canal, and the Liberals pressed that they be returned to their host countries. In the end, many of the canal workers either returned to their countries or went to work on the plantations of the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in Bocas del Torro. Elsewhere, plantations used seasonal laborers who would leave their fincas for the sugar harvest, and return home once the work there was done. Thus, labor needs were different in each region and during each period, and labor supply varied too. But the point is that, aside perhaps from its European ideological roots, the reason to change shifting ­cultivation and subsistence agriculture into monocrop, export-­oriented agriculture had little to do in Panamá with the creation of a labor reserve. Moreover, even after Porras’s reforms, which expanded and centralized the state apparatus, the government in Panamá was still relatively weak. In the interior, regional gamonales were the ones representing the government and the law, and they had the power to serve their own interests. Stronger than the gamonales were transnational giants like United Fruit, whose subsidiary, the Chiriquí Land Company, wiped out local producers in Bocas del Torro. The province was renowned for its number of small, independent growers in the 1880s. Early in the twentieth century, the company bought out its largest competitors, and then, using aggressive monopolistic tactics, it drove out smaller buyers and producers. The company made enormous land acquisitions, as it did in all of Central America, mostly to keep out any possible competition. Government agricultural and colonial policies had little influence on this process, which was hugely influential over two of its biggest and most productive provinces. Chiriquí Land (UFCO) easily bought the cooperation of local officials and other middlemen, and where it saw fit, its lobbyists pressured Assembly deputies and ministers in Panama City. The company’s sheer size—it was by far the largest taxpayer in Panamá—meant that presidents like Porras had to negotiate special 34

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

terms with its officials.43 So, important as the Liberal policies were, we should not assume that the government had the power to legislate immediate changes in the makeup of its agricultural landscape. Quite the opposite: the new policies in the interior were what gave the government for the first time a serious role in the entire national territory. By posing the progress of the interior as a central national question, the Liberals were in effect politicizing the issue of government presence in the national territory. But it was only after many of these plans were implemented, and “the action of the governments” made itself felt in the interior, that subsequent governments could exercise more control over the country. Coiba, in other words, was one of a number of exceptional cases in which policy immediately brought areas of the interior under direct government control, and changed the nature of local production. Thus, even if the Liberals overestimated the power of government to change the countryside—a mistake that was self-­serving and common in Panamanian politics—the overall framework of the policy toward the interior was nonetheless clear. The peasants needed to change, not in order to address any shortage of labor, but because they were primitive. They needed to awaken, be civilized, produce more, and decrease the country’s dependence on food imports. The Liberals felt that the nation generally needed more discipline if it were to produce more, organize better, and demand its sovereignty. The Cocoa Grove Riots, which took place only months before Porras began his first presidency, cost Panamá the disarming of its police and the imposition of a foreigner as the police’s chief inspector.44 In 1918, a North American force occupied the province of Chiriquí in response to American colonists’ complaints that their cattle were fair game for thieves.45 The Liberals concluded that everywhere that Panamanians 43. Philippe I. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 15–18. 44. On the Cocoa Grove Riots, see Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal, chap. 8. The US left Porras with no choice but to accept that his officers in Panama City and Colón would no longer be allowed to carry rifles. Porras would also have to accept an American as Chief of his police force. See the discussion in chap. 4 below. 45. For the most comprehensive account of the US occupation of Chiriquí, see Carlos Cuestas Gómez, Soldados Americanos en Chiriquí (Panamá, RP: Litografía ENAN, 1990).

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were not disciplined, they would find a foreign power all too eager to fill their streets with soldiers. In prisons, however, the code word for achieving such discipline was the “regeneration” of delinquents. And regeneration, the Liberals thought, required the construction of an entirely new, humane, and scientific penal apparatus. As a lawyer, Porras knew the Colombian jails in the Isthmus, and was deeply troubled by the fact that even a decade after independence, Panamanians had still not reformed this system.46 The old colonial jail in Panama City, the Presidio de Chiriquí, was considered a dungeon. At best, the jails in the police stations were a few rooms with bars—completely unfit for “correcting” inmates. Even well into Porras’s tenure, when Coiba was already functioning and the Cárcel Modelo project was underway, most of the detainees in the Republic were still housed in police jails, and living in conditions that both Liberals and foreign observers considered inhumane. A North American observer described one jail in the following terms: The present condition of the Colon jail is very unsanitary and demoralizing, not only to the prisoners, but also to the community at large. Located in the same block as the Roman Catholic Church and parochial school, the interior is constantly open to the public gaze. The prisoners sit or lie on wooden platforms level with the barred window in very scant attire. Men, women and children are confined to the same jail, most of them being colored. Recently the women and children were placed in a separate cell, which, though somewhat private, is entirely overcrowded and lacks the ventilation which those cells enjoy which are facing on the street. I counted sixteen women and children in a cell about twelve by sixteen feet in dimensions. The same is true of the men’s cells. American prisoners have reported that the place is filled with ver46. There are records of Porras’s inspections of jails in an official capacity and his reports of conditions there in 1888. Various documents in tomo 919, cajón 806, Sección Colombiana, Archivos Nacionales, Calidonia, Panamá (ANP). In 1895, Porras and some of the other leaders of the Liberal Party were imprisoned for a few months in Panama City, on orders from the Conservatives from Bogotá. Thus, most of the Liberals had known prison from the inside before exercising power. Sisnett Cano, Belisario Porras, 62.

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min and that the food is inadequate and of a poor quality. Sleeping accommodations are of the worst kind, consisting of a wooden platform raised up to level of the windows about six feet above the ground. In addition to this there is nothing in the way of reading material or useful labor of any kind to occupy the time of the inmates and as a result they are continually quarrelling and fighting amongst themselves.47 There was no doubt that, in these conditions, delinquents would never be regenerated. Porras had explained the matter in his lectures to law students in San Salvador some twenty years earlier: Two principal ends are to be pursued in these establishments: 1st, secure the culpable; and 2nd, correct him. For this, every prison or penitentiary needs to try to meet, besides the hygienic conditions fit for health and for life, the following principles: 1st—Security; 2nd—Isolation or separation; 3rd—Observation, and 4th—Work.48 The ideal, in short, was something between European text and American application. And when the Cárcel Modelo of Panama City was finally inaugurated in 1924, it looked a lot like the Philadelphia penitentiary on which it was modeled. The Cárcel Modelo’s first director was a Spanish criminologist, Dr. Fructuoso Carpena, who also operated a laboratory on site. In other words, the prison approximated the ideal of urban order—the fantasy of scientific discipline. Coiba, however, was established in response to a much wider set of questions: the Liberal civilizatory-­colonial problematic. The penal colony would establish the government’s control over unclaimed nature, connecting the interior to the terminal cities. It would civilize both nature and delinquent. New agricultural methods would be tested and used, and the lower classes would there be taught to cultivate prop47. Odin G. Loren, American vice consul in charge, to Bainbridge Colby, Secretary of State, September 10, 1920 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 29, frames 207–9), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panamá, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. 48. Porras, Derecho administrativo, 83–84.

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Chapter One

erly, regenerating themselves in the process. And the colony, everyone hoped, would soon produce enough—not just for its own needs, but for the needs of the entire penal system. Quite likely, soon—very soon—it would help the government decrease the nation’s dependence on food imports, and in this way help the nation attain true independence. VII. Carpintero, Biblioteca Nacional, Parque Omar, January 12 e barely managed to stitch together the first chapter, Del Valle and me, and we didn’t feel we could go on writing. Santo Wilson didn’t care so much about each and every word—the whole project was a bit foreign to him—but he didn’t like the fact that we couldn’t reach an agreement. You could see the tension in his muscles (he would sit fairly erect, and his leg kept tapping on the ground). And that only made us more nervous. Also, there was a general feeling that the director knew what we were doing. I suspected it was either one guy called 99, or Santo Wilson—who, by the way, had been a DENI detective before they threw him into prison.49 So we were all very anxious, we didn’t know what would happen, and that made people jump at one another even more. Long story short, Del Valle had the idea that we should build a computing device that would resolve the question for us. At first, we all listened politely, but then he started to draw sketches with a very sharp pencil he had, and it turned out these were the first sketches of what would become the Singer. We presented a sketch of the Singer to Capitán Soler, and he never hesitated. “Finally, a scientific apparatus here. This is good news.” I was taken aback by how positive he was—he never questioned why we needed such a machine to begin with. “And you say it would supply electricity to the grid too? Of course I’ve thought of an apparatus of this kind a while ago, but your draft is very interesting. It practically brings to life my idea.” He seemed to have had some instinctive appreciation of the problems we were facing, an almost carnal, animal understanding of them, and there was no need to apologize or explain. “This is the correct path to take,” he said, “theoretically, and practically.”

W

49. DENI, or Departamento de Investigación, was the National Guard department in charge of criminal investigations.

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Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

When I reflected on that scene later, I had the sensation that my wrists were rusting. It might have been some strange reaction you get when you’re frightened, but at the time it felt as though I truly had to oil my wrists somehow. Also—and I realize this is a kind of psychological symptom—I remembered the director’s tail dangling under the table as he spoke. It was thin and black, like a jaguar’s tail, and it seemed to shift to the right and left on its own. If you’ve ever observed a cat, that’s what it does, more or less, except in this case it was the director’s tail. Of course this illusion had to do with the psycho-­structural position I was in, but just to give you an idea of the situation, there we were, and there was the director’s thin black tail dangling under the table. We started working. It was the dry season, December maybe, and I enjoyed the work very much. Much of it was physical work, and a lot of trying out little things, improvising here or there, finding a screw that would fit. But it was the best time I ever had in the penal colony. As a kid, I had worked in my father’s machinshóp in El Carmen . . . (No, he sold it in 1972, when he retired. It’s an office building today.) I would come home with stains of grease on my pants, and my mother would make a whole scene. But I loved it, and I wasn’t bad at it either. So I knew how to hold a screwdriver, and when I looked at Del Valle’s drafts, I thought maybe this could be done. And your father—it was there that I understood his brilliance. The basic outline of the apparatus was entirely his, and he could resolve problems that came along very efficiently. I give him all the credit for that. 99, who had worked at an electronic repair shop, the one on Avenida Central, near the McDonald’s—he would help us from time to time. And besides Santo Wilson, there were a few other prisoners who would help us if, say, we needed to lift any large piece or— [. . .] Oh, no, remember, at this point, they still hadn’t brought Luna-­Icaza from his camp. But he wouldn’t have been very helpful with this sort of thing, and as it turned out, he had an almost allergic reaction to the Singer. He could barely go into the Singer’s shack without getting a rash and starting to stutter. But now that you mention him, there was an odd thing I noticed then: even Luna-­Icaza, who was at first paralyzed by the very idea of the Singer, gradually became accustomed to the machine, and not because of anything the Singer did, but because of the confidence we had in it. It was a social phenomenon, very powerful, and it worked on everyone there . . . of course, most people didn’t have very strong opinions for or 39

Chapter One

against the Singer, they were just reacting to the general excitement. But even the new man, who had a completely instinctive, bodily reaction against the machine, even he, when he saw how all of us believed in the Singer’s promise—he went along with it. It’s true that he was a very— well, Luna-­Icaza was not a strong person. That is, well, I loved him very much, but he was weak. It’s not like he would have stood against all of us and fought to—well, I don’t like to talk about him that way, especially after . . . but he was fragile. Extremely fragile. He was always looking for the right word, to put things just right, so he would never finish a sentence. And he might have had some demons haunting him in one way or another—he had had some problems with the bottle, the jinni, as he once referred to it. The point is, even Luna-­Icaza was swayed by this idea of the Singer because he saw that the rest of us believed in it so much. What’s that? Verdad. Sí, aha. Aha. Yes, look, now that I reflect on it, yes, it was obvious, I could see it in him right from the first moment, the first time I met him I knew all of it. It was after I ran the machine that time and came back to our room. I got out of the Singer’s shack, see, and I still felt that throbbing in my mind, that kind of omm-­shh-­omm-­shh, it would make a sound like that . . . I vaguely remember that I somehow avoided the crowd that stood outside, and it felt like I was walking through the island’s air with a kind of empty mind . . . still dazed. They told me later that a minute before I arrived, Pulga came into the shack. He’d been sitting outside somewhere, and now he came to sniff the new man. Luna-­ Icaza apparently got up and shook the dog’s paw with the respect one reserves for dignitaries, and after this formal introduction, the two of them became friends. And your father—that is, Del Valle—he was just finishing explaining the situation, you know, like he used to do to conclude something: “The important issue is, if we manage to fix the Singer, we’re saved. To sum everything up: documents, machine, history, authorities, life.—Who’s that? Carpintero, ha, my God, you frightened me. We were just talking about th—” “—It’s working. It’s scientific.” I stood in the doorway for a moment, as though wedged, and they later told me there was a kind of metallic resolve in my posture. I could still feel the rhythm of the Singer in my ears, but my mind was fully present, and in the background: omm, shh, omm, shh, omm. The printed stack looked like it was connected to my hand with a screw, and my 40

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

entire being was in rhythmic resolve. Del Valle thought to introduce some doubt about the whole . . . but he just looked at me as I stood at the threshold, frozen, staring at the papers in my own hand. The metallic color of the font hypnotized me. Del Valle asked: “What have you done?” I said: “The direction of the central shaft. It’s reversed now, so that the Underwood’s cog pulls counterclockwise—to the left.” “Reversed the direction . . . to the left!” He couldn’t believe I had taken such a step without consulting anyone. He must have thought of it as a kind of coup. There was a silence, but finally he asked: “And the . . . the points—fairly clear to decipher?” “It’s done.” I had the look of a robot that had found its energy. “It’s working.” Del Valle didn’t even present Luna-­Icaza, but I got who it was, and from the way he looked at me I saw everything. While the others waited for the proper time to ask to see the notes, I sat down and began circling certain phrases, drawing thin mechanical arrows. The Singer had produced a skeletal report and I only needed to give it meat and blood. I was completely transfixed, but I remember Luna-­Icaza, how he looked after we shook hands. He barely touched my hand as he shook it, that’s how gentle he was, and he looked at the papers I was holding as a boy might at a machine whose inner workings he can’t grasp. I was so confident. It felt as though my arms were made of platinum. “And the content?” Through my dark skin, my veins assumed a bronze tint. “Once the engine is calibrated, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s scientific.” VIII. o, pictures . . . no. I don’t think you’re going to find any. I don’t think so. Remember, the director was trying to contain the rumors about the Singer until he was sure it worked. So we were ordered not to talk about it . . . but of course the entire camp knew everything. Still, there were no pictures as far as I know. Maybe some sketches are left somewhere. No, it wasn’t a huge structure. If you went from the Casa Blanca, along the path toward the cemetery—you’ve visited the island, right? So you know the one? Well, there was a fairly big shack there. It’s gone now, of course. It looked a bit like one of those barns they have on Hollywood horror films. Not that big, and without the rounded roof,

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but otherwise somewhat similar. It was a shack they had used to store agricultural supplies, fertilizer, and all that, so it had no windows. There was no owl, but you can imagine it if it helps you get a visual image of the place. We took Luna-­Icaza, the three of us, and he stood in front of the closed shack, looking down on the ground for some reason. Someone grabbed each side, and the huge doors [opened], and then he was in it, in the noise, the darkness. The old sewing machine’s wheel we’d used to pass energy to the dynamo was working on neutral, as it did when the Singer wasn’t writing, the machine adding [electricity] to the colony’s grid. You’d connect a delicate keyboard from an old Underwood 6 with a rubber ribbon to the thin bronze cogwheel that powered the mechanism when you wanted to produce your outline. Luna-­Icaza looked at everything very carefully, like a man [transported] from the future, taking note of a primitive civilization. He confessed to me that when he was looking at it from such a close distance, he felt it was a miracle that the entire apparatus didn’t fall apart every time it was operated. And really, it was hard to get how the huge parts, some of which had been detached from an old Case International [tractor], could feed the refined keys. That’s part of what impressed him, the large dynamo pumping and the deep rhythmic hum—the huge parts were somehow [inaudible] into the finest taps of the letters. I stood there trying to look relaxed, with a smile that was curved slightly downward. My feet felt like they were bolted to the ground with giant metal screws. The rest of us were so used to the machine that we didn’t see it, but the new man felt, that is, [its] strangeness. The cogwheel had been oiled lightly, and it was so clean that it reflected like a mirror. For some reason, Luna-­Icaza was fascinated by this shine, and his body came nearer, his eyes almost touching the metallic thing. At that particular moment, it wasn’t clear who was observing whom: the reflection was of a hollow face. The new man froze and felt every movement of his blood. There was a slight notion in his armpits of something growing, like an itch. When I asked him later, he said he was sure he had heard of some machine on some prison or some island. Something like this? He didn’t remember, but he had a very vivid image and a strong sense of déjà vu. He didn’t say it, but I know he thought the whole thing was a cliché: the island, the Singer, the short stories he was himself telling everyone, the 42

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

committee, history . . . all of it, a silly, overused metaphor, turning like a mill, repeating itself. Aha. Bien. Well, there’s not much to say about the first years. Okay, sure. Around 1918, 1919, Porras personally followed [the planning of ] the penal colony. He exchanged letters with Canal Zone authorities and got descriptions of the penitentiary [they were operating at the time]. He also received the blueprints for the new small penal colony they were planning in the Zone, a kind of prison farm.50 I seem to remember two different people who knew the island writing the president with their opinions on the best locations for the central prison and camps . . . 51 And actually, Porras visited the island himself. He thought it looked good for the sort of penal colony he had in mind—lots of rivers, plants, that sort of thing.52 I remember one picture I saw somewhere, of him in his little bow tie and white umbrella, on the island. You would think the old lawyer had hitched a ride with a colonial hunting squad by mistake, but whatever he may have looked like, the president was the driving force behind this expedition. The main prison, Central, was built in 1919 in a little bay on the east coast of the island. They still have a little plaque there, commemorating the construction . . . yes, right. The guy who oversaw construction was the state’s chief engineer. They initially built a dining hall, a bakery, a prison house, big, for around two hundred prisoners . . . [inaudible] also a building for the guards, and I’m pretty sure they had a clinic, and quarters for the subdirector. There were also a few other buildings that would accommodate the engineer and other staff, a carpentry shop, that kind of thing. Yeah, they built a cement aqueduct to carry water to the 50. Col. Chester Harding, governor, U.S. Canal Zone, to Belisario Porras, president of Panamá, September 29, 1919, fol. 208–9, ser. 5-­02 (Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia), XIX-­A, ABP. 51. Norberto de la Guardia to Belisario Porras, April 8, 1919, fol. 196–202, ser. 5-­02 (Gobierno y Justicia), XIX-­A, ABP. See also Miguel Herrera to Belisario Porras, November 12, 1919, fol. 186–90, ser. 5-­02 (Secretario de Gobierno y Justicia), XIX-­A, ABP. 52. “In our exploration we visited all the neighboring islands,” he wrote years later, “deciding on Coiba definitively, because it was the vastest, and for having very fertile and leveled areas, covered with leafy forests; and for being crossed, from East to West and from North to South, with ravines and creeks that irrigate it.” Porras, Trozos de vida, 152.

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camp—I think that was in that same year.53 Then the first fifty prisoners arrived with the American police officer who would be Coiba’s first director. They were brought from the ancient Chiriquí Prison of Panama City and immediately put to work [preparing the land] for agricultural exploitation. They almost starved after a few months.54 By the way, the colony’s first director, Robert Lamastus, was a very hard-­working and systematic North American who knew all about the repression of the world’s workers from his experience in the Canal Zone. Earlier, the government had fixed a four-­year contract with him, sometime in 1913. [. . .] He was in charge of the direction of prison labor, paid something like $200 a month, a high salary, which they gave him for the reputation he’d earned under the Isthmian Canal Commission.55 He was officially given the title “subdirector” (I think out of some vague nationalist sentiment, some bourgeois nonsense). Lamastus was the man in charge, and he was the guy who set the course for the institution. [. . .] Yes, there were many foreign technocrats like Lamastus—we haven’t talked about that, but it’s something that characterizes the entire protectorate era. The Conservatives had already hired foreigners to head the Instituto Nacional, for example, the Chiriquí Prison, and a number of other positions.56 It was very similar to policies that the US 53. Julio Payló, national engineer, to Secretaria de Fomento y Obras Públicas, n.d., fol. 149–52, ser. 5-­02 (Fomento y Obras Públicas), tomo XX, ABP. 54. See the urgent telegram sent to Porras stating that the colony had run out of sugar, meat, beans, rice, and other condiments, and that the situation was becoming dangerous. Robert Lamastus, subdirector of Coiba, to Belisario Porras, telegram, October 27, 1920, fol. 465, ser. 5-­03, tomo XXXI (Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia, Policía Nacional), ABP. 55. Dodge Bryan, March 12, 1913 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 29, frames 170–71), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. 56. Dr. Edwin G. Dexter was given a four-­year contract as head of the National Institute by the Conservative government, five weeks before the end of its term in office. US Ambassador Henry Dodge reported that he had informed Porras of the contract, and that the incoming president had no objections. This indicates very little, as Porras was extraordinarily differential to the Americans until he took control of the country. Even later, he would pick his battles with US officials carefully. On Dexter, see H. P. Dodge, minister to Panamá, to William Jennings Bryan, secretary of state, August 23, 1912 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 33, frames 0072–73), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. Earlier, William E. Short, who had worked as assistant superintendent

44

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty

was imposing in its other protectorates, [which stemmed] from similar economic, strategic and ideological reasons [. . .] and led to similar contradictions.57 The Liberal Party of course came into power with a nationalist rhetoric and a nationalist agenda. Porras needed to give jobs to loyalists, and his party’s leadership also understood the symbolic problem with these foreign technocrats, so at first there was quite some resistance to the Empire’s pressure. But Porras himself became more accommodating to US pressure over time, and he began to see that at least some of these bureaucrats could be useful, seeing as they had no local loyalties and so were easier to control. Keep in mind that Porras personally, like some of his bourgeois friends, was convinced that Panamanians needed to learn from American bureaucrats and scientists. Well, how can a person talk of independence and at the same time think that foreign bureaucrats hold the key to your own progress? Your father saw it as a personal failure of Porras, owing to his aristocratic pretensions, his narcissism or whatnot, but we have to acknowledge the structural issue here. The agents and interests of the US in Panamá served powerful capitalist interests; Porras was trying to accommodate his lowerand middle-­class bases, and, increasingly during the teens, Panamanian capital. The further he moved from his popular base, the more personalistic his regime became and the more he needed to rely on the accommodation of US interests, which were, as he came to understand, easier to utilize than to resist.58 of the Culebra Penitentiary in the Canal Zone, was hired to run the Chiriquí Prison in Panama City. H. P. Dodge, U.S. ambassador, to Philander Knox, secretary of state, December 6, 1911 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 29, frame 180), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. 57. For a comparison of the development of Panamá under the protectorate regime with other countries in the Caribbean, see Peter A. Szok, “ ‘Rey sin corona’: Belisario Porras y la formación del estado nacional: 1903–1931,” in Historia general de Panamá, ed. Alfredo Castillero Calvo, 3 vols., tomo 1 (Panama, RP: Comité Nacional del Centenario de la República, 2004), 3:49–70. An interesting comparison can perhaps be made with the Cuban case. See Louis A. Pérez, Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy, 2nd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), chap. 4 and 5. 58. This view is similar to the one articulated by the socialist Diógenes de la Rosa in his short 1942 biographical essay on Porras. Diógenes de la Rosa, “Altura y desventura de Belisario Porras (Sept. 1942),” in Ensayos varios (Panamá, RP: Editora Istmeña, 1968), 103–7. It is not accurate, in any case, to see Porras as having been content with

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Chapter One

Aha, I’m not sure, but there was one document we found in the files of the secretary of government and justice around 1919 . . . [inaudible] It was a disciplinary scheme, like the ones penitentiaries in the US had at the time.59 I don’t know, possibly it was Lamastus who drafted this document—no one in Panamá knew the American penal system better than he did. There were measures in this document [. . .] assigning grade levels to prisoners (A, B, C) according to their conduct. They wanted to give positive and negative “points” to prisoners based on their behavior, and so if a prisoner gained thirty negative points, he would be lowered one letter grade. The regulations were very strict: prisoners had to be silent whenever they were outside their cells and couldn’t speak to a member of staff without permission. I don’t think anything nearly so strict was ever implemented on the island. You couldn’t have something that centralized on an island like Coiba. I think it was more of an aesthetic thing—you know, we’ll have the rice planted in rows and the prisoners classified into A, B, C.60 Within a few years, and following the general order to exploit the the ongoing humiliations that the US imposed on him. See, for example, his bitter letter to José Lefevre, his ambassador in Washington, about the US-­imposed comptroller, Adison T. Ruan, and on other US impositions. Porras to Lefevre, June 24, 1919, fol. 148–50, ser. 4-­1, tomo V, (Legacíon de Panamá en Washington, Oct 1918–­Mar 1919), ABP. On this question, see also Szok, “ ‘Rey sin corona,’ ” 3:49–70. 59. “Reglamento del Penitenciario de Panamá,” fol. 220–28, ser. 5-­02 (Secretario de Gobierno y Justicia), XIX-­A, ABP. 60. Though unclear, it seems like Carpintero is here asked about the transfer or implementation of foreign techniques. It would be useful to compare this example with some of the changes that Albert Lamb implemented in the National Police. Lamb used his first months in office to write a new manual for the Panamanian police, which was based on the work of criminologists from Europe and the US, and on which new legislation governing the police would be based. He reorganized the hiring and promotion of policemen so as to sever clientelist ties between policemen and powerful patrons; discipline and promotions within the police would now be systematized, and a file would be kept for every policeman. Lamb instituted modern forensic practices and began the use of a gabinete de identificación of the country’s delinquents. See Albert Lamb, instructor and inspector, Panama Police, to Jordan H. Stabler, chief, Latin American Division, State Department (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 26, frame 836), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. See also Lamb’s unpublished memoir in box 2, third and fourth folder marked “Writings,” Albert Roswell Lamb Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library (NYPL).

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island’s best agricultural lands to their fullest, Lamastus began to build smaller camps at various distances from the main penitentiary. First there were two more camps, then five more, and in later years the number continued to grow. (We had eighteen in our time.) The smaller camps were different from one another—some camps specialized in animal husbandry, others in different crops. Mm, yes, prisoners in the camps usually slept in wooden huts, and my feeling is that during the ’20s and ’30s, only the prisoners in Central [the central jailhouse] were locked in. In some of the camps there were only one or two guards; and sometimes a prisoner of confidence was left in charge. So the focus was not penal discipline, but the productive progress of those camps, and of the penal colony as a whole. Although that’s my view—your father never agreed with me completely on this. Either way, what you got pretty soon was a kind of bureaucratic regularity, so that the institution takes on a life of its own. Officials in Coiba had to report to the secretary of government and justice and to President Porras. And Porras made sure these guys understood the institution had to follow a larger plan. There had to be more camps and more agricultural production every year. The president sent an agricultural expert to the island during the construction of the first buildings, and then he nominated a person in charge of agriculture permanently, as second in command. There was a large variety of agricultural and horticultural activity [. . .] and for his part, Porras insisted that the colony use modern methods instead of shifting cultivation. He actually sent specific directions and queries. I remember one time he wrote something like—but you’ll have to find this and cite it directly, something about coconuts.61 Yeah, he was obsessed with this place. You have to ask yourself: why is a president spending so much time and effort directing the activity of a penal colony? Well, that’s what we were saying over there! During our work, I always emphasized production, production, production—the penal colony was part of a system of production. And your 61. “In your last report you speak of six thousand coconuts and now you speak of four thousand three hundred. Why the reduction? It is important that you make a nursery for fifteen or twenty thousand coconuts, which you will need to water daily, so that, once sprouted, you will plant them in May or June in a pasturage or by the seashore, to begin making a large coconut plantation.” Belisario Porras to Atanasio Cañizales, chief of Agricultural Section of Coiba, January 21, 1921, fol. 480, XXXI, ser. 5–03 (Gobierno y Justicia, Policía Nacional), ABP.

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father didn’t like that so much because he thought that the regime in Porras’s first decade was the most inclusive, the most democratic, that it held some promise. Well, later he modified his view, and I modified mine. But there was Luna-­Icaza too, who thought that the penal colony was a symbol for the advance of civilization, and as a symbol, it was so important to maintain. It was probably a bit of both. The Panamanian bourgeoisie was fascinated by something vague called civilization. And it was with this idea of civilization that it built its largest, most expensive and most ambitious penal institution. Well, once it was built, the penal colony was interested in discipline and order from a practical point of view: to keep the institution functioning, productive, secure—all that. But the emphasis was colonial. Civilization, yes? Eventually, the Liberals hoped, the whole of the interior of the country would be civilized in a way similar to the penal colony, and the paradise of progress and sovereignty would at last be attained.

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2 Punishment and Subject Formation …

I. Gerardo (“Bandera”) Smith-­Suárez, Parque Omar, January 28, 2003 o, I don’t remember. The what? I don’t remember much of that. [Carpintero: Bandera, you remember you would sit beside our shack? When we had our discussions?] Possibly. I don’t remember much from those days. [C: And do you remember this lady’s father, Del Valle?] Oh yes, a very honorable man. An “engineer.” A very educated man, your father. How is he doing? [TDV: He recently passed away, of cancer.] I’m sorry to hear that. A very respectable man. [TDV: Thank you, Señor Suárez.] He wrote very nicely too. [A few seconds of silence. C: When did they let you go?] After the Invasion, I spent a few more months there, but by then it was very relaxed. The Yankees let the imprisoned officers go, the militares who’d rebelled against Noriega [C: in March 1988]—those ones. They’d been in prison, with us, and now the Yankees let them go, and they were left in charge.1 We’d taken care of them when they were locked up, in Central, we gave them some food, something here or there—they were our friends. And now they were in charge, so they said, you can grab a chicken if you want to make dinner,

N

1. In 1987, the United States broke with Manuel Antonio Noriega, head of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) and de facto dictator of Panamá. In September of that year, the US began to apply economic sanctions; and in February 1988 Noriega was indicted in a Florida court on various counts, including drug trafficking and money laundering. In the midst of the economic chaos and widespread dissatisfaction with his rule among the populace, a group of officers rebelled against Noriega, on March 16, 1988. The group, led by Leonidas Macías and Bernardo Barrera, managed to take the PDF’s command, only to be overpowered by officers loyal to Noriega. The rebel officers were tortured and imprisoned in various locations—among them, in the central camp of Coiba. The description of the friendly relations between common delinquent and the rebel officers is accurate. Editor’s interview with Major (Ret.) Milton Castillo. Panamá, RP, August 3, 2008; editor’s interview with Major (Ret.) Humberto Macea, Panamá, RP, November 25, 2008.

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just don’t overdo it, guys. The last months were like that, and then we got out. [C: Altogether, you were there for how long?] Since 1987. [C: So that was a second time?] Yes. A second time. I was there from 1973 to 1985, or no, maybe 1972, around there, ’72 or ’73, and then I got out, and then they threw me in there again for “narcotics,” but the evidence had been “tampered with,” because it was Noriega’s men at that second time. [C: Entonces, Bandera, when you knew me and Del Valle, that was the first time.] Yes. [Silence. A few more questions. Short or vague responses. Bandera losing interest. In response to question about Luna-­ Icaza, his eyes light up.] Yes! Yes, yes. This Luna-­Icaza was a very special man, very . . . as is sometimes said, unique; although also, you know, like us. He only came later—before, he’d been in another camp. Then he was with us until they escaped, he was with us for a few months. I remember him very well. I never saw him later—he’s around? [C: He died in the escape. Bandera takes this news very gravely, with a note of disbelief.] That’s what they told us, but we thought they were lying. Is this “certain”? [C: Those on the other raft apparently drowned. We had two.] Chucha, I didn’t believe it until now. Let me tell you, he was a very [pauses, looks upward searching for the correct word], a very “philosophical” type. [Bandera motions quotation marks with his fingers. It is not clear if there is a system to his use of quotation marks.] We would come to see if he was there every day in our free hours, if we had any, we’d go up from the flag, outside of where these guys all slept, and we sat there with him, with Luna-­Icaza. I was in charge of cleaning the director’s house, the Casa Blanca, doing little “repairs” too, or [to] switch a light bulb if he needed it switched, that sort of thing, so I had more “freedom” than others, disque, that’s why I could go almost every day, and sit with him. These guys [points with his lips toward Carpintero] had it good because of the report. But most people had to work from morning to night, in the field. I did too until I got fixed up with that job. Around the time I started joining them, they gave Luna-­Icaza the responsibility of putting the question in the Singer. You had to do that, Doctora, because questions don’t just “present themselves.” [TDV: I’m working on an MA. But how did Luna-­Icaza come up with the question then?] Well, Licenciada, he asked everyone, what question do you want? What question does fulano want? And he finally went with a question about how Coiba messed with us, because that’s a question 50

Punishment and Subject Formation

people liked. [Looks at Carpintero for confirmation. Carpintero explains that in establishing the penal colony, a key presupposition was that the institution could “regenerate” the delinquent. So the question was, what did this institution do to the people who went through it? “We couldn’t speak to the historical protagonists: the prisoners who had been here in the 1920s and ’30s, most of whom hadn’t left so much as one written word, and which the records in the archive had reduced to statistical units. X number of prisoners in the clinic; x number punished . . . we didn’t have their perspectives on the institution, except in rare cases. But Luna-­Icaza said, let’s just see how this place made, or could have made, subjects.”] Of course, Maestra, the Singer, there was stress around there, people were going crazy with expectations, and these guys had to make it “work.” It was the first Singer in the world, to give you an idea, so we were all proud of it; even the director was very satisfied. Everyone asked me questions . . . about the progress, everyone wanted to know, because I sat in on their meetings, plus I had “other sources.” We weren’t allowed to talk, but some information came out. [Looks at Carpintero, who nods in agreement.] Carpintero here, he tried to find out who was leaking information—had his methods he’d picked up as a guerrilla. One time he had a trick he did, [he] wrote SECRET in big letters on an envelope and put it in the Singer’s shack . . . you know, “casually,” like someone forgot it. And he asked me to see if it turned up in the director’s hands. But nobody took it. He had methods like that, Carpintero, él era muy técnico. [Carpintero later clarifies during drive home: “When Bandera said it was stressful—see, the big secret was that we still had some problems. Del Valle had run the Singer the first time and it ended up giving him a bourgeois analysis—which he was all too happy to accept and elaborate. Yeah, aha, I mean, oh, okay. What you’d get—you’d put in all the relevant documents, insert the historical question, and what you’d get was a rough outline. Then you could fill in the outline with supporting facts and write a narrative in your own style. And you could insert more documents if you wanted minor corrections . . . but the Singer gave you the scientific scaffolding and that was the key. See—What on earth is—is he turning left? Look at the way people drive in this country! Yeah, sorry. Yeah, so after it gave us the bourgeois analysis, I went in there with 99 . . . we made changes, switched the direction of the central shaft. That’s when we had a huge fight, because your father wouldn’t have any of it, 51

Chapter two

and he even thought what I’d done would get us into trouble. It was then that the new man arrived, so after that we had him ask the questions . . . out of a kind of compromise. But keep in mind that every time we’d run the Singer, people would crowd around. It was a kind of spectacle, and the prisoners wanted to feel part of it. We had historical discussions outside the shack where we sat—quite a scene. That’s how Bandera knew what was happening.”] [Bandera resumes:] Carpintero, you remember what the theory was? [Carpintero raises his eyebrows.] There was a “theory,” they developed it, mostly Luna-­Icaza and the Singer. They called Coiba a total—[looks for the word]—a “total institution.” Basically, places [where] you weren’t connected to the outside world. Like basic training, or a big ship, a navy ship—or a monastery, you know, or even a boarding school, that sort of thing. If I’m “free,” like now, in the city, I work in one place, I eat some other place, maybe at home or on the street, I can go to the cantina or the church if I’m into that, go home, watch the planes taking off near the airport with my girlfriend, whatever. [By contrast,] in a total place like that, it’s pretty simple. You do everything in the same place. You have the staff and you have us, big separation, and they basically tell us what to do and when to do it. They’re supposed to “know everything” about us and control us, supposedly, in a kind of plan, but that doesn’t always work out the way they want. Still, that’s the theory.2 [Carpintero later adds: “Luna-­Icaza started with the work of the North American sociologist, Erving Goffman. Coiba fit the definition of 2. The definition is taken from Erving Goffman’s discussion of total institutions: “A basic social arrangement in modern society is that the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places, with different co-­participants, under different authorities, and without an over-­all plan. The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life. First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority. Second, each phase of the member’s daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together. Third, all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials. Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution.” Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961), 6.

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a total institution in the sense that it was quite separate from the world. What was different from the ideal type of a total institution was that, especially in the first decades, there was hardly any documentation of the inmates. So this entire issue of knowing the inmate, or in the way Foucault looks at it, the gaze, the normalizing judgment, all of that was not developed at all in Coiba. They were sending prisoners from the provinces without even a little note—hello, please keep this guy locked up for x number of years. There was one director, Vázquez Díaz, (who) freed a prisoner by accident, and when they realized it, he made a big spreadsheet, with the prisoner’s name, number, offense, punishment, date of entry, date of release, and so forth.3 It was also said that in total institutions the activities are tightly scheduled, following a kind of plan . . . and in Coiba it never functioned like that.4 Goffman talked about it, and Foucault pointed to these tight schedules too, as something that came out of the new European penitentiaries of the early nineteenth century. We found one document—this bureaucrat [who was] sent to see how things were going—basically describing life in Coiba, saying people worked from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, with a two-­ hour break in the middle.5 That can’t be right . . . the entire island had 3. The prisoner Carpintero is referring to must be George Stevens, whom Director Vázquez Díaz freed by accident, not having his records. See José María Vázquez Díaz, director, Coiba Penal Colony, to the secretary of government and justice, January 22, 1930, sección 3a, notas recibidas, 1930, no. 51, Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia, Sección Administración del Estado (SAE), ANP. The spreadsheet that Carpintero is referring to was made in the end of that year, but the prison administration is still unsure about the duration of the sentences of many of the prisoners listed. See tables attached to letter sent by Vázquez Díaz to Secretary of Government and Justice, December 30, 1930, Sección 3a, notas recibidas, 1930, no. 360, Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia, SAE, ANP. 4. Goffman, Asylums, 6. 5. A reference to José B. de Obdalía’s visit in 1930. Obdalía claimed that prisoners worked “from 6 am. to 11 am. and from 1pm. to 4pm., with the exception of Sundays and holidays. [. . .] After hours of work for the benefit of the Colony, the prisoners enjoy the liberty to gather, walk around within certain specified boundaries, smoke, fish on their own or rest until 9 pm at which time they return to their cells in the Central Station, and in the dormitories, which I have already mentioned, in the camps.” José B. de Obdalía, subsecretary of government and justice, “Informe de Coiba,” January 11, 1930, Secretaria de Gobierno y Justicia, sección 3a, notas recibidas, 1930, SAE, ANP. Goffman notes that institutions’ preparations for official visits are often quite elaborate, but it is not clear if officials in Coiba knew about this specific official visit in advance. Goffman, Asylums, 103.

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one schedule?6 For the entire year? It’s not how Coiba was run. Every camp had to keep up with the work needed for specific crops, so the schedule varied from place to place, and from season to season. In sugar harvest, directors would write Panama City asking for more ‘hands.’7 Oh, also, we never did figure out if they had clocks on the island back in the ’20s and ’30s.”] II. [Bandera seems tired after about half an hour, so recording is stopped. The group walks to get milkshakes, and Carpintero chats with him about someone they both knew from prison. At a certain point, recording is resumed.] Remember what happened with the hole? Carpintero, you remember that one? [Carpintero: The chasm? Bandera nods.] One person said it happened in Galicia, in Italy, around there, and that a kid fell into the hole because he wanted to grab a little, what do you call it, a sheep, is that the right word? A “goat,” and he fell inside. Inside the chasm. And in one version I heard last year, a wachimán, some Chilean, went inside, supposedly reciting some poem. [Carpintero: “A Chilean guard? In Coiba?”] Imagine that, some guy in a bar in San Miguelito last year told me this “version,” he said they tied this Chilean wachimán with a rope, 6. A few years earlier, another official recommended that work hours be cut to eight. Julio Arauz, “Extracto de anotaciones hechas sobre necesidades que han sido observadas en la Colonia Penal de Coiba,” March 31, 1925. In files pertaining to the presidency of Rodolfo Chiari, “Correspondencia Carlos López,” caja 1, años 1924–25, fol. 31–33, SAE, ANP. 7. Belisario Porras to Robert Lamastus, February 13, 1924, fol. 049–50, ser. 5-­02 (Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia, Colonia Penal de Coiba), XXIII, ABP; Robert Lamastus to Belisario Porras, April 4 and April 21, 1924, fol. 104–5, ser. 5-­02 (Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia, Colonia Penal de Coiba), tomo XXIII, ABP. The port, administration, and logistics were seated in Central, where agricultural processing also took place. By contrast, the three prisoners and guard living in La Aguja in 1930 were charged only with maintaining themselves. With just a little livestock and a vegetable garden, the camp served simply to deter escapes from attempting the short crossing to the next island, Coibita. José B. de Obdalía, “Investigación de los asuntos de Coiba,” 9–10. In the same year, eight prisoners, managed by a prisoner of confidence in Playa Blanca, grew thirty-­ five hectares of coconut, sweet potato, yucca, and plantain, and kept seventy-­six cows and three hundred chickens. The camp cut mahogany trees, which were then sent to Central to be processed by the carpentry shop (5–7).

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as he was singing, or reciting a “poem,” and that’s how he came out of it alive, and brought the kid with him. Disque. Es una historia maravillosa, I told him. The only problem is I happen to know it’s not true. And why do I know? Because I was a “witness,” and I can bring plenty of other “witnesses,” plus, there’s a lot of “evidence.” I corrected the man that the story didn’t happen in the mountains over there in Genoa, and it wasn’t a Chilean or a Mexican. It was in Coiba. [Carpintero nods. Later he confirms Bandera’s version.] There was a guy we called Pico there, a young guy who didn’t shave yet and looked like he was fourteen. I never heard exactly why he ended up in Coiba because he was supposed to be underage. One thing I heard was that when he was fifteen he was in love with this girl, una guial bien pai, and she loved him too much, but then some maleante over there, in El Chorrillo, he wanted her too and he basically just grabbed her and did whatever he wanted. Bad story, but this Pico, who never looked for trouble, had to go and knife that maleante, so at least she wouldn’t have to suffer. Very romantic story; I felt for him. That got him into juvie, and there, see, I’ve been to juvie, over there you have to defend yourself. Bueno, it looks like someone attacked him there, y entonces sacó un lofi y se defendió [so he took out a blade and defended himself ]. By that time, he was almost seventeen, so they “moved” him to Coiba. [Shakes his head.] To us he was still a kid, see. He looked fourteen or fifteen, [and] mostly kept to himself. They let him work in the carpentry shop in Central, and the officers began to protect him because he made them some things for their rooms. It wasn’t that he cared [for the officers], he just had a way of making every little thing like a little statue or something—very good hands. Many of the prisoners started liking him too because he was very “useful,” and caused no trouble to anyone. I asked him once for a little statue of a spy plane, a U-­2, like the Americans had, because that’s my vice, planes . . . and he made me a really nice one, of wood. One day, the people in the carpentry shop were called to [help fix] the enclosure, for the cattle. They worked there all day, and toward evening, they noticed a few cows [had] walked out through a part they’d left open. Can’t let anyone see that, so one of them stays and quickly fixes the fence that’s damaged, the other two go after the cows. Later, one of them said that at this point they also heard a low growl coming from the general direction of the mountains. Well, they ran quickly and got to 55

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the cows—six or seven of them—and the cows got the hint and started returning. Except for one calf, which for some reason started running in the other direction, toward the hills. So the other guys went to return the other cows, and Pico ran after the calf. The other two later said that as soon as they finished getting the cows [into the enclosure], they looked back to [where] Pico [had been before]. They didn’t see him so they started walking in the general direction; [but they] went very far and still couldn’t see either the calf or Pico. At this point, they start thinking what they’d do if they wouldn’t find the calf—how to explain that to the officers. Over there, they’d make you pay for something like that, you’d suffer. But if they were sure it was an accident, maybe it wouldn’t be as bad. They thought they heard something, so they headed uphill in the direction. You had the sun, all red up there, everything nice and gold, but hell, they can’t see the kid. They get scared. Now they hear another voice, but it’s not the voice of the calf or Pico; it’s a low howl. Something tells them to follow this growl, and that’s how they walk a bit more and get to a big hole, which Lieutenant Adriano later said was a “chasm.” Now, when you look at it, you see this chasm has a wide edge, a kind of shelf that looks like lips. They told me that the calf had slipped onto this shelf, and was standing there, and any minute he might fall inside, see. Pico [had] tried to grab it by the head to force it back up, but when the others arrive he makes a ballsy move: he goes down and stands on the shelf, trying to push the calf back up. “Careful, kid, you don’t want to slip in there.” The other two later said that, with the red sun, the calf—which, you know, was stone-­frozen . . . [looked like] it was made of gold. It made no noise, [and the] only sound was the low growl from below, so they were shitting in their pants. They started going around the chasm to reach Pico, and they were like hypnotized, you know, fixed on the kid and on the golden calf, and when I spoke to one of them a few weeks later, he said [it was as though] they were dancing around there, [in a] kind of trance. We never figured it out exactly, but maybe because the calf saw the other two guys moving, it moved again, slipped, and took Pico with it. By the time I got there it was already dark. It was a clear night, stars, full moon, and we could see one another, [as we] stood around the hole. But if you looked inside, you couldn’t see more than a few feet in. 56

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We tried calling Pico, shouting wake up, wake up—maybe he’d been knocked “unconscious” by the fall. The only thing we heard was a low growl, but very low, and not even a very disturbed growl. There was a beast in there, but it didn’t look like it was too worried about us standing above, and that made us all even more frightened. Yo lo admito, yo taba bien, bien frulo . . . like this [mimics trembling with his right hand]. At that point, someone said the devil was in the hole. Before that, when we were on our way, someone had mumbled something about the devil, but now it was said openly, and although Carpintero said there was no point in superstition when what we needed was to figure out how to get the kid back, others just looked at him and said, ay, if it’s the devil in there, we won’t get the kid back, and we’ll be lucky to return to camp ourselves. The guards were completely useless. Everyone wanted to get the kid out of there, pero esos cuecos were pretty much ready to leave him down there, and if it weren’t for their “officer,” Lieutenant Adriano, they’d go right back. For us that kid, he was like us, see, we felt, hey, that kid is me, you know, he wanted a girl too much, he got angry at some fucker, got confused, and there he was right in that hole, just like anyone. So we tried lowering the rope we had, except nothing happened. A few people pulled [it up], and we all started looking at each other, and I noticed the lieutenant consulting with Carpintero and one other guard. Then I saw Luna-­Icaza tying a second rope we had there into a kind of belt-­ type thing, you know, a harness. He put it on himself without saying anything, and although it was dark we could see that his face was calm. Strange man. We all just stood there and stared, and only Carpintero approached him and they talked quietly for a minute. We connected another rope to the first one, see, and started to lower Luna-­Icaza down into the hole. He said he didn’t need a torch, refused to take the rifle that Adriano offered him. [That was] the first and last time something like that happened. Never seen that in my life—[the officer] basically offered him a gun. [Looks at Carpintero, who nods in agreement.] The lieutenant directed [the crew that was handling] the rope, standing on the edge of the hole the entire time, saying, steady boys, steady. As he was hanging there above the darkness, I noticed that Luna-­Icaza took a deep breath, [as though he were] diving, and slowly released the air like this, [then his] eyes closed gently and the breath got gentle. The five men lowering the rope didn’t have to work too hard to lower Luna-­Icaza—there wasn’t much weight on him—but when they 57

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reached the end of the rope, they felt that they were pretty much holding the weight of the rope itself, [and they said] something’s happened to Luna-­Icaza, we can’t feel his weight. But Carpintero told them it was normal. Pretty soon they got to the end of the rope and then they just held it there, without any resistance. I saw a few people crossing themselves and mumbling something. After a while, they felt two taps on the rope, which were so light that they didn’t know if that was the rope itself somehow, and the boys started to pull Luna-­Icaza back up. When he got back up, I could see he was “empty-­handed,” and his face was peaceful. Someone asked: And the kid? “It’s empty,” Luna-­Icaza said. We all looked down and shook our heads. “The devil,” someone whispered, and another guy, “Was it the devil in there?” I saw that one of the guys was moving his lips silently like that, like praying. I don’t know what Luna-­Icaza answered, but Lieutenant Adriano took one more look at the hole and said, well kid, good luck in there, we’re all going to join you pretty soon. There was nothing more to do, so we headed back, and everyone walked silently, like in a procession. I remember that the next day I woke up just like any day—in the first minutes you’re awake over there, you think, fuck, let me sleep another hour, when’s this nightmare ending . . . and then you get up and it’s another day. By evening, people mentioned what [had] happened the day before like it was old news, and concentrated more on a knifing [that had just taken place that morning] in the jail. I ran into Luna-­Icaza later, a couple of days after [the incident], and so I asked him if he could see anything in there, in the darkness. He said if you ever want to be free, you know, to get back home, you need to get used to the dark. But hey, I said, don’t you want to know, I mean, don’t you want to know what’s at the bottom? I remember that he said that he stopped looking for the bottom. That got me curious, and I asked again: Is it empty in there? In there and out here, he said, empty and not-­empty. That sounded about right. [Looks up and thinks for a long moment. Then resumes.] I said, muchacho, empty, sure, but with all that emptiness there’s gotta be snakes! Like, you know, poisonous-­type snakes . . . he smiled gently 58

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and said that if there were any, he’d just have to make sure not to grab them. Just remember, he said, no grasping. But yeah, it’s all pretty empty [thinks, then adds] and not-­empty . . . empty and not-­empty sort of thing. III. Carpintero, Universidad Nacional, February 2 [Carpintero arrives in a long-­sleeve plaid buttoned-­down shirt. His age is beginning to show, though he still maintains something of an athletic figure. When looking at the texts TDV brings, he takes a pair of reading glasses he keeps in his leather bag, and the slow movement by which he puts the glasses on adds a touch of vulnerability to his otherwise confident professorial persona.] Goffman basically says that every social institution establishes a discipline of activity. And so, at some level, it also makes a discipline of being. You’re put in a kind of role, within a . . . a world.8 And you, as an inmate, you respond. So Goffman divides the inmate’s response to this: when a person does what the institution tells him to do, he’s acting according to the general spirit the institution calls for, what he calls a primary adjustment. The person has made an adjustment to his own way of being that fits what the institution demands. And if you’re an inmate and you do what you’re told in the way that you’re told to do it, and you get rewards, and then you appreciate those rewards in the way you’re told to appreciate them . . . this all falls under primary adjustments. But then there are secondary adjustments. [Opens Goffman’s Asylums.] Let’s find the exact—here we go: “any habitual arrangements by which a member of an organization employs unauthorized means, or obtains unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organization’s assumptions as to what he should do and get and hence what he should be.” 9 See that? Sure, that happens in every institution to some extent. Every worker finds ways to go around the system that coerces him, even if, you know, in small ways. But Goffman can talk about a whole “underlife” in these institutions because there’s a variety, a sophistication of secondary adjustments in total institutions. But I think there’s another mode—we called it “nonadjustment” in 8. “An obligation to be of a given character and to dwell in a given world.” Goffman, Asylums, 188. 9. Goffman, 189.

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the report, though I can’t remember exactly.10 If you’re opening a rebellion, yeah, that’s another issue. You’re not adapting your inner self to the way of life of the institution. And I’m not saying that’s not a possibility, but a prison revolt in a place like Coiba, it’s almost impossible . . . you have more passive forms of noncooperation, hunger strikes, that sort of thing. But from the point of view of a prisoner, these options, what— they’ll torture you or kill you, and won’t even make a big deal out of it.11 You can also think of escape as a form of nonadjustment. I told you about Santo Wilson—he tried seven times, and they caught him every time, and he was very lucky they never applied the ley de fuga on him. In our time, under the militares, the smaller camps were more guarded than they’d been before, much more, and still you could do it; some were shot or drowned on the way, and some made it.12 10. Goffman calls these “disruptive secondary adjustments” (199–201). 11. The director’s log for the month of June 1930 confirms this observation: “Day 1There was nothing new. Day 2—At 2 pm. died in the hands of chief of San Juan Camp, guard Lino Estrada R., prisoner Aurelio Benevides, having maintained obstinate all day in extreme rebellion. Day 3- There was nothing new. Day 4- There was nothing new. Day 5- There was nothing new.” Informe de Coiba, July 3, 1930, Secretario de Gobierno y Justicia, Sección 3a, Notas Recibidas, fol. 217, SEA, ANP. The killing of a rebellious prisoner is barely mentioned in the annals of the prison, and the officials reading this report in the Ministry of Government and Justice did not question the director. Officials did take precautionary measures against the possibility of a rebellion. See Ricardo J. Alfaro, minister of government and justice, to Belisario Porras, president, August 11–13, 1921, fol. 046, 047, and 063, ser. 5-­01, tomo VIII, ABP. 12. From conversations with former prisoners and guards in the Panamanian penal system of the 1980s, it appears that most inmates preferred other prisons to Coiba. The harsh conditions there, the impossibility of visits, and the intensive labor meant that the main advantage to the island was the relative feasibility of an escape. Some guards who had served there estimated that as many as 10% of the inmates at one point or another attempted an escape, and both guards and prisoners agree that escape, though difficult, was possible. A number of prisoners mentioned the agricultural labor as a positive factor, seeing as it allowed the inmate to do something, and above all, to be outside. In any case, the type of work and the conditions under which it was performed varied among the island’s fourteen camps at that time. For a description of conditions in the 1980s, see Maria L. Espinoza Díaz, “Características socio-­económicos y condiciones de vida de los reclusos del penal de Coiba” (tesis de lic., Universidad de Panamá, 1983); Gonzalo Antonio Moncada Luna Vargas, “La Isla Penal de Coiba” (tesis de lic., Universidad de Panamá, 1989). Reports on escapes are fairly common in the 1920s and ’30s. For an example of a more detailed report about an escape, see José Miguel Rodríguez, Secretary of Coiba, to Belisario Porras, President, September 21, 1923. Secretaria

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But you can’t get carried away because most of the time it’s not what’s going on. What you do have is people talking about escape, conspiring, planning—a whole field of knowledge, you know, the sea, currents, craftsmanship, [. . .] which for most people is not much more than a fantasy. It’s a kind of secondary adjustment because the prisoner is living, or as Goffman would have it, “being,” in opposition to what the institution dictates. I personally didn’t want us to focus on these secondary adjustments too much, but you’ll see how it can be valuable too, [and why] I followed through with them on this. The thing is, what prisoners do most of the time are primary adjustments: they wake up at whatever time required; they work as ordered; eat when, how, and what they’re told to eat; sleep when and where they’re told. And the terrible thing about it is, it’s not de Gobierno y Justicia, fol. 106–25, 5–02, XXI, ABP. For other examples, see Lamastus to Porras, May 30, 1924. fol. 141, 5-­02 (Gobierno y Justicia, Colonia Penal de Coiba), XXIII, ABP; Simón Esquivel, director of Coiba, to Guillermo Andreve, secretary of government and justice, April 10, 1932, Gobierno y Justicia, Correspondencia de la Isla de Coiba, 1932, SAE, ANP; Esquivel to Juan A. Jiménez, secretary of government and justice, November 14 and 15, 1932 (no. 491 and 496), SAE, ANP; Jiménez to Esquivel, November 23, 1932 (no. 2207), SAE, ANP.

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just the objective deprivation . . . it’s the fact that they take away your choice to control the basic facts of your own life. That kills you, and they don’t even need to press too hard. Even if they don’t put you on a very tight schedule, the fact that you can’t choose what to do and when to do it, that’s oppressive. If you’re ever isolated in a room, with all the time in the world, what, boredom can kill you too! See that? In interrogation, they do that to you—control your internal clock.13 To break you. But in Coiba, they weren’t doing that on purpose as far as I know. In our time, you had a very rough reception ceremony, and then most prisoners were just thrown into the penal colony’s routine.14 And that’s very typical of total institutions—you can’t make too much of the fact that most prisons don’t implement the idea of the Enlightenment’s reformers, to use tight schedules on prisoners. Today, maybe only in military boot camps they do that. But the point in all total institutions is that you’re told what and when to do things. And you know, a lot of people describe these institutions, but most people haven’t lived this kind of total life, and not many describe what it feels like to be there. What I was going to say is that people who, for good reason, talk about resistance, sometimes they miss the effects—everything coercion actually does to you. Even a person trained to resist, under hard pres13. Two different CIA manuals emphasize this point and use elaborate methods to achieve this disorientation. For example, a cell will preferably have no natural light or sound; a meal will be served after fourteen hours, and another one half an hour after it. CIA, Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation (CIA, 1963); CIA, Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual—1983 (N.p.: CIA, 1983). Both are available online through the National Security Archive: http://​www​.gwu​.edu​/​~nsarchiv​/NSAEBB​ /NSAEBB122/. 14. This is a reference to the way new inmates were often welcomed. One source describes it thus: “Arriving at the coast in a boat, we were received with a shot in the air, fired by an officer whom the prisoners called Pancho Pistolas. With this officer was another, Fernández, who, shouting, accused us of being terrorists . . . as Fernández was shouting these expletives, we were attacked with clubs, with blows . . . At one point during these public tortures, I felt Floyd Britton complaining, [and] I saw him with his eyebrows bleeding; and minutes later, I fell by his side, the guards clubbing us both on our backs, kidneys, buttocks, and thighs.” Alberto S. Almanza Henríquez et al., ed., Informe final (Panamá, RP: Comisión de la Verdad, 2002), 49. Britton, whom this source mentions, was a communist activist who turned to armed resistance after the military took power. The blows injured him severely; he was refused medical treatment and died within days of this reception in 1969.

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sure will probably be weakened. People regress, they begin to depend on the captor to satisfy their basic human needs, and this can be used to produce some emotional dependency . . . psychological.15 The question is if when they control your environment, they can begin to reach your internal organs . . . the self. Most of the time in Coiba, no one controlled our environment to that degree. It would have taken too much effort to play these psychological tricks they use on an inmate in an interrogation. From the practical point of view, to me it looked like what the institution needed was a certain equilibrium—staff, directors, most wanted as little fuss as possible. The whole rhetoric about “regeneration”—they didn’t do much with that. IV. Leonides Esteban González (“99”), Restaurante Antuan hey had a whole theory there that I personally liked. [I had] never heard theories before, so I still remember it, especially the part about how you end up screwing the prison, more or less. See, what happens is that most of the time they boss you around and you have to do what they say. [They say,] “You’re a maleante, you have to stay in this shithole, you have to eat this shit food, and you can’t have any coconut milk or nice shrimp that are right there in front of you, in the sea.” Bueno, mi’hija, what they say you can’t have is what you want even

T

15. One of the CIA’s manuals for interrogators discussed the uses of those feelings for an interrogator wishing to make a resisting subject cooperate, and cited the empirical evidence of social scientists on this matter. “One subjective reaction often evoked by coercion is a feeling of guilt. Meltzer observes, ‘In some lengthy interrogations, the interrogator may, by virtue of his role as the sole supplier of satisfaction and punishment, assume the stature and importance of a paternal figure in the prisoner’s feeling and thinking. Although there may be intense hatred for the interrogator, it is not unusual for warm feelings also to develop. This ambivalence is the basis for guilt reactions, and if the interrogator nourishes these feelings, the guilt may be strong enough to influence the prisoner’s behavior. . . . Guilt makes compliance more likely.” ’ CIA, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963 (released February 25, 2014), 83. The manual is available at the National Security Archive site: https://​ nsarchive2​.gwu​.edu​/​/NSAEBB​/NSAEBB122​/index​.htm​#hre. The manual also points out that “the initially resistant subject may become cooperative because of a partial identification with the interrogator and his interests, or the source may make such an identification because of his cooperation” (64).

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more. I’ve been to three different prisons in my life, and this part is pretty much the same everywhere . . . you find a way to get stuff. [You have a] black market for everything they don’t allow—drugs, guns, sex, whatever. You take stuff from the prison itself, you take from other prisoners, [or] in those days you had to pay the guards in Coiba to do some kinds of businesses, like weed, ooh—there were many stories. Everyone was screwing with the system that was screwing with us.16 If you asked the director why we were doing all that, he’d say [it was because] we were a bunch of maleantes, but the theory said it was our way of getting what we want against what they were trying to do to us . . . [Thinks for a moment.] It was our way of saying who we were, that you needed to respect us. [Questioned whether these were called “secondary adjustments.”] Those ones. It’s well known? Because the problem was, see, they were looking at all these letters and reports from way back, from history—say, a letter from the director to the president, way back when. That’s where they were getting their information, see. But you’re not really going to get any information about what’s really going on because everyone’s trying to keep it a secret.17 Now and then you get caught, but it’s not like the guards want to report that stuff . . . see, the spotlight will be on them now—it’s either they screwed up or they were in on it. But I remember Carpintero analyzed this one announcement that told prisoners they couldn’t use this Coiba flus18 [coin] anymore. [The document to which 99 is referring is reproduced below.] 16. For comparison, see William Carillo Leal and David Mond, “From My Prison Cell: Time and Space in Prison in Colombia, an Ethnographic Approach,” Latin American Perspectives 28, no. 1 (2001): 161. In some cases in Latin America, the staff essentially cedes control of the day to day operation of the prison to the prisoner, and the prison is effectively run by criminal organizations. Presumably, in such cases, the prison cannot be considered under the rubric of total institutions. See, for example, Robert Gay, Bruno: Conversations with a Brazilian Drug Dealer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), chap. 4–7. 17. This notion is elaborately developed in James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). The concept of “hidden transcripts” is, of course, applicable not only to total institutions but to all activities that run counter to the legal order, and sometimes simply counter to official discourse. Total institutions provide, as Goffman argues, an environment especially suited for the development of a rich “underlife.” 18. Flus is Panamanian slang for cash. 99 is referring to a special currency that was used in Coiba.

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HACE SABER ----------------------------------­ ————————————— That from this date on, employees of the Colony without any exception are prohibited from making payments or loans of any kind to prisoners, in currency other than the colonial one, used for that purpose in this Colony. At the same time, all employees are prohibited from saving, temporarily or indeterminately, money or articles belonging to prisoners. It is likewise prohibited to give prisoners any kind of clothes or other items; since this is the responsibility of this Office, which is in charge of implementing and enforcing the Laws, Decrees, and orders governing this Colony.19 Carpintero said it proved [that] guards were doing deals with prisoners—bueno, lógico—sometimes in Balboa and sometimes in this money they only had in Coiba. And maybe [the guards were] also keeping the cash for themselves and selling shit or something.20 Pardon me, Licenciada. Anyhow, back then, [prisoners] could also buy stuff from the shop [the commissary] just like guards.21 Prisoners had to work without hats 19. September 26, 1922, fol. 235–36, ser. 5-­02, XX, ABP. There are various mistakes and idiosyncrasies in the Spanish original. 20. In every total institution, staff members engage in some measure of secondary adjustments too, and for similar reasons as those of the inmates. In Coiba, moreover, the conditions of life for staff resembled those of the inmates much more so than in most prisons. Staff members were entitled to one month of vacation a year, and were paid forty balboa (equivalent to the US dollar) per month during the 1930s. Those that worked in the smaller camps lived in conditions quite similar to those of the prisoners, and were under threat of escape or rebellion. Thus, it is no surprise that directors constantly complained about staff transgressions. Apart from what was mentioned above, there were many cases in which staff consumed alcohol or gambled, both of which were highly forbidden. See, for example, Francisco J. Rodríguez, secretary of Coiba, to Belisario Porras, March 28, 1923, fol. 059–60, ser. 5-­02, XXI, 1923, ABP. Under military rule, prisoners were strictly forbidden to eat fruit from the trees without permission, while staff ate freely. Staff also had access to milk, beef, and other foods. Editor’s interview with José (“Serpiente”) Magolis and Julio Pérez (pseudonyms), Panamá, RP, February 15, 2009. Serpiente was a mechanic in the National Guard who, in the 1990s, aided the Truth Commission. Julio Pérez was a prisoner in Coiba in the 1980s, and he later aided the Truth Commission as well. 21. The following prices were reported in 1922: a pack of Camels, 20 cents; a pack

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in the sun, with clothes, you know, uniforms, wet from the day before. [TDV: In your time?] In our time, but also back in the day [in the 1920s], it’s what they found out [while] reading. [If ] you had flus, this Coiba-­ cash type thing, [a prisoner] could buy another [uniform], to change, you know. The theory said you’d do this stuff to get cozy, but also for respect, to say I’m clean, I’m a person . . . 22 The thing is, if you’re doing it legit, you’re not screwing Coiba, so it’s not the same . . . you want to be playing the double game. Yeah. Aha. [TDV asks about the stripping process which Goffman tells us takes place in almost all total institutions.] Yeah, they try to mess with you. To weaken you. [They] take everything, and now they’re in control.23 Ha? Yeah, so you have to wake up right away, get it? If you don’t have paper [for rolling tobacco], maybe someone gonna cut off the pages of the Bibles, ya tú sabes, that a group of what do you call them, religious types, give out . . . so now you can smoke. You learn quick. Say you carry milk containers. Bueno, maybe you can drink a little and top up the container with water.24 Yeah, they tell you you’re a worthless meña and of crackers, 5 cents; Reuter Soap, 35 cents; a toothbrush, 10 to 15 cents, depending on quality. See Roger Lamastus, director of Coiba, Order No. 10 (to the employees of Coiba), in José de Obdalía, “Informe de Coiba,” 16. 22. By contrast, the subminister of Government and Justice allowed prisoners to buy civilian clothes from their fellow inmates who had them, because he thought it was unfair to have released inmates arrive in the city with striped uniforms. José de Obdalía, “Informe de Coiba,” 7. 23. The CIA training manual adds that “the circumstances of detention [of a source] are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and reassuring, and of being plunged into the strange. Usually his own clothes are immediately taken away, because familiar clothing reinforces identity and thus the capacity for resistance. (Prisons give close haircuts and issue prison garb for the same reason). If the interrogatee is especially proud or neat, it may be useful to give him an outfit that is one or two sizes too large and to fail to provide a belt, so that he must hold his pants up. [. . .] The point is that man’s sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided internal recourses.” CIA, Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, 86. 24. These are references to a practice that was common during the military regime. Editor’s interview with José (“Serpiente”) Magolis and Julio Pérez (pseudonyms), Panamá, RP, February 15, 2009.

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you tell them fuck you by doing that. Sorry Doctora, I don’t mean to offend.25 Of course, some are. Some are, as you say, biological. I heard of one guy, they had him in the dark for a year, isolated, and when they got him back out he couldn’t really do anything . . . he wasn’t normal anymore. [99 muses about a number of subjects for a few minutes. He seems to agree that there are basic needs independent of cultural or social factors. Goffman had insisted that the need to assert one’s right to even the most basic of human comforts when an institution denies those comforts is a special form of social activity.]26 V. Carpintero, Universidad Nacional, February 4 asically, what happened was, I pressed, and Luna-­Icaza broke with Goffman. He brought more evidence to the Singer, inserted much more input, and there it was . . . turned out, as much as he couldn’t stand being around the machine, that kid knew how to use it. Of course, there were other complications—I won’t waste your time with stories—but the truth was, all the work with the Singer put him under stress. In any case, now we had a theoretical development that we could use to describe life in the colony. I don’t remember it exactly, but the basic idea was to deny that the core of a human subject is unified. What Goffman said was that an indi-

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25. Often, these rough conditions are not even especially planned. Directors of Coiba every once in a while complained about the conditions imposed on the inmates or staff because of lack of resources. The issue of not having enough uniforms was raised by more than one director. A feeling that an imposition is unjust may lead prisoners to legitimate a secondary adjustment. 26. A story of isolation of a prisoner for a full year is depicted in a memoir by a former prisoner. See Luis Alberto González Suárez, Coiba, la isla del olvido (Panamá, RP: Editorial Lagos, 1995), 69–71. Research overwhelmingly supports the claim about isolation made above; for example: “Even if one sets aside the corroborating data that come from studies of psychologically analogous settings—research on the harmful effects of acute sensory deprivation, the psychological distress and other problems that are created by the loss of social contact such as studies of the pains of isolated, restricted living in the free world, or the well-­documented psychiatric risks of seclusion for mental patients—the harmful psychological consequences of solitary confinement are extremely well documented.” Craig Haney, “Mental Health Issues in Long-­Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement,” Crime & Delinquency 49, no. 1 (2003): 130.

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vidual always manages to reserve something of oneself from the grasp of the institution. He’s a liberal in the end, and to him you can never take a man’s liberty, even if you press him very hard. There’s always going to be a way to resist, to cheat the institution, to practice secondary adjustments. And for Goffman, that’s the crucial point. Crucial, and valid not only in total institutions, but everywhere in society . . . it’s what, for him, defines the self.27 The implications for sociologists and historians are great. [He finds an excerpt of Asylums, and suggest that it be ­reproduced.] Sociologists have always had a vested interest in pointing to the ways in which the individual is formed by groups, identifies with groups, and wilts away unless he obtains emotional support from groups. But when we closely observe what goes on in a social role, a spate of sociable interaction, a social establishment—or in any other unit of social organization—embracement of the unit is not all that we see. We always find the individual employing methods to keep some distance, some elbow room, between himself and that with which others assume he should be identified. No doubt a state-­type mental hospital provides an overly lush soil for the growth of these secondary adjustments, but in fact, like weeds, they spring up in any kind of social organization. If we find, then, that in all situations actually studied the participant has erected defenses against his social bondedness, why should we base our conception of the self upon how the individual would act were conditions “just right”? The simplest sociological view of the individual and his self is that he is to himself what his place in an organization defines him to be. When pressed, a sociologist modifies this model by granting certain complications: the self may be not yet formed or may exhibit conflicting dedications. Perhaps we should further complicate the construct by elevating these qualifications to a central place, initially defining the individual, for sociological purposes, as a stance-­taking entity, a something that takes up a position somewhere between identification 27. Goffman writes: “The practice of reserving something of oneself from the clutch of an institution is very visible in mental hospitals and prisons but can be found in more benign and less totalistic institutions, too. I want to argue that this recalcitrance is not an incidental mechanism of defense but rather an essential constituent of the self.” Asylums, 319.

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with an organization and opposition to it, and is ready at the slightest pressure to regain its balance by shifting its involvement in either direction. It is thus against something that the self can emerge.28 I got Luna-­Icaza to question this position. I said, we’re supposed to be historians here in this committee. So as historians, we’ll have no problem agreeing that an individual preserves something against a given institution in a given historical situation. Secondary adjustment, resistance . . . whatever you want to call it. You can even have it that individuals fight against the institutions they’re part of all the time (you know, family, school, all that). But say you keep a corner of yourself “autonomous” from a given institution—wasn’t that corner created earlier, in a different institutional setting? You see where I’m going? You show me a prisoner who resists: they tell him he can’t drink alcohol, so he resists it by fermenting sugar in some makeshift way, or buying it on the colony’s black market. And you say that he’s maintained some “elbow room” against the institution. The penal colony tries to make him act in a certain way, and by acting in that way, to be someone he doesn’t want to be. And he chooses to act in a different way, and in doing that, to continue to define who he is. But what [pauses, looking at TDV], but why did he want alcohol in the first place? Couldn’t it be said that this prisoner’s desire for alcohol was created by another social institution? In other words, you can have your elbow room from one institution, but as long as you live in history, some other institution, or some other social framework, will have shaped you. Basically, I was saying, as a philosopher, you can think what you want, but if we’re going to think as historians, we have this premise that—what—that there’s no elbow room you can gain from history! No es así? You need to ask concretely, what structured this self to begin with? If alcohol is what a prisoner or guard wants—why alcohol and not water or coconut milk? I remember that in one of the documents, a colony official, I don’t remember who, said that some of the other staff want food like in Tivoli (you know the Tivoli? It was the Canal Zone’s hotel in Panama City . . . very luxurious back in the day).29 In other words, this 28. Goffman, 319–20. Italics in the original. 29. It was the secretary of the penal colony who said that “some employees want unlimited food rations, want meals prepared like in Tivoli, without understanding that they are in Coiba; they want fruit from the trees every day, and that they should put in

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guy’s claiming that employees in Coiba need to make some adjustments to the structure of their desires, so that they fit the new social subfield in which these employees now live. When we looked at the documents, we saw this a lot, and I said that desires (and also ideas, norms, morals, fears) arise in more than one subfield; and that the subjective constructs of one subfield can clash with those of another. Luna-­Icaza saw this very clearly, and he worked with the Singer on a more sophisticated model that would account for this problem. What we came up with was a division, a provisional division, in any historical subject, between self and persona. The self is the subject’s image of himself to himself. It’s an elaborate construct, and it changes during life . . . and obviously, it depends on what the individual meets in the field. But a persona is the individual’s image as it’s presented outside, in a given social subfield. Historians deal with personas, because when people say something, they’re always doing it in an implicit or explicit social context rather than inside their own minds.30 When you read through the documents, you get many examples in which people make one type of judgment or another about themselves or about others. But you never have people using the conceptual split I’ve just mentioned. We thought this was very important as far as discipline goes. I remember this one letter in which a guy, some staff member, defends himself against the accusation that he’d brought alcohol and distributed it. He says it wasn’t me, it was the doctor, and then apparently he attaches some documents that supposedly prove his innocence (I don’t think we ever saw these attachments). Basically, I remember him saying, I’m a pretty straight guy, and not only that, but I’m also studying journalism at the moment, or maybe commerce or English or all of them, in correspondence, in some American or inter-­American school in New York.31 But what I remember is thinking, ha, look at all the assumptheir houses daily, pipas, oranges, papayas, etc.; they want Mr. Lamastus to close the cattle so as to give them fresh milk and of this they have busied themselves so much that we think they want to wash their faces with the nutritious liquid.” Francisco J. Rodríguez, secretary, Penal Colony of Coiba, to the secretary of government and justice, November 12, 1922, fol. 218, ser. 5-­02, tomo XX, ABP. 30. The diary stands as a kind of counterexample here. The notion of “voice” in texts will be discussed in the next chapter. 31. This must be Francisco Rodríguez, who wrote to President Porras, “what I ask [is that] after examining the documents that I attach, to be returned , you confide in

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tions that both sides have to make for this correspondence to even get off the ground. Both of them have to believe that an action like selling alcohol, against the colony’s rules, stems from the individual’s core, his self—that it’s indicative of the essence of this self. And they have to believe that this self isn’t always changing or ephemeral—it’s constant. Maybe it can change a bit, over time, you know, but for you to take disciplinary action, you have to believe you’re punishing something more or less stable, that’s also unified with itself, coherent. And actions that the individual claims to do in the future (a degree in journalism) shed light on this coherent core, the self, and that’s why they’re supposed to say something about what the individual did or didn’t do in the past (in this case, studying journalism means the person’s bien educado—in our Spanish that’s well mannered and well educated . . . our bourgeois language!) I don’t remember all the examples we used but the point was, a social system, like any system, needs operating units—things that change in patterns. For a social system to operate smoothly, subjects need to be perceived as stable units, and they’re expected to engage in coherent action. From the point of view of the subject, the social system can appear in a lot of different ways, have different centers . . . but it’s also true that a lot of people will believe in a degree of “free play.” I mean, for example, that they’ll say someone is incoherent in some way . . . and they can see this as a problem with that person’s authenticity. You know? So and so, he’s a hypocrite, because he’s not really as everyone thinks, he’s different. He’s not really a Marxist, he’s just pretending . . . and that makes him an unstable unit in a social system. The point is, a lot’s been written on the fact that institutions make the actions of their members more predictable, and that’s how they guarantee outcomes. But for that to happen, everyone has to hold a prior assumption, which, from what I gather, most people happen to hold: that people are coherent units. One body, one self. A person looks in the mirror, sees one body, and the rectitude of my words and in the truth of my aspirations. In June or July I finish my journalism studies, and within a year I wish to finish the courses in commerce and English, which I am taking via correspondence at the Inter-­American School of New York, International [School] of Latin America and in the Universal Institute.” Francisco Javier Rodríguez, employee of Coiba, to Belisario Porras, president of Panamá, March 28, 1923, fol. 059–60, ser. 5-­02, tomo XXI, 1923, ABP.

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equates it with himself, [. . . and believes that] like an object, he has one true essence. At the time, we said that self and persona meet or are subsumed by something we called the subject—everything one knows, thinks, feels, all habitual patterns of the mind, its categories, the illusions, the ideology—the horizon on which consciousness arises. The point is that personas are adapted to their respective social subfields, but the subject absorbs the dialects, values, and tastes that the persona learns. I think that’s how we framed it. All the shoring up of internal contradictions happens on the level of the subject . . . and the larger the gap between personas and self, the larger the energy needed to repress and hide this gap. So when you talk about the subject, you’re talking about how certain personas are created and others are destroyed; how rigid the membrane separating the personas from the self is; how one persona is inflated, another is forgotten as you adapt to a new situation, [. . .] how specific knowledge is adapted [inaudible] while a different piece of information is discarded, [. . .] or when a set of memories is left in the subfield in which it was created, and another endures and proliferates, [. . .] how a taste, which, let’s say you learn in one subfield, it becomes strong and overrides all others. That’s where the problems of the subject come up, as when you can’t give up a persona that was good for dealing with one subfield, and it directs action in a new subfield (say, when soldiers or prisoners can’t adjust to civilian life). Or if you have a desire that emerged in one subfield, and it burns you in a new subfield. Yeah, I don’t know. There were all kinds of levels of subjectivity we didn’t deal with. We didn’t really get into the question about how conscious a man is of this internal process—if it’s something that you can become more aware of, and what that would mean. We didn’t think it was directly related to discipline, though it’s very interesting. We never got to talking about memory, for that matter.32 The revolutionary in Colombia, who I mentioned at some point, described his experience in prison there, saying that the streets seemed long and narrow when he came out, because he’d internalized the prison’s patio as his measure of space.33 I never had that problem in Coiba, as you can imagine. But 32. On this issue, see Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 33. A reference to William Carrillo Leal, who writes about his experiences as a

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the point is, none of us forgot that there are many experiences, like time and space, that you get from the field as a whole, rather than any particular subfield. Oh no, no. Actually, we weren’t very attached [to this model]. At first we were, see, because although much theorizing has been done, in France especially, around the notion of the split subject, what we thought the Singer had given us was a way to explain the contradictions of human agency that we saw around us and in the archives.34 Here, the model didn’t meander about the Self as a kind of opaque Other, or whatpolitical prisoner in Colombia: “Something odd happened to me when I got out; the streets seemed long and narrow—I had internalized the patio as a measure of space. The same happened with time. For example, I had an appointment with someone that involved my getting from the center of the city (Santa Fe de Bogotá) to Usaquén (a village some way north, now absorbed by the city), and I told them, ‘I’ll see you in half an hour’; obviously, I arrived an hour late. And I thought, ‘How the social dynamic has changed!’ and it was true, there was more traffic, there were more cars, more buildings, and so on, but at the same time I had lost my grip on the spatio-­temporal relation. You go over the journey in your mind and you think, ‘downtown to Usaquén, half an hour by bus,’ and that’s just wrong. “The subject loses the notion of time and has no means of resisting this change, because it is not a theoretical process. There is no way to avoid it. The only thing you can do is something the convicts use to ‘escape’ from jail—patio-­skating. You walk back and forth across the patio, talking with someone, back and forth. You can spend two hours talking and walking, walking and talking, imagining you’re in the Carrera Séptima (Seventh Avenue in Bogotá), remembering the stores there, and you don’t get at all tired. But it is not a mechanism of consciousness or unconscious resistance that you’re using to preserve your patterns of time and space; on the contrary, it’s an unconscious mechanism by which you internalize the patio as a spatial measurement, in the same way as the prison routine has become your pattern of time.” Leal and Mond, “From My Prison Cell,” 158. 34. For French notions of a split or decentered subject, see Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). According to Mary Douglas, the insistence on a unified self and the dismissal of competing notions are unique to the West in the modern era. Mary Douglas, “The Cloud God and the Shadow Self,” Social Anthropology 3, no. 2 (1995): 83–94. For a view of the contemporary debate about the “modularity” of the mind in contemporary psychology, see H. Clark Barrett and Robert Kurzban, “Modularity in Cognition: Framing the Debate,” Psychological Review 113, no. 3 (2006): 628–47; Robert Kurzban and C. Athena Aktipis, “Modularity and the Social Mind: Are Psychologists Too Self-­Ish?,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 11, no. 2 (2007): 131–49.

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not, although I always assumed that the category of the subject in this model did allow for the impenetrability of the subconscious, of desire, of dreams and symbols, and I suppose it included all that Foucault had meant when he discussed the formation of the subject—the ways in which regimes and structures of truth form subjects. But we thought that the nice thing here was how there was also a more direct, sociological explanation for the contradictions that we, and . . . that is, that historians see in the way people act. In hindsight, I really don’t think it matters so much. [. . .] It’s a model. [Shrugs.] It’s something that helps you understand reality in a certain way. It focuses you on certain issues, but because of that focus, [it] hides other issues. But it was a useful model, and what was most useful about it was that it raised the question of why the commonsense model was so different from it. See, for the institution to try and change someone, it has to believe that the individual has something like a coherent self, a structured, structuring entity . . . whatever you want to call it.35 If it didn’t, all the talk about “regenerating” the inmate would be nonsensical. The criminologists all believed it, more or less, and if you read some theses at the Nacional, they’ll all critique our prison system from that point of view— basically saying, sure you can change people, “regenerate” the prisoners, but Our Prison System doesn’t do a good job of it, because it’s not scientifically humane enough or something.36 Yes, that is, an institution doesn’t need to reach the depth of the inmate’s self. Something like a prison doesn’t need to mold your entire being. It can reach a kind of status quo by controlling your environment 35. A reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of the habitus: “The conditions associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transportable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53. The model outlined here is more complicated than Bourdieu would allow: it negates the possibility of deducing from anything the subject does or says what he is. In doing so, it counters the supposed fit between field and habitus, and poses a surface-­level fit only—between personas and their respective subfields. 36. For an example of this kind of critique, see Rubén Blades, “Estudio socio jurídico de 50 casos de reincidentes en los delitos de hurto y robo” (tesis de maestría, Universidad de Panamá, 1973).

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and frightening you into a series of patterns of actions . . . that molds your prison persona. But that’s not your entire subjectivity. Over there, what they do is focus on maintaining control over the framework of interaction, [the] lines of communication, [the] register, [and any] subtle symbolic gesture. The complicated part, if you’re a researcher, if you’re looking at all this from the outside, is to figure out what of something that’s said is done represents a given persona, and what is more representative of the subject as a whole. It’s fine to say that subalterns have agency, but you can’t infer from a given action or speech too much about the full being. You say, yes sir, yes sergeant, and when he turns around, you spit. But I remember that Luna-­Icaza said that if a person puts you under his boot, if you’re afraid that they’ll throw you into the Berlina, you’ll do as you’re told.37 And you may later do your secondary adjustments too. But he asked if we thought a person essentially has two parallel personalities, one subdued and the other erect. I remember him saying that when he was outside he had done what he wanted, he could go for a drink sometime or just sit in some hammock, and now, he said, “Now, what’s left of me? I can hardly utter a full sentence.” [Carpintero sighs.] It was true, and you could see it on him. In the end, we thought that discipline affects the framework of social interaction, which makes personas, who keep the framework running. The subject’s other personas are not affected directly, and the self is not affected so quickly and so finally, and this is why you still have some elbow room. But that doesn’t mean the entire structure of your subjectivity stays as it was before. [At this point Carpintero says he needs to meet someone at the coffee shop behind the Biblioteca Simón Bolívar and the interview is ended. The person he was supposed to meet does not show up, however, so Carpintero chats with a lawyer who’s come to meet his friends at the law school. Later, the recorded conversation resumes. TDV: People don’t usually think it’s that complicated . . . so how does knowing that people don’t use this model of explanation affect what’s going on?] No, of course, of course, it’s very important—for discipline, specifically. It’s very important that people assume coherency, because other37. The Berlina, sometimes called La Jaula del Tigre (tiger’s cage), were the cells used for isolation in Central’s jail. Located below the other cells, they had only a small window, which would let in almost no air or light. During high tide, water would rise in them.

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wise you can’t hold people responsible for their actions. You’ll notice that prisoners and other subalterns actually play it as though it’s not true—they play an incoherency game. But people in any position of responsibility have to justify that position [of human coherency] even though they see it doesn’t work. I’ll give you an example. Directors of Coiba always had a problem with labor, so they were stuck with staff they didn’t really like. One director, Simón Esquivel, fired a bunch of guards, for good reason, but then he got stuck and he rehired some. I don’t remember exactly how he phrased it, but he said, well, even though I fired them for being drunk gamblers, they’re actually good guys, you know, they’re drunkards, but they don’t drink in Coiba.38 When we read that letter, we thought, of course they did drink in Coiba, that’s why he fired them; but now he needed them, so he backed down. The point is that this director insists on characterizing them as either good or bad people, even when a situational or a positional characterization would serve his purposes better (they gamble when in company that values gambling, and they do not in other situations, or something of the sort). But he doesn’t have that choice because the underlying assumption he and his superiors work with is that subjects are more or less coherent units . . . and even if they are capable of gradual change, they are on the whole good or bad, short or tall, smart or stupid, blanco, negro o trigueño, bien educado o jugador, irresponsable y bebedor. You’re right. From this example, you can get the idea that subjects experience their desires regardless of the specific persona they take on, or the specific subfield they act in. I don’t think that’s true. There was this one note—I can’t remember who. Probably Vásquez Díaz or Lamastus, had this wonderful bit about how he was trying to change people’s corrupt desires. He actually called it “administración moral,” and it was part of the monthly report.39 He said pardon me, minister, I’m doing all 38. Esquivel wrote to his superior in Panama City that “with respect to Martínez and Matos, even when I included them with the ‘immorals, gamblers and drunks,’ I found that, among all the staff, they were the least bad and best men to direct work in the Camps, the work gangs dedicated to farming, since, although they do like liquor, they have never drunk it here and they have respected their positions.” Simón Esquivel, director, Penal Colony of Coiba, to J. A. Jiménez, secretary of government and justice, January 26, 1932, SAE, ANP. 39. This is a reference to a note by Director Vázquez Díaz: “ADMINISTRACION MORAL:—To end with the naughtiness that many employees without scruple, com-

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Work camp at Playa Blanca, Coiba, 1956. Convicts slept in the thatched huts seen in the image. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives [SIA2009-­4284].)

I can to stop the prisoners and staff from engaging in “sodomy.” He said that the staff was doing it with the prisoners, and they were refusing to pay for the favors . . . so, well, what do you make of that, theoretically? If the same prisoners and staff don’t demonstrate in other subfields the same inclinations toward, that is, homosexual activity, you need to consider, well, maybe you need to think if it’s true that at least some desires are more situational than is usually admitted. You come into a new subfield and a new persona emerges, with a new dialect maybe, new ways of mitted with the prisoners, yielding to their curiosities and refusing later to pay them; extirpate sodomy between prisoners and prisoners, and . . . you will be astonished, between those and the employees; to combat clandestine games and many other vices, has always been my tendency.” Vázquez Díaz to Robles, January 2, 1930, Secretaria de Gobierno y Justicia, Sección 3a, notas recibidas, 1930, SAE, ANP.

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reasoning, new patterns of action, new possible alliances, and possibly, new desires. And some of these patterns of mind and patterns of action are in plain contradiction to those the same subject holds in other subfields. In more than one sense, when an individual begins to live in a wholly different social setting, he may find himself to be a new person. My input into all this was that people usually don’t find themselves in wholly new social settings, and only dip into a new subfield with one foot, still holding on to the rest of their social life . . . so that’s why they keep the rest of their internal structures of mind. It’s because engagement in one subfield limits the possibilities of engagement in others. Hm? Yeah, if you’re a worker, you’re more likely to be in certain subfields and not in others, and once you’re there, you’ll develop a persona from within a certain range of possibilities . . . but it’s not limitless. As will be all too obvious to a prisoner on an island. VI. Recollections of Juan (“Tata”) Medina-­Pérez [Juan “Tata” Medina-­Pérez is a lawyer and amateur writer. I tried arranging an interview with him for a couple of months when I was in Panamá, but it never worked out. I finally managed to catch him on the phone, and he promised me he’d write a personal testimony and have his secretary mail it to me. I had already given up this lead as a lost cause when I got a letter with the short narrative below, printed on paper with his firm’s letterhead. A handwritten note on a separate yellow sheet stated that he wished me the best of luck in conducting my important research, and informing me that he may have taken some “liberties” in his depiction. The crux of the story, he said, was more or less true, and in any case, he tried to capture what 1979 was for them, “beyond the material facts.”]40 I’m cleaning the tiny drops on the lens, and I have this image in my mind, like God’s beginning to spit on us again. On the other end of the lens, two men finishing loading an armored car, marked: #342. I write down “armored car #342,” “2 men,” all that. There’s a third guy with a shotgun, looking bored. There we go, armored car #342 moving, gate opens, car leaving the guarded yard, slowly (11:​42 AM). The driver raises his hand—never mind, he’s just waiving to the guard at the gate. The ar40. Juan (“Tata”) Medina-­Pérez is certainly a fictional character, as is his narrative.

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mored car’s moving slowly, creeping into the street, in first gear, heavy, the engine working hard. I only put the 8x30 down to write the report of the events in the notebook. I’m thinking that it’s far enough from the scene that the picture I’m getting through the lens is silent; the noise of the cars underneath our apartment building fills the silence in the binoculars. I can tell the armored car is in first gear: heavy, it turns right, dragging itself, weighing on the asphalt, accelerating into the street, and there she is. Tupac III, listen, I see her, there she is: the floating girl. No response. Tupac III must be in the kitchen, eating yesterday’s rice with soy sauce. And Flojo doesn’t say anything either, but that’s normal. He’s in his tired Flojo posture, sitting on the sofa, reading the sports section. I’m all alone with the floating girl, who’s drifting past the Banco General’s backyard, gliding in illusive light strides. I would see her passing right by the giant gate of the bank’s backyard, every day, on her way to the Nacional. You have to watch her stride, I told Tupac III—that’s how you can tell her mood. Like, say, when she’s preoccupied, her steps become a bit quicker, but Tupac III: You’re an ass, Tata. From this distance, you can barely tell if she’s wearing her glasses, unless they’re shining in the sun. You’re so heavy, Tupac. Like, you don’t pay attention to stuff. There was this one time I walked down the street to get a Coke at the chino, and I thought I saw her from the distance, walking toward me. I was supposed to go into the store, but if I did she’d pass by when I was inside. So I got down to tie my shoelaces, as I’d been taught, and when I felt that she was at the right distance, I got up and looked straight at her. She was carrying a large book under her right arm, Kant, Critique of—I couldn’t tell what. She was a white girl, looked very yeyé, though I didn’t mind, because she didn’t dress with very expensive clothes, so maybe she was on the good side after all. I’d expected her to be larger, but now that I saw how thin her frame was, I imagined that had something to do with the fact that she floated. Her feet apparently figured they were doing the sidewalk a favor by walking on it, because they were just barely tapping, tak-­tap-­tak-­tap, but not really putting any weight down, just tapping suggestively. She was wearing high heels, but given that her body was suspended in the air, her heels only tapped on the concrete out of courtesy, or to give the city some rhythm. I bought the Coke and pasta without looking at the grocer’s face, 79

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and left the shop quickly, not knowing what I was doing. A few minutes later, in front of our door: ta-­tap, ta-­tata-­tap. Silence; someone else is there. Shit, I’d been daydreaming the entire way back from the chino, not having bothered to check if anyone was behind me. Tupac III opened and Carpintero was behind him, looking severe. I remember feeling a bit calmer for the first second, that Carpintero was there, and immediately feeling guilty about that thought—I was supposed to be a revolutionary, not a little baby waiting for Daddy to come and organize our post. Carpintero got back to what apparently he’d been doing before, which was giving Tupac III shit for having left his post while I was out. He can be harsh, Carpintero, but honestly, he’s right, if Tupac III had just abandoned his post. And why did you leave the apartment, Tata? Me? I went to the chino, to get some pasta, for . . . and a Coke. A what? You’re serious, yes? Carpintero: Discipline, revolution, urgency, Tata, and you, Tupac III, you want me to tie you to those binoculars? Everything you do here is a mission, comrades are going to be risking their lives, important action, our financial backbone, breaking up the national banks. Flojo: blank stare. He had been in the other room, and Tupac III didn’t bother calling him to take over. We weren’t much by way of a revolutionary cell, I admit. We were all bored to death after four weeks of this, but at least with me, well, I didn’t mind keeping my eye in the scopes. Please, Tata, mostly you’re just waiting for the floating girl to show up again. Famous quotes from the Calle F post, originally collected as supplement to log and later copied by author: 2 de diciembre, Tupac III: Durán is shitty coffee, but Durán is also the best boxer that ever lived. There might be a structural connection there, like, linguistically or something. Flojo: says nothing (could be sleeping on the binoculars). 3 de diciembre, Tata: Is it just me, or does Marx have a mistake on page—Tupac III, what do you make of this thing, that all value is added through labor? 5 de diciembre, Tupac III: We might be a decoy. Like, to confuse the police. No, seriously. Don’t give me your giraffe laugh, Tata. Ay, what a stupid giraffe. Flojo: nothing. 80

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5 de diciembre, Tata: You think it would compromise the mission in some way if I went and talked to her? Flojo: silent, sitting on the balcony, smoking, silent. (Who wrote this as a quote? A quote is when you say something.) 6 de diciembre, Tupac III: Tata, you ever think about like, what it would be after the revolution? No, I mean, are people still going to be, you know, when you flunk a test or something, or a girl you want and she doesn’t care about you, and goes out with some jerk. Like, basically . . . 6 de diciembre, Flojo (answering the phone, reluctantly): Dígame. Sí. No. No. Bueno. Tupac III (after Flojo goes back to the sofa without saying anything): Flojo, what was the call about? Flojo: Nothing. 6 de diciembre, Tata: The girl sat next to me today. Tupac, don’t give me that look, I’m telling you, before the meeting at the Nacional—she’s a law student. She started talking to me. Tupac III: The stress is getting to you. We need to get you checked. I should have mentioned this earlier: the main reason Flojo was with us was, well, two reasons. One, nobody knew what to do with him. He had worked as a crane driver in the port, and was recruited though a cell we had in their union. He didn’t talk much, so some people thought he was an informer. But the guy couldn’t say anything, physically, or like, almost physically. You’d be lucky to get the tiniest suggestion of a smile out of him, or a little grunt of satisfaction or dissatisfaction at some sports news. But he would do these fairly accurate pencil sketches, a bit abstract, but you got the idea. Carpintero thought that could be useful in a lookout post, and I think that was the second reason. I liked his sketches. They had no pretention whatsoever—he would sketch out of boredom. So you had a series of sketches and newspapers lying around: sketch of city skyline; “EDUCA Warns, No Budget for Schools”; the Bolivian embassy yard, as seen through the 8x30. Imagine, a newspaper on the table, “González Strikes the Chiricanos Out,” beside it, a sketch of people loading sacks on an armored car, and in your ears, a very subtle noise of someone moving in the apartment next door. 81

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Before we were placed in the apartment on Calle F, I was running around, from my economy classes to cell meetings, to student gatherings. The revolution took most of my spare time, all my thoughts. All my real friends now were in the movement. This is not to say that I had many friends—the movement wasn’t big. But I had a circle of people around me, and I started to speak like them, to make casual remarks about Cambodia like them, to fantasize about the future like them, and to leave no time for myself: like them. I didn’t notice this, but Camargo (one of our two mediocre poets) said something about it . . . I don’t remember exactly how he framed it, and pardon me if I’m missing the fact that he was paraphrasing some other revolutionary, but it was something about us needing to remember that all this revolution was about making better lives for people. Or more wholesome lives, or more human—I can’t remember exactly. And that comment woke me up to the fact that—I hesitate now that I come to define it; I don’t want to narrow this problem too much. We were sitting outside Artes, and people ignored Camargo’s remark for a few seconds. Then someone—Hernán maybe—said that, sure, we were fighting for a better world. Not only, Camargo said. He was a chubby little guy, that Camargo, with big shoulders and very quick fingers. He held a little pencil in his left hand, and he was flipping it slowly. We were fighting for a better world, he said quietly, sure, but also just so that people will live better, fuller lives. We had to make sacrifices along the way, for the struggle; and Che was right that we had to toughen up in the meantime, and become more altruistic. But the Cubans were so busy sacrificing themselves for the new world that they would end up building a new mule instead of a new man. This caused a sudden uproar in the small group, but Camargo didn’t seem to care. For a second, the pencil in his hand looked like one of those pneumatic detonators—you know, like in the movies, when they detonate the TNT, and the bridge goes up in the air two seconds before the German tanks roll across. A few people said, go to hell, you’re an ass, Camargo, but he held on to that pencil, and I personally was just about ready to take cover. Think about what you’re saying, Ximara said to him, how can there be a revolution without sacrifice? Sitting around and writing poems is what helps the bourgeoisie stay in power (I don’t recall who said this). There were more people following the party line, but Camargo just looked at them and 82

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held on to that detonator. Then there were a few seconds of silence— I suppose people wanted to give Camargo the chance to back down. I swear there was nothing I wanted to do more than shut my ears as he pressed his little thumb on the tip of the pencil: “I can tell you this much for certain,” he said: “Fidel Castro doesn’t read poetry.” I don’t remember how it was all settled. I think they brought it up to Carpintero, who had low tolerance for public denunciations of this kind. Probably, Camargo had to do some sort of self-­criticism, or maybe admit that it had been a bad joke. But I tossed Camargo’s pencil in the air a lot during our time in the apartment on Calle F, and no matter how I turned his words, they always seemed to detonate some bridge or other. It was true. Fidel didn’t read poetry, and if he did, he didn’t understand a word of it. Che had read a lot, maybe had written some crap too, but despite his posturing, he hadn’t taken any of it into his lungs. No one had much time to think about this stuff because at this point there were already rumors that we had some special information, and that the holdup was going to happen any day. A few years later, when I was no longer involved, I heard from one of the people who had planned the action that the information they had was that there were problems with the bank’s electricity, and that some company was going to come in and service it. I don’t know how they got this information, but from that point on they started going through the company’s garbage every day, and sure enough, the company was throwing out its faxes. Until this new information came in, the plan was somehow to wait until the armored truck came into the yard and started to unload or offload the cash, I don’t remember which. Initially, the idea would have been to jump the fence of that yard (quite tall, in my opinion) and hold up the three people who would be handling the cash, as well as the guard with the shotgun. It was a very risky plan, and as soon as the information on the electricity came in, everyone understood it was the best opportunity we would have. The week before the holdup, the floating girl passed again. She had on a very light, long orange skirt, which looked in the 8x30 as though it lingered in space minutes after she had already passed. I pressed my eyes so strongly into the binoculars that I could feel the picture pressing through my forehead, straight into my mind. It was no hallucination— the girl was only using her feet for rhythm, and her hips were propelling 83

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her through space, in a lighthearted, milky way. I remember this very vividly, because it was just then, a minute after she had passed, when her trace was still in the air, that Carpintero came to visit our post. He took the old rocking chair we had there, moved it to the balcony, and sat with me. We chatted—classes at the Nacional, my friends, things I had read. Carpintero was seven or eight years older, well read, in the inner circle. He was a completely disciplined revolutionary, and that made everyone respect him. I mean, some of us were trying, in a somewhat pathetic way, to hide the fact that we were 19, that we were there because some friend had invited us in and we were curious, because the secrecy excited us, because we dreamed of being like Che, with girls going crazy for us, because we thought it was all some big Neruda poem, a Costa-­Gavras film of which we were the stars. Not Carpintero. He was truly radical—his entire being was switched onto revolutionary gear. Everyone knew that we had to get money to buy more arms, but he was the one who put in the operations to get it into action. (He wasn’t confused, like us, about the niceties of bourgeois legality: the money belonged to the workers, was illegally in the hands of the oligarchy, and as revolutionaries it was our obligation to expropriate it for the revolutionary struggle.) I don’t know what he was like before he joined the cause, but by the time I got to know him he was a model revolutionary, and that also meant he was very strict with the members who were under his direct command. He was extraordinarily busy all the time, running from one meeting to another, attending to his fake job, only to draw out plans and put operations in motion, so he had no time or patience for games. I sometimes imagined—and I still think it’s very likely—that during this period, there was not one thought that passed through his head that was not directly related to the revolution. Though I didn’t know this for sure at the time, I had a sense he was in charge of the operation on the Banco Nacional. By this time, he had put all the pieces in place, and he was just waiting for an opportunity, which, as it turned out, came seven days later. Of course he had been under a lot of pressure all this time, but it looked like that afternoon for the first time he had a few moments to sit around and talk. He had chatted with me earlier on a few occasions, and it looked like he respected me for some reason. I suppose he could tell that I knew a lot of literature, poetry, that kind of stuff. He could ask me what I thought about Edmundo Desnoes or even about Juan Rulfo, if I thought this one or the 84

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other was about imperialism, and he would listen to my words, concentrating fully. It was a kind of honor for me, and some of the others also noticed this and commented on it. But this time, just after the floating girl passed, when the trace of her image was still in my head, he didn’t ask about some obscure poem by Rubén Darío. He took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, and held it in his hand, folded, as though it was a treasure. He never showed me what it said, but I could tell it was ripped somewhere along the middle, that he was in fact holding just half of the paper. It was the kind of paper they use for faxes. He asked me if I had heard what Camargo had said, and I said I had heard it. And what did I think? I said something like, it didn’t show much political consciousness to say it in the way that Camargo had said it. Carpintero held on to his ripped paper, and then put it back into his pocket. Then I gained some confidence, and, as though I was speaking to Che himself, as though I was speaking to all the revolutionary movements of Latin America, I said that, just between us, I thought there was a grain of truth in it. It wasn’t the whole story, of course, and you had to take into consideration the objective conditions of our struggle, Yankee imperialism, the militares torturing and disappearing people . . . but there was a danger that poets would be relegated to the poetry department, the historians to the history department, and those doing the revolution would be stuck in their own department—the department of revolution. He smiled. Then he said the problem wasn’t organizational. He’d been thinking about it himself ever since he had read Mariátegui. He had a notion that the problem had to do with the organization of the mind itself, with consciousness: that you get caught up in the practical, in the means, and only in a specific kind of means; that you give yourself so totally to the workers, to the vision of the future, of a better world, that you can no longer be in the worker’s world. We spoke for a little while longer, although with less intensity, as though we were just leaning back and looking at the rooftops. I watched the yard again, and he took out the piece of paper from his pocket, held it in his hand for another minute, just felt its texture, and finally put it back in. And from that point on, throughout the week, he would spend an hour every day in our post, the apartment on Calle F. Part of that was, well, he said he wanted to keep an eye on that yard, to watch it himself, to see if there was something we weren’t noticing. But I think he might 85

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have just been trying to take in something of the place, of its remoteness from the action. (Also, I’ve often thought that the conversations he had with me began to affect him—that he began to take what I was saying seriously. On a few occasions, I let him look at the “literary criticism” I was writing.) He even saw the floating girl once, and he smiled when Tupac III explained to him that I was making up stories about seeing her every other day. It was true. A week earlier, I had been sitting in that little round seating area outside the law library, passing time before a cell meeting. I was reading a story called “Beatriz” and I became very absorbed and read it twice—it’s a very sad story, about a little girl whose father is a political prisoner in Uruguay—and I didn’t notice the young women who were sitting by my side, or, actually, one was standing and two sat next to me so that even after I finished reading the second time and held myself not to cry or anything, I also didn’t want to look to my left because that would be pretty obvious, until, I mean, two of the girls left and just the one, the skinny girl was sitting beside me with her notebook open. I looked. She smiled and said, libertad es una palabra enorme. Yes, oh, haha, oh, you know the story? I was so confused, my pulse was like a conga, I could feel the beat even in my lips and fingers: it was her. She calmed me, spoke happily, smiled a lot, more like an older sister, which saddened me, I mean, a girl like that would never—I could barely keep up with my own thoughts. God only knows what I said, but I do remember the feeling of my words coming out of my mouth like bubbles, and the garden cool and sunny, everything in the air. I would meet her a lot after that (I found the most ridiculous pretexts to sit there, and sometimes I just passed by and she was with her friends, so I said hi and walked by, as if casually, like I was walking somewhere to do something). I was sad because, well, there was no chance she would, but I was also a little glad, because I thought if we became friends, maybe one day, like. VII. Carpintero, History Department, Universidad Nacional, March 10 ubfield? That’s a term the Singer used. I think it was a clarification of a term from Pierre Bourdieu . . . [it meant] any site in which one persona engages others. That’s in opposition to the field, which is

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[the interlaying of ] various subfields . . . so a field is a social space where subjects appear in more than one persona.41 A camp like El María is a subfield; a family is a subfield, or the building of the Ministry of Government and Justice in the Casco Antiguo. Those are all subfields. But Panamanian society is the field in which these subfields exist. Don’t get too hung up on these definitions. It depends on the specific analysis you’re doing. You know, if you’re thinking about some of the staff of the United Fruit Company, Panamanian society would almost be irrelevant as a field, and for many people in the Canal Zone, both Panamanian society and American society would . . . that is, they wouldn’t quite hold as the larger social field. See that? A subfield like Coiba will contain 41. The definition of the social field has much in common with Pierre Bourdieu’s category, but the implied author is apparently more careful in the description of its subcategories. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). See also Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. For Bourdieu’s subcategories (“political field,” “artistic field”) see, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, “Flaubert’s Point of View,” trans. Priscilla P. Ferguson, Sociology of Literature 14, no. 3 (1988): 539–62. Occasionally, Bourdieu seems to be aware of the importance of subfields, as when he writes that “in reality, the social space is a multi-­dimensional space, an open set of fields that are relatively autonomous, i.e. more or less strongly and directly subordinated, in their functioning and their transformations, to the field of economic production. Within each of these sub-­spaces, the occupants of the dominated positions are constantly engaged in struggles of different forms (without necessarily constituting themselves into antagonistic groups).” Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (November 1985): 736. But he reaches an impasse here because he does not define very well what these subfields really are. Most commonly, he speaks of something like politics or art as a “sub-­field.” It amounts to saying that an individual’s subjectivity is determined by his objective position in the field, and at the same time that this individual’s political or cultural positions appear autonomously in a political or cultural sphere. But how is this possible? If a person’s objective position in the field determines their subjectivity, what is shaping these autonomous positions? The question in these subdivisions of the social field is whether or not they create analogous subdivisions inside the subject. In the model above, the subfield is not defined according to theme but rather as a subdivision of the field in which individuals know one another’s personas. Of course, the definition here too is not airtight. Since subfields are porous, it is only logical that any social agent will have to maneuver between subfields that overlap to some extent, and in which attributes from one subfield (its special dialect, if one exists; any information specific to it; its hierarchies, and so forth) may seep into other subfields.

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smaller subfields within it: prisoner cliques or gangs, for example. So, a typical inmate will need to maneuver socially in various subfields, and he might hold a different social persona for each of them.42 We mostly said that in punishing, those more powerful in a relation are investing energy and resources in order to maintain a certain equilibrium in a subfield or in a field, or to press subalterns further in a direction they see fit. Punishment isn’t an end in itself. If you have violence inflicted out of, say, sadistic enjoyment—we didn’t think of it as punishment at all . . . although, you know, a guard can explain away his sadism as something rationally useful for the institution. It’s true that sometimes what’s formally administered as an act of punishment, officially, to structure future subaltern action, is in fact designed to achieve a second purpose. For example, a prison director can punish a prisoner to appease his staff, even when he himself thinks it’s unnecessary. And sometimes guards make these kinds of demands on their superiors, [when they understand] that this punishment reinforces their position vis-­à-­vis the inmates. And it can have certain costs, especially [if ] those on the receiving end see it as cruel or unjust. If a prisoner thinks he’s been punished unjustly, he might start breaking the rules and getting punished, going down in a kind of “downward disciplinary cycle,” at each point being punished more and responding even more negatively, and finally perhaps attempting an escape after being punished inhumanely, or something like that. With the case of the “colonial currency” that we talked about, what you have is a decision to legitimate an illicit practice. It’s a trade-­off— the institution loosens the limitations it imposes on the inmate, but it manages to neutralize the challenge posed to its authority more generally. They apparently felt that legitimating the use of state currency for economic transactions would have an extra cost, since prisoners could use the cash they saved in the colony when they ran away, you know, in their first days on land. Maybe normal currency could also be more tempting for staff, and so [it would] make bribes more common. That’s why Director [Robert] Lamastus made the “colonial” currency, which 42. A note in the transcript’s margins reads: In our model, “Something like a ‘political subfield’ or an ‘artistic subfield’ will only be thought of as subfields if it could be said that special personas appear in them, and that these personas need to position themselves vis-­à-­vis one another.”

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had value only for prisoners. [. . .] With the colonial coin? I think some official inspector advised Chiari to stop using it in 1925, and after that we never saw any mention of it in the documents.43 We thought that both—punishing or legitimizing an illicit action— were kinds of investments done to shape the subfield or field, so as to direct future activity in it. There were other “investments” too, like observation of inmates, cooption, the use of spies, most of which came from the top and were aimed at putting those at the bottom in line. But not only. In Coiba (and I know this is true in other institutions), both staff and prisoners could sometimes complain to the authorities or to the media . . . in effect, trying to sanction or “discipline” others, including their superiors. You had one by the name of Núñez, a prisoner who’d been in charge of the colony’s library and classroom, and had taught other prisoners. He launched something like a campaign to better his own conditions. He’d had a personal fight with Director [César] Ayala before either of them got to Coiba, and now he found himself in a tight position. He was lame in one foot, but when Ayala took charge of the island, he was stripped of his comfortable position and forced to work in the fields with the rest of the prisoners. And so this Núñez gets his brother, some government bureaucrat, to write a letter on his behalf to President Alfaro; attached was a medical certificate that Núñez was really a poor soul and had recently gone through some operation. And I think maybe he also wrote to the newspapers, or, I can’t remember, maybe that was something else. Anyhow, it worked, and Director Ayala was asked to ensure Núñez was working in ways that would not harm his health.44 [Carpintero is shown a document photocopied from the National Archives, in which Carlos Quintero, the penal colony’s secretary, tells President Ricardo J. Alfaro of the situation on the island. Two first paragraphs are quoted:] 43. Aside from the document cited, see also Francisco J. Rodríguez, secretary, Penal Colony of Coiba, to the secretary of government and justice, November 12, 1922, fol. 224–31, ser. 5-­02, tomo XX, ABP. On the abolition of the currency: Julio Arauz, “Extracto de anotaciones,” March 31, 1925, in Rodolfo Chiari presidency, “Correspondencia Carlos López,” caja 1, años 1924–25, fol. 31–33, SAE, ANP 44. Correspondence between Dionisio Núñez, Resguardo Nacional, and Ricardo J. Alfaro, president, September 29–­October 22, 1931, numeric file 3.44.2.15, Archivo Ricardo J. Alfaro, Bella Vista, Panamá, República de Panamá (ARA).

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A few days after I arrived, and seeing that every night, many prisoners with musical instruments went up to the Director’s house, and that they stayed there until the late hours of the night, I asked the Director if he did not think that this could attract the attention , at the very least, of the Secretary of Government and Justice. He answered that he was placed [as Director] by Acción Comunal. Although the reply did not match the question, I had to satisfy myself seeing as I did not want to ask another. On April 8, 1931, the Colony’s boat, “Quibo,” reached the Island, bringing back the group that had been sent to sell sacks of beans in Remedios, and a few escaped prisoners arrived with them; one of them, bearing the name Martín Espinosa walked at the front, zigzagging, playing an accordion—bought with the money from the vending of the beans—and in the back, the Director with the rest of the caravan of prisoners, and they went directly up to the house of Director Ayala, who, although he maintained silence, ordered that more prisoners be brought from the cells so that they could go up to his house with musical instruments, and so that they play and sing until after two at night.45 I remember this document, yes. Funny, ha? This was after the Acción Comunal coup . . . hmm . . . yes. Quintero later described a situation that must have been extremely unsettling for most of the staff. [Carpintero takes his reading glasses off with his right hand and assumes his professorial voice.] The director and his “economist,” who Quintero accused of having once been a communist, told the prisoners in one speech, if I remember it correctly, that in Coiba, guards didn’t need weapons because they [guards and prisoners] were all workers. He made a prisoner of confidence of one known as Gato, who had earlier led an escape of a group of prisoners, and had personally shot to death one guard and wounded another. Imagine that—the whole principle of the division of staff and inmates was being broken . . . and some of the guards were obviously unhappy. Although I personally don’t know how much I trust this Quintero . . . especially about this business of classifying the economist as a communist—keep in mind that anyone who’s mildly pro45. Carlos M. Quintero, secretary of Coiba, to Ricardo J. Alfaro, president, July 6, 1931, numeric file 3.45.1.5, ARA.

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gressive in this country is already considered a communist. But who knows—if he said they were all workers on the island . . . As far as what we were talking about, what you have here as I understand it is an agent who’s trying to enforce the institution’s form on his superior—to enforce discipline. In this case, the tactic backfired badly. Ayala understood that his secretary was moving against him, and he sent an urgent telegram requesting they sack seven of his employees, claiming that they were endangering the safety of the colony. The seven were fired, but later, more complaints reached the secretary of government and justice and the president (some through the press). Eventually, they investigated it and found Director Ayala guilty of fraud, and he was fired without ceremony less than a year after starting his job.46 [. . .] Keep in mind, though, that disciplinary measures aren’t like educational measures—they’re not designed to reach the self or the entire subject and change him. The behavioral environment is the issue, the codes of interaction, the proper alignment of individuals in the subfield. Exactly. Through this alignment, you affect personas . . . if a prisoner is continually degraded, he might lower his head in this subfield. But what the subject will absorb of this degradation is an entirely different question. For the institution’s purpose, for discipline, it’s not a crucial question. Only if the institution takes its job of altering the individual seriously—as mental hospitals supposedly do and Coiba clearly did not—at that point it becomes important. Most of these institutions believe they’re structuring the inner core of the individual. In reality, they structure one of his personas. For the daily functioning of the institution, it’s enough. And Luna-­Icaza actually had it that form, and not any specific content of a particular utterance or action, is the goal of discipline . . . the outer structural shell of personalities and the form of communication between them, rather than the inner core of the subject. Right, the main point I insisted on was that it’s not as though a person falls into a subfield from Mars, and as such can do all these secondary adjustments to gain himself elbow room and maintain some sort of intrinsic liberty. I would never have signed off on anything like that, because there’s a reason that the whole time I was in Coiba I never once met a person who happened to have come from Punta Paitilla [upper-­ 46. “Sumario que se instruye a César E. Ayala por el delito que define y castiga, el Título Sexto, Capítulo Primero del Código Penal, 1931,” numeric file 3.57.1.119, ARA.

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class neighborhood in Panama City]. Subfields are arranged in the field in a very specific way, so that if you happen to maneuver in one of the subfields of El Chorrillo, you have a much higher chance of also passing some time in one of the subfields of Modelo or Coiba. So, statistically, if what you’re looking at is Panamanian society, Bourdieu is right, and it seems to make no difference in what subfield you happen to fall. But the problem is in assuming Panamanian society as the thing to carve up into statistical tables when people don’t live in that reality for most purposes. We’ve known about this problem since Marx—“in themselves” versus “for themselves”—but we’re all very slow in coming up with empirical tools to deal it. And it’s no coincidence we’re so slow, because the problem is infinitely complex. As complex as human reality. We were so interested in it because the implications were not just for how you could look at action from the outside, as a scholar, warden, or whatever. But also for understanding the subject . . . see, if it’s true that objective reality makes subjective worldviews, what objective reality are you really engaged in? And what happens when one of your subfields forms a part of your subjective world in one way, and a different part where you live or once lived forms a different part of you that contradicts the first? As a Marxist, of course, I would only say that we’re living in the era that forces human beings to live in the most contradictory circumstances . . . so when we speak of someone going through a dialectic process, internally, we have to understand that this means the different parts of his subjectivity are truly clashing! It hurts. It makes you confused. It makes you act in ways that contradict your own interests. And it makes you a type of being that is extraordinarily difficult to account for. [Long silence.] The staff, right. Well, it’s true they’re in a bit of a bind, because on the one hand, they only hold their power in the subfield because of their relation with the field (it’s their job to beat you up). On the other hand, they constantly make every effort to supersede the field, to carve out more power than what the field gives them . . . in many ways. They do a lot of things the Ministry and the director tell them not to . . . drink alcohol, make deals with prisoners, or give [prisoners] protection [for illicit activities]. But then when they use force on the inmate, even if they do so in completely criminal ways, they claim to do so because of the institution’s needs. Some of these deviations are so established that they become the lay of the land. The ley de fuga is a good example: they’d murder prisoners who tried to escape—it was well established in Coiba more 92

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or less since the beginning, and obviously, it’s against the law. So guards participate in more than one subfield, hold views, and do things that are plainly contradictory. But they need to insist that both they and the inmates are unified beings. If not, that would open up room for all sorts of excuses like, well, it wasn’t me who drank the milk, it was the part of me that’s in the other subfield! So they have no options. They have to act with internal contradictions, but continue to believe in society’s iron rule of discipline: one body, one subject. As it turns out, directors of institutions, politicians, caudillos, judges, bureaucrats, and historians all support this view. And if they don’t, they write their reports, orders, their narratives and verdicts as though they did, [. . .] which produces the same results.

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3 The Singer’s Report Text and Critique in Coiba , 1920 –1935 …

I. “99,” Restaurante Antuan, March 12, 2003 messenger arrived with some bad news. It was hot that day, the air standing still. Then rain, but raining hard. The messenger arrives and I take a look at him and I say to myself, “99, watch out, because this messenger’s looking pretty suspicious.” The message was from the director, Capitán Soler, and it was that the next day there was going to be an inspection of the Singer at 3 p.m. sharp. It was evening when the messenger got there, five or six, so you do the math, mi’reina—twenty-­four hours! [TDV: even less.] Less! I just sat there quietly and listened and didn’t mix myself up because I thought, better not get yourself involved in this one because it’s going to get too complicated. Esto sí [es]‑taba claro desde’l principio. Cla-­a-­rito mana . . . [iba ser] bien foco [This was clear from the beginning . . . it was going to get really fucked-­up]. [B]ueno, Licenciada, they didn’t know what to do. Carpintero thought it was a kind of show and [that] in the end they would bury them all alive or hang them upside down, like this, in the sun, naked, from a tree— they used to do that sometimes, and a prisoner, the strongest, toughest guy, would be begging in tears after half an hour of that. Your dad tried to stay cool, though he must have been telling himself, damn, I’m too old for all this. And Santo Wilson, I saw him hold onto his little Bible all day like a prophet. But Luna-­Icaza, he had a different—see, he was always pretty frightened. He had a “condition,” I think that’s what they call it. I’d look at him because I thought that he was a special type, [and that] always calls one’s attention. [Thinks.] You know? [. . .] He would sleep with his eyes a little open, that’s what Santo Wilson told me. This Luna-­ Icaza, he would jump out of his bed at the smallest noise, and sometimes he’d sit on his bed and stare outside, where there was a little angle [from which] you got a view of the sea. You could blow a little bit of wind and he’d disappear like [inaudible]. All this was his condition. It all got a lot

A

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worse with the Singer, or so they said, and when the inspection was announced, that’s when I noticed the worst of it. Your father, Ingeniero Del Valle, he thought we should just show the machine, and whatever happened, happened. He was a very educated type when it came to machines, books, that sort of thing. But when it came to dicey situations, he was “illiterate” [makes quotation marks with his fingers]. So Carpintero said, well, why don’t we try to control the situation as best we can? Things can get messed up, but at least we’ll prepare a show, and figure out what to do in a few scenarios. He’d been in an urban guerilla–­type thing, Carpintero, so he had a little bit of a brain for that stuff, you know, plans, situations . . . so he said let’s prepare a show: we’ll run some question in the Singer, prepare the papers, bring the typewriter, and start typing right there in front of the director. Chucha, we said, good idea. So Santo Wilson said, let’s do a ceremony, raise the flag, sing the anthem—that way we’ll get them in the right mood. Epa! Now he’s talking. And some food—shouldn’t we see if we can talk to Sergeant Vicente, [to] get us some food from the kitchen? Couldn’t hurt to try. We’d have a prayer too, Santo Wilson said. Bueno, Carpintero said, nobody should impose a prayer on anyone. But Santo Wilson said a prayer will get people in the right frame of mind, and even Carpintero said maybe there was some sense to that. And shouldn’t we get the shack all cleaned up for the show? So now we were really thinking of a plan, and going over the . . . what do you call it? [TDV: The details?] Esos, sí, los detalles. But then your dad says, “Boys, what question should we insert in the Singer?” They said we should just put in a simple question, just for show. Pero que va! Luna-­Icaza said, we’ll ask the Singer about criticizing. I remember that moment exactly, because it was a great “moment.” They asked him, what do you mean, Lunito, like history-­type thing, or, that is, like, theoretically? So he says: both! Epa . . . that’s a hard one, that question. Bien-­bien duro. But he knew, if you want people’s attention, you need drama—tú tiene[s] que ir fakir [ you have to go all out]. Bueno, eso y el otro, and then they argued about what kind of papers to put into the Singer, because you know, it’s all in the papers. [TDV: The documents?] Those. It’s the documents, because you’re feeding it, right, Doctora, plus you have to make up the question, so that’s what there was always some fighting about. [TDV: About the questions.] About who 95

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gets to decide, and what kind of questions. [Pauses.] Look, I’ll tell you how it was. It was complicated because you could influence what came out of the Singer, but no one would admit it because it was supposed to be . . . what do you call it? [TDV: I’m not sure. Objective?] That’s right, objective. Nice word. Objective. I didn’t care so much, but these guys were politicals—and that’s how it is with politicals, they’re pretty uptight about that kind of stuff. I’m smarter than they all thought, so I’d just be sitting there and listening, dumb-­like, while they used big words, but see, I got what they were up to, and how, to give you an example, you could control what came out of the Singer, all that history-­type stuff, just by using the names you call things . . . you get me? [TDV: Names?] Sure, the names. [Pauses. TDV: The categories?] Sure, if you want to call them that. In the end, Santo Wilson got them all the food you could ask for. From the kitchen—he was connected, and the people in charge wanted to make an impression on the director. They sent a couple of prisoners fishing, and the guys came back with all sorts of good stuff. Ay, you wouldn’t believe what these sons of bitches (pardon me, Doctora) these guys in the kitchen could get their hands on. And I didn’t mention the drinks, because that only came later, at the point when you could believe anything. Most of the others, sometime in the middle of the morning, were already very enthusiastic. All the adrenaline! Life and death—that’s what they thought [it was], and it turned out they weren’t wrong either, though not for the reason they thought. And the devil’s tail, creeping up behind us. [. . .] But Luna-­Icaza, for him it was different—don’t know why. He worked just as fast as they did, pretended to be very excited, but then I noticed that his heart was evaporating and he was even sadder than always. I thought it was because of the fact that they were going to show the Singer, and he never got along that well with the Singer. It was part of his condition. [Reflects.] Era . . . este, era . . . un ser humano pues. Yeah. Aha. Well, but I have to get back to work. Of course, some other day. Just as you did today, you ask for me—if I’m not here, they’ll know how to get me. Okay. Okay, bien. Como no, a su servicio, como no. II. Carpintero, Pollo Riko, March 21 99 wouldn’t remember that kind of thing, no. No, he wasn’t involved on that level. What happened . . . there was very little time, only a few hours. 96

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To show the Singer worked, we had to make sure we were in agreement beforehand. The question Luna-­Icaza suggested was a bit tricky, but we liked it: how was Coiba critiqued in the 1920s and 1930s, and how could it have been critiqued? Good. So we come to pick documents. Imagine, we have two big American ammunition boxes full of photocopies of documents, and we need to pick a few. Maybe twenty or thirty. So we argue a bit about which and we pretty quickly get to the conclusion that we need to insert into the Singer some other documents too. About two issues, actually. I insisted that we say something about the larger historical context: the critique of the liberal project. You can’t talk about the critique of one institution without saying something about the critique that was developed at this same time about the entire social arrangement. Because we’re talking about the 1920s and 1930s—there was a Marxist and anarchist discourse developing in those days, and you also had Acción Comunal. Your father didn’t like my insistence on class conflict, but finally it was agreed. Then Luna-­Icaza said you also couldn’t expect the Singer to say something about critique without saying something about everyday reporting about Coiba. “What do you mean by that, Lunito? What can the Singer say about all the regular junk?” So Luna-­Icaza took a report by this one Cañizales person, I think he was responsible for agriculture in the beginning. He would send these one-­page letters, with maybe a paragraph-­long description of how things were going. President Porras answers one time saying the report was good but very sparse on the details.1 So very soon, “Sub-­Director” [in reality, Director] Lamastus takes responsibility for this, and starts writing much more detailed and more organized reports. In the beginning, he even tried having the guards [responsible for the little camps] write him up monthly reports, and he apparently forwarded those to the Ministry. A few years later, you already had the formulaic reports that directors like Vázquez Díaz and Ayala sent. So Luna-­Icaza raised this as a question: do we need to ask how these reports eventually become 1. The brief reports are: Atanasio Cañizales, chief of agriculture of the Penal Colony of Coiba, to Belisario Porras, president, December 26, 1920, folios 482–83, and January 30, 1921, fol. 484–85, ser. 5-­03 (Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia, Policía Nacional), XXXI, ABP. President Porras asks for more details in Belisario Porras to Atanasio Cañizales, January 21, 1921, fol. 480, ser. 5-­03 (Sect. de Gobierno y Justicia, Policía Nacional), XXXI, ABP.

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a kind of formula? In a sense, was this a type of disciplining of writing? Did these ways of reporting develop organically, as it were, from the colony’s needs, or did these bureaucrats use forms of writing they’d learned elsewhere, and that had their own history? Oh, no, Del Valle said, we can’t worry about this kind of thing. It’s beside the fact, I added, but made a mental note that it could be that certain colonial forms of reporting were later developed and applied here. In any case, Luna-­Icaza said of course, gentlemen, you’re right. But can we clear a few issues about regular reporting, just so we don’t have any misunderstandings later? Although we had little time, it seemed prudent. Luna-­Icaza showed us a document in which Porras tells Lamastus that they should remember to make a seedbed with avocado and grapefruit seeds. We all look at it. So? He points his finger at the word in brackets. Porras put the English “grape-­fruit” in brackets, to make sure Lamastus would understand.2 Okay, we know Lamastus is a Yankee, so Porras translated it for him. Well, Luna-­Icaza now showed us another document, in which Rodolfo Chiari, then minister of government and justice, puts things bluntly. What had happened was that a guard who’d been fired or who quit went on to denounce the colony’s office personnel (the guards and office people generally didn’t like each other).3 So Chiari wrote Porras about the incident, and also attached a letter by the “subdirector,” which was supposed to clarify the issue. In it, Lamastus said that the ex-­guard’s denunciation was false; that the employees denounced for certain serious behavior had been acting properly all along 2. Belisario Porras to Robert Lamastus, November 15, 1922, fol. 141, ser. 5-­02, tomo XX, ABP. 3. Rodolfo Chiari, minister of government and justice, to Belisario Porras, president, April 3, 1923, fol. 218, ser. 5-­01, tomo XI, 1923, ABP. “Esteemed friend,” the letter reads, “you will be informed by the letter I attach, written by señor Lamastus, which was received yesterday, of the results of the investigation that this Office ordered in the first days of last month, to look into the irregularities denounced by ex-­guard Cardoze. It can be understood from this letter that Cardoze’s reports are false; that the behavior of the employees that he accuses of certain grave offenses is proper, and that everything is going well in Coiba. However, I do think it appropriate to warn you that it is precisely these very employees who write and edit señor Lamastus’ correspondence, since he does not know Spanish and reads it very poorly, so in my opinion we should not accept this report without some reserve.” Chiari later sent his own agent to look into the accusations. Rodolfo Chiari to Belisario Porras, May 3, 1923, fol. 329, ser. 5-­01, tomo XI, 1923, ABP.

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. . . and that all was well in Coiba. But in passing the letter to President Porras, the minister of government and justice notes that, since Lamastus’s Spanish is weak, it’s these employees [who had been denounced] who actually write and edit his letters. See that? Minister Chiari says to Porras, take it all with a grain of salt. We didn’t see what made it more than an anecdote, but for Luna-­Icaza, this anecdote was a kind of starting point. Because what happens when you read all this correspondence between Lamastus and Porras, or between him and the other officials, you have a picture in your mind of what—of the two people corresponding, maybe even speaking between them. Lamastus signs, and me personally, I had that image, of him writing, a kind of mental image in my mind, even when I assumed some of the correspondence was drafted by his secretary. And the other way too. You see the secretary’s shorthand on Porras’s incoming mail, and you know it was often that secretary who, having gotten a general order of what he had to reply, wrote the actual letter. Oh, I suppose, sure, Porras was an obsessive letter writer, and you’re right, yes. Because of the type of person he was, he may well have personally known about most if not all the correspondence that was going out of his office. The doctor was pretty obsessive, controlled the country like his patria chica. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is it’s not him . . . or rather, he’s not the one actually writing the letter himself; and as it turns out, some of the officials answering him aren’t really themselves either. The point is that, as an intelligent reader, you know all that, but you still treat it as a conversation between two individuals, as if they were both present in the room. Luna-­Icaza said, let’s imagine for a second that we extend the model we made with the Singer, you know, about the division of the subject into personas and self. Let’s try to fit it onto the reports and letters. It’s not my field, but when I talked about it with people here—the old structuralists are the ones who know this stuff best, in my experience—they had a kind of division of agency for fictional texts. You have the real historical author. That’s the guy holding the pen in his hand, then putting it down, going to pour himself a glass of water, sitting down in his chair again and writing. And then you have, in the novel, say, you have the narrator. And that narrator, he can be a full character, who tells another character the story; or many times he’s a bit more of a voice, which stands in for the author. Omniscient narrators are often like that. And 99

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there’s all sorts of narrative organization schemes nowadays. You can have unreliable narrators: ones that the reader is not supposed to trust about the essential facts of the story; or you can have more than one narrator; or sometimes it’s an exchange of letters between two characters, what’s that called, eh, epistolary novel . . . or even in a film, where the camera “tells” the story by moving the lens through different places, at certain angles, behind half-­shut windows. And as I understand it, there’s still some controversy about a lot of issues [. . .] like the implied author. This implied author is used to point to the entity above the narrator but still within the text—that makes the larger aesthetic effect intelligible. See, you need someone to be communicating something to you. So if there’s an unreliable narrator, the reader understands that the ultimate meaning of the text is not what the narrator is saying. But who’s communicating the larger meaning of the book? The author? What if it is more than one author? Or what if the author didn’t really want to write the book that way, but did for whatever reason? Or what if he died before it was ready and some other guy finished it? So this implied author is more of a unit that the reader needs to posit so that the text as a whole can be secure and stable. At least, that’s how I understand it today, though I suppose you can think of it differently.4 All these categories sound awkward [. . .] because you’re used to dealing with coherent actors in your everyday. You want to know who the hell’s responsible for what you’re reading. García Márquez? García Lorca? Lamastus? Cardoze? You want to associate a social, a historical being with a text—which, after all, is a thing that lives in society . . . in history. But Luna-­Icaza said, if we’ve already agreed that person-­ to-­person interaction is more complicated, that people have subfield-­ specific personas—well, why not relate that to the text in some way? 4. The concept of the implied author was introduced by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction and created a serious controversy within the world of literary criticism. His use of the concept is still rather ambiguous, and in part for that reason was open to several types of attacks. Critics such as Seymour Chatman attempted to redefine or refocus the concept, contributing to a revival of its use. See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Tom Kindt and Hans-­Harald Müller, The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006).

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When he said it, Pulga, who’d been lying on his side in the middle of the room, suddenly looked up and his ears perked up. We stopped, thinking something was happening, but then he put his head back down, resting it on his paws—you know how they do that. We laughed—“Yes, Pulga, do you agree with this theory?” 5 None of us had any problem with the idea that in works of fiction the narrator who tells you a story is himself in one way or another a kind of textual device. But what Luna-­Icaza said was that if this division between narrator and author is useful in fiction, why not in bureaucratic correspondence? Or in any other text? But that’s where—the thing is, we didn’t get where he was taking us, and we started losing patience. But he kept giving us more examples of what he called “interesting cases.” There was one case in which, quite magically, a few days after the Acción Comunal coup, all the prisoners signed a petition to the new president, asking that Vázquez Díaz be kept in his position as ­director.6 Luna-­Icaza asked whose voice the ink in the letter represented. Santo Wilson said, “One of them wrote it and someone else collected the ­signatures.” But the truth is that it could have been the secretary who’d written it, or Vázquez Díaz himself, or anyone. And that did and didn’t matter, because Luna-­Icaza was talking about both agency and voice. Whoever read the letter back in 1931, what was he supposed to imagine? A choir of 139 prisoners standing before the president and speaking as one? All of them crowding into the presidential office, with one talking and everyone else nodding? It would be laughable, but for 5. Various scholars have used narratology to analyze face-­ to-­ face interaction and social interaction more broadly. In one way or another, this work builds on the earlier sociology of Goffman, which used a dramaturgical lens to study face-­to-­face interaction, already in his first book. See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990). For a discussion of current applications of narratological approaches in other disciplines, see Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer, Narratology in the Age of Cross-­disciplinary Narrative Research (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009). 6. One hundred thirty-­nine prisoners signed the letter, which was addressed simply to “Government.” It stated that the prisoners saluted the new government, and asked that Director Vásquez Díaz stay in his position. Prisoners of the Penal Colony of Coiba to “Government,” January 11, 1931, electronic doc. 3.57.1.118, ARA. A similar petition was sent a week later from the employees of the Colony. See Employees of the Penal Colony of Coiba to “Government,” January 17, 1931, doc. no. 3.57.1.117, ARA. Vázquez Díaz was dully replaced by an Acción Comunal member.

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the petition to be legible, you really did need to imagine, or to posit, something like that. The reader would have to have a narrator so as to be able to read the “situation” correctly. And above that, the reader also had to imagine an author who was “responsible” for the overall aesthetic effect. But what—but you don’t have any reason to prefer one of the signatories over the other as a source of this effect, or to even believe that it’s one person. And of course the question of how much whoever wrote and signed this letter actually wanted his director to keep his post—any question of will and agency, really—I don’t even need to mention how problematic that was in this case. Did even one of these prisoners who signed actually get up in the morning, hear about the coup, and say hey, they’re going to fire the director of my prison, so I better do something about it? That’s not very likely. So who’s responsible for the narrator in this letter? Back when we were discussing it, Luna-­Icaza suggested it was a kind of implied author. It didn’t quite exhaust all the issues, but Luna-­Icaza thought it opened up important possibilities. There was another petition that caused a different problem. In 1921, some prisoners asked to be freed so they could enlist and defend their country against the Costa Rican invasion.7 This was during the Guerra de Coto—the government was organizing volunteers to go up north and fight, and the prisoners offered their help. They were refused. But we looked at the petition—handwritten, you know . . . actually, it was prisoners from the Chiriquí Prison in the capital. Luna-­Icaza pointed to the same question of how one is supposed to read a kind of collective voice like that, but now he also added the question of the collective “posture” that you take up in [a] performance like that. These prisoners were saying they wanted to get out of prison just for the time needed, you know, to defend their country—[they’re taking up a] patriotic posture. You can believe the authenticity of their plea or not, but it forces you to notice the fact that there’s a . . . kind of a ceremonial taking up of positions. [And it] points to the assuming of positions that happens normally when people write. Even when you don’t adopt a surprising position, or one that seems conspicuous, ideological, whatever—you’re always taking up one. And Luna-­Icaza was saying that what we all found interesting in this specific position was the gap we saw between what we 7. Various prisoners to President Belisario Porras, February 26, 1921, fol. 504080– 81, ser. 5-­04, tomo VI, ABP.

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thought of these prisoners’ normal personas and their personas in this petition. But Luna-­Icaza thought you could not not take up a position. Did I say that right? Yeah, basically . . . you have to assume a paper persona in any correspondence, report . . . in any writing, just as you need to take into account a persona in real life.8 Most correspondence hides this fact, and most people don’t think that a letter or a report even has a narrator.9 The voice in there is supposed to be a simple representation of the voice of the guy who wakes up at night because his kid is crying. The same thing we talked about in the case of personas in everyday interaction applies here too. The reason for this condensation is that—well, at the time it occurred to me, you know . . . it may be something that rulers push for. It’s part of hegemony. Subalterns are always playing juegos de ser. They’re playing one role, but also another; and yes, they think something, but also its opposite, and won’t take responsibility for anything. Women always do this. [TDV: Oh, really?] Sure, I mean, they’re more flexible in taking up personas. [TDV: Is that right!] Sure. As are other subalterns. It’s the guy on top who has to make sure everyone is answerable, coherent, and, you know, responsible for their actions. The upper class lies and postures all the time, of course, but a powerful man has a material interest in being identified, “fixed” as it were, on top; and he has an interest that his subalterns will be held responsible, if not before the law, at least before him, which is often the same thing. So it’s the same issue with texts. The writer inside the text, you suppose he matches the living man—there’s no room for playing around. But it’s not just a question of who the writer is. There is, well, generally, [there are] a number of questions you can ask about voice . . . which 8. While never directly in conversation with other works, some of this debate echoes historians of the 1980s and 1990s. The question of how archival sources themselves use narrative conventions has of course received attention (although as far as I know the connection between form and discipline has never been explored). See, for example, Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-­Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 9. For this reason, theorists who place their emphasis on the reader’s construction of the narrative elements may come to deny the utility of the concept of the implied author. See, for example, Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 72–77.

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aren’t exactly the same as ones about agency.10 You can match the questions about the writer with ones about his intended readership—real, implied, and so forth. At least that’s what Luna-­Icaza claimed, and I can’t see why it’s problematic. [Asked to make sense of this scheme, he draws a little sketch.] [ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _____ TEXT _____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ] historical writer {implied author [narrator—narratee] implied reader} historical reader

I think it was something like that, see? You could have a narratee listening to the narrator within the text (you know, if one character is listening to another saying something within the bureaucratic text, or if a dialogue is reported). You can also have an implied reader—pretty logical, in my opinion. And a historical reader—the actual person who happens to be reading the text. Of course you can also ask the normal questions historians ask, about the texts’ authenticity (who wrote it, and if the facts cited in it are true) . . . or about its explicit or implicit purpose. And you can ask about how a text says what it says—questions of genre, of narrative conventions, you know. All these questions, Luna-­ Icaza wanted us to consider asking about even the most descriptive texts. The reports, inventory, tables of data, journal entries . . . you could ask the variations of these questions about all of them. (He maintained that most of the reports we were looking at were made of an amalgamation of text types: narratives, descriptions, tables, arguments, and so forth.)11 It was somewhat controversial, and no one wanted more of a 10. The debate on the distinction between the two should perhaps start with the seminal work of Gérard Genette. The structuralist author distinguished between various levels of what he called “voice” in narrative discourse. He dealt with the time of narration, narrative “levels,” “persons,” and other phenomena that characterize the act of narration and cannot be collapsed under the question of who the narrator is. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). As Richard Aczel points out, however, even this extremely sophisticated analysis does not come anywhere near exhausting the issue of voice. Richard Aczel, “Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts,” New Literary History 29, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 467–500. 11. Seymour Chatman differentiated between narrative, argument, and description; and most literary scholars would perhaps follow something like this rough division and apply the above tools to narrative alone. They would not speak of a narrator in, say, a descriptive text, an instruction manual, or a recipe. One problem with such a rough division is that most types of texts, as Luna-­Icaza suggests, contain a combina-

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headache than we already had that day. It was only later that I understood that this analytic lens can be useful for understanding power relations, class, and so on. By the way, there was one curious thing. Luna-­Icaza was suggesting all these issues we could look at, but the way he was suggesting them, it wasn’t like the rest of us. We would suggest something, or demand something, because we thought we were right. With him—no. It was as if he were standing on the Bridge of the Americas in the morning hours, you know, when it’s all one big traffic jam, and everyone’s just thinking how late they’re going to be to work, what their boss is going to say, and him, just standing on the edge, looking out to the horizon. That’s the image I have for some reason, when I think of how he was, with these suggestions. It was as if that whole day he was looking toward some strange horizon, and the infinite details, every line of the sea, every cloud in the sky, the dents on the metal of a yellow car, were all clues into something else . . . and he was just holding lightly onto some imaginary railing so as not to be tempted into the vast expanse. III. DECLARATION BY WILMA RODRIGUEZ.-­12 n the city of Panamá on the twenty third day of the month of June of nineteen eighty one, WILMA RODRIGUEZ appeared in the DENI office with the object of giving a statement on the present case.- Investigated by the detective below signed, she promised to answer truthfully all questions asked.- To identify herself she stated her name as written above, Panamanian, dark skinned, forty-­one years old, married, identification number 14-­5889, residing in house No. 2004, apartment No. 4, Avenida Balboa.-­To the rest of the questions the detective asked: ANSWERED: I came in at 7:15 in the morning, like every day. ANDRES TORRES DE LEON, GIOVANNA CHU and RAFAEL QUIROZ were already there. We did our checkup and opened at 8:00 as usual. The cleaning lady was a bit late, so she finished wiping the customer floor a few minutes after we opened, when a number of customers were already there, and then she went on to clean behind us, while we were attending cus-

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tion of various textual types within them. For a discussion of a number of more complex models, see Monika Fludernik, “Genres, Text Types, or Discourse Modes? Narrative Modalities and Generic Categorization,” Style 34, no. 2 (2000): 274–92. 12. The document is fictional.

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tomers. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: I don’t remember her name, she is fairly new. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: Maybe three or four months, but I’ve never spoken with her. Señor ARROCHA came in at 8:15, as he always does. We talked briefly, he mentioned he was reading Sherlock Holmes, a story about a monkey from India. He spoke at more length with GIOVANNA CHU, who is his mistress, although they pretend only to have cordial relations. We had problems with our electricity starting around 9:00 or 9:30. A part of the bank did not have electricity, and there were problems with the phones too.-­A SKED: ANSWERED: I thought they were connected, because the phone would get electricity from the same place but maybe I am wrong. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: We had trouble with the electricity before. It had been giving us trouble for a few days, maybe from Monday or Tuesday. Señor ARROCHA said he would take care of it earlier in the week, but it was only a few times, and even then, the lights went out for a few seconds and then came right back, so it was not urgent. That morning, it happened two or three times, and the phone hardly worked at all. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: The electricity crew came a few minutes after 2pm. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: I am fairly sure, because I just returned from my lunch break, which lasts from 1:30pm to 2:00pm. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: I did not know any of the employees from the electric company, but it did not look suspicious because they were wearing the normal overalls. They came in with their tools, and they knew what they were doing. ANDRES DE LEON opened the door to the back for them. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: No, there is no problem with this, because this door only leads to the yard, and to the corridor where the electric box and the plumbing is located. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: No, Señor ARROCHA had been back from lunch, but went out again on some errand. I’m not sure where. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: No, there is no special regulation about this, but there should be no problem to open that door, seeing as it has no connection to either vault or the restricted area. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: I was not aware that there was a robbery until the police arrived and the shooting began. At that point, I lay on the floor and waited for it to end. ANDRES DE LEON and GIOVANNA CHU were also on the ground, and I think QUIROZ was too, though I did not see him. I could hear the shooting, and the negotiation between one of the robbers and the police. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: None of the customers looked suspicious to me. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: I do not remember her. I was focused on helping customers in my line. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: 106

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I did not write any fax that day. -­Shown a fax, denied having written it, and claimed it was handwriting of ARROCHA. Shown other side of fax, ANSWERED: Yes, this side is mine. We use the other side of the fax as scrap paper because Señor ARROCHA doesn’t like us wasting paper. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: It’s a number triangle, to get good numbers for the Lottery. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: Those are my lucky numbers, and here I worked with them, to get this week’s numbers. -­At this point the questioning ended, without precluding the possibility of continuing it later if necessary, and so it be known, the signature of all those who participated, appears following its reading. The Declarant: [signed] Detective: Luit. R. Clemente IV. Carpintero, at His Home, May 5 s it on? Aha, aha [. . .] Correct. Yes, exactly, I insisted that we would look at the critiques of the Liberal project, and—that is, on the protests and social movements, because that was the historical context [in which] the criticism of the penal colony took place. We can’t think of reports—most of which call for fine-­tuning of this institution, and a few of which want more substantive changes—without a dialectical analysis of the larger challenge to the Liberal project. Of course there’s a history of working-­class activism in the Isthmus that goes back to the nineteenth century, and is well known.13 In the first two decades after independence, the Liberal Party managed to coopt, that is, to canalize most of this energy into its own ranks. You have to remember that the first president the Liberals managed to place in office was the black Dr. [Carlos Antonio] Mendoza, with a constituency of the [working-­class] arrabal; that it was the US that forced his resignation; and that it was the same Liberal Party who nominated black judges and bureaucrats, to the horror of the Conservatives and the US embassy. The workers of the Panama Railroad Company went on a few strikes . . . [as did] the diggers of the French canal.14 There were mutual aid societies and small syndicates (the bakers formed one, some con-

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13. Luis Navas, El movimiento obrero en Panamá (1880–1914) (Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1974); Marco A. Gandásegui et al., Las luchas obreras en Panamá (1850–1978) (Panamá, RP: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, “Justo Arosemena,” 1980). 14. For a helpful chronology listing the most important strikes and labor actions, see Gandásegui et al., Las luchas obreras, 34.

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struction workers another) and a few of them were combative. But the objective conditions, the . . . the objective conditions that capital imposed made it extremely difficult for the working class to go beyond this phase . . . keep in mind the division between Canal Zone workers, who came from all corners of the globe, and domestic Panamanian workers, who were themselves culturally diverse. There was serious Spanish anarchist presence during the Canal construction—eight hundred anarchists, according to one estimate, with a publication, member dues, and newspapers imported from Spain.15 But it’s not clear if these anarchists had any connection with anyone outside the canal; and in any case, they didn’t establish themselves outside the Zone. And Zone workers were themselves very divided, so that the Spanish and Antillean workers never quite managed to unite. The capitalist elite did everything in its power to exacerbate these divisions. When the [Canal Zone] workers went on their first major strike [in October 1916] and various sectors on the Panamanian side began to join it, the imperialist-­oligarchic alliance managed to isolate each group and prevent horizontal working-­ class action.16 You see the use of repressive tactics intensifying in the next massive Canal Zone strike, in 1920, [in which] 17,000 workers participated. Then you have a combination of cooptive techniques, divisive measures, the detention and exile of leaders, and the use of strikebreakers, all of which finally defeat the workers. So it was very difficult for workers to go beyond the level of mutual aid societies, syndicates, here a strike, there a strike . . . to unite and begin to challenge the existing order. That’s right, yes. The . . . vestiges of this tradition continued into the late teens, or maybe the early ’20s. President Chiari was elected (one 15. Juan Manuel Pérez, Pro mundi beneficio: Los trabajadores gallegos en la construcción del Canal de Panamá, 1904–1914 (Spain: Fundación Pedro Barrié de la Maza, 2007), 172–83. 16. A detailed account of these techniques in United Fruit’s plantations in northern Panamá can be found in Phillipe I. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Albert Lamb, the American citizen who served as chief of the Panamanian police, provides some details about the strike and his participation in its repression, which includes the use of spies as well as deportation of labor leaders. Albert Lamb to Ernesto T. Lefevere, president of Panamá, February 26, 1920. Albert Roswell Lamb Papers, box 1, folder 6, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL.

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of the wealthiest men in Panamá), and that’s where I draw the line . . . where the Liberal Party as an organization comes more fully into the hands of the Club Unión. It’s not a neat story, because loyalty within the party was more or less personalistic, so that Chiari, [though an] oligarch himself, might have cultivated some working-­class clients, as presidents Porras and Mendoza had. So the Liberal Party was now controlled by an oligarch—did that provide an opening for a renovation of Isthmian liberalism? [Carpintero begins to sketch a kind of chronology on a piece of paper, writing down significant dates with a shabby pencil.] In 1919 to 1921 you had a magazine called Cuasimodo, in which liberals, communist and anarchists all wrote . . . and you can see this kind of spectrum in the Federación Obrera [FOP] too, which they founded in 1921. [It had] porristas and left-­leaning Liberals from the so-­called Unión Obrera, together with a lot of people from the small syndicates, and also the communist and anarcho-­syndicalists of the new Grupo Comunista. But fairly soon the opportunistic factions began pushing the revolutionaries out. With the Federación Obrera in the hands of the reformists, the radicals broke out and made the Sindicato General de Trabajadores (SGT) in [December] 1924. All the best people were there—Diógenes de la Rosa, [Carlos] Céspedes, [Carlos] Bieberach, [Domingo H.] Turner, and of course José Blázquez de Pedro. In less than two years, this organ presents a very serious challenge to the existing order . . . so when we speak of critique, I said at the time, of a critical discourse, you have to remember the material conditions—the base—and also to remember the political-­ organizational context. Without that, you won’t understand what the discourse is about.17 17. On the Canal Zone strikes, see Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Carla Burnett, “ ‘Are We Slaves or Free Men?’: Labor, Race, Garveyism, and the 1920 Panama Canal Strike” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004). On labor in the 1920s, see Gandásegui et al., Las luchas obreras; Ricaurte Soler, Formas ideológicas de la nación panameña (Panamá, RP: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1972), 331. The journal Cuasimodo, published between 1919 and 1921, is now available online, as are other Panamanian journals: http://​binal​.ac​.pa​/ binal​/component​/content​/article​ /14​-­­sample​- ­­data​-­­articles​/149​-­­revistas​-­­panamenias​.html. During this period, usually, anarchists and communists were not censored. Often, however, the national newspapers displayed unabashed partisanship and championed their owners’ narrow inter-

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The most progressive liberal currents tried to answer the new challenge, to respond to it. They didn’t do much, but their discourse stretched the liberal logic to its limits. [José D.] Moscote, a lifelong liberal, was one of the editors of Cuasimodo, and the journal supported the October Revolution openly. Andreve’s Consideraciones sobre el liberalismo excuses his friends and colleagues by saying—here, I have it here [ jumps to the back of the room and picks up a photocopied version of the book]: “The Panamanian liberals of what we would call the epic period, descending from the heights of 1863 to the valley of reality, had to fight strenuously to achieve the many or few political and social goods that we enjoy.”18 But nevertheless he goes on to say, very forcefully, that a strong revision is necessary. It’s no coincidence that the most militant branch of this “neoliberalism” were to be found in the educational system. Because these men thought what was needed was a rethinking of education or something of the sort. Again, the notion that, somehow, by changing people’s ideals, you can fix everything up.19 ests. In several cases, they also refrained from reporting on labor unrest in the Canal Zone, attempting to hinder the spread of the news. Gandásegui et al., Las luchas obreras, 36. For an example of censorship, see José M. Blázquez de Pedro to Ricardo J. Alfaro, secretary of government and justice, December 14, 1921, Presidencia Ricardo J. Alfaro, caja 1 (12), tomo “Correspondencia recibida por R. J. Alfaro, año 1921,” SAE, ANP. 18. Guillermo Andreve, Consideraciones sobre el liberalismo (Panamá, RP: Casa Editorial El Tiempo, 1931), 98. 19. On this issue, see a similar opinion by Hernando Franco Muñoz, the biographer of Blázquez de Pedro. Hernando Franco Muñoz, Blázquez de Pedro y los orígenes del sindicalismo panameño (Panamá, RP: Movimiento Editores, 1986), 183. In the Instituto Nacional, the organ of liberal education in Panamá, there were many anarchist and socialist teachers, who influenced a generation of leftist and anti-­imperialist student activists. See, for example, the concerned comments made by Father José Suares to the US ambassador in 1926. According to Father Suares, the Ministry of Education, under the direction of the left-­leaning liberal Octavio Méndez Pereira, employed a large number of anarchists and socialists, some of whom had been exiled from other Latin American countries, and who were teaching their theories more or less openly. Father Suares supplied the embassy with a list—including the country of origin of these leftists—and asked for direct intervention in this matter. John Glover South, American Minister to Panamá, to Frank B. Kellogg, American secretary of state, July 26, 1926, no. 1104 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 26, frames 0235–40), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP.

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The most important challenge to the bourgeois-­imperialist order came with the Renters’ Strike of 1925.20 It started with the Chiari administration attempting to raise a new tax on real estate, and real estate owners responding with a drastic hike in rent—much higher than even the tax warranted. The SGT at this time already had some four thousand members, and it created an autonomous body to meet this challenge: the Liga de Inquilinarios. The Liga held weekly meetings, open to the public . . . toward the end it became mass meetings held daily in the Santa Ana Park. When it became clear that this organ was becoming powerful, the authorities tried to suppress it. They arrested and sent Blázquez de Pedro into exile, [and that] only infuriated the masses and radicalized the movement. Mayor Mario Galindo tried to buy time, naming representatives to “study” the problem. But these moves only made the problem worse . . . and convinced the workers that the government was trying to repress and coopt them. So the workers struck back with what was called passive resistance [in the beginning of October], declaring a no–­rent payment strike. The authorities tried to suppress public meetings, but the Liga defied them. And so the police, with Galindo practically leading it in the field, began shooting . . . and finally they injured eleven and killed four. It was clear that the police couldn’t handle the next battle because the masses were now completely enraged, and so President Chiari brought in a US occupation. The Yankees made mass arrests, exiled foreign activists, killed two more and injured some others . . . the city was essentially under martial law [until October 23]. So the Liga was suppressed, but at a high price. The Liberal Party and its head lost any semblance of legitimacy, and with them, the regime itself [lost legitimacy too]. In 1928 Chiari perpetuated his rule through the nomination of a crony, and so you can say that the laboring classes were contained, if not by Chiari’s own forces then by the threat of US occupation. Yes, yes. That’s right. We didn’t study it in any detail, but yes, there was also the rebellion of the Kuna of San Blas. Hold on. [Carpintero goes to the kitchen and brings us water with ice. He thinks for a minute about 20. On the Renters Strike, see Alexander Cuevas, “El Movimiento Inquilinario de 1925,” Lotería 213 (October 1973): 69–97. The same issue contains valuable primary sources on the affair. For more, see National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 26, Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. There are some relevant documents in the folders marked “Presidencia Rodolfo Chiari,” SAE, ANP.

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this issue, and then resumes.] Your father insisted that it was irrelevant, that the rebellion was a foreign-­instigated farce. Too many people (sad to say, Marxists too) say, oh, the poor Indians were duped to declare their independence by a scheming US princeling—they just didn’t know what they were doing. And it’s true that Richard Marsh, the American . . . you remember him, earlier, as US ambassador, he’d forced the resignation of President Mendoza. Well, now he was back in the Isthmus. I won’t say he wasn’t significant—he helped the Kuna leadership, maybe made them bolder. But Kuna resistance to bourgeois colonialism didn’t start in 1925—there were incidents at least since 1919, and really, peaceful resistance throughout the period. The Liberals began the plan to colonize these islands during Porras’s first presidency. Porras formed schools, but he also sent a “colonial police” with orders to intervene in the Kuna’s internal organization of their societies. The Protestant missionaries had been quite gentle by comparison—the Liberals pressed the Kuna to abandon their nose rings and the women’s traditional dress. The crucial thing was that they allowed various coastal groups to exploit natural resources . . . and finally, they sold American companies the permits to invade the San Blas archipelago, and those brought with them a foreign (mostly Antillean) workforce, heavy machinery and transportation. The assault on Kuna superstructure highlighted the more important assault—on the means of production. You had a series of Kuna attacks on the sources of oppression: the colonial police. [inaudible] and the fact that this revolt didn’t become more widespread were obviously structural. The Kuna were completely isolated, physically, socially, and culturally, from other oppressed groups. They couldn’t, and really didn’t join their cause with the SGT, and when they started their rebellion, protesters in Panamá and Colón even demanded that they be crushed. Well, this is the tragedy of the exploited.21 21. When the Kuna chief Nele Kantule came to renegotiate a long-­term agreement in 1930, he had the Federación Obrera act as intermediary. James A. Howe, A People Who Would Not Kneel: Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 295. But as Carpintero points out, there were no horizontal ties between subaltern groups. It would take another four decades before an incipient system of coordination between indigenous communities was established. The first massive protests to include all indigenous nations (and indeed, the urban left) took place only in 2012, and were led by the first woman cacique of the Ngöbe-­Buglé, Silvia Carrera.

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And who’s this? Who’s just come home? Ernestito? Come to Papá, haha, oh, where has he gone! He’s hiding, I can’t see him! I swear, Lizbeth, I just saw Ernestito come in with you! Where has he gone? We can’t find him! He’s disappeared . . . we have to find him! Is he under the couch? Mmm . . . no. Is he in the bathroom? No, I don’t see him . . . Lizbeth—I think we’ll have to ask all our neighbors to help us look for Ernestito because we can’t find—oh, here he is! Haha! [Throwing the kid in the air] Here he is . . . flying like an airplane . . . flying in the sky [Ernestito is ecstatic. When the interview resumes, Carpintero is reminded of the subject; his mood becomes somber.] Yes, it’s . . . well, after all these subaltern challenges to the regime comes the bourgeois Acción Comunal and knocks the regime out with one blow. Horrible. A small group of middle-­class professionals that established itself as a kind of secret society . . . you know, [they] recruited by personal invitation [and eventually] grew to a few hundred members. When you look at it today, some of the rituals they borrowed from the masons and from the tradition of the secret societies can seem ridiculous. But it was part of an organizational culture that made it possible to maintain the loyalty of their members; and it made it easier to keep knowledge compartmentalized. Well, yes, there’s no contradiction if I say that theirs was a critique too, sure. They critiqued the regime through a journal [named after the group itself, Acción Comunal], and to their credit, some of the group’s leaders met with the liberal Federación Obrera. And individually, some members joined the activities during the Renters’ Strike. They carried a double existence throughout the 1920s—public and underground.22 If you read their journal, you get a sense of the shallow bourgeois nationalism that these gentlemen advanced. Your father had a lot of good words to say about them—he saw them as a sincere attempt to rejuvenate Panamanian democratic values. But read through some of the interviews in Víctor Pérez’s work and you’ll get a sense—even with decades of hindsight—that their dis22. The best accounts of the Acción Comunal movement are Víctor Manuel Pérez, El movimiento de Acción Comunal en Panamá (Panamá, RP: El Arte Tipográfico, 1964); Thomas L. Pearcy, “Panama’s Generation of ’31: Patriots, Praetorians, and a Decade of Discord,” Hispanic American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1996): 691–719; Thomas L. Pearcy, We Answer Only to God: Politics and the Military in Panama, 1903– 1947 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), chap. 3.

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course is still confused.23 They speak in vitriolic terms about how everyone should count in balboas instead of in dollars, but they never promote a real plan for economic and political independence from the US, or even [offer] a serious agenda for internal social reforms. It’s true that they were solidly against the Kellogg–­Alfaro Treaty of 1926; and their position against US imperialism and its oligarchic agents was on the whole solid. But, see, Acción Comunal brought up the interior as a problem, and the interior peasant as a Panamanian who merits respect (in Arnulfo’s time, the government often made the interior the symbol of Panamanian identity). It was a cultural posture that didn’t say much about the real material issues that the peasantry faced as a class.24 There wasn’t even an agrarian reform plan—the usual staple of bourgeois reformism . . . And with regards to the working class, they only had general things to say, none of them at all radical. Bah—don’t waste too much time on them. They developed a solid internal organization; they had resources from wealthy supporters; and in the last couple of years be23. Enrique Abrahams explained: “Given its character of an immanently patriotic society, Acción Comunal would accept members of all parties and ideologies, but animated by a common goal of fighting for the grievances of the Republic. For that reason, it cannot be said that [the group] had a special relation with the neoliberalism of Andreve, Moscote, Duncan, etc. I can assure you, however, that circumstances transformed it into a militant political party, which prepared a government program that was later adopted by Panamanian liberalism when the latter gained power with the triumph of Don Domingo Díaz.” V. Pérez, El movimiento, 146. Another founding member of Acción Comunal put it more starkly: “Liberalism and neo-­liberalism, we should not speak of that because my conscience rebels against it. Here in Panamá, since its Independence, neither liberalism nor neo-­liberalism have ever existed in the strict sense of these words. What has existed and exists today is an extreme oligarchic liberalism, in which the masses, a people that has suffered and is suffering still, no longer believes. Here there were highbrow liberals whose actions placed them in an otherworldly conservatism: arrogant, negligible, contemptuous, who always evoked the soft shadows of the pseudo-­aristocrats of the Clúb Unión” (156). From this point of view, the nationalism of Acción Comunal was not meant to distinguish itself from other liberal currents in ideology as much as in action. Given how quickly the group splintered once in power, however, it becomes rather difficult to judge its actions. Those of it who rose to power—namely, the Arias Madrid brothers—became oligarchs in their own right. 24. On Arnulfo’s nationalism, and on the reliance of both his cultural program and xenophobia on an earlier nationalist “nostalgia,” see Peter A. Szok, “La Última Gaviota”: Liberalism and Nostalgia in Early Twentieth-­Century Panamá (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 110–14.

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fore the coup, they recruited enough men to carry a plan forward. And it’s not like discourse is everything, but I’ll grant them, their attacks of the government were articulated simply and strongly. And the Chiari regime was so obviously corrupt, authoritarian, nepotistic, and unable to address the basic issues of common Panamanians, that it made for an easy target. The economic situation got much worse in 1930, with the beginning of the Great Depression . . . so even within the pseudodemocratic confines of oligarchic liberalism, this regime was seen as having no legitimacy. On the night of January second, 1931, [three groups of ] Acción Comunal attacked two police stations, and then went at the presidential palace. These men took down the city’s phone system and managed to isolate the president [Carlos Arosemena, who surrendered after a few hours]. The next day, the group’s more prominent middle-­class citizens managed to assure the US that constitutional order would immediately be restored. It was the new “Good Neighbor” Policy, and so they managed to get the Empire’s neutrality. They forced Arosemena and his cabinet to resign, and nominated a new interim government under [Vice President Ricardo J.] Alfaro. The coup was to join a long list of similar events in Latin America, many of which did nothing to aid their countries, and some of which took a bad situation and made it worse. And on this, your father and I never agreed. The fact is, not much changed following this coup—your father was the first to acknowledge that. But for him, it was because of a series of errors, or because this or that person had “personal shortcomings,” or because Panamanian democracy “was not sufficiently mature.” No, the fact of the matter is, this group of people who ascended to power wanted what those before it had. Whereas before, Chiari’s clients had positions and lucrative contracts, after 1932, when Harmodio Arias Madrid became president, it was his friends and relatives who got the goods.25 25. Thomas Pearcy lists the following relatives of Harmodio Arias Madrid in prominent positions: Arnulfo Arias (brother), head of Panama City’s Santo Tomás Hospital, director of the Sanitation Bureau, and the Lucha Anti-­Tuberculosa; Tomás Guardia (brother-­in-­law), director of the Central Roads Board; Aurelio Guardia Vieto (brother-­in-­law), chief of police; Octavio Méndez Pereira (brother-­in-­law), director of the Instituto Nacional; and another brother-­in-­law was solicitor general. Much as with the Chiari regime, Don Harmodio handed out government contracts to family and friends, more or less openly. Thomas L. Pearcy, “Panama’s Generation of ’31: Patri-

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And it’s true that this was part of what made Acción Comunal split. But you need to ask yourself, aside from this claim to good government and honesty—which its politicians never lived up to—what else did this group really want? It critiqued the application of the liberal discourse, but did it have any issue with its fundamental tenets? Did it even have any special plan for any of the institutions that Porras’s liberals set up? That’s why, when we were looking at all the special reports about Coiba, I wanted everyone to keep in mind this larger historical context . . . to give meaning to any given report or call for reform. In the end, if the fuel of your criticism isn’t the organization of society around production, then you end with a coup, not a revolution. And that’s the difference between Panamá in that period, and, say, Nicaragua with Sandino. V. Bandera, Pollo Riko, May 22 [Interview takes place at the Pollo Riko restaurant, which is fairly quiet in the afternoon: some old men in white guayaberas talking in the corner, a couple in their forties, two cooks taking a break. The TV buzzes something in the background about an accident, an old diablo rojo bus that caught fire near Arraiján]. There was a lot of tension. I was there, but not part of the inner group—that was the intellectuals, the politicals, plus Santo Wilson. Still, with all the stress, I could feel it too, [seeing as] I helped set up the Singer. It was the morning after the messenger had come. I cleaned the shack, worked there with the rest of them [and later], with Carpintero, we sawed off a small window in the shack to let some air and light in. He complained someone had moved things around, and I said it looks all right to me. But Carpintero didn’t like it: “Someone’s been moving things around.” We went for lunch. When we returned, we couldn’t get into the shack because there was a lock and no one knew who put it there. Carpintero stood and stared at the lock. I could see he was shocked. [He] stood there for a minute, staring at the big—it was a brass Yale lock—staring and thinking . . . and then he asked me to see what I could find out in the central office. I said okay, and he said he’d go see if anyone else had heard anything. But no one knew anything. It was “shut” and that was it. ots, Praetorians, and a Decade of Discord,” Hispanic American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1996): 706.

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Later, another messenger came and told them the inspection of the Singer was “delayed” and nobody should enter the Singer’s building, that is, the shack. Delayed? For how long? No answer. And that was when the rumors started [that] they were shutting down the whole Singer, that it wasn’t needed anymore. That same day I heard from someone that there was a new computer in the central office that can do everything the Singer did but better, and that you wouldn’t even need to decide what questions to ask it . . . wouldn’t need to calibrate it or even decide on how it would work with the papers and the words. Others said that the Americans were shutting it down because it was too dangerous, it was going to mess around with their army, the CIA, [or that] it would damage an experiment they were doing over there [pointing in the direction of the Canal Zone with his lips], an experiment with new animals, chupacabras, that sort of thing. Carpintero thought that it was an order from above: finally, someone up there understood that a Singer of this sort, that can figure out how the classes were fighting between themselves, could clarify everything, and people would get sick of the regime, there would be a revolution of some sorts if they knew they were being . . . what do you call it? [TDV: Exploited? Oppressed?] That’s it, oppressed. That same day, around four in the afternoon, I went to see if the Singer was still locked. Nothing had changed, but I saw that behind the shack, Luna-­Icaza was sitting with a group of ten or, I don’t know, twelve prisoners, and telling them a story about a cheese vendor who’d ended up in Coiba.26 People didn’t like it, and a few of them started asking for a better one. Someone asked about the Indian ghost that comes every night to the dormitory at Catival. What’s there to tell? Everyone knew that in Catival there was a ghost of an Indian that showed up from time to time, always repeating, “En Coiba morí y en Coiba me quedo.”27 Luna-­ Icaza said yes, that is, possibly, but no, it doesn’t really count as a story. I stayed for a little while, so I heard Luna-­Icaza say that Pulga, our dog, was named after another Pulga, who lived way back. And it’s that Pulga who was the . . . what do you call it, when it’s not actually “you” telling the story, it’s like a . . . [TDV: Narrator?]—that’s it. The dog, Pulga, 26. An apparent reference to Ramon H. Jurado, “El hilo de sangre,” in Antología del cuento centroamericano, 2 vols. (San José, Costa Rica: EDUCA, 1973), 2:199–211. 27. This was told matter-­of-­factly to Gonzalo Luna Vargas when he interviewed prisoners there in 1988. Gonzalo Antonio Moncada Luna Vargas, “La Isla Penal de Coiba” (tesis de lic., Universidad de Panamá, 1989), 123.

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was the “narrator,” and Luna-­Icaza did Pulga, speaking like a dog.28 You know the story, Doctora? I didn’t either. I don’t remember it exactly, but it’s a dog that just spends his time playing with the crabs on the beach, chileando. The director has a mean dog that he trains to fight . . . and that dog kills the other dogs over there, one after the other. And so one day, right, the director forces Pulga to fight his own dog . . . but instead of running away, like all the rest, Pulga stands there and fights a balazo, pam, arrggh. And that’s it. That’s the story he told us. [Asked why he remembers this—if it was important.] Sure. To us, yeah. I mean, I ruined it a bit. It was better when Luna-­Icaza told it, really good, and people felt it talked about us. [Silence. Asked to clarify.] It was the dogs, right? But it was about us. Someone asked Luna-­Icaza to “write it down” so he could put it into the Singer, once they open the Singer up again. [TDV seeming perplexed.] Into the Singer, sure. It was what had to be done, and Luna-­Icaza knew it too. He said the others wouldn’t let him, that it wasn’t how it was done, but if you looked at him, you could see he didn’t like it. He knew we were right, see, and he started looking away, thinking hard about all of it, craneando pues. [Silence. TDV comments that the story was fictional. Didn’t the Singer use documents? Truthful accounts?] It was the truth. More truth[ful] than these “reports” that all these directors wrote. Those dogs in that story had to deal with it, it’s how it really was. You can’t understand what it was like over there.

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VI. Carpintero, Simón Bolívar Library, May 9 don’t remember exactly what was in there, no. Sure, I can try, that is . . . the main thing was a definition, a kind of sketch of two axes. One,

28. A reference to a short story by Panamanian author Enrique Chuez. See Enrique Chuez, “Pulga,” in Antología del cuento centroamericano, ed. Sergio Ramírez, 1st ed., 2 vols. (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1973), 2:378. The author told me he originally came from the interior but had grown up in El Chorrillo, a working-­class neighborhood of Panama City. To write this story, he began interviewing people who had been imprisoned there. Despite never having visited the island, the interviews allowed Chuez to add a realistic feel to the fantasy of his account. Editor’s interview with Enrique Chuez, La Chorrera, Panamá, May 29, 2008. For an analysis of this story, see Virginia de Fonseca, “Pulga Acusa,” Revista histórico-­crítica de literatura centroamericana 1, no. 2 (June 1975): 111–19.

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there was a distinction between assertive and playful texts. The other was between what was called criticism and what was called critique. When we said “assertive texts,” we meant texts that you write and read with the understanding that, well, for one, the narrator and the writer are the same. You know, that the voice of the narrator in the text is a simple, an authentic representation of the author. Also, I remember we said that the logic of the world in the text isn’t different from the logic of the real world. And generally, the form of the text . . . I mean, that form is more or less neutral, unimportant . . . [form is] like a simple convention, maintained, as it were, “for clarity.” So that was what we called assertive texts: bureaucratic correspondence, reports, scholarly writing, newspaper articles. And we contrasted assertive texts with what we called playful texts. In a playful text, the voice of the narrator and the actual author who wrote it aren’t the same thing . . . ideally, the reader understands that, though I guess some readers get confused. And the facts of the world represented in the text—that is, the fictional world inside the text—can be different from facts in the real world (even if it’s “based on a true story”). And there’s emphasis on formal tools of representation in a playful text, and these formal tools are understood to be more or less autonomous from the things they represent.29 Autonomous to some degree, and people usually see [these formal tools] as natural, an important part of the text. Either way, that distinction between assertive and playful texts wasn’t something we got very attached to. [Asked for an example, Carpintero picks up some of the documents from the archive. He reads through one and thinks for a moment. He then starts by pointing to the upper left corner of the document.] 29. M. M. Bakhtin used the term assertive texts often, though as far as I know he never defined it. The notion of play is of course very common, both in the tradition of social, anthropological, and historical analysis that goes back to Johan Huizinga, and in textual analysis, as in the work of Jacques Derrida (“free play”). The use and definitions of the term will naturally depend on the narrower context in which it is deployed. The implied author here uses the terms playful texts and playground as defined above, to indicate a text whose understanding requires an awareness of the gap between text and world. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-­Element in Culture, Humanitas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), 278–94.

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institution’s insignia SECRETARIA DE GOBIERNO Y JUSTICIA COLONIA PENAL DE COIBA ——— DIRECCION (PRIVADO) These are markers that were on the paper before the writer of the document wrote his first word. When a man puts this paper in a typewriter, he can begin to position an implied author in a social relation. See that? The man we refer to as Simón Esquivel appeared historically in different personas in various historical subfields. The signature in this document links a specific persona—Director Esquivel—to a textual persona (who is known by the same name), establishing a series of textual facts. He has his position of director, and then this paper, with the institution’s symbols . . . and this would have allowed Esquivel to spend almost no energy in defining his persona in the letter to President Alfaro. And in most bureaucratic correspondence, that’s how it is—you don’t start talking about who you are, just what’s going on in the institution. Still, given that in the letter he’ll ask the president to intervene in his subfield in a knotty situation, Esquivel wants to clarify his own position. Coiba, 18 de Febrero de 1932 Exemo. doctor don Ricardo J. Alfaro., Presidente de la República., PANAMA. Excel. Sir and friend:— I, that have come to this place, disposed to help you in your labor of economic, moral, civic and administrative reorganization, had the firmest goal of not distracting you from your multiple and delicate occupations, because I know all too well how hard your work is, but, circumstances of imperious necessity obliged me to resort to bring to your attention the following case. Pardon me sir, and deign to listen to me. Mr. Nicholás L. Justiniani (Economist), has come here not 120

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to work and collaborate with me in the organization of this correctional Center, but to put obstacles and destroy my labor, and to contribute, with his conduct and bad advice, to the corruption and disciplinary demoralization, as much of the inmates as of the Guard Corps, all with the premeditated and perverse goal of giving me problems, and, at the same time, to provoke a conflict, now with the inmates or with my subalterns, something that I have come to tolerate passively, until the time has come to respond, to which effect I give you an account of everything, as it has come to pass, so that you will be aware of my situation with respect to this subject, and so that you offer me the help that you had offered [before], to change this order of things.30 Here the letter goes into the specific problems Esquivel has with his subordinate. In regular correspondence, the writer wouldn’t need to go to such great lengths to establish his place and actions. But yeah, the underlying assumptions are the same. There is no difference between Esquivel, the person who speaks in the letter, and this same man in life; and no difference between both and the actual hand that composed the letter. No personas . . . the time-­space within the text is [assumed to be equal to] the one outside it; epistemology, just the same—everything that the voice in the text knows, the historical author knows too, and the theoretical conditions for this knowledge are equal. And generally, the world outside and inside the text are the same world. That’s an assertive text. At the time, your father didn’t understand how that would tie in with history, but I already understood where he was going. See, Luna-­Icaza said texts were a little like subfields. People assume that the voice in the text is something like a transcript of the voice of the historical author. The letter you brought me from Colman, the Kuna Indian—that was great, because people who are used to doing their business orally . . . you can see this problem clearly when they use the written form. My dear Sec of Government Charles [Carlos López], Mr. Colman say, first time the San Blas land, there was a indian chief name Inakinya. That time when panama change the flag of 30. Simón Esquivel, director of the Penal Colony of Coiba, to Ricardo J. Alfaro, president, February 18, 1932, doc. no. 3.57.2.60, ARA.

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panama. That time there was a president in panama name was manuel Amador grero [Guerrero]. And then he called for Indian kings to come to see him. And he went two time to manuel Amador grero and he died.31 See how he clarifies his own voice in the letter? “Mr. Colman say.” As he cites the promises President Amador Guerrero made to Inakinya some twenty years earlier, he repeatedly positions the narrator of each exchange. “And I will give school for them manuel amador guero said to mr Colman that. And I am going to fix up the san blas land afterwards too. Manuel Amador grero said that to mr. Colman.”32 This formula is not very different from a normal memorandum of a conversation. What makes the text special is that Colman uses oral conventions in writing, apparently converting some of the formal patterns of his speech in his language into English. Although he was the most prominent leader of the Kuna at the time, and thus he corresponded with officials, his education was oral, and it’s as if he weren’t sure that his reader would understand the description of the situation . . . and how it’s converted into written narrative. The issue is pretty simple, but Colman keeps clarifying it and situating the actors. He must be aware of the strangeness of the situation, because he comments on the difference between the two modes of memory. “And how you people forget, but you people got a paper, what manuel Amador grero said to mr Colman. But I only think in my brains, what manuel Amador grero said to Indian chief. And he said again five hundred years blood will not run in this land, manuel Amador grero said to mr Colman. And if you want anything from me, I will help you.”33 Bureaucrats and leaders don’t reflect on these issues, because they’re used to written correspondence; but their assumptions [about the text] aren’t very different from Colman’s. They don’t need to finish their letter with a formula like: “when you receive my letter, write me back again soon, and tell me some words, what you think, when you 31. All errors are in the English original. Simral Colman to Carlos López, secretary of government and justice, March 12, 1924, page 1, Presidencia Rodolfo Chiari, Correspondencia Carlos López, caja 1, años 1924–5, SAE, ANP. Simral Colman (Inagindibippilele), a major Kuna saila, was one of the leaders of the Kuna Rebellion of 1924–25. For background, see Howe, A People Who Would Not Kneel, chap. 7. Manuel Amador Guerrero was the first president of Panamá. 32. Colman to López, 2. 33. Colman to López, 2.

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see my letter and so I want you write me soon. your truly, mr Colman.”34 But you know, it’s as if the fact that Coleman’s words remain for the time hanging in the air without an answer, and that this seems strange—he’s used to having someone answer him in speech right away. But these are small peculiarities. Colman writes about himself in third person, but like all other writers of assertive texts, he considers the narrator inside the text (“mr Colman”) and the historical agent outside it to be the same. There’s no essential difference between text and world [for him], just as no difference [exists for him] between speech and world. He doesn’t mind the fact that he’s writing in a second language . . . or that Carlos López would read it in his second language (or use an interpreter, I’m not sure). Colman’s aware of the text’s power in facilitating memory, and that’s just one more reason for him to get mad at the Panamanian politicians who, despite their use of “paper,” fail to keep their predecessor’s promises. But generally, the text is for this Kuna leader more or less what it is to other writers: a tool for recording and transporting speech. Now, if you look at some of this other stuff you brought me, [ you’ll see that] other writers use much more sophisticated formal techniques, without giving up this essential position. Here, in the letter we talked about earlier, [Carlos] Quintero narrates the events chronologically, opening each paragraph with a date. One paragraph starts “on the 8th of April of 1931”; another “on the 12th of April”; the next, “1st of May.”35 This is a formal device. Instead of a letter of complaint about a superior officer, the impression the reader is supposed to get is one of an objective, “factual” report of a few days in the life of the colony—a kind of diary or log. And you have a variety of linguistic devices here: metaphors, allusions, tones of writing. All of which are very common. By distinction, if you want the pleasure of a fictional story, you have to give up something for the duration of being in the interaction with the narrator. Because you’re suspending your normal way of looking at the world, you’re not you in the strict sense of the word. You’re putting in there, in the whatever it is—this quasi-­social space . . . you’re taking on something like a special persona, which can mingle with the implied author. It’s like you create an implied reader, someone who is especially flexible in dealing with this new world. Your father, apparently remem34. Colman to López, 5. 35. Quintero to Alfaro, July 6, 1931, numeric file 3.45.1.5, ARA.

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bering Borges, said that the attributes we were talking about—playful or assertive—weren’t actually in the text at all. They were in the interaction between the reader and the text. What Luna-­Icaza was saying is that the fact that a regular correspondence adheres very rigidly to a given bureaucratic convention doesn’t make it formless. You could even say that a close adherence to a given formal convention shifts the reader’s attention from the fact that form is there. At some point we saw that we were going back to this same issue . . . a subfield can’t operate as a system without stable, coherent agents. For bureaucratic correspondence to work, the reader and the writer have to assume that the voice in the text is an authentic representative of a coherent agent. And along with that, they have to pretty much assume that form itself isn’t very important, and that the logic of the text and the world are the same. So they’re doing the same thing as far as creating an implied reader, and this implied reader needs to mingle with an implied author who he doesn’t think of as a special entity, and in conditions that he thinks aren’t special at all. It’s almost like the writer and the reader of a bureaucratic text are pretending to go into the other room and chat, whereas in reality they’ve just been transported into a strange netherworld. VII. ell, no, I was the only one to get arrested on the scene. The others managed to escape, although they caught Damian Bustamante on the Costa Rican border a week later. It was a very difficult situation because while I was held, the others had to guess how much information I would give up, and they had to adapt to that. They abandoned two safe houses within hours; people left for the interior, and they had to take care of the money too. Well, tell me what you know. Oh, all right. We knew that this specific Banco Nacional branch was being serviced by a small company, a private contractor. It was lights, some of the appliances and machines, and small fixes for their security system. We found the company, Gaelectrica, and we managed to intercept its fax system. We had a very good guy who could do that kind of thing easily, and according to him it was actually not very complicated. We had a crew dress up as telephone technicians and just go right up to the side of the building, connecting our chord to

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their box. We got an estimate of the labor Gaelectrica was supposed to do at the bank, and . . . so that the bank personnel would know where the contractor planned to be working, they sent a little sketch of which job they were going to do, and where they’d do it. [. . .] Exactly, yes, we’d been keeping a close watch on the bank for some time. We had someone open a bank account and spend some time inside, so we had a good idea of where things stood. I had a lookout detail the coming and goings of the armed trucks, and we identified the yard as the main vulnerability. The yard is closed, and so at first we thought we’d somehow jump above the fence just as they were unloading and stick them up. We had very little experience with this sort of thing, and none of us had any connections with criminals who could tell us about it. What I knew was from reading about other cases, like the Tiflis expropriation . . . and from watching, you know, Bonnie and Clyde and what have you. So finally we realized the Gaelectrica repairs would be our chance. I had already put together a team of seven people; [we] trained in a farm, not too far from Pedasí. We built a model of the bank with pieces of cardboard, and then drilled in it. Meanwhile, our two logistics people back in the city arranged everything for us—stolen cars, everything. My technical person, Remnik, found the box, you know, that services the cluster of businesses, and he figured out which plugs were the bank’s. So when we were ready to act, we had him fiddle around with the branch’s current . . . just enough to make it look like there were problems. We thought they’d try to call the company and have them fix the problems, so we toyed around with their phone lines too—we wanted them to use the fax instead of the phone. But we couldn’t tell if they had called the company or not, so the next morning we made their electricity go down a few times, for a minute or so every time, and created so much static in their phone that it would be hard to hear anything. Sure enough, at about 1 p.m., we intercept a fax that says come right away. Our initial idea had been that we’d kidnap the Gaelectrica crew, take their outfits, and get in. But we understood [that] it would be too complicated, so, instead, we stole one of the company’s vans (that was a few nights before). I had two guys placed further up the street, below the lookout post on Calle F—and all they were supposed to do was to block the real Gaelectrica van if it happened to arrive. It never did. The real crew must have gone to lunch. 125

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Of course our own crew was very prompt. I had my two cars parked in the street and we pretended to be taking a smoking break, you know, hanging with the car doors open. The armored car that was returning from the weekly cash pickup passed us just after 2 p.m., heading for the bank. We moved immediately. As planned, we came in from the front door, saying hi and asking to be let into the yard. We had our guns inside our toolkits, and I think no one took much notice of us. One of the ladies said it was nice that we came, and that the phones weren’t working either—could we fix that? I promised to take a look. Our lookout on the main floor, a very beautiful woman with the nom de guerre of Teresa, pretended to be a customer waiting in line. We pretended to be fixing the wiring that’s located in the yard, but as soon as we were in position, I held up the guard, and the three others disarmed the driver and the other worker. They showed no resistance, and we were very gentle with them, just tied them up in the back of the truck. We quickly loaded the cash into a few bags we had, and at this point, we were supposed to walk out through the back yard, into our cars, and disappear. We figured it would take at least ten or fifteen minutes for anyone inside the bank to notice what had gone on in the back. I never found out how it happened, but the fact of the matter was that the Guardia Nacional showed up just as we were wrapping up. We heard a few shots from the lobby, and I had the others run to the vehicles. A second later, Teresa came through the door—I’m assuming she had acted according to plan and shot the policemen on sight, giving us a few more seconds to start our escape. I ordered her to run to the cars, and said that they should not wait for me. Using the shotgun I had taken from the guard, I took a position behind the door connecting the yard and the lobby, and shot a number of times into the lobby, at the revolving doors, where the policemen tried to come in. I think I saw two of them—one was clearly on the ground. My shotgun blew the glass of the revolving doors to pieces, and I could tell they were stuck there. I shouted that we had hostages and that they should move away from the door. One of the policemen crawled back toward the street, wounded, and I couldn’t see anything else. After another minute, I left the shotgun on the ground, and tried to escape from the back—not out to the street behind the bank, where I figured the next police cars would arrive, but onto the neighboring parking lot. The yard’s fence was very tall, but 126

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somehow I managed to throw myself above it. I was shot a few seconds later, as I went from the parking lot into the next ally. VIII. ​una-­Icaza complained from the first week of work with us that he had a terrible sense of déjà vu. The more we read these special reports, the more we felt it ourselves, as though all these bureaucrats and criminologists were stuck in time, forced to repeat the same conclusions again and again. The food isn’t good enough, says a bureaucrat in 1926; the food is terribly deficient, writes another well-­intentioned observer in 1961. There is no system of classification of the prisoners—they are all just bunched together randomly!36 Most of these people make some observations about the functioning of the penal colony, and then compare these observations to a penal model they’d read about. They generally find the colony lacking, and list the problems in their conclusions. [Carpintero smiles gently and shrugs.] You also have these kinds of reports that one employee or the other writes about his superiors— a kind of whistleblowing. Usually they’re very self-­serving. Accusations and counteraccusations . . . I liked the one you brought, where [Director] Lamastus writes his superiors that his deputy, Brandon, got into a fight with his lady, and she was screaming so loudly that everyone in Central heard, so Brandon had no choice but to ask that Lamastus’s wife be sent to try and calm the woman. But then Brandon’s lady picks up his carbine, and points it at her!37 You’ll notice the guy only reported the event that had happened two months earlier because now he was in a fight with the person he was accusing. It did work in this case, and there was some ruling about women not being allowed without a permit. And now you can start adding all the other components we talked about. The narrator of this story is Lamastus, but the person typing, and perhaps either translating from English or actually ghostwriting, is the secretary. There are all the characteristics of a story, with plot, characters; an attempt to

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36. The first comment is a reference to Julio Arauz, “Extracto de anotaciones . . . ,” March 31, 1925, in Presidencia Rodolfo Chiari, “Correspondencia Carlos López,” caja 1, años 1924–25, fol. 31–33, SAE, ANP. The other two are Diego Dominguez Caballero, “Coiba,” Lotería 8, no. 94 (1963): 86; Moncada Luna Vargas, “La Isla Penal de Coiba,” 215. 37. Lamastus to Porras, July 26, 1923, folio 069, Secretario de Gobierno y Justicia, fol. 069, ser. 5-­02, tomo XXI, ABP.

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prove the knowledge of the narrator (he says, I handle the letters, and I see Brandon corresponding with his American wife, with whom he admits having two kids). There’s also an attempt to use a specific action [that someone has made] to show the essence of his character. [. . .] But what we noticed there—all of these are little power games that one or more agents are playing. They use criticism of this sort to make minor corrections in the form of interaction—I mean, in the real world, in the subfield. To make sense of it all, we made a distinction between what we called criticism and what we said should be considered critique. These were again two ideal types . . . and as with ideal types, most texts would probably fall somewhere between the two poles. On the one hand you had criticism, which we saw as something that tries to improve the functioning of an institution or a practice, [so as] to bring it closer to a set of predetermined ends. The person doing the criticism assumes that the ends are already known, so he doesn’t need to justify them. He needs to justify the content, the essence of what he’s saying, and to show how the essence of what he’s analyzing needs to change. But what—he doesn’t need to attack the thematic underlying the institution or practice he’s looking at. He doesn’t need to look at the ways in which truth claims are being made, or the underlying assumptions . . . in this definition, criticism is a kind of fine-­tuning—it serves the institution which it wants to reform. It’s usually written or spoken in the language of the institution that it analyzes. It rarely takes its own form as a problem. See that? It’s supposed to be efficient, and it is. Criticism gives positive conclusions, things you can change. And we defined critique as a discourse that explores something much larger . . . I suppose it can be an entire set of issues that arise in one institution, but it can also be something that a society encounters, or, to take Marx, capitalism as a whole. Critique is almost always written, whereas criticism can be written or spoken. It [critique] can raise issues that the institution it analyzes hasn’t seen coming; or it could define entirely new ends; or, I mean, it can explore a new logic by which you can understand these ends. Also, you can have in critique, you know, a kind of exploration of new forms of investigation and writing . . . new forms [with which] to think about the field. We didn’t distinguish between a critique that’s devised from the outside of a system and one that comes from within a field 128

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or a movement, that is, immanent critique.38 The issue is that critique can answer a predetermined set of questions, a problematic, in a new way; but sometimes, it attacks the thematic underlying this problematic. To me, the most interesting reports are closer to the other end—to critique. Look at this one, that you brought. It was the week after Acción Comunal toppled the regime, and somehow they already knew about this in Coiba. Director Vázquez Díaz doesn’t want the new regime to kick him out of his post, and that’s when you see those two petitions—the prisoners and staff line up to demand their beloved director keep his job.39 That same time, “our correspondent from Coiba” writes a newspaper article. In the article, he explains that Director Vázquez Díaz has given the prisoners a new “constitution,” and that this system of prisoner self-­government is already functioning.40 Before citing the entire directorial order, the narrator makes a few comments of his own, among them the following: “With the detailed reports that I will send to this newspaper periodically, when the scarce mail leaves to the Capital, about the works [carried out] in the penitentiary, perhaps the majority of the readers will no longer consider us prisoners to be wild men [hombres-­fieras], but rather like simple human beings, who at some occasion had the misfortune of being bad, a few because of temperament, and others, por la fuerza de los motivos.”41 Rarely do prisoners articulate themselves so eloquently, but the opinion is common enough 38. For an insightful discussion of the difference between criticism and critique, especially as it pertains to historical writing, see Joan W. Scott, “History-­Writing as Critique,” in Manifestos for History (London: Routledge [Taylor & Francis], 2007), 19–38. 39. These are the petitions mentioned above. Prisoners of the Penal Colony of Coiba to “Government,” January 11, 1931, electronic doc. 3.57.1.118, ARA; Employees of the Penal Colony of Coiba to “Government,” January 17, 1931, doc. no. 3.57.1.117, ARA. 40. This is a reference to three newspaper articles from January 11 and 12, 1931. The writer, identified as “nuestro Corresponsal en la Colonia Penal,” is not named. He may be the prisoner Antonio Enrique Nuñez, who earlier had worked as a journalist. See “En el penal de Coiba es fundado un tribunal de justicia para reclusos.” La Estrella de Panamá, January 11, 1931. A clipping of the article appeared in President Ricardo J. Alfaro’s inbox. See electronic file 3.57.1.118, pp. 1–4, ARA. For reference to Nuñez’ earlier carrier, see “Los Horrores de Coiba,” in La Prensa Ilustrada, to be found in electronic file 3.42.2.84, pp. 6–7, ARA. 41. “En el Penal de Coiba,” La Estrella de Panamá, January 11, 1931.

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among those with little power—human action is subject to quick turns, at times independent of our control. As for the director’s order: Article 1: Establish in the Prison Criminals’ Justice Tribunals, whose goals are: a)—Promote the moral, physical and intellectual culture of the inmates; and b)—Develop progress of every kind in the Colony. Article 2.—Starting on the first (1st) of January, a tribunal of five members will function in each camp. The tribunal will be elected by the members of this camp. Article 3.—The five members of the Justice Tribunal will nominate their Directive and a stand-­in for each member, and all will exercise their duties for a period of six (6) months. Article 4.—The Directive will consist of a President, a Secretary, a Treasurer, two voting members, and three Inspectors, which will be nominated by the same Tribunal. Article 5.—The Tribunal will supervise the function of the Inspectors; the tenure of those matching that of the Tribunal. But the Inspectors can be replaced if the Tribunal thinks it necessary. Article 6.—The Inspectors will have a VOICE but NO VOTE in the proceedings of the Directive. Article 7.—The Tribunal will have two types of sessions: a)—HEARINGS. To know the misdemeanors the inmates committed. Inmates summoned will attend [illegible] as well as spectators; unless the Tribunal decides to hold the hearing in private. b)—The GENERAL ASSEMBLIES, in which other issues will be dealt with; and in which all inmates will be able to take part with voice and vote. Article 8.—Hearings will be held every day between 5pm and 6:20pm or when necessary, and the Assemblies every Saturday between 2pm and 4pm. Article 9.—Duties of the Tribunal: a)—To prevent inmates from crossing the camp boundaries; b)—To supervise and ensure that everyone perform the duty or work he is assigned with enthusiasm, honor and efficiency; 130

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c)—To seek [to improve] the general culture of the inmates by all possible means, and ensure that everyone maintains his obligations at all times. Personal hygiene, the hygiene of the prison cells, of the camp; correct and decent expression; with regards to oneself, to authority, to the property of others and of the community in general, will be matters of the strictest surveillance of the Tribunal, as well as the compliance with each and every one of the Director’s orders; d)—To dutifully announce to the inmates the provisions that take Effect and instruct them the best way to comply with every one of their obligations; e)—To wake in every way the love of reading and of Nature, as well as the brotherhood of inmates; f )—To organize fiestas and healthy games in holidays. g)—To tell the command of initiatives the Tribunal takes, designed to improve the moral and intellectual interests of the colony. Article 10.—The Tribunal can impose sanctions for those who violate its regulations and orders: suspension from duty; suspension of honors; reproofs and warnings, private or public, as appropriate. It can also impose extra work hours, which it should communicate to the Director’s Secretariat or with the Camp Guard, so that they be enforced. Article 11.—The decisions of the Tribunal can be appealed before the camp Guard, in cases in which the punishment is extra work. Article 12.—The Tribunal will keep a meticulous register of the conduct of the inmates, in books or in [illegible]. Article 13.—Every member of the Tribunal can be removed from his post at any time by the Command, because of a proven infringement or if two thirds of the camp’s inmates demand it, for a cause justifying such measure. Article 14.—Create in the Penal Colony the “MEDAL of MERIT” awarded every year, on the first of January, to prisoners that Command deems have merited it. Command can revoke this medal because of infringements of the prisoner. Article 15.—In questions of interpretations of these clauses, the Tribunal will consult the Command as needed. 131

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Signed in the Penal Colony of Coiba, on the eighteenth day of December, nineteen thirty three. The Director of the Colony, J.M. Vázquez Díaz42 What do you think? Yes, yes, it was very controversial. Obviously, we weren’t sure if this was a real initiative. It’s published in the papers on January 11, a little over a week after the coup. So we thought it may have been part of this director’s attempt to keep his job . . . seeming progressive, or whatever. The order is dated December 18, 1930—two weeks before the coup—but they may have put that date retroactively, to create the illusion that this new order was already functioning. Either way, it didn’t help, and Acción Comunal replaced Vázquez Díaz with its own man, César Ayala. Apart from these articles, nothing more was heard of the tribunals. Can you imagine? Your father thought it was utopic—the prisoners would vote! Have their own system of law! I said the guards would maintain the guns, and this order specifically guarantees the director his power . . . I thought if it ever operated, it would create a cast of prisoner-­ guards. We never agreed. But Luna-­Icaza—see, he had an odd perspective on everything—he said we should look at what reading the document does to us. What he meant was that we should look inside, at our own minds, as we’re reading. He said he felt like he’d leaped into an alternate reality even while he wasn’t sure it was real. It was true—it had that quality, of lighting up your imagination. Now that I think of it, there was something about critique being essentially positive in some way, and criticism being negative. Usually, when you think of criticism and critique, you have an image of a father with a belt . . . it was Santo Wilson who planted the notion that actually, a serious critique entails a vision of a different future, and a faith that a different future could come. I found that interesting, that he of all people would say that, but he’d had some involvement with the liberation theology people at San Miguelito, and they may have given him some ideas.43 Essentially, the idea was that on one end of the spec42. “En el penal de Coiba es fundado un tribunal de justicia para reclusos,” La Estrella de Panamá, January 11, 1931. 43. A reference to the liberation theology movement lead by Father Leo Mahon

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trum, you have a very limited discourse—criticism—that only tries to correct something which isn’t functioning . . . a kind of correction that assumes the reader knows how the institution is supposed to work, and just points out what isn’t working according to the original plan. With critique, it’s more of a positive—a drawing up of an alternative, which, implicitly, also points up something not working in the present. From that point of view, this account of the tribunals could also be seen as a kind of critique. [. . .] Yes, exactly, it offers an alternative to the way Coiba is run. And that’s why, if you get caught up in this vision, you can say that critique has taken you on a kind of textual trip. It’s taken you and built something like a subfield for you—except that it’s a kind of dream world. To deal with this subfield, you create a kind of temporary persona for yourself and you enter this dream-­field. [. . .] So now the question is what happens when you finish reading. Every act of reading is a bit different, but if the text had a profound effect on you . . . [Sits back and pauses.] You know what happened to me after I read the Communist Manifesto? I was transformed. Not in a day, but something in me was changed—I had gone into a textual land and found a new me inside me. [Sighs.] I was fifteen. Well, how does that happen? Everyone is very vague about it, but come on now, that’s one of the bases of historical change. Of course, most critiques aren’t successful in doing that . . . for any number of reasons. Look, the other report you brought, from 1930.44 [Carpintero points out a few paragraphs.] On the whole, it’s not very critical about the colony. Everything is so marvelous—the camps are clean, the food is no worse than anywhere in the interior, and some prisoners decorate their little corner and make it as beautiful as a church.45 But then there was the part about making Coiba an efficient plantation. in San Miguelito, a working-­class suburb of Panamá. The movement is discussed in chap. 6. 44. José de Obdalía, “Informe de Coiba.” 45. On food being satisfactory: José de Obdalía, 4. On general cleanliness and comfort, see various pages—for example, the description of El Maria camp: “El campamento de ‘María’ se halla en medio de un palmar majestuoso que lo convierte en lugar de encantamiento. Las chozas de los reclusos están ubicadas entre las palmeras que les brindan refrescante sombra. La galera dormitorio-­comedor se yergue en medio de ellas y la limpieza del sitio lo hace sumamente atractivo. Este campamento está a

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I’ve always thought the idea of how to modernize agriculture came from North American capitalism. You had, for example, in 1928, [President] Arosemena asking the [National City] Bank of New York to make an investigation of the economic prospects of the country. The bank sent a very capable guy by the name of George Roberts, a vice president, and he wrote a book-­length study, outlining fairly careful recommendations for capitalist development. Where possible, this Roberts says Panamá should make export-­oriented monocrop operations, like those of the United Fruit Company in Bocas del Torro. He’s quite balanced in his recommendations, saying that many parts of the country would have to be led slowly toward more profitable agricultural progress; that coffee growing could be stimulated even on small farms and in less developed regions. But the goal Panamá should strive for, according to Roberts, is [to develop a] modern industrial agriculture.46 In Coiba, the early economic scheme was already commercial, but obviously, nowhere near that of a United Fruit plantation. So what we’re looking at here in this report, two years after the Roberts report, is an attempt to flesh out this plan. De Obdalía calculates that with the fifteen thousand banana plants of the San Juan camp, it was already possible to make $11,000 a year . . . and if more lands were planted and connected to the coast with Decauville rails, Coiba could become profitable. He estimates that the waters at the rear end of the island are deep enough for large boats to navigate. [TDV and Carpintero read document closely]: cargo ahora del vigilante Eliseo Vázquez, quien tiene bajo su custodia a 7 reos” (5–6). Also, “Durante el día, en los días feriados y en las horas de holganza, los presos viven en los campamentos en sus chozas privadas que ellos mismos han construídox [sic] y que han adornado de acuerdo con su propio gusto, habiéndome llamado la atención la choza del reo Estanislao Vázquez por su decoración que la convierte en una verdadera capilla, dada la profusión de imágénes [sic] religiosas que la ocupan” (5). 46. George E. Roberts, Investigación económica de la República de Panamá (Panamá, RP: Imprenta Nacional, 1930). For a Panamanian analysis of the agricultural situation, which was written a few years later, see Glaister Baxter, El problema agrícola de Panamá (Panamá, RP: Imprenta Nacional, 1937). Rather than calling for large investments in government-­sponsored agricultural development, Baxter typically favors small investments in agricultural training programs, as well as scientific investigations that would develop better seeds, irrigation methods, and so on.

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It will not be very expensive to lay a short pier, which could be connected with a five- or six-­mile railway to the interior, that is, to the heart of the area under cultivation. The inconvenience of this plan— I recognize it myself—is that, as Coiba is isolated, and entry without permit is prohibited, labor shortage will hamper the effort I am proposing. But this island is very large, and if the work of the inmates, whose number will always be relatively small, is not sufficient for the development of the bananas, it will be possible to divide the island into two regions: a part with free men and a part with inmates. Santo Domingo and Haití occupy the same island and nevertheless [this island] fits two distinct nations, even in language.47 Haha. Wonderful, no? Your father didn’t pay much attention to all this—he was more interested in the other document, the one about the tribunals, democracy, and all that. But you see what was being proposed here? This is the colonial idea: in order to develop a modern agricultural operation on a frontier territory, you bring in forced labor and create conditions for later capitalist expansion. Workers and prisoners would have to be separated . . . I didn’t get if in the future inmates who had served their sentence would be settled in the new colony, as was done in Islas Marías and many other places. But the general scheme is fairly clear. Now: if later, due to their growth, it will be free men who will have to cultivate the banana plantations, labor will undoubtedly be more expensive, but the quantity of the fruits cultivated will increase the income of the National Treasury in proportion, fully defraying the costs of the penal institution and other larger ones. Let us start the work at the present, then, with prisoner labor, and later, when immigration arrives in Coiba, the population imprisoned in one part of the beautiful island will not live at the expense of the free population, but will rather provide it, using special government-­designated agents, with other produce, especially beans, birds, beef, pork, fish and appliances, while this free population will cultivate bananas. It only costs work to make the first step, the rest comes naturally, and 47. José de Obdalía, “Informe de Coiba,” 12.

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the separation between the two parts of the island will be perfectly maintained.48 Coiba is the kind of penal institution that works like a peg in the colonial expansion scheme. Your father thought I was exaggerating, but what can anyone say with documents like this? In the cities, the liberals couple their public education with apparently more modern prisons, and when things get out of hand, they call the Yankees to take over the city. And at the same time, they follow the Yankee bankers and United Fruit when they bring more area under the control of their regime . . . preparing the interior for inclusion into the economy at a later time. And I would say that this document is, in a way, a kind of critique— a bourgeois critique. Their dream was production and accumulation of capital, and who knows, maybe some of those reading this report were taken by the fantasy of the banana plantation. But it’s not enough to have fantasies . . . for critique to work, the whole thing has to be realistic, or at least the reader has to think it is. Remember, this report was written in January 1930. Well, the Great Depression was just beginning, and De Obdalía might not have understood where things were heading. Within a few months, the government had no money to pay regular salaries, not to mention any investments . . . and anyhow, bananas wouldn’t be profitable in the next years.49 [inaudible] Yes, the whole part about playfulness was Luna-­Icaza. One hundred percent—I didn’t even know what to think about it. Yes, look, what Luna-­Icaza said was that a critique can be more powerful if it 48. José de Obdalía, 12. 49. This was not apparent to Director Vázquez Díaz, who, perhaps unaware of the severity of the crisis, had taken the initiative and planted thousands of bananas. By the end of the year, the fruit was rotting in Coiba. Vázquez Díaz to Adriano Robles, secretary of government and justice, February 10, 1930, and May 30, 1930; Vázquez Díaz to Daniel Ballén, secretary of government and justice, December 8, 1930; Secretaria de Gobierno y Justicia, Sección 3a, “Notas recibidas, 1930,” SAE, ANP. By way of comparison, the United Fruit Company had reported a net income from operations of $19,444,334 for 1929; 1931 closed with $5,745,499. In any case, with the collapse of world trade, the Panamanian economy was plunged into a deep crisis; and with government coffers practically empty, investment in the penal colony was unlikely. Victor M. Cutter, Thirtieth Annual Report, United Fruit Company (Boston: United Fruit Company, 1930); Victor M. Cutter, Thirty-­Second Annual Report, United Fruit Company (Boston: United Fruit Company, 1932).

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integrates playful discourse. The combination can create a textual world . . . a world where the reader is more willing to check alternatives to the existing structure. In that story of the dog, Pulga, you get an alternative world that tells you it is alternative, somewhat dystopic. The narrator’s a dog so you know that it’s fiction . . . but you begin to feel that something essential about it is true. You enter this world, and for an hour, you have a different persona and are living within a different world. You identify with the victims of the system of violence in the text—the stray dogs— and you’re left to wonder about the other victims of Coiba. Those who, before, you just thought were murders and rapists, now begin to seem more human. Just now, when you were inside the story, they were your friends . . . can you so quickly go back to see them as subhuman? Luna-­ Icaza said that on the one hand, “Pulga,” as a work of fiction, was more truthful—it said straight out that it was not true by placing the account in the mouth of a dog. But it let readers suspend their normal borders for a while—the borders that are really the borders of their persona, maintained by the objective realities of the field. Did we accept it? No, I have to say we didn’t. Or we didn’t have enough time to, you know, think about it fully. It occurred to me later that it wasn’t so much an issue of thought either . . . but of . . . [sighs] of actually diving into this alternative world ourselves, and being in one of these playful texts. I mean, in my world, between my friends, the people I respected in the movement, what mattered was the social structure, the material conditions . . . I had just given my life for this theory—I’d sacrificed everything for it. You think I’d just change my mind because of some debate? No, I would have had to immerse myself much more fully in a textual world somehow to even appreciate, emotionally, what was being said. In this case, there was no time. [The interview stops because Lizbeth says we should eat soon. TDV volunteers to draw animals for Ernestito, and Carpintero helps his wife make dinner, mostly by standing in the kitchen and chatting. TDV stays over for another couple of hours, chatting with them about Boston, and how it is when people work twelve-­hour days. When TDV mentions that her university’s library is open twenty-­four hours during exam period, there’s a moment of silence, which Lizbeth concludes with a note of compassion: “Así son.”]

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IX. DECLARATION OF FLORENCIO ARROCHA MIRANDA n the city of Panamá on the twenty third day of the month of June of nineteen eighty one, Lic. FLORENCIO ARROCHA MIRANDA appeared in the DENI office with the object of giving a statement on the present case.- Investigated by the detective below signed, he promised to answer truthfully all questions asked.- To identify himself he stated his name as written above, Panamanian, white, forty-­six years old, married, identification number 12–76654, manager of the Banco Nacional branch on Calle F, El Cangrejo, and residing in house No. 345, Calle N, Obarrio.-­To the rest of the questions the detective asked: ANSWERED: I have been the manager of the El Cangrejo branch for twelve (12) years, and we never had any attempted burglary. Most of my employees have worked at the bank for a long time. The cleaning woman, DYANA GOTTI was hired a few months ago, but she had been working for a friend before, and came with his recommendation. One of the people working with the armed truck was also fairly new, but they’re handled through the central administration so you’ll have to ask them. With regards to the problems with the electricity and phones, we had had problems here and there for the last week, or perhaps a bit more. The building is a little old, and so there are problems here and there, and we deal with them as they come along. On Monday, the electricity went out a few times, but we knew there was more serious maintenance work planned for the weekend, so it was decided it would wait for then. But on Tuesday morning, the electricity went out a number of times, and for longer periods, and the phones worked only intermittently. Since my cousin, SEBASTIAN ARROCHA-­GAEL, who is the manager of Gaelectrica, the company which services us, and I were meeting for lunch, I decided to talk to him about it then. At lunch, we discussed this problem, but ARROCHA-­GAEL said he could not get anyone there before Thursday morning. He said he knew what all his employees were doing, and there was no way any of them could be free. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: I went for lunch at 12:​45 and came back at around 1:30pm. A few minutes before 2pm I went to the shop around the corner to get some office supplies, and when I came back, I noticed the Gaelectrica van standing outside. I went into the bank and everything was normal. Our guard, ARTURO “MONO” was at his place, and there were about fifteen (15) clients in the three (3) lines. I went into the office area, and GIOVANNA CHU told me that the

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technicians had come to fix the electricity. This was very strange to me, because of what my cousin had said, so I tried to call him, but none of the phones were working. Señorita CHU told me the technicians were in the back, and then she said they were all “new faces.” This made me more suspicious, so I went to have a look for myself, but saw that the door had been locked. I then walked out of the bank through the front door, slowly, and when I got out, I turned toward Vía Argentina. Behind the corner, I had seen two policemen when I was out a few minutes earlier. They were having a soda at the chino, so I thought there was a chance they would still be there, and really they were. One of them ran to the bank immediately, and I ran behind him, and the other stayed a few more seconds at the Chino, and from what I understand he had told someone there to call the police. The other policeman managed to get there before I did, because he was younger and more fit. Both of the policemen ran into the bank with their pistols in hand, and I saw that the first one of them to try and enter was shot as he was trying to go through the revolving door. I saw a woman shoot at him, and then aim at the other policeman and the guard and shout. The guard threw his pistol on the ground, and the other policeman backed down and lay on the ground. I was on the ground as well. I’m not sure what happened in the bank, but the next few seconds I saw another few gunshots, and then the glass blew up. The injured policeman managed to crawl out. At that point another police car arrived from Calle F, and I could hear the siren of another one from the other side. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: No, I did not send any fax asking the electric company to come right away. What I had sent was the floor plan, the week before. -­A SKED: ANSWERED: No one else would have sent any such message for the electric company to come right away. None of the other employees were in any contact with my cousin. -­Shown a fax which states, QUOTE “You will see me when all is ready. Come at once, F.H.M” declarant ANSWERED: My cousin is a Sherlock Holmes buff, and has always encouraged me to read it, although I myself don’t read books, only the newspaper. He loaned me one book, the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is not very serious. When we met for lunch, I confessed I had enjoyed it, and a conversation developed about the merits of the book. I claimed that it was very entertaining, but did not teach anything, and that the deductions and inductions made were always very farfetched. I gave the example of one story in particular, about a young American lady who marries a British 139

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aristocrat and then goes missing. My cousin argued with me about this story, and I claimed he could not possibly remember the details of the story to such a degree that he could argue about it. He claimed he did, and to prove him wrong, I asked what the young American man writes the American woman on a note. My cousin was quite close: “come over now.” So when I got to the bank, I became curious, took out the book I had in my office, and faxed him the exact quote, which, as you can appreciate for yourself, is close, but not exactly as he had stated. ASKED: ANSWERED: I did not notice any suspicious behavior in any of my employees after the event. Naturally, we have all been very shaken by what has happened, and so some people are anxious, especially at the thought of being investigated by the police. -­A SKED:ANSWERED: No, when the shooting began, I was at first a bit shocked, and took cover behind a car that was parked in the street. I did not notice the van at all. I did see the robber as he fled, for one moment. Between the building of the bank and the parking lot, there is a tall fence. The young man jumped and grabbed the edge of the fence, and then lifting his left foot above it, he managed to pull himself over it and into the parking lot where I could no longer see him. He was moderately tall, thin, black. As he pulled himself upward, he reminded me of the famous picture of the young student who crossed the fence into the Canal Zone in the events of 1964. I would almost tell you he was carrying the national flag with him, as he crossed the fence, but I imagine that is an illusion, caused by the similarity to the historical picture. -­At this point the questioning ended, without precluding the possibility of continuing it later if necessary, and so it be known, the signature of all those who participated, appears following its reading. Detective: Luit. Pérez Hasan The Declarant: [signed] X. 99, Restaurante Antuan, June 27 he Singer was locked for two days and still no one knows why. The committee tried asking a couple of officers directly but there was no response. I kept myself out of it, but I heard that in the evening of the second day, just before lockdown, they went to the shack to see if anything had changed. The door was closed but they could hear noises from inside there. But there were two guards standing at the door, and they told them no one could go in. So your father asked if there was an officer they could speak to, just in order to clarify the situation. The guards

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didn’t like that, but one of them went in and got an officer. Del Valle and Carpintero apparently tried to explain but the officer just told them that no one was allowed to enter. There was no explanation, and they were told not to ask any more questions. But then in the morning of the third day a rumor started circulating that the inspection of the Singer would be that day. Who gave the order? Was it real? The shack was still locked, see, so how do you know . . . Del Valle said it must have been some technical difficulties that someone had noticed, [and that the Director wanted] to avoid an embarrassment in front of a crowd of people. But we all thought something was going on because why [the] secrecy all of a sudden? Your father didn’t want to see what was in front of him, understand? Maybe [there were] technical issues, but something else [had to be] going on too. In the afternoon, they were told it was going to happen later, and though the shack was still locked, they figured they might as well take care of what was outside, the decoration, that sort of thing. I was there and I remember a few of them carrying some tables—because there was going to be food after the inspection. Wilson and Luna-­Icaza hung two flags at the entrance, and another confiado, Brazil, helped them decorate the building. From what I saw, Luna-­Icaza began to sing very quietly, and then the others joined him, and finally they were all singing . . . you know the one: Na na na . . . es el lamento del cazanguero en Coiba de madruga’ Na na na . . . es el lamento del cazanguero en Coiba de madruga’ Apúrate Chino Juan, que a la fila llaman ya dice el guardia que esta vez no te quedes tan atrá50 Now, a pair of guards passed by, right—just looking with curiosity. First moment, they don’t notice the men singing, or they do and don’t mind. Then one of them looks like he’s enjoying it, unconsciously. But then, for no reason, the other fucker gets angry at the entire scene, and 50. This is Rubén Blades, “El Cazanguero.” The song appeared on the album by Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, and Rubén Blades, The Good, the Bad, the Ugly (New York: Fania, 1975). In his master’s thesis at the University of Panamá, Blades wrote about the Panamanian penal system, and as part of his research he visited the penal colony. The visit inspired him to write “El Cazanguero.” Rubén Blades, “Estudio socio jurídico de 50 casos de reincidentes en los delitos de hurto y robo” (tesis de maestría, Universidad de Panamá, 1973)

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he orders Luna-­Icaza to come to him. This guard, Abrán Tico, someone told me he lives in Pacora now, and I wouldn’t mind meeting him one day, because he once broke a broomstick on my back. So this Abrán calls Luna-­Icaza to him, and everyone turns silent. “Did I tell you to get this close, Senator?” (The guard thought calling a prisoner Senator was so funny—really too much.) “High and mighty in your committee there, Senator, aren’t you!” “Sir?” “Shut up! You think you’re going to be the director’s little puppies forever? And this piece of shit machine there! You write history, Senator, isn’t that it?” “Yes sir, a report about the, that is, the past.” “Epa!” He looked at his friend as if respecting, but you know, making-­ fun-­type respecting. “Hombre! And what will the report report?” “About the history of the penal colony, sir. About what happened here.” “Wow, Honorable, what a service your committee is doing us! And because you work so hard, you had time to sing, didn’t you?” “Well, sir, we–­” “But tell me, Senator, do I fit into your little story?” “Properly speaking, sir, we—that is, we were ordered only to deal with the past.” The guard thinks about this answer for a second, then steps up close to Luna-­Icaza, staring at him. Luna-­Icaza keeps his head down, right, but the guard’s standing so close that the air, from his breath, you know, the humidity touches Luna-­Icaza’s nose. For a second he can feel the man’s breath going whhhho, into his body, and they’re almost, like, one person. Then the guard spits in Luna-­Icaza’s face. No one moves. I remember I felt the blood running along my face—I could see a large stone on the ground near me and I had to tell myself not to move. We stand there, frozen. And [after] another few seconds, the guard grabs Luna-­Icaza by the throat, and pushes him back. When the guards are gone, Luna-­Icaza wipes the spit off his face like this, and we keep working in silence. XI. n the evening, around four, four or five, Lieutenant Adriano arrived with two guards. He opened that big lock, cluck-­cluk-­cluk, says the

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Singer’s going to be inspected later [that evening]. There was a lot to do, so they [the Committee members] walk in, turn the light on, and then they see “the adjustments.” They stand around the Singer, looking at it, no one says anything for a minute or two, [as] they try to make out [what had been done to it]. Originally, see, there was a kind of stand there, about three feet above ground, that had a small metal-­type thing where the paper was inserted. That thing was now gone. [Instead of it] there was a bed, which was covered with a layer of cotton wool and was standing directly under the Inscriber. And [there were] leather straps— two on each side of the bed. On one end there was also a lump of, este . . . what’s the word? I think it’s called felt . . . it looked like it could be adjusted. It was a kind of felt thing that you can move in there, see. Santo Wilson touched the bed for a bit, and then mumbled, “It’s cotton wool.” So Del Valle said, “Very odd” . . . Said it to himself or to the others—it wasn’t clear. “It’s a peculiar apparatus—it was from the beginning—and this addition here is even more peculiar.” He said it a few times: “Peculiar.” Luna-­Icaza, he looked like he was standing in front of his own grave. I don’t know if I can explain it well . . . there was no blood in his face . . . he looked defeated. Carpintero already understood what had happened more or less, but was still trying to figure something out. He kept looking up at the needle, at the Inscriber, to see what had been done to it. Meanwhile, your father took a ladder and climbed to get a better view. He felt a few of the tubes on the side, like that, with his fingers, and he just repeated: “Very odd.” The Singer’s needle itself was untouched, but on both of its sides there were more needles that looked a little smaller and—just a little different. “What could they possibly need so many needles for?” Del Valle was now the only one speaking. He was anxious, see, [but] maybe he didn’t allow himself to see [what the others were seeing]. Carpintero had taken a clean rag when we came in, and in the first few moments he climbed a second ladder and tried to clean the needle. Like, cleaning and thinking-­ type thing. But then he confirmed what he’d suspected, and he came down and stood there, looking at your father stone cold. I stood a bit behind them, so I couldn’t see your father’s face, but I remember noticing him climbing up and down the ladder frantically, observing the bed, 143

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then the Inscriber, feeling this or that, touching a tube over there. I couldn’t see him exactly but I heard his voice describing the changes made, nervously, like: “There’s a little engine under this bed, which must mean the bed itself moves, perhaps even rotates as the Singer works.” He sounded a bit breathless [as he was] touching the smaller needles. “It’s almost as though they created a kind of harrow around the needle. But what on earth—and then there are these little needles that, judging by their size . . .” He stopped for a minute and looked up. “The small ones can’t be useful for inscribing, and anyhow, the tubes over there—that must be water.” He looked at the rest of us. “What would they need water for?” Luna-­Icaza lowered his gaze. Del Valle looked at the harrow again: “There would be no need to cool down a process like this—it’s not as though they’re drilling through steel here.” But then he suddenly stopped speaking and looked at us. Carpintero suddenly threw his rag at the bed: “Nos jodieron, amigo.” Del Valle looks at him, like—confused. Carpintero repeats: “They fucked us over.” So then Santo Wilson helps your father down the ladder and says quietly: “The smaller needles pump water that washes the blood away. So that whoever is watching can see the inscription more clearly, on the back of the condemned. You see these gutters? The bloody water goes through there, in these small grooves, and then over there, to the gutters.” Your father now stood there, motionless, gazing at the bed. Finally, he mumbled: “None of it makes any sense. . . This is a scientific machine.” And Carpintero: “It’s for when they want to execute a prisoner. They bring him over here, he has to lie on the bed, facing down like this, with his head over there—that’s what the felt is for. They stick it into the guy’s mouth. Understand me?” But Del Valle says: “It makes no sense. The needle is designed to write history, not to . . .” So Santo Wilson: “They’ll use the mechanism we’ve created. Except now the inscription will be on the back of the condemned man. That’s what the water is for: to wash the blood away, so that whoever is looking can see the writing more clearly.” And so your father didn’t say anything after that. Then the door opened and the officer entered with a few prisoners. 144

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He showed them where to put the tables with the food, as [it had been decided that] everything would take place inside the shack. Then he signaled for me to come. From what I hear, they were stuck there for a few hours, just the four of them, while we went on with our regular jobs. I was back working on a pickup they had there, in the machinshóp, a piece of junk no one had any spare parts for. Then Del Valle came to get some more engine liquids, and he said muchacho, things are out of control—we can use all the help we can get. I said what the hell, either way I’m not going to finish working on this piece of junk any time soon, I may as well see what I can do for history. Off I go to the shack. Inside, I take one look and my pulse goes pam-­pam! Like that! Mi’hija, it was night already, dark outside, and in there they’d put a few little lights. But they were just three lights, and they were a bit dim, hanging on a wire, and a bit like, shaking. I open the door, and I see a tarrantantan of guards and prisoners, all mixed together, and I see they’re all holding plastic cups, like the ones from the kitchen, and the entire room’s a bit wavering, right—they’re all a bit red in the face, as much as you could tell in that light. Doctora, I had been twelve years in this prison, and this sort of thing can never happen. And if you thought this was some party, well, your father, Luna-­Icaza, Wilson, and Carpintero were not drinking. They were the opposite, see, they were in a bad state, and Luna-­Icaza was not himself at all . . . even more frightened than usual, but also with a kind of strange face, as if he’s in a different world already. Someone put a drink in my hand, and someone else made some joke and they all laughed. [B]ueno y yo como . . . e’ta gente ta tripeando o que? But before I knew it, I was getting a bit of a buzz too, because I hadn’t eaten. I managed to gather that what was going on was that we were all waiting for the director (the crazy fuckers, did they think he wouldn’t notice they’d had those drinks?) Later I asked about it and they told me that someone had said, “Just a little sip”—because they had a whole container full of guaro mixed in coconut milk for the ceremony—just one sip, relax, who’s going to notice? That was actually the guards who said that—it was just the guards who drank at first. And they waited for the captain to get back from a visit he’d been on, he’d gone to check how the work was progressing in Punta Damas, so they waited for him in order to start with the whole ceremony. They thought they’d do the beginning 145

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of the ceremony, and then they’d run the Singer, so that he could inspect it, and then there would be drinks, you know, to celebrate. So as they waited, they put on a radio, and one sip led to another, and then they said to Kumba, who was an old confiado the guards liked, they said to him, here, take a sip. And later Brazil too, here, you’re a good one, take a cup . . . and so an hour later it was what I saw myself. Meanwhile, the committee people, they figured they were going to test the machine with the same piece of paper as it had before, even though the thing for the paper [the contraption used to insert the paper] was gone. When I came back to help them, they were basically pretending as though the bed wasn’t there, [as though] they’d just run the Singer again, holding the piece of paper on the bed as it wrote. I helped them, but I’m thinking, this is never going to work, these guys are crazy. But later, when I reflected on it, I realized there might be some logic there after all. Yo tengo una teoría sobre este asunto, pero bien. [He changes to a more formal tone and makes a significant face. Asked about his theory, he does not elaborate but resumes his telling]. They adjusted the apparatus, they cleaned and oiled it; they thought they understood how the diagrams worked and they inserted a simple [historical] question and some documents. It didn’t work. Something got stuck there— I think they’d disconnected a few tubes too, because, remember, they were working against some of the adjustments [that had been done]. I told them, guys, this isn’t going to work. They just looked at me and Carpintero said, hey, can you pass me the 15 x 16? But yeah, it didn’t work, and we had to change all sorts of other things, not to bore you, but we were working very quickly [so that we could have time] to try a second test run. It had heated so much the first time that we changed the fluids and went in there and cleaned a bunch of stuff again. We were all working very close to one another, and even with all the noise, we could more or less hear one another. And I said, guys, I don’t know if you talked about this before I came back in, but I just don’t see this thing working. But they just told me not to worry, and I could see that they were all more composed now, your father too, and were just focusing on what had to be done. We didn’t want anybody to notice, so we pretended like we were just saying this or that—you know, like, hey, pass me the wrench, or hey, I hear it’s gonna rain. And they told me not to worry because everything’s going to be just fine. 146

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Suddenly I look back and I see all the rest of the people—it was like a madhouse—they began to hum along with the radio, and a couple were giving a beat on the ammunition box. I swear they looked completely drunk, or in some kind of trance. One night I took a chance and I went to a Vodu dance I was looking for a new romance that is why I went to the Vodu dance. The high priest he look very mean, when he enter upon the scene He made a motion to me and then begun the ceremony. Rocombey, rocombey selma!51 And so then they grabbed Luna-­Icaza. They grabbed him, like saying, be with us! And then I joined too, because what can you do, mi’lady, if it’s like that? Luna-­Icaza was wearing a white shirt, and someone took a piece of white cloth—not sure what it was—and wrapped it around his head, like, his shoulders too, and they were shaking him, and he hummed too, with them. Rocombey, rocombey selma! Rocombey, rocombey selma! At some point Carpintero and your father figured we were ready. The director hadn’t come, and who knows how long we would have to wait, so while the others were dancing and singing, they turned on the Singer, to start another test. At first it looked like it was working, but when they started inserting the papers it made a noise and then started heating up. It got red very quickly, even though the little needles were squirting water on the bed— there was water everywhere, it was water and that terrible noise. Carpintero’s shirt got caught between the gears and Santo Wilson had to grab him and tear it up to free him, and you had the smell of burnt oil too, and the screeching—Del Valle had to run to get more machine oil because we were afraid it would burn right then . . . and then at some point the singing and the music stopped, and it was just the Singer making all the noise. Everyone looked at it, and only Luna-­Icaza, Carpintero, and 51. The song, “Rocombey,” was a well-­known calypso in English and Panamanian patua (patois). Currently available in a version by Lord Cobra (Wilfred Berry): Lord Cobra and the Pana-­Afro Sounds, “Rocombey,” Panama! Latin, Calypso and Funk on the Isthmus 1965–75, Soundway Records, 2006; https://​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=​ tgRdqq7iI4Y. The word rocombey may mean to “recombine” or mix ingredients, but may also have sexual connotations, as rukumbine does in Jamaican patois.

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I now tried to stop the machine. But the lever wouldn’t pull, it wouldn’t shut down. All three of us tried leaning our weight on it, and then the lever got even more stuck . . . but the machine went on heating up. Then someone opened the door, and there was a kind of balance it all got to, between curiosity and fear, and people started leaving, slowly [. . .] pretending like they were just going outside for a minute to do something. But then the door opened completely, and even though I was concentrating on the Singer, I could tell who was standing there. Captain Soler was just close enough to the entrance that you could see he had the expression, the one he had when thinking, we’ll figure out how to resolve this—later we’ll square the accounts. That’s when I took cover behind one of the tables.

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Part II : Theaters of Authority …

4 The Remonato, a Hybrid State 1947 –1955 …

I. Sometime in 1992 rom the doorway of La Prensa, Del Valle looks at the Avenida 12 de Octubre without love: the groaning engines of old diablo rojos, the perspiring asphalt, the city, jammed, out of breath. Everything is strange and stupid, like it was on his first day back home. At what precise moment had Panamá fucked itself up? The words float above the cars, alien to them, then settle down with a torn billboard ad on the street, then they’re converted into the sound of a cursing driver, and now they detach themselves once more. Del Valle walks, eyes down, aware of the smell of the KFC down the street. At the corner of Vía España, honk at your fat mother, hijo de gran. Looks at the copy of La Nación in a vendor’s hand, distracted, imagines the headlines: SCHOLAR WARNS: DAY DISSOLVING INTO MODERNIST NOVEL. He feels like a copy, a cliché, like a footnote to someone else’s story. Another bus—“aeropuerto— Tocumehhhhhen!”—too crowded and sweaty, better save the cuadra. He is like Panamá, Delvallito is, he’d fucked himself up somewhere along the line. A black lady staring outside, and the driver’s assistant, hanging, one foot outside the bus, the other on the staircase: all of them, fucked. Walks down Vía España, stares at a thin biencuida’o who’s washing a car. Delvallito thinks, when? Sweating, speaks to himself, moving his lips, trying to catch his breath, no air, calling himself you. You’re like Panamá, Ingeniero. No. No, you aren’t; you fucked yourself up on purpose and that’s different. A cloud of diesel rises and you remember the smell, the horses. Everything is a sea of people and Papá is shouting, his face strained, and now you stand at the side, looking. So many big kids, in school uniforms, and women too, and people on the balconies, everyone shouting, with signs. Far away, the horses, the students with rocks from the construction site, couldn’t have been here, it was Avenida Central, near the Teatro Cecilia. Half an hour later, at the kiosk, behind the Simón Bolívar Library,

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takes a wet piece of cloth from his handbag and wipes his neck and forehead. He sits on the white plastic chair, at the white plastic table, staring, the bees, looking for sugar. The law students are going in and out of the photocopy shop, sitting around and talking about nothing. You order a soda from the young guy with the piercing on his lip and the T-­shirt of a rock band, what do you call them, metallic, like your daughter listens to. “Oye! Qué tal, Doctor? But look at you, growing old.” Carpintero says something, and you say something and back and forth a couple of times, but then Carpintero: “Can’t stand these formalities anymore, Ingeniero.” And you: “Go to another country pues, here it’s form over content.” “You’re writing again?” “A whole series.” “On the remonato?” “The remonato. It’s what I started in Chiriquí, years ago. I’m having a go at it again, for La Prensa.” No, no, it’s in-­depth, the editor agrees to it. It looks at first glance like the same old story: fat colonel takes over a country. But you keep finding, finding facts, finding missed opportunities, memories, whole worlds lost, memories, sitting there, in the breeze, early February, you in the white típica that you started wearing that year, and Carpintero with his new glasses. Now you’re friends. Back in the day you were too rigid, Doctor. They had us cornered, Ingeniero. Now that you started feeling the capital’s loneliness, you’re a better friend. Now that you see the sweating bodies and dry looks, the shopping malls, and the empty new towers, the ’90s, the city. He takes his time, chatting with you about politics, about Lukács, the SUNTRACS strike. You go silent when he asks about your family. Bueno, my daughter, Tali, you haven’t met her. Fourteen, but she joined a play here at the university. Her mother’s panicked. Who knows, I told her, it’s just a play, these are good kids. But you know how it is with a mother and a daughter, and the little one’s a rebel. You sink back to talking about the remonato, the trial, the murder, the system of patronage, and the Greaves case. But later: Can I ask you a favor, Carpintero? You’re here on campus, just go by there every once in a while, see what they’re up to. Oh no, just so I can tell Ale that someone’s keeping an eye, that they’re not running around naked over there. Just peek in there a couple of times, no? They’re Marxist kids, you can 152

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talk to them, and well, she doesn’t know you, but you’ll recognize her. The only fourteen-­year-­old, and looks a little like Ale, with the neck held high, a little darker. II. Del Valle, Notes ou open your political eyes for the first time, Delvallito, 1947, on the streets with everyone else, chatting during recess and somehow you know all about the Filós-­Hines Treaty too, they’ll never listen to us, and you, we’ll force them, Esteban. You feel it in the air, and even Gordito does, and some of the teachers: people aren’t buying the lies anymore, the charade is ending, Indio, Panamá is going to be a democracy. You think of it now, about the students, leading the protests, the feeling of unity, women’s first mass rally, the arnulfistas on the right joining the socialists, the liberals, and the Asamblea Nacional capitulating, and Esteban, victory, Delvallito, knocked them out. Thinking: how the country fucked itself over. Thinking, how? You go over your notes, writing: the political scene was diverse, there were few extremists, writing we had a weak church, no army, even our oligarchy was relatively liberal, worldly. Jotting everything down, the middle class, growing, literacy rates rising, high in the cities, thinking there were more radios and newspapers and news traveled fast, and we, the students, figured out how to make the news. And you thought, nothing is going to stand in our way, Delvallito, a democratic movement was going to unify the nation behind a national platform, launch a campaign to pressure the US to give us the canal. You know something went wrong by 1949, when the coalition that stopped the treaty can’t unite again, by 1950, when Colonel José Antonio Remón controls the country, by 1952, when he gets elected president, fucked, when the police becomes the National Guard, with the heaviest political repression since independence. You follow evidence, like a detective, writing about Remón’s successful negotiation of a new canal treaty with the US, of his modest achievements as president, that his reign would give his officers the idea that they’re the only ones capable of running the show, fucked. And you think, why did we change course so quickly, Detective? Why the militarization instead of democratic reforms? You talk to Carpintero, false consciousness, the Eighteenth Brumaire, you write notes for yourself, talk to Ale, and Jaramillo says who the hell

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remembers Remón. Thinking a more complete picture of the postwar period will provide some clues, you write: The escalation of the Cold War allowed the colonel to legitimate the repression abroad, thinking, the economic downturn, the oligarchic circus, the rich patriarchs squabbling for the spoils while the rest of us and the Pax Remona stabilized the machinery of the state, thinking, allowed for some growth. Then on the typewriter: The profound unease of Panamanians of the middle and lower classes with the quasi-­democratic regime in part stemmed from an external factor—namely, the nation’s relationship with the US and the Canal Zone. That relationship with the hemisphere’s preeminent power was not only a relation with a foreign entity—a diplomatic tension. It was not even just a matter of the ways in which the Panamanian state was tied to the various neocolonial entities, on which it was completely dependent. Diplomatic tensions there certainly were; and dependency of the state angered Panamanians. But people of all classes in the main cities were also tied to the colonial forces—tied to them, dependent on them, discriminated against and humiliated by them. The class that benefited most from the relationship with the colonial presence, the oligarchy, was, by a coincidence all too apparent, also in command of the state. Thinking, how we hated those sons of bitches and Carpintero you wanted to be like them, Del Valle, you wanted to drink with them in the Club Unión. Del Valle notes, there was no threat of communism here, not a huge ideological divide either. Notes Arnulfo was a populist, a threat to the police and the oligarchy, but throw it out: Arnulfo was on the right, and not too much further to the right than most oligarchs or the police. You try a thesis: The remonato was a response to the perpetual politico-­legal crisis that plagued Panamá—a standoff between various types of social organization and the scripts that guided them. And you tell Carpintero, in the modernization of the state under President Porras we established bureaucratic institutions, adopted certain ways of doing things and seeing things. But personal relationships, family, patronage, these institutions, their scripts, their ways of seeing, persisted. You write: The two kinds of scripts engendered opposite actions, at times demanded conflicting loyalties, thinking, battles inside you, Del Valle, inside us. And Carpintero superstructure, superstructure, but you say that this was a hybrid regime, partly bureaucratic, partly personalistic, partially sovereign, and you feel like a detective as you type of course there were 154

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disagreements about specific policies, just as there were ideological arguments. Writing: the enduring crisis was at its heart, however, not one of content, but of form. And for a short historical moment, the regime of José Antonio Remón seemed to provide an answer to this social, organizational and political crisis. And you remember, for a short moment, an answer to the formal crisis: Colonel José Antonio Remón. III. Del Valle, Late 1992 or a long while you thought your life was wasted, Ingeniero. Returned from Coiba and couldn’t find yourself. Wandered around thinking, when did you fuck yourself up, Delvallito? Wanted to start writing again, but spent months trying to find time, writing monologues in your diary, addressed to a mysterious reader, apparently yourself. Couldn’t make a conversation with your daughter that lasted more than five sentences. You felt like you were playing someone else’s role. Bad script. You sit for lunch with Jaramillo and Lucien at El Prado, hearing a dry laughter coming from your own dry throat: you’ve changed a lot. You don’t understand what’s going on, or no, you understand, and that’s the problem. You walk like you think, limping: past, present, future, fantasy, plan, think again, it’s all a mix. Your daughter’s upcoming play, some asthma attack she had when she was six, an image from an old movie, your wife’s tears, the articles you were writing about the remonato, an old newspaper from 1955 with some story about a man who was turned into a woman. That entire period, writing, couldn’t find out what had changed, you started looking for clues, like a detective, Ingeniero. Sometimes the smallest things, like Ale buying you a book by Vargas-­ Llosa, and you, adopting the narrator’s voice, thinking at what precise point did you fuck yourself up? Looked for clues when people spoke, in their shirts, in their beer, thought about Coiba, about the past, the future, then a fantasy, now a dream. You find a job in Juan Vallarino’s construction company, paid as though you had just finished school. Don Vallarino says it’s a favor to Moreno, that’s Ale’s cousin. Thinks: Fucked.

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CAST: Tali Del Valle: daughter. Is never home, when home, in her room, on the phone, giggling. Has taken to drawing paintings of jaguars. Hangs them all over her bedroom. Got her asthmatic condition from her father, but it’s much worse for her, and 155

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apparently in some way connected to her psychological state. A very odd girl, very argumentative: too smart for her own good. Spending all that time with her theater gang at the university. Makes Ale worried sick, the jaguar pictures and the play. Alejandra Aizpuru Del Valle (Ale): wife. A woman who keeps her neck straight. Lots of laughing, lots of tears, but always that neck, long and straight. Carpintero: odd friend. A real Marxist, one of those who wouldn’t take a job from Torrijos. Then, a devout Maoist; in some way, now, more human. Got a job teaching at the Nacional, watches a lot of boxing. Never would have met him in your old life, Ingeniero, but in this script, he’s a real friend. José Antonio Remón: chief of police, then president (1952–55). Has becomes a character in your life, Detective. How many times in a day do you see his image? How often do you think of Guizado, Lipstein, Rubén Miró? You know them better than you know the people surrounding you. Or do they exist only in the pages of old newspapers, like Dick Tracy? Don Vallarino: boss, useless piece of shit. Greedy pig like all the rest of them. You think of him and your back tightens. Prefer not to remember him. Francisco and Doña Johanna: neighbors, appear in the last scene. Life isn’t a play, Ingeniero. There’s no cast. People come in and out, too many to count. Real people have no meaning, historical characters that you’ve never met influence you, fictional characters that never existed touch you. And “that bitch of yours—in this house!”—what remains of her? And all those people from Coiba, who lived next to you for years—what remains of them? Brazil, the Ramírez brothers, 99, the other one with the funny nose . . . and Luna-­Icaza, wonderful, fragile, mysterious man—only a memory. That last name makes you melancholic and your face becomes warm. Ay, poor Lunito. Now it’s all coming back, and not for any reason you can measure. Transportation prices haven’t gone up, the bull of a president isn’t much different from the one before him. In the end, you watched Tali’s play, then had the night at the hospital, and then started typing. Everything came back, a different story now. 156

“The Extraordinary History of Roberta Cowell, the First Case of a

Transformation of a Man to a Woman,”  La Hora, January 11, 1955, 5.

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IV. Tali, April 10, 2002 returned home after TAing section and found a note my roommate had left on our fridge: my cousin Sophia asks that I call her right away. It was the end of first year of grad school and I was in no mood for complications. I went down to the convenience store, picked up a Small World Calling Card, dialed the 1-­800 number, pressed 2 para continuar en español and scratched for the hidden numbers. Sophia answered after the second ring: Your father’s in the hospital, it’s serious. I caught an overnight flight through Miami and was home the next day; the entire ordeal was over in less than three weeks. Mom hadn’t expected it at all. She kept hurrying to resolve minor logistical issues, preoccupying herself with questions of etiquette; now and then she would stop while doing something and stand in the middle of the room, lost. The day after the funeral, when we got home, she asked me into Dad’s study. She opened the window and looked out, concentrating on the cars that passed on the street below. I stopped at the threshold, leaning on the door frame and looking at the room. After half a minute, she turned to me with some resolve and said, “This room is your responsibility.” She let the order sink in, and then looked at me, hoping I understood better what it meant. I should say that, up to that point she had avoided the room, which was associated in her mind with Dad’s “insistence on getting himself thrown to that island.” The odd thing was, she had read all his writings over the years, correcting his mistakes and making millions of stylistic suggestions. (Admittedly, some were a bit capricious. I once saw a draft she had gone over, in which she corrected the following sentence: “The two, who had known each other since the early days of the Republic, rested under the shade of a palm tree, and when the colonel, distracted, looked away, he answered in a robotic manner that made his chest bloom with apathy.” She crossed out all but the words “he answered.”) In all these years my mother never entered this room, however, and I think she edited Dad’s work only out of a sense of duty—to ensure that the family name was not signed onto a piece of writing that violated grammatical etiquette. On a similar subject, my mother would often say, “La ropa de mala traza, se lava siempre en la casa.” (I once answered: “No hagas de tu vida un borrador, pues puede que no tengas tiempo de pasarlo a limpio.” She promptly retorted: “De padres muy cuerdos, hijos muy lerdos.”)

I

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Dad’s study was clean but disorganized. There were many photocopies of old dissertations, and quite a collection of historical photographs. Dad also kept about 150 books, a huge collection by Panamanian standards, and there were three cardboard boxes full of old newspapers and newspaper clippings. His notes were scattered all over the place, and I never figured out if he was at any point going to publish the series of articles he kept talking about. Mamá and I looked around, opened some file cabinets, and then stood in the middle and hugged. V. Del Valle, 1993, Notes for La Prensa Article The Filós-­Hines Protests an’t remember much except the smell of tear gas and horses in the distance, and Ale, you’re making these memories up. Now that you’re researching this period, Detective, you get a memory every once in a while that you’re not sure is really a memory: people throwing their flowerpots at the police. Standing on the balconies, on Avenida Central, watching the students, fifteen, sixteen years old, getting beaten up with batons, tear gas, the whole street smells, and the flowerpots. The flowers are all white—lilies perhaps, which haven’t yet budded. Tali: It must be something Freudian or Marcusean, and you, Detective, where does a teenager pick up these kinds of terms? And Tali: It’s a good thing you don’t remember people throwing their own children down on the policemen’s heads. You double down on the research, spending time in the Biblioteca Nacional between old copies of El Día and El Panamá América, Detective, piecing together the evidence, that they were the largest protests that had taken place until that year, 1947. The public doesn’t like the idea of permanent American bases outside the Canal Zone after the end of the Second World War. For the purpose of defending the strategic canal, the 1942 agreement allowed the US to build 134 new bases outside the Canal Zone, which it would have to evacuate one year after the war would end, but seeing as one war ends just as another, apparently cold one begins, the US military decides it wants to keep many of its bases operating, and so it was that—­without considering the fact that the country would become a network of bases, around which bars and brothels would emerge— Foreign Minister Francisco A. Filós signs a treaty with US Ambassador Frank Hines on December 10, 1947. According to the Filós-­Hines

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Treaty, the US would continue to operate thirteen bases outside the Zone.1 The rage that erupts over the Filós-­Hines Treaty was built up by a set of other factors. During the war, up to sixty-­seven thousand American soldiers had rested in the Isthmus before being deployed, and the service economy that supplied the military’s needs gave Panamanians jobs and paid their salaries. But now the economic boom was over. In its own way, the boom had itself caused dissatisfaction as the increased North American presence during the war was felt everywhere, and the heavy-­ handed “security measures” we had to endure on our own soil antagonized the general populace. There were other problems besides. Prices had spiked during the boom, but now remained high even while salaries stagnated and unemployment rapidly increased, and the peasants who had come to the city during the war years stayed on, while the jobs they had had evaporated, to say nothing of the shantytowns that had mush1. The reader may notice that parts of the historical narrative in this chapter and the next are more openly stylized, although not always in a very resolute way. A colleague who looked at this text commented that, despite the differences in their ideology and method, the style of each of the above characters is not entirely distinct. This is ­undoubtedly true. But a cursory reading of any selection of history books will show that there are not in fact many differences in style and tone between them. The narrators of history books from the US read as though they were all the same person, and more surprising still is that Latin Americans do not sound so distinct either. The text of even the most aesthetic-­minded historian one can think of—someone like Fernando Ortiz—is not easily distinguishable in its style from academic histories written today. In Cuban Counterpoint, Ortiz construes Cuban history as a struggle between sugar and tobacco, and paints a racialized, sexualized, and gendered picture using this framework. But open the book at random and read a paragraph: you will find little in the language of Ortiz to distinguish him from other historians. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). The aesthetic touches of a historian can be found elsewhere—in the particularities of the depictions of historical characters, in their narrative structure, in the details a text emphasizes, in the silences, and so forth. Thus, Del Valle’s history should be understood as a tragedy, in which the student heroes fight against the police and the oligarchy, perhaps against the force of Panamanian consciousness itself. The arc of the plot: the promise of 1947, then the repression during the remonato, a subtle development of a rebellious legal-­historical consciousness during the trials, disorganized rebellion thereafter, and eventually, the final tragic ending with the military dictatorship in 1968. It is in these elements, much more than in the particularities of his language, that we can see Del Valle’s aesthetic fingerprint.

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roomed outside Panama City to house the new arrivals from the interior, improvised barrios that no one had planned to service. These contextual reasons joined a variety of more direct political problems. There had been no presidential election since Arnulfo Arias was deposed in 1941— and now the situation couldn’t be justified by a world crisis anymore. The fact that Ricardo J. Alfaro and Harmodio Arias Madrid—two of the country’s most eminent statesmen, both of whom had participated in the negotiations—turned against the treaty, added to the sense that the deal was illegitimate. When the moment came, it was clear that the Jiménez administration would pass a treaty squarely against the will of the populace. But even so, no one foresaw the mobilization of the enormous coalition that eventually defeated the Filós-­Hines Treaty.2 In part, the successful popular mobilization against the treaty, just as much as the crisis that followed it, can be explained by looking at the new groups that took center stage after the Second World War. A decade after the founding of the Universidad de Panamá, its students began taking the leading roles in the country’s political theater.3 The Federación de Estudiantes de Panamá (FEP) was founded in 1943 and organized its first national congress a year later. Its leaders toured the country, meeting separately with high school students and with teachers of all levels, and within a few years they created the political infrastructure that would make them a voice in the national arena. Student-­civic groups of the interior, like La Joven Veraguas and La Vanguardia Coclesana, began to work during this period too, alongside local chapters of the FEP.4 By 1945, the students founded the Frente Patriótico de la Juventud, a movement that, while never transforming itself into a 2. The best account of the protests is Thomas L. Pearcy, We Answer Only to God: Politics and the Military in Panama, 1903–1947 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), chap. 5. 3. Harmodio Arias Madrid founded the Universidad Nacional in 1935, and his ally, Octavio Méndez Pereira, served as its first president. Méndez Pereira, whose tenure lasted until 1956, encouraged the students to get involved in politics. 4. Later, in the 1950s and ’60s, students took a more active role in peasant politics—most notably in Santiago de Veraguas. Beatriz Corrales de Alcedo, Emelda Cortes de González, and María Inés Ortega, “Las luchas sociales en Veraguas durante el periodo comprendido entre 1950 y 1960” (tesis de lic., Universidad de Panamá, 1984).

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large political party,5 allowed the students to develop a new institutional framework, and with it, to radicalize political struggles. Carpintero points out that at the same time that the students came to be conceived as a truly idealistic group, they never managed to formulate and propagate a clear and attractive agenda that would convince other groups to join them. Young, urban, and middle-­class, they failed to build coalitions with peasants and workers that could translate into electoral victories. Nevertheless, as they proved time and again, the students had the capacity to turn an issue into a national crisis, a debate into a struggle. And this is in effect what takes place in December 1947. On December 10, the treaty is signed, but still needs to be ratified by the General Assembly. Two days later, a rumor reaches students in the Instituto Nacional [high school] that the treaty would be approved that very day in a surprise motion in the Assembly. A number of students begin to force teachers to discuss the situation in class, and finally, students sound the school bell, congregating everyone. Despite the adults’ call for calm, the entire student body marches out into the street (the teachers follow, concerned). The teenagers encounter the police; skirmishes develop; bystanders, seeing the teenagers, join in. From a hundred students, the crowd soon reaches the thousands and the police response grows violent. A few hours into the clashes, now at the Santa Ana Plaza, police use tear gas, clubs, horses, and eventually live ammunition. The day ends with scores of wounded; a bullet leaves high school student Sebastían Tapia a paraplegic.6 That the police should have acted with such force against the students and the residents who joined them need not be taken for granted. The institution was highly dysfunctional in its first years: its officers were often beholden to political patrons and loan sharks, lacked skills and organizational autonomy. On the other hand, police officers sometimes reacted with lethal force to rioting off-­duty US soldiers, infuriating American officials. Under tremendous pressure from Washington, 5. Jorge Conte Porras, La rebelión de las esfinges: Historia del movimiento estudiantil Panameño (Panamá, RP: Litho Impresora Panamá, 1978), 33–52; Humberto Ricord Donado, Cinco ensayos sobre la revolución panameña (México, DF: Editora Vanguardia, 1962), 10–22. 6. A vivid testimonial can be found in David Acosta, “Influencia decisiva de la opinión pública en el rechazo del Convenio Filós-­Hines de 1947” (tesis de lic., Universidad de Panamá, Facultad de Filosofía, Letras y Educación, 1978), 59–70.

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President Porras nominated a US citizen, Albert Lamb, as instructor in 1918, and a year later as chief inspector of police. Having vehemently resisted the imposition, Dr. Porras soon found out that there were advantages to a chief inspector who had no local allies or patrons, with a modernizing zeal and the technical knowledge to realize it. Lamb’s reformed detective department—with an archive containing files on delinquents, new manuals, and training—soon proved useful politically, too. As was the case in his suppression of cattle theft in the northern province of Chiriquí, Lamb opened investigations against local gamonales for crimes that had been carried out more or less in the open. President Porras could then save these power brokers by using his influence on the judicial system. Meanwhile, Lamb was also called to represent Panamá in the Canal Zone and the US embassy, to argue that Panamá was indeed a state of law, and to prevent more US interventions. The end result of this process was to give President Porras more power over the periphery, on the one hand, and perhaps more freedom from the grossest US interventions, on the other. The price of the reforms, however, was a police system that, both in the techniques it used and in its quotidian operation, was much more enmeshed with the neocolonial force on the other side of the street.7 By the time Lamb left Panamá in 1928, the small institution he had reformed was capable of carrying out basic investigative duties. But Lamb, who after 1924 remained solely in charge of training, warned that the police department needed to be reinforced if it were to handle serious protests. As it turned out, the organization was not capable of guarding the regime against the coordinated assault of even a few dozen badly equipped Acción Comunal rebels. The Acción Comunal regime came to power by assaulting a weak police and now needed to purge the 7. Lamb’s confrontation with the gamonales of Chiriquí is described at length in Alfred R. Lamb, instructor and inspector, Policía Nacional, to John G. South, American minister to Panamá, April 17, 1922 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 26, frames 925–32), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. For an example of friction between Lamb and American officers, see William J. Price, minister to Panamá, to Robert Lansing, secretary of state, February 20, 1919 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M607, roll 26, frames 846–48), Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. See also Lamb, unpublished memoir, Albert Roswell Lamb Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, NYPL.

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force of whatever loyalties it had to the old Chiari regime, weakening it further. In the 1930s, moreover, presidents Ricardo J. Alfaro and Harmodio Arias Madrid both built their own paramilitary forces, and incorporated those forces into the police.8 In power in 1940, Arnulfo Arias Madrid attempted to solidify his hold on the police by investing more in its hardware and shuffling its officers. Simultaneously—aware of the opposition from within the institution—he created a separate force, the Policía Secreta Nacional, in 1941, further antagonizing the regular officers. In sum, the importance of the police as an arbiter of the political process incentivized politicians to invest more funds in it, and at the same time to undermine its autonomy and derail it from its civilian tasks. José Antonio Remón incarnated this praetorian push more than any other man. His father had drunk his money away, and when he died, he left a widower and seven children in poverty.9 The mother worked hard to pay for her son’s schooling, and “Chichi,” who made it to the Instituto Nacional, proved a diligent and intelligent student. But having graduated, Remón had to work in a sugar firm and a pharmacy and could not find his true vocation. Then he managed to get a grant to study at the Colegio Militar de México, and upon graduation, he joined the police as a captain. Remón was fired for political reasons in 1935, and he took charge of the circulation of El Panamá América on the streets. In 1940, Remón was brought back to the police, only to be sent to take a cavalry course in Fort Riley, Kansas. Twice maneuvered out of the force, Remón became convinced the Arias Madrid brothers were his political enemies. On his return from the US, therefore, he quickly planned the overthrow of Arnulfo, and when the opportunity came in October 1941, he helped Ricardo de la Guardia oust the president. His loyalty to Presi8. Pearcy, We Answer Only to God, 66–71. 9. The only biography of Remón is Concha Peña, José Antonio Remón Cantera: Ensayo de biografía con notas de mi cuaderno de periodista (Panamá, RP, 1955). The book is hagiographical, perhaps commissioned by friends or family. While far from perfect—and often unabashedly pro-­American—Larry Pippin’s account of Remón and the remonato is the most useful contemporary description of the man and his time. Larry LaRae Pippin, The Remón Era: An Analysis of a Decade of Events in Panama, 1947–1957 (Stanford, CA: Institute of Hispanic American and Luso-­Brazilian Studies, Stanford University, 1964).

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dent Enrique Jiménez in unfolding a conspiracy a little later earned him the promotion to commander in chief. It is often said that Remón “professionalized” the police; but unless we think it is the policeman’s job to take over government, the term is inappropriate. Remón lobbied for better conditions for his policemen, ensuring that they and their families would receive free medical treatment. He also made the police more meritocratic, and promoted black policemen. It was Remón who managed to start motorized police patrols, and it was he who reorganized the police into five national districts. At the same time, Remón and some of his officers achieved considerable economic clout during this period. They came to exercise control over several licit and illicit businesses—the cattle industry and the brothel industry, for example. These processes are not as contradictory as it may seem, however. The police force under Remón became a more cohesive, efficient institution, equipped with modern technology. But it was at just this time, and precisely because it became the only institution in Panamá able to carry out efficient repressive action, that the police became an instrument for the subversion of the rule of law. From the outside, then, we could simply see the police as an institution that, by 1947, had gone through the kind of modernizing process that Max Weber had identified. We could look at the police as a bureaucratic institution that developed a clear hierarchy, clear regulations, meritocratic norms, a professional ethos, and so on and so forth, and which (thanks as much to these developments as well to its possession of gun and baton) gained power over other, less coherent forces. In truth, however, only by carefully cultivating a personal following was Colonel Remón able to keep his officers playing the roles that the bureaucratic scripts called them to play; and only by ensuring that the officers received personal benefits outside the formal boundaries could he ensure their loyalty. This loyalty, it goes without saying, was to Remón, not to the letter of the law.10 10. It is not immediately clear why Del Valle does not compare Remón’s rise to power to that of other strongmen, such as Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza García in Nicaragua, and Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. One reason may be that, arguably, the differences between the path to power for each are greater than seems at first glance. Unlike Somoza and Trujillo, Remón did not gain power within the police due to his relationship with the US, though his training there late

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In December 1947, however, it was still unclear that the police would become the decisive actor in the next years. The brutality unleashed on the students on December 12 enraged the public and allowed the opposition forces to mobilize decisively. With newspapers and radio coverage of the events, civil organizations of every kind now join the students; labor organizations, schools and clubs decree their support too. The protest of the next day is already a truly massive event. On December 15, the opposition successfully coordinates a national strike and a student walkout. From that day, the economy comes to a halt. Some ten thousand women march as a solid block in the December 16 demonstration, the first cohesive action of the kind, and one that contributes greatly to the feeling of national unity.11 Finally, when the Assembly comes to vote on December 22, 1947, there is no way that the Filós-­Hines Treaty can pass, and indeed, the rejection in the Assembly is unanimous. You remember that moment well, a moment that feels like a turning point, everyone thinking, we’ve crushed a bad treaty, we’ve done it, a unified, principled, nonviolent people, we’ve defeated tyranny itself. VI. Del Valle (Date Unknown) he shack was a fiesta patronal, gushing fire. Buckets! Give me that, cuidado! Buckets! Get him out of there! He tells you how it was, and you, who watched it from the outside, when you play it in your own mind, you call yourself by his last name. It becomes real, and you are Carpintero, inside the burning shack, the Singer in flames. Light, darkness, smoke above the abyss, he thinks: This is your time Carpintero. The Ramírez brothers, in the water, pluf, pluf, 99 glances at the others, then he too, pluf, and Brazil, pluf. Sees the men in the river, like fish, wiggling slowly downstream, from inside the Singer’s building, out, down the river. Carpintero, it’s our time, but Luna-­Icaza, frozen, and

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in his career may have aided him, and though he was, of course, always friendly to American interests. He was not, moreover, involved in a civil war, such that had allowed Somoza and Trujillo to gain power within their respective countries. Perhaps most important, Remón gained power gradually, between 1935 and 1955; and even at the peak of his power, in 1954–55, he was never close to exercising as much control over Panamanian national life as did Somoza or Trujillo, or indeed, as much as Batista had. 11. For an overview of women’s movements in Panamanian history, see Fernando Aparicio, Historia de los movimientos de mujeres en Panamá en el siglo XX (Panamá, RP: Universidad de Panamá, Agenda del Centenario, Instituto de la Mujer, 2002).

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Carpintero: Let’s go, compa, we won’t get another chance. Wilson! The Lord has spoken and I will listen: no eighth escape for Wilson. Luna! We’ll burn alive. Lunito, we need to go, Lunito, with the others. The others, disappearing downstream, into the darkness, the flames, the bodies, wiggling slowly, gone. Remembers smoke, cold water, threw him into the water and jumped. Hold your breath, compa. Down and down you go, into the cold, the yellow light behind, gone. Wet clothes sticking to your body, compa, you push yourself out of the water, then the jungle, no, first crossing the barbed-­wire fence, passing by the cows, heavy running, in the distance, shouts, the fire in the camp, fast. Run, behind the others, silent, before the search squads organize, where is the alarm? Ramírez brothers leading, fence, watch out, compa, and there’s Luna-­ Icaza again, good man. That’s it, the jungle, like arms around you, protecting, the jungle, now uphill. No one knows what happened that day, it was all smoke and darkness. Carpintero said that for three days they camped there, waiting for the search parties to give up. The Ramírez brothers had planned a different escape, but when the Singer blew up, they jumped into the water, and now they were there without tools or food. Some prisoners would have tried to steal from one of the smaller camps, some would have become desperate and given themselves up, but the group knew it would be blamed for the explosion, thinking, buried alive. Morning, get your asses over here. The older Ramírez takes a stick and draws a map on the ground: this is where we are, this is Central, this is the aguas termales. Here is Catival, Jicarón. See Ingeniero, that’s how it was. Plan: build two rafts, oars, three or four spare parts, carved. Pass Catival, drop the spare parts, make it look shipwreck-­like, piece of shirt too, you’re smart, Ramírez, what will it be, like, two days in the sea? Four. Starve, skin burning. Hungry, imagines sharks coming and you saving everyone, fighting a big one, holding it with its mouth open, awwww, and more sharks coming at you like torpedoes, thuum, thuum, hungry. Ramírez says Cadillac, coconuts, Brazil and Luna-­Icaza, carving, 99, you with me to bring more wood, Carpintero with Ramírez on the lookout. Afternoon, they break a few coconuts and eat. Then the younger Ramírez, in a low, quiet voice: Cadillac, go the fuck over to the bush if you want to piss. And Cadillac returns from the bush, holding him by his hair, a fuckin spy, carajo! Cadillac got a sapo, chucha, hiding in the 167

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bush! Nobody touch him, the prisoner belongs to Ramírez, says Ramírez: What’s your name, sapo, and the sapo, well, you see, I am the a­ uthor. And they look at the Ramírez brothers: Mister, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but search within for an answer: does this look like a good time to be fucking with Ramírez? Sir, with the utmost respect, I am the author, says the author. And Cadillac kick, author on the ground, kick again, kick. Ramírez raises his hand and Cadillac goes back, and Ramírez looks at us, and then Luna-­ Icaza: Compañeros, I would like a minute with this man. That’s a frog, and you have a minute before we take his long tongue out. And Luna-­Icaza: Good sir, what kind of author would you happen to, and where do you come from, and what other works have you penned, this is very interesting, we have never heard before, aha, I see, but in that case perhaps it would be more accurate to say you are a narrator. Technically, said the author, that is to say, from a purely textual point of—you, Luna-­Icaza interjected, are not to blame for the author’s blunders, you inhabit a different realm. But he: for me to be a narrator, there must be a narrative and narratees, and, ehm, a text, that someone on the other end has to be—Not unless you think, Luna-­Icaza jumped, that a senator requires senatees and an ex-­senator ex-­senatees. Perhaps, said the ex-­author—but Luna-­Icaza: For the benefit of the court, where did Señor Narador study, at the, oh, very good, in Paris. And Luna-­Icaza: What kind of work will Dr. Narrator, aha, I’m sure it will be of great merit, of course, and the ex-­author, about the history of—to which Luna-­Icaza, aha, quite fascinating, and we will appear in this work as. Ramírez looks at Carpintero, who sits on the sidelines, tired: What does Carpintero think? Shrugs. As a scene, that is, not to be too critical but this is not social realism, and of course, well, one needs to avoid kitsch, which ends up serving the ruling classes but Ramírez cuts him off: the judges that put them here were kitsch too, this piece of shit of an island is kitsch, and Torrijos, the church, the newspapers and their lies, and all the rest of it, and Carpintero thinks that’s my point, but Ramírez this is my kitsch now así que what does the jury think of the narrator that did el Diken y el Balzáp y la Historia General de Chile? Cadillac: Eat the frog! 99: Eat the frog! And they yell, eat the frog! And Ramírez: Shut up, this is a trial of justice here, order in my fuckin’ court. Luna-­ Icaza, go on, you’re his lawyer. And don’t make up anything because we 168

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have a lot of experience with his type from Inspector Iglia and we know exactly how this ends. Luna-­Icaza: Distinguished members of the jury, truth about, much merit, we will appear in a book, this is only the narrator, a kind of day laborer, a cane cutter sweating in a field he does not own. But they: Pa-­re-­dón! Pa-­re-­dón! And Ramírez warns not to repeat the Inspector P. Iglia incident, because there’s no difference between a spy and an ex-­ spy, but Luna-­Icaza, pointing: This narrator will show up and disappear with the text, no need to reify or kill, nothing empty can die. Ramírez glances at Ramírez, who glances at Carpintero mumbling, a bourgeoisie, a regime element. A few more attempts on the part of the defense but the others smell blood, and Brazil, kick his narrating balls, porra! And Cadillac, kick in the face, kick in the stomach, kick, kick, and Luna-­Icaza, court, judge, great importance, we’ll appear in a book but Judge Ramírez says we’re in charge of the books. The Honorable Ramírez: Guilty. Of spying and narration of the first degree. Arms stretched, tied to a palm tree, break that coconut—pour it on his head, the termites, dark red, many small against one. The trial, the accusation, the ex-­narrator: done. VII. Del Valle, Notes, 1992 etween 1947 and 1951 Colonel Remón becomes the ultimate arbiter of the political game. Arnulfo Arias Madrid, who had most likely won the elections of May 1947, is kept out of office by an electoral machinery obeying Remón and his allies, and because none of the oligarchs competing for power has anything like Arnulfo’s charisma or political infrastructure, their struggle for power ultimately relies on Remón’s force. The radionovelesque machinations by which Remón now crowns new presidents—Henrique de Obarrio, Domíngo Díaz, then Daniel Chanis—provokes increasing protests, but the unity of the 1947 protests cannot again be achieved.12

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12. These incidents are well known and were understood at the time by Panamanians and foreigners alike. See, for example, the US embassy’s analysis of the events in which President Daniel Chanis attempted to force the resignation of Remón, his second and third in command. Colonel Remón—who was detained in the presidential palace by the presidential guard—managed in the end to force President Chanis to resign. Monnett B. Davis, U.S. ambassador in Panama, to the Department of State, November 25, 1949, “Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1949, The United

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In the final scene of this episode, during Chanis’s short presidency (July 28–­November 24, 1949), a parliamentary committee controlled by the opposition opens a public investigation into the National Cooperative, an entity sanctioned by the state to monopolize the Panamanian beef industry. The investigation brings to light that Remón and friends own and run the cooperative, and that the police and a loyal goon squad, Pie de Guerra, are openly working in this business and deriving enormous profits from it. Facing a national outcry, President Chanis tries to fire Colonel Remón, who responds by telling the president it was he who had to resign. The chief of police now tries to nominate his cousin, Vice President Roberto Chiari, to be the next president. But the maneuver soon meets with mass confrontations between the police and protesters, and Remón, facing a public that’s closing ranks against him, decides to play his final wild card. An emergency adjournment of the National Electoral Board is called, and a recount of the 1947 elections verifies what Colonel Remón just decided: it was Arnulfo Arias Madrid who had been the winner all along!13 You think, episode 128, “The Archrival Patriarchs in Bed,” typing: A marriage of convenience that made some political sense. Despite the intense animosity between them, Remón recognizes that Arnulfo Arias Madrid commands the largest and most disciplined political party, and Don Arnulfo sees that the commandant controls the most powerful and cohesive armed force. And you describe how the two, now together, begin the arduous task of political repression: opposition newspapers and radio stations are harassed, politicians jailed, and you remember how bitter you were, how you couldn’t understand what was taking Nations: The Western Hemisphere, Volume II,” Ralph R. Goodwin et al., eds. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), document 434, https://​history​.state​ .gov​/ historicaldocuments​/frus1949v02​/d434. 13. The most detailed summary of these events can be found in Pippin, The Remón Era, 30–59. The newspapers of the period offer a fair account as well. Within two years, they would be much more severely controlled. Already at this time, however, there is some censorship of the newspapers, especially on cases of explicit condemnation of police intervention in politics. See, for example, the first pages of La Hora, January 7, 1948. As is usually the case in Panamá, the American embassy’s dispatches are fairly accurate. See Decimal Files 719.00/5-­951 to 719.00/5-­1351, roll 1, United States Dept. of State, “Records of the U.S. Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1950–1954” (Scholarly Resources, 2002), Microforms, film A 524.15 (1950/54, Int.), Harvard Lamont Library.

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place. Remembering your deepening voice explaining to Esteban and Gordito, confidently, what was taking place, you don’t know what you’re talking about, Delvallito, ay Gordito, and you think no one does, Detective. Typing: Despite a degree of coordination between Arnulfo and Remón, in the end, divorce was imminent. Arnulfo insisted on building the Secret Police, a repressive force that would be loyal to him alone, while the Policía Nacional looked at its growing rival with concern. At the end of December, Arnulfo’s government even announced it would enforce the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions, terminating the monopoly that Remón’s National Cooperative held. The confrontation came when Arnulfo publicly announced he would nullify the existing constitution and reinstate his 1941 constitution. The police did not approve; the Assembly, in which the president never had a majority, was opposed; the Supreme Court clearly thought the decree illegal. Popular uproar would settle the matter. A mass meeting of some ten thousand people gathered in Santa Ana Plaza and started marching toward the police headquarters, gathering even more strength along the way. Remón was now seen as the only one who could protect the constitutional order against the arbitrary president. For a time, the police vacillated, negotiating with the president, who, for his part, apparently viewed the affair as settled. But the coalition against the president quickly united all non-­arnulfistas, including the various liberal factions, the church, and the students. On May 9, Panamá and Colón were paralyzed, and street fights between arnulfistas and anti-­arnulfistas broke out everywhere. That same day, the Assembly voted to impeach the president, and the Supreme Court authorized the vote. At this point, Arnulfo proposed that the police shelve his constitution; for a few hours the police chiefs seemed ready to accept this. Remón was planning to run for the 1952 elections, and he apparently calculated that to win, he would need some of Arnulfo’s supporters to back him up. But by this time, the opposition to the regime was fierce, and would accept nothing less than the resignation of the president. Finally, on May 10, the police sent a delegation to the National Palace. While a squadron took positions on the first floor, two officers went upstairs to speak with the president. The two were summarily shot. The National Police mobilized, and after a few hours of battle with the hundreds of armed arnulfistas as well as with Secret Police forces in the 171

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main cities, the police managed to suppress the supporters of the president. By the end of the day, there were twenty dead, dozens injured, and 1,600 women and men in prison.14 The most dangerous political prisoner was Arnulfo Arias Madrid. In a rather questionable interpretation of the constitution, the Asamblea Nacional decided to try the ex-­president for having crossed the constitutional limitations of his office. The Supreme Court approved this move. Arnulfo remained defiant throughout the public trial, reading a book in court contemptuously.15 VIII. et Carpintero, who has read my notes. Many comments. Doesn’t understand why I would be interested in the law at all, and thinks the questions I’m asking mislead me. Following his advice, I reread “Transitismo y dependencia” with an eye on the merchants’ relationship with the rule of law.16 In the article, Alfredo Castillero Calvo situates Isthmian history within a dependency theory framework, arguing that our insertion into the capitalist system, focused as it was on the provision of services for international commerce, created a local economy and society that was extraordinarily dependent on foreign metropoles and on fluctuations in world economy. It was also a society that, unlike most other Latin American societies, was dominated from the outset by a class of urban, outward-­looking merchants. This small group of families, according to Castillero Calvo, developed a highly ambiguous rela-

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14. These numbers are based on the official report made by the Ministry of Government and Justice. Pippin’s numbers are sixteen dead and 1,052 prisoners, including 216 women. It may be that the official death toll includes civilian deaths during the twenty-­four hours that preceded the battle. Pippin does not indicate where he got his figures, and there is little reason to believe that the ministry would overestimate the number of political prisoners. Pippin, The Remón Era, 75–76. 15. The judicial proceedings and supporting documents were compiled in an official publication: Asamblea Nacional de Panamá, Proceso del Dr. Arnulfo Arias M.: La Asamblea Nacional en funciones judiciales (Panamá, RP: Publicaciones, 1951). It can now be accessed online by searching the database of the Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano: http://​www​.iberoamericadigital​.net​/es​/Inicio/. 16. Alfredo Castillero Calvo, “Transitismo y dependencia: El caso del istmo de Panamá,” Nueva Sociedad 5 (April 1973): 35–50. Of interest too is Marixa Lasso de Paulis, “La Ilegalidad Como Sistema En La Sociedad Panamaña Del Siglo XVII” (tesis de lic., Universidad de Panamá, 1993).

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tionship with the Spanish Crown, which grew in the nineteenth century into an uneasy bond with Gran Colombia. Always fearing the masses on whose labor they depended, the merchants had to rely on foreign power to maintain order. But they resented foreign taxes and impositions, and ran massive and highly institutionalized contraband operations, which Castillero Calvo goes so far as to suggest facilitated their formation as a “sedentary” creole class. With time, the merchants found ingenious ways to subvert foreign rule. As a class, Carpintero claimed, the colonial elite wanted order and predictability, but subverted foreign rule regularly, and constantly looked for alternative patrons with whom to get a better deal.17 The fact that, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants from Curaçao, Aleppo, and elsewhere—and to a lesser degree Arab, Chinese, and Colombian immigrants—­became stronger economically and dominated the mercantile sectors only strengthened this tendency. Most of these merchants did not become directly involved in politics. The local oligarchy, by contrast, confined itself to real estate, some shops, and a few other marginal occupations; by the turn of the century it was far behind these immigrant groups in purely economic terms. The old oligarchy held onto its social rituals, attended the Club Unión religiously, and maintained its grip on the political process.18 “What you have,” Carpintero told me, is a situation in which a fractured elite cares for the law only occasionally, and in a self-­ serving way—that is, “when it is used to repress any threats to capital [. . .] in which large parts of the oligarchy benefit from graft directly, and much of the bourgeoisie profits from illegal commercial transactions, tax evasion, and so forth.” For him, the turmoil of the postwar era can be explained by the struggles of a weak and incohesive middle class to force the oligarchy to accept its national program, and with it, the supremacy of the rule of law.19 17. The best and most thorough contemporary discussion on the relationship of Panamanian elites and bureaucrats to the law is Matthew Scalena, “Illicit Nation: State, Empire, and Illegality on the Isthmus of Panama” (PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2013). 18. For a broad view of the transformation of Panamanian upper classes in the nineteenth century, see Omar Jaén Suárez, La población del Istmo de Panamá: Estudio de geohistoria, Cuarta edición (Panamá, RP: Editorial Universitaria Carlos Manuel Gasteazoro, 2013), 638–32. 19. Carpintero’s position, while citing Castillero Calvo, is more or less in line with

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I have not formulated a full response yet. I do recognize that the rise of the students as political agents during this period, and their emphasis on justice—articulated in terms of national sovereignty as well as the rule of law—coincides with the development of an incipient middle class. But our people’s relationship with the law, and with authority generally, was not just a result of class or material interests. Though it is undoubtedly true that certain sectors had a material interest in subverting the law, the legal consciousness that developed in our country is more complicated than a class analysis would allow. Carpintero admitted that there was some value in my notion of scripts, but said it was not well developed. He was very suspicious about my use of the term hybridity, however, warning me that I might be adopting it uncritically from other Latin American thinkers. He spelled out the connection between the racial category that the Iberian colonialist had used and the notion of a “hybrid society” or “hybrid culture” that the neocolonial creole writers use. This caught me by surprise, and I went home lost in a labyrinth of melancholic thoughts. When we met a few weeks later, I said that if there is still any value in the idea of a hybrid society, we have to reject the notion that what we are analyzing is a mixture of races, each with its own essential attributes, culture, or whatever. The scripts that were guiding our social and political behaviors, I said, were mixed. But he told me I need to clarify that I’m not identifying certain institutions with modernity and others with “tradition,” and, in any case, I’m not thinking about hybridity in terms of ancient and modern. I admitted I had a lot of doubts about it all now. But I said that if we want to understand the ongoing crisis of the quasi-­democratic regime of the postwar era, we have to look underneath the organizational shell of our institutions; we need to see the behavior of the people who inhabit them. Contemporaries, even Marxists, sometimes spoke in those terms: other Panamanians of the left, like Ricaurte Soler and Miguel Antonio Bernal. See Miguel Antonio Bernal, Militarismo y administración de justicia, 1st ed. (Panamá, RP: Ediciones Nari, 1986); Ricaurte Soler, Panamá, nación y oligarquía, 1925–1975 (Panamá, RP: Ediciones de la Revista Tareas Panamá, 1976). Matthew Scalena’s updated and more empirically grounded development of a similar position lends credence to the class-­based analysis of the centrality of illegality to Panamanian social life. Scalena, “Illicit Nation.”

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It is well known that at the end of an election campaign, defeated parties (as well as the winners, although those endure only to share the bureaucratic spoils) return to the absolute inactivity in which they had vegetated before the election. It is the norm in the oligarchic parties. Its leaders or owners are businessmen who use the electoral opportunities to position themselves advantageously vis-­à-­vis the government. The people are dragged along by the different candidates of the oligarchy, who sometimes invest large sums of money in advertising and in the ensuing electoral turmoil. After the ballot, directors and owners of the shiny oligarchic parties return to their lives and commercial occupations, industrial, livestock, etc., completely forgetting everything that concerns the political party, and leaving to their fates the masses which had been duped into following their nominations.20 I look at them, at the ministries and government agencies, at the parties, parliamentary debates, the courts . . . and they look all right from the outside. But even today—after two decades of military dictatorship and a US invasion—I wonder, are contradictory scripts running our institutions, directing the theater of our public life? IX. Del Valle, Handwritten Draft, La Prensa Series e were always aware that a different authority, with different legal codes and sociopolitical scripts, existed across the street. We interacted with Zonians and with US soldiers all the time, and the relations between the two populations, though many times tense, were also quite often intimate. A Panamanian could live without once crossing into the Zone, without ever being harassed by its zealous policemen and their Jim Crow laws. But a whole economy served the Zone; and Zone policies were crucial to the economy of the cities bordering it. It was impossible to avoid an intimate knowledge of the other state system across the street or to live unaware of its discrimination and abuse. And it was equally impossible not to notice the efficiency and technical skill on the other side of the street. If you were a merchant, the Zone commissary was the competitor you could not beat. If you were an Antillean

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20. Ricord Donado, Cinco ensayos, 51.

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laborer, after, say, the mid-­1950s, your house was often on the Panamanian side, and you crossed into the Canal Zone to experience discrimination every day in that neocolonial regime. But even if by some miracle you, personally, had no contact with the Zone, you would still have been aware of that other space—a “zone” that was everywhere around you, and perhaps somehow in you. This was the other dimension of our hybrid experience: the clash between Panamanian and foreign institutions, and the scripts underlying them. The sheer number of human beings living on the other side: in normal times, around 40,000 civilians and soldiers in the Canal Zone, a number that climbed in the Second World War to 140,000. During this same time we had about 240,000 Panamanians living in the provinces of Panamá and Colón, within which the Canal Zone was situated.21 And throughout the century, the Canal Zone was the largest employer of Panamanians after the government of Panamá. But beyond numbers and the level of influence they had over our lives, beyond any specific grievance they created, lay contradictions that they caused in our society, and in our ways of viewing the world. Much of the literature on the relationships between the United States and Panamá misses what was most complicated in our experience here because it deals with the clashes and accommodations of diplomatic teams and state agencies.22 What’s more interesting are the ways in which populations and institutions within each country were intertwined with the neocolonial institutions on the other side. And even more complicated, the ways in which we as subjects struggled with the internal contradictions this situation created in us, and the ever-­present “comparative” awareness. This was the other dimension of our hybrid state. 21. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Panama: Summary of Biostatistics: Maps and Charts, Population, Natality and Mortality, Statistics, with the Office of the Coordinator, Inter-­American Affairs (Washington [D.C.], 1945), 30. 22. To some degree, this was true for much of the diplomatic history produced in Panamá as well as outside of it. See, for example, Ernesto Castillero Pimentel, Panamá y los Estados Unidos, 1903–1953, 1st ed. (Panamá, RP, 1953); Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); John Major, Prize Possession: The United States and the Panama Canal, 1903–1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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The social situation in Panamá and Colón was quite complicated. Most Panamanians knew, for example, the divisions between different populations in the Canal Zone, and related to each differently. Most white Zonians were working-­class and middle-­class, who, in the Canal Zone, felt themselves superior, and marked themselves off from the Antillean employees of the Zone. Towns, schools, and pay scales were segregated. White Zonians also looked down on the US military servicemen, most of whom were working-­class and about a third of whom were Puerto Rican. White Zonians accepted the military officers, and they were quite amiable to wealthy Panamanians of European descent. US servicemen, for their part, despised the Zonians, and had much more ambiguous relations with Panamanians. They often brawled with Panamanian policemen, but were quite happy dating, and sometimes marrying young Panamanian women. Regardless of what they say of us, Panamanians were not “anti-­American.”23 (The term erases our Americanness, just as it claims that it is we who hate!) We loathed the neocolonial system that the US imposed; and the Zonians, who identified most fully with this system, who learned and practiced its racism from the playground onward, became synonymous with the injustice itself. Panamanians learned to live with repeated degradations—national and personal—but we never accepted them. And we never accepted the implicit and explicit contracts that underwrote the neocolony. X. Tali Del Valle, March 27, 2003 eanings are open: not only in a text, but in real-world interactions too, in society. Various cultures meet in every complex society; people from the countryside mix with the urban middle class, immigrants bring their food and music; ideas too are exchanged. Panamá and Colón were extreme, however. It wasn’t only that they were such heterogeneous cities. It wasn’t only that, like in the case of the US–­Mexican border, a “first world” empire was in daily contact with

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23. This may be an argument against the presentation of Panamanians in American reports; reports to American agencies in Washington often had a section on the state of “anti-­American” sentiment. The notion that Panamanians were “anti-­ American,” however, was common even in some scholarly works. The best example is Alan L. McPherson, Yankee No! Anti-­Americanism in U.S.–­Latin American Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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a “developing” nation-­state. It was also the juxtaposition of a few extremely different populations, each with its own distinct institutions, cultures, scripts, and ways of interpreting social text. The Antillean canal workers were in so many ways different from each other and from the white Zonians, who were, in turn, culturally distinct from the Puerto Rican soldiers and the Kuna who labored in the Zone; the peasants who migrated en masse to the cities had so little in common with the rabiblanco elite, the Chinese, Jewish, and Arab immigrants . . . each had communal institutions that were very different from the rest.24 And at a fundamental level, Panamanian and Canal Zone institutions were nourished by scripts that contrasted with one another. But people often lived in more than one social space, and constantly needed to switch between languages, institutional cultures, and scripts. So conflicts weren’t only fought outside, in public, between people. They were felt within, pulling people, unconsciously, toward opposing sides, causing internal conflict. It was not always easy to see this, but there are hints of these dissonances. Open the newspapers from this period. You see that many of them have both an English and a Spanish edition; and often, the same paper is split in half: Spanish, if you open from the left, and English if you open from the right. The headlines on the first page mix local news with events in the US and the world. “Se gradúan 104 unidades hoy en la Escuela Técnica de Contabilidad y Comercio”; “CARE Increases Volume of Aid to Panama in Numerous Ways”; “El Vice-­Pdte. Nixon llegó a El Salvador”; “Pingüino en Puerto Armuelles.”25 Turn to página nueve, “CUBITOS MAGGI ¡SON MAGICOS!” (“el mejor caldo-­base para su sopa.”) On the same page, HOY, due to public demand and to celebrate Mother’s Day, Auto-­Cine presents: “bajo una lluvia de balas mar24. The best work on the development of the relationships within the Zone is Michael E. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). On the Chinese community in Panamá, see Lok C. D. Siu, Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). There are no scholarly works to date on the small but economically important Jewish and Arab communities in Panama City and Colón. 25. The three Spanish language headlines are from La Estrella de Panamá, February 16, 1955. The English headlines “CARE Increases Volume of Aid to Panama in Numerous Ways” is from the Star and Herald, December 5, 1954, 9.

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chó solo hacia la peor madriguera de bandidos! HASTA EL ÚLTIMO TIRO, protagonizada por George MONTGOMERY, Dorothy MALONE.”26 Notice the little box in which CPR advertises its radio programs: mostly in Spanish, with a few in English or in Chinese.27 What kind of internal world develops when you watch Hollywood depictions, sometimes of yourself as Other, dubbed? Maybe Sarita Montiel—“llamada por la prensa de los EE.UU. la Marilyn Monroe latina”—will know the answer. She arrives in Panamá today, February 18, 1955, having finished her latest film, “where she acted alongside, no less, the famous stars Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster.”28 Maybe, even if debilitating or crippling, there’s nothing inherently contradictory, for a woman, say, to be constantly reading the world from a man’s perspective . . . but think about what it means to be opening the newspaper every day from two sides. Is there no contradiction in reading of the wonders of “American,” that is, US-­ian defense of freedom in Formosa, following Tarzan’s struggles in translation, and listening to the news of another treaty in which our politicians are forced to give up still more national territory to a foreign empire? Quizás, quizás, quizás. At the very least, the official discourse of the day, just as the dual-­language newspapers that were reproducing it, failed to grasp the tensions and contradictions that lay underneath it. The contrast was part of the cities’ scenery. Looking from the Panamanian side into the Zone, you saw a wonderland of tidy lawns across the road. The houses were two- or three-­story wooden dreams in neat rows; even the palm trees were lined up. It wasn’t just that one side had giant houses and neat lawns, and on the other end they were older, shabby-­looking; or that the streets were denser and messier here; or that you could see malnourished kids playing in our alleys. Most US soldiers and Zonians considered crossing into Panamá as a kind of entry into a red-­light country. Coming from the extreme rigidity of a state-­operated, segregated, and tightly controlled space, into an extraordinarily heterogeneous country with improvised housing and cha­ eanings. otic traffic, the aesthetic difference carried larger m Zonians and US soldiers acted wildly, and when they got away with it, 26. La Estrella de Panamá, Wednesday, December 8, 1954, 9. 27. For example, see its itinerary advertised in La Estrella de Panamá, February 17, 1955, 2. 28. El País, Thursday, February 10, 1955, 1.

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Historic American Buildings Survey, Quarry Heights, Officers’ Quarters,

Parkinson Lane, Balboa, Former Panama Canal Zone, CZ. General view in context, facing northwest. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC, HABS CZ,1-­B ALB.V,2A-­1.)

the stereotypes were reinforced. While the pictures changed over time, the contrast between the two sides only became sharper. The Panamá of Porras was unpaved but spacious. By the 1950s, while the Canal Zone maintained its aura—a mix of wealthy suburbs and groomed military bases—Panamanian working-­class neighborhoods were already overcrowded and suffocating. The difference was translated into social script. In the land of well-­ groomed lawns, the two worlds were often talked about in sexual or amorous terms, the US representing the man, Panamá being the woman. That’s common in colonial settings—the native is feminized, and the feminine is seen as everything that’s negative. Panamanians were stupid, emotional, lazy, materialistic (pathetically so, whereas the Zonians were charmingly up to date in their consumerism). All variations of the same dark-­eyed, unchanging woman: “There was something 180

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feline about her—something calculating, treacherous.”29 Some Panamanian women went to dances at the Fort Amador NCO club, even while the Zonians called them “gate girls” and regarded them as prostitutes with style. And yes, some “artistas” ended up having affairs with soldiers, sometimes giving birth to their babies. These women were often abandoned, occasionally married. But whatever the relationship— casual or permanent, with an artista or a woman of the interior—it was important not to break the hierarchy in the relationship between the two worlds. A North American could love a Panamanian woman, but he would remind himself from time to time that he did not “understand the Latin temperament” and anyway, as one character added, “it’s a mistake to take it too seriously.”30 Within each society, the relative power of each group represented its masculinity, so that working classes in both the Zone and Panamá were feminized and infantilized. This partly explains why desires and relationships that couldn’t comfortably sit within these social hierarchies were even more problematic. Gay and lesbian relations, especially between people on either side of the border, were extremely threatening. Relationships between American women (especially those who were white) and Panamanian or Antillean men were highly problematic— and the darker the man’s skin, the more dangerous the relationship. But even a fairly conventional relationship, between a Panamanian woman and a working-­class American soldier, regardless of how common it was, could cause scorn, if not indignation.31 29. The quote is from Kathleen Moore Knight’s novel, Death Came Dancing (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940), 8. The book depicts the 1940 case in which Zonian Eileen Watson murdered her Panamanian and Zonian (“Panagringo”) lover after a party in the Club Unión. The novel is cited in Michael E. Donoghue’s discussion of the Eileen Watson case. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus, 138. 30. Knight, Death Came Dancing, 28. The best source on relationships between American men and Panamanian women is Donoghue, chap. 4. The word artista in Panamá meant a sex worker who worked in a brothel or strip club, rather than on the street. While containing some rather sketchy generalizations, the account of sociologists John and Mavis Biesanz, written in the 1950s, is helpful too. See John Berry Biesanz and Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, The People of Panama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 310–14. 31. These relationships were dangerous on both sides of the Panama–­US divide, as Donoghue’s work shows. While perhaps not very common, Panamanian men could

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So the two scripts that were underwriting the postwar regime were in trouble. The liberal-­legalistic script was undermined by its clash with the imperial regime across the street. Its main tenets—sovereignty, democracy, meritocracy, and equality before the law—were met by a reality of Jim Crow discrimination and imperial legalistic pretense. And they encountered an equally strong foe in the system of patronage, patriarchal friendship, and nepotism. Indeed, nationalist masculinity was at every turn frustrated by the relationship with the empire. Panamá thus lived in perpetual crisis, and one that could not have a simple political ­solution. XI. Del Valle hen I returned from Coiba, they let me make a phone call from the police station. I called home but there was no one there. I called Ale’s brother, Moisés, who for the first second thought it was a prank. He came and picked me up in his old Toyota, and even had the sense to bring me a change of clothes. Moisés was always my favorite in Ale’s family, a practical man. As soon as he got to the station he must have slipped a few bills around, because we were out of there in thirty minutes. At home, everyone was waiting. Someone had already called my family in the interior, and one cousin who lived in the city managed to make it. God only knows how they managed it, but our apartment had quickly been organized for this surprise reception, and there was already some wine and food out. When I reminded him of it last year, Moisés joked that I looked like one of those ancient men who had lived in a cave for a thousand years.

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become violent toward Zonians or US soldiers, as happened when the chief of the Panamanian Secret Police branch in Colón assaulted and injured a US soldier who was sitting with his pregnant Panamanian girlfriend at the Joe Louis Bar in 1952. Initially, Panamanian authorities found the American soldier guilty and absolved the Panamanian officer. After an investigation by US authorities, Panamanians investigated the matter, confirming the US version of events. The Panamanian officer was eventually jailed for thirty days and sacked. Héctor Valdés Jr., inspector general, Policía Secreta Nacional, to J. S. Cox, provost marshal, U.S. Army, Caribbean, Fort Amador, C.Z., January 26, 1952, file “Policía Nacional, Correspondencia con la Zona del Canal, 1952,” SAE, ANP. Other documentation in the same file includes transcripts of investigations by US military officials as well as the Panamanian police, and correspondence between various US and Panamanian officers.

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I had not slept properly for two nights on account of the voyage; I was dehydrated and emotionally drained. As we came into the apartment, four people who were standing on the other side of the door jumped on me in a kind of collective ay! As I was hugged, my eyes found Ale standing by the window in the other end of the room, and I tried not to notice the young lady standing right next to her. But in the half second I looked around, before Tía Miranda embraced me, I noted this young lady: dark brown skin, eyes, sharp, narrow, a touch of golden eye shadow, looking straight at me. A million thoughts ran through my head all at once, and there was no way to separate every memory, fear, and hope which floated all in at once . . . but I recall that—I distinctly recall—that this fantastically beautiful young woman was somehow familiar, and that there was something frightening about this familiarity. As someone else embraced me and warm words echoed all around, I noticed in the corner of my eye that Ale and the panther lady were walking toward me—Ale, coldly, with full composure, as only Ale can, and the other one had the same walk, the same composure, the same head held high by that neck—and then it struck me. Tali! My baby, my baby, my little baby! Tali, a woman. “You’re a little late for lunch,” Ale said, referring to the fact that I had missed lunch on the Saturday of my arrest. I wanted to laugh but I could barely make sense of what she said because I was suddenly overcome with emotion. I cried as I hugged her, and I noticed her gentle tears too, and I felt that we would eventually forgive each other. But it was all so quick: Ale let go and said that I should embrace my daughter. “There must be some mistake! This isn’t my little baby!” Everyone laughed, and then there was something like a general sigh. We hugged, and I could tell she was confused too. Then we stood there and Ale put her hand ever so gently around her daughter’s shoulder. The entire room now took in Tali’s mesmerizing beauty. Ale said: “The smartest girl in our school system, but when she walks, the earth stops. Out of jealousy for those eyes.” I don’t think I ever saw Ale look at our Tali like that, with that combination of pride and overflowing warmth. But Tali seemed in her own world. She showed no external emotion, but only laughed gently, as she does when she’s a little embarrassed. Her eyes were taking everything in at once. I had the notion then that the way she observed her surroundings was similar to my way. 183

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XII. Tali Del Valle, Note on Cecilia Pinel de Remón ith Arnulfo in prison, and although large groups within the oligarchy and the middle class strongly opposed the militarization, Colonel Remón was now the undisputed boss of the country. But it was Remón’s wife, Cecilia Pinel de Remón, who outlined the way for the consolidation of his regime. Cecilia was the daughter of a pearl businessman who had lost the family’s money, and although at the time of her marriage she could no longer afford the comfort of the upper class, she had been educated in Boston and, like the colonel, dreamed of returning to her former social standing. Their marriage, by any measure a successful political union, was to become an unhappy one too: Remón’s children were of premarital and extramarital unions, and the concerned eyes of the capital would often see divorce as imminent. Cecilia apparently advised her husband throughout his career, and in 1951 it was she who pressured the strongman to “come in through the front door” by quitting the police and running for president. A contemporary American political scientist wrote:

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The campaign was barely underway when a clash of novel and traditional ideas on campaigning occurred. Major Alfredo Alemán, the CPN [Coalición Patriótica Nacional] treasurer, had called on Sra. de Remón presenting her with a $300 credit for beer to be dispensed to women voters. A discussion lasting several hours followed. The neophyte conjectured that the veteran of many political campaigns would attract few votes on the distaff side by employing only methods that had worked successfully on the men. Sra. de Remón presented a plan for organizing the ladies separately from the men, for the latter would not attend political rallies accompanied by their wives. At gatherings of women, food packages containing not beer but flour, rice, and other staples, would be distributed. The wrapper would carry the party slogan, “Remón sirve al pueblo” (“Remón serves the people”). Although skeptical that her plan would work, the Major was willing to experiment. The food parcel was an immediate success in the hungry, densely populated sections of the capital. Among the first CPN politicians to congratulate Sra. de Remón on the success of her food distribution plan was Major Alemán. Cecilia had proved her point and asked that the Major stay out of the women’s program. She would take the responsibility for its success or its failure. Once 184

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the campaign activity in Panama City was underway, Sra. de Remón turned to the rural areas. The interior of the canal-­bisected country was roadless except for the unfinished Inter-­American Highway and a few feeder roads. When it was not in use, “Ceci” traveled in her husband’s slogan-­plastered airplane, but she never scorned a jeep or a dugout canoe. She traveled on horseback and on foot. In so doing, the wife of the Colonel campaigned at many interior crossroads and met countless people who her husband was unable to contact. The Colonel, who spent the weekdays in the capital, getting the coalition to work as a single political machine, would on the weekends, campaign at a central point of the election belt in which his wife had been active on the preceding days.32 Doña Cecilia knew that offering women alcohol was offensive, as the Unión Nacional de Mujeres had only a few years earlier articulated a demand that no more liquor should be served in electoral campaigns.33 To most women, elections had been associated with a public cantina culture, in which political bosses offered men free drinks in return for 32. Pippin, The Remón Era, 84–85. Pippin based some of his statements on interviews with Cecilia Pinel de Remón, as well as with other friends and colleagues of Remón. Another relevant source is Biesanz and Biesanz, The People of Panama, 164– 65. According to the sociologist and feminist leader Georgina López de Jiménez, about 50% of the women voted in the 1952 elections, but it is impossible to know how women’s votes split. The opposition, for its part, tried to connect Remón’s militarism with a masculine chauvinism, arguing that women should cast a vote for “civilian government.” Georgina Jiménez de López, “Participación de la mujer en la vida pública,” Anuario de Derecho 4, no. 4 (1960–59): 266. Finally, it is impossible to know to what degree Remón manipulated the election’s results. There were certainly claims of mass electoral fraud, but no shortage of observers who claimed that Remón’s coalition had a clear majority. Remón spoke with the head of the United Fruit Company in Panamá “and assured him most categorically that he would be elected.” The US embassy reported on this conversation, saying that “the Colonel states that he has the votes, the government is behind him and that he will control the electoral machinery.” Remón intervened in the Assembly before he was elected to prevent passage of a law that would have obliged United Fruit to pay a special minimum wage to its employees. John C. Wiley, U.S. Embassy, Panamá, to State, January 24, 1952, disp. no. 528, Records of the U.S. Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Panama, 1950– 1954 (microfilm roll 4), Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002. 33. See “Segundo manifiesto a la nación,” in Clara González, Clara González, la mujer del siglo, ed. Anayansi Turner (Panamá, RP: Imprenta Articsa, 2006), 177.

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identification cards, which would later be stuffed into the ballot boxes. Instead, her campaign progressively changed the goods, from food and household products, to dental services, medicine, and cookware. Rice bowls with the strongman’s face imprinted on their bottom can sometimes still be found in rural Panamá. Cecilia Remón’s career during and after her husband’s presidency would follow this pattern. A public woman, yes, but Doña Cecilia refused the title of feminist. Though her public role could not have been achieved without almost three decades of feminist struggles, she did not see herself as, and really was not, a bearer of their struggle. It is said that the conditions she saw firsthand during the campaign moved her. As First Lady, she enrolled in a course in social work at the university. She began touring the countryside again, this time with the Society of Mutual Aid, which she had established, and other organizations. She declared often that women should use their vote to influence their society, rather than cast an automatic vote with their husbands. These words and actions could well have been influenced by the example of women like Clara González and Georgina Jiménez. But Cecilia did not adopt their critique of patriarchy, and they, for their part, fully understood the limitations of her kind of politics. It is an open question whether she was conscious of being “caught in bad scripts,” or if she wholeheartedly believed in the role she was playing.34 Clara González, who spoke on such matters often, would spell out the consequences of this kind of politics a decade later: To what level of corruption have we now come, when in this country of equal constitutional and legal opportunities, those who lack the resources to invest gross sums of money to buy votes—every time at a higher price—cannot aspire to elected position, unless they have a wealthy politician to back them, with the natural consequence of having to submit to him later? Unfortunately, in this political school, women—luckily, not all of them—have gained the malice necessary for the exercise of deceptive games, and have become accomplices of detestable practices.35 34. A reference to Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 35. C. González, Clara González, la mujer del siglo, 189.

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Women had achieved a lot, claimed González in this short essay. They had won the franchise, and some women were even elected for office— though only a few, and only under the political patronage of powerful men. But without “permanent and disciplined political organizations,” women’s influence on the country would remain weak.36 They would not gain full equality, and as Clara González understood, they would not live up to their calling, transform the “hybrid state,” and democratize their country. XIII. Tali Del Valle, Diary Entries, 1992 he first time I came around to the Nacional, I was amazed at how run-­down the place looked. Broken windows in Artes, stairways that haven’t been touched up since they were built, in like 1954 or something, a mural of Mao. I go to private school during the day, with our red and white uniforms, switch in the ladies’ room, and here I am. The theater people hanging outside of class, a couple smoking, people talking, laughing. I was like, hi, I’m a friend of Clara N. (I didn’t know if I should take my hands out of my pockets or not) . . . este . . . Carlo told her I could come and they would maybe have a role for me. It’s here, right? They look at me, amused. Carlo? Then a girl with huge curls makes a big-­sisterly gesture at me, and says she’ll ask The Don. I wait, standing beside two guys who are leaning their backs on the wall. One of them is wearing an old Iron Maiden T-­shirt, and the other has a rasta hat on (it’s a little warm for those, if you ask me, but it looks good on him). They glance at me, you mean Boom-­Boom? Carlo-­Iván Mateo? We call him Boom-­Boom. So I go oh, I don’t know him myself. The one with the Iron Maiden shirt says chévere. My name’s Ricardo-­D and this is Yonny. They were polite, but you know. Normal. The Don looked at me for a few seconds, imagining me in the role, and I guess he must have doubted it, seeing as I’m fourteen and really look younger . . . I don’t know this because at that point I hadn’t seen the script, but just then, standing a few seconds before this strange man with his impeccable style, I could tell he was considering some risk. He

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36. González, 190. The best and most comprehensive work on Clara González is Yolanda Marco Serra, Clara González de Behringer: Biografía (Panamá, RP: Universidad de Panamá, Cooperación Española, 2007). For a broader view of women’s struggles in Panamá, see Aparicio, Historia de los movimientos de mujeres.

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gave me the script and said, with a bit of an exaggerated manner, why don’t you try and read this. Now? Sure, now, act it out. You’re a woman who is fascinated with jaguars. Fascinated, frightened, slowly coming to terms with a danger within you. “Chévere,” I said. I took another minute, read the entire page silently, and then transformed myself into a jaguar woman and that was it. He read the other roles, I read the jaguar woman, and we stopped after two pages when he asked me for my hand. He shook my hand and asked me in English—mimicking a Hollywood character—if I had any idea how much he loved me. I giggled. He told me we were going to be good friends, and then remembered—have I asked my parents for permission? Oh yes, I lied, they support Art. Of course I loved it all. The only place I felt I could truly breathe was there. School, no air. My parents’ place, no air. With my friends, sitting at the park, no air, no air. XIV. Tali Del Valle, Diary Entries, April 19, 2002 ​t the hospital, Dad’s okay for now and I mask my fear with hyperactivity. Who knows what will happen. I reminded him of the time I had my last asthma attack and was in the hospital. He puts his hand on the back of my hand, and I notice how fragile he has suddenly become. He has me reading him the Joaquín Bolaño trilogy now. We’re in Gamboa Road Gang, p. 77. An hour later, I sit with Mom in the corridor, both of us silent, ­thinking. “I’m worried,” Mom suddenly says, “about the apartment. It’s been ages since it’s been cleaned. Is there anything to offer the guests?” “There’s some fruit,” I say, thinking about something else. “I want you to do some shopping. So that we can offer . . . your father’s family is so large, and people are coming to support us, gracias a Dios . . . at the very least they should be able to stop by before . . .” I say nothing. Some time passes with the hospital’s low hum. Some thought makes me nauseous. “Already there’s that smell, it’s the damn humidity. We’re lucky we haven’t had any problems with cockroaches this year, but if the apartment stands empty all day,” she reflects again, “it’ll begin to stink . . .” I don’t respond, looking at my black nail polish, which is starting to fade. I feel my stomach.

A

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“Now that your father can read again, we should give him a little more time alone.” I don’t respond. She says he needs his space. She says we need to remember to water the flowers. (Ay, my stomach.) I don’t know what else she’s saying. I think this has happened between us before . . . I feel numb. I wonder why there’s a few years I have so few memories of . . . a strange feeling. I feel like going for a walk—these fluorescent lights are starting to get to me. Are there any ice cream shops open this late? She’s saying something; I turn a shoulder to her and stare at the other side. It’s happened before—we don’t remember. She stares forward, pretending not to notice that something is happening to me. I want to disappear. XV. Del Valle, Assorted Notes, 1993 f Remón had stayed in office for longer than twenty-­seven months, it is possible that he would have established himself as a dictator in the violent tradition of the circum-­Caribbean. He controlled all but five deputies in the Assembly according to one count, and a majority of the Supreme Court’s judges answered to him. (He had exercised a covert veto power since 1947, when he took control of the police.) His “Law of the 45,000” decreed that any party that had not reached that number of votes in the 1952 election could not be recognized legally. The parties that constituted his own CPN [Coalición Patriótica Nacional] could be quickly reorganized into a single party. The same was not allowed in the case of the Alianza Civil, the coalition that had run against him. Arnulfo’s Panameñista party had not run in the last elections, so it too was illegal. Oppositional groups seemed to have acknowledged defeat. After he threatened to close the university if a strike were held, students stopped almost all their political activity. In keeping with hemispheric fashions, the colonel outlawed all Communist activity (and in this case, moved quickly to make arrests). He limited the rights of labor unions to strike, and sent the chief of police with two other trusted men to mediate a labor dispute, which was promptly resolved. The press was never completely censored, but it was brought in line, in part by reaching a status quo with Harmodio Arias Madrid, who controlled half of the country’s media outlets.37 Thus, within a year, Remón effectively muzzled most

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37. Pippin notes that under José Remón’s tenure, Antonio Arias, Harmodio Arias Madrid’s son, became the vice president of the Cooperativa Pesquera, a firm in which

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public political expression and restored “calm.”38 But evidence suggests that the Pax Remona was unpopular. Overwhelmingly, Panamanians of all classes understood democratic freedoms and valued them—76% of them thought that their country was not free.39 This statistic was true in 1949—that is, before the ramping up of repressive measures. Back then, 48% believed their country did not have free and fair elections. Significantly: the middle class was most concerned with these issues— almost 80% of that sector did not believe in the legality of their system. Remón’s authoritative measures were thus applied to a public that understood the promise of democracy and placed a high value on its freedom. At the same time, Remón’s control over the bureaucracy meant he could make some improvements in its functioning. A World Bank report calculated that there were almost twice as many employees working for the government in 1950 as there had been a decade earlier, without a corresponding increase in services rendered.40 Remón was said to have appeared personally in government offices in the morning to ensure that they were actually open. He lowered the budget deficit from over $8 million when he came into office, to $2 million in the next year. Later he also reformed the tax code, and he established a progressive income tax system in 1954.41 Alejandro Remón was president. Antonio Arias’s prospering in that role shows that the colonel was willing to accommodate his chief rivals when it made sense to do so. Pippin, The Remón Era, 93. 38. Regarding Remón’s repression more generally: Pippin, chap. 8; Biesanz and Biesanz, The People of Panama, 161–64. 39. Carolyn Campbell, “Political Freedoms,” Panamanian Institute of Public Opinion 4 (October 1949). 40. Star and Herald, August 24, 1952, cited in Biesanz and Biesanz, The People of Panama, 145. The authors attributed the lax service in government offices to the fact that most of those serving in them had received their jobs due to connections rather than merit. “In one office a Panamanian noted hour by hour through a typical day the employees who were working and those were chatting with fellow clerks, doing their nails, courting, jesting, going out for coffee, or otherwise loafing. He found less than half the time spent working. Yet, people came to the office and had to wait; some waited for hours to get the help they needed, while others were never served at all” (146). 41. On Remón’s tax reforms, see Louis C. Nolan, economic attaché, U.S. Embassy, Panamá, to State Department, February 18, 1953, Disp. No. 727 (Microfilm), Records

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Unlike his political maneuvers in other fields, however, in foreign policy Remón reached out to a broad field of statesmen, some of whom were his most powerful opponents. The result was perhaps the strongest diplomatic team the country had fielded, which included Harmodio Arias Madrid and Ricardo J. Alfaro. In March 1953, he coined the phrase that would serve as Panamá’s motto for the talks: “Neither alms nor millions, we want justice!” The US embassy was taken by surprise, but [President Dwight] Eisenhower agreed to enter negotiations. The Panamanians demanded not only a change of the annuity, but also the implementation of the equal employment promise of 1936; the power to tax Panamanian canal employees; more Canal Zone purchases of Panamanian goods; and various other issues, the most important of which was the repeal of article III of the Hay–­Bunau-­Varilla Treaty of 1903, which had granted the US control over the Canal Zone as though it were sovereign. Throughout the negotiations, Remón used national and international forums to step up pressure on the US government. Reportedly, 100,000 people showed up at the massive rally he held in support of the talks.42 In Caracas, in 1954, Cecilia Remón criticized the discrimination in the Canal Zone at the Organization of American States. Carpintero pointed out to me that the advances made by the center-­left elsewhere—with Jacobo Arbenz reforming Guatemala and Gamal Abdel Nasser demanding that Egypt be handed over the Suez Canal—­ provided the perfect context for these maneuvers. Remón’s administration repeated the claim that the Canal Zone’s injustices made communist arguments gain credence in Panamá. And within the international context that was quickly taking shape, the Eisenhower administration wanted to avoid another trouble spot in the Isthmus.43 of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Panama, 1950–54, RG 59, reel 4, Columbia University. 42. Pippin claims that “the presence at the gathering of all living ex-­presidents except Arnulfo Arias preserved the nonpartisan theme of the entire negotiation drive. No partisan symbols—posters, signs, and party banners—were permitted at the assembly.” Pippin, The Remón Era, 110. 43. Another factor in the negotiation was the Canal Zone 1950 reforms. Before, the military had run the canal and the civilian life surrounding it, and various administrative reports found the entire Zone inefficient. President Truman decided to turn all commercial activities over to a new, civilian Panama Canal Company. Municipal

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After sixteen months of negotiations, having resolved several impasses, the parties finally reached a compromise towards the end of 1954. The US would not consider any change of its sovereignty over the Canal Zone, but Panamá made several gains. Panamá could now tax Antillean canal employees, and the annuity would be raised to $1.93 million. The US promised equal pay rates regardless of nationality—a promise that was never truly implemented. The US also promised to build a bridge over the canal, and to cede grounds it was not using around Panamá and Colón. If this was not all they had hoped for, at the end of 1954 Remón and his negotiators could return home as victors. They had managed a significant revision of previous treaties. In sum, after two years in office, Remón seemed as though he had finally figured out a formula to make the hybrid state function. He stabilized the regime and pushed through significant reforms even as he oversaw the most significant revision of the treaties with the US in decades. And he did this without altering the status quo between the patriarchal and bureaucratic scripts. Indeed, his rule depended as much on his careful maneuvering between them as on his repressive efforts. Hence, the status quo completely depended on José Antonio Remón himself.

functions would be run by a new organism called the Canal Zone Government, and the goal was now that half of the Zone’s costs would be defrayed by tolls. For the Zonians, the idea that their playground would be run by businessmen (and that their high standard of living would be reduced) came as a shock. Their anger at Washington was so wild that for a short moment they began backing Panamanian demands for a larger annuity and for equal pay for the nonwhite workers. The unprecedented and never-­to-­ be-­repeated support for Panamá may have aided Remón’s bid in the negotiation. See Major, Prize Possession, chap. 8.

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5 Trials of Authority Legal Consciousness and Formal Struggles in the Postwar Era …

I. Del Valle, Final Draft, La Prensa Series resident Remón was having a few drinks with some friends in the clubhouse of the Juan Franco Racetrack on the night of January 2, 1955. José Peralta, who had recently lost his job, sat for a minute and asked the president to use his influence to get Pitin Obarrio, the owner of the racetrack, to rehire him. A few minutes later, Obarrio obliged Remón and Peralta had his job back. At one point Remón was fondling Olga Yanis, the beautiful high school teacher. Later, he told Thelma King she should not be so friendly with Jorge Illueca, the student leader turned Asamblea deputy. King told the president that Illueca was doing what he thought best for the nation. Then Remón said she was being too friendly with Norberto Navarro, the leader of the Partido Revolucionario Independiente. The president finally said that he was going to fire King from her post as minister of work, social welfare, and public health. Someone later claimed that King had a little pistol in her personal bag, but President Remón must not have known this when he threatened her. Firecrackers were heard all around, leftovers from the New Year’s celebration of the night before.1

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1. Various accounts of the events circulated in the press; some of the best sources available today, however, are the secret reports produced by the agents of the US 470th Military Intelligence unit (470th MI). Agents of the unit worked for about two months gathering evidence on the case, and produced some eight hundred pages of secret reports. It is unclear if the unit was officially asked to do this, but—as was usually the case—its agents had no problem gathering information at all levels of civil society, government and police forces. Editor’s interview with Richard Koster, former agent, 470th MI, Panamá, RP, July 22, 2007. (For biographical information about Koster, see 159n5.) See also Arsenio P. Sánchez Jr., agent, 470th MI, report, January 4, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, Records of the Army Staff, RG 319, NACP. Sánchez based his report on a conversation his informant had with city councilman Alfonso “Mono” Pérez, who was at the scene. Pérez also claimed that it was later found out that Thelma King

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The clubhouse was open from all sides, and looked a little like an upscale cantina: cheap wooden tables and folding chairs, a few beer bottles lying around. It stood just a bit higher than the horse track, so that if they had been seated at the tables during a race, the horses would have passed some fifty feet from them. At night, the sitting area was well lit, but the surrounding space, though completely open around them, was pitch black. At the tables around the president were fifteen people, among them city councilman Alfonso “Mono” Pérez; national assemblymen Antonio Anguizola and Julian A. Fernández; Danilo Sousa, the swimmer; and Antonio Santamaría, a night court judge. It was around 7:30 p.m. When the first shots were fired, Remón said, “There go those damn firecrackers again.”2 A moment later, the president was on the ground. The bodyguards later claimed they did not understand where the shots were coming from—an odd statement, given that at least one of the assailants was shooting multiple rounds from a submachine gun, which would have been easy to see in the darkness. According to several sources, however, there was more than one shooter, making the situation of the attacked more confusing.3 Yanis threw herself on the floor immediately; those who managed to, crawled to the back. had a .45-­caliber semiautomatic pistol in her purse. Another report by the same agent on January 6, 1955, in the same file, gives a version of Assembly Deputy Julian A. Fernández. See also “Report by Francisco J. González, 470th Military Intelligence, January 5, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, Records of the Army Staff, RG 319, NACP, which was based on a conversation with Lt. Col. Carlos Arosemena G., executive secretary (adjutant) of the Guardia Nacional, and owner of the bar at the clubhouse. Arosemena witnessed the shooting and was privy to the Guardia Nacional’s investigation. 2. Arsenio P. Sánchez Jr., report, January 4, 1955. 3. Borrel Gonzáles came at around 6 p.m. to look for his father-­in-­law, José Arosemena Galindo. He was injured during the shooting, and finally crawled out of the clubhouse. Once on his feet outside, he saw two black men sitting on the back fenders of a Willys in light jackets (“guayaberas”). He asked them to take him to the hospital, but they didn’t answer. Assuming they were part of the hit squad, he walked by himself to Vía España. F. Alvarado Jr. et al., Sumarias para averiguar quién o quiénes son los responsables por los hechos ocurridos el día dos de enero de este año (1955) en el Hipódromo de Juan Franco, a cuya consecuencia murió el Ex-­Presidente de la República, Coronel José Antonio Remón Cantera, José M. Peralta, Danilo Sousa y Antonio Anguizola (Panamá, RP: Comisión Investigadora, 1955), tomo IIIB, 474–76, BAN. (This is the official docket prepared for the investigation and its volumes, tomo I, II, III, etc.; hereafter expediente tomo I–­III). I have not been able to find the original trial

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Scene of the assassination of President José Antonio Remón, at the clubhouse of the Juan Franco Racetrack. (Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park, declassified photo, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP.)

Remón was taken in critical condition to the hospital, and his death was soon certified. The shooting occurred at the exact time that the National Guard shifts change, and the policemen’s initial response was confused. Finally understanding what had happened, the officers moved into emergency positions; but when no coup materialized, they turned their attention to stabilizing their control of the state. Vice President José Ramón Guizado, having learned from the doctors that surgery had failed and the president was dead, went directly to the National Guard headquarters. There, Minister of Government and Justice Catadocket, and it may very well be that it has been lost. Between the Biblioteca Nacional de Panamá in Parque Omar and the Biblioteca de la Asamblea Nacional, copies of the official dockets can be found. But the documentation used to prepare the docket is nowhere to be found, and some of the official proceedings of the 1957 cases are lost too. Significantly, neither the Supreme Court nor the National Archives Judicial Section holds a copy of any of the official records of the trial. See also José Vicente Romeu, Del caso Remón-­Guizado (Panamá, RP: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Editorial Mariano Arosemena, 2000), 50; on the people who were at the racetrack, see 46–47.

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lino Arrocha Graell, First Commandant Bolívar Vallarino, and Second in Command Saturnino Flores took him to the commandant’s office. They asked the vice president what course he intended to take if sworn in, and when they were satisfied with his answer—that he would keep things as they had been—they told him he was now president. They all shook hands.4 The next day, the formalities of mourning began in earnest. Telegrams of support were sent from every corner. A suspicious number of influential people were in the US at the time—the dead president’s wife and brother among them—and they rushed home on special flights. The funeral, on the evening of January third, was a massive event, in which somewhere between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand people participated. But is it true, as one newspaper had it, that “the entire country, facing the shameful crime in horror, expressed its deep pain and profound anguish” as it rendered its farewell to Remón?5 The newspaper felt no special sentiment about the advertisement for that night’s films appearing as usual.6 (Carpintero brings me a text by Humberto 4. José Ramón Guizado, El extraño asesinato del presidente Remón (Barcelona: Editorial Linomonograph, 1964), 37. 5. “Ante la tumba del Coronel Remón, todos los Panameños rinden el tributo de su gratitud,” La Nación, January 4, 1955, 5. Newspapers of all political stripes ran similar stories of national agony. 6. The US agent who reported on the funeral that night claimed that “no sign of grief or sorrow was apparent among the masses.” Quite the opposite: “With no respect for the occasion, several groups were formed in which jokes of the worst taste were told. People pushed just for the fun of it; laughing and talking loudly. Thirty cars, which included hired taxis, brought in wreaths which piled up in the small space around the grave. Remón’s body arrived at 1815R on a funeral truck of the fire department. The coffin was taken down and placed on the concrete pavement of the center aisle of the cemetery. As it started to get dark, the people began to move out of the cemetery. Speeches, made at the grave side and broadcast[ed] over most of the local radio stations, had to be read with the aid of a flashlight as there was no lighting in the area. [. . .] President Guizado, accompanied by his cabinet, left about 45 minutes before the burial. Members of the National Assembly also left shortly thereafter. Fifteen minutes before the remains were actually buried in grave number 4, second row from the left of the center aisle entering from Jerónimo de la Ossa Street, scarcely a hundred people remained at the cemetery. Hampered by the absence of adequate lighting, the work was slow and uneasy. An official car was driven into the aisle to furnish light with its headlamps. Volunteers were enlisted from the little crowd present to help put the coffin into the grave. This was finally done at 2115 hours. Three volleys of rifle fire

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Ricord, who claimed that the rhetoric about popular agony was completely empty. After the first days of surprise and confusion, the popular notion was, according to Ricord, that “he who kills by the sword dies by the sword.” 7) Rumors, which would play an important role throughout the affair, were now circulating fast and without a clear direction. It was said that Bolívar Vallarino, first commander of the Guardia Nacional, had left fifteen minutes before the shooting began. Thelma King was found in the toilet after the shooting subsided. (Some said she ran there as the shooting began, while others claimed she had been there a few minutes before.) Danilo Sousa, the swimmer, was injured during the shooting, but there was information that he was finished off by the third commander of the National Guard, Timoteo Meléndez. One Dora Borrero claimed that shortly after the shooting, two foreigners came to see socialist intellectual Diógenes de la Rosa, and that one of them said, “The job has been completed.” De la Rosa was said to have replied: “Good, you may leave now.”8 Various theories developed in the next months. The first two groups suspected were the communists and the right-­wing arnulfistas. Remón had repressed both groups with a thoroughness that was unprecedented in Panamá. Seeing as the attack took place on January 2—the anniverwere heard from a distance estimated to be about 75 yards from the grave.” Ramon M. Velez-­Rodriguez, Agent, 470th MI, report, January 4, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. 7. In Spanish, “Quien a hierro mata, a hierro muere.” Humberto Ricord Donado, Cinco ensayos sobre la revolución panameña (México, DF: Editora Vanguardia, 1962), 100. 8. About the execution of Sousa, see an early version, as told by Partido Liberal Renovador member Rodolfo Federico Samuda. In Arsenio P. Sánchez Jr., agent, 470th MI, report, January 4, 1955,” file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. Another version of the same information claimed that bullet holes could be seen in the car transporting Sousa to the hospital. See Castro Soto, 470th MI, report, January 21, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. Within two months, both of these claims would be public knowledge. The CIA report on the same issue is even more detailed and clear than the others. See U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “Activities of Guardia Nacional (GN) Official Following Remon Assassination,” May 9, 1956, http://​www​.foia​ .cia​.gov​/sites​/default ​/files​/document​_conversions​/89801​/DOC​_0001319571​.pdf. The accusation of Diógenes de la Rosa can be found in the above report by Sánchez, who received his information from Deputy Julián Fernández. It was later included in the official docket, expediente tomo I, 49.

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sary of the 1931 Acción Comunal coup—suspicion naturally fell on the veterans of that group, and dozens of arnulfistas were arrested. Diógenes de la Rosa had been working in El Salvador, and the Panamanian ambassador there issued a report claiming that the socialist De la Rosa had bought arms there, before leaving on December 20, 1954.9 Some even hypothesized that the right-­wing arnulfistas had collaborated with the left—international, local, or both—to eliminate their mutual enemy. The two groups had, after all, collaborated in the past, and when it came to fighting treaties with the US, they were capable of putting aside their ideological differences. The Remón–­Eisenhower Treaty was to be signed shortly, so a conspiracy was not unimaginable. And it was noted that the two women at the scene had socialist leanings, as well as sympathy for the anti-­imperialist Arnulfo. Another disaffected group included the Canal Zone workers, who were to be doubly hit—first, by the Remón–­ Eisenhower Treaty’s provision that they would henceforth be taxed, and second, by the loss of their purchasing privileges in the Zone’s commissaries. A more powerful group that had been hit, however, were the wealthy—it was said that Remón had demanded that they pay their taxes. Both Alfredo Alemán and Temístocles (“Temi”) Díaz had been considered friends, and both had fallen out with the President after he demanded that they pay like everyone else.10 9. On initial theories, see Burgin, State Department (DRA), to Pearson, State Department (ARA), January 12, 1955, file no. 719.00/1-­1255, Central Decimal File 1955– 59, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP. Burgin cited the head of the notorious Venezuelan Seguridad Nacional, Pedro Estrada, who told the Americans he thought the shooting a prelude to a Central American flare-­up. He said Remón had warned Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez that Cuban gunmen were planning to liquidate both him and Pérez Jiménez. For his part, Somoza blamed José Figueres and Rómulo Betancourt, and characterized the plot as communist. Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala told his American benefactors that he had received a warning on December 29 that within days Somoza and Remón would be dead. It is still unclear on what these men based their declarations. In Panamá, the newspapers of the period echoed many of the theories outlined above, usually through the mouths of key players in the drama, or by citing an investigation into a certain detail. See also Pippin, The Remón Era, 123. 10. Pippin recounts the following anecdote: “About to leave Panama on official business, Alemán was not allowed an exit permit for having failed to produce a peace and safety certificate indicating that he was up-­to-­date on his tax payments. When a humiliated Alemán took the matter directly to the President, the latter cracked, ‘I pay

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Among those arrested was one Martin Irving Lipstein, a North American who claimed to have been passing through Panamá en route from Venezuela to Mexico City. His presence in Panamá was never clarified, but it aroused immediate speculation. Some said Lipstein had been sent by Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, because Remón had reneged on a promise to help crush President José Figueres of Costa Rica. (The attack was supposed to have been joined by the Nicara‑ guan dictator, Anastasio Somoza. There would be plenty of specula‑ tion that the hit came from Nicaragua for the same reason.) Some suggested that Lipstein was connected to the international narcotics trade, and that the assassination was in response to Remón having stopped cooperating with the mafia in its dealings. No one truly controlled or purposely instigated the rumors, as the National Guard would later learn to do under Omar Torrijos.11 Official acts, like the immediate arrest of so many arnulfistas and communists, were not designed to indicate to the public who was behind the murder. Rather, they were the result of a disorganized and incoherent response of various people and institutions heading the state apparatus at its most chaotic moment. The list of arrests in the first days included characters like the socialists Diógenes de la Rosa and Thelma King; feminist leader, intellectual and educator Georgina Jiménez; and the mysterious gringo, Lipstein. Arnulfo himself was arrested and held incommunicado in a Chiriquí prison, where he was rumored to have been abused. One story had it that Timoteo Meléndez traveled to Chiriquí on January 10 or 11 and personally beat Arnulfo in an interrogation that ended with the doctor losing consciousness. Harmodio Arias Madrid, the most influential man in Panamá, had to meet Colonel Vallarino and demand that the maltreatment of his younger brother stop. Colonel Vallarino in turn got into a serious fight with his third in command over this issue— according to one version, Meléndez had exchanged blows with Second my taxes.’” The Remón Era, 124. Pippin fails to clarify that Remón may have paid his taxes but also stole millions from state coffers, in transactions that became publicly known during the trial. A Panamá América correspondent who had looked at Remón’s will after his death estimated him to have been worth around $8 million. Ramón M. Vélez-­Rodríguez, agent, 470th MI, report, March 22, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. 11. On this, see chap. 6 below.

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in Command Saturnino Flores, and Meléndez was finally jailed for a few hours.12 The story quickly morphed, and the mystery of what had happened at the racetrack soon led to a larger set of questions. The nation began to wonder who was truly controlling the investigation. Was anyone hiding facts from the public or manipulating the legal proceedings? And who, ultimately, was controlling the country? Pieces of information were circulated in the next three years, in the background of the legal proceedings, and in times during which none were taking place; through rumors, in newspapers and on the radio, doubt was cast about the judicial processes. It was not only the lawyers and legal pundits who argued about the case, in court and out in the open. Panamanians of all classes and occupations became detectives and judges of the legal plot, and this heightened legal consciousness would come to have serious historical implications. Indeed, from the first weeks of the Remón Affair, knowledgeable observers commented about the social and political significance of the judicial process. There was constant, if conflicting, speculation about the political consequences of specific outcomes of the trials. Some said the government would collapse if the accused were to be freed; others thought their imprisonment would cause disturbances. The National Guard was on the highest alert during trials and appeals, and the entire state bureaucracy was paralyzed during the final trials of 1957. But what was the fuss all about? If the judicial process was clearly rigged from the beginning, why did Panamanians expect more from our judicial system in the first place? Did people not know that our judiciary had never been an independent branch of government? Judges, after all, had always kept political alliances; bribes and favors could always sway a trial. The police had always been thoroughly corrupt—and it was Remón who brought its power to center stage. Why would anyone in Panamá expect so much as a serious investigation from a police that owned companies, smuggled drugs, and protected brothels? Or, was it the appeal of one or all of the characters in this drama? Surely, no one cared much about Remón. He had never been popular, despite his populist propaganda. He had no personal appeal, no cha12. These rumors appeared in Alphonso E. Marshall, 470th MI, report, January 21, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP.

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risma. He was never seriously committed to the lower classes, as the masses understood all too well. None of the other accused were especially liked either; nothing about any of them was particularly alluring. Nor was it a question of any specific narrative that fascinated the populace. In all three years of judicial proceedings, no narrative ever prevailed. Certainly, the content was fascinating. There was a mystery, and there were members of the wealthiest families accusing one another of a crime—a little like a good radionovela. But something more profound charged the trial with enormous social energy, deeper than any particularity of its content. Historians sometimes imagine themselves to be the final arbiters of the public’s understanding of the human past. They labor to convince one another that their methodology and the meticulousness with which they arrange their evidence proves that it is their interpretation of the past which is the correct one. But let us admit that, in our Panamá, few read works of history. In the case before us, however, lawyers and judges used evidence to make claims about the past, and this had immediate consequences not only for the lives of the accused and their families, but also for the regime. The trials mattered historically, moreover, because they provided the public with a chance to challenge the method our ruling class used to determine what really happened in the past. It was not that any specific narrative about the murder convinced the nation, nor that one character assumed the role of redeemer, as had happened before and after. In fact, the public did not answer the call to judge one or all the defendants, to agree or disagree with their sentence. Instead, it was the judicial system, and with it, the entire political order, that found itself in the docket of the accused. Our thesis is that the judicial crisis of 1955–57 came close to bringing about the collapse of the regime as a whole precisely because during it, the Panamanian people learned to dispute the regime’s rituals of interpretation of social and political reality. As the judicial process unraveled, the public began to demand changes in the form in which the inquiry was being carried out. And it was not just the defense, not just the colegio de abogados or the legal pundits in the newspapers who demanded a change in the method of using evidence to decide what had happened in the past. The masses demanded justice. And people’s notion of justice had less to do with any empathy for some romantic character. (Though empathy there may have been, it was not the cen201

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tral issue). Justice would only be served if the correct methods were followed. If the correct procedures were taken, the truth about the past would be revealed and order would be restored. “

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II. omething” a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all others. She looks fairly young. Twelve or thirteen, maybe a little more, bronze, petite face, a little catlike.” “What about her eyes?” “Clear. Pretty sure they’re green, half closed to focus better on the drawing. She looks at her subject: the black panther or jaguar, whatever it is, at the zoo, which was quiet at first, stretched out in its cage. But when the girl made a noise with her easel and chair, the jaguar spotted her and began pacing back and forth in its cage and to growl at the girl, who up to then was still having trouble with shading in the drawing.” “Couldn’t the animal smell her before that?” “No, there’s a big slab of meat in the cage—that’s all it can smell. The keeper drops the meat near the bars, and it blocks out any smell from outside, that’s the point, so the jaguar won’t get excited. And, noticing the anger of the wild animal, the girl begins to work more feverishly, with faster and faster strokes, and she draws the face of an animal that’s also a devil. And the jaguar watches her, a male jaguar, and it’s hard to tell if he’s watching to tear her to pieces and make a meal of her, or if he’s driven by some other, still uglier instinct.” “Nobody else at the zoo that day?” “I think in the novel there were some children playing in the distance, but in the play, it’s just her and the jaguar. There’s a cold wind blowing. So the girl’s practically by herself, sitting there on the folding chair she brought out herself, along with the easel to clip her drawing paper to.” “And she’s not cold?” “No, she’s not thinking about the cold, it’s as if she’s in some other world, all wrapped up in herself drawing the jaguar.” “If she’s wrapped up inside herself, she’s not in some other world. That’s a contradiction.” “Yes, that’s right, she’s all wrapped up in herself, lost in that world she carries inside her, that she’s just beginning to discover. She has her legs crossed, her shoes are black—think high heels, open toed, with dark-­polished toenails sticking out. Her stockings glitter, that kind they

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turned inside out when the sheen went out of style, her legs look flushed and silky, you can’t tell if it’s the stockings or her skin.” “Look, I mean, the girl you described, the actress, that’s my daughter . . . I’m sure it’s her, and well, let’s not, I mean, it’s enough.” “Whatever you want. Well, it looks like a good-­enough play. You know, rehearsals . . . and she’s a natural at it.” “What, eh, what’s the framework . . . ? I mean, Ale will go crazy if she hears about all this erotic stuff. There’s no, I mean, she doesn’t do any . . .” “Oh no. Not in the play. Not in the novel either. No, see, that’s the problem. This woman comes from somewhere in Romania, some mountains . . . in Transylvania, where it’s all forest, and pretty cold in the winter. Well, there was some Muslim king who was more or less the empire of the day, and he came in there and killed everyone when he conquered the place. And then the men all went to the forest to organize the guerrilla, and the women were left to fend for themselves in the forest.” “It’s a vampire story.” “Hold on—it’s actually pretty complicated. But yeah, bottom line, there was some panther, which I guess in this version they changed into a jaguar, to make it more relevant. Every once in a while, a woman goes to the forest to pick berries or something, and she’s attacked by the jaguar. And most of them get eaten alive, but one of them doesn’t. Something happens, and she returns safe, but a little different. Her eyes are green, and something about her is changed. And when the men return, they notice that a few others are like that, and they understand that in this village, the women made a pact, see . . . and according to the old legend, every once in a while a guy tries to do something with his woman that he probably shouldn’t be doing, and she eats him up and runs off to the forest. Something like that—I didn’t get all the details, and anyhow, that’s just a backstory . . . in the play you don’t hear much about it.” “So what did you tell me about it for? Carpintero, pay attention here—look, I’m just worried about my daughter, I don’t care about all this other stuff.” “Have it your way. I’m just giving you an objective report of what I saw. It’s not every day I get to spy on someone’s daughter.” “So she doesn’t do anything that would get her mother upset.” “That’s the issue. She has this attraction to jaguars, and that’s no coincidence. She begins dating this older man, and one day—” 203

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“An older man? In the actual play, or is that another background story?” “Will you let me finish a sentence?” “Sorry, go on.” “One day, she sits at a restaurant with the guy she’s dating and some other people, and they’re all having a great time. But when the waitress comes to their table, she looks at her—right into her eyes—and Tali is extremely frightened at this. The waitress keeps coming back to her, and finally she tells her something in Romanian, and Tali falls silent. She doesn’t know what to do, and everyone asks her if everything’s all right—but she just says oh, it’s nothing, and asks to leave.” “She does stranger things in real life.” “Little by little, she becomes aware of her true identity, of the power she has in her, and it frightens the wits out of her. She wants to love this man she’s seeing, she wants to kiss him, but she’s afraid that if ever she did, she would tear him apart.” “Well, if she never kisses anyone, it’s probably going to be easier to maintain the peace with her mother.” “Well, I suppose it’s all right in that way, except let me think . . . and there are the metaphors you need to consider . . .” “The metaphors won’t kill anyone.” “Yeah. You know, it’s all a political allegory too. About capitalism, repression, that sort of thing. See, they’re two prisoners in a cell. There’s nothing to do, so to pass the time, the one, a gay prisoner, tells the other one—a Marxist revolutionary—about old Hollywood films he’s seen way back.” “One’s gay and the other one’s a Marxist?” “Scary stuff, huh? Well, she plays the female character in the films the gay one is describing. Actually, they’re only doing two films from the novel. The first one, in which she’s the jaguar woman, and the last one, with the African Santería.” “Well, at least it sounds smart. So they take the old Hollywood movies and recreate them . . . by putting them together like that?” “Yeah, that’s what Puig did in the novel, originally. Then they just had to do a film adaptation of it—with a Hollywood star and money . . . ruined it completely. But this version here is actually quite smart—they made good use of Yankee military propaganda too, screening it in the background at a few points.” 204

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III. Del Valle, Final Draft, La Prensa Series n the first days that followed the shooting, the new president, José Ramón Guizado, did his best to maintain stability. He had various foreign experts come to Panamá to begin aiding the Panamanian forces in their investigation, and Canal Zone forces were directed to help. The aid was needed from a professional point of view—the National Guard and Secret Police made so many mistakes in the first couple of days following the event that the negligence began to seem suspicious. But given that it was Guizado who pressed for this external professional help, and that those detectives who arrived were afforded almost no cooperation, one might also suspect that the president sensed that something was being baked in the Guard’s headquarters. There was a problem: José Ramón Guizado had been a convenient vice president, but given how little clout he had, no one thought he could rule the country. Information began to circulate that immediately following the murder, leaders of the ruling Coalición Patriótica Nacional (CPN) had been called to the National Guard’s headquarters. It was also known that Guizado was at the hospital at this time. People began to guess that some power arrangement had been guaranteed under the Guard’s offices. Everybody was now a detective, piecing the clues of the story together. The mysterious Martin Irving Lipstein, for example, was set free without anyone being able to say who had signed the order of his release. The Cuban detective Israel Castellanos did not think this foreigner had anything to do with the murder, but the press reported that Lipstein left the country overnight; one can only imagine people putting their papers down and glancing at each other meaningfully. At the same time, a man reported to the investigating committee a conspiratorial conversation he had heard among a number of North Americans in the house where he worked as a guard, about a murder set for New Year’s. The next day, he was found dead in his home—a rather odd case of suicide for a person who was not reported to have special problems.13

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13. It is of course impossible to say who circulated which rumor, or to make accurate claims about who knew what, when. While many of the details revealed above were recounted in the judicial procedures, US intelligence agents were picking up on rumors already within the first two weeks after the assassination. They knew of the claim that arrangements had been made to keep Guizado in power temporarily from two different sources. See Francisco J. González, 470th MI, report, and William E. Hillbush, 470th MI, report, January 4, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP.

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An odd scene developed in the first cabinet meeting after the murder, on January 5, 1955. The new president, Ramón Guizado, discussed with his cabinet the proposed $50,000 that would be granted to anyone supplying information that would lead to the capture of the vile assassins.14 Some of the ministers made some technical comments, and then the minister of foreign relations, Roberto Heurtematte, said that in the government’s ad, they should not write “capture the assassins.”15 An assassin isn’t only the person who holds the submachine gun, but also the person who plans the murder, and that’s who the government should be more interested in, he said. “The president, however, said that upon arresting the person who executed the deed, it was certain that the intellectual author would be found.” 16 But at this point the minister of agriculture, commerce, and industry intervened, insisting that the chief thing was to arrest the intellectual author. After a long debate, it was finally decided that the government would notify the public that it would give the money in cash, “to the person or persons who were to give Colonel Bolívar Vallarino information that would lead to the finding and arrest of the author or authors that ended the life of President José A. Remón Cantera.” 17 The essence of these reports was induced by other observers from the fact that Guizado was in the hospital at the time that other prominent cabinet members were at the National Guard headquarters. The media openly discussed the fact that politicians met at the National Guard headquarters before crucial political turning points. About Lipstein, see more information below. The man who stepped up to give a formal declaration to the police was 53-­year-­old José Conrado Lasso Núñez, a guard at the private home of Jorge Mendoza, a Mexican businessman. His declaration can be found in expediente tomo I, 189. He was found hung in his home on January 10, a day after talking to the police. A newspaper article correctly asserted that he had been arrested in connection with the murder; but the facts of his death were never investigated fully. When Jorge Mendoza was investigated, he claimed that a few days after his employee had been arrested, the man came to his house, looking extremely tired. Mendoza claimed to have let him go home and rest. The wealthy Mendoza gave the names of several people who had visited his house, all of whom were Costa Rican or Spanish rather than of the US; Mendoza denied that any politics were ever discussed in the meeting. Expediente tomo I, 226–28. 14. “Acta de la sesión celebrada por el Consejo de Gabinete el día 5 de enero de 1955,” caja 1, tomo 71, Presidencia de Ricardo Arias Espinosa, SAE, ANP. 15. “Acta de la sesión celebrada.” 16. “Acta de la sesión celebrada.” 17. “Acta de la sesión celebrada.”

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On January 14, the public learned that Rubén Miró—who had been jailed ten days earlier, set free, and arrested again—finally confessed to the murder. Still more sensational, Miró claimed that the intellectual author of the crime was none other than the new president, José Ramón Guizado. IV. Del Valle, Notes, 1993 resident Guizado arrived at an emergency session of the Assembly that same day [January 14] and offered his temporary withdrawal from office; once the investigation cleared his name, he told the Assembly, he would resume his duties. The Assembly rejected this temporary withdrawal. Instead, in resolution no. 35 it impeached President Guizado and put him on trial as the intellectual author of the great political crime. It nominated Ricardo Arias Espinosa, who had been second vice president under José Antonio Remón, to be the new president of Panamá. The Assembly also declared itself to be the court in which Guizado would be tried. In effect, it split the judicial processes in two. The public prosecutor would pursue the case against the confessed material author, Rubén Miró, who would be brought to trial in the judicial system, while the legislature would try the intellectual author of the crime, the impeached President Guizado.18 How could the legislature turn itself into a court? How would a political body conduct an objective inquiry, weigh evidence, find the truth about the past, and guarantee the restoration of justice? The Assembly cited articles 2309, 2286, and 2091 of the judicial code, interpreting those curious legal provisions in a rather imaginative and roundabout way. Naturally, Guizado’s lawyer appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming that the Assembly was not competent under the constitution to act as a tribunal. But despite the growing public unease about the

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18. The best discussion of the legal and constitutional issues surrounding the Guizado trial remains the 1957 work by Assembly deputy and lawyer Carlos Iván Zúñiga: El proceso Guizado: Un alegato para la historia: La sesión secreta, 2nd ed. (Panamá, RP, 1980). José Ramón Guizado wrote a memoir while still in prison, which was later published together with a collection of newspaper articles from the period. Other secondary sources of interest are Juan Materno Vásquez, Anatomía de una infamia (Panamá, RP: Ediciones Olga Elena, 1987); Romeu, Del caso Remón-­Guizado; Carlos A. Vaccaro, El proceso Guizado o un error judicial de procedimiento (Colón, RP: Imprenta Atlántida, 1958).

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Assembly’s decision as well as the investigation, the Supreme Court, considering the appeal four days later, accepted the Assembly’s decision and allowed it to try Guizado.19 Whatever murmurings surrounded the opening of the unprecedented public trial, the Assembly and the Supreme Court were in agreement, Remón’s political body, the CPN, seemed to be a unified coalition again, and the National Guard closed its ranks. Thus, it began to seem as though the official interpretation of the recent events would hold. If you were drawing this history in little cartoon boxes in your mind, you would have perhaps followed the prosecution’s version, which was already solidifying and gaining publicity. You would have drawn a first cartoon in which Rubén Miró buys the submachine gun. He tests it. Think of a second image: “Later, in the Club Atlas, he meets Rodolfo Saint Malo.” For a third box, think of a picture of Guizado, broad shoulders, sitting at his office with a serious look on his face, a black telephone at his side, reading a note. Perhaps add a little caption, like they used to have in cartoons, inserting a direct quote from the press: “On New Year’s, Guizado received a telegram from Miró in which the latter predicted that 1955 would be his summit year.” Image 4: “That January 2nd in Juan Franco, Miró decided that this was the propitious day to execute his trecherous crime. He took his car and drove to his house 19. On the growing unease, see, for example, the report made by an American agent, that Dr. Eneas Quintero Piza, a dentist, told him that “at the autopsy of José Antonio Remón Cantera, the bullet which killed Remón was identified as a .38 caliber, rather than a 9mm as the public is being told now. The body of Antonio Anguizola contained two types of bullets, presumably .38 and 9mm. At least one eyewitness reported four persons in the assassin’s automobile. Now the public is wondering as to the identity of the persons being protected by Rubén Miró, the confessed slayer. The people of Panama are beginning to ask: 1) Why haven’t the circumstances surrounding the death of Danilo Sousa been investigated and published? 2) Why was the Policía Secreta Nacional—PSN (National Secret Police) removed from its normal and legal jurisdiction in the investigation? and 3) Are the Commandants of the Guardia Nacional—GN (National Guard) trying to suppress any phase of the investigation that would reflect adversely upon themselves?” Report on conversation with Dr. Eneas Quintero Piza, by Kent B. Mecum, 470th MI, January 17, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. The information is fairly accurate, though a bit odd, given that what is commonly referred to as .38 (often a .357 caliber) is equivalent to a 9mm. It is one of many examples of the degree to which the public was familiar with the goings-­ on behind the scenes in the affair.

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to get the submachine gun. He switched the car and, having put on dark clothes, he returned to the racetrack. This time, he left the car he had borrowed with the lights turned off and the keys in the switch.” (Draw a dark figure leaving a dark car. Consider drawing a church in the background, to contrast with the immoral act your reader knows is about to take place.) “Slowly, ‘walking toward suicide,’ he crossed the track, conscious that if he was seen he would be a dead man, but with a goal in mind: to assassinate the president.” Draw a man walking purposefully, a shadow with a hat. “In this way, he got to the booth in front of the president’s box . . . he shot two murderous volleys . . . and . . .” In the last box, draw two men, shirtless, in a little boat on the sea. Write: “A little time later, he invited his son on a boat trip, and he let the submachine gun fall into the depths of the bay.” If the story is not perfectly detailed yet, it is nonetheless taking form in your mind. The chaos of evidence begins to sort itself out into a narrative, and the richness of detail gives the narrative the effect of reality. Before the trial in the Assembly began, however, Miró came out with another sensation. He smuggled a letter to his relative, Harmodio Arias Madrid, which was published in Harmodio’s newspaper the next day. The letter opens dramatically: “With a centimeter-­long tip of a pencil that I can hardly hold between my nails, I sketch you these lines.”20 Miró writes that Colonel Vallarino and Major [José] Pinilla had threatened to arrest his wife and son if he did not blame President Guizado for the murder. In fact, he states that he had become a political enemy of Guizado some years earlier. A lawyer himself, Miró points out that in the last paragraph of the protocol of the confrontation he had had with José Tejada, there is a reference to the latter’s attempted suicide.21 And he states that not only he and Tejada, but all the detainees were under intense coercive pressure. The detained lawyer closes his letter by asking Harmodio Arias Madrid to intervene personally and help Guizado fight 20. Zúñiga Guardia, El proceso Guizado, 41–42. 21. A confrontation between Tejada and Miró was registered as having taken place on February 5, although in the letter Miró refers to one that took place on February 14. See expediente tomo III., 473–74. Tejada cites his departure from Guatemala during the counterrevolution there, then the death of his mother, and finally “what has been going on now.” Tejada claimed he was threatened that if he didn’t speak, his girlfriend and family would be arrested.

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the injustice done him. “There is nothing as horrible as condemning an innocent man.”22 This written retraction of the prosecution’s key witness was not admissible in the trial, which started in the National Assembly on March 21. Assembly members were given the 1,400-­page file prepared by the special investigative committee, and they listened to the arguments of the prosecutor and the defense. According to its rules, the Assembly could not consider the case of the material author of the crime or of any of the accomplices; those would be tried in a criminal court—meaning that the intellectual author of the crime was judged without the judicial system already having established the basic facts of the crime itself. The Assembly would hear no testimonies aside from that of Guizado himself, and it allowed no examinations of the witnesses who had testified before the Investigative Committee. The deputies would have to base their interpretation of what had happened on the docket prepared by the Investigative Committee, without a possibility of questioning the method that was used to prepare the docket. But because of these obvious failings, the entire nation began to examine not only the evidence but also the official interpretative framework used to examine it. And the more the politico-­judicial apparatus tried to hide the methodological secrets of its magical docket, the more the public focused on these very secrets. It is true, however, that the official narrative was at this point no better or worse than alternative ones. It was outlined in prosecutor Lasso de la Vega’s opening statement, which lasted thirteen hours (with intermissions for eating and resting, stretching over three days). In this narrative, “the conditions of the country when President Remón assumed the reins of power were disastrous, on a sociopolitical and socioeconomic level, and because of these two factors, chaos raged in the country.”23 President Remón managed to improve the situation of the country, strengthen its constitutional order, improve the well-­being of its most impoverished people, and revise “our contractual relations with the Nation of the North.”24 José Ramón Guizado, a wealthy engineer and poli22. Zúñiga Guardia, El proceso Guizado, 42. The letter was published in the Panamanian newspapers and in the Cuban journal Bohemia. 23. “Primer alegato del fiscal Lic. Eligio Crespo V,” La Estrella de Panamá, March 22, 1955, 2. 24. “Primer alegato del fiscal Lic. Eligio Crespo V.” See also “Primer alegato del Acusador José N. Lasso de la Vega,” La Estrella de Panamá, March 22, 1955, 2.

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tician, used his position as vice president and minister of foreign relations to become even richer by corrupt means. (There was no doubt about this part of the story, but, as would be confirmed during testimony in the trial, it applied more or less to the entire political class.25) It was not enough, however, and Guizado wanted to be richer and more powerful still. He called to his office, in the middle of November, a treacherous lawyer named Rubén Oscar Miró. He promised the lawyer he would name him minister of government and justice after he finished off the beloved president. In order not to arouse suspicion, he asked Miró not to come to his office again, and instead arranged for Rodolfo Saint Malo, the vice president’s business associate and longtime friend, to serve as liaison. Miró was trusted with executing the plan because already as vice president under Alcibíades Arosemena, Guizado had worked out a similar plan with Miró (which never came to fruition).26 Following the Castillo Armas counterrevolution in Guatemala, Tejada—a Panamanian cadet in its police academy—returned to Panamá, managing to smuggle in a Schmeisser 9mm submachine gun.27 Miró bought the Schmeisser from Tejada, and the cadet was told about the plans to take down the president. A few more people became entangled in the plot as it gained momentum, among them Alfonso Hyams, the mechanic who drove Miró to the scene without understanding the diabolical plan he was helping to execute. At the racetrack, Miró asked Hyams to wait in the car, and then, a lone gunman, he went and shot the president and his party. There were a few other twists and turns in the story, but this was the general outline of the plot. Aside from the narrative, the prosecutor’s long statements involved an enormous amount of highly questionable and clearly irrelevant information. Guizado had plans that Panamá would take out a $43 million loan, which Remón resisted and which Guizado could presumably have some control over; Guizado passed a law that would allow him to make 25. Felipe Escobar, Guizado’s lawyer, told a US agent that his client turned over to him a list of Assembly deputies who had received money from him on different occasions in order to approve contracts for his private construction firm. President Remón received kickbacks from this scheme as well. See Alphonso E. Marshall, agent, 470th MI, report, March 10, 1955 (I-­176), file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. 26. This was at least what Miró claimed; Guizado never refuted the story. 27. The reference is to the German World War II MP40 submachine gun, which Americans referred to as a “Schmeisser.”

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changes, including in personnel, to various institutions, and so he could nominate people according to Miró’s dictates; there was an analysis of Miró’s psychological well-­being; and all sorts of odd details about the interrogation itself.28 The defense realized that it was not going to get anything like a fair trial. It could not access key documents that were held separately from the docket the Assembly would see; and the prosecutor even sat in on interrogations as he saw fit.29 Moreover, the defense could not use material that was readily available and known to the public—like Miró’s letter of retraction—because it was not information that was gotten in the official interrogation of the Investigative Committee. And Guizado’s lawyers knew that any information that was the product of the Committee’s work was vetted, so that no material that could possibly implicate the National Guard in the crime could be used. Seeing as it could not win, the defense focused on swaying public opinion in its favor.30 The only real evidence tying Guizado and St. Malo to the crime was the accusation of a confessed murderer, who could not be brought to take the stand, and who in any case was now claiming he 28. Privately, the public prosecutor told a US agent a different story: “Among the government officials and prominent businessmen of Panama who are involved, Lasso de la Vega described the key figure as being the one who suffered a heart attack shortly after the assassination and who has been drinking very heavily since that time. Supposedly this individual has in his possession the money which was contributed by various government officials and businessmen involved, as there is the possibility that this negotiation may be discovered.” L. E. Ledbetter, agent, 470th MI, report, March 22, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. The man De la Vega refers to as having had a heart attack is Juan Euribiades “Baby” Jiménez. 29. Pippin, The Remón Era, 140. 30. Although the defense received nothing like impartial cooperation from the authorities, several gestures were made to it which were quite surprising, if only because they remained unknown to the public. For example, the defense was allowed to sit in on a kind of official questioning of the three commanding officers of the National Guard. Meléndez and Flores, third and second in command of the Guard, respectively, were asked about their relationship with Miró. (Miró had provided legal services to Flores.) Another officer, Captain Mata, confessed to have been approached by Miró for help in assassinating Remón. Mata did not report the incident, and in this forum claimed he thought Miró was joking, seeing as Miró had just received a job from the president. Vallarino and the other officers who had interrogated Miró were questioned about having pressed him to confess. See Francisco J. González, agent, 470th MI, report, March 23, 1955 (no. I-­277), file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP.

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had been coerced to make that accusation.31 Guizado’s lawyers hammered at this fact, but also, completely convinced of the innocence of their client, they made use of every rhetorical tool they could use, and were often swept up by their own emotions. When Guillermo Márquez Briceño pleaded with the Assembly to acquit his client, he broke into tears.32 The next day, defense lawyer Felipe Juan Escobar followed with an angry attack on the Prosecutor, claiming he was “living in a world of unreality.”33 As he spoke, a woman in the audience (who was later described as insane) got up and shouted, “There is too much injustice here!” She threw a heap of magazines and newspapers onto the Assembly floor. If Remón’s ghost were allowed to testify in the case, Escobar claimed in his closing statement, the ghost would emphatically deny Guizado’s involvement in the murder.34 After an entire night of deliberations in a closed session on March 29, the Assembly voted 45–8 to condemn Guizado. The deposed president was sentenced to ten years in prison, with a third taken off for unspecified attenuating circumstances. The public resigned itself to gossiping about the judicial drama, speculating, sharing information and disinformation, and commenting on the spectacle at the Assembly. It looked bemused at the affair, apparently concluding that the issue was an internal matter of its oligarchic families. And whatever doubts were already simmering in the public consciousness, the defense had not been able to provide a solid alternative historical narrative. Without it, and with the full force of the politico-­judicial apparatus having turned its story into verdict, the keys to the writing of history remained in the hands of the regime. 31. Prosecutor Lasso de la Vega admitted toward the end of the trial that the evidence against Guizado was circumstantial, and this is no doubt an understatement. But he claimed that the type of crime committed, and the elevated position of the defendant, meant that Guizado’s crime could only be proved through circumstantial evidence. “Verdict Will Be Reached in Secrecy.” Panama American, March 26, 1955, 8, http://​ufdc​.ufl​.edu​/AA00010883​/00693​/8x. 32. “Lasso de la Vega Marathons Again,” Panama American, March 25, 1955, 1, http://​ufdc​.ufl​.edu​/AA00010883​/00692. 33. “Verdict Will Be Reached in Secrecy,” Panama American, March 26, 1955, 1, http://​ufdc​.ufl​.edu​/AA00010883​/00693​/1x. 34. “Guizado’s Fate,” Panama American, March 28, 1955, 10, http://​ufdc​.ufl​.edu​ /AA00010883​/00695​/10j.

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Depiction of the prosecution’s version of the murder. La Hora, January 21, 1955, 2.

V. ​le is walking around the living room. Tali has been sitting with her biology textbook open, trying to do her homework. There is a tense silence, which follows an exchange of questions and monosyllabic answers between the two. Ale walks to the window, looking outside at the rain, which has been falling harder. She finally makes up her mind and closes the window, to which Tali responds by shaking her head and looking upward, as if to confirm something she has known all along. Ale notices this facial gesture, and returns to the line of attack she had taken earlier, but more aggressively now.

A

Ale: All I’m asking is if you considered what that play is about. That’s all I’m asking. Tali: Normal. Ale: What does that even mean? Tali: They’re prisoners in Argentina. It’s different. Ale: Quite different! Tali: Normal. [Ten or twenty seconds of silence.] Ale: It’s like making him go through it again. Tali: It’s not like you can go on pretending everything’s just 214

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fine when you have, like, that dark well in the middle of your apartment. Ale: Hija, the past is past. Of course we—look, you don’t know everything, even after all those wonderful books you read . . . we cannot let you in on each and every detail . . . you know, we also try to protect you. [Silence. Tali gives a barely perceptible ironic smile, which her mother pretends not to notice or mind. Ale goes on.] At some point one has to . . . there are ways of dealing with what has happened, but one has to let time play its part as well. Tali: Bien. Ale: Bien ¿qué? You know very well that you should have consulted me. You’re not as mature as you think, but you’re not a little girl anymore. Tali: I got your permission. Ale: By making up an imaginary name for a play and distorting its subject, your role, and the themes. You lied about—and what are you opening the window for? There’s a hurricane out there. Tali: Don’t exaggerate. We need some air in here. Ale: “Exaggerate.” This wind will blow us out to the sea! [Visibly annoyed, Tali closes the window. Ale resumes her accusation.] You lied to that director about having my authorization, and you lied to me too . . . you come here at night, sneaking in like some— look, one has to respect one’s home. Maybe it’s no mansion, but this apartment is our home. Tali: An apartment is just an apartment. Those are walls, and these old windows that won’t close, and your old picture of a landscape in the Alps or whatever, that God only knows why you keep . . . anyway, we weren’t born in this apartment, and one day we might move out of it. Ale: But now it’s our home. You’ll have to respect it. Tali: Normal. Ale: Well, I have no idea what you mean by that word, but you’ll have to face up to the consequences of your actions and quit the play. And I say this with sorrow because I know how much it means to you. I admire Art—you know that. But with the situation that you’ve created, you’ll have to quit the theater now. Tali: That won’t be possible. Not at this stage. Ale: What does that mean? That is not for you to decide! 215

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Tali: The play will take place—it’s too late. And I can’t be replaced at this point. Ale: Two months of rehearsals and you forget how to speak in this house! What makes you think you can speak to me in that condescending tone? ¡Es una falta de respeto! Tali: No, Alejandra, I respect you. But it’s too late. The play can’t be changed. Ale: When did you start speaking to your mother like that? You wander around there with older men doing who knows what until the middle of the night, like some girl from El Chorrillo— did you consider that I don’t sleep until I hear you coming back through that door? Tali: I get back as soon as rehearsal is over. Sometimes before, if they don’t need me. And I just wish you’d close your little tribunal and stop judging me. Ale: What I want to know is what you thought you were doing, joining that play. What in the world you thought you were doing, making your father watch two men in a cell, one of them with visible signs of torture on his body. That’s what I want to know. [Silence. They become aware of the honking coming from the street—three or four different cars at once. The honking stops and the cars drive on. Twenty or thirty seconds go by. Ale resumes, a little louder now.] Sometimes, I ask myself how your internal processes in there are working. Are you aware of what other people are thinking? Of, what . . . they’re feeling? He spent seven years in that hell. It’s truly beyond me—making your father watch the full trag— Tali: —I didn’t say he had to watch it! Ale: Ha! Bueno. Tali: I didn’t ask that either of you watch it! Ale: How on earth will you tell him not to watch a play you’ve been working on for months? Please, I want to hear what sort of scenario you have in mind. Are you imagining that now you’ll talk to him alone and just tell him—hmm, let’s see: Listen, Father, I’ve decided you should not watch the play I’ve been working on for the last months? Does that seem likely to you? Tali: Dizque . . . Ale: You use that word incorrectly, señorita, and I’m sorry to inform 216

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you that although you do not seem capable of maintaining a conversation with him, the man is your father. And even though you are mostly focused on yourself, you should accept it as a fact that he cares about you, deeply. Tali: I’m doing what I think is right. Ale: You’re not mature enough to know about— Tali: Mature enough to know when I’m depicted like some kind of monster, when— Ale: I didn’t say— Tali: You’re using this as an excuse to judge— Ale: No, no, listen to me. Tali: —to judge me, and it’s not— Ale: Listen to me. Tali: Ay por favor. Ale: No. Wait a minute. I’m going to say something to you, although you might not be mature enough to understand. [Ale stops, considering her words. Tali looks away.] You are what he lived for in that hell. Can you understand what that means? Don’t look at me like that. I want you to answer me. Do you understand what it means to sacrifice oneself ? [This word hits home. Tali looks away, holding back her tears. Ale goes on, more resolute, as if trying to get her daughter to turn around and face her.] I want to know one thing. Just one thing. Did you, for one minute, stop, get out of your little Hollywood fantasies, and consider the pain that watching this play will cause him? Tali: [in tears] Like you always considered his pain! Ale: What?! Tali: Normal. Ale: [visibly shocked] What did you mean by that comment? Tali: You’re hypocrites, that’s what I meant. Hypocrites! Like seven years you sat and waited! Like you’re some saint, the Virgin Alejandra! We should all worship your innocence! Ale: [trembling with anger] Are you completely determined to destroy this family?! Tali: I have a right to say the truth! Ale: What truth?! Tali: Your entire life is a play! At least my play is about the truth! Ale: Where are you going now? Sure, run away! Of course, why 217

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don’t you really go to the street—it’s where you spend most of your time! VI. Del Valle, Final Draft, La Prensa Series o understand the power that the judicial proceedings held in the public’s mind, one has to appreciate fully the place of justice in Panamanian life of the postwar era. First, as every Panamanian knew, there was no separation of powers in Panamá, and the judiciary was never an independent branch of government. Judges—including Supreme Court judges—were political appointees who kept their loyalties to powerful patrons. To this day, knowledgeable Panamanians can give a rough estimate of how many of the judges a president “controls”; and they can often account for the depth of the loyalty by tracing family connections, joint business ventures, and so forth. This fact, in itself, did not guarantee that every case before every judge would be ruled dishonestly; political alliances were important only in cases in which the power broker to whom the judge owed allegiance was interested. But it meant that, on a basic level, one could not enter a courtroom expecting a nonbiased judgment. To ensure a favorable ruling, one had to use all sorts of means—a bribe or a plea to a patrón, for example. These means could often be employed at other points in the system; most commonly, on the street, in contact with the police. Kickbacks from the service sector played an important part in the income of police officers. Of course, poor people were less likely to be able to employ such means.35 Another noticeable feature of the Panamanian legal system was that it coexisted with the Canal Zone system on any number of levels. Across the street, the Canal Zone had its own judicial system, police force, and penitentiary; and those were in effect subdivided into two systems of enforcements: one for the Antillean “Silver Roll” workforce, and another for the white “Gold Roll” employees.36 The Canal Zone even had its own

T

35. These were not novelties of the postwar era; Porras, a doctor of law and the architect of the Panamanian judicial system, controlled the judiciary as thoroughly as Colonel Remón did. See, for example, Dr. G. Patterson to Charles E. Hughes, secretary of state, February 5, 1924 (National Archives Microfilm Publication, M607, roll 25, frames 0097–108), Records of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Panama, 1910–1929, RG 59, NACP. 36. From 1914 to 1979, the Canal Zone judicial system operated one district court, with two divisions—on the Pacific and Caribbean sides. Appeals went to the Fifth Fed-

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espionage system, autonomous from either military or federal agencies. Naturally, the US military had its own legal system; and the military police had to pick up the drunken off-­duty soldiers when their brawling could no longer be tolerated in Panamanian bars. This profusion of agencies and jurisdictions managed to function partly because, in the postwar period, the cooperation between them increased. The improvised and very coercive tutelage of the teens and ’20s gave way to more formalized and cooperative programs like Point Four, the USAID Office of Public Safety (USAID/OPS), and the School of the Americas. On the ground, cooperation between forces included the routine sharing of information, officially and unofficially. Courtesies were commonly exchanged between the two sides, as, for example, when Panamanian policemen took new arrivals from the US on a kind of city tour.37 There is no single issue on which Panamanians have written more than on the subject of our sovereignty, including the causes of our independence, and the contractual relations with the Empire that we were forced into. What is left unsaid is that common Panamanians, while apathetic to the literary world, were nonetheless expert when it came to the analysis of contractual relations. In no other nation that I know of can uneducated people so readily cite clauses of the international treaties by which their nation is bound. This knowledge was not dormant or eral Circuit in New Orleans, but the US Supreme Court dismissed Canal Zone cases that reached it, citing lack of jurisdiction. Michael E. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), chap. 6. 37. For the reference of the tour of Panama City, see James W. Totten, U.S. colonel provost, to Raul R. Acevedo R., Panamanian general inspector of the National Secret Police, April 11, 1948, folder “Policía Nacional; Correspondencia con la Zona del Canal, 1952,” SAE, ANP. More on cooperation between the two forces can be found in the same file. The earliest USAID/OPS work in Panamá can be found in “Records of the USAID, Office of Public Safety, Latin America, Country File,” entry 26, box 92, folder 1957–60, RG 286, NACP. The USAID/OPS held three permanent staff in Panamá at the time and handled all police and antiriot training and equipment issues. The Guardia Nacional also received substantial training and aid from the US Army, and cooperated with various US intelligence agencies. Remón himself was the first officer to undergo extended professional training in the United States. Later, Panamanian officers regularly underwent military training, first in the Latin American Training Center at Fort Amador, and then in the School of the Americas (SOA).

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static or a kind of religious chant—it was a very dynamic, highly political knowledge. We went out to the streets repeatedly to protest during the postwar period knowing what clauses we objected to; which agreements, already signed, were not being implemented; and which group or sector in each country was responsible for inserting which clause. It was precisely through a legal, contractual point of view, in other words, that we learned to fight for our national sovereignty and for legal justice generally. Protesters in January 1964 crowded around the house of the notorious Canal Zone judge Guthrie Crowe for this same reason. The everyday discrimination and injustice of which he was in charge—which included a whole generation of poor Antilleans imprisoned for petty thefts—was linked in the minds of protesters with the larger contractual injustice our country had to endure. When I showed these notes to Carpintero, I could see he was very interested, and it took him a long time to read over each argument. He then commented on what he called “popular resistance to the injustice system.” First, he said there was an entire network of working-­class “confiscations” (Carpintero’s words) of property and material that operated in the Canal Zone.38 People cheered the kids crossing into the Zone to take mangoes, risking arrest or beatings if the Zone policemen caught them.39 The popularity of John Peter Williams, the “Antillean Robin Hood,” suggests the depth of aversion to the Canal Zone system, which had existed since its inception.40 And there was an entire network of lower-­class theft, the buying and selling of cables picked up in case they had been abandoned, and otherwise cut and stolen from the Canal Zone.41 38. For a detailed description of theft in the Canal Zone, see Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus, 6. 39. Donoghue, 55. 40. Williams, who grew up in the working-­class neighborhood of Caledonia, engaged in a series of dazzling thefts and burglaries in the Zone and in Panamá. From the late teens until his capture, escape, and finally death in 1921, Williams broke into some fifty homes and establishments in the Zone alone, and defied Panamanian and Zone police forces. Donoghue, 117–23. 41. Cable thieves preferred to take discarded cable, but would also disconnect, then chop and sell miles of cable. This was an ongoing problem for the US military and civilian communications and power operations. Notwithstanding the draconian sentences, however, the practice continued, if only because it entailed a lower risk of being

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It is undeniable, at any rate, that most judicial cases were not discussed in public on a daily basis, and were not politicized in the way that the 1955–57 trials were. In any number of cases involving small claims between shop owners, complaints of abuse between family members, or accusations of slander, the judicial system functioned as a mediator. Often, such cases were resolved with a slap on the wrist, an apology from the offending party, or a promise to marry in the case of a man who had left his pregnant girlfriend. In such cases the judicial system, which positioned itself above the parties involved, solidified its authority; it perhaps increased its legitimacy when it suppressed crimes that the public considered illegitimate.42 Carpintero argued, however, that patterns of policing were very different in wealthy and poor areas, and that the law was never applied equally to white- and blue-­collar crime.43 At caught than other forms of theft, and provided a steady, if low, income. For more on the practice, see Donoghue, 207. 42. For examples of the deflowering cases, domestic disputes, or small criminal cases, see the Sección Judicial in the Archivos Nacionales. The section is very roughly organized and possesses only a very partial and problematic index. For testimonies in cases that were resolved outside of the court, see, for example, caja 8, Gobierno y Justicia, SAE, ANP. To date, no one has tried to do with these collections anything like the analysis that Sueann Caulfield has done with deflowering cases in Brazil. The chaotic condition of the judicial section of the Panamanian National Archive and the paucity of trial dockets would make such work more difficult; the relative marginality of criminological discourse in Panamá may make it more complicated to make comparable claims about the active roles that Panamanian working-­class women played in these cases. See Sueann Caulfield, In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early Twentieth Century Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 43. In a letter to a district governor, Minister of Government and Justice Celestino Arrocha Graell—himself a wealthy man—tells his subordinate that he has received complaints about burglaries of some of the vacation homes of important personages in El Valle, a town where the wealthy of Panama City vacation. Seeing as El Valle’s elected mayor had been too lenient on the “rateros” the local police had arrested, Arrocha Graell instructs that he be replaced. The minister clarifies: “In view of the importance of El Valle as a township of those most important, where numerous families of the capital spend their summers, it is necessary that the authority display the utmost activity there for the security and tranquility of the dwellers and their property.” Celestino Arrocha Graell, minister of government and justice, to Bolívar Patiño, district governor, December 9, 1953 (No. 1221 DM). Ministerio de Gobierno y Justicia, 1951–52–­53–56, SAE, ANP. For in-­depth analyses of patterns of policing elsewhere in Latin America, see Boris Fausto, Crime e cotidiano: A criminalidade em São Paulo

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no point during Guizado’s trial, for example, did prosecutors think it was necessary to use the evidence that was accumulating to file charges on graft (against Guizado or others). There were enormous regional differences in the reach of the law, and in its manner of operation. Consequently, people of different regions, classes, and groups understood the law differently. In the countryside, the judges in a given area would be from the leading families there—the local caudillo or a member of his family would sit as municipal judge, sometimes in his own house.44 There, the law was the word of the caudillo. (The one or two policemen would generally abide by that word too.) In many of the indigenous regions, different corporate systems were practiced, so, there again, legal consciousness would have been quite different. But if regional differences existed in legal consciousness, the struggles that police officers like Albert Lamb had carried out against local caudillos in the 1920s were long gone. By the postwar era, the central state had gained enough authority so as to reach a status quo with local powerholders. But it was precisely the strengthening not only of the Panamanian state but also of the Panamanian national consciousness that made clashes between the legal systems in the Canal Zone all the more challenging. Two cases from the postwar period stand out, both for the starkness of their respective injustices, and for the way the different groups responded to them. The first was the case of Lester Leon Greaves, a black Antillean Canal Zone employee. Greaves was imprisoned in February 1946 for raping a twenty-­five-­year-­old white woman, the daughter of a Canal Division manager. After he was caught, he confessed to Panamanian as well as Zone police, and was sentenced to fifty years of hard labor in Gamboa. The case shocked the Isthmus, but it stirred com(1880–1924) (São Paulo: Editora brasiliense, 1984); Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Marcos Luiz Bretas, Ordem na cidade: o exercício cotidiano da autoridade policial no Rio de Janeiro: 1907–1930 (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1997); Thomas H. Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a 19th-­Century City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 44. In Santa Fe de Veraguas, for example, the Vernaza, Castrellón, and González families—all linked through marriage—rotated the municipal judge’s seat among them. See the town’s “Libro de entradas y salidas” from 1964, found in the Juzgado Municipal de Santa Fe.

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pletely opposite feelings in the different communities. To white Zonians, Greaves became a symbol of the dangers of black, Antillean, or Latino men, who, Zonians feared, could assault white women. To Latinos and Antilleans, what was striking was how different the same judges treated the same offense when it was a white man and a Latina or Antillean woman.45 Greaves’s sentence contrasted sharply with the case of two Panamanian sisters who were raped by two US soldiers, and whose trial took place shortly after the Guizado trial.46 The sisters had met Sergeant William Mitchell and Corporal Vernon Helton at the USO -­sponsored dance at the Fort Amador NCO club. At the end of the night, they accepted the offer of a ride home from the soldiers. The men pulled over onto a side road and assaulted the women violently. Despite overwhelming evidence, the Zone court turned into a tribunal of the supposedly indecent behavior of all Panamanian “gate girls”—women who attended dances in US military installations. When one of the young women testified, the Zonian audience openly laughed in court. Mitchell received a thirty-­day jail sentence and a $100 fine. After the injustice and humiliation of the first case, the sisters refused to return to testify at Helton’s trial. Judge Crowe suspended the trial and asked Panamanian detectives to convince the women to return to his court. When they refused, Commandant Bolívar Vallarino was asked to step in himself. In an atmosphere of wall-­to-­wall outrage in Panamá, Vallarino refused. The rape charges were finally dismissed altogether. Nine years after the imprisonment of Lester Greaves, the defiant refusal of the sisters to accept the injustice of the Zone fed the waves of nationalist sentiment, which connected the broader realm of political injustices with the humiliations that Panamanians felt in their own lives. It also connected the larger contractual issues between the two countries with the issues that men and women faced in their relation with the judicial systems of both countries. 45. See Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus, chap. 4 and 6. The case served as the basis of Joaquín Beleño’s celebrated novel, Los forzados de Gamboa, 3rd ed. (Panamá, RP: Ediciones Librería Cultural Panameña, 1959). The courtroom and the legal framework served as a backdrop for other Panamanian writers of fiction as well. See, for example, Rogelio Sinán, La boina roja: Y cinco cuentos (Panamá, RP: La Escuela Nueva, 1954). 46. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus, 128–37.

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The most dramatic criminal cases elicited as much emotional outpour as serious critiques of the neocolonial arrangement, but it was the Remón Affair that stimulated some of the most sustained critiques of the foundations of the regime. One writer in a popular newspaper, for example, wrote that “for justice and truth no one can be privileged. The constitutional regime ceases to exist from the moment in which those governing the State destroy the interdependence of the organs that comprise it, and put themselves above truth and justice.”47 The writer, like others, went on to analyze what he called the “process of institutional degeneration.”48 Carpintero claimed that most of the opinions I’m reading are middle class. I met him in his little cubicle at the IDEN and he took out his copy of Ricord’s Cinco ensayos, a favorite of his. He showed me a paragraph Ricord had written on the Frente Patriótica, the political arm of the student movement, as though there was nothing more to say. The struggle for the implementation of the law, so seductive to those souls with fine juridical insight (in the Patriotic Front there were many young lawyers), does not in any way lead to the solution of the grave problems that the majority of our nation face, nor is it even the field of struggle for this majority. In what way does the legality of the nomination of a few Supreme Court Magistrates benefit the Panamanian worker, who is deprived of basic rights, because the Labor Code does not give them to him, in more than a shylockian manner? What meaning, for example, does the fact that the Executive does not act on a Supreme Court decree on the slaughter of beef have for the Panamanian peasant, who carries an unbearable existence, on the margin of any positive participation in national life, a victim of innumerable physical and spiritual miseries?49 I told him that about the peasants I don’t know, but that he would have to acknowledge that, in the cities, people of all classes cared about “juridical problems.” 50 Although the middle class played a key role in 47. “Una posición comprometedora,” Revista 18, June 18, 1956. 48. “Una posición comprometedora.” 49. Ricord Donado, Cinco ensayos, 26. 50. A note left between the pages of the text points to the monetary contributions people made to the Investigative Committee at the beginning of the investigation as evidence that, indeed, Panamanians of all classes cared about the outcome of the judi-

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insisting on its definition, the notions of equality before the law, separation of state powers, correct procedure and the truth it generated— these formed a legal consciousness that was important to Panamanians of all sectors. Panamanians were also concerned about such issues as juvenile delinquency.51 They cited different causes for the high levels of delinquency, from the child’s environment to poverty and the negative effects of films. And they had different ideas about how to solve the problem—many thought building more playgrounds would help, while others thought vocational training or more adequate housing would be the proper solution. But there was never any indication that the populace connected the need to deal with delinquency with a license for extrajudicial measures. If anything, polls suggest that Panamanians connected a stricter adherence to the rule of law—not arbitrary police force—with their sense of security, freedom, and justice.52 Legal consciousness does not develop gradually in a people, like a kind of literacy. A public can gain a particular kind of legal consciousness, and that awareness can change, morph, fade, or become more nuanced and acute. The sources that feed this consciousness are varied, and should not be too neatly located in one event—a grand trial, the signing of an unpopular treaty, the eruption of a protest movement. Nor should we assume that legal consciousness is only nourished by the public’s objective comprehension of historical phenomena. During the Remón Affair, forensic evidence—say, a picture of Remón’s shirt (the holes circled for the jury and reader to see, with pictures of bullets, and ballistic reports)—could appear on the front page of the newspaper. On another page, Dick Tracy was shown examining similar images. The ballistics expert carried a lot of weight in the cartoon plot, while in the Remón case the expert was marginalized, leaving the country fuming. People know that Dick Tracy is a cartoon. But can we confidently claim that ficcial process. Some of the contributions are as large as $100, and would only have been made by wealthy individuals; but others are much more humble. The third-­year students of the National Institute managed to pull together $2.25, while a few other contributors also donated less than $5. “Siguen las contribuciones populares para la investigación del crimen,” El País, January 10, 1955, 2. 51. A reference to a series of public opinion surveys conducted under the supervision of an American political scientist. Carolyn Campbell, “Political Freedoms,” Panamanian Institute of Public Opinion 4 (October 1949). 52. Campbell, “Political Freedoms.”

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tions—Agent X-­9, Dragnet, Tracy, and the others—did not in one way or another affect the reading of the front page? It is clear that during the trials we became a nation of detectives. But it is inadvisable to point out exactly to what criminological school we belonged, or to make solid claims about how we developed our legal consciousness. Our thesis is that, as the public busied itself with the whodunit mystery, a sense of the methodological problems inherent in making claims about the past took on special urgency. And it was this urgent legal-­historiographical consciousness that shaped not only the trial itself, but the acute crisis that followed it. VII. ne night, Del Valle dreams he is in the same Cárcel Modelo cell into which he had been thrown on the first day of his arrest, before being transferred to Coiba. His cellmate is José Ramón Guizado, who looks worn out and sad. The floor is covered with newspaper clippings, documents, photos of bullets, of the racetrack. Guizado’s white suit hangs from one of the bars on the window. When Del Valle wakes up, he tries to remember what the two spoke about, but all he can make out is that he was trying to encourage Guizado, telling him there is new evidence in the archives, and that he, Del Valle, will find out who really had done it. He will clear the name of his innocent cellmate. But Guizado is extraordinarily sad, a defeated man, sitting on his bed and looking at the newspapers on the floor of the cell. Awake now, Del Valle lies on his bed, thinking about the dream, telling himself that he was lying to Guizado. He has no idea who killed Remón. There are too many clues, too much information and disinformation. After a few minutes, the image of Del Valle’s mother arises in his mind, and he is a child in her arms, five or six years old. He thinks how young she must have been. He sees her bathing him, cleaning his shoulders, then rubbing oil on his back. What was that oil? He looks at Ale, sleeping. It is very early in the morning, but he can’t go back to sleep, his mind is traveling too quickly now. He thinks, when did you fuck yourself over, Delvallito? He thinks of the Guizado case. Thinks, what if Guizado was one of the donors paying for the job, who was recruited in November . . . and all the others managed to get away clean. Thinks, what will you uncover in your detective work, Delvallito? What logical sequence

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Photo attached to the ballistics report found in the 470th Military Intelligence unit file. (Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park, declassified photo, file no. X8731026, Box 490, RG 319, NACP.)

Part of a Dick Tracy cartoon that appeared in La Estrella de Panamá in January 1955.

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of facts will lead you to solve . . . will lead you to pose the right question . . . and what are you really after in this hunt for evidence? He gets up and walks to the kitchen, putting some water on—but then he changes his mind, goes to the bathroom, brushes his teeth, washes his face, and moves that piece of thing, whatever it’s called, from there to just over here. For some reason, a conversation he had with a friend on campus during the police siege of 1958 arises in his mind. On the blackboard behind them someone had written in huge letters: “Universidad Nacional—Sierra Maestra.” Everything’s going to change, the guy said, the oligarchy can’t hold on much longer. Del Valle doesn’t recall if he agreed. In the kitchen again, he puts some water on the stove for coffee. Hadn’t he done that already? He thinks of the old house they used to live in, of the contracts he used to do for United Fruit. Thinks: You were ashamed of working for those fuckers, and because of that, you got yourself into all that nonsense. You lived like a Yankee, but not on their little plantation. They didn’t consider you civilized, and you—he doesn’t complete the thought, but it’s true. He had lived like he was compensating for something, trying to forget something, working long hours but taking any hour available to play dominos with the boys, to pass by Xochimara’s house, to make some poetic comment to himself about her body, to feel strong, to drink. And that was when he started to write, silly opinion pieces at first, then more serious, but always with a righteous tone that hid the true facts of his life as he lived it. The more righteously he wrote, the more alienated he grew from his day-­to-­day existence. He hated the company, hated the provinciality of Chiriquí. The utter provinciality. He repeats that word for some reason. About Ale he could not think clearly, and his mind is careful not to bring up that subject now. Ale held herself from confronting what she knew until the day that she returned home to the smell of another woman. That afternoon, she went to the bank, then to the Super Don Ismael. (“A suitcase,” the cashier said, “I’m jealous.”) When she picked Tali up from school, the girl held open for her the notebook in which she had traced the letters H through P with a colored pencil. The memory of her daughter showing her the letter M and the picture of a butterfly would surface in her mind like a painful hallucination even twenty years after the fact. As they began to walk home, Tali wanted to walk on the lines, but Ale snatched her up without saying anything, walking quickly. Tali said: Mamá, why are you sad? 228

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Ale said: I’m not sad. Tali said: Mamá, why are you angry? There was no answer. Tali: Did someone hit you? Ale said no one had hit her but that she might hit someone very soon. Tali thought her mother was referring to her and said nothing until they got home. There, her mother told her to bring all her clothes to the other room because they were going to play a very special game with suitcases. She could choose three toys and three dolls too. Tali did not like the game but knew it was not a good time to argue. That night, they slept at a friend’s house, mother and child in the same bed. In the morning, they went on a special trip on the big bus. VIII. Del Valle, Submitted Draft, La Prensa Series ​fter the closing of the trial at the National Assembly, the ruling circle expected to return to business. And in certain senses, life went on. The treaty was signed just three weeks after Remón’s death, and went on to be ratified by legislatures in both countries. Opening the newspapers of the era, one could forget about the Remón Affair for days and follow instead the range of domestic and international stories. “17 New Business Will Be Established in the Free Zone [of Colón]”; “MORE THAN 1,500 DOGS WILL BE PICKED UP IN THIS CITY”;53 Ernesto de la Guardia is in the next presidential race; the Communists attack in Laos, and the current president, Ricardo Arias Espinosa, “Will Ensure That Everyone Votes Freely.” A spaceship will circle the world in ninety minutes.54 But the trial was always in the background, if only because its material author had never been tried. Guizado and St. Malo were in prison, the latter awaiting trial; and their families used their resources, organizational capacity, and social standing to maintain a steady, expensive campaign for their release. One of the high points of the families’ campaign was their public letter of May 16 to the prosecutor, accusing him of a whole series of crimes relating to his investigation of the Remón Affair.55 The First Judicial District’s prosecutor, Francisco

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53. Both headlines from El País, April 12, 1955, 1. 54. Communists attack in Laos reported in the Panama American, July 10, 1955, 1; President Arias Espinosa’s quote is from El País, Wednesday, May 4, 1955, 1; “Spaceship to Circle World in 90 Minutes,” Panama American, July 30, 1955, 1. 55. A remonista group, the SAL (Sociedad de los Amigos de Louisiana), was running a public campaign to have the accused sentenced. (The name is a reference to a cantina Remón owned, the Louisiana Bar). Their campaign included the printing of leaflets accusing the defense of false accusations. On the day the trial began, the group

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Alvarado, felt he had no choice but to ask a second prosecutor to open an investigation into the investigation, and the latter submitted the results of his “investigation” for the Supreme Court’s consideration that August. Rubén Miró, for his part, kept himself in public view by emitting declarations from his cell, that he would soon point to the real culprits, disclose some key evidence, or otherwise help resolve the mystery. The newspapers found that almost any novel story about the case would sell—the more sensational the better. And the more they sold, the more they were willing to risk reprisals from the authorities. They began publishing every piece of information, often without verifying their facts.56 Guizado’s appeal to the Supreme Court for a retrial in September 1955 served to systematize the suspicions against the official judicial process. The prestigious Colegio de Abogados recommended at its annual meeting—which coincided with the beginning of the appeal—that all the members of the Supreme Court be reappointed, on the grounds that they had none of the necessary legal qualifications to be justices. (The judges disregarded this recommendation.) In his appeal, defense lawyer Escobar made two kinds of arguments. First, he pointed out a set of judicial irregularities and contradictions.57 New evidence, such as the declaration of Miró’s friend Eduardo Grau, was now put forward. Grau claimed that Miró told him of his plan three weeks before the shooting, boasting that he had the support of Timoteo Meléndez and Saturnino Flores, number three and number two in the police hierarchy, ­respectively. Grau reported the information to Commandant Vallarino dropped leaflets over Panama City from an airplane—a move that received the highest official authorization. Francisco J. González and Frederick R. Thome, agents, 470th MI, report, and Alfred F. Ballou and Arsenio P. Sánchez, agents, 470th MI, report, March 23, 1955, file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. 56. The newspapers’ position of course depended also on their owners’ interests. Guizado owned an estimated $10,000 worth of stock in El Día; naturally, this tabloid was the most outspoken. The government tried to suppress El Día in various ways. President Arias Espinosa reportedly threatened one of its major shareholders that he would ruin him financially if the shareholder did not sell his stocks. See CIA, “Activities of the Family of Former President Jose Ramon Guizado,” October 24, 1955, http://​www​.foia​.cia​.gov​/sites​/default​/files​/document​_conversions​/89801 ​/DOC​ _0001319579​.pdf. 57. See Felipe J. Escobar, Recurso de revisión de la sentencia contra el Presidente José Ramón Guizado, Editora La Tribuna (Corte Suprema de Justicia 1955), 5–6.

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before the shooting, and after the shooting he was called to speak with Vallarino again. Vallarino clarified some of the information he had heard before and thanked Grau again. Grau also spoke with deputies Heraclio Barletta and Diógenes Pino, both members of the Investigative Committee, recounted the details of his information, and asked to give official testimony. None of this information, however, appeared in the official docket presented to the Assembly.58 Nor did the testimony of Deputy Hugo Torrijos appear there. According to Torrijos, on November 11, 1954, Father Carlos Pérez Herrera warned him of a plot to assassinate Remón and Commandant Vallarino. That same day, Remón heard the information of the plot personally from the priest, who added two possible locations where it would take place—one of them being the racetrack. A few weeks later, Deputy Torrijos managed to find out that the source of the information was Carlos Miró, Rubén’s brother. From November 11, Commandant Vallarino received from this source too the exact information surrounding the plot, including the name of the plotter, Rubén Miró.59 Escobar’s appeal contained other information indicating that Miró had been plotting the shooting for at least six months. This made the claim that Guizado convinced Miró to shoot the president when the two met on December 18 even more problematic than it had been. It was all looking as if powerful people close to the interrogation were trying to keep key evidence from coming out.60 The Supreme Court rejected the appeal on October 14, claiming it lacked jurisdiction. On December 12 the Supreme Court also threw out the case against the prosecutor Alvarado, which the St. Malo family’s public denunciation had opened.61 For the time being, it seemed that 58. Escobar, Recurso de revisión de la sentencia contra el Presidente Guizado. See also Guizado, El extraño asesinato, 112–17. 59. Escobar, Recurso de revisión de la sentencia contra el Presidente Guizado (Corte Suprema de Justicia 1955), 9–10. See also Guizado, El extraño asesinato, 104. 60. Other pieces of evidence pointed to systematic attempts at perjury by the Investigative Committee. Escobar, Recurso de revisión de la sentencia contra el Presidente Guizado (Corte Suprema de Justicia 1955), 12; Guizado, El extraño asesinato, 67. 61. Investigación practicada en relación con los cargos formulados por Gladys M. de St. Malo, Carlos de St. Malo, Guillermo de St. Malo, Alfredo de St. Malo y Alberto de St. Malo, contra el Fiscal Primero del Primer Distrito Judicial, Lic. Francisco Alvarado Jr., Registro Judicial 234 (Corte Suprema, 1955).

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the defendants could achieve nothing through the judicial system. They continued to appeal, but with the view of stirring the public. The process, however, had by the end of 1955 gained its own rhythm. The ruling group of CPN politicians, National Guard officers, and judicial officials attempted to stall, dismiss, give heavy and circumvented formal responses, and otherwise generally buy time. They managed in this way to continue their rule, but the calm was often exploded by some utterance or some piece of information that did not seem to merit the ripple effect it caused.62 But with all the excitement, Ricardo Arias Espinosa managed to serve out the remainder of Remón’s term in office. And although their coalition was constantly on the verge of breaking up, the CPN managed to go to the 1956 elections unified behind Ernesto de la Guardia. The opposition claimed that the CPN committed massive fraud, but regardless, the ruling coalition remained in power.63 62. “On August 17, the long-­awaited article in Bohemia by the deported Cuban journalist Armando CRUZ Cobos (Embdesp 65, August 10) entitled ‘Narcotics: Motive for Remón’s Assassination’ with subtitle ‘Guizado: Panamanian Dreyfuss’ arrived in the Isthmus from Habana. To a public, at this point willing to believe almost anything about the case, it came as a sensation. In three hours, 10,000 copies were sold, and El Día, which reprinted the full text, was completely sold out.” Robert B. Memminger, chargé d’affaires, U.S. embassy in Panamá, to State Department, August 22, 1955, Central Decimal File 719.00/8-­2255, page 3, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP. As the embassy indicates, Cruz Cobos did not verify his information; indeed, it was later discovered that Gaspar “Bilo” Méndez, a known swindler, was the source of the information in the article. It seems as though Méndez was at least one source of the rumors that Remón was the victim of a criminal narcotics ring, although more reliable sources pointing to a criminal conspiracy exist. In any case, writers and publishers were well aware of the level of interest in such scoops. Carlos Iván Zúñiga, one of eight deputies to have voted against Guizado’s conviction, worked quickly to publish a book on the decision, feeling that it would be a best seller. Strangely, a CIA source reported this fact at the time when Zúñiga was in Perú. Zúñiga wrote a thesis on the trial, in which he had taken part, and published it as a book in 1957. He told the CIA source that it would have more appeal if published during the trial. See CIA, “Carlos Juan Zuniga’s Thesis on Assassination of Jose Remon,” October 22, 1957, http://​www​.foia​.cia​ .gov​/sites​/default​/files​/document​_conversions​/89801​/DOC​_0001319616​.pdf. 63. The US embassy reported that “notwithstanding de la Guardia’s statement in Miami on June 3 that the Panamanian elections had been ‘the most civilized in Panamá’s history,’ there are strong indications that, while the elections were orderly, the CPN victory was achieved with almost unbelievable corruption at the polls, and in

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If the De la Guardia regime was stable, why did it not want the trial to be over and done with? No one knew. Possibly, some of its key figures were involved in the murder and were afraid of losing control of the judicial process and becoming directly implicated. Or perhaps the government was not sure of its ability to contain potential popular outbursts in the aftermath of a trial, and, for the moment, stalled. De la Guardia at least understood better than his predecessor or his coalition that it was in his best interest to maintain a distance from the proceedings. While the opposition was slowly reconstituting itself after years of repression, De la Guardia’s remove allowed him to pass his first year in office more or less peacefully. But finally, on October 21, 1957, the trial began. As Rubén Miró, Rodolfo de Saint Malo, Federico Hyams, José Tejada, Luis Hernández, Camilo González, and Teresa Castro faced the jury, Panamanian public life stood still. The General Assembly could not muster a quorum for the duration of the trial, and important pieces of legislation like the passing of the budget of 1958 had to be delayed until after its conclusion. The show—for which an entire nation had been preparing for almost three years—was still completely unpredictable. We were all detectives, making sense of each utterance, connecting each new piece of information to the larger story, discarding old theories that no longer made sense. Often, several dramatic moments followed one another in one day. On October 26, for example, Panamanians got to see Hyams accuse Tejada of participation in the events (the audience stood on its feet). Next, Charles Altiman was taken to the racetrack, where he failed to point out exactly where he had seen the cadet Camilo González running after the shooting. Hyams and Miró were driven in a police car the registering of qualified voters. It is understood, for instance, that in the San Blas Islands, before a recount was ordered, there were more voters counted than there are actual known inhabitants of the islands. The Embassy was also reliably informed that the National Electoral Jury was inundated with complaints from almost every precinct regarding flagrant ballot stuffing and the use of devices to keep authorized opposition observers away from the polls and that these protests were summarily ignored or rejected.” R. Austin Acly, counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Panamá, to State Department, June 14, 1956, disp. 441, Central Decimal File 719.00/1-­355 to 719.00/3-­2659, box 2987, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP. The embassy went on to claim that the elections for National Assembly deputies had been just as corrupt—with the CPN guaranteeing itself forty-­eight out of fifty-­three seats.

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later that day to show the route they had followed before the murder (an enormous motorcade of curious citizens followed the official caravan). Finally, a doctor was called to examine a young woman serving on the jury—he was to assess if she could continue to serve, given the state of her nerves.64 The defense did, in the course of the trial, offer alternative narratives to the official one. But its focus was to fault the official investigation, the docket it had produced, and the official interpretation of events. The defense lawyers managed to place the interpretation of the past at the center of public discourse, in the headlines of the tabloids, on radio programs, and in people’s homes. And what was at the center of the debate was not so much any specific narrative, character, or theory, but rather the basics of the interpretative procedure the State was using. A tabloid headline: “The Defense Sustains That Yes, There Was Coercion.” 65 Such assertions focused the nation’s attention on the correct methodology of determining what really happened in the past. A man could be a fine lawyer, as the public prosecutor perhaps was; or very wealthy or powerful or good; a Marxist or a liberal—it did not matter now. The jury and the nation had to understand that certain interpretative procedures were the only way to reach the truth about how events had unfolded. Who killed Remón? Unable to answer, the masses were left to speculate; more important, the nation was called to examine the methodologies displayed in court. The question of who killed the president was no doubt important, but the question of the procedures that would be used to solve the judicial riddle were now becoming more salient still. Some of the arguments were new, and there were a number of issues that were more fully developed now. Numerous people, after their arrest, were held without accusation, without any rights, never allowed to meet with their lawyers or families. For example, Guizado’s son, “Mon,” was held for months without any charges. A writ of habeas corpus filed in the Supreme Court was dismissed with the most embarrassing arguments: it was filed against the public prosecutor, Alvarado, who claimed it was not he who had ordered the arrest (but no one else seemed to have signed the order either, nor was there any explanation for the prolonged 64. El Día, October 26, 1957, 1, 15. 65. “Sostiene la Defensa que sí hubo coacción,” La Hora, November 28, 1957, 1.

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detention).66 Naturally, it was not a stretch to suggest that the arbitrary and abusive manner in which most if not all of the detainees were handled made it easy to coerce some to give false testimony. It was well known by the time of the trial that all the international detectives and experts who had been brought especially to investigate the crime were, once in Panamá, marginalized, refused access to crucial material, not allowed to speak to National Guard agents, and so forth. Over the course of three years, these experts discussed the Panamanian case openly in the foreign and local press. And since the public came to suspect everyone in their country—and especially those charged with investigating the crime—the words of the foreign expert became particularly damning. Why, after all, would the Cuban detective, Israel Castellanos, lie? As it happened, Shelley Braverman, the North American ballistics expert, had been granted some measure of cooperation, and his report claimed, among other things, that the bullet that was supposed to have killed Remón matched the Schmeisser submachine gun he had inspected; this gun was, however, in reality assembled from two different weapons; and that at least three arms had been used at the racetrack aside from those used by Remón’s bodyguards.67 The merits of any of these points could perhaps have been argued. But in a country where local knowledge is always considered inferior to foreign expertise, and where the skill of all public officials involved in the investigation lurked under the shadow of their interests, it was nearly impossible to refute the claims of a ballistics expert of impeccable credentials who made nothing but the most careful comments. Thus, the Braverman report joined a series of observations that cast doubt on the investigation as well as on the narrative the investigation had produced. The defense 66. Recurso de Habeas Corpus propuesto por el Lic. Heliodoro Patiño contra el Fiscal Primero del Primer Distrito Judicial, Lic. Francisco Alvarado Jr. y a favor del Sr. José Ramón Guizado Jr. (enero a junio 1955), Registro Judicial 48 (Supreme Court, 1955), 1. Guizado Jr. (“Mon”) was arrested following the detention of his father, at a time when constitutional guarantees were suspended. When the constitutional guarantees were restored, the writ of habeas corpus was filed. The dissenting voices in the Supreme Court’s decision point to the obvious problem that a person could not be detained in Panamá without accusation, regardless of who had signed the detention order (in this case, no one). The colegio de abogados demanded in 1957 that all the Supreme Court judges be replaced on account of this embarrassing level of legal argumentation. 67. “Informe complete de Braverman.” El Día, October 28, 1957, 8.

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could easily cite the fact that documents were missing from the official docket—some said two hundred—and claim that what was missing was precisely those documents that hid the truth. The Lipstein issue was most likely a distraction, but it still worked to cast suspicion on the authorities: the fact that it was never clarified why Martin Irving Lipstein, a North American who had been wandering around the city after the murder, was arrested in the first place; why he was released after it was found out that his body and clothes were full of nitrate; and why no one took responsibility for having given the order of his release. As a parenthetical note, I should say that the facts relating to Lipstein have remained the most mysterious of the entire case. On the one hand, he had impeccable alibis. Various North Americans saw him around the hour of the crime, and under investigation, he claimed he had gone to see the canal. His description of a German ship and an American one passing the locks simultaneously—in accordance with the log register of the same hour—was a precise description of the only such occurrence that day. On the other hand, years later, during the JFK murder investigation, a Warren Commission agent found and interviewed a prisoner by the name of Marion Cooper. This Cooper, whose declaration was later opened to the public, claimed that he had been flying civilian planes for the CIA in different locations. He was ordered, so he claimed, to fly two hit men who worked for Lucky Luciano from Honduras aboard a United Fruit Company plane. The two were flown in, according to Cooper, on January 2 and flown out that same day.68 This piece of information corresponded with the evidence 68. Despite the Panamanian government’s plea that the US embassy take responsibility for having pressured for Lipstein’s release, the embassy was not willing to lie. Its officials reported to the State Department that, at the time, they had asked that he be provided the normal legal protections, but nothing more. Del Valle mentions internal correspondence of US agencies. In a FRUS volume available in Panamá, the Special National Intelligence Estimate of January 11, 1955, is reproduced. It is highly unlikely that an SNIE, which the CIA helped write and which is submitted to the US president, would be falsified. It claims plainly that “the identity and motivation of the assassins of President José Antonio Remon [sic] have not yet been established.” Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC), “Special National Intelligence Estimate 84–55,” January 11, 1955, cited in John P. Glennon, ed. in chief, and Edith James et al., eds., FRUS, Vol VII: American Republics: Central and South America (Washington, DC: United States Printing Office, 1987), 244. On the US embassy’s refusal to claim responsibility for Lipstein’s release, see U.S. Embassy in Panamá to State Department, November

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that Lipstein had in fact been a mafia hitman, but the issue was never settled. It is not impossible that the CIA, or someone in it, conspired to kill Remón—­Trujillo found his death with CIA help after serving it for a long time. But Remón was tremendously useful to the United States until the day he died. The fact that the US lent so many secret agents on the Isthmus to help uncover the murderer, and that its now declassified internal correspondence treats the case as a riddle, indicates too that the Northern Nation was not involved in the murder. In the end, the various defense lawyers sketched out a few alternative theories. The women—Thelma King and Olga Yanis—were by now understood to have had nothing to do with it. The communists had been an early scapegoat too. The arnulfistas were never entirely cleared of the affair, if only because both Miró and Guizado had been affiliated with the Partido Panameñista, the murder had taken place on the anniversary of the Acción Comunal coup, and Remón’s cops had only four years earlier engaged Arnulfo’s men in a gun battle that ended in the National Guard’s victory.69 There were a few others who had been eliminated from the list of possible assassins, but the options were still quite open. The defense believed it was an international narcotics ring, connected with people in the government. One of the lawyers sketched the scene, depicting one of the shooters located on a tree; and various other more or less speculative assertions followed. Perhaps we will never know: it 14, 1957 (disp. 283), Central Decimal File 719.00/1-­355 to 719.00/3-­2659, box 2987, RG 59, NACP. Marion Cooper’s version has been discussed in the Panamanian press following the release of more documents, all gathered in 1977. See, for example, Betty Brannan Jaén, “Las revelaciones de la CIA,” La Prensa, January 2, 2007. There are other indications, besides Cooper’s testimony, that Cooper was flying planes for both the United Fruit Company and the CIA (in fact, he had been arrested with another pilot in Panamá two years earlier); that Lipstein was working for the mafia; and that he had met LeRoy “Tincy” Eggleston, a Texas gunman, earlier that year. (In August 3, 1955, Eggleston was found dead in Texas.) On Cooper, see CIA, “Arrest by Panama National Police of American Flyers,” May 18, 1953, http://​www​.foia​.cia​.gov​/sites​/default​ /files​/document​_conversions​/89801​/DOC​_0000914885​.pdf. On Lipstein, see Gaspar “Bilo” Méndez to Juan Materno Vásquez, minister of government and justice, March 14, 1973, “Correspondence Manuel Antonio Noriega, Assorted documents,” SAE, ANP. While Gaspar Méndez is not a reliable source, the information he supplies in this case may be true. 69. A number of sources point to Rúben Miró’s plotting in 1954. It is difficult to ascertain which if any of these sources is reliable, however.

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is quite possible that more than one conspiracy to eliminate Remón by coup or murder was being hatched in the months before January 1955.70 This may have made it more difficult to distinguish relevant clues from false leads. Sousa’s murder received more attention not because it proved that any of the accused were innocent, but because it proved that the official investigation concealed and misrepresented evidence relating to this crime. What the defense needed to do, in other words, was to systematically point out all the failures of the prosecution’s story, rather than to solve the judicial mystery.71 Along the way, the defense achieved much more than it had hoped for. Miró became extraordinarily popular—people lined up outside court to cheer him and the rest of the accused every day before the trial. Not because of who he was; nobody had known or cared about him before the trial, and after it was over they forgot about him, and his occasional megalomaniac assertions did not move anyone. But now he stood for something: he was a victim of the same system that was grinding us all down. And what was that system? Nobody could explain it well, but it was a system of injustice, of lies, of perjury and corruption. The moment arrived and the jury had to make a decision. In the last weeks leading up to its conclusion, the North Americans reported to their superiors: “So thoroughly engrossed had the entire nation become in the proceedings of the long delayed Miro trial [. . .] that virtually all non-­essential government services and many private business enterprises had come to a standstill.” 72 After three hours of deliberation on 70. Guizado, for one, told his lawyer that he knew of a coup that was being organized but did not come to light. See Alphonso E. Marshall, Agent, 470th MI, report, March 10, 1955 (I-­176), file no. X8731026, box 490, RG 319, NACP. 71. Luis Morales Herrera, defending the cadets Hernández and Tejada, managed to have Dr. Manuel González Ruíz testify that he saw Sousa come into the hospital with four death wounds, and that he complained when he saw the autopsy report, which indicated only one shot. Sousa’s murder was never investigated, and was one of the key arguments for the defense. 72. Embassy to State, November 14, 1957, doc. 719.00/11–1457, disp. 283, 1955– 1959, Central Decimal File 719.00/1-­355 to 719.00/3-­2659, box 2987, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP. The CIA predicted that acquittal would result in disorder, especially from the students. This odd prediction was soon proved false. See CIA, “Political Repercussions of Government Trial of Ruben Miro, Accused Assassin of Former President Remon,” November 22, 1957, http://​www​.foia​.cia​.gov​/sites​/default​ /files​/document​_conversions​/89801​/DOC​_0001319614​.pdf.

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December 6, 1957, the jury reached its verdict. All of the accused were found not guilty. Within a few days, the Supreme Court pronounced the Guizado verdict to be “contradictory” to this new verdict, and he too was set free. IX. Del Valle, Sometime in 1993 ​ast week, a strange scene: our daughter invited us to participate in a funeral. As it happened, the funeral would be organized in the little patch of earth around the corner, where a house had recently been demolished. Tali had invited the university students involved in the play to this funeral, and I counted nine of them. The director of the play, a somewhat odd but very agreeable man by the name of Ernesto Sócrates Peralta, came too, and played his part as best he could. Our cousin Ema Tapia, who lives around the block and loves Tali, came as well. Tali was in charge, seeing as it was her idea to give our canary a formal burial rite. Señor Peralta read a piece from the Bible, which I’m assuming Tali had prepared for him. Then Tali read a little Neruda poem about love, and then she said her closing words about the canary, saying that it had died of the noblest reason of all (fear); and that each and every one of us carries one or two canaries in our hearts, and if we didn’t, we should. Then she took the little jewelry box in which the canary had been placed, and lowered it into a little hole someone had dug in the ground. As one of the students covered it with earth, using a shovel that seemed too big for the occasion, I could see the director glancing at us. Ale noticed this and glanced back with the same look of amused seriousness. Yes, she seemed to say in my name too, we realize just how curious our little woman is. I stood there and reflected how, in the months after I returned from Coiba, I found I could not speak with my daughter. I didn’t understand her language, her gestures, the references she made to US and Latin American popular culture. Or maybe it was something completely different, which only Ale truly understands. We couldn’t speak, my daughter and I, but I told myself that on some other level we appreciated each other. I said it and I believed it rationally, but it was only at the funeral that I began to really respect her. It was there that I understood that she has her own language, her own aesthetic intelligence, and that she is willing to fight for it. I tried to imagine how she’d gotten all those students to go along with this performance. Did she explain to them the logic of it, or was it just how theater people do things? (She said to Ale

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and me in all seriousness that she would consider it an honor if we were to attend.) I only have one daughter, so I can’t compare. But I sometimes think of other parents—are they proud of their silly kids, who are so awfully boring, who won’t ever say one interesting thing in their entire lives, and whose intellectual world will amount to some deal they get on a new pair of jeans at the mall? Imagine, a funeral for a canary, and all of us, standing around as another student places the little gravestone Tali had made. On the stone, she carved the words, “To the gentle, who fly.” X. Dell Valle, Final Draft, La Prensa Series he trial was over before the end of 1957, and in May 1958, a new series of events began, and the country fell into a two-­year crisis. On May 2, Operation Sovereignty: students, in a meticulously planned and executed action, planted some thirty-­nine flags on Canal Zone territory. The press was overwhelmed with joy; the North Americans were stern (but composed); and the government, which apparently had been notified of the action in advance, managed to remain ambiguous and not lose too many points.73 On May 16, however, the students shifted the target of their attacks, from the Yankees to the regime. A protest organized by high school students called for the resignation of the minister of education, educational reform, and the immediate resignation of the three top National Guard commanders. As their calls were not answered, they took to the street again three days later, this time joined by some university students. In a confrontation near the presidential palace, the police began shooting tear gas and charging with sabers. A student died, which touched off a wave of rioting. The next days witnessed a situation that looked like it would become a full-­fledged revolution. University students, opposition members, and workers set up councils in schools and neighborhoods; a national strike was declared; in Colón, students laid siege to National Guard headquarters. The government suspended constitutional guarantees and declared the entire educational system closed. With labor leaders joining the fight, with armed right- and left-­wing radicals taking to the streets, the government lost control of Panamá and Colón for a number of days. The Na-

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73. U.S. Embassy to State Department, May 6, 1958, disp. 557, Central Decimal File 719.00/1-­355 to 719.00/3-­2659, box 2987, doc. 719.00/5-­658, RG 59, NACP. For a broader discussion, see Conte Porras, La rebelión de las esfinges.

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tional Guard managed to repress the uprising only after laying siege to the National Institute and the University of Panamá for a few days (their water supply was even shut down), arresting hundreds, shooting and injuring dozens, and killing a total of eight more people.74 These protests were the first in a series of challenges to the oligarchic regime, which lasted for the two years following the trials and were the most tumultuous the country had ever known. To give a sense of the crisis, let us recall some of the events that ensued. In October 1958, the students mobilized against a law limiting their right to organize. In February 1959, a wave of protests and a popular assembly (cabildo abierto) resulted in the firing of the entire Panama City municipal council. On March 1, 1959, Vallarino managed to avert the “Sergeants’ Revolt”—a coordinated move between officers and NCOs of his National Guard and civilian politicians.75 That April, Roberto (“Tito”) Arias sailed on a boat with some seventy Cubans to Panamanian shores, intending to repeat the experience of the Sierra Maestra. Simultaneously, radicalized students from the Santiago high school in Veraguas opened a second foco in the mountains near Santa Fe de Veraguas. The young Major Torrijos suppressed the poorly armed and untrained Santiago teenagers, while a company headed by another officer, Rubén Darío Paredes, aided by US intelligence, routed the Cubans. In October, the March of Hunger and Desperation moved slowly from Colón to Panamá. Independence Day, November 3, 1959, witnessed the “Siembra de Banderas,” as the students 74. The situation could be seen as dystopic or utopic depending on one’s point of view. Compare, for example, the embassy report with Abraham Bell E., El movimiento estudiantil de 1958 (Panamá, RP: s.n, 1992), 9–14. U.S. Embassy to State Department, June 2, 1958, disp. 588, Central Decimal File 719.00/1-­355 to 719.00/3-­2659, box 2987, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP. Unlike these two sources, however, the Comité de Familiares de Desaparecidos de Panamá puts the toll at twenty-­two dead and dozens injured. See Comité de Familiares de Desaparecidos de Panamá Héctor Gallego, COFADEPA-­H G, “Breve Análisis de las causas del golpe militar en Panamá (1968),” http:// ​www​.sicsal​.net​/ informes​/ANALISISCAUSASGOLPEMILITARPANAMA​ .html. 75. It was announced that twenty-­four were arrested. Between the Guardia and civilians, at least forty planned the revolt. A group that was nicknamed the “Young Turks” and which included Major Omar Torrijos began to take form as a serious threat within the Guard. U.S. Embassy to State Department, March 6, 1959, disp. 429, Central Decimal File 719.00/1-­355 to 719.00/3-­2659, box 2987, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP.

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again planted Panamanian flags in the Zone. The action was followed with an escalation of protests, including the March of the Torches, with its rejection of the entire Hay–­Bunau-­Varilla framework. These events were only the most visible and threatening to the regime. Beneath the surface, an entire field of smaller, more localized peasant protests was simmering.76 (In 1960, the biggest strike in the history of the United Fruit Company’s Panamanian subsidiary took place). In short, the two years that followed the conclusion of the trial were not only politically volatile, but were also years of political radicalization: the students, peasants, and workers marching, striking, protesting and organizing were not interested in cosmetic changes but in a replacement of the regime, or at least its radical reform. To be sure, each protest had its own cause, its own protagonists and goals. And if one reason had to be named for their failure to dislodge the oligarchic regime, it would be precisely the lack of a unifying framework—organizational, ideological, sometimes even social and geographical. But if unrelated, why did the protests follow one another so closely? Did the judicial process, which ended just before the regime’s troubles began, have anything to do with this dramatic crisis? Note 2/1/93: Three hypotheses were developed and discussed with Carpintero. A first hypothesis maintained that the political crisis stemmed from economic hardships; or at least that the worsening of economic conditions was the salient factor in the upheavals. To assess this possibility, I bring Carpintero the economic figures available to me. Carpintero is dismissive of this argument (surprising, for a materialist). As he goes over the figures, he repeats that there is no evidence for any economic downturn. “One has to be very careful with these numbers,” he says. “You can’t deduce from the macroeconomic growth that everyone was doing well.” But according to him, the 1955 treaty, together with favorable international conditions, stimulated a period of economic growth that lasted into the early 1970s. Between 1958 and 1962, there was a steady rise in salaries without a corresponding rise in prices. He emphasizes that 60% of the peasants still lived in subsistence, and that there was malnutrition 76. See Corrales de Alcedo and Cortes de González, “Las luchas sociales en Veraguas.”

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among the urban workers and unemployed. But he shows me numbers that he claims hint at growth even in poor urban sectors—the clearest indicator being a dramatic rise in electricity consumption.77 A second possibility, which he helped me formulate, stated that the crisis had to do with the country’s altered foreign relations. Although in 1955 the Remón–Eisenhower Treaty had seemed like a modest victory, after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, the Panamanian arrangement seemed pathetic. Despite dramatic changes in the cities bordering the Zone, the US did not implement the treaty’s most important concession: equal pay for Panamanian and US canal workers. There were other problems of implementation besides, but the most humiliating one was that Panamanian flags were not flown anywhere in the Zone. Carpintero made the point, however, that these factors were not static; rather, they provided grounds on which various groups could mobilize, take positions against one another, and so forth. For example, he said, the oligarchy’s politicians used these issues to pretend like they were siding with the students, all the while assuring their US patrons behind closed doors that matters were under control. Various radical student groups, by contrast, took principled anti-­imperialist stands as part of a larger strategy to embarrass the oligarchy and keep its complicity with the nation’s humiliation on the agenda.78 77. I would like to thank Harvard economist Noel Maurer, with whom I discussed these figures. He concluded that while the available figures are not good enough to make very accurate judgments on the situation of particular classes, there is no evidence for an economic slowdown of any kind. Nor could he conclude, based on agricultural prices, that there was any crisis in the interior. If the figures available indicate anything, it is that Panamá in the late 1950s was experiencing an impressive, steady period of growth. Within a few years, it would be possible to claim that Panamá had the highest rate of growth in Latin America—a fact that could have slowed the demise of the regime. For figures on 1958–60, see Panamá en cifras: Compendio estadístico, años 1958–1962 (Panamá, RP: Dirección de Estadística y Censo, 1963), 101–67. See also Robert E. Looney, The Economic Development of Panama: The Impact of World Inflation on an Open Economy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976), 19–23; United Nations, El desarrollo económico de Panamá, Análisis y proyecciones del desarrollo económico 7 (México: Naciones Unidas, Departamento de Asuntos Económicas y Sociales, 1959). 78. A revealing conversation on the repercussions of the Suez crisis, which confirms the students’ worse suspicions about their politicians, took place in August 1956. It is interesting to contrast the congruence between US diplomats and Panamanian

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Carpintero adds that in the middle of 1958 the university students were already well aware of the war in the Sierra Maestra, and that this affected their combative stance. Panamá and Cuba shared many characteristics, and the public in both countries took a special interest in the ongoing affairs of their sister republic. (Notice the interest with which the Cuban journal Bohemia followed the Remón Affair, for example.) By mid-­1959, everyone understood that the game had changed. A third hypothesis points to a deep crisis of legitimacy, which the Remón trials unleashed. Naturally, it is difficult to break down a crisis of hegemony to its components; and it is especially hard to do so if there is not a watershed event—say, the Malvinas War for Argentina—that is widely recognized by the historical actors themselves as a game changer. And how could a trial, farcical as it may have been, be compared with losing a war? Our hypothesis states nonetheless that, with the three-­ year trial, the regime dramatically enacted its hypocrisy, corruption, and malevolence, destroying the symbolic web that sustained it. I have no doubt that, during the trial, the public slowly shifted, from a polite suspicion of the ruling forces to a deep anger at all it stood for. But this is not precise enough, and I am afraid I do not myself have the tools with which to judge the evidence. It is possible that a combination of the altered global context and the crisis of hegemony that the trials stimulated was responsible for the eventual deterioration of the regime. The process, which began during the trials and reached its peak between 1958 and 1960, subsided with the fall of the Coalición Patriótica Nacional and the election of the opposition’s candidate, Roberto Chiari (son of former President Rodolfo Chiari). But the calm would not last, and with every new outbreak of protest—1962, 1964, 1966—­Panamanians became more desperate and radical. XI. Tali, May 11, 2003 don’t remember much from the play anymore, and anyway, it’s always strange what an actress remembers of a play. In the last scene, I was wearing an elaborate costume they had made just for those few

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decision makers on the Panamanian situation with the state of mind of the Egyptian leadership at the time. See “Memorandum of a Conversation, Panama City, August 9, 1956,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, American Republics: Central and South America, vol. 7, Office of the Historian, US Department of state, http://​ history​.state​.gov​/ historicaldocuments​/frus1955​-­­57v07​/d147.

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moments. I was a woman-­spider, and the way it had to work, the webs were growing out of me and restricting my movement. During the scene before it, congas had been playing in the background, bit by bit getting louder, to the horror of the white characters who had been trapped in the enchanting Caribbean rhythm. Now, in the very last act, I had a way of moving slowly, so it would look very elegant, and the stage was dark and glittery, which made it all very dreamlike. The drums started rising again, and a dim light shone just beneath me, where Valentín was lying in a kind of children’s pool that had been disguised as a pond, and now he was half drowning, speaking from within the morphine with the lover he remembered from before his prison time. I stand there, moving only slightly, and very gently, and the web moves with me. I have the thinnest of smiles, as I point Valentín toward the jungle, where he could eat his last dinner of guava paste and roasted chicken. Tears start running down my cheeks. I’m crying gently while Valentín speaks to his love, and as the happy dream closes, the lights dim. Then all I hear are the drums getting louder . . . and the next memory I have is of the lights on and the audience clapping loudly, over the drums, standing up . . . now the stage people disconnect me from the web and I remain in a glittering black dress that’s tight on my skin, and we’re bowing, bowing, happy. I look at my parents, and Mom is excited, despite everything, and you can’t tell that she’s concerned at all, and so is Dad, excited, clapping his hands with all his force, although his eyes are a little glazed as he looks at me. Then I don’t remember exactly what happened, because I was behind the stage with the other actors, but someone must have called Mom, because I had trouble breathing. I suppose I regained my breath, because I had to have gotten home somehow, and I don’t remember that being a problem. And at home Mom warmed the sancocho she had made me, and Dad stood at the window and looked outside. But later (it must have been quite late), I remember myself barely breathing, in the darkness of my room, with only the little lamp. I can’t breathe and I feel like someone had put a huge pillow on my face, a giant pillow, and my chest is pressing. I find the inhaler at the bottom of one of the cabinet drawers, but half a minute, maybe a minute later, it’s not doing anything, and I’m drowning. Now I feel tears, and I notice Mom standing on the other side of the door, whispering my name, not sure if she should get in or not, whispering Tali, amor. Then she knocks, gently, and I don’t respond, the inhaler in my mouth, and 245

Chapter five Panamanian students crossing the fence into the Canal Zone on the night of January 9, 1964. The image

appeared in Crítica the next day, and was reproduced over a full page in Diario La Prensa, March 14, 1964.

The photo of students crossing into the Canal Zone was taken by Peruvian photographer Emilio Gastelú. Later, it was reproduced numerous times on student pamphlets, bulletins, and calls-­to-­arms, becoming the iconic image of the protests—indeed, the iconic image of Panamanian resistance. About the celebrations on the night of December 6, 1957, see US Embassy to State Department, December 7, 1957 (Control 4166), Central Decimal File 719.00/1-­355 to 719.00/3-­2659, box 2987, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP.

she knocks harder for a second but then walks in, Dios, she touches my hair and then runs to get the nebulizer. My face was covered with vapor, under a towel, but I could hear Dad shouting to my Mom that there was no answer. Panamá: midnight, asthma attack, no ambulance. No one even answers the phone. We didn’t have a car so my father had no choice and he started knocking on our neighbor’s doors—it was almost midnight—and people cursed, but he was shouting in the stairway, please, my daughter needs to get to the hospital, we need some help. A few doors opened, but people said they didn’t have a car, one said he was getting his fixed, and my father ran to the third floor, then the second—he was desperate. Then from the fifth 246

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floor, Doña Johanna shouts to him, “Ingeniero, my husband is putting on his shoes!” I don’t remember that part, but apparently Francisco and Johanna, with whom we’d never exchanged more than a hello, helped take me to the hospital. And that’s the last scene—my parents taking me down the stairs, to Don Francisco’s car. I think Dad never did end up saying anything about the day they announced that all seven defendants were innocent. It was 2:30 in the afternoon when they announced it, and people began crowding the streets and public squares immediately. The president gave some speech an hour later on the radio, calling for calm, but no one listened. The National Guard mobilized to contain a rebellion, but that was not necessary. That night, however, there was dancing on the balconies, in the streets, a carnival in the city.

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Part III : On the Way to Chumumbito …

6 Héctor’s Hermeneutics Radical Readings and Christian Liberation in Santa Fe de Veraguas, 1968–197 1 …

I. Tali Del Valle hree plainclothes agents knocked on the door of the hut before midnight, June 9, 1971, and asked if they could speak with Jacinto Peña. Knowing that it was him they were looking for, Héctor Gallego answered the men while fumbling in the darkness to find his glasses, then he made his way out. Two weeks earlier, his hut had been torched, and now he was sleeping in Jacinto’s home. The men presented an order of arrest. Héctor argued for a while, promising that he would drive down to the police station in the provincial capital in the morning. There were apparently some threats before the young priest finally agreed to go. He went back into the house and put on his clothes, then came out into the darkness. Jacinto said: “A man at each side, they walked slowly in the direction of their car, passing behind the Cooperative’s car and entering the little alley that the two cars formed. I watched through the incisions of the mud wall of my house, and when they entered this alley I lost sight of them. Then a few seconds later I heard two faltering shouts. I suppose something muffled his mouth because the cry came out like a shriek.”1 When I came to Santa Fe, my understanding of the Torrijos regime was sketchy, and I knew that, without understanding it, I wouldn’t be able to make sense of the historical context of the region’s Popular Christian Movement (here, sometimes referred to as El Movimiento). Like most Panamanians, I saw Manuel Noriega as a thug, and considered his regime (1983–89) as an opportunistic, utterly corrupt, cruel dictatorship. Many in Panamá have a much more benign view of Omar

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1. Testimony of Jacinto Peña, quoted in Sumarias en averiguación de las causas que originaron la desaparición física del sacerdote Héctor Gallego, 1993 Ministerio Público, 3 (1993). Names in this chapter have been altered, except those that are well known in Panamá, such as Alvaro Vernaza, Héctor Gallego, and Jacinto Peña.

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Torrijos, the man who led the military regime from 1968 until his death in a mysterious plane crash in 1981. A lot of people see General Torrijos as a true socialist, a man of his people, who led the most important land reform in the country’s history and successfully negotiated the return of the canal to Panamanian hands. Growing up with my father in prison, I was naturally suspicious of this view, but I couldn’t develop a more mature understanding of this period and, perhaps like most Panamanians, preferred to think about other issues. As I dove deeper into this research, I came to see that, by the mid-­’70s, the military under Torrijos really did come to fashion itself after the Juan Velasco regime in Perú, flirting with socialist ideas. Between aiding the Sandinistas and making bold anti-­imperialist statements, putting in place a progressive labor code and a new land reform, and finally renegotiating the treaty with the US, Torrijos certainly gained the respect of many on the left. But I think a more mature view would see that the military coopted and integrated elements of the left only after popular challenges in its early years almost unseated it. It would be easier to look at the military regime as a populist dictatorship with a political economy and a foreign policy that shifted dramatically from center to center-left, and again to the right, as circumstances warranted. I saw Veraguas Province as a key to understanding the period because it was caught in a development race in the ’60s and ’70s, an ideological competition on the path to modernity and material progress that captivated Panamanian observers. It was one of the poorest provinces in Panamá, and the peasants of the highland region of Santa Fe suffered from disease and malnutrition. Meanwhile, radicals in a growing movement within the church began to experiment with their own solutions. A decade after the Cuban Revolution (and the Cerro Tute Rebellion, which followed it in Veraguas), this development race was not only about improving the material conditions of the peasantry. It was a competition over the way in which to modernize Panamá, about who would lead development and with what ideological framework, about who would make claims to its benefits and boast of its achievements. In Santa Fe, between 1968 and 1971, Father Héctor Gallego’s movement overturned the rule of the region’s strongmen and radicalized the peasantry. Peasants joined Bible-­reading circles and literacy classes, and peasant leaders went through a rapid process of technocratic education and spiritual self-­examination. The movement, which counted around 252

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two thousand members from the town’s surrounding areas, grew increasingly bold, expanding its multiservice coops and finally occupying lands. It drew the personal ire of Torrijos as it withstood immense pressure from the military, and it wouldn’t change course even after the “disappearance” of its leader and the exiling of the church team that had helped him. Indeed, the national crisis that the “disappearance” provoked would eventually play a role in the regime’s own left turn. At first glance, many of the developmental solutions that the regime and the different agencies in Veraguas provided were quite similar. And really, the church, which cooperated with USAID and Peace Corps volunteers, could be seen to have operated either on the left or the right of the military. Different sides were learning from one another, and so cooperatives and alphabetization were keywords in every development project in rural Panamá. But there were important differences in the political culture of the organizations, their guiding ideology (or lack thereof ), their gender relations, and ultimately their goals and purposes. There was a difference between the projects that the government had launched and those of the church, but there was also a marked difference among various church projects as well. Some of the elders in Santa Fe today lament that the coop they founded during Héctor’s period has, over the years, become too similar to a normal business; that what was an instrument of a radical movement has lost its ideological core. They have been struggling—without much success, they will be the first to admit—to fix the part of their movement that dealt with what they call formación. But though they were the first to go through the personal transformation in the movement’s first years, they aren’t sure what it was that kept the process alive, and why it decayed. They speak of the energetic discussions, the enthusiasm, the first feeling that they too had a voice. They explain how they interpreted the Bible and reflected on their own reality. They talk about cobbling together the first few coins to create a coop, and about carrying sacks of produce on their backs. And they marvel at how they, the peasants, who could barely read or write, stood up—first against the local bosses who had kept them down for so long, and finally against the military regime itself. They are at a loss to explain, however, what kept their internal discipline strong enough to fight a repressive regime that had easily swept away the militants of the right and left. And they are not sure what it was that prevented them from falling into fights 253

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among themselves. At a time when internal fights are endangering the continuity of their project, they wonder how it was that they had managed to stay on the path during Héctor’s time. What was it that kept the peasants from robbing their communal institutions, as happened in similar organizations in the country, and as would happen in their own coop again and again in later years? What was the ideological fuel that kept their movement on the march against such powerful forces, and how did it suddenly run out? Although I’ve only been looking at one marginal region, these are big questions, central to any attempt to understand radical movements and their chances of transforming a ­society. During my time in Santa Fe, I came to see the deep discussions about the Bible, about history, and about the contemporary social realities of the peasants as crucial to the movement’s success. To most of the peasants who participated in these debates, the discussions were of course important. In Santa Fe, the analysis and debate about contemporary problems was tied to a much broader framework, one that had been developed during the Movement’s formative years. So when I suggested to some of the old peasant leaders that it was the reading circles and the debates that kept them on the right moral and ideological path, they agreed. And a number of peasant leaders also said that, beyond structural differences, what distinguished their coop from the government’s asentamientos was the spirit that animated their organization. But as people with urgent material preoccupations and a strong practical bent, the peasant cadre never thought much about the abandonment of the reading circles after Héctor was no longer around to guide them. And I could tell that it was difficult for them to explain exactly why and how this theoretical and ideological framework mattered. To my mind, the movement used the interpretation of the present and past as an ideological and cultural engine—an engine that gave it social power and allowed it to radicalize its cadre, close its ranks, and challenge an entrenched and authoritative elite. It’s true that Héctor’s leadership allowed the peasants to create the social framework for these debates. Together with a team of church clergy and lay workers, moreover, Héctor formed a series of supportive frameworks, like the radio classes and leader retreats. Peasants learned not only the technical skills required to run a coop, but also the analytical framework that allowed them to keep the reading circles oper254

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ating in their hamlets. But the way I see it, the movement’s voice was polyphonic. It combined concepts taken from an emerging liberationist Catholicism—themselves a result of various activist traditions—with modes of expression and practices typical for highland Panamá. Seeing as its raison d’être was empowerment, polyphony allowed the peasants to develop their independent voices. But it also meant that, when the church’s team in the region was forced to disperse, the peasants gradually focused on the kind of interpretative practices they were more familiar with and abandoned the reading circles and the existential debates of the movement’s early years. By then, in any case, a new subjective world had been created—one that overturned the world of the region’s caudillos and forced the Torrijos regime to find a new, more progressive path. II. ​ast April, a gas attendant from Veraguas, a man by the name of Abdul-­James González, went to the capital to arrange himself a better job. Around 5:30 p.m., he was ordering a chicken, Coke, and corncob combo at the Jap Jap when he saw Carpintero standing right there, waiting for his order. The two hadn’t known each other well in Coiba, but Abdul associated Carpintero with the intellectual prisoners, and without any introduction, told him he had seen his old friend at a gas station in Santiago de Veraguas. “It’s your friend, the guy we all took for dead. You know the one. He’s alive but he says his name is Artemio López.” Carpintero tried to remember Abdul’s name and to get to the bottom of what he was saying. “I told him ‘tamo offi compa’ . . . I said, broder, I know you’re Luna-­ Icaza, ’ta todo prity . . . pero que va.” Carpintero said “ya,” and Abdul grabbed his food and sat next to him. The man continued talking as he devoured his chicken, making large gestures with his hands. “I had my doubts for a second there because he looked confused when I called him Luna-­Icaza, me entiendes? We lived in the same cabin in Coiba for a year.” He paused as he took down half of his Coke. “It’s been years. What happened is, see, he had that way of standing, leaning a bit in, like this.” (Abdul stood up and imitated the posture, still holding on to a piece of chicken with his right hand.) “Ya,” Carpintero said. “So he says to me ‘este . . . I don’t want to contradict you, that is, about

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the name,’ he says to me—epa! Only Luna-­Icaza would say he doesn’t want to contradict someone who gets his name wrong!” Abdul shouted, raising the chicken for emphasis. “Ta’ ahuevao o que!” “Ahuevao,” Carpintero agreed, shaking his head. “And you say this Artemio López lives in the mountains now?” “Over there in Santa Fe de Veraguas,” Abdul said, pointing to the general direction with his lips. “Well,” Carpintero sighed, “you never know.” But he later told his wife it probably meant nothing, and added a caveat about “the prisoner ­psyche.” A few months later, in June, a journalist friend asked Carpintero to join him and three organizers from SUNTRACS who were going to the June 9 commemorations. Without giving it too much thought, Carpintero agreed, with the idea of meeting some of the old lefties up in the mountains. They went up in a black SUV, avoiding the morning traffic, and were in Santa Fe in less than five hours. I heard about it at some point in June, after one of the interviews I did with Carpintero. I had gone back to the US to finish the semester after Dad passed away, and then returned as soon as the semester was over. I hadn’t spent more than a couple of weeks in Panamá since I had left, at eighteen, and I found myself confronting a circle of family, old friends and acquaintances that was restricting my airflow. I remember one time walking in Parque Urracá with a friend I’d considered an independent person. Her live-­in empleada was pushing the two-­year-­old in a stroller, a comfortable distance behind us. As my friend was telling me about her husband (manager at Scotiabank), I went over the list of friends I had in Panamá: all sold out. As I was already doing an MA in Latin American literature, I told my adviser I wanted to write about the reading circles that were formed in Santa Fe. I figured it would be a good way to spend more time near my mother; I had promised her that I would compile some material about my father, and publish the articles he’d left nearly finished. By June, I was already doing interviews, meeting people my father had known in prison, dipping into the archive, and having long conversations with Carpintero. I’m an obsessive person, and when I get into this kind of drive, I hardly sleep or eat, going on for a few days until I exhaust myself, then dipping into a philosophical, melancholic, gazing-­out-­the-­ window kind of rest. I realized that my drive this time was especially intense because Dad had recently passed away, that this was a way of 256

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working with the mess. One night I wrote in my diary: “I don’t know what keeps me going. The material [has] somehow gotten larger, it’s spiraling, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.” Carpintero took me up to Santa Fe, and we stayed the night at Luna-­ Icaza’s house, which he shares with his partner, Concepción. (Here, only the wealthy marry; most others live juntados). Luna-­Icaza had no memory of Carpintero or my father, but being with us animated him, and from time to time he closed his eyes for a second, concentrating on a detail that had been mentioned. He remembered coming in and out of consciousness and living in a hut near the beach, not far from Bahía Honda, where a pair of old people took care of him for a short time, smearing his burns with an ointment that smelled of olives and thyme. They called him Artemio, apparently knowing nothing of the origin of the name, and he assumed they knew him. Now and then he would ask, in a soft voice, the same questions he had already asked, and they repeated the answers, emphasizing from time to time that if anyone should ask, he needed to use their last name, López. Gradually, he became more focused, regained his strength, and started helping the old woman tending to the vegetable garden around the house. When he recuperated, they said he should not stay en esos partes, and arranged for him to go with a cousin of theirs, a fish merchant, who was going up to the mountains. This cousin came one day in a Toyota pickup that had a huge plastic container in the back full of fish and ice. Luna-­Icaza recalled that during the time he was living there, he felt a terrible hunger for reading, and while he couldn’t remember anything about himself, he seemed to know a whole lot about the world—names of places, authors, presidents, obscure religious doctrines. A few times, the old man brought him a newspaper that one of the merchants had given him, but aside from this, the little shack only had one book, a little black Bible. The two could not read very well, but Luna-­Icaza read it cover to cover as though it were a detective book. When the old lady asked him to, Luna-­Icaza would read her a chapter out loud. The old man didn’t care too much for the Bible, but was very curious about faraway lands, peoples, and customs. Luna-­Icaza knew that fakirs did not live in Israel, as the man had guessed, but in India, that there were time differences between countries because the world was round and spinning on its axis, and when asked, he could also explain that Lenin led the October Revolution and that whales were mammals. Mammals, the 257

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old man repeated thoughtfully. Three days before he left, the old man asked Luna-­Icaza to draw him a map of the world, and except for northern Russia and parts of the Indonesian islands, the penciled image he drew was precise. The old man studied it carefully, every minute or so putting his hand on his young friend’s arm: And where is China? Cuba, so little? Finally, the old man folded the piece of paper carefully and put it in his pocket. III. ​fter dark, I sat in the little front porch of Luna-­Icaza and Concepción’s house and wrote in my notebook: “The wind was blowing very hard yesterday and it made a strong impression on me. I’m carrying a map I brought from the city, and I think I’ll get to know the region with my feet, at the same time as I do my interviews. I’m still playing with the wish to feel what Héctor felt when he first started walking these paths, telling myself maybe he too was trying to walk in someone else’s footsteps. Yesterday, the wind was pressing against my body as I climbed up the dirt road toward what’s-­the-­place-­called: I was thinking consciously of everything. I walked up the road, taking everything in, noting fifteen minutes, pueblo to bridge, forty-­two from—and the wind: whhoo-­oo. A pickup truck passed by slowly, and stopped about a hundred meters away; the dust gave the image the feel of a 16-­millimeter film. I tried to understand if anything important was happening. The wind: whhooo, who-­ooo. A kid climbed down from the back of the truck, slowly, then his mother, and a young man. I feel like a separate entity, living outside of the world around me—everything’s foreign. The pickup drove uphill, the people disappeared off to some path, and I walked away, uphill. The mountains breaking upwards everywhere, Cerro Mariposa, Cerro Tute. Below, the Santa María River, now as high as it’s been in years, overflowing, and the wind. Santa Fe de Veraguas.” I was writing for a while when I suddenly felt I needed to correct the title on the first page of my orange notebook: “Field Notes.” (Later, I noticed that some of the notes I had written at the National Library were very formal, like a history book, and others had the feel of a diary.) I had coffee with Concepción and Luna-­Icaza, then helped put together a light dinner. Her daughter having left for the city the year before, they now had an extra room, and Concepción arranged the little bed for me. Looking through the gaps between the white cane stalks that made my

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wall, I could see the darkness outside, and when it rained, I would fall asleep with a light tap on the tin roof. For a moment after the fall of the CPN and the election of President Roberto F. Chiari in 1960, it looked like the students would go back into the classroom, and the general populace would ease back into respectful political participation. But the regime had lost legitimacy, and almost any well-­organized protest could now escalate into a popular rebellion.2 Still, no opposition group managed to fully capitalize on the profound dissatisfaction. The students could unite for a brief campaign, or in response to an emergency, as they did in January 1964. But they were split into a variety of small groups, some of which were now so radicalized that they found any cooperation with the centrist groups painful. Many of those groups were led by one or two strong figures, who could be coopted, offered a job, or convinced to fight against a competing group. Unification, democratic decision making, and long-­term strategic planning were unimaginable, as was any broader and more durable alliance with workers and peasants. For a decade, the National Guard was back in the barracks—a suitable arrangement had been found between its head, Bolívar Vallarino, and the governing families. “Lilo,” as he was called, was himself of elite extraction, and was satisfied to remain a key player without taking over in the way Remón had. Underneath him, as it turned out, the Guard was changing. Since 1903, Panamanian policemen had almost all been members of the lower classes. With Remón, there began a process in which members of the lower-­middle class who had a high school education (often from the National Institute) took scholarships and studied in military schools in other Latin American countries. Of the 3,369 Latin Americans trained in the School of the Americas in 1966, 757 were Panamanians—more than the soldiers of Perú, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala combined. But while they were becoming 2. The most well-­known protests are those of January 1964, about which there are various sources. See, for example, Alan L. McPherson, Yankee No! Anti-­Americanism in U.S.–­Latin American Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 3; Alan L. McPherson, “Rioting for Dignity: Masculinity, National Identity and Anti-­US Resistance in Panama,” Gender & History 19, no. 2 (August 1, 2007): 219–41; Virgilio Araúz, La gesta de enero de 1964 (Panamá, RP, 1988); Roberto N. Méndez, Panamá, 9 de enero de 1964: Qué pasó y por qué (Panamá, RP: Imprenta de la Universidad de Panamá, 1999).

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increasingly well trained, the Panamanian policeman’s chance for upward mobility was still low. A captain in 1959 took home a monthly salary of $225 before taxes, equal to that of a high school teacher. For most officers, in other words, the existing scheme meant that even with kickbacks from illegal activities, they could not hope to rise above the middle class. From the policemen’s point of view, moreover, they were constantly asked to confront the people who resembled them most, and to do so for a class which constantly reminded them they could not enter its clubs. Increasingly in the 1960s, the officers came to consider the National Security Doctrine, preached with confidence in the Canal Zone, as a way in which to take center stage.3 For the time being, however, most guardsmen did not directly involve themselves in politics. The officers had no political clubs, for example, and nothing that could serve them as a think tank or an ideological laboratory. Until 1968, then, the one issue that could unite them against the political class was the integrity of their own institution. In 1968, the oligarchy descended into a deep crisis. That year, the violent repression of riots in Colón, which were followed by the parliamentary rejection of the Robles–­Johnson (“Three-­in-­One”) Treaty with the 3. In 1959, only 35 of 192 Guard officers had been trained by military academies; by 1970, there were four trained in academies for every five brought up from the ranks. Renato Pereira, Panamá, fuerzas armadas y política (Panamá, RP: Ediciones Nueva Universidad, 1979), 112. This claim should be qualified, however. The main influence on Panamanian officers was indeed the US Army School of the Americas (which until 1961 had functioned under USCARIB in a more restricted role); but the influence of other Latin American schools, especially those of Perú, México, and Nicaragua, is also notable. This is especially true since Panamanian officers saw themselves as closer to other graduates of the foreign school from which they had themselves graduated. Beyond that, there was a Venezuelan military station in Panamá during this period, and a USAID Office of Public Safety office. The latter was especially significant seeing as it had its own agenda, which ran counter to US military doctrine. The USAID/OPS promoted a version of police rather than military professionalism, including subordination to civilians, maintenance of public order with a minimum of civilian casualties, and so forth. The USAID supplied the Guard with all its antiriot gear and handled most of the requests for US funds; and after 1966, the State Department paid National Guard salaries indirectly through USAID. See, for example, Embassy Airgram to State, January 13, 1967, Records of the USAID, Office of Public Safety, Latin America, Country File, entry 26, box 92 (brown manila envelope), RG 286, NACP. On the subject generally, see also Carlos Guevara Mann, Panamanian Militarism: A Historical Interpretation (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1996), 85–88.

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US, caused the ruling coalition to divide.4 In the upcoming elections, former president Roberto Chiari and his supporters sided with Arnulfo Arias Madrid, who pulled off a decisive victory (despite the widespread fraud). Reluctantly, Colonel Vallarino agreed to recognize Arnulfo’s victory, and, given the personal feud between the two, the commandant would also retire. Arnulfo, in return, would honor the Guard’s internal hierarchy and nominate officers according to their seniority.5 Nine days after having taken office, Arnulfo came to the National Guard headquarters to attend the ceremonial change of command. 4. The government lost control of Colón for a week after an activist’s body was found in a ditch. Order was restored, but not before three more protestors were killed and dozens were wounded or arrested. Rolando Sterling Arango, La insurrección de Colón (Panamá, RP: Publipasa, 1994). 5. There are many sources on the coup. The best informed is R. M. Koster and Guillermo Sánchez Borbón, In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), chap. 2. While Koster and Sánchez Borbón often default to journalistic depictions of good and evil characters, they are unmatched in their knowledge of Panamá and its behind-­the-­scenes politics. Richard Koster first served in Panamá as a US military intelligence agent in the early 1950s; later, he took his MA in literature from NYU, and returned to settle down in Panamá thereafter. He taught English at the Florida State University campus in the Canal Zone, wrote a number of successful novels (among them, the Tinieblas Trilogy), and wrote numerous investigative journalism pieces for Panamanian and US news sources. His connections within the US establishment in Panamá were unparalleled. Panamanian Guillermo Sánchez Borbón wrote most of his life under the pseudonym Tristán Solarte. He was perhaps one of the two or three most successful novelists in the country, and was one of its most respected journalists. In the 1980s, when La Prensa was allowed to reopen as the country’s only independent newspaper, Sánchez Borbón began writing a column, “En pocas palabras.” The column mixed the deep and hilarious Panamanian sense of irony with well-­informed writing, and quickly became a main source of news about behind-­the-­scenes politics. As a joke, Sánchez Borbón gave his newsroom number as a hotline to report problems with the government. People played the joke to its full consequences, however, and reported the most embarrassing information on the dictatorship. Though the newspaper could not be censored (Torrijos had ceded its protection to US President Jimmy Carter as part of the negotiations between the countries), Sánchez Borbón was beaten and harassed more than once, and regime paramilitary forces broke into the paper’s headquarters several times and damaged it. After “Solarte” had used insider tips to uncover the chilling decapitation of opposition fighter Hugo Spadafora at the hands of Noriega’s men, the journalist was confirmed as an immediate threat to the regime and forced into exile. I interviewed Richard Koster at his house in Panama City in July 2007 and May 2008, and had an informal conversation with Sánchez Borbón at his home in June 2009.

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There, in front of the entire officer corps, he announced that second in command Colonel Pinilla was also to leave immediately. (Pinilla reportedly suffered a heart attack later that day.) A little later, the officers learned of an entire series of changes in the Guard—officers would be fired, or sent to remote posts or on diplomatic missions. Arnulfo’s barber was to be chief of the powerful investigative department. While the highest-­ranking officers couldn’t decide on a course of action, Major Boris Martínez, who commanded the northern Chiriquí Province, negotiated with the officers who outranked him and got their nod for a coup. Then he retooled plan A, which US counterintelligence had devised for the Panamanian officers as a means of reversing a communist takeover. Martínez airlifted his troops from the north and took command of the Guard’s headquarters; and in the vacuum of leadership the other officers took his orders. Arnulfo and his supporters did nothing during the hours it took to execute the coup, and by nightfall, they were all in the Canal Zone.6 Although the National Guard acted decisively that day, it had no internal protocol for going forward. The officers didn’t have a clear national agenda, and now that Martínez had convinced them to hold onto power, they improvised. Constitutional rights were suspended; a junta, headed by colonels José Pinilla and Bolívar Urrutia, was organized. Behind the scenes, two men emerged as the new leaders: Boris Martínez and Omar Torrijos. A list of ten points, “Postulates of the Revolution without Dictatorship and with Liberty with Order,” was announced on TV. (No. 8 was the removal of the Guardia from politics, while no. 10 announced free and fair elections.)7 After one day, a new civilian cabinet was sworn in, its members apparently believing they would be allowed to govern as they wished. Two civilians the officers nominated were key 6. Retired General Rubén Darío Paredes told me that, years later, he had several meetings with Arnulfo Arias on friendly terms. When asked, the old politician could not give him a logical explanation for the move he had made in October ’68. Paredes, who commanded the Colón garrison in 1968, said that what preoccupied the officers mostly was the idea that Arnulfo was consciously trying to destroy the institution. In the months before the elections, Arnulfo met with officers privately, usually at night, and people began speculating and distrusting one another. Editor’s interview with Gen. (Ret.) Rubén Darío Paredes, Panamá, RP, January 16, 2009. 7. Patricia Pizzurno Gelós and Celestino Andrés Araúz, Estudios sobre el Panamá republicano, 1903–1989, 1st ed. (Panama, RP: Manfer, 1996), 525–26.

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to lending legitimacy to their government: Dr. Carlos López Guevara, who was now minister of foreign affairs, and Dr. Juan Materno Vásquez, the new minister of the presidency. The first, with a doctorate in international law from Harvard, had impeccable professional credentials and a reputation for honesty. The second was known as a serious leftist as well as a professional lawyer, and would be the first to lend leftist credentials to the military. Both had darker skin—a visual contrast to the oligarchic technocrats. In January, four of the cabinet ministers would resign, protesting the fact that civilian rule had not been restored as promised. By then, it was too late—the Guardia Nacional was in control. Opposition—armed and unarmed—began immediately and in earnest. A day after the coup, a student demonstration was crushed. Arnulfo recovered from the initial shock and formed his headquarters at a friend’s house in the Canal Zone. Two of his followers began transmitting Radio Clandestina (later, Radio Rebelde), giving out surreal and completely false information about a rebellion that was supposedly already taking place on the streets of the capital. Within a week, a popular front was organized to coordinate the opposition to the dictatorship. A call for a national strike was signed by thirty unions, professional organizations, and civil society groups. Arnulfo, however, was not involved; and the front included groups that were clearly opposed to one another, such the Christian Democrats on the right and the communists on the left. Significantly, the popular front did not include the chamber of commerce. The National Guard understood the danger, however, and moved quickly to secure itself, imprisoning hundreds of left-­leaning activists within its first days in power. After a few days during which the US gave its full backing to Arnulfo, the officers managed to secure a wait-­and-­see approach from Washington. Torrijos, with his sharp political instincts, understood that deals could be made even with imprisoned opponents, and after a week he secured an agreement with the Moscow-­line Partido del Pueblo—it would be left alone in return for breaking up the national strike. (The strike collapsed.) The Maoist groups, headed by Floyd Britton, Alvaro Menéndez Franco, and others, were decimated after several confrontations.8 Some of the fighters were caught, gunned down, or 8. The two groups most strongly influenced by Maoism were the Vanguardia de Acción Nacional (VAN) and the Movimiento Unidad Revolucionario (MUR). While

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disappeared; others, like Britton, were tortured in prison—in his case, to death. Left-­wing rebel groups barely managed to survive after 1970, and were mostly ineffectual thereafter. In Chiriquí, the arnulfista insurgents were more successful, coming out victorious from almost every confrontation with the Guard. Noriega, who was in charge of suppressing them, terrorized the civilian population, burning houses of people suspected of arnulfista sympathies, imprisoning and torturing dozens, and eventually managing to cut the guerrillas’ supply lines. Within a year, this resistance too was exhausted. Behind the scenes, groups of officers were beginning to coalesce around slightly different agendas. On February 23, 1969, with US support, Torrijos and a few of his friends in the Guard arrested Martínez and sent him to Miami. With that, and after a few required personnel changes, Omar Torrijos appeared in charge of the Guard. In the months following, he took control of all the media outlets in the country, dissolved the National Assembly, managed to have full US recognition and aid restored, occupied and dispersed the university (whose students were as of yet unwilling to make any deals with him), and generally secured the regime.9 Then, while Torrijos was on a trip to México, Colonel Amado Sanjur, with the backing of the US Southern Command, organized a coup against him. Torrijos, however, managed to land with a private jet at a base Manuel Noriega had secured for him in Chiriquí, to rally the support of other officers, then proceed to the capital in a triumphant caravan. Having secured himself, he now had something like a foundational Maoism was important ideologically, and while both groups opposed the accommodationist strategy that the Partido del Pueblo followed, Cuban influence was notable too. Floyd Britton, the most important radical of the time and the leader of the MUR, insisted that the Panamanian left had to forge its own way, tactically and ideologically. The VAN and the MUR merged into the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional 29 de noviembre (MLN-­29) in 1970. 9. While armed confrontation with the regime was minor and ineffectual after 1970, some small groups did take action throughout the military period. Of a total of 110 known cases during the military’s rule, fifty-­five men and women were murdered between 1968 and 1972. One of the best accounts of this process, and especially of early resistance to the regime, is Brittmarie Janson Pérez, Panamá protesta: 1968–1989 (Panamá, RP: Litho Editorial Chen, 2002), chap. 4. The numbers of people murdered or disappeared during the military regime is from Alberto S. Almanza Henríquez et al., ed., Informe final (Panamá, RP: Comisión de la Verdad, 2002), 9.

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myth too. He had fought the Yankees, the oligarchy, and the corrupt traitors within the Guard, had bravely returned to his country by plane and motorcade, and was welcomed back by the masses, who lined the Inter-­ American Highway to cheer their new hero.10 Some of his advisers, however, cautioned him that he needed to secure more stable bases of support if he was to ensure the regime’s endurance. IV. hile their relative wealth and power are disputed, there is consensus that in 1967 the interrelated Vernaza, Hernández, Castrellón, and Gonzáles families ruled the district of Santa Fe de Veraguas.11 The Vernaza family was exiled from another region in Colombia

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10. Torrijos officially complained to the new US ambassador, Robert Sayre, about the US Army’s involvement in the failed coup; and he seemed to have thought that the CIA was against him too. He apparently did not know that Noriega was a CIA source, and was consulting his handlers throughout the coup. As it turned out, while the US military in the Canal Zone supported the plotters, the CIA supported Torrijos, and the State Department was kept completely in the dark. An elaborate view of the Torrijos version can also be found in Pereira, Panamá, fuerzas armadas y política, 129–33. In a secret report afterward, Secretary of State William Rogers was informed that although the 470th MI unit had known of a plan to explode Torrijos’ plane, “this critical intelligence, affecting the life of what amounts to the Chief of State, was withheld by the US Army from the Embassy and therefore the Secretary of State and President, for 72 hours.” See “Memorandum from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Inter-­American Affairs (Hurwitch) to Secretary of State Rogers, Washington, January 2, 1970,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. E-­10, Documents on American Republics, 1969–1972, doc. 527, Office of the Historian, US Department of State, http://​history​.state​.gov​/ historicaldocuments​/frus1969​-­­76ve10​/d527. See also “Memorandum from Viron P. Vaky of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), Washington, February 19, 1970,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, vol. E-­10, Documents on American Republics, 1969–1972, doc. 531, Office of the Historian, US Department of State, http://​history​.state​.gov​/ historicaldocuments​/frus1969​-­­76ve10​/d531. Again, Richard Koster’s contacts with US intelligence agents in Panamá allow him and Sánchez Borbón to give the only full and credible version of the event: Koster and Sánchez, In the Time of the Tyrants, 127–37. 11. The Vernaza, Gato Vernaza (pseudonym), explained to me, originally came from Toscana. The imposing old man sat with me on his balcony, which overlooks the road entering the village. “Buenaventura Vernaza Velazco,” he said loudly, but with some difficulty, and then turned to an employee—“Diego! Put it over there!” Then he went on: “Buenaventura Vernaza Velazco, the wife was called Carla Moreno, they

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to what was then the Department of Panamá in the mid-­nineteenth century, and settled in the region before the twentieth century. (Their first land purchase in Santa Fe appears in January 1920, but this may have more to do with the reform that the Liberals had passed a short time earlier, which simplified land acquisition.) By 1932, formal complaints were made to the Ministry of Government and Justice that the Vernazas were monopolizing the municipal administration of the region, and deciding local issues among themselves.12 The region was one of Panamá’s most underdeveloped, and in the 1960s conditions were harsh, even for the ruling families. The rich— all of whom lived in Santa Fe itself rather than in the outlying hambrought two male sons . . . the first, the firstborn, his name was Heliodoro Vernaza Moreno, the general . . . but he later came here during the guerrilla [in the War of a Thousand Days] . . . and the other was named Manuel Antonio Vernaza Moreno. Those were the two sons, and from them came the entire family.” This was our second conversation, and as we went through some old stories, Don Gato helped me draw the family tree. “My great-­grandfather participated in an armed uprising against General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, in Colombia—he was the president, dictator, of Colombia in those years, 1850, around there, Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera. It was my great-­ grandfather and another group of relatives. They were taken hostage in an ambush, and they were going to shoot them. So my great-­great-­grandmother, I don’t know what she was called, the mother of Buenaventura, asked the dictator Mosquera—they say she fell on her knees—that if her tears of a mother were not worth something, then they should take into account the service of her husband, the father of old Buenaventura, in the War of Independence, at the side of General Simón Bolivar.” Editor’s interview with Gato Vernaza (pseudonym), Santa Fe de Veraguas, Panamá, March 9, 2009. It may be that Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera exiled the family, but it is not clear to what uprising Don Gato is referring. Mosquera’s first four-­year presidency ended in 1849, and he would not rule Colombia again until after the Civil War of 1860–62. Manuel Antonio Vernaza was probably a member of the Democratic Society in Cali, because he was among those who signed the petition of manumission for the freeing of forty-­six slaves there in 1851. See James E. Sanders, “ ‘Citizens of a Free People’: Popular Liberalism and Race in Nineteenth-­Century Southwestern Colombia,” Hispanic American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (2004): 283n20. 12. The titles can be found in the notary section of the National Archives—for example, Escritura Pública No. 89, Sección de Notaria (SN), ANP. It is difficult to determine how early the Vernazas came to dominate the region, seeing as, for example, land could have already been in Vernaza hands before the first formal land purchases. The complaint mentioned is Ernesto Hernández and Julio Palacios to Guillermo Andreve, secretary of government and justice, September 12, 1932, caja 70, tomo 327, Municipio de Santa Fe, SAE, ANP.

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lets—rarely had a car, let alone the mansions of the Panamanian oligarchy. They could have a tin roof, perhaps a piano standing in the living room, but no electricity or potable water.13 The older generations of the Vernazas were often homeschooled, and many were autodidacts. Some members of elite families were illiterate too. As for the peasants, many were struggling to survive. Working twelve-­hour days, they could sometimes get day jobs in a cafetal, sometimes tumbando monte for 40 or 50 cents a day. Earlier, peasants used to organize juntas de trabajo. In this arrangement, several people work a full day for one household, and are paid in food and chicha; later, on another day, the members of the household reciprocate by working for the others. By the end of the 1960s, this tradition was dying off, and instead people worked either on their own parcels, or as day laborers, for money. (A day laborer earned half in the Santa Fe area compared to the area near the provincial capital. I can’t prove this, but I suspect this gap has some connection with the labor regime of the strong families in the area.) Men would sometimes go to the valley during the sugar harvest to work in the plantations, as they still do today.14 13. “There was no light. No water. We had to carry water with little buckets, like the Chinese, from the ravine or the well.” Editor’s interview with Gato Vernaza (pseudonym), Santa Fe de Veraguas, Panamá, March 9, 2009. Ellen Pérez, a Peace Corps volunteer at the time, claimed that apart from the four or five families who controlled the region, there were about eight to ten families who formed a kind of middle class between the peasants and the strongmen. Again, by the standards of the Panamanian oligarchy or the Canal Zone, the wealthy were not very wealthy at all. Their houses were typically made of cement blocks, and had some relatively nice furniture (“sometimes covered in plastic”). Occasionally, they had a small electric generator that provided the house with electricity. Pérez also noted that the wealthy were more mobile, and could, for example, send a family member to Panama City to receive medical treatment. Editor’s interview with Ellen Pérez, Peace Corps volunteer, by telephone, May 17, 2011. 14. A day laborer could earn 40 to 50 cents a day in the Santa Fe region, as compared to about $1 to $1.25 in the center of the province. The prices of labor cited for Santa Fe were confirmed by several sources. Editor’s interview with Jacinto Peña, Santa Fe de Veraguas, Panamá, June 10, 2007. For comparison, see Stephen Gudeman’s description of Los Boquerones, a small village on the Inter-­American Highway, about ten miles east of Santiago. Stephen Gudeman, Relationships, Residence and the Individual: A Rural Panamanian Community (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 34–35. His research in 1966–67 found four types of labor exchange practices, similar to those practiced in Santa Fe at the time. The main difference regarding

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Most people had two or three years of education, and the school’s only teacher taught six grades simultaneously, a morning and an afternoon shift. Some peasants could read and write, but only members of the elite had secondary or university training. Once they were done with schooling, young peasant boys and girls helped their parents, working on the mountain or around the home. Many young women went to the city to work as housemaids as teenagers, and had to endure the humiliations, abuse, and low wages there.15 (Sometimes they brought a child back for their mothers to care for.) Boys too could look for jobs in the city, and some spent their early years struggling to survive in the migrant neighborhoods there.16 In a radio interview Héctor gave in 1971, he quietly spoke about the situation in the region at the time of his arrival. labor was that no monopoly on employment existed in Los Boquerones, and the village was close enough to the provincial town and other lowland agricultural operations to allow for some casual employment outside the community. As mentioned later, when the movement began to call on members to avoid working as peones for the region’s strongmen, labor was brought from the valley, resulting in a sharp increase in labor costs for the caudillos. The gradual decline of the juntas de trabajo in Veraguas as a whole is documented in Ricardo Seidel et al., Plan de Veraguas; guía de acción para el desarrollo económico y social de la provincia (Santiago de Veraguas, RP: Obispado de Santiago de Veraguas, 1968), 57. Gloria Rudolf gives a detailed ethnographic description of such juntas still operating in 1972 in a more isolated part of highland Panamá. Her description shows that the juntas had a festive and even ritual aspect to them. See Gloria Rudolf, Panama’s Poor: Victims, Agents, and Historymakers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 48–52. 15. “I was treated like a slave,” one woman who had worked for a Santiago family told me. Speaking of the experience of life a fifteen-­year-­old at the service of a wealthy family, she would not go into details, and simply asserted: “They would humiliate you.” Editor’s interview with Silvia Toribio (pseudonym), April 1, 2009, Santa Fe de Veraguas, Panamá. 16. There are cases in which migration to the city eventually led to upward mobility—usually into the ranks of the lower-­middle class. The outstanding example here is that of Enrique Peña, who, as a teenager, almost starved to death on one of his journeys into the remains of the Spanish mine in the rainforest. With a friend, he would spend a few days in the mine, and then trek all the way to Colón, to sell the little gold he had found. Eventually, he got a job in construction, where in time he managed to get a promotion and supervise a crew. With the little capital from the job, he began making little investments, and currently he owns two cantinas and another small business. By all accounts, this is a rare example of upward mobility. Editor’s interview with Enrique Peña, Santa Fe de Veraguas, Panamá, March 18, 2009.

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[There was] an extremely marked exploitation, not only relating to what they [the merchants] sold in the shops and the price they stipulated, but also at the time of the purchase. Because normally, the peasants sell during the period of production, the harvest, and in this period, the caciques, the owners of the stores, reduce prices, to buy at a low price, and in the period of scarcity they up the price to sell at a high price. [. . .] Many times they lent—I know cases in which they lent somebody ten dollars and in the end of the year they charged twenty, no? And if he didn’t pay, he had to go to jail.17 In Panamá, the state has never enjoyed a level of control comparable to industrialized countries; and its own agents are often more loyal to their patrons and friends than to the official bureaucracy. The rule of the caudillos in some rural areas, however, was meticulous, subtle, and effective. It was based just as much on the caudillo’s capability to bestow favors—material and symbolic—as on his ability to punish. A caudillo would become a peasant’s compadre (godfather) after having paid for a son’s baptism. There was no bank, and it was up to the wealthy to decide to whom to extend credit and on what conditions. What police force there was, was under their mandate; they were the judges and the mayors too. The grocery shops all belonged to these same families, as did the cantinas. Members of the Vernaza, Castrellón, and Hernández families also operated the mule trains to stock the stores; they owned coffee and cattle, and naturally, were the largest employers. Their peons could be directed to use violence, and on some occasions people were punished formally—by the local judge. A peasant could be imprisoned, or, more commonly, his head and hands or feet would be tied in the cepo, a kind of wooden stocks. Generally, a peasant who did not stay in good graces could suffer a whole set of consequences—anything from a price hike at the shop to a loss of property or imprisonment. According to James C. Scott, peasants everywhere use “everyday forms of resistance” in situations of exploitation. This political scientist argues that there is a “prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest 17. Héctor Gallego, interview with Padre Manolo on Radio Hogar, June 4, 1971. Editor’s digital copy. A transcript of this interview is available in “Entrevista con Hector Gallego: Cinco días antes de su secuestro,” Diálogo Social 34–35 (1972): 84–87.

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from them.”18 In these quotidian struggles, everyday forms of resistance are “the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on.”19 It is possible that there were ways the peasants here could wage subtle forms of resistance to the rule of the caudillos, but very little memory of any “infrapolitical” activity remains today.20 Foot-­dragging and evasion there must have been—the highland peasants are masters of disappearance and nonanswers even today. But according to both elites and peasants, fiercer infrapolitical activity did not take place. It may be that, at least to some degree, Santa Fe’s caudillos could control the area so effectively because of their intimate and systematic knowledge of their society. A peasant who came down from the mountain to church on a Sunday could receive an invitation from a Vernaza for a cup of coffee at the latter’s house. Sometimes, a drink in the cantina would serve the same purpose. The peasant would be flattered and would feel obligated to cooperate; and of course he needed to give information in order to remain in good standing with the caudillo. Other people, meanwhile, seeing the peasant sitting on the caudillo’s balcony and not knowing what information was passed, might reveal information themselves in order to avoid trouble. A key difference between these practices and the techniques used by a detective or secret service agent is the fact that in the latter cases, an archive systematizes the information and makes it accessible to any agent with clearance in the institution.21 In the case of the Vernaza, their po18. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 29. 19. J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 29. 20. For more on infrapolitics, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 7. 21. This comment needs to be qualified, however, as police archives in Panamá were not always very efficient. A USAID Office of Public Safety (USAID/OPS) report recommended extensive reorganization of the DENI archives and record-­keeping practices in 1965. Four years later, an internal report again recommended reforms, such as preparing an index of the personal files in the collection and registering all files borrowed by other police units. Arthur L. Russel, “Study of the Records Management Practices,” DENI, Republic of Panama, USAID: Panama, 1965, in Office of Public Safety (USAID/OPS), Office of the Director, Programs, Surveys and Evaluations, 1959–74, box 9, RG 286, NACP; Luis A. González, chief inspector, Criminal and Criminological

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litical knowledge—a kind of mētis—is shared with family members and selected political friends.22 There was a small local archive in Santa Fe, and some judicial records are still kept in the local courthouse. But the elite’s oral archive was its main tool, and with it, local caudillos achieved levels of social control that would not shame a sophisticated totalitarian state. Moreover, they achieved this control with only a modest investment, with hardly any resistance, and without the caudillos fearing, as dictators always do, that the spy would turn against his patron. The boundaries between these two forms of knowledge, in any case, are permeable because representation of the state and familiarity with its apparatuses were key to local control. In the urban centers, after Identification, DENI, Modernización de los archivos del DENI, R 466 no. 638, DENI: Panamá, 1969, in “Gobierno y Justicia, Varios asuntos y años,” SAE, ANP. Agents of the US, as can be seen from the above sources, were heavily invested in helping centralize and improve intelligence gathering, but while they were doing so, they collected information from the very agents being aided. As several Panamanian officers have told me, relations between Panamanian and US officers were very close; one US intelligence officer by the name of Padilla had compadrazgo ties with many Panamanian officers in the 1970s and ’80s. For the most part, however, Panamanian officers received perks within this relationship, while US officers gathered intelligence on Panamá. Thus, the systematization of Panamanian information-­gathering aided the state as well as its imperial patron. Biographical details of individual officers include, for example, how many times they phoned their wives while undergoing training in the US. See folder no. 950725DIA081, Panama / Operation Just Cause, box 1, Collection of the National Security Archive, Washington, DC (NSA). Various officers—among them Omar Torrijos and, most famously, Manuel Noriega—were on the CIA’s payroll for many years. Thomas S. Blanton, “Recovering the Memory of the Cold War: Forensic History and Latin America,” in In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 59. On the issue more broadly, see Martha Knisely Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 22. James C. Scott uses the term mētis to refer to types of knowledge that are practical, gained from experience, and local. He opposes this kind of knowledge with bureaucratic knowledge, which states use to keep track of their population. By contrasting the caudillo’s knowledge of his terrain with that of the intelligence agency, the implied author hints that practical knowledge, which in this case is patriarchal, can be every bit as oppressive as that of large bureaucracies. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 9.

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elections, a new government would change large parts of the bureaucracy (down to the archivist and the tax man). But in Santa Fe, the same leading families always represented the state—even after the Guardia Nacional took control. Much information on people’s private lives became available to the elite when it performed formal roles, as a look at the list of cases in the local judicial archive will show: cases of alimony, “defloration,” and petty economic disputes among the peasants were ruled over by a local judge who was always of the same families. One man told me that the campesinos in the Pantano, a short walking distance from Santa Fe, had no fences, and if a calf or a pig wandered off to a neighbor’s plot, it might graze that neighbor’s crop. This was illegal, and a peasant could go up the hill to Santa Fe and ask that the judge intervene in his favor. The judge would notify the offending peasant that if he didn’t have enough money to build a fence (which was the whole problem to begin with), the peasant should sell him—the judge—his animal.23 And so this system allowed a Vernaza to continually reaffirm his formal and symbolic power, to maintain or increase his capital, and simultaneously to gather intimate information about the peasants’ little fights and trivial sins. Peasants who had joined the movement say that they were ignorant before Héctor arrived, and either did not understand they were being exploited, or were convinced there was no way to fight the exploitation. I suspect this view is too extreme. But it is important to keep in mind that virtually all the sources of social, political, cultural, and religious authority in the region taught the peasants obedience. Education, the peasants involved in the movement reflect, was a form of domestication: “Do this, do that, copy this, write that down.”24 The church, which up until the 1960s had almost no presence in the region, in its occasional performance of hollow ritual only gave its seal of approval to the status quo. Mass was in Latin, for example, and peasants were never encouraged to think about the Bible critically. The “spiritual path” peasants 23. I have heard a similar depiction from a man Tali later refers to as Tío Bravo. Editor’s interview with Tío Bravo (pseudonym), movement leader, Pantano (Santa Fe District), Panamá, March 8, 2009. 24. A few people spoke in those terms. Tío Bravo said: “we noticed that education is domestication. It doesn’t make people think. They tell you ‘say door,’ and you say ‘door.’ ‘Table,’ ‘table.’” Editor’s interview with Tío Bravo (pseudonym), movement leader, Pantano (Santa Fe District), Panamá, March 8, 2009.

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were told to take meant that their basic material needs, including concerns about starvation and disease as well as injustice, all had little to do with Christian teachings.25 If anything, peasants had to reflect on their own ignorance and sins as the source of their poverty. On the one hand, priests reinforced the cosmological world of the peasants by participating in rituals now and then. On the other, the fact that this spiritual world included local folklore (some of it with indigenous roots) with church teachings was proof of the peasants’ ignorance and sin. Ultimately, most priests did not care enough to confront either injustice or people’s worldviews. For the time being, La Silampa with her white, cloudlike robe, walked hand in hand with Jesús and San Pedro, and the Tulivieja could appear from time to time, avenging women who had been abandoned by cheating husbands.26 V. rom the late 1950s, a few priests in the Catholic Church in Panamá began to experiment with new social practices. The origin of the wave of radical social-­religious activity among Catholics across Latin America isn’t simple to account for, but commentators usually note various factors. First, there was an increase in competition by other denominations, most notably evangelical ones, as well as the growth of nonreligious ideologies and movements (anarchism, Marxism, populism). This competition had various implications, the most obvious of which was that Catholics could borrow practices and ideas from non-­Catholic sources, and that some priests felt forced to do so to avoid losing followers. Second, a heightened interaction with theological circles in Europe, climaxing in the opening allowed for by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), meant that Latin American priests could borrow

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25. Gudeman analyzes peasant consciousness in depth, although note that the community he studied was located on the Inter-­American Highway, very near Santiago, the provincial capital. Gudeman, Relationships, Residence and the Individual. For more general notes on peasant consciousness in the province, see Seidel et al., “Plan de Veraguas.” Some of the observations made by Gloria Rudolf are also relevant, especially those on gender relations. Rudolf, Panama’s Poor. 26. Rómulo Torres (pseudonym) told me: “God was a little old man, stuck there between Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the saints were those you asked for rain or sun.” Editor’s interview with Rómulo Torres (pseudonym), movement leader, Pantano, Panamá, April 16, 2009.

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radical ideas from left-­leaning Catholic circles in Europe. Third, the consolidation of a continental Catholic community—with the establishment of the Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (CELAM) in 1955, enabled the circulation of radical ideas and practices in Catholic Latin American forums, and helped radical priests form informal networks. There are precedents for Catholic engagements with social work, and experimentation had been on the rise since the end of the nineteenth century.27 And there are examples of radical popular Catholic movements, theological currents that identified the church with the poor, and so forth. But in its size and its organization, and in the coherency and sophistication of its message, the emerging liberationist current was probably the most significant challenge to Catholicism since the Reformation. Moreover, the radicalization of the social struggle in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution gave a new global context to liberationist movements, and placed them at the center of attention of Christians everywhere. As the Veraguas case shows, the liberationists’ new praxes and theologies gave hope to a whole set of actors, and represented a real threat for many more still.28 In Panamá, the church had always been relatively weak, and so the 27. A recent anthology suggests the breadth and depth of Catholic social and political activism in Latin America from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s. As its editors argue, this activism had both local and global roots; without appreciating this history properly, it will be impossible to understand where liberationists got their ideas, or indeed, to properly appreciate their innovation. Stephen J. C. Andes and Julia G. Young, eds., “Introduction: Toward a New History of Catholic Activism in Latin America,” in Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in Latin America from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), xi–­xxix. 28. For a good treatment of the early liberationist period, see Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For an analysis of the ideology and philosophy of liberation theology, see Michael Löwy, The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (London: Verso, 1996). There is no substitute for reading the works of liberationists themselves, but note especially Löwy’s comment that the impressive works by theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff came as a reflection on practices that were already taking place in the field. It is certainly relevant to Gallego’s case, as it is to the San Miguelito liberationist movement of Father Leo Mahon. The only academic history of the Panamanian Catholic Church is Andrés Opazo Bernales, Panamá: La Iglesia y la lucha de los pobres (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones, 1988).

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new experiments—usually promoted by priests of foreign origin—were a way to change communities and recruit followers at the same time. In San Miguelito, a squatter neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital, Father Leo Mahon from Chicago set up some of the first Comunidades Eclesiales de Base in the continent, started training courses for lay leaders, and established a tradition of home visits and community organization. In Veraguas, Bishop Marcos McGrath, a US citizen who had participated in the Second Vatican Council, set up a development office for the new diocese. Before long, a church radio station was established and a multiservice cooperative took shape in the provincial capital. At the Latin American Episcopal Conference in Medellín in 1968, the growing set of practices and critiques from across the continent were consolidated. The Medellín Documents—a set of resolutions calling for peace and social justice along radical Christian lines—gave liberationists an official voice. For those not acquainted with the struggles taking place behind the scenes, it seemed like Catholicism had taken a resolute leftward turn. Works by theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez soon followed, and by the 1970s a serious theological body of critical writing could already be associated with Latin American Catholicism: liberation theology. But speaking about the extremely divergent set of practices, social movements, and theological writings as a single theology suggests a unity that did not historically exist. A few radical priests, like the Colombian Camilo Torres, read Marx, and were ready to take arms or support armed insurrection. Others were influenced by people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Paulo Freire. And while all took the Bible and the main currents of Catholic theology as their general guide, some, like Héctor, were ready to challenge the status quo, and many others mixed religious ritual, social work, and development projects. While liberationists were never a majority within the Latin American Church, with the Medellín Documents in hand, radical priests like Héctor could feel that it was they who were leading Catholicism into a new era. The Panamanian Church was short of priests in the 1960s, and McGrath, then bishop of Veraguas, brought Héctor from a seminary in Medellín. The young Colombian first worked in Veraguas as a deacon in 1966 under the guidance of Monsignor Alejandro Vásquez-­Pinto, and a year later was assigned to be the first parish priest of Santa Fe. In 1966, the church’s new development agency in Veraguas, CEPAS (Centro de Es275

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tudios, Promoción y Asistencia Social), was already one of the church’s most dynamic agencies in Latin America. Vásquez-­Pinto had been experimenting with social programs there since 1958, and after Marcos McGrath became the first bishop of the province, he widened the initiatives into a broad program.29 CEPAS built its own training center in 1965 a short distance from the provincial capital, and began to train its peasant leaders there.30 By 1966, McGrath’s team had established forty cooperative and pre-­cooperative groups, and built a loose organizational roof for them in the multiservice Cooperativa Juan XXIII. The influential Plan de Veraguas, which CEPAS published in 1968, surveyed the province’s economic, social, and political situation, presented all the data available, and suggested concrete action for the government and the church.31 Plan de Veraguas seems no different from a development report, but the questions it opens up go beyond the usual economic or educational concerns. The following are a few of the problems that were noted about the rural communities in the province: 50.—Ignorance and lack of confidence in the capacity to change one’s situation. Belief that luck or destiny control life. All this contributes to the breaking of the individual’s motivation to effect a change. 51.—In the villages, there is neither group nor group spirit. Consequently, the peasants do not unite to better use their resources. 52.—Leaders are lacking, as is the confidence and will to follow someone. There is a tacit repudiation of every order combined with a will not to take orders from anyone. 29. Editor’s interview with Mons. Alejandro Vásquez-­Pinto, Aguadulce, Panamá, May 21, 2009; editor’s interview with Luis Batista, CEPAS employee, Santiago de Veraguas, Panamá, February 17, 2009. 30. Mons. Vásquez-­Pinto and several others had gone through training at the Coady Institute, a school for community development in Nova Scotia, Canada. On this center, see Catherine C. LeGrand, “The Antigonish Movement of Canada and Latin America: Catholic Cooperatives, Christian Communities, and Transnational Development in the Great Depression and the Cold War,” in Andes and Young, Local Church, Global Church, 207–44. 31. The report was written by a team of sociologist and priests: Ricardo Seidel et al., Plan de Veraguas: Guía de acción para el desarrollo económico y social de la provincia (Santiago de Veraguas, RP: Obispado de Santiago de Veraguas, 1968).

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53.—There is no rootedness in the communities. Families move from one hamlet to another and/or disintegrate with relative ease. 54.—Lack of confidence in popular representation and a tolerance for the system of vote-­buying. This results in a lack of confidence in the elected officials and participation in the system of favors. Moreover, since the peasants have no representation, they become an abandoned people.32 The church cooperated with any individual and organization that showed interest—from local businessmen, scholars, and government agencies to the USAID and Peace Corps. While government bureaucrats were often set on inefficient, top-­down, spasmodic interventions, the US agencies were ready to adapt to McGrath’s model of operation. The result was a provincial development cooperation that was extraordinary in Panamá both in its scope and in its political ambitions, and which dramatically increased the church’s influence in the province. And although CEPAS was a development agency, the church was going beyond a technocratic analysis. As Plan de Veraguas shows, the diocese was taking issue with political problems as well as problems having to do with education, culture, and regional political economy.33 In parts of Veraguas, as was indeed the case in Santa Fe, the church’s new interventions in social and political issues created tensions with local elites. Alejandro Vásquez-­Pinto, the senior priest in the Santa Fe area, had organized a broad coalition that threatened a regional boycott of the 1968 elections if a road to Santa Fe were not built. A few months before the elections, the region’s strongest caudillo, Alvaro Vernaza, received payment from a national party to break up the coalition he was a part of and to deliver his normal quota of votes. The elite split, some still favoring the priest’s position and some going with the head of the Vernaza family. Then, to bolster his new case against the No Road–­No Vote campaign, Alvaro Vernaza brought an old electric generator from one of the sugar plantations in El Valle. The caudillo could not boast of having 32. Seidel et al., Plan de Veraguas, 33. 33. Seidel et al., Plan de Veraguas. See also George C. Lodge, The Veraguas Report: A Study of the Organization of Change in Rural Latin America, ICH 116103 (Boston: Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, Division of International Activities, 1967), 29–37.

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brought electricity to his poor town for long, however. Soon thereafter, a couple of adolescents of the opposing faction poured gasoline on the old machine and set it ablaze. In the weeks before the elections, the situation got so tense that Bishop McGrath removed Father Vásquez-­Pinto from the area altogether. In the end, No Road–­No Vote managed for the first time to unite the peasantry in a political campaign. As the road was not built, most of the peasants stayed in their hamlets on election day.34 Notwithstanding this involvement in the formal political process, most church activities in the region had nothing to do with party politics, and were, moreover, nonconfrontational. In fact, in his first months as priest in 1968, Héctor tried to gain the trust of the Santa Fe elite, and he managed to gain a few followers. As was the elite’s custom, he was treated warmly at first, housed and fed, and offered support. (This, say some peasants, was a first method of cooption.) According to one version, the Vernazas offered Héctor leather boots—a status symbol in the region, and helpful in negotiating the region’s muddy pathways. But the priest said he had a problem with his feet and opted for sandals instead. Héctor’s more radical ideas, in any case, failed to get him a large following among the ruling families. And so he started walking between the small hamlets that surround Santa Fe, going door to door and talking to the peasants. For about three months, he appears to have done a kind of research of the area. Soon, he began inviting peasants to Bible-­reading circles, but many peasants were still suspicious (some must have had better things to do). It was immediately noted that he did not wear priests’ clothes except when performing religious rites. He insisted they call him by his first name, and explained that “Father” should be reserved for the man who reared them, or for God. Soon, he was seen helping peasants here or there in their fields, or working on someone’s irrigation ditch. After about three months, he moved into a tiny hut. VI. n one of my last weeks in the region, I joined Flaco, Ismael Tenorio, and Edgar Castillo on a two-­day trip to Gatú, the edge of the area that Héctor covered. They are working part time for the Asociación de Productores Orgánicos, which they founded, trying to convert small

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34. Editor’s interview with Mons. Alejandro Vásquez-­Pinto, Aguadulce, Panamá, May 21, 2009.

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farmers to sustainable, shade grown coffee production. A Spaniard had donated a GPS the year before, but it was lying around unused because the instructions were in English. In my first weeks in Santa Fe I figured it out, and we found we could save them time by using it to measure lots. So now they invited me on this trip to help them with some more measurements, and to get to know an area that they considered the limits of Héctor’s sphere of influence (and perhaps one that, still relatively inaccessible, reminds them of the conditions they grew up in). We drove all morning in Flaco’s pickup, out from the Santa Maria basin and into the next valley. Edgar talked the whole way—about agriculture, the left, the economic crisis, the crisis in the coop. Old Ismael sat in the back, holding a small transistor radio on his shoulder, keeping one ear on our conversation and the other on his típica. Flaco drove, from time to time making a short comment, never articulate but always sensible. There are few houses in Gatú, nicely spread between steep mountains. We stop first at the house of Sebastián, a man whose back is beginning to wilt, with a pleasant, smiling, dark face and black rubber boots. Everything is surrounded by an ancient cafetal, its bushes perhaps 50 years old. A fighting cock stands on a stick outside, blind and still. Everyone shakes hands, offering only the fingers and shaking ever so gently. (Any two people greeting each other in Gatú gently say bien gracias simultaneously, without asking how the other person is doing.) Sebastián brings us chairs, we sit, and a young woman brings us sweet coffee. We talk about nothing for a while and then divide into two groups and go out to measure lots. At night, Edgar and Ismael start talking about the legends that people in Gatú and Gatuncito had told them. The house, half wood and half adobe-­covered bricks, is at eight o’clock already quiet. We sit on the porch and there is no light—only the moon shining through the ancient cafetal. Edgar thinks it is important to collect some of these legends, ­although he clearly doesn’t believe them in the strict sense of the word. He considers it a kind of intellectual duty of sorts. There is ­Chumumbito, a mountain in the area to which no one can go (strange things always happen and change one’s plans). There are the green-­horn cows, which are pretty normal except for their green horns. (In one version, they live on Chumumbito). There is the legend of the chupacabras, the mysterious animal that sucks the blood of goats and other animals, 279

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common in Puerto Rico and Northern México since the 1990s, and for some reason occasionally menacing livestock here.35 Cristo Amarillo is simply an image of Christ, or sometimes San Francisco, found on a rock in the middle of the river (if you sit on it, the image is always larger than you). There are various tales of very strange people living on isolated mountains, but these we could not properly classify as legends, given that Ismael has seen one mystical woman with his own eyes. And there is a whole peasant experience with the curanderos, though again, some of them evidently have real powers. The conversations proceeded quietly, and Edgar said that his life had been in complete ruin some years back, so he went to one curandero . . . who had no effect on him. A few months later, he went to another, who, without knowing anything about Edgar, guessed he had a drinking problem and had cheated on his wife. He also guessed that Edgar had visited another curandero and told him that it was foolish of him to have done so, because the other man was not a healer but an imposter. The real curandero then went on to cure him. (Ismael volunteered that some curanderos evidently have powers, but these are not related to God. Perhaps to the devil, he added.) Edgar is a short man, dark, with a thin moustache. He is intense and calm at the same time, a first-­rate farmer, always ready to experiment and theorize. Everyone respects him for his intelligence and sincerity, but the strange tension of the unsaid always floats between his words. I saw how he sat a little apart from us the next day, and I asked myself if it was ever possible to characterize a man like that, from the outside. I thought about all the other interviews I had done; about trying to assign agency to any of the people I meet, to say nothing about these same people decades earlier, or about those who have since died. What would they say if I were to show them my notes? Would they rebel against this gaze? I couldn’t help trying to read Edgar’s thoughts, and I imagined him saying: “Well, everyone knows about the period I was on the bottle, and even if someone did not know, they’d notice that I won’t drink even a sip at social gatherings. And they must all think, ‘he works well now and has taken responsibility before too, but deep inside that Edgar is still an addict, a weak person.’ But all the while I am much more than 35. On the chupacabras in Puerto Rico, see Lauren Derby, “Imperial Secrets: Vampires and Nationhood in Puerto Rico,” Past and Present, 2008, 290–312.

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that and none of them suspect it, not even Flaco. It’s true that at any moment I can slip back, go even further down than I have before, but I have a sensitive soul and I am ready for a commitment much greater than any of them. Well, they think, he’s a big talker, always dreaming out loud. And it’s true—I dream! But I am ready, I don’t even know what for . . . just come what may, a revolution, another Héctor, I am ready, more than anyone here, and they don’t even suspect it.” Most of the way back to Santa Fe, the four of us were silent. I could hear the Hilux’s engine groaning, now and then blending with the soft hum of the vallenatos coming from Ismael’s transistor. We gazed outside, and I noticed the sharp beauty of these mountains, a beauty that had made me sigh when I first got here, and which after three months of living in Santa Fe was beginning to drift out of my consciousness. I don’t know how the thought came to me all of a sudden, but I turned to the back and looked at Edgar: “Let’s go to Chumumbito one of these days. I’ll get Artemio López to join too.” “Sure. Flaco, what do you say—go to Chumumbito?” [No response. After a minute:] “They’re working on this road here. The PRD primary season’s getting going.” “Flaco, what do you say about Chumumbito?” “When?” “I’m in the city this weekend, but maybe next Sunday.” “Next Sunday, I’m in Santiago. But maybe the one after it.” [Silence. I hear the vallenato from Ismael’s little radio.] “You guys think we’d find the way? People know the way, no?” “Oh yeah, don’t worry about it, Doctora, people could show us.” “I’m doing an MA,” I correct him. “For us, you’re doctora enough,” Edgar says, smiling. After a few minutes, I remember to ask: “And the legend, that no one ever makes it?” I say this smiling, and they smile too, staring outside. “That’s the legend,” Edgar says. VII. he church ran various educational programs in the province, and Héctor began promoting them in the region. Peasants were encouraged to attend “radio classes,” in which a literate peasant helped

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others follow the program and improve their writing skills.36 A few nuns began working in small women’s groups, addressing problems like child pregnancy and encouraging women to become lay activists. An intensive leadership program began, and each hamlet chose community responsables. Héctor recruited some thirty such responsables at first, each of whom participated in three-­day retreats in the church’s center in San Francisco. The number eventually reached about sixty, and the responsables began to run the Bible circles themselves. The priest would do his best to attend to the hamlets in person, but as a piece of his itinerary of 1971 shows, it would take enormous effort to do so. He would cover one or two hamlets a day, sometimes walking hours between one hamlet and the next.37 In a letter Héctor wrote to the church journal describing the discussions among the sixty community representatives, it seems that the Plan de Veraguas was generally being followed. This could have meant that after the sociologists and priests had summarized their empirical findings in the report, the local leaders would discuss the specifics of how to implement its conclusions in their region. The tone of the movement’s discussion is quite different, however. The representatives of the communities divide into smaller groups, and then bring up a series of questions. First: “What is it we are looking for in work? What are we trying to bring about?” Héctor lists the representatives’ answers, and more questions are treated in the same manner: “¿Qué es una persona humana?” and later, if the peasants have or have not realized this vision of humanity. Since the peasants are not satisfied with their own situation, the discussion moves on to analyze what is impeding the human being from developing.

–­ –­ –­ –­

because we do not understand things well. Ignorance for lack of social communication [falta de roce social] because of Caciquismo. Intermediaries bad Governments. The authorities

36. An excellent discussion of the development of the radio school can be found in Mary Roldán, “Popular Cultural Action, Catholic Transnationalism, and Development in Colombia before Vatican II,” in Andes and Young, Local Church, Global Church, 245–76. 37. “Agenda del P. Gallego: Cuatro meses por las Comunidades,” Diálogo Social 34–35 (1972): 60–61.

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–­ –­ –­ –­ –­

lack of union between ourselves. Lack of faith gossip, schemes, false accusations, misunderstandings vice, bad habits lack of roads. Lack of schools lack of love and responsibility. Lack of union, of cooperation, of organization, interests, etc. –­ because of egoism –­ lack of decisions for one’s self.38

This list is then taken back to the group for further debate; a way out of the vicious circle is sought, in which the peasants blame themselves for their deficiencies. The answer is often a general account of the way the current social structure creates subjectivities that are adapted to it. There is always a double question—how to change objective structures in order to change human consciousness and vice versa. The social and economic structures that the movement created—the coop being the most important of them—have been used everywhere in Panamá. Following the success of some of its coops in Veraguas, the church tried to open coops everywhere. Pamphlets were printed, and many of the same methods were used. Many of those did not survive very long, while others never quite managed to get off the ground. Torrijos and his men, meanwhile, studied the Plan de Veraguas, and as they copied and pasted parts from the Peruvian land reform, they tried to create asentamientos—another name for agricultural coops. Those failed even more quickly, often lasting no more than two or three years, and serving as a shell for officers and regional power brokers to appropriate government funds.39 Gloria Rudolf has described how one such government-­dictated coop was formed in the community of “Loma Bonita” where she was doing 38. “¿Qué pensaban las comunidades de Santa Fe?,” Diálogo Social 25 (1971): 19. 39. Many torrijistas cite the regime’s land reform as the ultimate proof of its revolutionary role. Unfortunately, a cold economic analysis shows that Torrijos’s reform benefited midsize landowners like the Vernazas much more than it did subsistence peasants and small landowners. Politically, the top-­down “revolution” did little to improve the strength of the peasants, who were never allowed to represent their own interests. The most persuasive (and somber) assessment of the Torrijos land reform can be found in Andrew Zimbalist and John Weeks, Panama at the Crossroads: Economic Development and Political Change in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chap. 5.

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ethnographic work in 1972. To begin with, these highland peasants were ordered to forgo urgent agricultural work they were doing and come to a meeting. We arrived late. In attendance were eight women and twelve men. Four students (one woman and three men) were sitting at the front of the room. With a tape recorder and a complicated agenda written on the board, students explained that they were studying at the Institute of Inter-­American Cooperatives in Panama City. They were in Loma Bonita for about a week to learn about problems of campesinas/os and to help them. Students divided people into four small groups to discuss community problems. The student leader in my group solicited problems. Silence. In a kind but assertive manner associated with city people, he tried again. This time Geraldo spoke, echoing what I knew to be almost everyone’s thoughts. “We need a highway here. Otherwise we can’t develop.” The student wrote “highway” down on his notepad, but after several others spoke out to support the highway, he explained that a road was actually out of their reach. Anyway, he asked, weren’t people interested in a credit cooperative? Everyone shook their heads in agreement as highlanders do under such circumstances. The student wrote “cooperative” at the top of the list and solicited more ideas. When the large group reconvened, to no one’s surprise cooperatives were given priority among the issues raised in all groups, while the highway was not mentioned. Several students gave speeches about cooperativism and drew diagrams on the board—tape recording and writing furiously all the while. Another meeting was announced for the next day. As we climbed the path home, everyone was talking about how on earth they would get their agricultural work done during this pivotal season of the year. The students stayed a week, held three more meetings, and called for an election of officials for a cooperative committee. Said one student, “Nominations are open for President.” Silence. A second try brought embarrassed giggles. “What about Carlos?” asked a student. Carlos said nothing. The vote was called. He won.40 40. Rudolf, Panama’s Poor, 137.

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Since the church itself sometimes ran programs that were nearly as bad, I tried to get people to describe in more detail how their movement was different. No more than a handful of people joined the government-­ sponsored coop Rudolf describes above, and only a few more joined the church coop initiated in the same village a few years later. How did the Santa Fe movement get to two thousand members after three years? Even the Vernazas admit, Héctor “captured” the peasants. Hundreds would walk long hours to hear his monthly Mass, and there’s consensus that the man they came to listen to was no great orator. What was the source of Héctor’s social energy, then, and what made the movement gain so much power in such little time? While he was not a captivating speaker, a few peasants described Héctor’s charisma in a religious sense, as having been somehow chosen, or blessed. These stories show nothing by way of a superhuman power; only devotion, a measure of self-­denial, stubbornness, and clarity of purpose. For example, when it was time for Héctor to visit his parents in Colombia, his only clothes were worn out. He’d used all his meager allowance on scholarships for high school students. The peasants decided to put together the funds and buy him new clothes. (“He had nothing,” one old man told me.) At the same time, Héctor’s self-­denial was coupled with his insistence to make extreme poverty visible and injustice an urgent matter. One day, he showed up in the Santiago obispado with a large group of Ngöbe, some of whom were suffering from malnutrition and parasites. He had apparently met them in one of his longer excursions into the mountains, and he brought them to the provincial capital so that they could be cared for. Bishop Martín Legara and the others there did not know what to do with so many people, but everyone was used to Héctor’s behavior, and they worked cheerfully.41 A few volunteers were quickly assembled; someone managed to get a nurse to attend to the Ngöbe; food donations were arranged. The efforts to insist that every person be treated with dignity should be understood against the context of church traditions in the area. Some 41. Marcos McGrath was promoted to archbishop of Panamá in 1969. He was succeeded in Veraguas by Bishop Martín Legara, who headed the church in the province until 1975. While supportive of Gallego’s struggle, Legara was not nearly as dynamic as McGrath had been, and he was in all likelihood unable or unwilling to confront local powerbrokers.

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peasants described attending mass as young people: a priest who had his back turned to them and spoke Latin, of which they understood nothing. Héctor turned Mass into a Socratic dialogue. Of course, in theory, anyone interested in empowerment will understand Héctor’s insistence that peasants think, analyze, and speak for themselves. But practically, to lead, on the one hand, and at the same time to overturn the power dynamics on which your own leadership is based, is extraordinarily difficult. When he started asking people to join him in meetings in their hamlets, at first, only ten to twenty people would show up. Héctor would open by reading a short passage from the Bible, and then ask people to interpret what was read. Inevitably, there was silence. The way out of this silence was distinct in each hamlet. In one case, Father Alan, a priest who had come to observe Héctor at work, reported on a meeting in a hamlet near Narices. Fifteen people showed up to this meeting— the first in this hamlet—and everyone sat on stones under a mango tree. Héctor began by reading the parable of the sower (Matthew 13), then asked the peasants what they thought it meant, or if they thought the parable could teach them anything about their own lives. Alan waited. But no one spoke. He waited, calculated, imagined who among them would speak first, he observed them one by one, but nothing. . . . When he looked at his watch, five minutes had passed in total silence. Nor did anyone move. Only the eyes, blinking. Héctor remained with his head tilted, resting on his right palm, immobile like them. Alan looked at his watch again: ten minutes without any change, like a frozen image of a film stuck in the projector. Alan could not sit any longer. He stood up, though with care not to step on a leaf or on a little branch so as not to distract anyone in this profound silence, for him, inexplicable. He remained standing, without moving, as if he’d grown roots, transforming himself into another tree, a part of the scenery. He looked at his watch again. Fifteen minutes, almost sixteen. A few words struggled at the tip of his tongue, looking for a way to get out. He felt the imperious need to make some noise, whatever noise, to break that paralysis. Or was it an ecstasy? He held himself. At twenty minutes he could already distinguish with precision the flight of bumblebees from that of the flies and dragonflies. When he looked at his watch, which read twenty-­three minutes and ten sec286

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onds, he heard a timid, faint voice, and he breathed, comforted, like a drowning man who comes out of the water. “In what you read,” said one of the peasants, the oldest, “the Bible says that there are different types of land.”42 Héctor inquired which kinds, and there was silence for a few more minutes, before another person spoke. After two hours, they had concluded a conversation, which Alan thought must have been more or less interesting, but which he could no longer follow, suffering as he did from heat and impatience. The group dissolved, and Héctor promised to return in two weeks for another meeting. When the two were alone, Father Alan confessed that he could not stand it—that if the initial silence had lasted any longer, he would have said something himself. Héctor replied: It’s a good thing you didn’t, because I would have asked you to be quiet. Father Alan repeated how horrible it had been. Héctor: “But Alan, didn’t you come here looking for something? It’s in these silences, in theirs and in mine, it’s there that you’ll find it.” “But so much?” “As much as is needed. Only with our silence will the peasants speak. As long as we keep on speaking, Alan, they are only going to reaffirm what you and I tell them. We have to patiently take all the world’s silences. ¡Es como una cura de caballo! That’s how they will go on liberating themselves, go on discovering what they think with their own head. And as a bonus, if we shut up, we’re gradually going to overcome all that shitty priest arrogance that we carry inside.”43 42. The episode is from María López Vigil, Héctor Gallego está vivo! (Panamá, RP: Pastoral Social-­Cáritas, 1996), 221–22. López Vigil interviewed Father Alan McLellan, but I do not know how closely she dramatized his words, or if she even made up parts of this dialogue. Father Leo Mahon of San Miguelito, though perhaps as committed to the idea that peasants participate in the discussions, was sure to steer the discussion throughout. See Phillip Berryman, Memento of the Living and the Dead: A First-­ Person Account of Church, Violence, and Resistance in Latin America (Eugene, OR: Resource Publication, 2019), chap. 6. For a comparative perspective, see the discussion of the parable of the sower in Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, rev. ed., 1 vol. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 158–62. Cardenal mentions a silence, but it is not clear how long it lasts. The peasants seem, in any case, much more articulate than those Héctor encountered for the first time. 43. López Vigil, Héctor Gallego está vivo!, 222. The expression cura de caballo refers to a cure that takes drastic, rustic measures, perhaps deepening the wound and causing more pain, but ultimately getting to the root of the problem.

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In El Carmen, another hamlet, the path was different. Héctor had been there a few times before, but people were unable to speak. One day he was working in a field, some distance away, helping a peasant mend his fence. A young boy arrived with a message that a girl was gravely ill in El Carmen and would soon die—the priest was needed to give the benediction before her death. Héctor followed the boy, and the two ran for a couple of hours until they reached the small village. The parents explained that the girl had contracted the illness the other night and now her fever was worse. Héctor asked if any medicine had been given. No, none was to be had—they did not even have enough food to give her, and could not carry her to town, seeing as they had no mule. Héctor said he was going to carry the little girl on his back and get her to a doctor in Santa Fe. The parents did not understand. The distance was considerable, perhaps a few hours uphill—on his back? The priest carried the child, using a piece of cloth to help secure her to his back. A few hours went by; the neighbors were now all convened in the family’s little hut. They did not think to come before, afraid as they were of contamination, but everyone had by now heard of Héctor’s deed. Moved, they waited for his return with a miracle. It was dark already when he returned and placed the cold body gently down in her parents’ hut, repeating quietly, se me murió, se me murió. At the next meeting in El Carmen, Héctor proposed that they reflect on their daily lives instead of on the Bible. He asked why they thought Clarita, the little girl, had died. One man spoke, saying it was because God willed it; another suggested it was because they were poor and had no money for medicine; some more people had other ideas. Héctor asked why they were poor, and a variety of theories were suggested. The silence was broken.44 In other words, Héctor would force people to deal with social reality, but then refuse to use his own authority to give them answers. He did not deny that miracles could happen, but he insisted that people should not wait passively for God’s intervention. They had to think for themselves, talk to one another, and act. To do that, they had to stop believing that the priest or anyone else was above them. 44. The depiction above is a summary of the narrative found in López Vigil, Héctor Gallego está vivo!, chap. 4. Again, I am not sure about the exact depiction, but the story is more or less accurate, and has been verified by everyone I spoke with.

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The Catholic Church is a patriarchal institution, and in Panamá, for the most part, that is what it has been. Some—though certainly a minority within the emerging liberationist critiques—targeted the patriarchal system within the church, as well as the church’s role in maintaining patriarchy in Latin America.45 So it’s not completely surprising that the most progressive priests, even as early as the late 1960s, would try to change the direction of the church on the ground. Various people have told me that Héctor was interested in “women’s issues,” but it was also said that a priest couldn’t gather a woman’s circle. (Aside from the obvious issues, it would also open him up for accusations of womanizing.46) He did form “grupos de parejas” to discuss family and relationship issues, and the message was that women have equal rights. Machismo was often criticized as a sin, especially its more obvious manifestations—drinking, violence, womanizing, and so forth. These critiques were common in the church at the time, but while in other parts of Panamá the church encouraged women to stay away from leadership roles, in Santa Fe, by the mid-­’70s, a variety of activities were developed by and for women, and the movement saw strong, politically active women as key to its success. A number of women (the most prominent of whom was Aquilina Abrego) became key peasant leaders, went through advanced training, and maintained a high public profile.47 So I think Héctor and his team had a clear antipatriarchal agenda, which was consistent with every45. Indeed, a feminist immanent critique of the liberationists was developed early in the emerging theology’s development. See Marcella Althaus-­Reid, ed., Liberation Theology and Sexuality (London: SCM Press, 2009). 46. Several people told me that Monsignor Vásquez-­Pinto, the priest who was in charge of the San Francisco and Santa Fe areas before Héctor, had one or more mistresses. For his part, Vásquez-­Pinto listed “claiming a priest has a mistress” as one of three common caudillo tactics to neutralize or get rid of a troublesome priest. Editor’s interview with Mons. Vázquez Pinto, Panamá, RP, May 21, 2009. Zorrito Macea (pseudonym) called my attention to the fact that in none of the pictures that survived from his work in Santa Fe does Héctor appear only with women, and this, according to Zorrito, was because of his sensitivity to this problem. Editor’s interview with Zorrito Macea (pseudonym), Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, February 20, 2009. 47. On Aquilina Abrego, see the short biographical note in Ileana Gólcher, Cien mujeres: Por la vida y la dignidad nacional (Panamá, RP: Universidad de Panamá, Facultad de Humanidades, 2004), 47–48. Various people have confirmed that this was indeed the agenda of the church’s evangelizing team; several emphasized the work of two Maryknoll Sisters in this work.

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thing from the approach to “women’s issues” to the refusal to tell people a correct interpretation of the Bible. The Popular Christian Movement in Santa Fe encouraged truth-­ seeking, and Héctor denounced injustices in an extraordinarily frank and confrontational way. Peasants were encouraged to speak out against the little lies and injustices they saw in their communities, to criticize one another in case they had “committed an error,” and generally to open up unpleasant issues. There was a deep interest in truth, in other words. But on the other hand, it was openly acknowledged that different people could and should have different perspectives, worldviews, and opinions about even the most sacred issues. There was no escaping it. If one wants to encourage free thought and speech in a people who are used to being silent, one has to honor different views of the world. What that leads to is a movement that speaks in many voices, in various dialects, and with a syncretic ideology. Carpintero keeps telling me that you can’t have social justice or social transformation without getting the facts straight. Yes, the movement was very interested in the facts. But they weren’t willing to suppress the essential historical fact that different people, who come from different institutions and social realities, interpret the world differently. They live in different worlds, and when you bring them together, you either suppress that diversity or you find some points of convergence, and acknowledge a coexistence within your movement. Luna-­Icaza put it to me this way: a radical movement has to ask that its members change themselves as they change the world. Unifying around a common identity—saying that we’re campesinos, that we’ve been oppressed in a specific way and should unite around our common identity—can be a good thing. But a radical movement can’t just allow its members to remain who they are, with a fixed identity, to go on reaffirming their identity politics. A radical process happens when you question who you are; when you become fully aware of the different subjective views of your neighbor or priest, or even of your enemies. But you can only immerse yourself fully in such a radicalizing process if you acknowledge a priori that subjective worldviews other than your own are not only valuable, but also, potentially, transformative.48 48. While Héctor did not work or train in San Miguelito, it is worth mentioning that it was there that Father Leo Mahon’s team first experimented with incorporating local culture and art into its message, and that this was done under the banner of “revolu-

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This process, however, was not thought of as separate from the urgent, concrete questions the movement’s cadre asked themselves. One man told me that he had had a long conversation with Héctor in which the two tried to list the basic human necessities. Not the bare minimum, but something of a realistic balance of what a person living in these areas would need. There were some material needs—food, shelter, clothes; some social needs and maybe cultural; and then some spiritual needs as well. A few people made reference to such conversations during those days, and I think they mark a deep engagement with basic existential questions. Ultimately, this sort of intense dialogue means that you allow yourself to be affected by others’ views of what’s real and what’s desirable . . . and also, of what’s beautiful. You don’t get that from any chat you have with someone, but the intense conversations that took place among members in the movement eventually brought many of them to transform themselves, and transform Santa Fe too.49 I asked Luna-­Icaza, just as an experiment, to make a list like that with me, which would be relevant to our days. We came up with a few things (food, love, friends) and then a neighbor came, and Luna-­Icaza went to put some water on for coffee. (A ritual here: many people drink it with milk powder for some reason.) When he came back, and before the conversation with the neighbor could develop, he remembered something: “Put down a little house too.” I looked at the list, and really, we had forgotten to write that down. He glanced at the paper for another second and said, “Yeah. A moon above, and a house.”

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VIII. he more I speak with people here about the movement, the more I think about how these interactions are for them. I’m not the first

tionizing” Panamanian society, as well as the church’s relationship with it. By 1965, in San Miguelito, Mass included Panamanian music. A modern passion play was staged there, in which Jesus was dressed as a Panamanian campesino while the Roman soldiers used Guardia Nacional uniforms; the plot was told partly in décima form. Berryman, Memento of the Living and the Dead, 59. 49. A document circulated by Ismael Fernández in a workshop in Santa Fe on June 8, 2011, touched on similar issues. Fernández, who had worked for CEPAS alongside Héctor, talked about such conversations at length. The document contained an example of such a list, which includes “corporal necessities,” “spiritual necessities,” “social necessities,” and “economic necessities.”

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or the last to ask about Héctor—now and then someone writes a piece in the newspaper, and there was López Vigil’s book too.50 The memories of the movement are different from a memory that’s private, that you can hold deep inside you. I’ve been struggling with my own ghosts, so I suppose it’s something that I’m trying to learn here . . . how to manage memories, how to live with them. I went through a phase in my undergraduate years during which I thought I would kill myself. It was after a borderline-­self-­abusive sexual experimentation phase, in which I kept telling myself I was completely free, could do whatever I felt like, and couldn’t care less what society thought about me. I dug myself a hole without noticing it, under my dorm bed. At night, when nobody was looking, I’d move the little rag I had there, unhinge a few of the floorboards, and dig under it with a little spoon. At a certain point, I had dug myself so far in that I didn’t want anything anymore. I didn’t eat much, and couldn’t taste anything. I barely made it through the semester, and when it was over, took a cheap flight and went to lock myself in my old bedroom, in my parents’ house. My parents got scared. Before, Mom could at least count on a good fight with me, but now I wouldn’t respond. I just stared. I have no idea how I got out of it, but somehow it was September again, I was back in Boston, and my body temperature returned to normal. I took up yoga and agreed to help with a play (costume design). I graduated two years later and never looked back at this period. Being here has made me think again about memories and question the terms of interactions between confident researcher and humble sources. I’ve changed so much in the process of being in Santa Fe. People here have inspired me; they’ve shown me the world in a new light, and challenged me. And how many of my own interactions here were even conscious? In one of my first nights in town, I had a dream in which I read an academic paper that dealt with Héctor’s early experiences in the area. The paper in the dream deals with “radicalism in the Magic Forest,” and at a certain point makes a rather surreal connection with the assassination of Malcolm X. Somehow through this discussion I am brought into personal contact with Héctor, but then the dream shifts to my own work. I interview a parrot, or it may be that this parrot is in some way Héctor. There is a constant slippage in the dream from 50. That is, López Vigil, Héctor Gallego está vivo!

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the feeling that I am in contact with the real protagonists and the feeling that I am “making” them somehow. As the dream proceeds, I have a conversation with someone, and I complain that I can’t seem to make my historical protagonists real. “Real people worry about their kids getting sick, or about their bills . . . historical characters never come up like that.” But it’s not clear what the other being’s answer to this problem is. The dream ends abruptly and another one begins, but I remember distinctly that, still sleeping, I make a note to remind my conscious self in the morning to write this idea down. But what can I do with it now? It’s just stuck here, in my notes, without any special meaning, like most other things in life. So many of the memories I elicit from people here are caught up in the larger narrative of liberation that I find myself digging for the human in the human. I probe, but people come to the interviews to talk about Héctor as a man sent by God, who sacrificed himself.51 I ask about what they felt as they went through the process and get the vaguest of responses. About Héctor they are more forthcoming, if mostly r­ everential. I go around in circles, asking for anecdotes, and finally some of them oblige. I ask a couple of others about the story, and someone laughs and says, es verdad! Exactly how he told you! Sometimes they laugh or sigh, and say, “Is that right? Who told you that?” If discretion is not a problem, I tell them who it was, and if the source of my information is considered reliable, they tell me so. One day when he was visiting his home in Colombia, Héctor was to attend a friend’s wedding. A procession was underway in which the guests walk from one village to the next. People in those rural parts are superstitious, they believe in ghosts and all sorts of legends, but walking in a big procession gave everyone some confidence. But then, all of a sudden, they saw a white image coming from the side of the road. The procession stopped. For a moment, they couldn’t see very well, but then someone gasped, and they saw that it was a white . . . and it made an awful sound, howling, wooo, whoo-­oo! Someone shouted, and then the others panicked—a ghost! People ran, frightened out of their wits, 51. Jacinto Peña, one of the priest’s closest supporters and later a leader of the movement, told me: “I always say that he [Héctor Gallego] was prepared, and that he was sent by God. He was a man who had been born with clarity.” Editor’s interview with Jacinto Peña, Santa Fe de Veragaus, June 10, 2007.

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and the procession fell apart. But then, on the side of the road, a young man, laughing, took off the white sheet he had on: “No, hey, it’s all right, it’s just me, Héctor.” Héctor had to apologize profusely to the bride and groom—he didn’t think his prank would be so successful. He just wanted to make fun of people’s superstitions.52 Such a strange anecdote, I think. It makes for a more complex character. I tell someone else about it and he laughs and says he didn’t know about it, but then adds about Héctor, “Así era.” Someone says yes, he was a bit of a prankster, and thinking a bit more, adds that if Héctor had a little time, he liked to play soccer with the boys. I find an old photograph in an issue of Diálogo Social, in which Héctor and two “amigos campesinos” are bathing in the river.53 Well, all these images are still very rough, but at least one can start seeing something more human. IX. y 1970, the church’s efforts in the region had gained considerable force. The coop, which had opened its first small grocery shop in 1968, was now beating the merchants. It began offering a variety of other services, and was poised to become the dominant economic player in the region. The caudillos would have lost strength quickly, had it not been for one strange coincidence: General Omar Torrijos Herrera was Alvaro Vernaza Herrera’s first cousin. As the struggle between Santa Fe’s caudillo and the movement intensified, the general began to take personal note of the affairs of his cousin’s patria chica. Under Torrijos’s direction, the military began paying more attention to the church’s work elsewhere in the province, applying a confusing cocktail of intimidation and generous offers of cooperation. In Santa Fe, however, Torrijos’s attention was much more focused and personal. And given how small and marginal the village is, the general’s sudden appearance in his helicopter seemed even more strange. In one incident, Torrijos stood at the back while Héctor was giving Mass, and the general suddenly raised his voice and asked why the respectable people of the village itself—as opposed to the poorer peasants from the hamlets—were not attending. “Because

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52. I confirmed this story with Edilma Gallego, Héctor’s youngest sister. Editor’s interview with Edilma Gallego, Panamá, RP, July 20, 2007. 53. “Reunión, 25 Diciembre 1969,” Diálogo Social 34–35, número especial (1972): 68.

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I can’t order people to do things,” Héctor shot back.54 But while Héctor himself apparently thought nothing of answering the general, the movement did all it could to avoid direct confrontation with the military. In 1969 it invited Torrijos and other high-­ranking officers to a feast to inaugurate the opening of the coop. The officers were seated in tables with the peasants so they could converse freely, and Torrijos was awarded honorary membership. The tensions continued to rise, however. A number of coop members, in Santiago to sell beans, were arrested without charge. They were held incommunicado and let go only after a couple of months of pressure from the church. In Santa Fe itself, June 29 is the village’s patron saint day, and the movement tried to assert its new force in 1970 by reinventing the fiesta patronal. Traditionally, the village merchants would organize two days of heavy drinking, eating, cockfights, and dances; and since the event would attract the peasants from the entire area, large profits were guaranteed. Héctor decided he did not want to lend religious sanction to the event, but must have understood it was impossible to cancel or fundamentally alter its character.55 After Mass, therefore, 54. Editor’s interview with Roberto and Clara Páramo (pseudonyms), Narices, Panamá, April 2, 2009. Another man recalled a second public confrontation between the two on a different occasion, in which Father Gallego was even more combative. Editor’s interview with Zorrito Macea, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, February 20, 2009. 55. Father Leo Mahon, the liberationist priest from Chicago who worked in the popular Panama City barrio of San Miguelito, reported the same dilemma in his parish: “I detested walking in those processions more than anything else I was asked to do in the whole of my experience in Panama. I felt foolish and so used, walking behind the statue, accompanied by a few women and children. Four little girls held a bed sheet by the corners into which bystanders threw coins and bills—money traditionally given to the priests. “Men were conspicuously absent. They had already begun the drinking, the games of chance, the dancing, all of which were the real celebration and out of which the cacique and his cohorts made plenty of money. Major politicians were invited by the padrinos, the godfathers of the whole affair, often donating the beer and liquor for the three-­day event. The fiestas patronales were pagan festivals covered by a layer of Christianity so thin as to be transparent.” Leo Mahon and Nancy Davis, Fire under My Feet: A Memoir of God’s Power in Panama (New York: Orbis Books, 2007), 83. In María López Vigil’s depiction, the Movement decides to “kidnap” the statue, and hides it in the provincial capital. The account here is accurate, however, and verified by several of the movement leaders with whom I spoke. Editor’s interview with Sófocles

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the movement sent its people home to the hamlets, and twelve of the leaders stayed with Héctor to guard the statue of the saint, which they announced would not leave the church for the celebration. A group of men from the wealthy families broke the thin church wall, tried to beat up the priest, and took the statue by force. The village policeman prevented these men from engaging in more violence (Héctor demanded that there be none on the part of his men), but it was clear that a full-­ blown contest for power was taking place. In July, Héctor was arrested for the first time and accused of having burned Alvaro Vernaza’s electric generator two years earlier. He was made to pay a fine covering the damage: $7.50. Before Héctor’s release, Torrijos met him in person to “clarify” the situation. By now it was clear that the movement’s economic activity was transforming the region. In 1970, $50,000 passed through its coffers—which, as Héctor commented, was money that did not go into the local merchants’ accounts.56 A few of the merchants’ shops had to close; others were barely surviving. Work groups were beginning to pop up in the hamlets, renewing the tradition of the juntas de trabajo, but now with technical and administrative aid from the church and Peace Corps, along with improved seeds. Local peasants refused to work under the old conditions, and the ranchers had to bring peons from other parts of the province, resulting in a spike in their labor costs. The coop had already managed to get an old jeep to drive merchandise directly to markets in Santiago; and it was understood that it was preparing to start offering small credit too. The elite demanded direct government action, and the movement had to buy time to continue its work. Conflict became more severe with every month that passed. When Héctor returned from his short detention in the Santiago jailhouse, Monsignor Vásquez-­Pinto accompanied him to Santa Fe (perhaps to show that the young man was not a renegade priest). After Mass, Alvaro Vernaza tried to run down Vásquez-­Pinto with his jeep and the priest only barely escaped, jumping to a ditch. Then Vernaza took a cable that he had in his car and whipped Vásquez-­Pinto. Following this event, the Pérez (pseudonym), La Mula (Veraguas), RP, March 19, 2009; editor’s interview with Zorrito Macea, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, February 20, 2009. 56. Héctor Gallego, interview by Padre Manolo on Radio Hogar, Panamá, RP, June 4, 1971, editor’s digital copy.

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church attempted at once to denounce the violence and pacify Santa Fe’s elite. For the first time, Héctor visited his parents in Colombia, perhaps to allow his parish to cool down, but he was only allowed to return after church pleas. On his return, he was obliged to attend another meeting with Manuel Noriega and Torrijos, this time hosted by Father Mahon. The officers offered Héctor a repeat of the formula they had used with Father Mahon. After initial arm wrestling with the military, the leadership of Mahon’s San Miguelito movement had agreed to be awarded a “special district” status. In effect, San Miguelito received a serious financial commitment from the government, but the whole program was run directly by a government office. Mahon and his movement at first thought they would be able to keep up popular pressure and continue their work, and the priest was for a time on friendly terms with the general. But by 1971 Torrijos had already divided and coopted Mahon’s leadership. By the time they made Héctor a similar offer, it was clear that the Guardia had neutralized the San Miguelito liberationist movement and controlled the district even more thoroughly than it did other areas in Panama City. Knowing this, Héctor listened to the offer Torrijos and Noriega made, and asked for time to bring it up in the communities. The movement tried to stall, giving Héctor authorization to write a formal letter to Torrijos, asking for clarifications and demanding that the people administrating the “special district” be popularly elected. Torrijos did not bother answering. By now, groups of students and people related to the church had begun arriving in Santa Fe to learn the movement’s methods, and on several occasions Héctor spoke publicly of the need to create alliances between workers, peasants, the church, and students. “Looking to the future,” he was asked in a radio interview in June 1971, “how do you see Santa Fe, after the program there is completed?” “I really can’t imagine it alone,” Héctor answered. “It can’t go very far if it’s alone, if it’s an isolated foco. And really, all the objectives of creating a new community, of creating a new society, will remain reduced if it’s an effort that’s reduced to one district, no?” 57 A work camp had been established in the mountains, and the local elite began to speculate that it was a cover for guerrilla activity. It did 57. Héctor Gallego, interviewed by Padre Manolo on Radio Hogar, June 4, 1971.

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Héctor talking with campesinos.

(Courtesy of Cooperativa La Esperanza de los Campesinos, Santa Fe de Veraguas.)

not help that one group of students from Panama City, on their way to the camp, stopped in Santa Fe wearing military fatigues (bought in the Canal Zone commissary). The peasants thought the fragile city kids who barely made it to the camp and could not hold a machete properly were funny, but the G2 agents who saw them had very little sense of humor; all the students were arrested.58 In mid-­May, Denis Ruiz, a well-­connected government employee from Santiago, tried to bulldoze a poor woman’s house so that he could enlarge a lot he was using as a vacation house in the village. The movement sent word to the diocese in Santiago, which played a special song on its radio station three times in a row—a kind of clarion call. Peasants arrived from the surrounding hamlets and occupied the land. The Santiago chief of police, who tried to intervene in favor of Ruiz, finally had 58. The group consisted of several students, as well as Father Phillip Berryman and four of his parishioners from the working-­class neighborhood of El Chorrillo. Berryman, Memento of the Living and the Dead, 115. It is thus clear that Héctor was attempting to foment horizontal links between left-­wing students, workers, and peasants. The military later sent a delegation of students loyal to it, in an apparent attempt to spy on the movement. See Sumarias en averiguación de las causas que originaron la desaparición física del sacerdote Héctor Gallego, 1993 Ministerio Público, 14–15 (1993).

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to cede ground, and the lady stayed in her house. I have heard contradicting accounts on this, but according to some, the incident represented an increasing tendency during that year: peasants were taking over land they thought belonged to them. Be the case as it may, a land occupation right in the center of Santa Fe, at the heart of the ruling families’ symbolic seat, could not be tolerated. On May 23, Héctor’s hut was torched while he was sleeping. The priest barely escaped, and his few belongings were burned. X. n Sunday night, I returned from Carnival. I’d been out of the country for six years, so I didn’t really remember what it was like, and from time to time I took out my orange notebook and wrote down some impressions. In Santa Fe, no one celebrates Carnival, so I took two buses and two camionetas and met up with my friend Maya in Pedasí. We stayed at her family’s place there—rustic to the extreme, badly kept, with no running water for most of the day. We pitched our tent in their abandoned backyard and joined the family, which headed to the beach. Later we went to the town center for the nightly round. The local carnival queen came on a tractor-­towed wagon, waving to everyone royally, and another wagon carried the band behind her. Throughout the carnival, we had at least one cooler with vodka, seco, rum, and beers at all times, and someone always toasted. As you walk down the street, sometimes there’s a family sitting on its porch, somebody drumming on a tambor, and people singing congos. People blast reggaeton everywhere: annoying, but necessary; here and there, some típica comes out of someone’s pickup truck. All of those are also played at the main events, with very little salsa and merengue, and never more than a few couples dancing to it. The next day people woke up at random, and somebody made some drip coffee. After a light breakfast, I played hide-­and-­seek with a seven-­ year-­old, who was there with her (single) mother. The girl had a beautiful rolling giggle, and a very forceful will—she argued quite eloquently that although we were going out now, I had to agree to play with her again later. The day’s mojadera was fun, and now, for some reason, the carnival queen had little six-­year-­old princesses suffering in the sun with her in elaborate costume, their mothers standing at the side of the wagon,

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smearing them with sunscreen and pressing juice bottles to their mouths. We followed the floats to the central plaza, and soon all turned alcohol and grill smoke. Everyone passed the next few hours around the water tanker trying to get under the water hose, shouting, gordita, aquí, dale aquí! Back in Santa Fe, Concepción asked me how my trip went, and I described some of the scenes. In the background, an old transistor was playing Radio María. The conversation drifted, and at one point I told her about the last night of carnival. Since the night’s party was already winding down at the plaza, I headed back with a gringa who was staying with the family and whom I had befriended. We were back at the house at around 11 p.m. As we walked into the house, the single mom, who was a bit of a party animal, grabbed the gringa and asked her to sleep in the same bed with her little girl so she could go partying for a bit. This seemed fair, so the gringa said okay. But then the mom, just so there would be no questions about what had to be done, took the gringa to the bed and showed her the sleeping child. I had been in the kitchen, looking for some water, but hearing them whisper, I came and looked into the room too, in case the mother wanted me to translate. The girl was sleeping on her side with a look of concentrated serenity, her right hand holding her curls ever so gently. There was a guy, some cousin, sleeping in another bed in the room; and one or two other men elsewhere in the house. The mother showed the gringa the bed and said, you stay right there, okay? The gringa, who had intermediate Spanish skills, nodded. The mother repeated, “You sleep right there, and you don’t go until I’m back, okay? I’m just going for an hour.” The gringa nodded— sure. “But just be sure not to leave that bed,” the mother repeated. “No matter what.” Concepción was sifting through the beans as I told her this, and she looked up calmly. She had a sack of beans on the table, and she would take a couple of handfuls and spread them on the table. As I told her this last anecdote, I found myself helping her sift through them. (I’ve noticed women here do this together sometimes, as they talk.) “Yes,” she said, “that’s understandable.” “Yeah,” I said, “although, I mean, why should it be like that? It’s so extreme.” Concepción didn’t look at me but raised her eyebrows, in the almost 300

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imperceptible way by which some highland women show that they are not exactly on the same page. She said that it is how life is here too. Everything was peaceful, everything pretty, but mothers knew about the dangers . . . we talked about that caution that underwrote everything. How much more empowered young women now were in Santa Fe, how much less “timid” (as she put it) they were, but also about the limits of that freedom, the realities that men imposed, the violence, the cantina and its culture. She went to put some water on the stove for tea, and when she returned, stood behind me and put her hand on my shoulder ever so gently. XI. or Héctor, the Bible was God’s word in history; the Sign of the Times was his word in the present. Following the burning of the electric generator, Héctor wrote in the church’s Boletín: “So I understood what Christ says in the Gospel of John. For all those who take his word seriously. I understood that when a person or a community encounters hate because of their FAITH, it is a good SIGN. It is a sign that LIGHT is illuminating the darkness.”59 Since the same “author” created reality and sacred text, it only made sense to interpret the meanings of the two alongside each other. I think, though, that Héctor and liberationists like him broke with a long church tradition on the politics of interpretation. Instead of the priest functioning as expert, as a professional authority on the correct interpretation, the process was democ-

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59. Héctor Gallego, in Santa Fe’s parochial bulletin, cited in Bernardo Van Quathn, “Los boletines de la Parroquia San Pedro Apostol de Santa Fe,” Diálogo Social 34–35 (1972): 78. It seems to me that the phrase “for those who take his word seriously” is a reference to Martin Luther King’s sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967: “Many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: ‘Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?’ Peace and civil rights don’t mix, they say. And so this morning, I speak to you on this issue, because I am determined to take the Gospel seriously. And I come this morning to my pulpit to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.” Martin Luther King, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” sermon, Riverside Church, New York, April 30, 1967. Transcript available online through Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley Social Activism Sound Recording Project: http://​www​.lib​.berkeley​.edu​/MRC​/pacificaviet​ /riversidetranscript​.html.

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ratized. Everyone was called to read and analyze. It wasn’t that Héctor interviewed people, used them as one does a source of evidence about something (the nature of poverty, or whichever). The movement called people to create an analytic framework together. Of course, they weren’t all equal—they couldn’t even all read, and Héctor had a world of interpretative techniques. But their voice counted: their understanding of poverty, of faith and sacrifice and love could illuminate the darkness too. People in Santa Fe cannot explain why the Bible circles stopped taking place almost immediately after Héctor and his team were no longer there. Perhaps the peasant leadership, though increasingly confident about running economic functions, couldn’t bring itself to take the full responsibility of interpreting the past without the presence of those who could read effortlessly. Most, after all, were bit by bit returning to take night classes so as to complete elementary school. How could they lead a discussion on the Bible? And what’s more, the material issues had always seemed more urgent to them, more readily understood and handled. And, really, the collapse of the interpretative circles had no immediate consequence. It was only with time that problems began to arise. Coop employees, even leaders, began stealing from the organization; nepotism; caudillismo interno—meaning, coop leaders employing self-­ serving, patriarchal methods within the coop itself; infighting; badmouthing; petty conspiracies . . . all issues that—each and every person I spoke with insisted—did not occur during Héctor’s time.60 I suspect that one of the reasons these issues erupted was that the movement ran out of the ideological fuel that had kept it burning. Of course, the elimination of the movement’s leader and the dispersal of its dynamic church team made it harder for the peasant leadership to maintain its path. No social or economic structure can answer the moral questions that peasant leaders and coop employees confronted; and given the Panamanian current, not raising these questions at all resulted in an erosion of the sources that nourished the movement. The interpretation of the present in light of the past—a special past, no 60. A peasant leader had robbed most of the coop’s funds already in 1973, only two years after Héctor’s disappearance. Editor’s interview with Serviliano Aguilar, movement leader, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, June 11, 2007.

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doubt—was what kept the Movement radical. It allowed it to challenge an existing situation, to rebel against it. I think about this as I walk to Santa Fe after an interview. It’s a forty-­ five-­minute walk, and I have time to get lost in my thoughts. I enjoy my time in the region now, and it’s no longer just an escape from the city. I still have a romantic admiration for the movement, but it’s slowly giving way to a more balanced understanding of the problems that people here faced, the choices they’ve made . . . their courage. A camión passes, slows down, and the driver says, muchacha, I’m going to Santa Fe. But with such a nice breeze, I say no, and he drives on. I breathe in deeply, smelling the light orange scent and the smell of burning wood somewhere. With so much that’s wrong, so much suffering, one needs a Santa Fe— real, historical, and maybe also imagined, to some extent—a Santa Fe to walk up to. I feel my steps, a bit of pain in my feet now too. Before I know it, I turn the corner at El Pantano, cross the heavy bridge over the Bulabá, and there I am, at the foot of Santa Fe de Veraguas. I meet Edgar at the Fundación Héctor Gallego, and we chat about this and that. I tell him we never ended up going to Chumumbito, and he promises me that when I return, we’ll take Artemio and Flaco and go. The legend might be true, I say—something always comes up and interferes with your plans. He laughs. The important thing is, he says, we’re on the right path. XII. he night Héctor Gallego was arrested, Jacinto and a few other friends went to the diocese in Santiago. By morning there were groups of peasants from the entire region walking the two-­day hike from the Santa Fe region to the provincial capital (some estimated the number of peasants that made the trip at around two thousand). Protests escalated; students from Santiago joined the peasants, and the church’s radio station spread the word throughout the country. But the young priest was gone. Disappeared. In the following months, the church showed it was not truly willing or ready to challenge the regime. While tens of thousands of protesters threatened to unseat Torrijos, the church leadership vacillated—­ apparently either afraid of repression or afraid of a right-­wing coup. Torrijos played his cards well: an ingenious disinformation campaign

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spread doubt as to who was responsible for the disappearance, suggesting, at the same time, that Héctor was a communist; that he was a corrupt priest who had received money from Torrijos and fled with it; that the case had somehow to do with the CIA. Counterpressure was applied on the church in the meantime, even as empty promises were made to McGrath that the matter was being investigated.61 The regime avoided violent repression of the protests and waited out the crisis, and within two or three months regained stability. There is still controversy on the question of just how far the church went toward Torrijos. According to some sources, with Vatican intervention, some agreement was reached with the Guard leadership in 1972, and the church hierarchy moderated its criticisms thereafter. It continued to demand the truth about Héctor, but Bishop Legara sent the seven nuns and two deacons working in Santa Fe out of the province, and, as it happened, none of the priests that succeeded Héctor were anywhere as dynamic or active. People in the movement quickly became distrustful, and in fact, the church lost its leadership role there. (Many of the movement’s leaders and cadre even stopped going to Mass at some point, although all claim to be faithful to the Gospel.)62 61. This is not to deny that initially the National Guard was indeed surprised by the church and peasant response, and was caught unprepared for a national crisis. As the US ambassador to Panamá explained to his superiors, “Gallegos [sic] case has put PUG under great pressure. Lt Col Noriega is General Torrijos’ most powerful and useful subordinate in the National Guard. Noriega would be difficult to sacrifice and his ouster might cause strains in Guard. With negotiations with the US just beginning Torrijos cannot easily try to involve US or distract public opinion with other incident. Such a course remains a possibility but his credibility with public is already strained. Torrijos himself has often stated that only the Canal issue and the Church can unite Panamanians. He must now find the Church a difficult opponent.” Robert M. Sayre, U.S. Embassy in Panamá, to William P. Rogers, secretary of state, June 29, 1971, POL 23-­28, box 2537, Records of the Department of State, RG 59, NACP. 62. Monsignor McGrath, who in 1970 was nominated archbishop of Panamá, never admitted to any accommodation with the regime. Until he died, he claimed that Héctor’s fate was never known to the church, and that they always demanded it, even as they understood that it was futile. It was never clarified why the church dispersed the evangelizing team Héctor formed; why it did not publicly charge the National Guard with the murder of its priest, even after its private investigation had led to that very conclusion; why the people believed to be responsible for the crime were not excommunicated; and why Monsignor Legara ordered the burning of Héctor’s documents and belongings in the obispado.

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As for Santa Fe, the region was by now transformed. In the following years, the merchants had no option but to find new sources of income; their shops closed one after the other. Their economic and political strength never regained its old splendor, and the Cooperativa La Esperanza became the dominant economic and political agent in the region. While the movement suffered an enormous blow with Héctor Gallego’s disappearance and the dispersal of the church’s team, the political economy of the area would not revert to its former state. The fact that Torrijos now made special efforts to pacify the area strengthened this tendency: eventually a new road was paved, allowing the coop easier access to provincial markets, and this stimulated the rise of something like a middle sector in Santa Fe. Tío Bravo told me that after a sermon sometime before his death, Héctor was taken aside by two plainclothes agents for a short conversation. When the priest returned, Tío asked him what the agents wanted, and Héctor said it was nothing serious. But there was a tear running down his cheek, Tío said. It may be a fantasy of sorts; Old Man Tío sometimes falls into uchronic dreams these days.63 But I think of this tear a lot. It concentrates something that was in the air after the first attempt on Héctor’s life. My understanding is that Héctor knew very well that he would disappear—we all do at some point—and he felt his time was short. He would not change the world. In his last sermon in Santa Fe, he explained to the enormous gathering that had crowded into the church that he could soon be disappeared. People were hypnotized by the spectacle of the priest who had just survived an attempt on his life but was refusing to leave his parish. There was one sentence everyone remembers: “If I disappear, do not go looking for me. Keep fighting.” The world was not changed in these years, though one small region in it was. From the Cerro Tute one cannot see a promised land, only shacks and humble people. But the world was interpreted once again in Santa Fe—Héctor tickled those stubborn, quiet people, and they spoke. And if the world could not hear them just then, perhaps someday it will. 63. A reference to the work of oral historian Alessandro Portelli. Tali is implying that the incident may not have happened quite literally. I interviewed the man to whom she is most likely referring, and heard a similar account. Editor’s interview with Tío Bravo, movement leader, Pantano (Santa Fe District), Panamá, March 8, 2009. For Portelli’s work, see Alessandro Portelli, “Uchronic Dreams: Working-­Class Memory and Possible Worlds,” in The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990).

305

Acknowledgme nts …

I do not take it for granted that such a bizarre intellectual project as this one should develop and become a book. Many people and institutions in the United States, Panamá, and Israel have helped me along the years of research and ­writing. The project started at Tel-Aviv University. My adviser in Tel Aviv, Gerardo Leibner, encouraged me at the same time as he challenged my simplistic ideas about Latin America. I benefited from the comments of Tzvi Medin, Raanan Rein, and Rosalie Sitman too. Fellow students at the Instituto read my work, argued with me (loudly), and provided me with fantastic criticism and encouragement. The institute’s support generally, and its Archival Research Scholarship specifically, were crucial for my first trip to Panamá and the essay that developed from it. I had the great luck of having Gil Joseph as my adviser at Yale. Gil managed to look at this project with my eccentric vision, and he helped me think through each and every turn of the project. My committee members—Ray Craib, Seth Fein, and John Crowley—went above and beyond their calling, read various drafts, gave me tough but extremely helpful critiques, and made many valuable suggestions. I have also benefited from the comments of James Goodman, Alexander Kirshner, James C. Scott, Anne-­Marie McManus, Philipp Nielson, Lisa Ubelaker Andrade, Juanita Cristina Aristizabal, Omri Boehm, Hayden White, and Kirsten Weld. Yale’s Writing History workshop gave me valuable comments; and I benefited greatly from participation in the Agrarian Studies Series, as well as from conversations with fellow Latin Americanists at Yale. I could not have completed this work without the help of fellow scholars and writers in (and on) Panamá. Fernando Aparicio helped me get acquainted with the archives in Panamá, and I had the pleasure of taking his class on Panamanian history at the Universidad Nacional. I could not have gone very far without the help and friendship of journalist and writer Rafael Pérez Jaramillo; and I am grateful to Alexis Sánchez, César Díaz, and Richard Koster, who aided me as well. Peter Szok, Michael Donoghue, and Thomas Pearcy gave me valuable information and comments, and Noel Maurer helped me make sense of my economic data. I found the friendship and knowledge of my fellow researchers Katie Zien, Ashley Carse, Blake Scott, Jeff Parker, Matt Scalena, and Kaysha Corinealdi to be enormously valuable. While I was in Panamá, Barak and Shirly Cohen often housed and fed me, and sometimes endured my cooking too. Gregorio and the wonderful librarians at the Biblioteca Nacional were always helpful and kind. The cheerful archivists at the Archivos Nacionales were supportive and fun to work with, and I am grateful too for the help of archivists at the Archivo Belisario Porras and the Archivo Ricardo J. Alfaro. Collaboration with Doug Cox, as well as with Carlos Osorio and his colleagues at the National Security Archive, did not yield what we had hoped for: that the United States would 307

Acknowledgments

repatriate the millions of documents it had stolen from Panamá. But I learned a lot from the experience, both about the politics of the archive and about contemporary Panamá. I am thankful for their help on this project. I would like to acknowledge the generous funding of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), which supported the bulk of my fieldwork. I am also thankful to Yale’s Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research, its Agrarian Studies Pre-­dissertation Award, and the MacMillan Center Predissertation Fellowship. Yale’s International Security Studies funded a part of my research through its Smith Richardson Foundation. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Rethinking History: History as Creative Writing 4 17, no. 1 (2013): 2–37 (https://​www​.tandfonline​.com​/doi​/full​/10​.1080​/13642529​.2012​.75 0778). I would also like to thank the people who helped me turn this project into a book. My editor at the University of Chicago Press, Tim Mennel, read several versions of this text and offered insightful comments. I benefited greatly from Marjorie Becker’s perceptive and supportive thoughts. Dain Borges gave me an extraordinarily close reading of the manuscript and made valuable comments on its arguments and style. I would like to thank them both, as well as the two anonymous readers of the manuscript, whose comments and critiques were helpful too. I owe a special thanks to the people of Santa Fe. The Fundación Héctor Ga­ llego and the Cooperativa La Esperanza de los Campesinos helped me in numerous ways. I am especially thankful to Jacinto Peña, Eric Concepción, Cerviliano Aguilar, and Edilma Gallego, for the hours of conversation and for the abundant information they have provided me. Justo Abrego, Stephanie, Horacio, Pedro Vernaza, and Dra. Abrego, and many other people in Santa Fe helped me too and showed me their hospitality, openness, and kindness. I am deeply indebted to them all and hope that, once translated, my work will contribute to their effort to pass down their narratives to a younger generation. Mil gracias! Finally, I want to thank my family for their support through years of intermittent work. My family in Israel listened patiently to my complaints, prodded me along, and encouraged me to stay the course, while my mother read and commented on my entire doctoral dissertation. As I was sporadically editing the book, my wife, Priya Lal, made numerous suggestions on content and form, gave me time to write, and pushed me toward the finish line. I am greatly indebted to you all.

308

Biblio graphy …

Archives Consulted ABP Archivo Belisario Porras, Biblioteca Simón Bolívar, Universidad Nacional, Panamá ANP Archivos Nacionales, Caledonia, Panamá (ANP) Sections consulted: Sección Administración del Estado (SAE) Sección Colombiana (SC) Sección Judicial (SJ) Sección de Notaria (SN) ARA Archivo Ricardo J. Alfaro, Bella Vista, Panamá BAN Biblioteca de la Asamblea Nacional, Panamá BN Biblioteca Nacional Ernesto J. Castillero R, Parque Omar, Panamá LLHU Lamont Library Government Documents and Microfilm Collections, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA NYPL New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division NSA National Security Archive, George Washington University, Washington, DC NACP United States National Archives at College Park, MD Record Groups (RG) consulted: RG 59, Department of State Agency Records RG 84, Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State RG 286, Records of the Agency for International Development (USAID) RG 319, Records of the Army Staff Newspapers and Magazines Published in Panama City, República de Panamá, unless otherwise noted. Bohemia, La Havana, Cuba Cuasimodo Diálogo Social El Día El País El Panamá América and the Panama American La Estrella de Panamá and the Panama Star and Herald La Hora La Nación and the Nation La Prensa 309

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La Prensa Ilustrada La Prensa Libre Interviews Cerviliano Aguilar, movement leader, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, June 11, 2007. Daniel Alonso, Panamá, RP, June 21, 2011. Luis Batista, CEPAS employee, Santiago de Veraguas, RP, February 17, 2009. Ricardo Arias Calderón, Panamá, RP, September 15, 2008. Major (Ret.) Milton Castillo, Panamá, RP, August 3 and August 31, 2008. Enrique Chuez, La Chorrera, RP, May 29, 2008. Régulo Franco, Santiago de Veraguas, RP, February 9, 2009. Edilma Gallego, Panamá, RP, July 20, 2007. Héctor Gallego, interview by Padre Manolo on Radio Hogar, June 4, 1971, editor’s digital copy. A transcript of this interview is available in “Entrevista con Héctor Gallego: Cinco días antes de su secuestro,” Diálogo Social 34–35 (1972): 84–87. Padre Fernando Guardia Jaén, Panamá, RP, June 4, 2007. Richard Koster, Panamá, RP, July 22, 2007, and May 12, 2008. Professor George C. Lodge, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA, January 10, 2011. Major (Ret.) Humberto Macea, Panamá, RP, November 25, 2008. Padre Múgica, Santiago de Veraguas, RP, June 12, 2007. General (Ret.) Rubén Darío Paredes, Panamá, RP, January 16, 2009. Enrique Peña, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, March 18, 2009. Jacinto Peña, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, June 10, 2007. Ellen Pérez, Peace Corps volunteer, by telephone, May 17, 2011. Mons. Alejandro Vásquez-­Pinto, Panamá, April 27 and May 21, 2009. Interviews under Pseudonym Eduardo y Concepción Abrego, Tute Arriba, RP, March 20, 2009. Tío Bravo, movement leader, El Pantano de Santa Fe, RP, March 8 and March 11, 2009. Andrés Castillo, Santiago de Veraguas, RP, February 17, 2009. Gerónimo Delgado y Helena Flores, El Alto, RP, April 1, 2009. Nicanor Fernández, Tute Arriba, RP, February 13, 2009. Zorrito Macea, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, February 20, 2009. José (“Serpiente”) Magolis and Julio Pérez, Panamá, RP, February 15, 2009. Roberto and Clara Páramo, Narices, Panamá, RP, April 2, 2009. Efraín Soto Pena, former Coiba prisoner, Santiago Jail, Santiago de Veraguas, RP, April 21, 2009. Sófocles Pérez, La Mula, RP, March 19, 2009. Juan Suárez, Santa Fe de Veraguas, RP, March 5, 2009. Rómulo Torres, movement leader. Pantano, RP, April 16, 2009. Damián and María Rios, Narices, RP, April 2, 2009. 310

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