The Seeds of Fiction (27 page)

I was excited at the prospect of obtaining firsthand news about the fate of the Baptiste brothers. It was just possible, I hoped, that if they were still alive Ambassador Young could obtain their release. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The question that was to haunt both Graham and me was whether we could have done more to save the Baptiste bothers. Had we pressured the regime earlier, might they have been released? If Fred had been released to the local insane asylum, only a few miles from the prison, at least he would not have rotted away like forgotten garbage in Fort Dimanche.

According to prison survivors, both of the Baptiste brothers were carried out, like other victims, wrapped in the traditional Fort Dimanche shroud, the lice-infested straw mats that had been their beds for all those years. The fellow inmates pressed into service to handle the corpses were careful not to remove them head first, as Haitian superstition says that if a dead person is removed the wrong way (head first) from a room, the other occupants are sure to follow the corpse to the grave.

Jean-Claude Duvalier permitted me back again in 1980 and granted a three-hour interview. He had just wed the divorcee Michele Bennett, and the story I reported appeared in
Time
's Hemisphere edition. From then on I visited Haiti regularly, observing the forces of change evolve. In early December 1985 I predicted that the political end was near for Jean-Claude.

My photographer son Jean-Bernard and I attended the January Independence Day church service at the cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Although we were both arrested, the events proved us right. The service was to be the last public ceremony for the young couple and the last full-dress parade of the Duvalier dynasty's hated thugs, the Tontons Macoutes. The popular revolt succeeded, and on 7 February 1986 Duvalier fled.

Far from improving the disastrous situation, the succession of self-serving and authoritarian neo-Duvalierist ‘interim' governments further undermined ideals and provoked even greater misery and hardship. In the aftermath,
Haitians faced greater duress. Corruption, thievery and state terrorism had become institutionalized under the Duvaliers as had the drug trade. Greed had become a creed. An entire generation of Haitians sought to imitate their role models, the super-ministers who practised grand larceny on a grand scale.

Yet even as Duvalierist thugs both within and without the army, commanded by General Henry Namphy, roamed the streets, wreaking their savagery at will — evidenced by the massacre of thirty-four voters on a bloody November election day in 1987 — the Haitian people persevered in their non-violent struggle. From the depths of their anti-Duvalierist, anti-politician feelings they chose a different destiny. In overwhelming numbers they turned out to elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an ambitious 37-year-old Roman Catholic priest, to the presidency. Aristide had waged a campaign based on his public opposition to Duvalierism, and his platform had been simple and what the people who mistrusted politicians wanted most: justice and transparency. His was a movement of hope, and the little priest-turned-prophet won the most democratic election in Haiti's history.

But the Haitian people's hope for change brought only more of the same. With the former priest, the people's hope was once again tragically dashed, as he, too, proved to be just another politician whose use of violence as an instrument of power harked back to Papadocracy.

Graham continued to be prophetic in writing about Haiti. In one of his last letters to me, on 20 November 1990, he predicted that if Father Aristide won the presidential election ‘he wouldn't survive long'. Aristide lasted only seven months in office before he was overthrown and the Haitian military assumed power once again. That bloody coup of September 1991 and the repression that followed the ousting of Father Aristide from office triggered an unprecedented flood of boat people trying to escape Haiti. More than forty thousand were intercepted at sea by the United States Coast Guard; unknown numbers of others drowned. Thousands were imprisoned at the US naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba.

During a 1992 hearing in Washington, DC, US Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, obviously displeased with the policy of then President George Bush of summarily returning Haitian boat people without determining their refugee status, asked a US Justice Department lawyer, ‘Have you ever been to Haiti?'

She answered, ‘No, your honour. I'm sorry. I have not.'

Justice Blackmun asked, ‘Are you familiar with a book called
The Comedians
by Graham Greene?'

‘No, your honour. I'm not.'

Blackmun then told the attorney, ‘I recommend you read it.'

In a sense Graham Greene's influence over the fate of Haiti will endure. The reason why is perhaps best explained in a passage at the end of
The Comedians,
reflecting the eternal struggle between good and evil, darkness and light and the plight of humankind — caught in the middle — in trying to cope and choose. The young exile priest — Bajeux — preaches a short sermon based on an exhortation by St Thomas the Apostle, ‘Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him'.

The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism. In the days of fear, doubt and confusion, the simplicity and loyalty of one apostle advocated a political solution. He was wrong, but I would rather be wrong with St Thomas than right with the cold and the craven.

In December 1971, on my return from covering the third anniversary of a military coup in Panama, I wrote enthusiastically to Graham about a different breed of Latin American dictator, Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera. This heretic populist Panamanian strongman, then forty-one years old, was struggling with Washington, demanding a new treaty for the Panama Canal. If peaceful negotiations failed, he hinted that violence was in the offing. For foreign correspondents the story had the stereotypical ingredients: an underdog ‘banana republic' challenging Uncle Sam and a charismatic
caudillo.
But, more sub-stantively, Torrijos's challenge was a major policy issue for Washington that would not only affect the fifty thousand Americans living in the Panama Canal Zone but touched a nostalgic and proud nerve in the American people. The strategic Panama Canal had been the young United States' greatest engineering feat. It likewise symbolized American hegemony in the hemisphere. The spirit of Teddy Roosevelt was still alive in the United States, particularly among ‘Zonians' on the isthmus. On the other hand, Panama's 1.3 million citizens, along with most Latin Americans, if not all, were sympathetic to Torrijos's cause. Instinctively, I knew that Graham and the General would get along.

During possibly the largest rally ever in Panama City, held on
I
I
October 1971 to mark the third anniversary of Torrijos's revolution, I had noticed how ill at ease he was when speaking in public. Yet the enthusiasm of the thousands that crowded into Plaza Cinco de Mayo was not the ritual cheering of a rent-a-crowd; he didn't have to buy their emotions. Their love affair with the charismatic general was genuine. Torrijos had given them a new sense of national pride.

Absent was the clutch of politicos whose ambitions and perquisites he had upset. Most of the
rabiblancos
— white tails (wealthy members of the upper class whose nickname comes from a white-tailed songbird) — didn't like his populist rhetoric. He was the butt of their jokes at the elite Union Club. Torrijos was a graduate of the Salvadoran Military Academy. He was a country boy without a university degree. Still, he was a shrewd, wily negotiator with a folksy intuition. He had an unusual ability to coin one-liners that provided slogans for his political battles, and he spoke in parables steeped in rural logic.

That day, in 1971, in a neat white dress uniform, Torrijos was obviously
uncomfortable in his role. But once he launched into his speech his emotions took over and his voice rang strong with conviction. He had provided the slogan for the banners, ‘
‘Nunca de rodillas
(‘Never on our knees'), and he wanted the US administration of President Richard Nixon to take notice. The crowd roared ecstatically.

There were tense moments when it appeared his words might trigger an assault on the American Zone on the other side of the fence behind the crowd. ‘What people can bear the humiliation of seeing a foreign flag planted in the very heart of its nation?' Torrijos demanded. The people's patience, he warned, had limits; their anger could be directed at the Zone, and ‘we' were prepared to die. However, unlike the riots of 1964 when the Panama National Guard was nowhere to be seen, Torrijos had taken the precaution of stationing guardsmen with orders to halt any movement towards the Zone. The only thing to die that day was my story. Without a riot there was no interest from
Time
's editors in New York.

The American Zonians, the canal workers and their families, were shaken by the giant rally, which had also set off alarm bells in Washington. Concerned Zonians wrote to their congressmen, and back in the United States an emotional anti-Panama Canal Treaty campaign began to gather steam. For the Americans working and living in the Canal Zone — an insular enclave and quaint relic of the days of US gunboat diplomacy — the barbarians were at the gates. The canal and the Zone must be saved.

On the Panama side of the fence, General Torrijos had promised that gaining sovereignty over the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone was no longer a Panamanian pipe dream. It was a matter of sovereignty, pride and dignity.

The helicopter was buffeted by the storm, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. The green jungle canopy suddenly appeared perilously close to the chopper's window. We were in the full embrace of a heavy tropical rainstorm. Visibility was near zero. Some of my journalist colleagues suggested General Omar Torrijos, who was bounce-dancing in his seat in front of me, was crazy — a real nut. That Monday morning in early October 1972 I was wondering whether they might be right. We were swinging about in the thunderstorm's blind fury, almost grazing the jungle roof. The very nature of the General's authoritarian profession would normally have made security the highest priority. Not for this fellow. The chopper had no escort. The pilots didn't fiddle with the radio to report our position to the Comandancia, headquarters of the National Guard in Panama City. They didn't know where they were anyway. The Comandancia, I later learned, usually had no idea of their commander's whereabouts.

With nature in command, the General appeared in high spirits. A woman
from one of his embassies abroad occupied the seat beside me. Occasionally the wild gyrations of the chopper brought us together; the ride had its pleasant moments. Besides a pistol the General carried a water bottle on his hip which some suggested was filled with vodka. Unlike his
caudillo
counterparts who fussed over their dress, often bedecking their chests with medals (usually bestowed for diplomatic victories), the General's only distinctive accessory was his bush hat, which he wore at a cocky angle.

Tapping him lightly on the shoulder and giving him the ‘What's up, Doc?' gesture with the outstretched palms of my hands, I wanted to know what was making Torrijos dance in his seat. He smiled and shared his earphones with me. I received a blast of Panamanian music. He unveiled his secret: a cassette player with his favourite Panamanian and Colombian
boleros.
As he savoured my surprise I shouted over the engine's roar,
‘General, estamos perdidos?'
(‘General, are we lost?') He shook his head and laughed as the pilot locked on to a swollen stream and began bucking down towards the Atlantic coast. Not to worry, the General assured me, still grinning. ‘If we crash I'll get you out of the jungle. I graduated from the
gringo
jungle warfare school.' I strained to hear his heavy country-accented Spanish.

I had visited the Jungle Operations Center near Fort Sherman in the Canal Zone, which was part of the multifaceted military curriculum at the US Army School of the Americas. They had created a replica of a Vietnamese village and called it Gatun Dinh for training purposes (after the Canal's Gatun locks). The trainees' lunch featured barbecued snake. The Bolivian Army Rangers who tracked down and killed guerrilla icon Che Guevara had been trained at the School of the Americas. Leftists throughout Latin America called the School of the Americas many things, from ‘The Coup d'Etat Factory' to ‘Gorilla University' to the ‘School for Dictators', implying that the institution taught Latin officers to usurp civilian power. ‘I am not comfortable with such a school in my parlour. Who would be?' Torrijos asked me this question between jolts of the helicopter.

A squad of the General's Red Berets — special forces — had picked me up at dawn from my little hotel in downtown Panama City, and when the General arrived on the helicopter pad behind the house on Calle 50 we flew off into stormy weather. What kind of strongman was Omar? Based on my observations, he didn't crave the usual trappings of power. He was essentially a shy sentimentalist who detested public and social functions, preferring the company of a small group of friends who did not always share the same ideology. He detested the protocol that went with his job and left most of such chores to his friend, engineer Demetrio B. ‘Jimmy' Lakas, a huge US-educated man of Greek descent who had been involved with Omar in the 1968 coup that brought him to power and who remained a loyal friend.