The Seeds of Fiction (44 page)

But less than two months after Graham's meeting in Panama with Marcial the FMLN announced to the media on Thursday 9 October 1980 that a final deadline had expired and that they had executed Ambassador Dunn for non-compliance with their demands. ‘The Salvadorean government, the racist government of South Africa and the Dunn family are responsible for the justifiable execution of the criminal ambassador Dunn,' the guerrillas declared. They presented no proof that Dunn had in fact been executed. However, it was later confirmed that Dunn had cheated his captors. The FMLN had actually been prepared to accede to Graham's plea and to collect the ransom money, but the Ambassador had deprived them of the deal by dying and leaving them to dig his grave.

‘I have got nothing further to write you about poor Mr Dunn. I wish you could write a piece about the forgotten hostage, quoting from that abominable article in
Granma,'
Graham wrote in a letter dated 5 January 1981. ‘You'll be amused to hear that the Red Brigade [West Germány's terrorist group] were on the telephone to me the other day but I refused to play. [Graham did not elaborate.] Don't mention this in
TimeV
The late Ambassador Dunn would not turn out to be a character in Graham's unwritten novel. The Dunns of the world, caught up in human tragedy, already peopled his books.

My dateline had shifted back and forth between Nicaragua and El Salvador. The year 1980 had been a particularly bloody one for the Catholic Church in Central America. It had begun with the assassination in San Salvador of Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, a saintly man whom I had interviewed a number of times. He had been shot dead as he said Mass on 24 March, during the consecration of the Eucharist. More were to die at the archbishop's funeral service when a noise bomb exploded and the crowd panicked. The year was to end with the torture, rape and killing of three American nuns and a female lay worker in El Salavador by members of the government security forces.

The following year, in the summer of 1981,
Time
decided to reopen its Miami/ Caribbean bureau. I was transferred with my family from Mexico City to Miami, from where I continued to cover Central America.

The move shocked Graham. ‘Your letter was a complete surprise! I never
expected to find you living in Miami but of course I understand very well the reasons,' he wrote in a letter dated 9 June 1981. In early April Graham had gone to Jerusalem, where he received the $2,000 ‘Jerusalem Prize' award from Mayor Teddy Kollek.

‘I have just finished reading the proofs of your
Somoza,'
Graham added and went on to critique my new book on Nicaragua. His critical response was another rare reflection of his personal literary standards and acumen.

I know you want me to be frank and I shall be frank. I think it is an excellent book of research which will be invaluable to future historians. I found that you went into too great detail and there were too many quotations from speeches etc., which were repeated over and over again. You wanted to cover every moment on the ground. I felt you should have got up in a mountainside and looked down and seen the main points before writing. My fear is that only people like myself who have a particular interest in Central America will appreciate the work you have done. The last chapters were excellent because you were dealing with actions and not words. If I was your editor I would advise you to cut out the notes. Notes in a book of this kind are only useful if they really cover all references, which you don't, or add something to what has been written in the text. Over and over again I looked for the source of a story and found it was not there, although many more trivial points were attributed to some newspaperman or other. I would be bold and eliminate the notes. A little point on
p. 223
. You say that Somoza threw an evening cocktail party for 40 foreign correspondents and make a point that he served a 34-dollar bottle of Russian vodka. The bottle wouldn't have gone very far among 40 people! Somewhere else I think you emphasized the point that Somoza tossed down his vodka neat but that is the usual way of drinking it. Oh yes, that's on p. 235. I would have been horrified if he had mixed it with orange juice or some awful concoction.

Please don't be discouraged by my criticisms. The book is of value, but I'm afraid it will be very heavy reading for the ordinary public. You have been too anxious I think to put in all the information which you have gathered without thinking of it as a book which must have a shape and appeal to a reader who is not necessarily deeply interested in the subject.

P.S. I don't know what my summer plans are yet. My Spanish priest [friend] is having an operation on his throat and we may not be able to go off on our usual tour before August. I have only heard one word in recent months from Chuchu and I don't really expect to be invited for
the fifth time to Panama! If I am I will try and fit it in. Otherwise I must find some other escape route. PPS. If your publisher want a quote which is an honest quote I suggest: ‘Bernard Diederich with his books on Somoza proves himself an indispensable historian for Central America.'

Graham's editorial suggestions were of immeasurable value. He was correct. Published in the United States by E.P. Dutton, my book was the first of many to appear on Nicaragua after the fall of the Somoza dynasty. It did well, even in the United Kingdom.

A macho gambles with destiny, ready to win or lose. He gambles with death, he gambles with God. A burning love affair is a victory over Destiny; a revolution, a victory over death; sin a victory over God. When the three come together, man has accomplished his fulfilment.

Julius Rivera,
Latin America: A Sociocultural Interpretation

A cable from Graham arrived on Saturday 1 August 1981 at our new home in Miami. He hoped I would be joining him for yet another trip to Panama. ‘I don't think I'll go this time,' I told my wife Ginette. Call it a premonition, but I had strange, unsettling feeling that something disastrous was about to happen. My thoughts were that Chuchu's little plane might not make it through the rainy season, and I didn't want to be in it when it went crashing down into the Panamanian jungle. I was about to call Chuchu in Panama and advise him of my decision not to travel to Panama to join Graham, who was due to arrive in Panama City on 6 August, when the phone rang. It was one of my colleagues at the
Miami Herald
asking whether I had any information about what was happening in Panama. According to a brief news agency bulletin out of Panama City General Torrijos was missing.

There were no details. I called Chuchu. ‘Chuchu is not here.' His Italian wife sounded as if she was crying. ‘He believes something terrible has happened to the General … He thinks there has been an attempted coup.'

It was the same with all my other sources in Panama. All that was known was that the General was missing. There was nothing to do but wait. My thoughts went back to our 1972 helicopter ride, when were lost in a rainstorm and Omar had told me, his eyes merry with laughter, that he could get us out of the jungle if we went down because he had graduated from the US Army's jungle survival course.

Panama's terrain is no joke. Its formidable rainforests, steep mountains, tidal mud flats, mangrove swamps and rolling savannah blanketed with towering elephant grass are quite capable of hiding secrets. The General was famous for changing his flight plan in mid-flight. This might have been good for his personal security, but it also made it difficult for his headquarters to keep
track of his whereabouts. No one ever seemed to know where he was at any given time. Travelling with Omar, one never knew one's real destination.

It was a Saturday filled with anxiety. News out of Panama was a long time in coming. Even its National Guard seemed unsure of where the General was headed or what had happened. Colonel Roberto Diaz Herrera, the secretary-general of the National Guard, later claimed that he had been informed by intelligence chief Noriega at 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, more than eighteen hours after the General was first reported missing.

‘My father had trouble with a crown on one of his teeth,' Carmen Alicia, Torrijos's eldest daughter, recalled. She was the last member of the family to have seen Omar alive. ‘He had insisted on driving over from Farallon to our dental clinic that Friday [31 July], even though we were little better than a rural clinic. This was his third trip to our clinic in Penonomé in seven days. He was challenging us to fix his tooth, even though I told him he should go to the dentist in Panama City who had made the crown in the first place.'

Carmen Alicia was doing her odontology studies social service work at the time in Penonomé in the province of Coclé, a 25-minute drive from Farallon and some sixty miles from Panama City.

Following his dental work that Friday morning Omar invited his daughter to accompany him. A plane was waiting at a nearby airstrip. ‘I told him, “No, Papi, I have my work to do,”‘ Carmen Alicia told me. She said she had earlier admonished her father, saying he shouldn't go around disrupting the country's health services. Not long before, the General had taken the entire medical staff from a Chiriquí clinic with him to see at first hand the conditions in a rural area. ‘I told him such things were disruptive to our work. He understood, but that was how he was, he often made decisions on the spur of the moment. When he left for his plane he told me, “I'll see you in Farallon in the afternoon when you have finished your work.” Those were, for me, his last words. The weather was fine at Penonomé when he left,' she recounted. ‘When we had finished working we went to Farallon and waited and waited. When my father didn't show up we thought he had stood us up. He had a habit of changing his destination even when we flew with him. “Didn't you see we changed course and crossed the canal? You must always keep your wits about you,” he instructed us.'

Chuchu had stayed at home to translate key passages of French President François Mitterand's book into Spanish, since Torrijos was planning a visit to France. Then an officer telephoned, reporting that the General was missing. Chuchu immediately suspected a plot.

The next day, Saturday afternoon, a farmer appeared at a National Guard post near Coclesito and reported that he had heard an explosion on a nearby mountain. He led a rescue party to the site, which turned out to be where Torrijos's plane had crashed. By then US Air Force planes had joined the
Panamanians in their search for the General. Major Domingo Ocalagan, the National Guard public relations chief, finally confirmed that Omar's plane had crashed and announced, ‘There are no survivors.'

Normally it was a fifteen-minute flight to Coclesito from Penonomé. At the controls of the De Havilland Twin Otter 205 carrying Torrijos were a veteran pilot and co-pilot. The mountains had suddenly become cloaked in a storm. It was the rainy season, but storms didn't ground the General, and his pilots were far too macho to admit being defeated by the weather. The General's awful flying habits were legendary. He could unnerve visiting US senators by changing their destinations in mid-air. One night the US Ambassador, Ambler Moss, was visiting Omar at Coclesito. The General, relaxing in his hammock on the veranda, suddenly remembered he had to go somewhere. It was 9 p.m. Ambassador Moss asked him, ‘How?' The airstrip had no lights. Simple, Torrijos explained. ‘We place a truck with its lights on at one end of the runway as a guide, and if we don't hit the truck we are airborne.' And off he flew without hitting the truck.

That fateful Friday morning poor visibility had forced Omar's pilots to abort a second try at landing on Coclesito's dirt airstrip. The plane was gaining altitude as the pilots intended to circle again to make a third try. As the Canadian-built aircraft ascended, the right wing clipped a tall tree, sending the Otto crashing into Cerro Marta only a few feet below its summit. The National Guard blamed the crash on bad weather. Along with Omar, six others aboard the aircraft perished. It was not until the next afternoon, 1 August, that rescue workers finally reached the crash site and removed the remains of the General, two other passengers, the crew and two guardsmen.

It was as if Omar had chosen the place and manner of his death: the rural Panama he loved, high above Coclesito. His friend, Gabriel García Márquez, in his tribute to Torrijos, whom he had visited only two weeks before the fatal crash, noted they had flown together in mid-July in the same plane. Omar, knowing García Márquez's fear of flying, made sure that the Colombian novelist flew with a glass of whisky in his hand. In the ‘ultimate instance', García Márquez later wrote:

Torrijos trusted his good, mysterious and true intuition! It was his only orientation in the darkness of fate! … He didn't realize that servitude to his supernatural intuition, which perhaps saved his life many times, ended in the long run being his most vulnerable side since at the end he gave as many opportunities to fate as to his enemies. [Torrijos] had reserved for himself the privilege of choosing his time and method of death. He had reserved it for his last and decisive card of his historic fate. It was the vocation of martyr which was perhaps the most negative
aspect of his personality but also the most splendid and moving. The disaster, accidental or provoked, frustrated this design, but the sad mourners who attended his funeral were without a doubt moved by the secret wisdom the impertinent death without grandeur, one of the most dignified forms of martyrdom.

In Washington the White House announced that President Ronald Reagan, who had once called Torrijos a ‘tinhorn dictator', had sent ‘most sincere condolences' to Omar's family and the people of Panama: ‘General Torrijos is one of the outstanding figures in Panama's history,' a White House statement said.

Former President Jimmy Carter issued a statement from his home in Plains, Georgia, declaring, ‘The untimely death of General Omar Torrijos is a tragic loss for the people of Panama and for all who admired him as a wise and effective leader. I knew him personally as a dedicated and unselfish man committed to a better life for those who looked to him for leadership.'