Guillermo Endara reminds me of...

by Eric Jackson

I moved back to Panama during the waning days of the Endara administration. I visited in its first days, coming in on the first civilian flight into the country after the 1989 invasion, and again a year after that. I remember the conclusion of the Endara presidency as a time of constant utility outages, cracked-out mothers hanging around city street corners overseeing the begging activities of their little kids, jokes about Ana Mae and widespread disappointment with the man who had so convincingly crushed Noriega's nominee five years earlier. As I recall, Endara left office with favorable ratings from only about 20 percent of the Panamanian people.

Now there's a groundswell of public support for Endara's bid to reoccupy the Palacio de las Garzas. On first reflection, it looks as if this phenomenon is simply a matter of the current administration handling matters so very badly that a failed ex-president looks very good.

But it can't be just that.

The voters can, and most likely will, turn to Martín Torrijos as the alternative to HER and her hand-picked would-be successor. The substantial minority of Panamanian voters who dislike both the Arnulfistas and the PRD could turn to Ricardo Martinelli instead, or to some dark horse whom we can't see at the moment. Yet polls suggest that Guillermo Endara is poised to win the votes of most rank-and-file Arnulfistas, most "third force" supporters and even a few people who had been leaning toward Torrijos. This cannot be explained only in terms of a Moscoso entourage that belongs in jail.

The rejected leader who looks good in retrospect is a theme that has appeared at many times and in many places. From John Quincy Adams to Clement Attlee, from Juan Peron to Benazir Bhutto, we have seen it again and again. Rarely is there a return to power, and when there is it's rarely a happy experience, but it does happen and it's not inevitably a disaster. For every several disastrous second chances like the Milton Obote restoration in Uganda, there is somebody like a Winston Churchill who comes back from defeat and finishes a political career as an admired national figure.

In a number of respects, Guillermo Endara reminds me of a failed American president who looks better in hindsight --- Gerald R. Ford.

Ford was an amiable and parochial troglodyte congressman from a Calvinist bastion of southwestern Michigan, an accidental unelected president who had been hand-picked by the vile criminal Richard Nixon after Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew was disgraced by petty venal sleaze. Actually a brilliant scholar and gifted athlete, Ford's verbal and physical stumbles boosted the careers of more than one humorist. He was in the White House when the US-backed regimes in Saigon and Phnom Penh came to their ignominious ends, and would have followed those southeast Asian debacles with something similar in Angola had the Congress not blocked him.

But Jerry Ford helped a traumatized country heal from its nightmares.

Under Nixon, Americans with dissenting opinions were branded traitors. I was one of those so classified, and the only reason I never threw stones at Tricky Dick was that I never got close enough. I protested against Ford's policies and helped vote him out of office, but I have to give him credit for saving an endangered American democracy and restoring some semblance of civility to a badly divided society.

Endara was chosen to head the anti-Noriega slate at a meeting hosted by the US ambassador and the Catholic archbishop. He was sworn in under the auspices of the US Southern Command during the 1989 invasion, and when his presidency began the Palacio de las Garzas was under foreign military occupation, with low-ranking American soldiers telling him which parts of his official residence he could use and which he couldn't. The elder George Bush treated him as a jovial figurehead, assigned US military officers to oversee each Panamanian ministry, and tried to run the government through Vice-president Ricardo Arias Calderón. I have no doubt that in the coming campaign all this will be used to denigrate Endara's patriotic credentials.

But then Endara took away Arias Calderón's power, moved the foreign troops out of his house and resisted American demands for a post-1999 military bases agreement and an end to banking secrecy. Though it was the elder Bush's intention to leave the Panamanian government destitute and dependent --- I remember, for example, watching a couple of maleantes strip the roofing off of the Registro Publico in Cristobal as a well-armed American soldier stood by smiling --- Endara ended his presidency with money in the public treasury.

Most important of all, the unpopular Endara handed the government over to his old PRD foes after the 1994 elections didn't go the way he would have liked.

Yes, there were plenty of abuses associated with the end of the 22-year dictatorship, but most of the unwarranted arrests were carried out under the direction of US troops or during the year when Arias Calderón was Minister of Government and Justice and head of the police force.

Guillermo Endara could have waged a reign of terror, rigged the elections and replaced the Noriega regime with an Arnulfista dictatorship subservient to US masters. Instead he left Panama with a certain imperfect semblance of democracy and a large if less than absolute measure of sovereignty, attributes that were not particularly part of George HW Bush's plans for this country.

Just as Gerald Ford, despite all of his mistakes and unpopularity, helped his country get over a protracted trauma, Guillermo Endara did much the same in Panama.

Now the country is in the grip of a clique of hoodlums and incompetents, the rule of law is only theoretical, and such democracy as we have is in grave peril. The PRD's leader, Martín Torrijos, not only seems unwilling or unable to address the enormity of the crisis, he actually went along with Mireya's anti-democratic election law changes. People are looking for leadership and change, and it doesn't appear to be available in the usual places.

Thus we shouldn't be surprised that a failed former president now looks good to a lot of Panamanians.

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