Sherman, turn the Way Back Machine to the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
In a sense, it could be after ANY war. After the guns have silenced and the bleeding has stopped, there are always guys who can’t seem to turn it off. Thus, in the aftermath of that great American bloodbath, the Civil War, veterans of both sides were largely responsible for making the Wild West so wild and violent. Thus as well the wave of lynching and gangsterism after World War I, and the great American crime wave of 1946. Russia has had the same problem with Afghanistan veterans, Lebanon is similarly burdened by those permanently warped during its many-sided civil war of the 70s and 80s, and if Colombia’s horrors ever do run their course, that will be part of the residue.
After Vietnam Tom Bleming, a US Army vet eventually diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and given full disability benefits, spent years wandering from country to country on several continents observing and participating in various wars. He didn’t do it for Uncle Sam per se, and the money was but a minor consideration if Bleming is to be believed. Right wing ideology played its part, but basically he was a warrior who, though he may have been walking wounded, couldn’t or wouldn’t turn it off.
Fast forward to 1979. The Somozas were falling in Nicaragua, discredited by a botched earthquake relief job, unable to suppress the ragtag Sandinistas, imploding from the assassinations of a couple of high-profile journalists and under the added military pressure from bands of international volunteers, one of whom was a young Panamanian named Martín Torrijos. The Panama Canal Treaties were going into effect, the Zonians were beginning to leave en masse, and the sense of national unity that General Omar Torrijos had forged for the purpose of incorporating the Canal Zone into Panama was beginning to crumble. The Carter administration that had pushed the treaties through the Senate by the narrowest of margins was sliding into a series of foreign policy crises that would spell its devastating defeat at the polls. The Panamanian dictatorship was founding the Democratic Revolutionary Party to continue its revolutionary process in a renascent electoral arena, and Torrijismo’s great nemesis, Dr. Arnulfo Arias, was likewise preparing to do battle at the polls. In the United States Ronald Reagan, who had almost unseated a president of his own party in 1976 by campaigning against the Panama Canal Treaties and deriding General Torrijos as a “tinhorn dictator,” was gearing up for another campaign that would put him in the White House this time.
And a ragtag little outfit calling itself the National Front for the Liberation of Panama, led by one Abraham Crócamo (a/k/a "Mario") had been preparing to make war against General Torrijos’s government since 1977. Though beleaguered and ultimately deposed before they could deliver what they promised, the Somozas were disposed to reciprocate for the activities of Martín Torrijos and the Victoriano Lorenzo Brigade by backing this outfit. So, too, were some right-wing groups in the United States, most especially an element of Miami’s anti-Castro Cuban exile movement. The Front gathered and smuggled arms, raised funds and recruited soldiers and adventurers from several countries, among them Tom Bleming. At the beginning of 1979 there were six Americans --- Bleming, a Vietnam vet named Bill Carpenter from Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami --- in the little guerrilla force.
Bleming's armed struggle began on February 5 of that year, with the bombing of an electrical station in Chiriqui that plunged much of Panama into darkness.
Bleming said that the Front had been informed that General Torrijos's intelligence (G-2) chief, Colonel Manuel Antonio Noriega, would personally inspect the scene of any rebel attack, and in hope of a lucky shot he had planted another bomb at the scene, one equipped with a timer set for when it was guessed that Noriega might arrive. The man whom at the time Torrijos called "mi gangster," and who a few years later would later assume dictatorial powers and lead Panama to disaster, got there sooner than the rebels supposed, and the second bomb was found and disarmed.
The bombing was in the world scheme of things a common sort of feet-dipping for a political movement about to take the plunge into guerrilla warfare, but the Front had a far more audacious plan. They were going to hijack a gasoline tanker truck, crash it through the front gate at the Panama Defense Forces' David barracks and detonate it with an explosive charge, then follow with an infantry charge backed by mortar fire, take the barracks and its arsenal, distribute weapons to supporters and march on Santiago.
However, before that could happen, on the afternoon of October 11, 1979, soldiers came crashing through the door of the house near Concepcion where Bleming and another foreign volunteer, Cuban-American Wilfredo Bermúdez, were staying. "I was awakened from a deep sleep and ordered to put my hands up, not to make any sudden moves," Bleming said in an affidavit written years later. "I did as I was ordered and was hit numerous times in the back and stomach by rifle butts.... My friend Wilfredo Bermúdez was near me and was beaten severely in the back and neck with the butt end of a pistol even though he had surrendered, putting his hands on the top of his head."
Elsewhere in Chiriqui other members of the Front were arrested, and before long a little band led by José Fidel Guerra that had staged a series of little hit-and-run raids turned themselves and their weapons in. The National Front for the Liberation of Panama and Tom Bleming's war were history. Another ordeal was just underway, as charges of gun smuggling, sabotage, insurrection and public intimidation were laid against Bleming and his name was added to INTERPOL's list of international terrorists.
A question nags Bleming to this day --- who was the sapo? The safe house where he was arrested was anything but. Someone might have been detected sneaking in from Costa Rica on a supply mission and then followed, or other investigative techniques may have been used, but it seems more likely that an informer told the PDF where they would find Bleming and Bermúdez.
Bleming suspects that the double agent was in the Front's leadership. He produces no solid proof, but cites incongruous lifestyles and strange dealings back then and subsequent political histories. But according to what Bleming said and some basic political analysis, there would be other candidates.
Front leader Abraham Crócamo "got a lot of money from the Panameñista Party," Bleming said, noting that in his months as a guerrilla in Chiriqui he had stayed at the homes of a number of followers of Dr. Arnulfo Arias, including those of some of the Panameñista leader's relatives. "Arias was aware" of the Front, Bleming said, and in turn "our aim was to reinstall him." He even claimed that some of the grenades and firearms that he smuggled into Panama went to Panameñistas in the capital. But at that time Arnulfo Arias and the other civilian politicians that the military had overthrown in 1968 were thinking in terms of accepting the offers of gradual democratization that Torrijos had made in order to get the Panama Canal Treaties ratified. The Front may have been a liability that Arnulfo Arias's movement wanted to shed.
Bleming also said that the CIA and the US Embassy "were aware" of the Front's activities and knew who was involved. He said that he met CIA people in the United States before he came down here, and was visited by a man he thought was from one of the US military intelligence units while he was down here. But of course, despite many conspiracy theories to the contrary, in the US the CIA and armed forces are run by the civilian government and not vice versa and at the time Jimmy Carter was in charge of the US government and considered Omar Torrijos his friend. It's not at all unreasonable to suspect that Bleming and Bermúdez had been turned in by their fellow Americans.
Whatever the circumstances behind his arrest, however, Bleming's lifestyle abruptly changed from that of guerrilla at large to one of a political prisoner. In the first days after his capture, he said, he was shifted around various prisons and military bases and repeatedly threatened with death. Two days after his capture, he said, he and two other prisoners were taken for an airplane ride, during which the door was opened and they were told that they would be thrown out over the ocean.
During a brief stay at the PDF's Santiago barracks --- then run by the infamous Major Julio Ow Wong --- Bleming said that he was handcuffed to the bars of a cell in such a way that his feet didn't reach the floor. (This was a favorite form of torture at the Carcel Modelo during Noriega times, except that there the unfortunate prisoners were handcuffed to the basketball backboard.) He showed scars on his wrists that seem consistent with such abuse.
Bleming told of illness and hallucinations while in a dank cell at the Coiba penal colony, where he had a piece of cardboard for a mattress.
He said that at La Modelo he fell down the stairs and suffered a painful back injury.
And there, he claimed, Major Leonidas Macías interceded and allowed him a proper bed so his back could heal. "He treated us like soldiers, with respect," Bleming said of Macías, noting as well that he encountered other decent and humane jailers as well the minority of torturers and the more common bored prisoncrats.
Early in his ordeal, before the US consul got to visit him, Bleming decided to sign whatever his captors demanded he sign, to take responsibility for anything and everything that the National Front for the Liberation of Panama may have done, and explain his motives when he got his day in court. However, when he finally did get to see a magistrate what he said was ruled inadmissible and out of order. Moreover, Bleming's confession caused differences with Bermúdez, who maintained his silence throughout and wanted Bleming to do likewise.
In 1980 there was an amnesty for the Panamanian members of the Front, but Bleming and Bermúdez were not included in it. Bleming claimed that the decision to keep the Americans behind bars came from Manuel Antonio Noriega rather than Omar Torrijos.
Prison conditions in Panama are and were abominable, and worst of all for foreigners who don't have anyone to visit them and bring them food, as the families of inmates are expected to do. But Bleming and Bermúdez got regular packages from a freedom committee in the United States headed by the late conservative activist Charles Laidley. "He kept us alive" with the food and vitamins that were in those packages, Bleming said.
In addition to occasional visits from US consular officials, Bleming also received the late Catholic Archbishop of Panama, Marcos McGrath, who spoke with him in English and left him an English-Spanish Bible. "I prayed to God for sanity --- not for tomorrow, but for the next minute," Bleming said.
About one year into Bleming's incarceration the wheels of politics and history turned. Carter was defeated by Reagan and American policy changed. Torrijos, who complained that Reagan addressed him as if he were the governor of Puerto Rico, became dejected, began drinking more than usual, and perished in a plane crash. A military regime in flux before Noriega rose to the top decided to rid itself of a potential irritant by turning Bleming and Bermúdez over to the US Embassy on July 20, 1981 and ordering their immediate expulsion from Panama.
"Panama was my Waterloo," Bleming now admits.
Late last year Thomas J. Bleming filed a pro se multimillion-dollar civil suit in the US federal district court for Wyoming, where he owns a ranch in Lusk, against Manuel Antonio Noriega. The handwritten complaint alleges that "General Manuel Antonio Noriega, in his capacity as Chief of the Military Intelligence Service (also known as G-2), of the Republic of Panama, did order the torture of the plaintiff...."
The conventional legal wisdom is that the lawsuit is a loser. There's this matter of the statute of limitations, for starters. But maybe not --- a reasonable legal argument could be made that it is now customary international law that the statute of limitations does not apply in cases of crimes against humanity, as torture arguably is. But even if lawyers and judges might be willing to consider that point, proving Noriega's personal culpability and then collecting a judgment against him are challenges upon which ordinary attorneys who are interested in getting paid pass.
So Tom Bleming, who recently came back to Panama to marry a Panamanian woman --- ironically a relative of Omar Torrijos on the late general's mother's side --- fights on alone, this time in Thomas James Bleming v Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, case number 02CV-162 on the docket of the United States District Court for the District of Wyoming. "Win, lose or draw, I'm looking for final closure," he said, adding that "if I get the money, I don't think I should keep much of it." Maybe just enough to buy a nice little home in the Chiriqui highlands, he suggested.
Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Nuevos Horizontes 2003
Conservative group gets different reception this year
A former political prisoner's tale
