Community, Victoriano Lorenzo remembered

A century ago on May 15, they shot Victoriano Lorenzo down.

In retrospect, it was one of the dumbest things that the Colombian Conservatives ever did. It set the stage for Panama’s separation from Colombia within the year, and led to the disappearance of the Conservative Party from the Panamanian political spectrum within a few years after that.

Various political factions are paid their respects in Panama City’s Plaza Francia, where the execution took place. First thing in the morning, Panama City's PRD Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro affixed a plaque, laid a wreath and issued a proclamation that Lorenzo was innocent after all. Later in the morning the Partido Popular's national Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo) added another wreath. As the sun was beginning to go down the SUNTRACS constructon workers' union turned out en masse, red flags flying, to pay their respects.

There were other observances. Lorenzo's mug shot adorned the tickets for the May 14 national lottery. At Lorenzo's rural Cocle hometown on May 15, the National Police fired a 21-gun salute. On the evening of May 15, many of Panama's artists and student radicals held a cultural event in Lorenzo's honor at the Casa Gongora.

In the course of the various observances all sorts of claims were made about the cause for which Lorenzo fought and died.

Victoriano Lorenzo was a Cholo, a man of Hispanic culture and mostly indigenous ancestry, with maybe with a little bit of Spaniard or African in his genetic woodpile. He was born into a family of poor farmers in the mountains north of the Cocle provincial capital of Penonome.

The name “Penonome” says a lot about the culture. When the Spaniards arrived on the isthmus, there was a thriving indigenous culture in Cocle and, under the leadership of a cacique named Urracá, they held the Spanish Empire off for more than a generation. But then Urracá died a natural death, the Spaniards became stronger and Panama’s central provinces were conquered. A man named Nomé continued to lead resistance to the conquistadores, but he was captured and executed. “Aquí penó Nomé,” (Here Nomé was punished) it was said of the place of execution, an indigenous village that was eventually given the name Penonome.

Since the conquest, Panama has been dominated by the Creole aristocracy established by Pedrarias the Cruel. In the social pecking order indigenous people count for almost nothing at all and the Cholos, people of mixed indigenous and other racial backgrounds, count for only a little more.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Conservatives pulled a few slick maneuvers in Bogota and ousted the Liberals from the government. There ensued the Thousand Day War.

Since the days of Simón Bolívar, the two parties had been warring almost without respite. The Conservatives mainly represented the interests of the landed aristocracy and supported the establishment of the Catholic Church as Colombia’s official religion. The Liberals primarily represented the interests of commerce and industry, and were for freedom of religion. Both parties had followings among the middle class professionals, working people, small farmers and fishers, but by and large the Liberals had the biggest share of these. Panama was for the most part a Liberal stronghold within Colombia.

Victoriano Lorenzo was a rural elected official in his early 30s when the war broke out, and he took up arms, following Panama’s Liberal leader Belisario Porras. It is often said that Porras and Lorenzo fought for Panamanian independence, but really, they were for a better deal for Panama within Colombia, and a more just Colombia in general.

Early on in the fighting, Lorenzo took part in a Pacific beach skirmish, with a boatload of arms for the Liberals the prize and the Conservative mayor of Chame one of the fatalities. Lorenzo became one of the most wanted men on the isthmus, and retreated to the mountain fortress of La Trinchera, from which he waged guerrilla war. Conservative attempts to storm this stronghold were repulsed with heavy casualties for the attackers.

The war raged across the length and breadth of the isthmus, as elsewhere in Colombia. Neighbors turned against neighbors, houses were looted and burned, crops were destroyed and horses, cattle, swine, poultry and human beings were killed and left for the vultures. A century later, some of the devastated countryside has still never recovered from the economic calamity.

Lorenzo was the object of repeated assassination attempts, which he fended off while trying to turn an enraged rabble of aggrieved peasants into a disciplined army.

Finally the Conservatives bought some traitors from the Liberal ranks, who came to Lorenzo to lure him to a supposed meeting with Porras to discuss Liberal strategy for peace talks. Lorenzo was seized, paraded before a kangaroo court for a summary farce of a trial and promptly executed.

The Thousand Day War ended shortly thereafter, and soon after that the Colombian Senate rejected a proposed treaty that would have allowed the Americans to build a canal through Panama. That gave Panamanian Conservatives reason to feel betrayed by Colombia’s Conservatives, because a canal held the promise of Panama as a prosperous commercial center with riches to be made, but the aristocrats in Bogota preferred to maintain Panama as a backward hinterland. A group led by Conservative railroad company physician Manuel Amador Guerrero, using a Frenchman who owned the residue of the failed French canal effort as their intermediary, contacted the Roosevelt administration and hatched a plot. Less than six months after Victoriano Lorenzo’s execution, Panama separated from Colombia and the Americans moved in to protect their new ally.

Panama’s independence was not a mere Teddy Roosevelt plot. It came to pass because Panamanians were sick of Colombia’s wars and political intrigues. The execution of Victoriano Lorenzo is a symbol of that of which offended Panama. Our nation’s culture and self-image include many things, and we have plenty of arguments of our own about these matters. However, one key concept --- a negative one --- runs through all versions of the Panamanian identity: we’re not Colombian and we don’t want any part of our neighbors’ violent madness.

Since independence Panama has developed along its own course, and Colombia has continued its seldom-interrupted series of political bloodbaths. The memory of Victoriano Lorenzo has become a symbol of Panamanian nationalism to many, and to the left, an example of a poor Cholo who took up arms against the rich white aristocracy.

To some who look behind these simplifications, Lorenzo stands out as a shattered possibility of something that could have been, a man of courage and convictions for whom politics was a means to achieve justice rather than an extension of the family business, the icon of an alternative to the sordid politics we know. That may also be a gilded legend, but it would be a useful one if enough Panamanians believed in it and acted accordingly.

The lesson of Victoriano Lorenzo is also very important when considering today’s US-Panamanian relations. We have a president who supports Plan Colombia and tilts in favor of the bloodthirsty AUC death squads that periodically invade our country, but who is unable to forthrightly declare and defend her government’s de facto position before the Panamanian people. That’s because, just as people here were horrified by Lorenzo’s execution a century ago, today’s Panamanians find Colombia’s ongoing warfare thoroughly revolting and want no part of it.

Thus, when the US government comes around pushing the idea that it’s in Panama’s interest to side with Colombia’s government and right wing death squads against its leftist FARC and ELN rebels, it’s a non-starter. The converse is also true: for good reason you don't see the Panamanian left holding "solidarity with the FARC" rallies. We’re not Colombian, we don’t want to get mixed up in Colombia’s civil conflict and any suggestion to the contrary flies in the face of one of the few unifying concepts of Panamanian identity.

community

Victoriano Lorenzo, a century after his execution

by Eric Jackson