On August 6 the grand icon of Panama’s Christian Democratic movement, former Vice-President Ricardo Arias Calderón, came to speak to the Panama Historical Society. The mainly English-speaking group met upstairs at Niko’s in Balboa as it usually does, but for Arias Calderón it may as well have been in a basement. “You are part of the Panama underground,” he said in a voice softened by an advancing Parkinson’s disease. “I didn’t know there was a historical society.” Though political class usually does ignore the English-speaking community and its institutions, there were several dozen Panamanian voters in attendance to hear Arias Calderón’s English-language presentation.
The former vice-president, who later headed the Christian Democratic International and who from his retirement has urged his renamed party (they’re the Partido Popular now) into an alliance with their old foes the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), spoke at length about Panamanian political history, his own involvement in it, the values he brings to bear on the subject and the nation’s present circumstances and future possibilities. The core of his talk was about the phenomenon of caudillos (autocratic political bosses) in Panama’s century as a republic. He said that he’s been doing a lot of research into the topic since being invited to give a lecture at the Union Club and finding that his research notes amount to the better part of a book.
He decided to to all the way and turn it into a book, which he will call “Remember the Future.” His talk to the Historical Society was in part a sneak preview. “I began to think that I have a message to leave,” Arias Calderón explained, one that’s based in history but goes beyond the usual historical scholarship. “Historians tend to put value judgments in parentheses,” he noted, “but citizens can’t. Politicians BETTER make value judgments.”
That he did, not only about what has gone before but with special vehemence about what’s going on now. “Mrs. Moscoso is inept, and has turned out to be corrupt, and has become indecent in her corruption,” the man who was elected vice-president in 1989 as part of an alliance with the Arnulfistas charged. “I have very little respect for Mrs. Moscoso,” Arias Calderón acknowledged, as he launched into a blast in which he accused her of nominating her lover (Winston Spadafora) to the Supreme Court and bribing the legislature to ratify it.
Arias Calderón, who taught at the University of Panama for many years, began his well organized discourse in a vein of historical dispute. While acknowledging that Ovidio Diaz Espino’s “How Wall Street Created a Nation” includes some “serious” scholarship about the financial benefits that various actors received for their roles in Panama’s separation from Colombia, he strenuously objected to the notion that the Panamanian nation was invented in the USA. “The Panamanian people have a sense of their identity and have had it since the mid-18th century,” he argued. In the 19th century, he continued, “they became a historical agent, a historical subject. People began to think ‘we were meant to have a canal.’”
In order to achieve this national yearning, Arias Calderón argued, Panama needed three things: its own commitment to the cause, US geopolitical support, and the backing of Wall Street financiers. He dismissed the characterization of French engineer Philippe Bunau-Varilla and American lawyer and lobbyist William Nelson Cromwell as architects of the Panamanian nation and maintained that “Roosevelt did not invent the idea of an independent Panama.”
After our independence nearly a century ago, the retired politician and professor said that Panamanian history is best seen in four phases, each with its collective national aspiration and outstanding figures.
The first phase, from independence in 1903 until the day in 1931 that Arnulfo Arias pointed a gun at President Florencio Arosemena and forced him to resign, was a time when Panamanians aimed to transform a department of Colombia into a republic. The caudillo of that time was Belisario Porras.
When Panama declared independence under Conservative leadership, the Liberal leader Porras was denied citizenship and thus prohibited from holding office under a law that disqualified those who didn’t support Panama’s separation from Colombia. But, Arias Calderón noted, Porras was a “political caudillo,” a man who “oozed politics,” and above all a realist. Porras’s Liberals won several national elections in a row and rescinded the law aimed at keeping their leader on sidelines. Porras dominated Panamanian politics for about a dozen years and held the presidency for nine and one-half years. He “touched everything,” building roads, promoting cultural and educational institutions and got a start at making Panama City look more like a national capital than the seat of a provincial government. However, Arias Calderón argued, Belisario Porras also left Panama with a legacy of presidentialism, concentrating power in his hands and making a mockery of democracy.
The second phase of Panamanian history as the former vice-president sees it lasted from 1931 to the 1968 coup in which Arnulfo Arias was overthrown. Panama’s aspiration in this epoch was to become a “national state... something more than a republic.” What more? A country in which the government affects social, economic and cultural life in addition to running the political sphere, Arias Calderón said. Also, a society in which voters see themselves as more than just voters, but as participants by way of political parties and social and economic organizations. Moreover, a society imbued with a strong dose of nationalism.
During this phase Arnulfo Arias was the great political caudillo, but mostly out of office. After his 1931 coup the Americans more or less selected Florencio Arosemena’s replacement, and in the elections of the following year Arnulfo’s brother Harmodio Arias Madrid defeated Pancho Arias in what Ricardo Arias Calderón called Panama’s “first election worth its salt.” Arnulfo went off to be Panama’s ambassador to Mussolini’s Italy, but came back and was elected president himself in 1940.
Arnulfo Arias stifled the growth of civic organizations, Arias Calderón argued. “He believed in personal loyalty. He believed that people were loyal, or traitors.” Unfortunately for him, the Guardia were not loyal to Arnulfo Arias. Elected president in 1940 and again after a new constitution was promulgated in 1941, Mrs. Moscoso’s late husband flew off to Cuba to visit his mistress as America’s formal entry into World War II loomed, and with the backing of Colonel José Remón and Franklin Roosevelt Panama was rid of a caudillo and the Americans of an Axis sympathizer in a sensitive place. But Arias made his comeback in 1948, only to have his mandate cut short “by popular demand” and General Remón’s intervention when he tried to abrogate the 1946 constitution, and again in 1968, when he won the elections and served as president for 11 days, until a decision to bypass the rules of succession in the military command led to a coup directed by Colonel Omar Torrijos and Colonel Boris Martínez. In 1984 Arnulfo Arias again won the most votes for president, but was denied office by an election fraud engineered by Manuel Antonio Noriega and supported by Ronald Reagan.
Arnulfo Arias, the former vice-president opined, was a “social caudillo” who deserves credit for creating the Social Security Fund and other institutions. However, he was a caudillo who despite overwhelming public support and several presidential election victories only ruled for a total of 30 months.
Arias Calderón called the second phase of the Panamanian republic’s political life a failure, for which he blamed Arnulfo and the Guardia Nacional, whom he said “made it impossible for the national state to fuse.”
The third phase of this country’s independent existence, in Arias Calderon’s historiography, was the dictatorship that lasted from October 11, 1968 until December 20, 1989. Its principal figure was Omar Torrijos, whom his old adversary described as a “nationalistic caudillo” and whose time in power is reckoned at 12 and one-half years, from the day that Boris Martínez was exiled to Miami to Torrijos’s death in a 1981 plane crash.
Arias Calderón acknowledged and agreed with the conventional wisdom that the Guardia had acted openly and behind the scenes many times to promote the Creole oligarchy’s prerogatives over the aspirations of Arnulfo Arias and the will of the Panamanian electorate, and that by 1968 the officer corps had decided that they wanted to themselves benefit from military intervention. However, he thinks it’s a mistake to dismiss the dictatorship as just that. The Torrijos legacy, he opined, was a “social and national militarism” that embraced concepts of social justice and national identity. However, after the treaties by which Panama gained sovereignty over the old Canal Zone were approved, the contradictory tendencies within the militarist project asserted themselves and that brand of nationalism also failed. Basically, the former vice president explained, militarism is a top-down system, while social justice and national identity are bottom-up phenomena.
According to Arias Calderón, who by the Torrijos epoch was also a significant actor on the political stage, during the latter stages of the dictatorship an alternative, civilian national project arose, aiming for “an all-inclusive democracy.” In 1984 Arnulfo Arias may have polled more votes than the military-backed Nicolás Ardito Barletta, but the alternative “didn’t have the middle class.” However, over the next few years the middle class shifted away from the dictatorship, which suffered a crushing May 1989 election defeat at the hands of a slate composed of Guillermo Endara, Ricardo Arias Calderón and Guillermo Ford, who took office when the Americans invaded at the end of that year.
Since the invasion Arias Calderón said Panama has been in a fourth historical period, one in which the elections are legitimate but “we have lost the sense of the future.”
The Endara administration, with which the Christian Democrats broke after about a year as coalition partners, Arias Calderón described as a “mini-project,” the purpose of which was to “restore, not renovate” Panamanian democracy. The following PRD administration of Ernesto Pérez Balladares, the speaker said, made an attempt at modernization that only affected the economic and not the political and social spheres. That narrow emphasis, he argued, allowed Mireya Moscoso to undo some of her predecessor’s reforms.
“Under Moscoso, there is no project,” Arias Calderón alleged.
In the question-and-answer session that followed his presentation, the Partido Popular leader talked at length about the deeply ingrained paternalism in Panamanian culture and his party’s present alliance with the PRD.
He noted with some irritation the way that people who are the victims of some disaster or injustice tend to talk to television reporters. “They have done nothing for me” is the usual refrain, and he said that’s indicative of the passive attitude of people who don’t see themselves as capable of acting in their own right.
He expressed confidence in Martín Torrijos’s personal leadership qualities and said that his party should not be a “prisoner of the past” that’s paralyzed in the face of new situations by old rivalries. He expressed a little annoyance at the younger Torrijos’s frequent defenses of his father, noting that the two man are different individuals operating in different circumstances and opining that too strong of an identification of the PRD with its dictatorial origins is both an inaccurate portrayal of its present reality and a political mistake.
He responded skeptically to suggestions of a new constitution, arguing that “we have to have a cultural and ethical change of heart” instead.
He advocated “an all-inclusive democracy,” one in which there is more citizen participation and that reduces the gap between Panama’s rich and poor.
He urged Panamanians to regain their sense of the future, to look through the current mess and beyond immediate gratification to more worthy national goals.
And with Parkinson’s disease closing in on Ricardo Arias Calderón’s life, he still found cause for optimism: “God remembers Panama every now and then.”
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