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The republic's first caudillo
So often, Panamanian history is presented to Americans as merely a local commentary on what the United States was doing. By that world view, Panama's independence in 1903 tends to be presented as this plot by Teddy Roosevelt, a Frenchman and some Panamanian and US business leaders who were determined to see a canal get built here despite the obstacles of Colombian politics.
It's not that all of the above factors are untrue, but generally ignored in the usual accounts is what happened in Panama leading up to that time, and in particular these versions tend to play down or omit the devastating Thousand Day War.
When the Thousand Day War broke out across Colombia in 1900, Panama was mainly a Liberal stronghold. However, at the war's outset military blunders arising from a battlefield division of Liberal leaders led to a smashing Conservative victory at a battle for a bridge in Calidonia. More than 500 Liberals, including many of their leaders, were killed. The Conservatives held Panama City for the duration of the war.
Almost by default because of those losses, Belisario Porras became the principal Liberal leader during the war. On the battlefield, it was the cholo guerrilla leader Victoriano Lorenzo who rose to prominence on the scorched earth of Cocle and western Panama provinces and eventually seized Penonome from the Conservatives, but Lorenzo followed Porras's political leadership.
As the war wound down to a negotiated and inconclusive end, Lorenzo was betrayed by a fellow Liberal to the Conservatives, tried and executed. Porras was the last Liberal leader of consequence left standing.
A few months later a predominantly Conservative cabal staged the coup that made Panama an independent republic. Porras didn't like the idea of a new country being born under the leadership of his enemies from the recent war, and the new regime wrote election laws that declared Porras a foreign citizen ineligible to hold public office.
But Panama was still a Liberal stronghold and within a few years the party under Porras's guidance took control of the government and drove the Conservatives into historical oblivion. The exclusionary laws were repealed by a Liberal legislature and Porras was elected president and came to be the dominant Panamanian political figure from the early teens to the mid-20s of the 20th century.
Photo of the statue in Plaza Porras by Eric Jackson
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