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Putting Panama City in its proper historical perspective

First city of the American Pacific

by Eric Jackson

Roberto Bruno is, by his formal education and the things he formerly teaches, mainly a mathematician and physicist. Regulars on the English-language theater scene here will know him as an actor from time to time with the Ancon Theatre Guild. In the banking community he is known as a top-notch economic analyst and development specialist. He's also a noteworthy historian and a member of the Panama Historical Society.

In a country that doesn't pay much attention to its own history and its attractions, Bruno has a proposal that would emphasize an aspect of what we have been and are both to visitors and residents.

"Panama City really deserves to be called the first city of the American Pacific," he said at a September 5 presentation to the Panama Historical Society. Vasco N��ez de Balboa, he argued, "discovered more than just the sea on the south coast --- it was the last frontier of the Age of Discovery."

Say what? Wasn't there this vast stretch of water known as the Pacific Ocean yet to be explored? Well, yes, but Europeans had reached the Pacific from the other side --- Marco Polo reached it centuries earlier, and Portuguese traders were on their way to the Moluccas, the fabled spice islands of what is now Indonesia.

The man who ordered Balboa's execution, Pedro Arias Davila --- Pedrarias the Cruel to many --- came after Balboa with a commission from the Spanish crown and specific orders about how to build a capital city.

There is a great historical controversy about how to treat Pedrarias. Bruno said that when reviewing the record he set aside moral and emotional comparisons, and noted as well that Balboa, despite the historic rehabilitation of his reputation, "wasn't a nice guy."

To reach the Pacific, Balboa had to cross the turf of five different indigenous tribes, and in one he executed a number of the locals, but siccing attack dogs on them, for homosexuality.

Moreover, Balboa was on turf that the Spanish crown didn't consider his when he crossed over to the Pacific side. He had been part of Alonso de Ojeda's ill-fated effort to establish a colony on what is now the Gulf of Uraba in Colombia, dubbed at that time by the Spanish authorities Nueva Andalusia. Much of what is now Panama had been chartered to Diego de Nicuesa, under the name Castilla de Oro.

Neither settlement prospered and Balboa fled from Ojeda's settlement to Nicuesa's turf, where he set himself up as leader and crossed to the Pacific. But meanwhile at about the same time the king of Spain was giving Pedrarias the appointment as governor and specific instructions to set up a city according to a standardized plan.

And so it was that in August of 1519, as Magellan was rounding Cape Horn into the Pacific, Pedrarias took over an existing indigenous settlement on the Pacific side and platted it out according to a checkerboard pattern.

That style of setting up a city was something that Pedrarias had seen as a youth in Santa Fe, the miltary city that served as a base for the final Christian assault on the Muslim kingdom of Granada. That way of urban design had been handed down from the ancient Romans, who in turn got it from the earlier Greeks.

Panama City, was, according to Bruno, the sum of two enterprises, that of Balboa and that of Pedrarias. Balboa was the explorer, but to Bruno, Pedrarias was "the first urban visionary of the Americas."

Balboa was the first to hear from the locals about a great kingdom down the coast of the South Sea --- the Incan Empire with its golden riches --- and Pedrarias oversaw the building of the city from which the conquest of Peru was launched. "Panama was not just the first city, it was part of a whole system," Bruno pointed out. The gold from Peru and the silver from Potosi in what is now Bolivia came through Panama City, then across the isthmus to the Atlantic side and then by ship to Europe.

So what does Bruno propose? Acknowledging that Santo Domingo is the first European city of the Americas, and that Panama Viejo, the Casco Viejo, San Lorenzo and Portobelo are all UNESCO world heritage sites, he thinks that Panama should emphasize the historic role it played as the city at the edge of the Age of Discovery's frontier and the place where the seed from which the Spanish settlement system was planted on the Pacific side of the Americas --- in short, that in our concept of who and what we are and how we present ourselves to others, that we begin to emphasize our capital's identity as the First City of the American Pacific.

He'd like to see Panama work together with the Dominican Republic to create an itinerant museum show emphasizing the roles of Santo Domingo and Panama City as stepping off points of Spanish colonization.

Also in this section:
This year's Caravana de Asistencia Social
Panama: First city on the American Pacific
Tuesday talks, the coming Museum of Biodiversity

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