Book review, "Panama: Echoes From a Revolution"

A primary historical source about a footnote in Panamanian history and some more enduring situations and personalities

A Vietnam veteran who won the Silver Star, a warrior of Lakota and Irish lineages, he didn't adjust well to peacetime Army life. Nor was he content with the workaday world of painting houses and other civilian pursuits. He's one of those many men who go off to war and never seem to be able to turn it off, and although he has dealt with a bad back from being tossed around by an artillery blast in the former South Vietnam's highlands and post-traumatic stress disorder from his experience in that war, he has time and again gone back to soldiering in one way or another, in the bush wars of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is the tale of an adventure that went badly, an attempted 1979 insurrection that, after a somewhat promising start that left Panama in darkness for a few days after a Chiriqui electrical system bombing, rather quickly made political prisoners of Bleming and his comrades-in-arms.

Although this book is an account of his experiences rather than a statement of his suspicions, Bleming believes that his arrest was most likely the result of his betrayal by one of the leaders of the incipient guerrilla resistance, which was by and large an unofficial sideshow of the Arnulfista movement. Thus there are vignettes or mentions of the late high court magistrate Jose Manuel Faúndes, civil aviation functionary Abraham Crocamo, former Comptroller General Alvin Weeden and his brother George, and the late Dr. Carlos Young Adames. You meet some of the former PDF officer corps here, including mostly from behind the scenes General Manuel Antonio Noriega and including some ex-soldiers who are Bleming's friends or relatives by marriage today.

Bleming spells Faúndes's name with a z rather than an s, and doesn't get into the scandal that he brought upon the Supreme Court and Panama's legislature at the end of his public life, but his observations of the man as a sleazy lawyer who took the money and didn't do the work --- probably criminal in Panama, where the publication of unpleasant truths about the dead can constitute the offense of "injuria" and be punished by a year in prison --- stands as a classic vignette about the ethical crisis in the grip of which we find not only the legal profession and the courts but all of Panamanian society.

Yes, they have torn down the old Carcel Modelo and closed the Coiba Island penal colony, so one might say that the things that Bleming saw and experienced in those places are ancient history. However, most of the same conditions apply in the prisons that replaced those facilities. Are you some foreigner engaged in drug running or some other illegal racket and without the political connections or bribe money to extricate yourself if you get caught? This book is required reading for you.

So what resources did Bleming and his Cuban-American accomplice have? Not the support of the Panamanians at whose behest they came to do battle. Not the CIA, which knew pretty much all but had warned in advance they would deny all knowledge. But say whatever you will about the right-wing Cuban exile movement in Miami and the shadowy gun runners and recruiters that hung out in circles around Soldier of Fortune magazine, but don't call them disloyal to members of their crowd who find themselves in distress as the result of fighting in foreign lands. Family and friends in the USA, a few backers on the right wing of the Republican Party, some conscientious officials of the US Consulate in Panama and a number of Panamanian soldiers and prison officials possessed of professional pride and a sense of decency also helped out. In the end a change of administration in the United States altered political conditions to the point that it was no longer convenient for the dictatorship to hold Bleming and his Cuban-American co-defendant Wilfredo Bermudez.

(Recall as well when some Cuban exiles who plotted to set off a bomb at the University of Panama were on trial here. The Panamanian left, whose members would have been counted among the many casualties if the plan had been carried out, picketed outside at the trial. The Miami Cuban right packed the courtroom and saw after the needs of the defendants, in a show of solidarity from which their Panamanian leftist critics would do well to learn.)

Panamanians learned all we need to know about the clique closest to Mireya Moscoso during the five years of her kleptocracy, and all we need to know about Faúndes from that widely broadcast tape recording of him negotiating a $20,000 bribe to let a Colombian drug suspect walk in an ex parte conversation with a defense lawyer. This book is cumulative evidence about the ethical and operational bankruptcy of key figures in that wing of Panama's political class.

Is anyone slow to realize the nature of the Norieguista crowd that once again occupies high places in the Panamanian government? Does anyone fail to recognize the ethical nature of the TV news personalities that thrived under the dictatorship and have remained in their positions through and since the 1989 invasion? Let Mr. Bleming's book remind you, with tales from a quarter-century ago.

Is anyone convinced by the GOP mainstream's coded arguments that torture works? Well, it didn't make Wilfredo Bermudez talk at all, and the only reason why Tom Bleming didn't confess to getting Jack Oliver drunk and thus provoking the Watermelon Slice Incident is that he doesn't know that much Panamanian history. As John McCain, who has direct personal knowledge, reminds all of us, torture doesn't work. This book gives a personal account of why that is so.

On the bottom line for too many people in these dumbed-down times, this is also an entertaining read and the sort of adventure story that Hollywood likes to make into movies. Especially so, when main villain pulling the strings is somebody who has already been demonized in American eyes, one Manuel Antonio Noriega.