Henry Morgan II, or The Preppie Pirate AT APPROXIMATELY 4 P.M. ON MAY 1, A crypt containing the remains of Panama’s national hero, Gen. Omar Torrijos, was opened and his ashes were stolen. In an arm’s-length account characteristic of Pan- ama’s post-invasion “free press,” the daily La Prensa reported: “It was known that the person who looked after the Torrijos remains made a statement to the effect that the theft could have been committed by two white-skinned persons with a foreign accent…” Guillermo Endara, the corporate lawyer who began his term as Panama’s president at the U.S. Army’s Fort Clayton on the eve of last December’s invasion, was in Washington at the time and had no immediate comment. Neither did George Bush. But as with so many things, the president may know more than he lets on. For many if not most poor Panamanians, the figure of Gen. Torrijos is closely identified with the nation itself. Torrijos’ 1968 coup d’etat brought an end to decades of white minority rule. (Endara personifies the return of that oligarchy on the coat-tails of the U.S. Army.) He guided Panama out of the thinly veiled colonialism in which it had languished ever since Washington engineered the country’s independence from Colombia in 1903. Torrijos was influential in helping the Sandinista Revolution reach victory. Most importantly, he convinced the United States to return the nation’s only significant resource: the Canal. Torrijos died in a mysterious plane crash in 1979, a year after he retired as head of state. Many Panamanians attribute his death to the CIA, and to the Agency’s primary contact in Panama, Manuel Antonio Noriega. Torrijos’ body was placed in a monument-like mausoleum on Fort Amador, the joint U.S.-Panamanian military base at the mouth of the Canal. (Torrijos often said he did not want to enter the history books, only the Canal Zone.) And his home in downtown Panama City was turned into a mu- seum with all the characteristics of a patriotic shrine. During the first hours of the U.S. invasion the Torrijos Museum was bombed from the air. The precision of the attack left little doubt as to the intended target; the homes and gardens on either side were left untouched. Then relatives of the general began receiving phone calls from persons who threatened to desecrate his tomb. On Febru- ary 17, his family exhumed the body, had it cremated, and deposited the ashes in a crypt in the National Cemetery, from where they were ultimately stolen. T ORRIJOS WAS NOT THE FIRST ENEMY OF the Empire whose remains were disappeared. Mexi- can revolutionary Pancho Villa’s grave was pillaged a few years after his assassination in 1923, and the head re- moved from his body. The head was given up for lost until recently, when a group of retired businessmen in El Paso discovered the unpublished memoirs of a deceased local rancher. As Mark Singer reported in The New Yorker last fall, the rancher claimed to have known the man who robbed Villa’s grave. The operation, the man told him, was financed by a 150-year-old secret society at Yale University, the Skull and Bones Society. Skull and Bones is open only to the elite of the elite. Many of the original OSS and CIA operatives were recruited from its ranks. George Bush is a member. The Apache Tribe waged a long and ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit to retrieve the skull of their legendary leader Geronimo from the Society’s headquarters on the Yale campus. The El Paso businessmen are convinced Villa’s head lies in this trophy room of the old Yankee oligarchy. They hope to convince Bush to return the head as a gesture of good will toward Mexico. FEW DAYS BEFORE TORRIJOS’ GRAVE WAS defiled, Panamanian judicial officials opened an- other grave at a cemetery across town. This one was a common grave, 100 feet long by 20 feet wide and ten feet deep, containing 123 bodies in green plastic bags. They had been buried hastily by U.S. troops in the days follow- ing the invasion. The bodies were removed one by one, so that the hundred-odd family members gathered under the hot sun could identify their loved ones. Nearly all of the faces had been destroyed. Some bodies had name tags; others bore identifying signs-a piece of clothing, a tattoo, a gold tooth, a ring; others had been mutilated beyond recognition. The attorney general refused to allow autopsies to be performed. After identification the cadavers were placed in coffins and returned to the earth. According to the Association of Families of the Dead and Disappeared, which requested the exhumation, there are at least 14 other common graves, which the Association claims could contain as many as 3,000 bodies. Officially the United States insists that a total of 203 civilians and 304 soldiers died in the invasion. The U.S. Southern Com- mand, however, conceded in March that only 50 of the dead were actually military personnel. N 1671 BRITISH PIRATE HENRY MORGAN captured Panama City for 28 days of looting and pil- laging. When he tired of the killing, he burned the city to the ground. Our twentieth century Morgan is a kinder gentler buccaneer. There is something terribly preppie about the theft of Torrijos’ remains, somehow appropriate for the president’s persona. And it would certainly be in keeping with his cavalier devastation of Panama. But like with all of Bush’s adventures, we’ll never know for sure. B OBBYE ORTIZ, A MEMBER OF NACLA’S board of directors, died on June 15. Her tireless dedi- cation to the struggles of Third World women raised the consciousness of the North American Left. Thanks to her, our understanding and our lives are incomparably richer. Bobbye’s wise counsel will be sorely missed.
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