Eight years ago on this day, then-president Juan Carflos Varela led a solemn observance in front of the eternal flame where once stood the flagpole at what was once Balboa High School. For all of their faults, Varela and the people and parties represented in his cabinet were sincere about this. At the time of the disturbances the founder of Varela’s party, Dr. Arnulfo Arias, denigrated the fallen. Several months later Arias suffered his only electoral defeat. Take away the innocence of anyone or everyone involved and concede the grains of truth in all of the stereotypes, but what happened was extraordinary. An entire nation, people of all regions, faiths, political parties and ethnicities rose up in many different ways to demand an end to an intolerable colonial situation. Photo by the Presidencia (2016).
This is who we are
by Eric Jackson
If you are Panamanian and do not understand, you have been woefully miseducated. If you are a foreigner, you may be quite intelligent and erudite, but your ignorance of Panama’s history, customs and laws could land you in trouble on this day.
NO loud music. NO public drunkenness. No dancing and partying. NO sale of alcohoic beverages. NO insulting of the Panamanian nation.
This is not a day to make an especially big show of waving Old Glory, although the Stars and Stripes will fly at the US Embassy and at the American Cemetery in Corozal. If you want to show a full understanding and appreciation of what happened, this may be a good time to visit the American Cemetery and pay homage to the four US Army soldiers who died in the course of these events: David Haupt, Gerald St. Aubin, Luis Jiménez Cruz and Michael W. Rowland. Brave American soldiers also sacrificed their lives and it’s just nor right if they are forgotten in some political and diplomatic shuffle.
There were exceptional heroism, accidental tragedies and dumbass thuggery in the mix.
Panama’s most remembered martyr, teenager Ascanio Arosemena, was shot through the aorta and killed while he was helping the wounded. Did he ever suspect what was about to happen to him?
An exceptional American military man, General George Mabry, well knew the risks. Twice awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, plus the purple heart, the silver star and the bronze star, he fought in three US wars. He was sent to the old Tivoli Hotel — now the site of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institue headquarters — to sort out an angry and deadly confrontation between Canal Zone police (with a few Zonian civilian volunteer gunmen) holed up in and around the hotel and Panamanian protesters massed on the hillside below. Mabry ordered the Zonian cops and civilians to leave, then had the soldiers who came with him fix their bayonets and form a phalanx, with him out front if anyone cared to shoot, and advanced on the crowd, dispersing it. It was not the end of all the violence, at the scene or elsewhere, but it did reduce the carnage.
The protests. and the violence, spread throughout the country in incidents reported or not, depending on whether there were reporters there or bodies left behind. Perhaps the most ferocious fighting took place a couple of days later in Colon. In the Interior, US-owned farms and businesses were vandalized. Cars with Canal Zone license plates parked across boundaries in the Republic were trashed.
And on the Panamanian side, a number of individuals showed their bravery and decency by protecting stranded Americans. Some just changed license plates on other people’s cars. Some took Americans into their homes. Some helped people go get back into the Canal Zone. An exceptional example was set by the commander of Colon’s bomberos, the elder Jimmy Butler.
Colon was the scene of awful tragedies arising from US attempts to limit casualties. US Army personnel put out front with guns but no ammunition and picked off by Panamanian snipers. Tear gas fired instead of bullets, one such grenade sent into a tiny apartment where a six-month-old baby girl, Maritza Alabarca, died of the fumes.
It was all so embarrassing to Uncle Sam, whose official response was that tear gas is by definition an non-lethal weapon so Alabarca’s death at the hands of the US Army never happened. And soldiers sent into harm’s way without bullets? Official silence for all these years.
Glorification and opacity have fed into so many misconceptions, and varying body counts. YES, some of the Panamanians died from “friendly fire,” like those who were looting a US company’s office building when others set fire to it. Yes, some poor guy selling his goods on the street several blocks away was killed by a bullet of undetermined origin. Yes, the looting of a gun store and distribution of weapons to an untrained crowd was ineffective against the Americans and probably added to the Panamanian casualty count.
Then Panamanian political taboos concealed or played down some other noteworthy roles.
Omar Torrijos, rising through the ranks of the Guardia Nacional at the time, had friendly relations with the CIA and the US Army, and had just been transfered from commanding the combined military and police force in Colon to its outpost in David. The Americans quietly flew Torrijos back to Colon to resume command, and a local guardia force traumatized by the death of Sgt. Celestino Villareta and US troops that fired on the ambulance sent to rescue him, fell into line and restored some semblance of order It would not do, and would not be all that true, to call Omar a lackey of the colonial occupiers. His later legacy belied attempts at hostile simplification.
Then-President Roberto Chiari? When Panamanian protesters began to blame HIM, he reportedly blew up. Whatever the emotional reaction, he broke diplomatic ties with the United States. Thus began new negotiations and concluding chapters of the Canal Zone’s history.
But the process? It had begun years before, with a former American soldier and his Panamanian counterpart, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President José A. Remón respectively. Ike had been stationed here between the world wars And Remón had been the military strongman who ran for president and was elected in his own right.
These dry laws in effect today. Understand that although it’s a day off for most working people, The Day of The M;artyrs is officially a day of mourning. The laws and customs about that go back to Roman times, from which Panama’s legal system descends via the Napoleonic Code.
This is PANAMA. Your claimed American constitutional right to play loud music and throw a party as means of self-expression don’t apply here. We are a jurisdiction that has banned the death penalty so Roman consequences for violating the customs and laws of a national day of mourning do not apply. But in the words of a Chinese judge who was a character in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, “Don’t be asshole….”
This flag was torn in a scuffle between American and Panamanian high school kids. It set off a chain of events in which 27 people died.
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