Rufina Alfaro, in the official imaginations of Panamanian guys.

Today in legend and history

by Eric Jackson, from The Panama News archives

What Panamanian guy would be so unpatriotic as to question the magnificence of Rufina Alfaro’s tits? Or so sexist as to doubt that she was a machete-wielding badass revolutionary?

Those questions raise deeper historical questions about the suppression and falsification of our history. But given all that, might it actually be the case that the Rufina Alfaro legend is very close to the historical truth?

The legend has it that Rufina Alfaro was a young campesina who would sell vegetables and eggs to the soldiers at the La Villa de Los Santos army base. Using her friendship with the soldiers, it is said that she convinced the troops to rebel against the Spanish crown, a key elements of “El Grito de La Villa de Los Santos” on November 10, 1821.

So, a foxy young lady with a machete, calling out the troops and perhaps threatening to cut the nuts off of those who did not comply?

At the time, all sorts of people had reasons to lie about who did what. There were at the time political prisoners of the Latin American independence movement held on the isthmus. Some of such folks had been executed at Fort San Lorenzo, then a Spanish prison, overlooking the mouth of the Chagres River. Rebellion against Spain was, after all, a capital offense.

It was also quit a popular thing to do. Panama’s place in the Spanish Empire had been as part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, more or less encompassing today’s Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama. Simón Bolívar and a badass Irish and Vene crew, decimated and defeated in Venezuela and driven into the snake-infested swampy boonies, had hacked their way through the bush, scaled the snow-covered Andes and showed up behind Bogota. Taken by surprise, the Spanish troops put up a token bit of resistance but retreated, and their commanders and the viceroy fled. As the rest of the viceroyalty was falling, Panama became the more or less administrative center in exile while great effort was being made to preserve a Spanish presence in Ecuador, from whence to launch a restorationist counteroffensive.

That was apparently not a very attractive thought to demoralized Spanish soldiers stationed in the Azuero boonies.

Nor was being drafted into the army, nor paying extra taxes to support a recolonizing venture, an attractive venture for local farmers.

Back then, the miracle of Panama’s geographical position had worn down to almost nothing. The last trade fair had been almost a century ago and the heyday of that era was even longer gone. The isthmian economy still had a few trade route related components, but this was a provincial backwater that depended of producing things by farming the land or fishing the sea for its livelihood. La Villa de Los Santos and the other provincial towns were there to serve as markets and supply stores for the farmers. In this largely illiterate rural society, forget about much in the way of an administrative bureaucracy. The learned ones, such record keepers and teachers as there were, were concentrated in the Catholic Church. Baptismal certificates were far more common than government birth certificates. It would not be so unusual for a rural midwife or a campesino family to ignore the paperwork.

At the inception of the Spanish Conquest, the Catholic Church was better about these roles. By treaty with the Spanish Empire, these were church obligations that came in exchange for a cut of the loot from the golden kingdoms and farmlands to be conquered, plus land and buildings for the churches. But when Napoleon conquered Spain and put his brother — to this day reviled by Spaniards as Pepe El Borracho — on the throne in Madrid, the old deal more or less became a dead letter. Napoleon was ephemeral, but the attempt to restore the old Church and State order was resisted by colonials who had done well enough without orders from Spain and by a new breed centered around freemasons like Bolívar, San Martín and O’Higgins, men who favored secular government and religious freedom. Meanwhile, even if farther up the hierarchy there were bishops and so forth who looked to restore the old arrangements, down the ranks of the clergy there were people grown accustomed to carrying on without much funding from a decadent and no longer so legitimate state.

So, does the lack of a church or state record of Rufina Alfaro’s existence prove her to be a myth? Probably not. But the lack of records about an Alfaro family in the area is taken as persuasive.

In any case, troops and townspeople rebelled against Spain on November 10, 1821, called a town meeting — cabildo abierto — and mainly at the behest of the local merchants drafted a resolution calling for independence from Spain. That was what the shouting was all about.

A few days later, the priests, bishops, merchants and bureaucrats in Panama City accepted the wisdom of this argument and they declared both independence from Spain and allegiance to Bolívar’s Gran Colombia. For the church is was a new state with which to make new arrangements and that maneuvering was a source of tremendous grief for 19th century Colombia, of which Panama was a part. A lot of people were killed about it.

By the time that Panama separated from Colombia in 1903, the country had been devastated by too many civil wars about which whether the Catholic Church would be the official religion was one of the issues. With independence came deal to exclude priests from government, maintain state support for things like church buildings and catechism in the public schools, and not to talk about the religious history of Panama. Now, more than a century after that we have a country intentionally raised to be ignorant about that and many other parts of our history. And if somewhere in some archive there is a church record about Rufina Alfaro’s existence, it has been neglected.

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At the time, fear and political expediency distorted news coverage: the paper was a key part of the plot.

Colon Day: a very Panamanian revolution

an archives story by Eric Jackson

So, what were the details of Panama’s smashing military victory over the 500 Colombian Army troops stationed in Colon to maintain Bogota’s authority on isthmus?

First of all, understand that most of these soldiers were bored and war-weary, people who had been mobilized for the Thousand Day War that has ended about a year earlier. Second, consider that throughout the war the Conservatives held control of Colon, Panama City and the Panama Railroad route between the two cities.

Politically, this was traditional Liberal turf. It was under Conservative control due to a great Liberal blunder at the war’s outset, an insane charge into machine gun fire on Panama City’s Calidonia Bridge over the Curundu River. There were some 500 Liberals killed in that battle, but many of their weapons were rescued and sent to the Interior, for Liberals to fight another day. That they did, in a civil war that essentially depopulated and scorched Cocle province with Liberal guerrilla general Victoriano Lorenzo grabbing the weapons from the Conservative mayor of San Carlos who died trying to intercept them, leading a retreat to a mountain stronghold northwest of El Valle, then sweeping down to take Penonome and Aguadulce. But Lorenzo had been betrayed, then executed at the Casco Viejo’s Plaza Francia some six months earlier.

In Colombia the Conservatives had everything rigged but could not muster a quorum for the senate to approve any treaties nor muster the votes in the rump senate to pretend to do so. In Panama City, the Conservatives were politically in a bad way, not because they didn’t rule with an iron fist but because the city’s food supply from Cocle and points west was cut off both by loss of production and by a Liberal blockade. The blockade lifted with the war’s end but those who had fled their farms for the city mostly did not go back and Panama City was starving. In early 1904, when the first US Army medical mission arrived in the city, they found that the leading cause of death was beriberi, a starvation disease.

After the rump of the Colombian senate had declined to ratify a canal treaty with the United States the previous August, things were getting desperate for the shareholders in the moribund but still existing French canal company. Its concession would expire at the end of the year. Thus its shareholders, the biggest of which was the Panama Railroad, would have little or nothing to sell. The railroad company and the local Conservatives needed a new paradigm, quickly.

So a coup plot was hatched, essentially a Panama Railroad and Conservative Party conspiracy, with the connivance of the US government. The new president, Manuel Amador Guerrero, was the railroad company doctor.

The top Colombian military officers were bribed. Orders went out for the next levels of military commanders to take the train from Colon to Panama City for urgent consultations. They got on the train, and out in the jungle near the Continental Divide the engine decoupled from the officers’ car and sped away. The troops at the Colon garrison were thus left leaderless.

And besides, November 3 was a Colombian holiday. Even though Ecuador had gone its separate way, on November 3, 1820 Cuenca had declared independence from Spain and the Colombians still celebrated it. A boring day for bored soldiers, and the bars, stores and banks were mostly closed. However, the Colon office of the Star & Herald had money in its safe, the publisher, the mayor and those with liquor sales licenses were in on the plot and courtesy of the press all available liquor in town was purchased and delivered to the garrison. The troops got drunk en masse.

By the time that anyone sobered up enough to notice, the USS Nashville had landed and disembarked its Marine contingent. US forces were patrolling the streets.

What were the troops to do? The mayor made a gracious offer. They could get on a ship and sail back to Colombia, with guarantees of no violence or abuse from the Americans or the fine citizens of Colon.

That offer was accepted, and on November 5 the soldiers got on a ship and sailed away.

Thus went the resounding military victory in Panama’s war of independence from Colombia. Colon has celebrated it ever since.

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