The 1968 coup and Torrijos’s consolidation of power
Omar Efraín Torrijos Herrera was born on 13 February 1929 in Santiago, in the province of Veraguas, the sixth of twelve children of two schoolteachers; his father was Colombian. He was educated at the local Juan Demóstenes Arosemena School and, at eighteen, won a scholarship to the military academy in San Salvador, graduating with a commission as a second lieutenant. He joined the Panamanian National Guard in 1952, was promoted to captain in 1956 and to major in 1960, took a cadet course at the U.S. School of the Americas in 1965, and by 1966 had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and the post of Executive Secretary of the National Guard. The accusation that he had been involved in electoral fraud led to his being posted to El Salvador as a military attaché in 1968, the same year his fellow officers moved against President Arnulfo Arias Madrid [1].
The coup of 11 October 1968 was organised by two of the National Guard’s senior officers, Major Boris Martínez and Colonel José Humberto Ramos, with Torrijos’s tacit support. The immediate trigger was the newly elected President Arnulfo Arias Madrid’s attempt to install a civilian cabinet and assert civilian authority over the National Guard, the recurring fault line of twentieth-century Panamanian politics. The coup installed a three-man military junta with Martínez as the senior figure, but within five months Torrijos had moved against his co-conspirators: on 23 February 1969, Torrijos ousted Martínez and Ramos, exiled them to Miami, and promoted himself to brigadier general and the regime’s undisputed leader [1].
Torrijos’s first three years were the most repressive period of his rule. The National Guard (under the operational direction of Manuel Noriega, whom Torrijos had promoted to lieutenant colonel and chief of military intelligence in August 1970) carried out a sweeping purge of opposition figures, exiling approximately 1,300 Panamanians whom Noriega’s intelligence files identified as threats to the regime. Among the most publicised cases was the murder of the priest Jesús Héctor Gallego Herrera, whose body was “reported to have been thrown from a helicopter into the sea” (see The Noriega Dictatorship (1983–1989) for the broader pattern of repression and the 2001 Panama Truth Commission’s documentation of the casualty figures). The 1969-1971 period was the regime’s most violent phase; the political space narrowed considerably after 1972, when Torrijos promulgated a new constitution and allowed the formal structures of civilian government to operate under military supervision [1].
The 1972 constitution established the political framework of the regime. Demetrio Lakas was elected president by a constituent assembly dominated by the National Guard; Aristides Royo succeeded him in 1978 in a similar process. Both elections were exercises in regime legitimation rather than free contests, but they allowed Panama to maintain formal civilian government and to participate in international institutions. Torrijos’s title was “Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution”, and the constitution gave him the practical role of head of state while preserving the fiction that Panama was a civilian republic [1].
The 1977 Carter–Torrijos Treaties and Panama’s sovereignty claim
The Carter–Torrijos Treaties, signed on 7 September 1977 at the Pan American Union Building (OAS headquarters) in Washington, D.C., were the central diplomatic achievement of the regime. The treaties replaced the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903 as the legal framework for the canal and committed the U.S. to transfer the canal and the Canal Zone to Panama on 31 December 1999. The treaties consisted of two documents: the Panama Canal Treaty (which set the handover schedule and the joint-operations regime during the 1979-1999 transition) and the Neutrality Treaty (which committed Panama to keep the canal neutral and gave the U.S. the right to defend the canal’s neutrality after 1999) [2].
The treaties were a hard political lift in both countries. In Panama, the 1977 ratification was secured by Torrijos’s personal authority and by a narrow margin in the National Legislative Council. The treaty texts, Torrijos’s draft and the U.S. State Department’s draft, were the subject of sustained negotiation between 1973 and 1977, with the most contentious issues being the canal’s neutrality regime after 1999, the U.S. military’s continued presence in the Canal Zone during the transition, and the precise terms under which U.S. forces could intervene after 1999 to defend the canal. Torrijos himself was reportedly drunk at the signing ceremony, and his speech was slurred and poorly delivered, a moment that has since become part of the political folklore of the era [1].
In the U.S., the ratification was a near-run thing. The Neutrality Treaty passed the U.S. Senate on 16 March 1978 by 68-32, one vote more than the two-thirds required for ratification, and the Panama Canal Treaty passed on 18 April 1978 by a similar margin. The opposition coalition, organised by Senators Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and a small group of conservative senators and Panama Canal veterans, argued that the treaties gave away a vital U.S. strategic asset without adequate compensation; their campaign ran for over a year and contributed to Jimmy Carter’s domestic political weakness throughout 1978-1979 [2].
The treaties’s legal effect was substantial. The 1979 entry-into-force of the treaties transferred most Canal Zone lands to Panama, replaced the Panama Canal Company with the U.S.-led Panama Canal Commission, and began a twenty-year joint-operations regime. The 1999 final transfer, when it happened, was a contractual obligation, not a U.S. policy choice, and the treaties’s Neutrality provisions remained the controlling legal framework for the canal after 1999 [2].
Domestic policy: land reform, the banana cartel, and the new constitution
Torrijos’s domestic policy was a hybrid of nationalist rhetoric, redistributive reform, and patronage through the National Guard. The most concrete redistributive measure was land reform: the regime redistributed approximately 180,000 hectares of uncultivated land to smallholders and landless peasants, much of it from large foreign-owned estates. The reform was politically symbolic as much as economically significant (180,000 hectares over twelve years is modest against Panama’s agricultural land base) but it was the largest redistribution programme in Panamanian history and it remained Torrijos’s most cited domestic achievement [1].
The 1974 attempt to form a Union of Banana Exporting Countries, modelled on OPEC, was a more ambitious and more futile project. Panama’s banana industry was dominated by three North American multinationals (United Fruit, Standard Fruit, and Del Monte), and Torrijos hoped that a producer cartel could raise banana prices the way OPEC had raised oil prices in 1973-1974. The attempt was diplomatically interesting but economically irrelevant: the three multinationals controlled the trade and the cold-storage infrastructure, and they could easily shift production to Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Honduras if Panama pushed too hard. The cartel did not materialise [1].
The 1972 constitution was the political framework of the regime and the document on which Torrijos’s civilian successor, Aristides Royo, took office in 1978. The constitution provided for a National Assembly, an elected president, and a Supreme Court, but it also created a “Maximum Leader” title that Torrijos held personally, and it gave the National Guard effective veto power over all political decisions. The constitution’s preamble, drafted by Torrijos’s intellectual circle, declared Panama’s “revolutionary” character and its claim to sovereignty over the canal. The 1979 founding of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), loosely linked to the Socialist International, was the regime’s attempt to build a civilian political vehicle that could outlast the National Guard, and it remained the dominant civilian party of the left for the next forty years [1].
International politics: Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Canal-era regional context
Torrijos’s international posture was nationalist and non-aligned, with rhetorical sympathy for left-wing regimes in Latin America. He restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, supported the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and hosted leftist refugees from Chile after the 1973 Pinochet coup. He was inspired, according to the Wikipedia biographical entry, by Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia and by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, both examples of small-state leaders who had successfully confronted larger neighbours. Torrijos’s most quoted line on the canal, “We have never been, are not and will never be an associated state, colony or protectorate, and we do not intend to add a star to the United States flag”, captures the rhetorical register [1].
The Torrijos regime’s relationship with the United States was more complicated than the rhetorical posture suggested. Torrijos took a cadet course at the U.S. School of the Americas in 1965 and was reportedly on the CIA’s payroll in the 1960s and 1970s. The Carter administration relied on Torrijos’s personal authority to push the Canal Treaties through the U.S. Senate; in turn, Carter pressured Torrijos to liberalise his regime’s political controls enough that the treaties could be defended to the Senate as a “human-rights” deal. The regime’s relationship with the U.S. military and intelligence services was neither purely cooperative nor purely adversarial. It was a transactional arrangement in which Torrijos delivered the canal treaties and the U.S. tolerated a level of political repression that would not have been accepted for any other Central American government in the late 1970s [1].
The 1981 death and the succession crisis
Torrijos died on 31 July 1981, when his Panamanian Air Force DHC-6 Twin Otter crashed at Cerro Marta, near Coclesito, in weather that was later described as light. The plane carried Torrijos, two pilots, and four aides; all six were killed. The crash was officially attributed to instrument failure, but a persistent line of speculation (including statements by Manuel Noriega’s attorney Frank Rubino in 1991 and by former Noriega chief of staff Colonel Roberto Díaz, a cousin of Torrijos, in 2013) has alleged U.S. involvement in the death. The U.S. State Department has denied these allegations, and the investigation by Panamanian authorities in 1981 concluded that the crash was an accident [1].
Torrijos’s death created a succession crisis that Manuel Noriega would exploit. The immediate successor was Florencio Flores Aguilar as acting president, who gave way to Rubén Darío Paredes as commander of the National Guard. Paredes was unable to consolidate control, and over the next two years Noriega, who had been chief of military intelligence since 1970, accumulated power through a series of promotions, the 1983 expansion of the military under Law 20, and the manipulation of civilian political figures. By 12 August 1983, when Noriega openly became the de facto ruler, the Torrijos era was effectively over; the Noriega period that followed (covered in The Noriega Dictatorship (1983–1989)) was, in many respects, the consequence of the National Guard’s institutional autonomy that Torrijos had built but not constrained [1].
The crash site at Cerro Marta is now a national park, and Torrijos’s Coclesito house is a museum. His legacy is contested: among Panamanian left-wing and centrist parties, he is remembered as the nationalist leader who secured the canal treaties; among Panamanian conservatives and among the families of the regime’s victims, he is remembered as the military ruler who tolerated or ordered the political repression that the 2001 Panama Truth Commission would later document. The Torrijos era’s central position in twentieth-century Panamanian history, between the canal-era of 1903-1977 and the Carter-Torrijos transfer era of 1977-1999, is the basis for both these memories [1].
Where to take this next
The Torrijos era ended with Torrijos’s death in 1981, but the institutional structures he built (the National Guard, the Democratic Revolutionary Party, the canal-treaties framework) shaped everything that came after. For the regime that succeeded Torrijos’s regime and the political repression it institutionalised, see The Noriega Dictatorship (1983–1989). For the 1989 U.S. invasion that ended the Noriega era, see The U.S. Invasion of 1989. For the canal-treaties transfer that Torrijos’s diplomacy made possible, see The Canal Transfer Era (1990–1999).
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