Word: panama
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...POINT during the Panama Canal treaty negotiations, Omar Toreros received unexpected advice from an unusual source, Filed Castro. The ubiquitous Cuban leader called his friend Omar--the military leader who had brought Panama's dream of ruling the canal to fruition--to urge "prudence and caution" in Panama's increasingly complicated external affairs...
...dictatorship, and a man who rarely used force because his skills as a politician rarely made it necessary. His domestic achievements were substantial but his international achievements were stupendous: in a decade of rule before his 1981 death in a plane crash he recovered the canal and made Panama a leader of the "Contadina group," the alliance of four Latin nations which has advocated moderate solutions to the economic and military problems that are crippling Central America...
...winter of 1976, a telegram arrived for Graham Greene in Antibes. Would he come to Panama as the guest of its leader, Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera? "I thought of it as only a rather comic adventure," recalls Greene, "inspired by an invitation from a complete stranger." But the comedy was to pass through surrealism to tragedy, and the stranger was to become an intimate...
Nevertheless, Greene complied with the dictator's wishes. During the Torrijos years, he worked on a novel, Monsignor Quixote, about the adventures of a simple village priest abroad in the world. In Panama, he was a real-life counterpart. By his own evidence, he served as the go-between in a kidnaping, learned about the hoax of the "Virgin that perspires," failed to write a book about Panama, finally located a well-made rum punch, and saw a "horseman [ride] by carrying a cock on his hand in the way a waiter carries a tray...
...author, "this bizarre and beautiful little country" was a mixture of fantasy and mistrust. One popular song, he notes, was titled Your Love Is a Yesterday's Newspaper; local drivers were cautious about letting their wheels go across the border between the Panama and U.S. zones because ".. . if you were involved in a traffic offense on the wrong side of the street, you would be judged in an American court." In contrast to the new towers of Panama City lay a sprawling slum called Hollywood; even remote villages had Walt Disney figures as roadside totems. Greene once grumbled...