Word: panamas
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DIED. Omar Torrijos Herrera, 52, cigar-chewing brigadier general of Panama's National Guard and the country's de facto strongman, who negotiated the return by the U.S. of the Panama Canal Zone to his country's control; in an airplane crash; in the western jungles of Panama. Torrijos joined the National Guard in 1952, and in 1968 helped to lead a coup against President Arnulfo Arias. The next year Torrijos effectively took sole power and served an official term as chief of government from 1972 to 1978. Occasionally ironfisted with local dissenters, he showed his formidable...
...last week Eden Pastora stunned the Sandinista leadership by resigning as Vice Minister of Defense and leaving for Panama. The ruling directorate tried to talk Pastora into returning. Three directorate members appeared on national television to plead with the revolutionary hero to "undo" his action...
...Pastora's first remarks to the press on arriving in Panama suggested that revolutionary fervor may not have been his only motive. Panama's daily La Republica, whose editor met with Pastora shortly after his arrival, reported that the Nicaraguan had left following a "break with [Interior Minister Tomas] Borge and the Reds" over the presence of "many military observers from Cuba in Nicaragua," along with increasing numbers of Cuban and Soviet "political units...
...important role in the new government. Over the next 18 years U.S. economic aid was contingent on the rebuilding of the military, and direct military aid during that period came to $56.6 million. Even more important, between 1950 and 1975 nearly 4000 Bolivian military personnel were trained in Panama and the United States. The ideological emphasis of this training was rabidly anticommunist, and the predominant message was that only the military could "save" the country from internal threats to political stability. Young officers were taught to see politically active workers and campesinos as insurgent enemies...
...when the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, and he had distinguished himself only briefly as a soldier: in combat, as an eager young West Pointer in the Mexican War, and as an enterprising peacetime quartermaster who led a hapless party of California-bound travelers across the Isthmus of Panama...