I had a flight to Panama in the morning, and was finishing my work in Managua. But there was an opportunity to meet with Ben Lugo in Granada. So I  finished my interview with broadcasting icon Carlos Chamorro and boarded a ‘chicken bus’ for my dinner with Benjamin. After a rollicking bus ride, I sat in the vernanda of a grand old hotel overlooking the Parque Central, the same spot where Tenneseean mercenary William Walker once roamed, burning the city to the ground after his dreams of being emperor of Central America was dashed. Ben was late but I didn’t mind as I sipped a beer on beautiful, sultry evening. A scantily-clad prostitute periodically approached, each time lowering her price ($20!). Finally, Ben arrived and we went to a deserted outdoor restaurant for an unhealthy dinner of nachos, beer and vodka. Below are parts one and two of our three hour chat. The transcription is the work of new Afterparty intern Anaka Allen. 

PART 1

Contrarrevolución

Benjamin Lugo is a democracy activist, a former Sandinista who has seen Nicaragua struggle through a quarter century of political growing pains.  The United States has been involved  in Nicaraguan politics for more than a century.  With support from Cuba and the Soviet Union, Sandinista revolutionaries launched a guerrilla war against US-backed president Anastasio Somoza Debayle, overthrowing him in 1979. President Jimmy Carter cut off long-standing economic and military aid to Somoza in 1977 because of his widely-condemned human rights record. 

Ben begins his analysis of American intervention and its effects in Nicaragua by introducing how the relationship of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with the FMLN of El Salvador. 

Lugo: In 1979 there was a historical opportunity to have a different relationship with the United States. And then I think that because of all that was happening here in the Sandinista regime against private enterprise, against all these people that were not part of the Somoza dictatorship, I think that worked against El Salvador (so) people would not help or support the FMLN.

The FMLN, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, was a left-wing political party in El Salvador, comprised of multiple leftist guerrilla groups.

Lugo: Because the private sector in El Salvador and the United States said, “This is happening in Nicaragua.” So that actually was a catalyst against the FMLN in El Salvador; what was happening here back in 1980. And then what happened was terrible because all of this started to decrease efficiency and production, and then more and more resources were committed to war efforts against the contras, which was a small group in Honduras but then—

BG: So are you suggesting that the Sandinistas used the contras as a way to create a paranoid justification for more radicalization?

Lugo: To be more radical. They like to be warriors, you know. I think there is even this syndrome of greatness.

BG: Going from a bitter, brutal, bloody guerrilla life in the mountains, with that kind of camaraderie and success, [to] then suddenly [having] to govern; that’s pretty boring. You have to compromise and fix potholes, you have to do all the boring administrative stuff. These twenty-year old kids who have been the commanders of some large area, they’re neither trained nor interested in doing that. So to say, now we’re back, we have this common enemy…

Lugo: It was more exciting to say that, but it was terrible for the country. Because then you started getting into the Cold War with two big players, with the United States. Then this Nicaragua, instead of learning from the Cuban failures — there are good things in Cuba, education and health care for the kids, that we should take.

BG: Even take some of their doctors.

Lugo: See if they can help us. But to go and ally yourself with that terrible, state-owned, state-directed economy, is terrible. So the country started failing economically and then the war effort made it worse. It’s not only the war that created all this chaos. It was the attitude of confiscating everything, everything becomes state-owned. We don’t need a new war to ruin the country, that made it worse, of course. But [there were] already a lot of problems back in ’83-’84, before the war.

In 1981, President Reagan withdrew aid to Nicaragua when the Sandinistas would not end their support of the rebel forces in El Salvador. The Reagan administration viewed the Sandinistas as a dangerous political enemy because of their interaction with communist Cuba under Fidel Castro and the Soviet bloc. The Reagan administration, led by the CIA, began covertly assisting anti-Sandinista fighters, the contras, claiming that their intention was to disrupt the flow of arms to revolutionaries in El Salvador. By late 1982, the United States was funding and managing operations of the contras. President Reagan claimed that America’s goal was to ensure that Nicaragua did not spread violence and rebellion to its Latin American neighbors, specifically El Salvador.

BG: So you’re talking about ’83-’84. It’s my general understanding, that in the beginning, the contras were created out of whole cloth by the United States CIA. They supported the soldiers in Honduras, gave them money, gave them ideological talking points, gave them direction, told them what to do, brought them together in Miami to create a committee.

L: I have to be honest with you, no matter what Reagan or the United States did, if there were no people willing to fight, there was nothing they could do. There were a lot of people willing to fight against the Sandinistas.

B: The Guardia Nacional.

L: No! That was only a small nucleus of maybe two to three thousand people at the most. It’s just an educated guess. I didn’t count them, [laughs] I didn’t like them either. But then from there to eighteen thousand? Something happened there. There were no more National Guardsmen. That was it.

B: So would you say that if the United States did not make that effort—and I wasn’t meaning to demean the broad base of support based on all the issues you talked about that caused people to want to join the contras or one of the contra factions—but would you say that if the United States did nothing, the contras, the counter-revolution would have still happened?

L: Oh yeah, maybe not the way it happened, but a lot of disaffected people, people that were kicked out of their own small plots of land—

B: And then you have the Miskito Indians. Reagan went on television and said, “I am a Miskito Indian.”

L: Yeah. “Yo soy un freedom fighter,” but that was later. Those Miskito Indians did not even know who the CIA was.

B: And my understanding is that the Miskitos had a lot of autonomy under Somoza, so they really didn’t have a lot of problems with him.

L: No, they did. They were taking down the forest, were cutting up trees, this and that.

The Miskito Indians are a tribe that inhabits the northeastern coast of Nicaragua near Puerto Cabezas.  During the Sandinista revolution, many of the tribe sided with the contras.

PART 2

Betrayed Revolution

Lugo claims that the Nicaraguan people suffered great disappointment during the Sandinista regime because they betrayed their original intentions of dismantling the practices of the Somoza dictatorship, ushering in a new government focused on unifying Nicaragua through Marxist-Leninist ideology. 

L: [There was a] change in the direction of the revolution [that] was catastrophic to the country. It led us to a war because, without us knowing, they were trying to confiscate areas, in the rural areas to make [room for] enormous foreign projects, for sugar cane, etc. They were displacing all these small peasants from the land, so these people started fleeing to Honduras and that’s where the contras got bigger and bigger. It’s not like they were imported from Afghanistan. They were Nicaraguans that were displaced from the Sandinista repression.

And then the Miskito Indians, los Miskitos in Puerto Cabeza, they started organizing themselves because they said things were going to be very different with the new revolution, but they started being persecuted too, all of a sudden in like 1981/1982. By that time, the economy was coming down. No political parties were allowed.

Some things were done in a short period of time, including the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, that was not denounced by the Sandinista regime. I said, “This is not what we fought for, this is not what we wanted, this is not what all my friends died for.”

Another terrible [betrayal] was that the former Somoza regime, the leaders, lived in these big houses, and then the Sandinistas came to live in those same houses, with the same swimming pools and sometimes they even kept maids and drivers. So that was terrible because if you are preaching to be humble and to be for the people, and that you are going to save money so that people can live better, and then all of a sudden you go out and live in the same houses…It was a continuous degradation from the original 1978 proposition.

B: And in your personal evolution, what official, unofficial or active role did you have with the Sandinistas in ’79, and how did you gradually change and decide to actively oppose the regime?

L: This revolution was so much my revolution that I never fought against it afterwards. So I was never part of the contras. For one thing, I resented the fact that some of the leaders were part of the Somoza National Guard. We have nothing to do with them, you know. And then the United States being so openly supporting it with Reagan, you know.

B: More of the same.

L: During these years in 1980/81, Doña Violeta [spoke against] the regime; Alfonso Robelo too. Another experience that I lived, was in Nandaime. Robelo called for a citizens movement in Nandaime against what we were seeing: the overtaking of the revolution by these radical people. So he said we are going to march in Nandaime. It was on a Sunday. That was the first time I saw the Sandinista army with guns opposing the people. That was marked in my mind. I saw this and thought, “It’s almost the National Guard, again.” It was terrible what happened to me that Sunday morning.

B: So talk about the 80s, you said you didn’t join the contras, tell me more about your personal evolution from 1979 to 1989. I mean, you’ve already talked about how you were seeing certain things that were troubling to you.

L: In 1982, a little brother of mine had this terrible accident in Atlanta. He suffered a stroke at 16 years old. So I had to go urgently to the hospital in Atlanta. When I left the country, they said that I had fled the country, and they knew it was because of this reason, because of my brother. So they decided to confiscate our properties: my family’s, mine, whatever we had. It was kind of ironic, having been part of this revolution, you know.

B: Were they targeting you for any reason?

L: [It was to counter] the bourgeoisie. Because of this decision, they wanted everything to be state-owned. So, they said I had fled so they took over the company, houses—bite by bite, ruining the country, the economy. It was a no-win situation because you are degrading your productive system, inside the country, and then you have a war that was financed by the United States, by Reagan. But there were no mercenaries, in the sense that, they were all Nicaraguan people that were disaffected by this regime. So you could have all the money in the world, but if you have no people willing to fight, the money sits there. Period. So it was this combination of factors. Then by becoming pro-Cuba, you were actually confronting the United States.

After the Sandinistas took control of the Nicaraguan government, they became more radical in the eyes of both the opposition and supporters. New economic policies included confiscating, occupying and redistributing properties, businesses and finances.  At one point, they began to restrict the press. Parts three and four of the conversation will be posted shortly.

We have two brilliant new interns who are furiously working through our backlog of interviews, transcribing, fact checking, looking up historical context. As we get up to date, we will provide deeper backgrounders, and, of course, you’ll get to meet them though their bylines and bios. This interview was transcribed by Kayley Ingalls.

Kayley received her BA in International Studies in 2012 from the University of Chicago. Though her coursework includes African Politics, the Modern Middle East, and the Politics of Islam, she wrote her thesis on fairy tales and their use as a vehicle for discussing the Holocaust. A good-natured stickler for grammar, she enjoys taking the odd class on mechanics and usage. Since graduating, she’s tried her hand at working as a Library Assistant and teaching summer school at an exclusive private school in Oakland, California. She dreams of exploring the world and hopes to find her place in it eventually, whether it be in writing, editing, law, or something she has yet to dream up.

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When I arrived in the first country for the project, Guatemala, I stayed in the home of a former student activist, congressman and architect, now retired. Cesar’s grandson Marco Antonio picked me up at the airport, and, over Johnnie Walked Red, the three of us spent the night talking about the historic 1954 CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. Marco took me out to the countryside, where he is a teacher and we hung out with one of his friends. This is my conversation with his educator friend, Fabio an extroverted young man in his twenties.

BG: Okay. What do you know about 1954? Jacobo Árbenz. 

(Guatemalan president overthrown by the United States in 1954.)

What do I know? He was overthrown by the American CIA. He was labeled a communist. Because he wanted to make some reforms.

BG: Was there truth to that? Was he a communist?

No, he wasn’t. The Americans were very nervous about the Soviet Union and the ideas of Marx. They were trying to use communism as an excuse to keep control of many countries in Latin America. That’s what I think.

BG: You can say both were real, there was genuine hysteria, paranoia, fear of the Soviet Union, communist China, Stalin, Mao, Eastern Europe.

I think American society was entitled to be paranoid to a certain degree, but in Latin America that was used as an excuse, again, to be in control of the region. I don’t know if you remember McCarthy?

BG: Sure.

He was talking about the domino effect, if one country fell down, then the next one, and so on.

BG: The domino theory.

Yes. But I don’t think Árbenz was a communist, or Allende in Chile.

(Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to be elected president in free elections in Latin America. Elected 1970, overthrown in a 1973 CIA-supported coup.)

BG: What do you think is the line between being a communist and having some communists in your political coalition or legislature, or pushing for long overdue reforms? The Spanish oligarchy controlling the economy for decades or centuries…

Historically, what we have in Guatemala is a situation in which a minority controls the majority. The wealthy class controls the working class. That is the situation in this country, but every time the working class wants to see changes in society, they always label us. Drug gangs, terrorists.

BG: It’s a convenient way for…

…to get rid of certain people.

BG: Even Obama is called a socialist. Compared to who?

No way! I don’t think he’s even close.

BG: But these words are used to paralyze public discourse. Instead of debating how we affect healthcare reform, well, he’s socialist.

Two things, if the working class is in charge of making changes, the first thing that they probably will change is healthcare for everybody and education free for everybody. And that’s Marxism.

BG: Well, it’s what some Marxist countries have as a priority. I don’t think that’s Marxism though.

The working class being in control of the–

BG: Being in control, that part. But free education and healthcare? Is that socialism?

That’s a little bit. More Marxism than… But Sweden has both things. Free healthcare and free education. And they are capitalist.

BG: That’s right. A lot of Americans think that ensuring good health care for people and good education is a priority. A lot of Americans think that no, that’s socialism. You’re taking my money, my taxes. I want to lower my taxes, not raise them. Take my money so that some other kid can get good education or healthcare? That’s socialism. This is a significant political view in the United States.

I think that this is like a, how do you say, Obama… I used to have friends from Austria talking about Obama, good things about him. One of his attributes is basically that he is a well articulated person. He can explain things carefully and clearly. But he fails many times because he cannot explain the important things to the American community.

BG: I think that’s true.

People don’t want to be labeled as whatever, communist for instance. So they have to clarify. This is what I am offering, it has nothing to do with being a socialist. He has failed to distance himself from labels, philosophies, or ideologies, I don’t know.

BG: If I can ask, how old are you?

I don’t answer that.

BG: (Laughter.) Okay, you don’t have to answer that. As you were growing up, learning about what happened in 1954, and then seeing the civil war or reading about it, how did you feel about the United States as you heard those things?

I think that it’s a process because it takes time to… As you have more details and more details, you start putting everything together. All the pieces. It fits in time. But I think the American goal was really bad, you know? If you were in school here, you probably would understand what I’m talking about. Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the elections and he was actually dealing with the Iranians. They were using Iranians to pass weapons to the Contras.

BG: Illegally.

And also they paid the Iranians to keep the American hostages a little bit longer. Yeah, check that.

BG: I’ve been reading about that lately.

Bill Moyers discusses that in one of his documentaries.

BG: They paid or made certain promises.

No, they were payments.

BG: I have heard that. I love Bill Moyers.

So the Americans came. I think that the agreement… He asked for a favor, if they could maintain the hostages a little bit longer, until after –

BG: The Iranians hated Carter because of the Shah.

(The Carter administration seemed to be complicit with the Shah, who came to the United States for medical treatment after being overthrown in 1979. Carter toasted him on television.)

They wanted to portray Ronald Reagan as a powerful guy, that he is not negotiating with terrorists.

BG: He did negotiate with terrorists, more than once.

Yeah, he did! But they were saying, no, he’s not negotiating with terrorists.

BG: So during the civil war, were you aware that the United States government, particularly during the Reagan administration, was supporting Guatemala’s military dictatorship? What was your attitude about that?

We didn’t know that until we were much older Because that’s part of our history and at that time we weren’t sure. Instead of saying, “You guys have a threat of communism in the area. We are going to help you to eradicate that problem.”

BG: That was the justification.

Yeah, but the money was used to maintain the status quo, to maintain the rich families in power, and keep the military strong.

BG: Did you know any people who were kidnapped, or tortured, or killed?

Just one. He was an old guy. He was kidnapped and killed. Apparently he was associated with a Catholic group.

BG: Catholic?

They say that sometimes the Catholics were indoctrinating.

BG: (It’s estimated that) US-backed military dictators in your country, over time, killed 200,000 people.

Now, they (former political leaders) are using that as justification. Yes, people were brutalized and really badly tortured in Latin America, But you know what? We didn’t do it. It was our military, when it was in Guatemala, Chile, or Argentina. It was the military. We were not involved in that. We weren’t physically there.

BG: The political leaders are saying that it was the military?

Yes. The Americans weren’t involved. You were not doing it. It was the Guatemalans in control of the wrong paramilitary groups, of which there were many. Or, in Latin America as well, we weren’t there. It’s like saying that Hitler is innocent because he wasn’t in Treblinka or Auschwitz. He wasn’t there physically, yeah, but he was the mastermind. The point that I am trying to make is that Ronald Reagan, he was the mastermind behind that machinery.

BG: What do you think was going through Reagan’s mind when he was supporting these brutal dictators?

I think he was really scared during the missile crisis in Cuba. Americans were very scared. We have nuclear weapons, they are no longer in Russia, they are in Cuba. And this is how many miles out of the United States?

BG: 90 miles from Miami.

Suddenly, they can nuke us. And that’s the thing that really scares me. And after Vietnam? Wow.

BG: Yeah, we can lose.

There was a certain degree of paranoia among the military. Among the politicians in the United States. It probably was related to the right wing. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.

BG: What’s happening now in Guatemalan politics?

I am totally disconnected from Guatemalan politics. I read the New York Times, La Stampa Italiana. I only read news from other countries.

(Laughter.)

I was trying to be in tune with the Guatemalan congressmen who were opposed (to legislation supporting privatization of seeds for) Monsanto.

BG: I heard that today, yeah.

And they decided to go in favor of Monsanto. Something that was really disappointing. In part because they don’t even know what the hell is going on. Because they don’t have the education. They don’t understand our genetics in a way. It’s frustrating. But I am totally disconnected from American politics, too. I don’t understand anymore what’s going on and I have no interest.

I visited  leading Guatemalan policy institute ASIES and talked to analyst and scholar Hugo Novales Contreras. We talked about the culpability of the United States, whether democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz would have been overthrown without the CIA-sponsored invasion of 1954, and why modern military leaders and landowners pursue their grievances through democratic means (including the paying off of politicians).

Jacobo Arbenz was a Guatemalan military officer when he participated in a coup to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator General Jorge Ubico in 1944. He became Secretary of Defense serving under President Juan Jose Arevalo, then was elected president himself in 1951. He was overthrown in a CIA-financed and managed coup in 1954.

BG : Why was Arbenz overthrown ?

HN : There are a lot of theories. The one which I like best was brought by Piero Gleijeses in his classic book “Shattered Hope.”  The Guatemalan revolution had a lot of enemies from the beginning. There were several attempts to overthrow (previous president) Juan Jose Arevalo, who implemented some important reforms such as the Labor Code, revolutionary for its time. In order to sustain the revolution, the Arbenz government needed to have an actual citizen base, and this support was provided by the worker and peasant unions, and eventually this led to the agrarian reform.

There were internal causes for the overthrow. There was a privileged, land-owning elite that wasn”t happy with the agrarian reform. More importantly, there was an army that  had been trained to be anti-communist. They did not support Arbenz and his government, and that”s what eventually led to the overthrow. The so-called intervention didn”t really imply an excessive use of military force. Arbenz was overthrown by a ragtag army formed by peasants with very little training, with no significant weapons. But the army feared that the United States might intervene. And what they didn”t want was the army to be humiliated by fighting as grand an opponent as the United States. So this is a responsibility that we tend to ignore in Guatemala, because we just want to say the United States came in and crushed us. It wasn’t really that way. There is part of that responsibility that”s right here in Guatemala, the army included.

BG : Your point is it wasn”t a full scale military invasion, and therefore there had to be internal dissension and support for the overthrow for it to happen…

HN : Exactly.  This is something I heard from my grandmother. I don’t know if you want to record this because it’s more personal…

BG : Personal is relevant.

HN : My great-grandfather supported the revolution at the beginning and he eventually moved against the revolution during the next ten years. Basically he started out helping overthrow Ubico, then he also helped to overthrow Arbenz. There were a lot of people in Guatemala who were anti-communist, and they feared the fact that Arbenz was surrounded by communists. They feared that something greater might happen after the agrarian reform. The peasants would be empowered to pursue options. So, there was an actual fear of communism in Guatemala, and it was probably supported by propaganda from the United States and from the Church.

BG : When you talk about the land owners and the twenty, thirty families who historically had tremendous economic power in this country, how do you see the evolution of their thinking? There is a coup led by Arbenz in ’44, followed by the election of Arevalo. Did a lot of them just say, ”Hey, this is progress, we have less control in a democracy, but the world is changing,” or, do you think, from 1944 they were saying, “This must stop and we must find a way to take back control?”

HN : Well, when you look at the actual protagonists of the revolution, or the actual coup against Ubico, you know a lot of the people who supported the coup were, I wouldn”t say they were the twenty or thirty families, but they were the bourgeoisie. So it wasn”t really a popular revolution strictly speaking. Many of the Arbenz and Arevalo cabinet members were actually coming from those families, starting with Jorge Toriello, who was one of the leaders of the original coup in 1944. I guess this class was alienated from the revolution two different times. The Labor Code, which I think was in 1947, distanced them from the revolution, and then later on with the agrarian reform. One thing that needs to be pointed out is that the revolution could have carried on without the agrarian reform. For example, in order for you to be able to receive land from the agrarian reform, you actually had to form a committee with a couple of representative from the peasant unions. Some might have thought that agrarian reform was fair, but they felt that it wasn”t going to be carried out in a fair way.

BG : If the United States did nothing, would Arbenz eventually have been overthrown?

HN : I would not be able to say, but what I can say is that there would have been attempts to overthrow. What really made the difference is that the threat of an eventual United States intervention actually turned the army against Arbenz, so that was the main role of the United States.

You couldn”t just blame everything on the United Fruit Company. They would have still been able to sustain their business here in Guatemala, even with the agrarian reform. I mean there wasn”t a real threat to their operation. They had such a huge operation that they could have even disregarded their “ hard drive recovery software security standards are set high by CompuCom to ensure that our customers’ data is never vulnerable. Guatemalan operation and still be a profitable Company.

BG : Why do you think the Reagan administration provided so much aid to the Rios Montt administration?

HN : Nicaragua was already under Sandinistas rule by that time. So what a lot of people in the army in Guatemala and the United States feared was a domino effect, that Nicaragua would fall and then El Salvador and later Guatemala. There was a strong ideological component to the relationship between the United States and Guatemala during the Cold War, and, obviously, some corporate interests.

BG : Was Arbenz a good leader for the years he was in power ?

HN : It”s a really subjective question, but I would say yes. In comparison to what we had so far to that point, and what then had until 1985, in principal he was a democratically elected leader, so that was a qualitative difference from other leaders. Second, he had a program, a nationalistic program,. He had four points, you know, the agrarian reform, the building of a dam to produce hydro-electric power, which is still working, and the building of the road from Guatemala City to Puerto Barrios which was a key issue based on the fact that the United Fruit Company also owned the national railway.

BG : That was a competitive threat to them?

HN : Right. So it wasn”t only the agrarian reform. It was a challenging of the monopoly that American companies had in Guatemala.

BG : How would you characterize Guatemala politics today ?

HN : Right now we have 27 parties, we have people moving from one party to another, we have a very volatile system. It is a very corrupted system but it”s also a system that”s really unpredictable and it”s hard to actually know what”s going to happen.

BG : What do you mean by corrupted: people getting paid, people paying for influence, people looking after their own interests?

HN : Well, you know, there”s corruption in every political system. Hopefully it”s not natural, hopefully we can have politics without corruption but, you know, so far, we don”t. But the Guatemalan system is particularly different. Public interest usually doesn”t play a role in legislation for example. I mean, we”ve come to that point. There were two recent examples. One of them is the, they’re calling it the Monsanto law which is…

BG : GMO’s.

HN : It”s basically a law to protect patents on developing new varieties of seeds or vegetables or whatever. It was still a rather unpopular law. You had a congress vote almost unanimously for that law in June and now we had them revoking that law which basically happened yesterday because of the social pressure because nobody, I mean, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, nobody wanted it to go…

BG : I heard that many legislators were given direct cash payment by Monsanto.

HN : I mean the budget, the national budget is used to buy legislators because many of them have links to companies; so if your brother owns a construction company, then you”re gonna try to use the national budget to give contracts to this construction company. I mean, most of them probably didn”t read it. They just want to make sure how much am they going to get out of this particular law..

And the other example is a recent reform to the telecommunications law, that actually benefited just one company, Tigo by allowing them to build antenna towers without the studies approval, without the municipal approval, which is something that clearly violates Guatemalan legislation on municipal autonomy, and really weakens their capacity to extract taxes from such a large company.  .. That’s worth to Tigo several times the state’s budget. I guess that”s the way a lot of laws are working in Guatemala working right now.

BG : When”s the last time the military was in control of the country ?

HN : Ah, well, in control, an actual control I would say just before the transition to democracy which was in 1984.

BG : Do you think they want it back ?

HN : Want it back ? I”m not sure, I”m not sure… On one hand, you can access power through democracy right now and they would be able to do it. A lot of former military men are actually involved in the government so, you could say that there is really no reason for the army to take power back because they can access it through different channels, democratic channels, which is basically what makes the democracy stand, the fact that you feel that you can access power through democratic means and you don”t need to do it through violent means.

BG : And that”s probably similar throughout Central America with the taste that people have for democracy. Businesses that may be in the past have preferred a military dictatorship now want it to at least seem it like a constitutional democracy that is not controlled by the military.

HN : Families would actually realize that they could have better business by actually allowing a certain degree of democracy, because nobody is gonna trade with these military dictators who have been in Central America.

BG : In 1998, Clinton came to Guatemala and apologized for past U.S. interventions.

HN : Well, you know, that”s really cool about the States that even though apologies don”t change, discourse does change. Can I add one more thing?

BG : Please.

HN : Guatemala still has strong ties to the United States, immigration, drugs, but even though I don’t see an intervention in the near future, the United States still meddles in Guatemalan affairs in a very direct way and probably the best example…have you heard of Claudia Paz y Paz?

BG : No.

HN : She was the Attorney General that left office a few months ago. The Rios Montt trial would not have happened without her being in office. There were several drug lords that were captured and extradited during her time in office. And the United States was supporting her.  The previous ambassador McFarland, he actually supported the trial openly, he went to the hearings, and we need some to assume certain responsibility as Guatemalans for whatever happen, but it”s really not fair that the United States doesn”t want to take their own responsibility for that. You would think that the United States have nothing to do with Rios Montt, when in fact they had a lot to do with it. Right now, everybody in Guatemala loves the States, even the left are saying we need United States support and I agree with that. But it”s really unfair for us to take full responsibility for…

BG : What would you like to have seen during that trial from the United States?

HN : I really appreciated McFarland being there, but, what I would have expected as well was a recognition of responsibility. Not so much putting Rios Montt on trial and pointing at him, saying no, he”s the bad guy, which he was, but also assuming a certain responsibility as a government, similar to what Clinton did. The relationship with the United States did not end in1954.

BG : I think you only get one apology every fifty years, so….

HN : I guess that’s too much to ask from a superpower.

I met Rod Diaz at a lunch with former Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano at the elegant Edificio Capital Plaza in Panama City. I was fascinated by Rod’s intimate stories of former Panamanian head of state Omar Torrijos. We agreed to meet again, and did, several days later in his office.

Rodrigo Díaz Paredes is Panamanian political history incarnate. He begins by revealing the stunning history of his family. Chiseled, handsome features, athletic and toned, with masterful use of language to emphasize, persuade and seduce, he looks like a Latin Rod Serling. He is dressed in a dark suit, with an open neck, pressed white dress shirt.  He sits at the front of our finely polished conference table.

“My family has been involved in Panama life since our foundations as a republic. On my father’s side, General Domingo Diaz was second in command of Battalon Colombia, the battalion that was here. He led the liberal party so he was key in the process of independence from Colombia. On my mother’s side was Panama’s first head of government. When Panama became independent, there was a junta and my two great-grandfathers were part of that junta. Both great-grandfathers  became president. One of my grandfathers was governor of the second largest province of the country and my other grandfather was in the Assembly and his brother was vice president.”

You have a lot of work to do to live up to that.

“My father was General Torrijo’s best friend and right hand man. He headed the negotiation process for the Panama Canal treaties. There was a book that came out about the negotiating process.  The U.S. head negotiator said of my father in referencing their first meeting, “He was brusque, he was rough and had no diplomatic abilities.”

Was he like that way at home?

Rod smiles. “He was a military man. He went to U.S. military school when he was seven years old. He graduated from Georgetown. He and my grandfather established in 1962-63 the first satellite telecommunications company in Latin America. On October 1, 1968, a new government came into power; they were brought down on October 11. In that process, they tried to retire General Torrijos and they tried to take away my father’s very prosperous business. That same day Torrijos met with the commander-in-chief, the head of the Panamanian military structure. said the government had changed. Torrijos was forty and my father was thirty years old, and they led a coup.”

Tell me, how does a coup happen?

“In Panama, the climate was perfect for it. That president, it was his third time he was thrown out of office.  He had proven to be very irresponsible. He had very radical positions.”

Radical in terms of left wing. Or as in extreme policies?

“He was extreme right in the sense that he was a racist, an open racist. He believed that blacks had to be neutered and said it openly. Torrijos was a military man that came from a family in the interior of the country, from high school professors, a teaching family, and he strongly believed that Panama needed the opportunity to create social equality. For that to happen, it had to be done from the highest part of the government. The beauty of it is that, his life was all about that. He also believed there was a lot of corruption in the government that had to be attacked head on. He also believed the Canal had to be returned.

“Panama since our independence from Colombia had lived under the U.S. military presence. Imagine having Soviet tanks going down Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s what we had. Usually coups are not done by Generals. Torrijos was a Lieutenant Colonel and was the executive officer at the central HQ of the army. He got the support of the junior officers, mostly majors, and captains and lieutenants.”

Scenes from the 1989 United States Invasion of Panama Called Operation Just Cause

You were young at the time. How did Panamanians react?

“Of course at the beginning, there was concern. He got the support of his forces by presenting his ideas. Because he worked hand in hand with them for many, many years. He was educated in one of the most prestigious academies, and trained in the U.S. and Europe.  He came from an intellectual family, he educated himself on the ideas that he had, and he got the support of the officers saying, you know what, Panama deserves a lot better. We deserve equality. We deserve integrity. We deserve sovereignty. With that idea, they went forward to the process.

“There was a major event that sparked that. Panama and the U.S. government had agreed that the Panamanian flag was going to be raised within the Canal Zone in specific areas, and the U.S. was not complying with that. In 1964, January 9th, a bunch of students climbed the fence, went in, there was a major event, and  21 students lost their lives. Torrijos, one of his responsibilities was to calm the people. He said, it’s so contradictory, if I am going to be fighting with them against this oppression, how can I stop them?

“That sparked a major nationalistic movement. He was a leader, he was very charismatic. He said, you know what, guys, this government is going to take the country even farther right, where we will deviate even more from our objectives as a nation.”

Was there a sense around that time that it’s time for an end to this tradition of right wing military governments, with officers often paid by the U.S. government. it’s time for this to end? 1968 was a time of student riots in France, anti-war protests in the U.S. Was there some rising tide in the region, that we want to do things differently?

“Oh, without a doubt, you had movements all over the region but Panama was the first one to make that step forward. Torrijos created a mechanism for educating and creating a middle class. At the time there were extreme left-wing guerrillas in Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, but Torrijos was neither right nor left, so you had none of that. His saying was, ‘Never the right, never the left, only Panama.’”

What was the relationship between Torrijos and Noriega?

“At that time, Noriega was a captain and worked for Torrijos. Very smart, studied in Peru, then was head of intelligence, went to the U.S. School of the Americas with elite intelligent officers from all over the world, the Mossad.”

Former CIA asset, Panamanian head of intelligence, head of state, narco trafficker and arms dealer Manuel Noriega, overthrown in the 1989 U.S. invasion, then imprisoned in Florida.

Did his colleagues know he was a CIA informant?

“No, they did not know. I imagine the U.S. identified his weaknesses, his desire for resources, for the fine things in life. In his first year, he proved to be a very good asset and kept order in the ranks. That allowed Torrijos to spend a lot of time out of Panama getting international support (for the Canal treaty).”

So no one suspected Noriega was a CIA asset?

“Toward the end Torrijos had questions but was not sure. There was a coup against Torrijos. Noriega was essential in allowing him a safe return.  Torrijos was in Mexico when they advanced on him. They tried bringing him back through Costa Rica where they were going to kill him. So he went in via El Salvador where he had many ties with his former academy friends, now in high places in the military. The airport didn’t have lights. So, my uncle and other family members pointed their cars toward the runway and turned on the headlights.”

“Great movie scene. At what point did he go from being an asset to being a problem?”

“Noriega played a major role for the U.S. because he kept a relationship with the guerrillas in Columbia and left-wing movements in Central and South America. He was in charge of providing funding for the contras in Nicaragua from drug trafficking in Columbia.”

“You know that Ronald Reagan did creative things with the Iran contra deal. Was Noriega freelancing with the U.S. looking the other way, or were they supporting it?”

“The information that we have here was that it was well aware that one of his responsibilities was to manage the drug trafficking so that xyz movement is allowed, but not the rest, so they are contained. He also got resources to fund some of his operations. At one point, he got the hang of it. The problem was he enjoyed it, he thought, if I am doing 100, why not do 150, then 200? And then it kept growing and growing.

“He kept informing for the CIA in the scope of his responsibilities and then he went out for himself. He funded the guerrillas, left-wing movements, the Sandinistas, because he was also an arms dealer. He was working with everybody. At the end of the day, he sold to the devil and anyone who was there for him to do business with.”

I laughed, “He was a great capitalist.”

“There is a book by a writer called John Perkins.”

“Economic Hit Man.”

“Yes, when Torrijos died, my father was supposed to be on that plane. My younger brother had meningitis. Lost his hearing. Torrijos said, go ahead, be with your family. I’ll meet you at the beach house.”

That was purely a mechanical failure, not sabotage?

“Noriega was not next in line. There was Torrijos, then Flores then Paredes.   Then Noriega. That specific plane had just come back from maintenance.  There was speculation about several things. One.  There was a case of sodas that came in at the last minute that was not checked by security – that invited a lot of question marks about Noriega. Two, within the control systems, there was a release of a gas that makes people fall asleep, there was speculation that that happened. One of Noriega’s security heads told me once that there was guy in a bar, he was drunk and he said that he had orders from Noriega’s people to get to the site first. He got there first, and he killed everyone. And that guy was murdered a week later. (The guy I talked to) was one of the heads of security for Noriega and very well informed.”

Omar Torrijos

Tell me about the moment that the U.S. said, this guy is out of control.

“Going back, there has to be motive, what are the interests. When Torrijos was doing his process to get support for the Canal treaties, of course he went to the world. When he did that, he became not only a Panamanian leader, but a Latin American leader, admired by the world. Because he lived what he preached. There was a U.S. photographer that had been taking pictures of Reagan and he came to Panama. And I’ll tell you a story, it’s a great story. Tom Zimboroff, he was from California, he came to Panama and was here for a couple of weeks without having a chance to meet with General Torrijos. So he found out that there was a press conference at his beach house. He could not get an interview because Torrijos did not like to give interviews. Everybody left and all of a sudden the helicopter started spinning, and he said, well, this is my chance. He got into the back of the helicopter, strapped himself in. A few minutes later my father went into the helicopter and General Torrijos came in, and security and they left. I’ll show you a picture how they always sat one in front of the other. And they were talking. All of a sudden, Torrijos looks at Tom and says, ‘Who the hell is that guy??’ And my father says, I don’t know. And so they asked him, who are you. And Tom explained. And Torrijos said, you know what, you know I have to say, you have a lot of guts. I have two options here.”

One is to kill you.

One is to kill you and throw you out of the helicopter for violating security. You want to talk to me?  I admire people with bravery and guts. So, if you want to document this, let’s go, let’s do it. So he spent most of 76 and 77 traveling the world with him. Took 18,000 pictures. We have the pictures. My father kept the original minutes of all those meetings. So we have pictures and minutes and will put together a book.

“Tom spoke to me one day and said when Reagan was running for the presidency, a lot of his speeches were against the treaties. So General Torrijos sent a message to Reagan through Tom and said you don’t know me, let’s get together and suggested they meet. And Reagan sent back a message that I never am going to meet with that tin horn general.

“In ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’, Perkins mentions that in 1981, Jaime Roldos, the president of Ecuador died in a very mysterious plane crash. And in the book he suggests that the only two heads of state that he met that never kneeled down to the U.S. global empire were Torrijos and Roldos. And for that they paid with their lives.

“I had a chance to speak with a relative of Roldos here, a very smart man, and he was 100% convinced that it happened that way and had a lot of evidence and information as to why that was true.

“Motive once again. One of the things the U.S. was trying to achieve was to leave military installations here in Panama. And under Torrijos that would never happen. When 2000 came and the Canal was reverted, there had been negotiations at the U.S.’s initiative to put multi-lateral drug centers under the control of the U.S. military. I imagine that when we say where is the motive, preserving the asset, preserving the strategic position for the U.S. Southern Command, Noriega was feeding the U.S. information about Torrijos’ intentions, about the situation going out of control for the U.S., how Torrijos was getting way too much international support.”

The non-aligned movement.

“Torrijos had a plan, an open plan, that he asked the Assembly that he be granted head of state powers between 1972 and 1978 with one mission, to return the Canal. When that was concluded, the process began for return to civilian administration. So, between 1972 and 1978, there were elections, not selected by everyone, by a selected group, 505 members of the community, intellectuals, people who really knew their job, and the next step was to have general elections. That meant military people who were in power would be reduced. A lot of people pushed Torrijos to run for the presidency and Torrijos said no, I have to set the example. I have to go back to the barracks so that the army can follow me. If not, how am I going to tell anyone else to go back to the barracks. That meant for Noriega, and all his group, there was not going to be a succession plan. They would go back to being everyday military men.”

How did Noriega rise to power?

In 81, Paredes was a lieutenant colonel. He never, out of respect for Torrijos, wanted to become a general. He was more an executive. He was very easily taken out. Paredes had a strong control of the government, Noriega was his right hand man.  Noriega, very smart guy that he is, he convinced Paredes to retire, and to run in open elections in 1984 with the support of the party and the support of the military.  In that way he would gain legitimacy, control everything and continue the process that Torrijos had envisioned.”

Sounds good.

“Sounds good. When he announced his retirement, there is a famous speech that said, ‘Good job, my general.'” Rod wipes his hands. “From that day on, Noriega proclaimed himself general, gained control of the armed forces, we did have elections, the winner was not Paredes, but instead a former world bank VP for Latin America, a University of Chicago-educated, very smart guy, who served for a couple of years until he said I can’t do this any more. He stepped down.

“In 1987, you had a major event. A left wing doctor Hugo Spadafora who fighting in Nicaragua came to Panama to announce that Noriega was doing all this drug trafficking with the contras, and Noriega’s guys intercepted him and he was murdered and decapitated.

“In 1987, Noriega’s right hand man turned on him and made public Noriega’s participation in drugs. That became a major crisis. The crisis was building up to the point that the U.S. decides, this guy is out of control.  Every day there is more intrigue. Taking him out with a Navy SEALS team would have been very simple. But with an invasion, taking out the entire structure was sending a message. And that happened 10 years before the final Canal handoff. I imagine they said, if this guy is doing that now, when he gets control of the Canal, there is going to be chaos. If it is going to be left in Panamanian hands, it is going to be under conditions that are acceptable. And at the same time with a civilian administration that we can try to negotiate the terms for the drug interdiction center. He knew a lot of things about George Bush. It was just ’88, and Bush just became President. Noriega held A LOT of information. ”

Meaning, George Bush wanted to…

“…silence him. A lot of information.”

So, George Bush is head of the CIA, Reagan’s Vice President, and then President, ten years before the handover of the Canal, plus out of control narco trafficking, plus the Canal situation, handed over against Reagan’s objections, with this guy in power, the Canal is in jeopardy.

“The canal was in jeopardy.”

“There were two coups in 1989. The second came out poorly for eighteen officers.”

“That’s why I mentioned that taking out the whole structure was part of the idea  When there was a coup against Noriega, the officers had support of the U.S. Southern Command. Everything was coordinated in case Noriega’s supporters regained control. When they called for support, they were told you are on our own.”

Why?

“As I said when you look at motive, if you only dismantle the head of the armed forces, the same structure goes forward and you are not going to get your objective of negotiating conditions where you can leave your base here in Panama.”

So then the key was dismantling the Panamanian Defense Forces and instituting an elected government. That was the strategy?

“Yes. So that they could have a formal counterpart to negotiate with.”

That was a brutal betrayal, to encourage these guys and then leave them hanging, only to get slaughtered.

“Slaughtered.”

Do you think the U.S. told Noriega this was happening?

“I don’t think so.”

So, in conclusion, as a Panamanian, you see that Noriega was taken out, certain things happened that may have had positive outcomes, what is your point of view about ‘Operation Just Cause?’

“I think it was an operation that, propaganda-wise, was great propaganda, that there were very little casualties, very little damage, we liberated a country from this horrible dictator. The reality is that we had a great head of state that had done magnificent things and he was the one that was murdered. We were then left with the inheritance of this monster. Look what he did with the support of the U.S.. Once the U.S. objectives were accomplished, he was no longer needed, so then there was an invasion that killed thousands of innocent people.

“I was in the U.S. with my dad, we were skiing. We had to come into Costa Rica. When we first came into the city, about 10 days after the invasion, the military HQ areas were leveled. The U.S. tried a lot of equipment for the first time in Panama, and they missed targets, and a lot of innocent people died. Since, Panama has been able to rebuild itself by working very hard and setting objectives and thank God, Noriega is out.  But the price and the way…Panama was on its tracks without him. Noriega was forced here by the U.S. I was educated in the U.S., it’s not a matter of education or affinity, it’s how I see things.

You’ve been generous with your time. What advice would you have for U.S. policy in the future as it relates to interventions, as was done in Panama?

“I think every day it is more clear, the U.S. has consistently done the same thing. Noriega was a former ally who became a monster and there a lot of casualties in the middle. You have Saddam Hussein, ally, then a lot of casualties in the middle. Osama bin Laden, an ally, then you have the same. The story repeats itself and I think it’s time the U.S. learns from its mistakes.”

And what is the lesson?

“You have to evaluate what your policy is and how you are going to infiltrate and participate in foreign affairs. If you are going to be a political partner or you are going to be an economic partner, or are you going to try to control what is happening in other countries.”

But, if I may, is there a certain moral principle or foreign policy principal…”

“I think the moral principal is, you create these monsters that then turn on you, and that at the end of the day creates hatred. Thank God, we here in Latin America, we are very passive people, we are mainly of Christian background, forgiving.  But elsewhere in the world, they are more radical. And that is what we are seeing.”

We shake hands, promise to follow up with photos and more information, and Rod adds one last thing.

“You know, the Canal treaties were ratified in the Senate by only one vote. Teddy Kennedy. Torrijos promised that the Canal would be returned to Panama. So, he and my father arranged, and no one else knew, not even the soldiers involved, that if the Canal treat was not ratified, orders were given to blow it up so no one else could have it. Not permanently. Just for two years.”

After a brief pause, I said, “That’s pretty strong.”

Rod holds his hands wide apart and smiles. “Torrijos had huge balls.”

The Panama Canal treaty was negotiated by a Frenchman and an American before Panamanian officials could reach Washington. It was one of many, many grand heists of land from people with far fewer gunships. As Jimmy Carter negotiated a treaty with Panamainian General Omar Torrijos, candidate Ronald Reagan campaigned on a platform of, screw those people, we are not giving it back. Which motivated John Wayne, yes that John Wayne, to weigh in and say the following.

Associated Press. March 16, 1987.

In a letter to Mr. Reagan dated Nov. 11, 1977, a copy of which was sent to Mr. Carter, the actor accused Mr. Reagan of spreading untruths about the Panama Canal Treaty in letters to his supporters.

He signed the letter ”Duke” and enclosed with it a five-page rebuttal – written on the stationery of the Republican National Committee – of Mr. Reagan’s stand on the canal issue.

The treaty was signed and honored.