ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 10, 1996 TAG: 9611120136
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN LE CARRE
I first visited Panama seven years ago while I was researching an earlier novel of mine, ``The Night Manager.''
I wanted a place where one of my characters, a British baddie, could plausibly pick up a very large shipment of cocaine without being bothered by overvigilant authority. I was talking tons.
The drug-agency people in Miami assured me there was nowhere to compare with the Free Zone of Colon: the best facilities, they said, a long tradition, privacy and plenty of official understanding.
I also wanted my baddie, who was a world-class dealer in illegal arms, to be able to stage a noisy demonstration of high-tech firepower in order to impress his customers, the Colombian drug cartels.
Panama was once again the recommended spot. So I flew to Panama City and waited around in bulletproof air-conditioned offices overlooking the Avenida Balboa, and talked to people engaged in what is politely called import-export, and ate with them in quiet restaurants while heavy gentlemen kept guard over us from adjoining tables.
I sat in the casino of the Hotel Continental and watched the gambling. The men wore gold chains and white shoes; some of the women, fur coats. The air-conditioning was turned to cold - I suppose to make the fur coats necessary. A notice at the door commanded guests to turn in their handguns at reception.
I sat in the hotel lobby and watched the mating rituals of uniformed U.S. soldiers and the quick-eyed girls who hovered round the hotel steps. The soldiers had not checked their guns.
I was being one of my characters at the time, waiting for word of his missing secret agent, so I couldn't leave my post.
I sat alone at the hotel poolside in a canyon of new buildings and ate barbecued chicken and drank Chilean red while the band played rumbas to empty tables. I was reminded of Beirut between battles, when Lebanon too was determinedly ``back to normal.''
Soon I drove out to the poor suburb of El Chorillo, where Operation Just Cause had gone so horribly wrong. No one knows anymore who started the fire. Some say the invading troops did it - can you invade a country you already occupy? Others blame Manuel Noriega's elite guard.
``Everyone was sleeping with Noriega,'' one of his political advisers, Joel McCleary, has declared, in language the general would appreciate. ``Noriega was a lovely hooker. But then he grew old and got wrinkled. He grew more corrupt; he started selling drugs. He wasn't fun to take to parties anymore. So you had to get rid of him.''
Richard Koster, an American writer living in Panama, made a similar point in The New York Times a few days after the invasion. The United States, he said, had performed a brilliant piece of surgery on a lung-cancer patient they had been pushing cigarettes to for the past 30 years.
I had to go back to England to complete ``The Night Manager.'' It didn't give much space to Panama, not nearly as much as I would have wished.
I wrote another novel too, but Panama still wouldn't let me go. I was drawn by the prospect of a tiny, much-colonized country deciding who to be in the year 2000.
First the Colombians had had them, then the French, now the United States - but only until lunchtime on Dec. 31, 1999, when [the treaty expires, and] the gringos must ask Panama's permission to remain.
And even if they get it, kiss their majestic, lovingly maintained canal goodbye.
I was also fascinated by Panama as a microcosm of the United States' colonial experience and by the peculiar community of ``Zonians,'' mostly American employees of the canal company who, unable to own property in the zone, had resorted to a kind of watered-down Christian communism dating from the 1920s.
And I was struck by the fact that Panama's relevance to the great anti-Communist crusade had died with the end of the Evil Empire - and coincidentally at the very moment when America's colonial tenure in Panama died too.
Above all, I was drawn to the canal: as a power symbol, as an object of colonial nostalgia and as a geopolitical wild card as we drift into the 21st century.
Will Panama become another Singapore? It is a notion much peddled these days, and certainly it is the dream of its many bankers. Their thinking? ``Let's upstage Miami as the spiritual capital of the hemisphere; let's be banker, playground, shopping heaven and offshore tax mecca for the whole of Latin America!''
Yet first Panama must feed, house and educate its poor. It must build roads, railways, hospitals and schools. It must impose real taxes and collect them. Try selling that idea to its ruling few.
To become a Singapore, Panama will have to produce a high-tech clerical class and rid itself of the omnipresent drug trade and the wasteful effects of corruption. To prosper, Panama will have to invest in Panama - another concept abhorrent to the tiny group of powerful people who control the country's destiny. The president, incidentally, is not considered one of them.
``They got Ali Baba,'' ran the joke after the U.S. invasion, ``but they missed the Forty Thieves.''
Panama is a beautiful country, with splendid people, coastlines, mountains, pastures, forest and out islands. Will sloth, corruption and stupidity ruin this little paradise, as they have ruined so many others?
The canal is a precious and delicate instrument that depends on meticulous maintenance and massive amounts of fresh water every day from the surrounding rain forest to fill its locks. The Suez Canal, by comparison, is child's play.
Will the Panamanians be able to isolate their canal from the perennial vices of short-termism, nepotism and corruption? Will they hack into the forests and kill the canal? Will they rush to raise tariffs, reduce maintenance and cut corners?
Panamanians hate to fix things if they are not broken, and sometimes if they are.
The canal has always been a nonprofit enterprise. Will profit now become the name of the game? And if so, who exactly is going to profit here? The usual fat cats, or for once the Panamanian community as a whole?
Or is the canal already out of date, as many insist: will it soon be marginalized by new transportation methods and new technological needs?
And as the clock approaches noon on Dec. 31, 1999, will the United States really relinquish power, or will right-wing North America dig in its heels and find a reason to stay put?
Such a reason might be the Japanese, who are everywhere in Panama and whose ambitions to build their own sea-level canal are refusing to go away.
I was aching to get back to Panama and start my novel. But it was four years before I got back. Everything, and nothing, had changed. A new president named Ernesto Perez Balladares had been installed, a man with a baby-fine complexion and nascent jowls.
``So what kind of book are you proposing to write?'' he asked, smiling.
Smiling too, I said I was still looking around. I said I couldn't guarantee it would be a love letter.
``Well, just as long as it's good,'' he said, still smiling.
I said I would do my best. We agreed that one couldn't do more. We shook hands, smiling like mad.
Only a few weeks before, a fuming Perez Balladares had vowed to sue The Economist magazine for accusing his party of receiving dirty money from an intermediary of one of the Colombian drug cartels.
Grim-faced British lawyers were flown to Panama City to sharpen the ax. And days later Balladares was back on television, this time to confess that there was substance in the allegations. An overzealous party official has been earmarked to take the fall.
Yet the truth is, nobody was faintly surprised. Everyone knows that in Panama even the best of men find it hard to get rich without a little white powder sticking to their fingers.
So I began putting my story together.
``Quel Panama!'' the French used to declare at the turn of the century, in the wake of France's failure to build its own canal across the isthmus. They meant: ``What an insoluble mess!''
As I listened to one horror story after another about high-level Panamanian corruption, I found myself nodding in silent recognition, and thinking: ``Quelle Angleterre.''
The odd thing is, Panama is not half the mess it might be after being mauled and abused and corrupted by a succession of colonial exploiters. Do you know how many people died at the hands of Noriega's cynically misnomered Dignity Battalions and secret police? Twenty-five odd - negligible, by Latin American standards.
Panama is like no other Latin American country, in that its people possess a mysterious self-righting mechanism that again and again has saved them from the kind of appalling blood baths that have engulfed Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
No public lynchings or beatings followed the downfall of Noriega. But there was any amount of looting, notably by the rich. Some of Panama's best and brightest were caught on video pinching goodies from grand shops where they had charge accounts.
But there was little in the way of retribution - some would say, too little. Partly, Panamanians have their selective amnesia to thank for this. And partly an eerie tolerance of one another's foibles that, for all the rumor mill and the gossip, is one of the country's greatest charms.
And Panama has a new dawn ahead of it.
And just possibly a new, politically responsible generation will emerge and find its voice and sling out what is rotten, which is quite a lot.
And perhaps some unlikely piece of magic will result.
- 1996 JOHN LE CARRE
John le Carre is the author, most recently, of ``The Tailor of Panama,'' published by Alfred A. Knopf.
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