Eric Jackson covered the subject well about our holidays in November.  They seem to go on forever.

Everybody’s favorite, the Bomberos. Archive photo by José F. Ponce

We also have a slide show courtesy of Mark Heyer here.
November’s Panamanian holidays, in a different order
by Eric Jackson

The old order of church and state

So, you’re new to the country and don’t know what they’re taking all these days off and marching about this month? Or you were born, raised and educated here and in school they just told you some dates to memorize so you really don’t know much about it? Let me explain it in historical context and more or less in the order it happened.

A lot of Panama’s history is the product of decisions made elsewhere. A critical mandate from abroad for us and all of the Americas was the European Conquest, which had some details generally skipped over in school, one of which went back to the decline of the Roman Empire, when Constantine donated vast authority and territorial jurisdiction to the Catholic Church. A long succession of Popes took it literally, and as the empire broke up and new kingdoms arose they adopted the theory that although the church was sovereign, it assigned lands to various kings, who in turn owed tribute to the Vatican. They extended this attitude to lands newly “discovered” or conquered by the forces of those monarchs whom they considered vassals. The attempts to expand overland to the east were a bloody and expensive fiasco known as The Crusades, but some temporary gains were made and two of the ultimately important things for Panama that happened during those unfortunate wars between Christianity and Islam:

1. The Crusaders who reached the marketplaces of the Levant acquired tastes for spices and other things to be had in India, Indonesia, China, East Africa and other realms with which their Muslim foes traded. Those who made it back home to Europe brought these tastes back with them and created markets where these products were previously unknown.
2. The bankers for the Crusades, the Knights Templar, did business in Jerusalem for many years and arrived at the heretical conclusion that a God-fearing Jew or an Allah-fearing Muslim with a good reputation in the community was a far more worthy and less risky business partner than many a nominal Catholic. For this they were dispossessed, persecuted and disbanded, but it is said that the followers of the martyred Jacques de Molay avoided much of that by going underground, centuries later to emerge from absolute clandestinity as the modern-day freemasons — whom the Catholic Church condemns to this day. Whether or not the Masonic claims to direct organizational descent from the Knights Templar are true, their free-thinking and anti-clerical views and the Vatican’s hostility to these are facts that have played an important role in the history of the Americas.

Spain in Portugal, for some pretty compelling domestic reasons of their own, set out by sea to find trade routes around the Muslim lands to the spice islands and environs, in the course of which their navigators encountered and colonized places in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Early in this process Pope Alexander VI issued a 1493 decree, and then a year later sponsored the Treaty of Tordesillas, which set a line west of the Azores and through the poles down the other side of the globe, granting Spain dibs to whatever they could conquer on one side of the globe and Portugal similar right on the other side. Thus Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Timor, Macao and Brazil (etc.) were “Portuguese,” while Panama, most of rest of the Americas, Guam, the Philippines (etc.) were “Spanish.” Part of the deal was that Spain and Portugal owed the Vatican a duty to convert the conquered peoples to Catholicism, finance the church’s missions in the colonized lands and otherwise pay tribute to the church. That amounted to a major wealth transfer from the indigenous people of the Americas to Spain — with a share to the Vatican — when the Spaniards were stripping the gold and silver out of Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. The windfall subsided, but even after Spain’s degeneracy and bankruptcy the Holy See retained a financial stake in Spanish rule in the Americas and remained the strongest royalist institution.

Independence from Spain

Come the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions and the secular and ecumenical notions that the freemasons had long held became a lot more respectable and powerful in the world. Spain, meanwhile, had been ravaged in the early 18th century by European powers fighting over which foreign prince would acquire its crown and by the early 19th century did not have popular king to whom very many Latin Americans looked up as the father of their country. The ultimate ignominy was when Napoleon conquered Spain and put his brother Joseph — popularly reviled as “Pepe el Borracho” — on the Spanish throne for five years. Joseph Bonaparte, a Mason, ended the Spanish Inquisition and Spain’s special relationship with the Holy See, including the tribute. The few years under French anti-clerical rule changed the ways that the Catholic Church operated in the Americas in lasting ways.

After the European powers and particularly the British ganged up to put Napoleon in his place — on a God-forsaken island in the South Atlantic — they had a big congress and installed an allegedly legitimate monarch on the Spanish throne. Post-Napoleonic Spain kept some of the reforms imported from the French — which is why Latin America’s legal systems are based upon the Napoleonic Code — and partially restored its severed ties with the church. But all through the time of the French Revolution and its aftermath in the Americas the winds of the Enlightenment were still blowing and orders from Madrid seemed increasingly incongruous. And then, just as such freemasons as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin made trouble for the British Crown in North America, so did such South American freemasons as José de San Martín, Bernardo O’Higgins and, most notably of all, Simón Bolívar, create problems for the Spanish Crown.

Bolívar, the son of slave-owning oligarchs in what is now Venezuela, was a persistent pest who was better liked by the Vene slaves than by folks from the social class in which he was brought up. Exiled from previous revolutionary attempts he returned with a pittance of support from independent Haiti and a commitment to both oust the Spaniards and free the slaves, he was run out of Caracas and into the trackless jungle, never to be heard from again those Venes who supported Spain hoped. But with a ragtag army that included some hardcore Irish revolutionaries, he cut his way through the bush, scaled the snow-capped Andes and appeared behind Bogota, much to the Spanish authorities’ surprise. On August 7, 1819 the hastily assembled royal forces crumbled before Bolívar’s army in the Battle of Boyoca, after which The Great Liberator marched into a Bogota that the Spanish authorities had fled.

Bogota had been capital of Spain’s Viceroyalty of New Grenada, which included Panama. The Spanish viceroy, Juan de Sámano, fled to Panama City. The defeated and ailing old cavalry officer asked Spain to send in a replacement, but while he was waiting, in July of 1821, he died.

Meanwhile, if Spanish rule in New Granada had been decapitated, there vicious local loyalists looking to cash in on a restoration. One of these was Rodrigo Zúñiga, the royal mayor of Nata, which at the time encompassed the Azuero Peninsula. The locals were not eager to accept either his or Spain’s authority and after his deputies encountered violent resistance on a mission to Azuero he ordered the executions or exiles of a number of community leaders.

The main standing Spanish royal presence in the Azuero was a small army garrison in La Villa de Los Santos. Its fall to local residents is an historical fact and also the stuff of legends.

The legend has it that most of the soldiers in the garrison had the hots for this foxy young lady named Rufina Alfaro who sold eggs and vegetables from her family’s nearby farm, made some money on the side as a cook and who was well connected with everyone. “Everyone” in this case included the colonel in command of the garrison and the leading dissidents who were wanted by the mayor and his minions. It is said that Rufina Alfaro found out about the daily routines of the soldiers, including when they would all have their guns disassembled for cleaning. At this precise time on November 10, 1821, it is said that she led a local mob, armed with sticks and stones, which compelled the soldiers to surrender without firing a shot.

There is no documentary evidence of the existence of Rufina Alfaro or her family. There is evidence not only of the surrender of the La Villa de Los Santos garrison, but of the Catholic parish priest’s role in ensuring that this happened without loss of life. Not only that — in Nata and many towns in the Interior the leading citizens, including some clerics, called for independence from Spain and effectively put an end to the mayor’s authority. The declarations of the town meetings (cabildos abiertos) in these communities mostly do survive and the one from La Villa de Los Santos is considered the first call for Panama’s independence from Spain. Its anniversary is a national holiday here.

In Panama City the news about Bolívar’s continued victories against Spain did not end with the deposed viceroy’s arrival, but the sensational news of the uprising in the Interior advanced the cause of a shadowy clandestine independence movement. The Interioranos also appointed one of their own, Segundo Villarreal, to lead their independence movement into Panama City. That he did, organizing an assault on the jail there where most of the political prisoners were held, liberating those men. (The political prisoners held there and at Fort San Lorenzo included not only anti-Spanish rebels from Panama, but also from elsewhere in the Spanish Empire.) However, like the liberation of the Interior this was also no military battle. The commander of Spanish forces on the isthmus, Colonel José de Fábrega, sympathized with the independence movement and did not seriously contest the jailbreak.

On November 28, 1821, Panama City held its own cabildo abierto, under the sponsorship of Colonel Fábrega, the Catholic bishop of Panama José Higinio Durán y Martel and the heads of most of the city’s aristocratic families of that time. They declared independence from Spain and joined Bolívar’s Gran Colombia project. Fábrega took a commission as general from Bolívar and graciously allowed those of his former subordinates who remained loyal to the crown to sail away to Spain. Thus, while The Great Liberator’s armies never fought a battle on the isthmus, Panama is considered one of the Bolivarian republics.

Independence from Colombia

After the fall of Colombia to the revolutionaries, Bolívar set out in 1821 to liberate his native Venezuela (which in the Spanish colonial scheme was a captaincy general apart from New Granada) while General Antonio José de Sucre fought the Spaniards in Ecuador, winning decisively in 1822 and delivering that part of the old New Granada into Gran Colombia. Next The Great Liberator and his Southern Cone counterpart, the Argentine General José de San Martín, collaborated in driving the Spanish out of Peru. San Martín bowed to the Venezuelan’s leadership and retired to Europe, whereupon the Bolivarian armies decisively crushed the last major Spanish force in the Battle of Ayacucho and rolled on to liberate what was then Upper Peru and is now Bolivia.

While he was off fighting these wars, Bolívar entrusted the government in Bogota to one of his officers, General Francisco de Paula Santander. The two young men soon fell out. Santander was a stern legalist, whereas personal authority and a sense of justice were more characteristic of Bolívar’s style. Santander tended to rule by legislation, Bolívar by decree. Santander tended to execute captured Spanish officers and rebels, while Bolívar generally pardoned them. The political rivalry became fierce and debilitating, and even if Bolívar got the upper hand he couldn’t keep Venezuela in the union (and never intended to incorporate Peru or Upper Peru into Gran Colombia). That left him as leader in Bogota of a government with a largely hostile political class. He despaired, resigned as president and died in 1830 at age 47 of tuberculosis. It is said that shortly before he died he summed up his political and military career by exclaiming that “All who served the Revolution have plowed the sea.” When the liberator left the political stage, Ecuador pulled out of Gran Colombia.

That left Panama as part of a truncated Colombia, never quite happy with its status. There was a brief fling at independence in 1840 and 1841, and various constitutions changed the name and configuration of the country. Meanwhile, Colombia always seemed to have a civil war going on. Mainly it took the form of Conservatives against Liberals, the former for establishing Catholicism as the official religion and dominated by the biggest rural landowners, the latter based mainly among urban commercial and industrial interests and opposing state-sponsored religion. On top of all ideological disputes, there was, and is to this day, a phenomenon of warlordism on the periphery, of local bosses and would-be bosses taking up arms to dominate areas remote from Bogota.

The chronic violence and instability retarded Panama’s desires to be a world transportation and commercial center, which it had been in the days of the Portobelo Trade Fairs and had started to be again with the building of the Panama Railroad. The fighting got so bad that in 1885 the fighting disrupted the French effort at building a canal (which in any case was doomed for public health and financial reasons) and burned down most of the city of Colon, whereupon the US Navy sailed into Colon to restore order and the Chilean Navy sailed into Panama City to prevent US annexation of the isthmus.

Throughout the Colombian period Panama was mostly Liberal turf but there were a lot of Conservatives, particularly in Veraguas and Panama City, and the Conservatives also had the advantage of divisions among the Liberals.

In 1894 and again in 1898, Colombia’s Conservatives were “re-elected” on the strength of Liberal newspapers being shut down and many of the leading Liberal activists jailed or exiled. In both years their presidential candidates were infirm old men with military figures holding the real power. In October of 1899 the Liberals staged an uprising. But first the Liberals stopped to argue about who would be in command and when the shooting would start, giving the Conservatives the opportunity to put their defenses in place. In Panama City a divided Liberal force was thrown back in confusion from the Calidonia Bridge with about 500 killed, leaving the Conservatives in control of the city for the duration of what became The Thousand Days War.

Across Colombia and Panama more than 100,000 people were killed. Panama City was besieged and the most merciless civil war was fought in what are now Panama Oeste and Cocle. In the affected part of the Interior, some 80 percent or more of farm houses, livestock and crops were destroyed as the Liberal guerrilla General Victoriano Lorenzo retreated from San Carlos (with the weapons rescued from the debacle at the Calidonia Bridge) to a mountain lair above Penonome and El Valle, then advanced from the hills to take Penonome and Aguadulce. In the city there was mass starvation, to the extent that nearly one year after the war, when the first US military medical teams arrived there, they found the leading cause of death to be beriberi, a hunger-related vitamin deficiency disease.

A peace of sorts was brokered aboard a US Navy warship, without the participation of any of the Panamanian Liberals’ actual leaders. When General Lorenzo questioned its terms, he was betrayed by a fellow Liberal, handed over to Conservatives, given a summary military trial and executed in Plaza Francia in May of 1903. Shortly thereafter the rump Conservative government in Bogota negotiated a canal treaty with the Americans but it couldn’t muster a genuine quorum in the Colombian Senate at the time and in August Conservative senators who might otherwise have ratified it refused to vote for it under such circumstances. (The notion that the US government would pay $40 million for a French concession that was about to expire also led some Colombian senators to turn down the offer and hold out for more.) The Americans might have waited a few months for things to get back to something approaching normality and had their treaty with Colombia, but two groups conspired against this:

1. The Panamanian Conservatives could see the handwriting on the wall and saw a return to any semblance of democracy as their ticket out of office in the next elections.

2. The French canal concession had been moribund for years but was still going through the motions. However, their concession from Colombia would expire at the end of the year, which would mean that the shareholders — the Panama Railroad (a New York corporation), French engineer Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla and a group of speculators represented by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan Cromwell being the dominant group — would lose their opportunity to sell the remains of their concession to the Americans.

So a plot was hatched in the offices of Sullivan Cromwell, which used its influence in Washington to bring Theodore Roosevelt’s administration into its machinations. The Panamanian plotters were led by Panama Railroad doctor Manuel Amador Guerrero and included mainly railroad employees or professionals on retainer from the railroad but also leading Panamanian Conservatives, Star & Herald publisher José Gabriel Duque and a few dissident Liberals like Federico Boyd and Carlos Mendoza. General Esteban Huertas, commander of Colombia’s troops in Panama, was bribed. An early November coup was planned and for that purpose Sullivan Cromwell put together an independence kit, replete with declaration of independence, new flag and other documents to be promulgated.

The coup was moved up to November 3 when a suspicious Colombian government sent the Tiradores Battalion from Barranquilla to Colon. Huertas cabled the battalion’s commanders to take the train to Panama City to meet him. They got on the train and in the jungle near the Continental Divide the engine stopped, decoupled from the officers’ car, and sped away. With the officers thus stranded and it being a bank holiday, funds were obtained from the Star & Herald’s safe to buy copious amounts of liquor to bestow upon the heroic warriors of the enlisted ranks of the Tiradores, who promptly and as planned got blasted out of their gourds and in no shape to fight. Sullivan & Cromwell’s declaration of independence went out over the wires and the coup was on. The USS Nashville and its marine detachment sailed into Colon. The Frenchman Bunau-Varilla made representations to the US government on behalf of the provisional government.

Meanwhile, the law firm’s independence kit was kind of an embarrassment, so some of the independence plotters’ wives were commissioned to make a Panamanian flag and Carlos Mendoza sat down at a typewriter to compose the Acta de Independencia that would be approved at a cabildo abierto. General Huertas and the coup plotters had everything under control, including the Colombian governor and the Panama city council on board, except that they didn’t control the Colombian Navy, except that all places in Panama City where troops might be landed from a ship were secured against such a possibility. But on the evening of November 3, seeing what had happened and not caring to live with the reputation of having given up without resistance, the captain of the Colombian gunboat Bogota, which was in Panama Bay, ordered his men to open fire on Panama City. The only thing they hit was a vegetable vendor’s cart, killing Chinese merchant Wong Kong Yee and his donkey. Thus went November 3, 1903, Panamanian Independence Day.

The following day people gathered in Plaza Catedral, where the Acta de Independencia was read and approved and the new flag was displayed. Thereafter November 4 has been observed as Flag Day, a legal holiday in Panama.

Over on the other side, the Colombian troops were waking up from their drinking binge to find the US Marine Corps patrolling the streets of Colon. With their officers missing, nobody rallied the soldiers to do battle with either the Americans or the separatists. Finally an offer was made: if they got back on their ship and went back to Barranquilla, nobody would shoot at them. On November 5 the Colombian soldiers accepted that offer and since then the day has been celebrated in Colon as the anniversary of the Colombian surrender.

There are many spins put on the story of Panama’s separation from Colombia and its link to the canal treaty that Bunau-Varilla made with the Americans — about which Panamanians agitated, fought and died for three-quarters of a century to abrogate — but some further history begs a questions about these spins.

The separation leaders were careful to stipulate that the Liberals’ principal surviving leader, Belisario Porras, was not a citizen and was ineligible for public office. They installed a Conservative government. But the Conservative hold on power lasted only about six years, and soon after the Liberals came into office they legalized Porras’s status and he dominated Panamanian politics for nearly a generation. The Conservative Party quickly disappeared from the scene, forever. Panama was, after all, mainly Liberal turf. So why did the Liberals accept the Conservative coup of 1903?

There would be many reasons, but one of the central ones is that more unifying than any self-definition of what “Panamanian” is, there was and is a commonly accepted definition of what it is not. We are not Colombians and we do not care to be part of their never-ending civil conflicts. Panama is not an artificial country created by Teddy Roosevelt, notwithstanding the important influences of his and all manner of other US actions on our existence. We were already speaking different dialects of Spanish than the Colombians, were demographically far more international in our ancestry than the Colombians and had a transportation services and international commerce economy that Colombia lacked by the time we became independent. Various individuals, factions, companies and nations took advantage, but Panama went its separate way in order to live as who we are in some semblance of peace.