Some four or five years after starting to read Graham Greene’s Getting To Know the General, I found the leisure to finish it on a trip to Brazil. Previously, I had brought a copy with me on a trip to Panama (the General of the book’s title is General Omar Torrijos, Panama’s military ruler from 1968 to 1981), but accidentally left it in a motel in Boquete, which makes an brief appearance in the book, after having read only the first few pages.

But by that point I had reached one passage that stayed with me until one day I had a chance to buy another copy of the book (at a grotesquely inflated price at the annual book fair in Buenos Aires):

A friend asked me, as I was writing the closing passages of this book, ‘But why this interest which you seem always to have shown in Spain and Spanish America? There was Mexico in The Power and the Glory, Paraguay in Travels with My Aunt, Cuba in Our Man in Havana, Argentina in The Honorary Consul, you visited President Allende in Chile. And now you’ve published Monsignor Quixote…’ … Perhaps the answer lies in this: in those countries politics have seldom meant a mere alternation between rival electoral parties but have been a matter of life and death.

While I have never been particularly invested in politics personally, I found that this passage expressed much of what had long made Latin America seem to me a romantic and adventurous place, particularly before the extremism of the current administration in the United States made politics there seem somewhat important in that country once again.

Greene’s relationship with Torrijos begins as an unsolicited invitation by Torrijos to meet him in Panama. The motive for that invitation is never made explicit, but clearly Torrijos was aware of Greene’s stature as a writer, and presumably he believed Greene would provide him a favorable representation in the world press. (A reference is made to a portrait of the General that Greene published in the New York Review of Books, during the period covered by this book.) I am not sufficiently familiar with Greene’s work to say whether there is anything in his writing that might have suggested to Torrijos that any such representation would be sympathetic, but we can perhaps assume that to be the case as well. What starts out as a somewhat fragmentary memoir ends up being not only a deeply humane portrait of a leader who in many ways typifies Latin American politics, but an insightful overview of the Central American (even more broadly Latin American) political context in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

If one includes the book’s epilogue, written in 1983, the action ends little more than 20 years ago, yet its context seems completely foreign from today’s vantage, surely because the fall of the Soviet Union largely put an end to the American intervention which intensified and polarized the conflicts in Latin America, and also caused exciting ideological clashes to give way to the duller calculus of economic development in the context of the global capitalism triumphant.

Indeed, American alarm at the prospect of Soviet-friendly client states at the doorstep of the United States lent the region a strategic importance that it clearly no longer has–this importance energizes Greene’s account of the Panamanian leader accordingly. While Panama was not the locus of the kinds of bloody conflicts that took hold in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s, the sense of shared destiny among Central American countries leads Torrijos to dream of a successful confrontation between his tiny republic and the United States should he fail in his attempts to negotiate a new Canal treaty in a way favorable to Panamanian interests:

We could hold Panama City for forty-eight hours. … As for the Canal, it is easy to sabotage. Blow a hole in the Gatún Dam and the Canal will drain into the Atlantic. It would take only a few days to mend the dam, but it would take three years of rain to fill the Canal. During that time it would be guerilla war; the central cordilleras rise to 3,000 meters and extend to the Costa Rican frontier on one side of the Zone and the dense Darién jungle, almost as unknown as in the days of Balboa, stretches on the other side to the Colombian border, crossed only by smugglers’ paths. Here we could hold out for two years–long enough to rouse the conscience of the world and public opinion in the States. And don’t forget–for the first time since the Civil War American civilians would be in the firing line. There are 40,000 of them in the Zone, apart from the 10,000 troops.

In fact, while the Canal treaty negotiations form the centerpiece of the first half of the book, the second half focuses on Panama’s support, under Torrijos, of left-wing forces elsewhere in Central America, including the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Here the friendship Greene forms with Torrijos broadens into a political sympathy for those groups, and in fact Greene finds himself drawn personally into fascinating intrigues, finding himself for example acting as an intermediary in separate hostage crises involving kidnappings of a South African diplomat and employees of a British bank by left-wing Salvadorean guerillas. Later, Greene is visited in France by Central American guerrilla leaders en route to Italy, searching for financial support for their cause–they believe Greene, a famous author, might put them in contact with rich sympathizers.

Greene also makes several references to events that illustrate the interesting role that small countries like Panama can play on the international stage. For example, I hadn’t known that the Shah of Iran found refuge in Panama after having been refused asylum by the United States in the wake of Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution. In "Getting to Know the General," these international relations often take a personal turn, as when, due to being the only Latin American state to vote in Israel’s favor regarding what Greene refers to as "the Entebbe affair" (an issue presumably involving the questionability of Israeli’s commando raid on a hijacked airplane in Africa–I haven’t yet looked this up), Torrijos was able to persuade an important Israeli to intervene for him to resolve the estrangement between his wife and Jewish father-in-law.

While I think that Greene’s sympathy for both Torrijos and the causes the General endorsed is largely justified, particularly in the case of Nicaragua, so clearly better off under the Sandinistas than under the Somozas, Greene seems naively dismissive of charges of populist demagoguery leveled at Torrijos. Torrijos in Greene’s account clearly emerges as a generous and humane figure, but Greene never questions whether the democratic socialism Torrijos dreams of bestowing upon Panama is viable in the absence of Torrijos himself. When the General intervenes on behalf of individual Panamanian citizens, directly contacting landlords to lower rents, or contacting businesses to offer a person a job, Greene writes: "To me it seemed that the General was practising a direct form of democracy, though the General’s enemies would have called him a populist, a word which is now commonly misemployed and used as a sneer." Later, after Torrijos’ untimely death, Greene seems puzzled as to why the prominent Sandinista Tomás Borge is skeptical about Torrijos’ successors:

Perhaps to Borge Panama without Omar was only the Panama of 163 banks¹ and the rich foreigners’ yachts sailing under the Panama flag and the oligarchy of which I had not yet had a glimpse: confrontation with the United States belonged, apart from Omar and the Wild Pigs, only to the students, to the slums of the cities, to the barrios of the poor like El Chorillo.

Clearly the preponderance of military rulers and demagogues in Latin America, whether left- or right-wing, reflects the weakness of democratic institutions in those states. Greene vividly describes a massive rally in Managua after the Sandinistas’ defeat of Somoza, where the people rejected the prospect of early elections after their military victory:

‘No elections before 1985′–that was a revolutionary slogan which they could understand. I was puzzled by their response until I remembered what the word ‘elections’ meant in Nicaragua. During his long reign Somoza had frequently called elections and had thus legitimized his dictatorship, if only in the eyes of the United States, by winning all of them with huge majorities. So ‘election’ for most people in the crowd was a word which meant trickery. ‘No elections’ was a promise to them of no trickery.

While so much of the political backdrop of "Getting to Know the General" belongs to history, the image of a Latin American left-wing military ruler (as opposed to the classic right-wing death squad-supporting dictator who owes his existence to paranoid American anticommunism) has resonance in the figure of Hugo Chavez. Torrijos’ adoption of the title "Chief of the Revolution" evokes Chavez’s styling himself as the head of a "Bolivarian Revolution." While there may be much truth in the unsympathetic portraits of Chavez one finds in the US press, Greene’s account makes abundantly clear the extent to which ideology and interest colors such perspectives. A speech by former Panamanian president Arias which appears in the book as well as US State Department documents referenced in the book’s epilogue contrast starkly with Greene’s own account of the General. Regarding Arias, Greene writes:

[He] had drawn a portrait of Omar as a tyrant who had flung his enemies out of aeroplanes and tortured prisoners. No names of these ‘disappeared’ victims had eve been published anywhere, no widows had paraded on the streets of Panama City as they had in Buenos Aires, for of course the disappeared did not exist. … Arias had based his picture of Torrijos’s Panama on reports of Videla’s Argentina and Pinochet’s Chile, while he sat in his safe home in Miami.

And the State Department documents refer to Torrijos as "volatile, unpredictable … a populist demogogue with a visceral anti-American bias … and a penchant for the bottle," despite Torrijos’ friendly terms with the Carter administration, while a Council of Inter-American Security document refers to "the brutally aggressive extreme left dictatorship of Omar Torrijos."

One is inclined to side with Greene’s humane portrait of the man, but Greene perhaps undermines his own case when he refers to offers on the part of Torrijos and his men to "resolve" via violent means a personal difficulty Greene was having with an individual back home in France. To what extent did Torrijos and his regard themselves as beyond the law?