Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Victoriano Lorenzo did not return to the cells of the Bogotá but was taken to an airtight vault and chained up there until the arrival in the city of General Pedro Sicard Briceño, military commander of Panama. Unusual demonstrations of efficiency on the part of General Sicard: on May 13, during the night, he decided that the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo would be tried by verbal court-martial; by noon on the fourteenth, posters were up informing the general public; on the fifteenth, at five in the afternoon, Lorenzo was killed by thirty-six bullets shot from a distance of ten paces by a firing squad. Usual demonstrations of cunning on the part of the same General: the defense was put under the charge of a sixteen-year-old trainee; no witnesses were allowed to speak in favor of the accused; the sentence of capital punishment was carried out with deliberate haste, to prevent the President from having time to receive the telegrams pleading for mercy that the Panamanian authorities from both parties sent. For the Liberals of Colón the whole trial had a certain stale (or rather rotten) taste, and the fact that a firing squad enacted the sentence did not prevent many from recalling the crossbeam set up across the railway lines and Pedro Prestán’s hanging body, his hat still on his head.

The Panama newspapers, gagged (for a change) by a Conservative decree, at first kept an obliging silence. But on July 23 all of Colón awoke papered. I walked down the quagmires we had for streets, skirted the cargo docks, and darted through the fruit stalls in the market, I even visited the hospital, and everywhere saw the same thing: on the telegraph poles, a poster announced the imminent publication, in the Liberal newspaper El Lápiz (number 85, special eight-page edition), of an article on the murder of Victoriano Lorenzo. The advertisement caused two immediate responses (which did not appear posted anywhere). Secretary of Government Aristides Arjona decreed resolution number 127A, declaring that the description of a sentence issued by a military tribunal as “murder” to be in contravention of the 6th ordinance of the 4th article of the legislative decree of January 26. And while the resolution provided for a caution to be issued against the publisher of the newspaper as set out in the 1st ordinance of the 7th article of the same decree, and by virtue of that caution publication of the newspaper was suspended until further notice, Colonel Carlos Fajardo and General José María Restrepo Briceño, much more expeditious, visited Pacífico Vega’s printing press, recognized the publisher of the newspaper, and beat the hell out of him with their boots, swords, and batons, not before spilling and stamping on the type, destroying the presses, and publicly burning the existing stocks of El Lápiz (number 85, special eight-page edition). The newspaper was subversive and must be punished. So ordered.

And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As time goes by it seems increasingly clear to me that it was at that moment, at nine-fifteen on that July evening, that the map of the Republic began to crack. All earthquakes have an epicenter, don’t they? Well then, this is the one that interests me. The Liberal newspapers, indignant over the execution of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo, took the aggression of the military boot (and sword, and baton) very badly; but nothing had prepared us for the words that appeared in El Istmeño the following Saturday, and that arrived in Colón on the morning’s first train. I’m not going to inflict on my tolerant readers the entire contents of that new explosive charge; it’s enough to know that they harked back to the times of the Spanish Empire, when the name of Colombia “resounded in human ears with incomparable fame,” and Panama, seeking “a golden future,” did not hesitate to join that nation. The rest of the text (published between an advertisement for a herbal remedy for gaining weight and another for a manual on learning hypnotism) was a long declaration of regret; and after wondering like a resentful lover if Colombia had reciprocated the affection Panama had lavished upon it, the shameless author — who with every phrase gave new meaning to the word corny —wondered if the Isthmus of Panama was happy belonging to Colombia. “Would it not be more content separate from the Republic and constituting itself as a sovereign and independent Republic of its own?” Immediate reply: Secretary of Government Aristides Arjona decreed resolution number 35 of the year of Our Lord 1903, declaring that those questions expressed “subversive ideas contrary to national integrity” and violated the 1st ordinance of the 4th article of decree 84 of the same year. Therefore El Istmeño had earned the corresponding sanctions, and publication was suspended for a period of six months. So ordered.

In spite of the sanctions, fines, and suspensions, there was no longer anything to be done: the idea was left floating in the air like an observation balloon. In the Darien Jungle, I swear, though I’ve not seen it, the land began to open (geology receiving orders from politics), and Central America began to float free toward the ocean; in Colón, I swear, with full knowledge of proceedings, it was like a new word had entered the citizens’ lexicon. . One walked among the ruckus and smells of Front Street and could hear it in all the accents of Spanish, from the Caribbean Spanish of Cartagena to the purest bogotáno , from the Cuban to the Costa Rican. “Separation?” people asked each other on the street. “Independence?” These words, still abstract, still uncut, made their way up north as well; weeks later the steamship New Hampshire arrived in Colón, with a particular edition of New York World in its hold. A long article about the question of the Canal contained, among other explosive charges, the following:

Information has reached this city that the State of Panama, which embraces all the proposed Canal Zone, stands ready to secede from Colombia and enter into a Canal Treaty with the United States. The State of Panama will secede if the Colombian Congress fails to ratify the Canal Treaty.

The anonymous text was widely read in Bogotá, and very soon came to form part of the government’s worst nightmares. “What the Gringos want is to frighten us,” said one of those battle-hardened congressmen. “And we’re not going to give them that pleasure.” On August 17, those nightmares leapt from the unconscious to reality: on a day of unbearably strong wind, a wind that made the deputies’ hats fly from their heads, that forced open the finest umbrellas and inconsiderately ruined the ladies’ hairstyles — and made one or two suffer a wee bit of embarrassment — the Colombian Congress unanimously rejected the Herrán-Hay Treaty. Neither of the two representatives from the Isthmus was present for the vote, but no one seemed to care too much. Washington trembled with fury. “Those contemptible little creatures in Bogotá ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future,” said President Roosevelt, and days later added: “We may have to give a lesson to those jackrabbits.”

On August 18, Colón awoke in mourning. The deserted streets seemed to be preparing for a state funeral (which was not all that far from the truth); days later, one of the few Liberal newspapers that had survived Aristides Arjona’s purges published a cartoon I still have; in fact, I have it here, in front of me, while I write. It has several scenes and is not terribly clear. In the background is the capital of Colombia; a little lower down, a coffin on a funeral carriage, and on the coffin the words: HERRÁN-HAY TREATY. Sitting on a rock, a man wearing a Colombian peasant hat weeps disconsolately, and standing next to him, leaning on his cane, Uncle Sam looks at a woman pointing the way to Nicaragua. . If I have described it in detail, it’s not, dear readers, on a whim. In the weeks after August 17, those weeks that, seeing what they presaged, passed almost masochistically slowly, in all of Panama people talked of the Treaty’s death or demise, never of its rejection or failure to be approved. The Treaty was an old friend and had died of a sudden heart attack, and in Colón the rich paid for Masses to lament its passing from the world of the living, and some paid more so the priest would include in his words the promise of resurrection. Those days — when the Canal in our heads turned into some sort of Jesus Christ the Savior, capable of miracles, dead at the hands of impious men and who would rise from the dead — have remained associated with the cartoon in my memory.