Dateline: Panama City, Panama : A Funny but Sad Story on the Strange State of Affairs

It was sad, watching “60 Minutes’ “s Mike Wallace last week as he pressed the grimly smiling Panamanian strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, on a point of detail:

Had Panama’s military really sent deposed president Eric Arturo Delvalle scuttling out the back door of his own home in search of refuge at the U.S. ambassador’s house?

A president is a president, after all. And even a Panamanian president is entitled to a little dignity in the surrender of his office.

For presidents of the Central American republic, however, dignity has been hard to come by--both before and since Noriega, who is currently under indictment in absentia on U.S. drug charges and who inherited behind-the-scenes power following Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera’s death in 1981.

Once, I caught a disheartening glimpse of the problem.

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, I visited Panama City for a few days in 1985. At the time, I was observing a lawyer for MCA, Inc., as he wrangled with some local businessmen who were appropriating big studio movies without much bother for the niceties of copyright law.

Local gossips said Noriega had a piece of the action. Nobody ever proved it, but the rumor didn’t make the MCA lawyer’s efforts any easier.

Yet this was all in the happy days before the drug indictment--and before Hugo Spadafora, an outspoken Noriega opponent, turned up just across the Costa Rican border minus his head.

So it still seemed a bit comic that one of the video pirates, on an earlier trip, had actually managed to dispatch three armed National Guardsmen to the Panama Hilton, where they tried to arrest the lawyer. Wisely, the MCA man resisted--and got off the hook with some help from a well-connected local attorney who used to be a top Torrijos aide.

It seemed even funnier that the Bank of America, MCA’s banker back in the U.S.A., proved to be the pirates’ biggest lender. The studio’s outraged complaints to B of A officers brought expressions of embarrassment, but no immediate action.

But what seemed funniest of all was the incongruous grandeur of the presidential palace, where the attorney and I stopped for an audience with then-president Nicolas Ardito Barletta.

Seemingly everyone in Panama had assured us that the president was a figurehead, serving at the pleasure of Gen. Noriega. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the executive mansion.

The building was an enormous colonial-style residence, complete with indoor courtyards, palm-brushed verandas and fountains that ran cool in the tropical night. Security was heavy, and the trappings of power were worthy of the White House.

Only an ornate antechamber to the president’s office gave away the country’s dirty little secret.

Lining the room were portraits of every president in the republic’s 82-year history. I really don’t remember the precise count. But there were far too many for a history so short. Some presidents had come and gone more than once. In fact, one of them, Arnulfo Arias Madrid, was turned out of office three times, but kept coming back. Apparently, it was almost a mark of shame among the country’s planter aristocracy not to have been president at some point.

Ardito Barletta I remember only as a sad and silent man, an economic thinker who had served as a vice-president of the World Bank. He listened carefully as the attorney, with politesse worthy of Talleyrand, explained that important American companies were deeply grieved by the movie pirates--and suggested that their unhappiness might endanger economically sagging Panama’s U.S. trade privileges under the Caribbean Basin Initiative.

Somewhat glumly, Ardito Barletta indicated that he understood. But there didn’t seem to be much he could do, about video pirates or anything else. A few months later, he resigned in a dispute with Noriega.

Ardito Barletta was succeeded by Delvalle in September of 1985. By then, however, it didn’t seem to matter who was president. The demoralization of the office was all but complete.

Indeed, one studio executive told me that he visited with Delvalle, again trying to resolve a piracy problem. The president sat in his office, watching TV. He complained that it was difficult for him to go abroad, because of demonstrators at the airport and the rigmarole of presidential travel on a commercial airline. Apparently, he wasn’t quite sure he had the authority to bother the military for a plane.

And somehow it didn’t seem funny any more.