Born in 1929, Omar Torrijos, It is a name that remains in the memory of Panamanians. He led the definitive diplomatic battle to recover for his country the invaluable canal that unites the Atlantic and Pacific seas. And he faced none other than the United States, which had controlled him since 1904.
His father, a rural teacher, José María Torrijos, was born in Roldanillo, a town in Valle del Cauca. He married a Panamanian teacher, Joaquina Herrera with whom he had twelve children. The eighth, Omar was born in Santiago de Veraguas and has been linked as the greatest leader of Panama in the last century. He soon entered the army and after a rapid promotion in the National Guard he became General Torrijos.
To achieve his purpose, he sought a unique strategy outside of weapons that he had already silenced in the street riots. And he found an ally in his neighboring country, Colombia: President Alfonso López Michelsen who assumed solid leadership among the group of regional leaders that Torrijos put together to recover the canal through diplomatic means. His main supporters were Daniel Odúber from Costa Rica and Carlos Andrés Pérez from Venezuela.
Torrijos, called “Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution” by the 1972 Constitution, took his country’s cause to the United Nations and there won the round against the United States.
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The diplomatic move to recover the canal
But there was a small big problem: the United States had signed a treaty with Colombia, the Urrutia-Thompson, which gave it rights of passage for military ships through the canal, special prices for the transportation of goods, and free transit of Colombian citizens.
Invited by Torrijos to Contadora Island, López Michelsen, Odúber and Pérez signed that Colombia renounced those rights and that Panama undertook to recognize them again when it was free and sovereign. It was the way to unblock the task. Only with the word of the Panamanian leader. That statement produced a political earthquake in Colombia, the former conservative president Misael Pastrana Borrero came out to protect Colombian rights and López was accused of treason before the Commission of Accusations.
North American President Jimmy Carter was willing to negotiate with Panama, but it was the knockout of his re-election. In September 1977 Carter and Torrijos signed the treaty to return the canal. The issue was so sensitive that the treaty was approved by the US Senate by a one-vote majority. Some senators who supported Carter also lost re-election.
The rights granted by the United States in 1921 to Colombia were recovered with the treaty signed in Montería between Colombia and Panama by Colombian Foreign Minister Diego Uribe Vargas and his Panamanian counterpart Carlos Ozores Typaldos on August 22, 1979, during the government of Julio César. Turbay Ayala in Colombia and Aristides Royo in Panama. On December 31, 1999, the United States returned the canal to Panama.
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Claudia from Colombia sings and enchants the Torrijos
In the Torrijos dynasty there is a Colombian who came to the family in 1979, when she married the general’s son. Claudia from Colombia was at that time a star who had been born in the clan club and in the midst of the ye-yé wave she had shared the stage with Roberto Carlos, Leonardo Favio, Oscar Golden and Billy Pontoni. She had in her honor having been the first national artist to fill Madison Square Garden in the mid-seventies. Being that figure of international stature, she married Dumas Torrijos Pauzner, the son of Omar Torrijos, who was not interested in politics, she wanted to make music. He had become famous for the Spanish adaptations of Janis Joplin’s songs.
The couple seemed to enjoy musical complicity, and Blanca Gladys Caldas from Manizale had been warmly welcomed into the family by the general himself, who adored the interpretations of songs from that time such as I need you (1970) or El Cóndor (1970).
The couple had a son, a grandson named after his grandfather Omar Efraín Torrijos Caldas. Everything ended in divorce two years later, in 1981. In the early hours of August 23, 2013, Dumas died of a heart attack, when he was preparing to appear on the program Your face sounds familiar to me (Panama)in which he was going to be a participant.
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Martín Torrijos and his sister-in-law from Huila
Martín Torrijos Espino is very clear that his life is politics, that he is a politician and that he is a Torrijsta politician. He was already president between 2004 and 2009 and wants a second term. For this election he proposed his name with the Popular Party, outside the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party, to which he wants to return to restructure it and return the pre-eminence it had.
During the campaign he promised to solve the country’s problems in three years, and that in a popular consultation, it would be the people who would decide whether he had fulfilled his promises. If the Panamanian people believe that he has not complied, he will immediately propose that the constitutional reform that he will promote includes the revocation of his mandate with immediate effect, because “it is time for the candidates to stop lying.”
Martín Torrijos cultivates proximity to Colombia. During Álvaro Uribe’s government he was on a working visit, 15 years ago, during his presidency and took the opportunity to decorate Carlos Pérez Norzagaray, a key figure, although discreet by decision, in the Contadora agreement. He often visits Cartagena, one of his most appreciated cities.
In Colombia he has family. The brother of his wife Vivian Ferenández, daughter of the Cuban writer and publicist Tony Fergo (Antonio Fernández Gómez) is married to María Eugenia Puentes from Huila.
They are the parents of Liliana Fernández, the current ambassador of Panama in Colombia, an economist and political scientist from the University of Los Andes, who was ambassador to the United Kingdom and consul general in London.
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The leader of the dynasty, who was never president but had all the power and popular admiration in his hands, died on July 31, 1981 when a De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter of the Panamanian Air Force crashed in Cerro Bush. There is still speculation whether it was a crime with two coincidences: the death of the president of Ecuador Jaime Roldós three months earlier in similar circumstances and the simultaneous inauguration of United States President Ronald Reagan.
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