Omar Torrijos

Omar Torrijos ruled Panama from a 1968 coup until his death in a plane crash in 1981, and negotiated the treaties that returned the Canal to Panamanian sovereignty. He was a schoolteacher's son from Veraguas who joined the National Guard and took power with Boris Martinez eleven days after Arnulfo Arias was inaugurated president for the third time; he pushed Martinez aside the following year and never took the presidency himself, ruling as Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution through civilian figureheads. His domestic programme mixed land redistribution, a labour code, rural schools and clinics with the suppression of parties and the exile of opponents, and left the country heavily indebted. The Canal Zone had been American-administered territory since 1903 and the riots of 1964 had killed more than twenty Panamanians; he internationalised the question, getting the UN Security Council to meet in Panama City in 1973, where the United States had to cast a veto in front of an audience. The Torrijos-Carter Treaties of September 1977 provided for transfer of the Canal at the end of 1999 and were ratified by the US Senate by a single vote more than the required two-thirds after a bitter campaign. He also gave asylum to the Shah of Iran in 1979 when few others would. His aircraft flew into a mountainside in Cocle province in July 1981; sabotage has been alleged for forty years without proof, and Graham Greene, a friend who wrote a book about him, believed it. Manuel Noriega, his intelligence chief, took control of the Guard within two years and ruled until the American invasion of 1989. The Canal passed to Panama on 31 December 1999 as agreed. He was never president and never held an elected office of any kind. His son Martin Torrijos was elected president of Panama in 2004, the first full term under Panamanian control of the Canal.

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