The Untold Story of Panama by Earl Harding

Author:Earl Harding [Harding, Earl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Military, Other, United States, Americas, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781839744037
Google: s71PAAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Barakaldo Books
Published: 2020-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10 — Coverups and Contradictions

To cover up tell-tale evidence and conceal the sources of opulence sprouting in the private lives of some of the Panama patriots as well as in the purses of bribed Colombian Ì soldiers and generals a technique was used which was calculated to make detection difficult.

Law 48 of 1904, passed by the Panama National Assembly and signed on May 13, 1904, by President Amador, legalized in lump sum all expenditures of the infant Republic up to and including June 30, 1904. They footed up to $3,000,000 Panamanian silver, equal at the then rate of exchange to $1,365,000 U.S. gold. J. Gabriel Duque, proprietor of the lottery and of the Panama Star & Herald, told me in Panama that accounts showing the distribution of this money had been burned by agreement in a secret session of the National Assembly.

The juggling of funds, the use of cash from the safe of the Panama Railroad to bribe Colombian soldiers, and the conflicting accounts of temporary loans by Panamanian businessmen are a long, involved story. The whole truth will probably never be told. Most of the facts were buried, as I found later, by the legalized lump-sum accounting under Law 48 of 1904. I did not obtain access to the record of that blind accounting until after our rogatory commission had departed.

According to Bunau-Varilla, the preliminary financing of the “revolution” was arranged this way: On October 22, 1903, Bunau-Varilla cabled his bankers to remit to him in New York $100,000. Cromwell arrived in Paris on October 23, 1903, and Bunau-Varilla’s bankers established the $100,000 credit in New York on October 26. Was this by coincidence? Or was it prearranged—and by whom?

This much is conceded: Bunau-Varilla forced his own appointment as Panama’s first Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary over the vehement objection of Dr. Amador, whose early distrust of the Frenchman was inherited by his son Raoul—as Don Raoul frankly told me in 1910.

Bunau-Varilla’s rush to sign the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty has never been forgiven by Panamanians. They never liked the treaty. Dr. Amador and Federico Boyd, as special commissioners from the Junta in Panama, as told in Chapter IV, were on the train two hours distant from Washington when Bunau-Varilla, knowingly disobeying their orders, affixed his signature. They had ordered him to defer signing until they could review details, and they would have arrived in time had they not waited a day in New York to confer with Cromwell on his return from Paris. Cromwell reingratiated himself with Dr. Amador, and later tried to get Bunau-Varilla removed.

Bunau-Varilla’s legacies to history are quite as confusing, as Cromwell’s. Each man, brilliant, audacious and vainglorious, would have the world believe that he was the father of the Republic of Panama.

Prolix and grandiose in his writing, Bunau-Varilla in his published books omitted significant facts which he related in Paris in conversations with Don C. Seitz, business manager of The World, and William R. Hereford, its Paris correspondent. I worked intimately with these men and knew them as carefully trained, conscientious, truthful.

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