Panama fever (26 page)

Núñez's efforts to reverse the Liberal reforms prompted civil war in mainland Colombia, which quickly spread to Panama, at a time when the French canal effort did not need new problems. In July 1884 an attempted Liberal coup in the province was suppressed with difficulty, and after further disturbances, martial law was declared and a military governor appointed.

Amid the growing anarchy, foreign consuls on the Isthmus hurriedly telegraphed for gunboats to be sent for their nationals’ protection and on January 18, 1885, the U.S. Navy's
Alliance
was brought up alongside Colón dock, trained her three-inch guns on the town, and stationed men on the wharf and around the Panama Railroad offices, with particular attention to safes and vaults. The demonstration of American power provoked the resignation of the mayor of the town in protest, but calmed the situation for a while.

Allegedly the landing of U.S. troops had been at the request of the military governor, General Vila, but in Washington the Colombian minister shared his grave concerns with the British ambassador. Apparently, he had received a telegram from the government in Panama reporting that “the sovereignty of the State was in jeopardy.” According to the Colombian, the danger “arose from the intrigues carried out by the United States’ Government to obtain control over the Isthmus.” The United States, he said, was “fearful of the establishment of a French colony … and would use the excuse of anarchy on the Isthmus to establish a filibustering colony.”

In Colombia, the revolutionary party was in the ascendant, with Cartagena on the Caribbean coast threatened by a powerful Liberal army. The Colombian president responded by requesting that Vila send a loyalist force from Panama for the defense of the city. The general raised taxes further in the province and introduced conscription, but this merely led to another series of demonstrations against his regime. So Vila instead proceeded to the mainland with five hundred soldiers from the regular garrison. As it turned out, his action saved the city, and may have turned the course of the civil war, but it left only 250 loyalist troops in the province, most of whom were stationed in Colón. So it was in Panama City that Núñez's opponents first seized their chance.

On March 23, acting British consul Mallet brought the Foreign Office up to date on events in Panama. “My Lord, I have the honour to inform you,” the letter begins, in the customary way, “that a Revolution broke out in this city on the morning of the 16th inst.,…” “At 2 a.m. on the 16th,” the
Star and Herald
reported a few days later, “General Aizpuru gathered his men, 247 in number, at the garden of Paraíso, where after receiving some drinks to fortify them for the dangerous enterprise on which they were about to embark, they proceeded to enter the city.” The barracks and police station were speedily captured, but fierce fighting, in which some twenty people were killed, continued around the town hall, where the depleted Colombian garrison had taken refuge.

As soon as the diminished garrison departed from Colón on the railway to deal with this emergency, another Liberal leader, Pedro Prestan, seized his opportunity. With 80 men, he overpowered the small police force left guarding the Atlantic port and took control of Colón. Prestan, a mulatto and fervently anti-American, had a strong following among the poor and nonwhite in the town.

The Americans responded by landing troops from a warship, the
Galena
, to guard the railway and the wharf. Meanwhile, Prestan did his utmost to secure arms for his growing band of followers for the inevitable confrontation with government troops. After an uneasy truce of a few days, while in Panama City the government forces ousted Aizpuru, the hastily purchased weapons arrived in Limón Bay on a steamer from the United States.

The steamship line's agent in Colón was John Dow, an American with little love for Prestan or his followers. Dow refused to land the arms. Prestan was furious, and immediately arrested him, another Pacific Mail employee, the American consul, and two officers from the
Galena
, who had been with their men at the railroad.

Prestan also threatened to fire on any of the crew of the U.S. warships who disembarked and warned the U.S. commander in the bay, “Any aggression against us on the part of the U.S. ships will imperil the lives not only of the hostages but also those of your fellow-countrymen living in Colón.” Prestan is quoted as saying to his staff, “I wanted to prove to these people that their nationality and race does not protect them from my revolutionary authority. For the first time in the history of America a mulatto has dared put his hands on white U.S. citizens, and this fills me with pride because I have vindicated by my act the dignity of the negro, outraged by the white man across the centuries.” The quote has the whiff of subsequent invention or embellishment, but the sentiment is accurate. The U.S. consul, in fear for his life, urged Dow to deliver the arms. Dow consented, and the hostages were released. However, at this moment the captain of the
Galena
took possession of the shipment of weapons in the name of the government of the United States, and the hostages were quickly rearrested and taken to the rebel's position on Monkey Hill.

Here, Prestan's men were awaiting the rumored return of government forces from Panama City. One hundred and sixty men were indeed on their way by train. They disembarked at Mindi and proceeded to attack the rebel positions at dawn on March 31. Hopelessly outgunned, Prestan's men were driven back to Colón, where fierce combat continued for the next eight hours. At one point the fighting reached the walls of the British vice-consulate, where “rebel bullets and cannon balls … completely riddled the building.” At four in the afternoon, with Prestan's forces on the brink of defeat, a fire broke out in the north of the city. Colón, almost entirely built of wood and lacking piped water or any sort of fire brigade, was soon an inferno, and in no time a rumor was circulating that it was Prestan himself who had ordered the fire to be started. Helped by a strong northeasterly wind, the fire burned for another twenty-four hours. Almost every building in the town was destroyed. Men were landed from the European warships in the bay to help save the foreign enclave of Cristóbal, happily separated from the main city by a shallow inlet, and soon the Americans and government troops were restoring order by shooting suspected looters. Within two days, the rebels had been destroyed or captured, although it seemed that Prestan himself had escaped.

In Panama City, Aizpuru had taken advantage of events at the other end of the railroad to launch a fresh attack. Fighting continued for eleven hours. “The firing was hot and reckless in the extreme,” Mallet later reported. “Thousands of cartridges were burned as the scarred and wrecked appearance of walls and interiors sufficiently prove.” By the end of the day, Aizpuru was victorious, and on April i declared himself the military and civil chief of the city.

The bloody fighting and the tragic events in Colón had, however, given everyone a moment of reflection. Neither the government forces, now in control of what remained of Colón, nor Aizpuru in Panama City had sufficient force to overwhelm the other, and they signed an agreement to suspend hostilities for a month, “to preserve the capital from criminal elements, and to give security to interoceanic traffic.” It seems it was an effort to prevent foreigners from having an excuse to intervene.

But U.S. naval forces, including marines, were arriving in strength. The USS
Shenandoah
anchored off Panama City on April 6. The
Alliance
returned on April 8. Two days later the USS
Tennessee
, with an admiral aboard, appeared off Colón, together with a steamer of the Pacific Mail line packed with marines. More vessels arrived and by April 15 an entire marine brigade, along with two or three support battalions of bluejackets, was in place. Together with four field pieces, 170 men were ordered ashore on April 8, and armored railway cars to protect the transit were improvised with weapons and boiler plate from the ships. By April 18, according to Mallet, there were some five hundred U.S. troops based around the railway station in Colón, armed with a battery of Hotchkiss and Gatling guns and Dahlgron howitzers. In Panama City were a further three hundred men, with another two hundred scattered along the railway line. Offshore at either end of the line were half a dozen U.S. warships with a further 1,800 men and thirty more field guns. It was the largest overseas military expedition to be mounted by the United States between the Mexican War of 1846 and the war with Spain in 1898.

In mainland Colombia, Núñez's party was gaining ground against the revolutionists, and a loyalist force was being assembled at Buenaventura to depose Aizpuru in Panama. The general started erecting barricades in the city and preparing for a siege.

To the Americans, this was unacceptable. To protect foreign property and interests, troops were ordered out of their barracks and off their ships to take control of the city. Barricades were removed, and key positions in the city secured. All the bars and saloons in the town were closed down, and Aizpuru, together with his senior officers, was arrested. “The entry of the American marines into the city was a complete surprise for everyone and occasioned great excitement,” Mallet reported. “The belief among natives was that the city was to be taken away from them; patriotic feelings were raised to a fever pitch, and threats were openly made that unless General Aizpuru was released and the American force withdrawn every foreigner would be assassinated, and the town reduced to ashes.” The U.S. commander reassured the Panamanians that “the presence [of the U.S. force] is only temporary and simply to restore law and order. The idea of occupation or annexation of the Isthmus is one that has never occurred to the American mind.” On the evening of April 25, Aizpuru was released, having promised to respect foreign nationals and not to fight within the city limits. The U.S. force, now 1,200 men with twelve howitzers, retreated back to the railway station and everyone waited for the arrival of the Colombian loyalist soldiers.

Two days later, their ships were seen anchoring off Taboga Island in the Bay of Panama. By now, Aizpuru had lost too many of his men to desertion to risk fighting, and he surrendered to Colonel Rafael Reyes, the loyalist leader, on April 29. The next day, the Colombians landed and over the following week the American troops retired to their ships.

Aizpuru was later fined and exiled, and a witch hunt was launched against his and Prestan's erstwhile supporters, with Jamaicans and Haitians singled out for special treatment. Many were shot out of hand, and others languished in jail without a trial for up to four months. Two were hanged on May 6 for starting the Colón fire, even though, while incarcerated on a U.S. warship, they had helpfully signed testimonies which pointed the finger of blame at Prestan.

Prestan himself had escaped to the state of Bolívar but after the fire found himself friendless and soon fell into the hands of government troops, who returned him to Colón to face trial for arson. Held on August 17, it was a military tribunal on which sat a motley collection of soldiers and locals, all enemies of the accused. Four witnesses were called for the prosecution, foreigners, none of whom actually saw the fire being started, although they testified that Prestan had threatened to burn the city at some point or other. In fact, it is unlikely that Prestan was responsible. He owned property in the town, had his wife and daughter living there, and had nothing to gain militarily from the act. But the verdict was never in doubt. None of the witnesses requested by Prestan in his own defense appeared, and the tribunal ordered that Prestan be hanged. The sentence was carried out the next day at noon, on a scaffold made out of railroad ties erected in one of Colón's main streets, a stone's throw from the entrance to the new canal. “I saw no sign of fear,” wrote Claude Mallet, who was a close witness to the execution. “As he was dying he made no struggle and kept moving his arms as a sign of farewell to the crowd.”

he whole dramatic episode had many important repercussions. It had now been firmly established that the real power on the Isthmus was the U.S. military, and with the defeat of the Liberals, control of the country had been, it seemed, irrevocably handed over to the Conservative elite. In the
arrabals
, the poor quarters of the cities, and among the Colombian workers on the canal, the U.S. intervention had fueled fear and hatred of the “Yankees.” Elsewhere, among the outward-looking elite and the foreign residents, the chaotic events had underlined the impotence and incompetence of the Colombian authorities as well as the malign influence of mainland politics. “The State will never be free from such revolutionary nonsense,” wrote the
Star and Herald
, “until it withdraws from the union and sets up a government of its own under the protection of the United States or the great nations of Europe …There is a strong and growing sentiment in favor of such a movement.”