A Review of The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned World

Omar Torrijos, military dictator of Panama, may be one of the most understudied leaders in modern Latin American history. After seizing power in 1968, he reshaped the country’s destiny, most notably by negotiating the transfer of the Panama Canal from U.S. to Panamanian control in 1977. Up until his sudden death in 1981, he also played an outsized role in inter-American affairs. Contemporaries widely considered him a singular political talent: Gabriel García Márquez wrote that Torrijos was a “cross between a tiger and a mule,” combining the instincts and finesse of the former with the stubbornness of the latter. 

The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned World by Jonathan Brown (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024)

And yet Torrijos will likely be unfamiliar to most students taking university-level courses on the region’s history. For their part, historians of the Cold War in Latin America—a booming subfield—rarely discuss him when telling the story of that tumultuous period. Thankfully, the versatile and accomplished historian Jonathan Brown has helped set things straight with an engaging and well-researched new book,  The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned World. 

Brown aims to solve a bit of an international relations puzzle. How did a small, developing country (the weak) convince the United States (the powerful) to give up control of the world’s busiest waterway? Based on research in U.S. and British archives, as well as interviews with key Panamanian leaders, the book provides compelling answers. Furthermore, The Weak and the Powerful is worth reading simply because it’s the well-spun tale of a political phenomenon that defies conventional characterizations of Latin America during the second half of the 20th century.  

Torrijos was a man of countless idiosyncrasies. Early in the book we learn that, as a young National Guard captain, he cut his teeth repressing revolutionary movements. In 1959, he ascended the ranks after putting down a student-led guerrilla uprising, inspired by that year’s Cuban Revolution, in his native Veraguas province. But he didn’t feel great about it. The students, he later reflected, were motivated by a “just cause.” Resentment among Panamanians was widespread due to U.S. control over the Canal, as well the existence of the U.S. enclave “Canal Zone,” both of which stemmed from the neocolonial circumstances in which Panama gained independence from Colombia in 1903. Worse still, decades of “elected” oligarchs had proven unable or unwilling to confront Washington over it. “Had I not worn the uniform,” Torrijos said, “I would have joined [the students] in the trenches.” 

In 1968, then-Coronel Torrijos seized power in a coup, promoted himself to Brigadier General, and began ruling as a dictator (though he preferred the term “strongman”). At a time when military dictatorships were the norm in Latin America, his stood apart. In most countries, Brown rightly notes, militaries allied with status quo elites and pointed their guns at student movements that tended to agitate for change. Torrijos, by contrast, called students “national heroes” and sought to harness their energy to power the so-called Panamanian Revolution. His regime claimed to be for Panama’s poor, mixed-race majority against its Europeanized aristocracy, or rabiblancos. Moreover, toward the end of his tenure Torrijos dropped the honorific “Maximum Leader of the Revolution,” instituted some republican procedures, and tried to increase civilian control over government at the expense of his own National Guard. The few elected leaders in the area, such as Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez, saw him as an ally in the struggle against the Pinochets and Somozas of the era.  

Omar Torrijos’ personality, which is difficult to describe but jumps off the pages of The Weak and the Powerful, was larger than life. Brown vividly describes a statesman who loved to crack jokes, drink and smoke cigars; he was also known to hold audiences with business leaders or foreign diplomats while lying in his hammock. Raised by parents who were both schoolteachers, he grew up middle class but nonetheless excelled at speaking to Panamanian campesinos, with whom he felt at home. Graham Greene, who wrote an entire book about his time with Torrijos, noted euphemistically that the General “was not the kind of man to be sexually faithful to one woman.” But, Greene added, he “had a deep loyalty to the past and was faithful above all to friendship.” 

While the Cold War created stark ideological binaries, often dividing the so-called Third World between socialist and anti-communist blocs, Torrijos was his own ideological brand altogether. After beating back a countercoup in 1969, his government took a left turn, decreeing an agrarian reform and new labor code. “The only road for Latin America,” he told a foreign journalist, “is socialism.” Nevertheless, Torrijos’ cabinet included both communists and University of Chicago-trained economists, and he was willing to support private sector leaders with business-friendly measures (“No one can redistribute imaginary wealth,” he explained to an advisor, “first you have to create it”). While he shook up the inter-American scene by restoring ties with communist Cuba in 1974, Brown notes that Torrijos identified the Panamanian Revolution more strongly with the Peruvian Revolutionary Junta led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado—another socialist-leaning military regime that famously eludes classification by political scientists.  

“Neither left nor right,” he would often say, “¡Panamá!” Indeed, if one thing is clear about torrijismo, as Torrijos’ movement was called, it’s the nationalism. Brown argues that Torrijos’ concentration of power and socioeconomic reformism served “one purpose”: giving himself the leverage required to negotiate a new treaty with the United States that would finally expel U.S. troops from the country and transfer control of the Canal to Panamanians. Upon the signing of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties he became an anti-imperialist icon for many Latin Americans. But he wasn’t exactly an anti-American firebrand. Torrijos had been trained in the School of the Americas and was proud of it. And while Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi called him a friend, so did the likes of Nelson Rockefeller and John Wayne.  

The book’s key contribution concerns its explanation of how Panama won sovereignty over the Canal. Many factors were at play, but Brown emphasizes the global diplomatic campaign that Torrijos mounted to delegitimize U.S. control and pressure Washington into negotiating in good faith. Likening him to a “player of a multidimensional chess,” Brown describes Torrijos’ tireless efforts to lobby key power brokers in Europe and the United States. Crucially, the “chessboard” expanded with the emergence of dozens of new states in the wake of Afro-Asian decolonization. Thus, Torrijos focused much of his energy on the non-aligned world; “A pawn himself,” Brown argues, Panama’s leader “deployed lots of other pawns against the United States.” As part of this quest, Torrijos sought the mentorship of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, founder of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which Panama joined in 1976. Their passionate bromance (“So long as Tito is alive, I will never be lost,” Torrijos avowed) is one of the book’s most surprising and memorable throughlines.  

Brown also delivers new insights surrounding Torrijos’ other, less-known adventure on the international scene: his mission to overthrow Nicaragu a’s Somoza dictatorship in 1979. To isolate Somoza diplomatically and arm and unify the rebel Sandinista Front, he helped bring together a diverse supporting cast as perhaps only he could: Castro, Pérez, and Presidents Rodrigo Carazo and José López Portillo of Costa Rica and Mexico, respectively, all played crucial roles. Torrijos pursued armed insurrection in Nicaragua as stubbornly as Somoza clung onto power despite losing all popular support; “The problem of Nicaragua,” he told a Carter administration official, “is not a problem for the OAS [Organization of American States]. It is a problem for a psychiatrist.” He even allowed his teenage son Martín (future President of Panama) to fight alongside the Sandinistas.  

Torrijos, who came to see the young Sandinista leaders through paternal eyes, tried to project some of his ideological nuances (or contradictions, perhaps) onto the Nicaraguan Revolution. Sympathizing with their righteous indignation over U.S. backing for the Somoza dynasty, he nonetheless warned the Sandinistas against needlessly provoking Washington. And while Torrijos endorsed their ambitious plans to address social and economic inequality, he plainly stated his wish that they not follow the example of the Cuban Revolution, especially in regards to one-party rule. All of this was part of a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, Torrijos saw revolution in Central America as an inevitable and even laudable reaction to a history of poverty, exclusion and U.S. neocolonialism. On the other, he worried that without proper guidance armed leftist groups could incite a cataclysm of violence that would lead to even greater U.S. intervention in the region. Brown writes that in the months prior to his death in July 1981, Torrijos became increasingly concerned that things weren’t going to plan: the new Sandinista regime was growing closer to Cuba and a civil war was beginning to rage in El Salvador.  

Torrijos’ death in an airplane accident fed numerous conspiracy theories and ultimately plunged Panama into turmoil. With the General gone, the new canal treaties were not reversed. But Manuel Noriega of Torrijos’ own Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) cancelled any steps toward democracy and built a second, more chaotic dictatorship that only ended in 1989 with a U.S. invasion.  

Thus, Torrijos’ legacy in Panama is divided. Some credit him with laying the foundation for both the democracy of the 1990s and 2000s as well as the strong economic growth the country has experienced since then. Others see him as a repressive tyrant responsible for normalizing corruption and setting the stage for Noriega.  

What’s certain is that Torrijos, without a firing a shot, extracted historic concessions from the United States at a time of intense American intervention in Latin American countries’ affairs. The Weak and the Powerful might have benefitted from deeper, more generalizing reflections on what this case says about asymmetry in the history of international relations or about Latin America’s place in the world, past and present. That being said, given the evidence Brown provides it is difficult to dispute his conclusion that “no model of international relations can explain [Torrijos’] accomplishments.” 

Moreover, the story of Torrijos delightfully complicates any attempt to build a grand narrative of Latin America during the Cold War era. Was it a history of confrontation between Left and Right? Panama’s strongman, like Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina (another friend), blurred the lines. Democrats versus dictators? Torrijos was somehow on both sides. Jonathan Brown captures the complexity of both the man and his historical context.  

Mateo Jarquín is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Program in War, Diplomacy, and Society at Chapman University. He is the author of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024).