Cuban leader, former Panamanian president meet in Havana

[Judi Lynn]

Cuban leader, former Panamanian president meet in Havana
15:52, July 12, 2010

Cuban President Raul Castro met with visiting former Panamanian President Martin Torrijos, local media reported on Sunday.

At the meeting, Torrijos and Castro discussed "international issues of mutual concern," said the local NNTV, adding that Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also attended the dialogue.

During his presidential term, started in September 2004, Torrijos traveled to Cuba six times.

His last official visit to Havana as president took place in January 2009, when he inaugurated a statue honoring his father, General Omar Torrijos (1929-1981), and exchanged greetings with Raul Castro.

Torrijos is the current president of the Socialist International Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Cuba and Panama keep historical and close ties based on the friendship between Fidel Castro and Omar Torrijos.

http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90777/90852/7062421.html

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Reference to the assassination of Omar Torrijos in an interview with John Perkins:

Corporatocracy
interview with John Perkins author of 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man'
by Daniel McLeod
Z magazine, December 2005

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com.nyud.net:8090/PageMill_Images/redblueline.gif
~snip~
DANIEL MCLEOD: You place economic hit men in a long line of imperial agents including Roman centurions, Spanish conquistadors, and 18th and 19th century colonial powers. All of these approaches relied on military force, but EHMs are different. Can you recount the origins of this strategy for empire building?

JOHN PERKINS: I really think it came out of our supposed success in Iran in the early 1950s. The Iranians had democratically elected a president (Mossadegh) and he began to clamp down on the oil companies, insisting that they pay fair taxes so the people of Iran would be recompensed for the oil being taken out of their country. The British and the U.S. were involved there and our oil companies were very resentful of this so we decided to get rid of Mossadegh. We figured that we could not send in troops because Iran was bordering the Soviet Union, which had nuclear weapons.

Rather than sending in troops, we sent a CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's grandson. With a few million dollars, Kermit managed to overthrow the democratically elected Mossadegh and replace him with the Shah of Iran, who we all know was a despot-and a friend of the oil companies. This experience taught the people in charge-what I refer to as the corporatocracy-that creating empire by using agents like Roosevelt was a lot cheaper and safer than the old military model. The only problem was that Roosevelt was a CIA agent and had he been discovered, the U.S. government would have been very embarrassed, to say the least. Soon after that, the decision was made to employ people from private businesses-making it difficult to trace these activities back to Washington.

What happens when an EHM fails to persuade a leader of a country to sign on to the empire's agenda?

That's pretty rare. In a few short decades EHMs were successful a majority of the time. But there are occasions when they failed, as I failed with Panama's president, Omar Torrijos. At such times, what we call the jackals, CIA-sanctioned assassins, are sent in to overthrow governments or assassinate the leaders-as in Guatemala with Arbenz, Chile with Allende, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. When I failed with Omar Torrijos-who refused to play the game-his private plane went down in a fiery crash. We all knew it was a CIA-supported assassination.

What was your relationship with Omar Torrijos?

I liked Omar Torrijos as a person. When I was sent to Panama to bring him around, he told me, "I realize that if I play your game I will become very wealthy, but that's really not my interest here. I want to help my poor people so you can either get out of the country or stay here and do it the way I want to do it."

I went back to Boston and relayed this message to my boss at MAIN. We decided to stay in Panama. After all, we could make some money and felt we still had a chance to bring Torrijos around. The thing was I knew he was probably in trouble because I knew the system was built on the assumption that leaders are corruptible and when a leader like Torrijos is not corruptible, it sets an example throughout the world. Torrijos had staked his reputation on convincing the U.S. to turn the canal over to Panama. So even though I really appreciated the firm stand he took, I feared the jackals would be called in.

More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Globalization/Corporatocracy_Perkins.html