Panama fever (44 page)

The first option was quickly written off. The president wanted a decision before the 1904 elections and was not inclined to continue negotiations with what he now called “the foolish and homicidal corruptionists in Bogota.” But to turn to Nicaragua (or see this option chosen by Congress) would for Roosevelt not only represent a personal defeat, but also be “against the advice of the great majority of competent engineers,” as the president declared. Furthermore, there was a growing consensus that the great new warships under construction in U.S. yards as part of Roosevelt's naval expansion would struggle with Nicaragua's narrow and winding rivers. Roosevelt was set on Panama. In September the French minister in Washington, Jules Jusserand, sent a dispatch to his government reporting of the president that, “I know, for having heard him say so, how intensely he wants it [the canal at Panama]; he will neglect nothing that may enable his country to perfect this work and be the master thereof.”

So nothing was to be ruled out, including seizing the Isthmus by force. In March 1903, U.S. spies had been sent to Panama to obtain information to assist military operations there. Days after Colombia's rejection of the treaty, a paper had been forwarded to Roosevelt by Hay's deputy, Francis B. Loomis, which seemed to offer a fig leaf of respectability for such a move. Written by an expert in international law, Professor John Bassett Moore, the paper argued that under the justification of “universal public utility” Colombia had no right to stand in the way of an improvement that would benefit the entire world.

Such a move carried great political risks, both domestically and internationally. But there was another option. Only two days after the rejection of the treaty (but before the news reached the United States), Senator Shelby Cullom gave a press conference on the canal question. Cullom was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and had just been conferring with Roosevelt at the president's summer residence at Oyster Bay. Roosevelt was prepared for bad news, said Cullom, but was still determined on a Panama canal. When asked how this would be possible if the treaty failed to be ratified in Bogotá, Cullom replied, “We might make another treaty, not with Colombia, but with Panama.” A month later Hay wrote to Roosevelt dismissing the possibility of making a “satisfactory treaty with Colombia,” but going on, “It is altogether likely there will be an insurrection on the Isthmus against that government of folly and graft that now rules in Bogota… Something we shall be forced to do in case of a serious insurrectionary movement in Panama, [is] to keep the transit clear. Our intervention should not be haphazard, nor, this time, should it be to the profit… as heretofore, of Bogota.”

n Panama the independence plot had gathered momentum and important friends. Following Arango and Amador, more Panama Railroad employees had been brought on board, including Herbert Prescott, assistant superintendent of the Panama Railroad (whose brother, another plotter, was married to Amador's niece), and James R. Beers, freight agent and port captain for the Pacific terminus of the PRR. Both were United States citizens, and the U.S. consul Arthur Grudger also joined the group. In July 1903 Cromwell, de facto head of the railroad, had summoned Beers to New York, at about the time of his planted story in the
New York World
about Panama's secession. Beers's meeting with Cromwell went well. The lawyer gave Beers a cable code and warned him to keep secret the involvement of the PRR, as it could forfeit its concession from Colombia. Cromwell also suggested a date for the revolution, November 3.

On August 26 Amador was sent by the plotters to New York. They were aware that without U.S. help any move by Panama toward independence could easily be crushed by Colombian forces. Amador sailed on board the
Seguranca
, a Panama Railroad and Steamship Company steamer. He had few funds for his trip, but managed to win a goodly sum playing poker during the voyage. Also on board, on unrelated business, was José Gabriel Duque, the Cuban-American owner of the
Panama Star and Herald
and the lottery, head of the fire brigade, and reputedly now the richest man on the Isthmus. Duque, an American citizen, knew about the plot, but was not part of the revolutionary junta. He later claimed that much of the money won by Amador was from him.

The boat arrived in New York on September 1, and Amador saw Cromwell the next day, receiving “a thousand offers in the direction of assisting the revolution.” But it was José Gabriel Duque who was met off the boat by Roger Farnham and taken straight to the office of Cromwell and Sullivan at 41 Wall Street. For Cromwell, Duque had two distinct advantages over Amador: he was rich, and he had no awkward connection with the Railroad. The lawyer assured Duque that there was no chance of Colombia coming to a deal, and that if Duque lent the revolution $100,000 on Cromwell's security, the lawyer would arrange for him to become the first president of an independent Panama. Of course, Cromwell went on, Duque should go to see Hay, and, picking up a phone on his desk, he organized the meeting there and then. The following evening Duque was on an overnight train to Washington (to avoid having to register in a hotel), and met Hay at ten o'clock the next day. The secretary of state all but told him that the United States would support the revolution: “The United States would build the Panama Canal and did not propose to permit Colombia's standing in the way,” Hay pronounced. If the revolutionaries took Panama City and Colón, he went on, American warships would prevent Colombian troops from landing under the justification that they were keeping fighting away from the all-precious transit.

No sooner had he left Hay's office than Duque was on his way to see his old friend Tomás Herrán at the Colombian legation. Perhaps because of some slight from the junta in Panama, from the influence of his wife, a fiercely patriotic Colombian, or because he still hoped to shock Bogotá into ratifying the treaty, Duque told Herrán everything. The next day, September 3, the Colombian minister cabled home: “Revolutionary agents of Panama [are] here. Yesterday the editor of La Estrella de Panama had a long conference with the Secretary of State … There is the probability of revolution with American help.” Herrán also set detectives on Amador's trail and fired off a warning to Cromwell that the Compagnie Nouvelle and the Railroad would lose their concessions—everything they were hoping to sell for $40 million—if they supported revolutionary activity.

This had Cromwell running scared. The next time Amador went to his office, he was “out.” Amador said he would wait, but still the lawyer refused to appear. Eventually Cromwell burst out of his office and physically removed the Panamanian doctor from his premises. Soon after, Cromwell made arrangements to leave the country on business. He knew his card was marked and that someone else would have to take up the challenge of engineering the revolution.

Amador was confused and downhearted, cabling a single-word message—
“Desanimado”
(“Discouraged”)—to his coconspirators in Panama and prepared to sail on the next ship. But then Amador heard that, should he remain in New York a little longer, he would receive help “from another quarter.”

Philippe Bunau-Varilla later claimed that his voyage to the United States at the beginning of September 1903 was motivated by the illness of his thirteen-year-old son, who was staying with John Bigelow. In fact, the Frenchman was up to his neck in Cromwell's plot. At the beginning of the month he had written an article for
Le Matin
, predicting revolution on the Isthmus and naming that same date—November 3. He arrived in New York on September 22—exactly the time it would have taken if Cromwell had summoned him straight after Herrán's warning.

Bunau-Varilla met Amador two days later and found the doctor in a state of fear and indignation. “All is lost,” said Amador. “At any moment the conspiracy may be discovered and my friends judged, sentenced to death, and their property confiscated.”

The Frenchman reassured him that he, Bunau-Varilla, would handle everything. Just over a week later, Bunau-Varilla, through Hay's deputy Francis Loomis, one of the many Americans he had cultivated as they passed through Paris, secured a meeting with Roosevelt, ostensibly to discuss
Le Matin's
role in the Dreyfus affair. Of course, the conversation turned to Panama. Bunau-Varilla announced that there was a revolution coming. The president was naturally unable to give overt support, but the Frenchman picked up what was left unsaid. Roosevelt later wrote to John Bigelow of the meeting: “I have no doubt that he was able to make a very accurate guess, and to advise his people accordingly. In fact, he would have been a very dull man had he been unable to make such a guess.”

A week later Bunau-Varilla met Hay who agreed that an insurrection was imminent and let him know that U.S. naval units were already standing by to dash to the Isthmus “to keep the transit open.” When Bunau-Varilla got together with Amador again shortly before the doctor's return to Panama, he assured him that U.S. help would be forthcoming for the revolution, as long as it happened on November 3. The money—$100,000—needed to bribe the Colombian garrison would come from the Frenchman's own resources, on the condition that Amador agreed to make Bunau-Varilla minister plenipotentiary in Washington for the new republic.

Bunau-Varilla now took total charge. As he wrote, “I held all the threads of a revolution on the Isthmus.” The weekend before Amador's departure he spent at the Bigelows’ house at Highland Falls writing a declaration of independence, military plans, and a new cipher code—Amador was “Smith,” Bunau-Varilla, “Jones”—while his wife and Grace Bigelow sewed together a new flag made out of silk purchased by Bunau-Varilla at Macy's. The whole “revolution kit” was wrapped in the flag and presented to Amador when he left on October 20.

Back in Panama, Amador found his coconspirators unhappy about Bunau-Varilla's demand to be made minister plenipotentiary, the flag (it was much too similar to the Stars and Stripes), the small amount of money promised, and the lack of firm proof of U.S. military assistance. Where was the signed agreement from Hay or Roosevelt? Who exactly was this Bunau-Varilla, and what authority did he have to offer promises of help? The plotters, for the most part wealthy landowners or professionals, had much to lose. The “revolution” experienced its first serious wobble.

Worse was to come. While Amador had been away in the United States, the junta had been working to bring into the conspiracy key players on the Isthmus. The mayor of Panama City, who happened to be the brother of Amador's young wife, María de la Ossa, was successfully recruited, as was the deputy head of the police force. General Esteban Huertas, the young commander of the local garrison, who was married to a Panamanian, seemed sympathetic although so far uncommitted, but his second in command, when approached, indignantly threatened to reveal the plot. To get rid of him, the state governor José de Obaldía, who lived with Amador and was unofficially in on the conspiracy, had invented an invasion in the north of Panama by Nicaraguan troops and dispatched a force under the man's command to investigate. But Obaldía, to cover his back, also cabled Bogotá on October 25 about the invasion scare. Three days later, Obaldía heard that the Colombian authorities, acting with uncharacteristic haste, had readied a force at Cartagena under the supreme commander of the army, General Tovar, to proceed to Colón to assist in repelling the supposed invasion.

The news caused a renewed panic among the conspirators, who demanded that Amador should rapidly provide proof of American support and the veracity of Bunau-Varilla's promises or the whole project would be abandoned. The next day, October 29, Amador sent the following cable to New York: “Fate News Bad Powerful Tiger Smith,” which translated as “For Bunau-Varilla. More than two hundred Colombian troops arriving on the Atlantic side within five days.” “Urge vapor colon,” Amador went on, abandoning the code. Obviously he hoped that Bunau-Varilla, on his own authority, could order a U.S. Navy steamer to the Caribbean side of the Isthmus.

Of course, Bunau-Varilla had no such power, but he did have friends in the right places. The same day he rushed to Washington. “It was a test to which I was being submitted,” he later wrote. “If I succeeded in this task the Canal was saved. If I failed it was lost.” His aim was to make the U.S. government understand that “its duty was to send immediately a cruiser in anticipation of probable events, rather than to wait for their explosion” as it had done in 1885 during the Prestan uprising. In Washington, Bunau-Varilla saw his friend Loomis, who was standing in for the secretary of state while Hay was away on holiday. Loomis agreed that the situation was “really fraught with peril for the city of Colón” and gave the Frenchman to believe that a steamer would be dispatched straightaway.