The Nicaraguan Route

I worked for the Panama Canal Commission during the “transition period,” from 1981 through 1985. For the first two years the Canal Zone district court was still open. I was the last lawyer admitted to the Canal Zone bar.

I did a lot of reading about Canal history during those times. The Nicaraguan route was a possibility that was seriously discussed in the early 1900’s—the French effort in Panama had failed—and the presence of Lake Nicaragua was considered a plus. To convince his colleagues to turn away from the Nicaraguan route, a congressman brought a Nicaraguan postage stamp to the floor of the House. The stamp showed an active volcano and afterwards the Congress turned its attentions more seriously to Panama.

Today Nicaragua has its own problems: Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas. To quote Gerry Adams, they’re still around, you know. In Panama I worked with George Rivas, who had been the translator for William Stewart, the ABC News reporter who was shot by one of Somoza’s National Guard soldiers. George was a Jehovah’s Witness from Louisiana. In Nicaragua he met and married his wife, Cristina. She had been involved with the Sandinistas herself.

After Nicaragua, he moved back to New Orleans so Cristina could learn English. The Canal had a procurement office at 4400 Dauphine Street. George then got a job in my office in Panama and stayed after I left. It was around this time that George broke up with Cristina. Cristina took this badly.

The split was theatrical: George fell in love with a Panamanian stripper who worked at the same dive written about by William Burroughs in his novel Junkie. After shooting his wife, Burroughs headed south and spent some time in Panama before continuing on to Colombia where he experimented with ayahuasca, said to be a therapy to cure heroin addiction.

Cristina saw her husband and his new friend sitting in his car at the Balboa train station, a place where trains then appeared only twice each day. The discovery upset her. She drove into the station, accelerated and rammed her husband’s car from behind.

It is a bad idea to fight with your wife; it is a worse idea to fight with your wife when she has military training provided by a guerrilla army that successfully overthrew a government.

The Panamanian Defense Forces, then under the command of General Noriega, responded. The Zonians took Cristina’s side even though she was a newcomer and neither Panamanian nor American. Even the Witnesses had had enough and excommunicated Ted. He told me that he was confident he would someday be re-admitted to his faith and he did achieve this much later.

Cristina must have shared her military credentials earned during the war to overthrow Tacho because the Defense Forces did nothing and let her go. Eventually George divorced Cristina, resigned and moved to Miami. There he got a job in City Hall.

I was in Miami from 1985 to 2001, before I made the fateful decision to work in Saudi Arabia. There I saw George only twice. Back in the US, George married an FBI agent. I suppose it would have been awkward for us to socialize together as his new wife was working hard to put my clients in jail.

George then moved back to New Orleans, where he now works for the park district. I got his email from their web site and put him on the mailing list for my A Brief Unpleasantness pandemic newsletter from Bahrain, but I never heard from him.

From him and Cristina I learned a good deal about the war in Nicaragua. When I left Panama in 1985, the Contra war was hot. And Noriega? To quote an LA newspaper, He was our guy.