Panama: Rule of the Whitetails

All OAS efforts at quiet mediation had failed. Nor would any U.S. gesture of conciliation shake Panama's deter mination for a showdown over the canal. And so last week, the OAS unhappily voted 16-1, Chile alone dissenting, to invoke the Rio pact and formally investigate Panama's charge of U.S. aggression during last month's Canal Zone riots.

The Panamanian leaders standing so inflexibly against the U.S. are not the usual run of Latin American leftists and rabid ultranationalists. President Roberto F. Chiari, his most influential ministers and all major candidates in the May 10 presidential elections are members of a deeply entrenched elite that has ruled Panama since it proclaimed independence from Colombia in 1903. They are wealthy, well educated, antiCommunist, vigorously competing among themselves for power—and finding the widely resented canal treaty an ideal target to call attention away from their own position.

In politics, as in everything Panamanian, some two dozen families have the last hurrah. Since 1903, all 37 Presidents have come from the elite ranks. Through intermarriage and partnerships, they control the banks and businesses, sugar mills and coffee fincas, newspapers and radio stations. They are the employers and landlords who count: less than 1% of the country's landowners hold half of the privately owned land, most of it the choice acreage. In the bitter slang of the streets, Panamanians call them rabiblancos, meaning whitetails.*

Neat But Not Gaudy. The whitetails send their sons to Harvard and Oxford, fly off on regular visits to Paris and New York. Their suburban Panama City homes may be relatively modest by U.S. millionaire standards, but they have vacation retreats in the mountains and cruise the Gulf of Panama aboard their private yachts. Yet in the strict sense, they are not oligarchs. They are less formal than the dynastic families of Peru and Colombia, probably not as rich, certainly not as snobbish.

Though a few families claim conquistadors as forebears, others rose up from the land only two generations ago. To their credit, most wealthy Panamanians normally reinvest their profit at home, instead of socking it away in U.S and Swiss banks.

President Chiari himself is one of

Panama's richest men; he donates his $22,000-a-year presidential salary to the Panamanian Red Cross. His major source of wealth is the family's dairy farm and sugar plantations. Chiari's Blue Star dairy supplies most of Panama's milk, and the sugar plantations give him. a near monopoly on that commodity. (Price of sugar in Panama: 110 per lb., v. 60 in the Canal Zone.) Chiari's father was one of the leaders in Panama's fight for independence from Colombia, soon after built up a fortune in cattle and sugar. When the family fell on hard times during the Depression '30s, Roberto worked on a Panama Canal ferry. But shrewd real estate deals and other investments have rebuilt the family fortune, until today the Chiaris are millionaires many times over.