The Foreign Service Journal, January 2006

Auckland. A dozen years later, I was deputy consul gen- eral in NewDelhi. Having recently been promoted to the rank of FS-1, I itched to head a consular section. So in mid-1989, when a cable asked for volunteers for the con- sul general position in Panama City, I eagerly threw my hat into the ring — even though I was just one year into my three-year assignment, and ineligible to bid because Delhi was a hardship post. Fortunately for me, the department ignored the rules in its eagerness to get a warm body to fill a less-than-popular job. I still recall col- leagues asking incredulously, “Panama? Are you sure?” After all, dictator Manuel Noriega was seriously rattling sabers and the U.S. consular section’s visa operations had been suspended. Meanwhile, on Dec. 20, 1989, the U.S. invasion, Operation Just Cause, dropped into Panama’s night and not long after, arrested Noriega. Ambassador Deane Hinton picked me to be the first post-dictatorship consul general, and I arrived in Panama City three months later, in March 1990. Those were heady days for the U.S. embassy, and as consul general I dealt with Panamanians at all levels who sought to put efficient, democratic gov- ernmental operations in place. That second Panama tour would last just over three years, during which I made life- long friends — and met my Argentine-born, naturalized- Panamanian wife-to-be. As I prepared to depart for my second consul generalship, in San Salvador, in 1993, I remember thinking, “Panama is a place where I could set- tle down.” However, in the meantime my life and career had to move on. Finally Settling Down Eight years later, as I wrapped up my tour as consul general in Argentina, it was time to plan one final Foreign Service assignment. Despite political and economic upheavals at the time, I considered retiring in cosmopoli- tan Buenos Aires. However, I still had some time-in-class to use up and, despite very tempting alternatives, with my wife’s agreement I bid on Panama yet again. State shared my enthusiasm for the assignment, and as it had shown by sending me to Buenos Aires, its rules did not prohibit ser- vice in a foreign-born spouse’s country of nationality. So in August 2002, I was back in Panama City yet again for a third tour, and second time as consul general there. In accordance with the treaty, the U.S. Panama Canal Commission had handed over the keys to the locks to Panama on Dec. 31, 1999. The nation finally ran its canal and controlled the extensive infrastructure of the former American Canal Zone. As they built over the last vestiges of the long U.S. presence, workers turned former military bases into housing developments, schools, supermarkets and the regional headquarters of international organiza- tions. Yet, when I drove into Panama City on the new freeway from the airport with my wife and young daugh- ter, it felt like a homecoming — a feeling reinforced when we visited a neighborhood supermarket where three Panamanian acquaintances greeted me by name, over a decade after we had left the country. A year later, in 2003, I retired from the Foreign Service. With a Panamanian-citizen wife, I quickly obtained Panamanian residency. Others at Embassy Panama City followed that trend, not to mention increas- ing numbers of baby-boomer retirees from the U.S., Canada and Western Europe. I joined the country’s most important international law firm, Morgan & Morgan, as a part-time consultant. I also became interested in the local politics that affected my new life and home. I knew people in every part of the Panamanian political spectrum, but it was clear to me that what had historically been the “party of the dictators,” the Revolutionary Democratic Party, was now (ironically) the country’s most democratic and representative political movement. A Historic Election The PRD’s presidential candidate in the May 2004 elections, chosen in a party primary, was its secretary gen- eral, Martin Torrijos, a son of Omar Torrijos, the military strongman who ran Panama during my first tour there a quarter-century earlier. The U.S.-educated Torrijos con- vinced me that he and the PRD offered Panama its best chance for economic progress and continued good rela- tions with the U.S. In addition, like most Panamanians, I shared then-U.S. Ambassador Linda Watt’s publicly- expressed disenchantment with President Mireya Moscoso’s antidemocratic actions and apparent indiffer- F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 Robert Raymer was a Foreign Service officer from 1975 to 2002, serving in Panama (three times), New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, India, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina and Washington, D.C. A founding member and first dean of the Panama Consular Corps, since October 2004 he has been a special assistant to Panamanian First Vice President and Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro.