Murder of a Strongman

"I had to do away with anarchy." said Jose Antonio ("Chichi") Remon, explaining why he ran for President of Panama in 1952. As the country's strongman police chief he had watched five men try to govern Panama during the span of one normal presidential term, had reluctantly turned a couple of the failures out of office at gunpoint. President Remon brought order out of disorder, and Panama found the sensation so pleasant that it marked him down as almost indispensable. But last week Remon lay dead, and something like a relapse into anarchy plainly threatened.

At the Races. Jowly President Remon was his tiny (pop. 800,000) country's No. 1 horse lover; only a state crisis could keep him from his Sunday afternoon in the presidential box at the finish line of Panama City's suburban Juan Franco race track. If the Remon stables had a winner, Chichi usually called for a mild celebration (his favorite drink: champagne on the rocks). So when his Valley Star copped the tenth race last week, the President and his guests stayed on in the emptying clubhouse.

Chichi joshed and chatted. The President's bodyguards, knowing that he hated to have them too conspicuously at hand, fell to playing dominoes. The sudden equatorial nightfall left the group pinpointed alone under brilliant fluorescent lights. At the table, ice tinkled in glasses; outside the stands, a black Dodge sedan crunched to a stop.

Two men in dark suits slipped out, 9-mm. German-made Schmeisser burp-guns cradled in their arms, and crawled behind a hedge that ran only 20 feet from where the President sat. At 7:20 a string of firecrackers exploded somewhere in the neighborhood. "They are celebrating a birthday over there," a member of the Remon party remarked. Two minutes later bursts of machine-gun fire sprayed the box. Two men died instantly; Remon's heavy frame slumped to the floor, blood darkening his pleated white sport shirt. "That was no firecracker," he gasped.

From safety in outer darkness, the gunmen kept Remon's bodyguards pinned down for several minutes, then made their getaway in the Dodge. At Santo Tomas hospital doctors gave the President five transfusions -but it was likely that the bullet which pierced his aorta killed Remon even before he reached the operating table. Next day a throng of 40,000 followed his bier, borne on a firetruck to Panama City's old downtown cemetery.

At Work. In office, Chichi Remon had paid up the government's bills, enforced income-tax collections, outlawed the Communist Party, negotiated a favorable overhaul of treaty relations with the U.S. over the great canal that bisects Panama. Who wanted to assassinate him? If the Communists had engineered it, the job must have been carefully organized from outside; Panama's local Reds were not up to such a slick, professional gang-style killing.

Secret Police detectives immediately arrested ex-President Arnulfo Arias, a spellbinding surgeon with a sizable personal following. He and Remon were old political enemies. In 1949 Police Chief Remon put Arnulfo into the presidency in the hope that his popularity would bring stability--and threw him out when Arnulfo tried to extend the term illegally. But there was no public evidence to tie either Arnulfo or the Reds to the killing, and there was no move to seize power.

At Wit's End. The cops also nabbed a touring New Yorker, Martin Irving LipStein, 34, who had arrived before the killing and aroused suspicion by his eagerness to leave the next day. Lipstein produced an alibi, swearing that he had been rubbernecking at ships in the canal at the hour of gunplay, and his release was expected early this week. Dozens of others were run in. By week's end, implicitly confessing bafflement, the police were importing detectives from New York, Cuba, Costa Rica and Venezuela.

Vice President Jose Guizado, 55, who moved up to the presidency, is a millionaire contractor, educated at Nashville's Vanderbilt University, and another good friend of the U.S. But he is in poor health and lacks Chichi's tough-minded energy. Remon's death thus created a vacuum in politics as well as at the head of the National Guard. Arnulfo Arias, if he is freed, may seize the chance to whip up his followers for a new try at the presidency. Guard officers will have to recalculate their loyalties. Between political demagoguery and military ambition, the gloomy prospect for Panama is a return to the turmoil that, in the country's 51-year history, has let only five out of 28 Presidents finish their terms.

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