Ambassador in Motion

Bearing gifts, 4,000 Panamanians jammed into Panama City's National Gymnasium last week for a tumultuous farewell celebration. Peasants from the interior of the isthmus presented fancy wickerwork baskets they had made. In shirtsleeves and bright native costumes, they waved flags, cheered, sang, wept, and danced the tamborito. Dancing, singing and weeping along with them was the guest of honor, no Panamanian politician of the people, but Joseph Simpson Farland, 49, the departing U.S. ambassador.

Lure of the Land. Panamanians could not remember when one of their own, much less a Yankee ambassador, had received such a spontaneous tribute. But Farland was an extraordinary envoy.

Never one to hang around the office, he preferred to Jeep through the back country, shaking hands with villagers as if he were running for President of Panama. On his frequent trips to villages, he wore native hats and shirts, and he developed a stomach for such dishes as mondongo and bollo chango.* He felt at home among Panamanian peasants, he said, because "their machetes have only one edge."

A lawyer and a Republican, Farland was counsel to a West Virginia coalmining executive before President Eisenhower chose him in 1957 to be Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. He proved to be shrewd and tough in his dealings with the late dictator Rafael Trujillo. Transferred to Panama in 1960, he smoothed Panamanians' wrought-up feelings about the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone so successfully that President Kennedy asked him to stay on as the New Frontier's only noncareer ambassadorial holdover.

Parting Swipe. Then the squabbling began. Farland felt far from comfortable coping with the red tape of the U.S. foreign aid program. In 1961 he asked Washington for funds to build a road so that farmers in the interior could cart oranges and pineapples to market some way other than on their backs. He was told that first, engineers would have to carry out a year-long "feasibility" study at a cost of $240,000. "Too long and too expensive," he complained, and went ahead on his own. He persuaded U.S. instructors who were training Panamanian bulldozer operators to let the men do their learning along the road route instead of digging useless holes and filling them up again. Volunteer villagers dug drainage ditches, built log culverts, spread gravel. At a cost of less than half the price of the feasibility study, Farland got his road.

Throughout the rest of his tour of duty, Farland kept sniping at the cautious pace of U.S. aid, while helping to push through other road projects, trade-school construction, self-help housing, and health centers. He felt that many of the projects stressed social betterment at the expense of economic development. As the time for his normal rotation approached, the Kennedy Administration offered Farland career status. But he decided to resign altogether rather than serve time in Washington at the State Department--"that rabbit hutch." In quitting, he took a parting swipe at "glaring defects" in the U.S. aid program. After all the farewell festivities, he intends to return to the U.S., where it so happens that in West Virginia, the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat will be up for election next year.

*Mondongo, a thick stew of tripe and chickpeas seasoned with onions and peppers; bollo chango, ground corn boiled in the shuck.

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