In the annals of Latin American politics, Omar Torrijos of Panama was a David against Goliath, a charismatic leader who challenged the landed oligarchy and redistributed land and wealth. He died tragically in a 1981 plane crash widely rumored to be the work of the CIA.
This unique, intensely personal homage by two giant talents—the great Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide and the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez—shows Torrijos as the man behind the story. Never-before-published photographs and never-before-told personal reminiscences offer up candles of memory and understanding and a correction to history. Torrijos’ friend describes a moody, lonely president drinking whiskey all night, and in pre-dawn, summoning one of six different women he knew to keep away the demons. In their eyes, Torrijos is understood not as a dictator who silenced opposition, closed the media, ran up debt, and turned a blind eye to corruption, but as a flawed hero in the footsteps of Simon Bolivar: the first leader to advocate for the poor, yet an innovator in schools and jobs who lured foreign investment to create a regional financial center, and a historical giant whose greatest legacy to his people was the Canal Treaty, signed with President Jimmy Carter in 1977.This is a memoir about a man ahead of his time.
Graciela Iturbide has received many honors, including a W. Eugene Smith Grant in 1987 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988, published numerous books, and has held major exhibitions around the world.
One of the world’s greatest writers and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth-century literature, Colombian-born Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
