Reaganites and Rosa-Golpistas: US Foreign Relations in Panama and the Andes and the Rise of the Reagan Doctrine

From 1968 to 1981, Omar Torrijos led Panama’s military government. Unlike many Cold War military regimes in Latin America, Torrijos's government embraced a heterodox policy program that sought to increase Panamanian autonomy from United States foreign relations priorities. His stances were characteristic of contemporaneous rosa-golpista (“pink-coupist”) military governments in states such as Bolivia and Peru. While he is best known for securing the Panama Canal from the United States, Torrijos also embraced Third World and neutralist solidarity efforts over other matters, participating in multilateral fora such as the Non-Aligned Movement and the Socialist International. However, the Panamanian Torrijistas' counter-hegemonic foreign policy prompted concerns that Torrijos was susceptible to communist manipulation, which conversely motivated an oppositional, transnational network of activists, intellectuals, and policymakers, primarily those who came to be aligned with the Reagan administration. Such proto-Reaganite elements included figures representing various non-state organizations from the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) to the American Security Council Foundation (ASCF) to Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), who often regionally operated in tandem with rightist state-sponsored initiatives, such as Argentina's "Operation Charly" and Taiwan's "Peitou Program" in Central America. This nexus of domestic and foreign neoconservative-oriented factions challenged high-level US government efforts to build a constructive relationship with Torrijos's Panama throughout the late-1960s and the 1970s, proving instrumental in influencing the emergence of the nascent Reagan Doctrine prior to the eponymous president's formal accession to power. Both Torrijos's "horizontal diplomacy" and the proto-Reaganite mobilization against Panamanian rosa-golpista initiatives demonstrate the significance of non-state and extra-hemispheric actors.