PANAMA CITY — Not many leaders have the political dexterity to bear-hug Fidel Castro and male-bond with former President H.W. Bush soon after. But it's a balancing act that Panamanian President Martin Torrijos seems to be carrying off with aplomb.
Torrijos, the 42-year-old son of the late strongman Omar Torrijos, knows a thing or two about the high wire: He has distanced himself from his father's authoritarianism without rejecting his legacy of winning control of the Panama Canal and reaching out to the country's poor. And he says that accommodating leaders on the left and the right in the region, as well as within Panama's fragmented political scene, is less a matter of personal predilection than of dealing with "geographical and economic reality."
"We respect the different views in the region, the different stands of the countries, and we try to get along," Torrijos said, sitting in his ornate Spanish Colonial office in this capital's historic Old City.
Asked whether he was under pressure from the United States to take sides in the region's increasingly polarized politics, he said, "I think it's a mistake to try to divide the hemisphere in ideological terms."
Torrijos' politics are eclectic. His advocacy of free trade and fiscal responsibility has earned plaudits on Wall Street; at the same time, just a hint of his father's populism makes him look perfectly at ease in the company of Castro and the Cuban leader's anti-U.S. ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The Panamanian leader was warmly received by Castro in December during a visit to Cuba to reestablish diplomatic relations between their countries, broken amid rancor in 2004 after Torrijos' predecessor, Mireya Moscoso, released four men suspected of plotting to kill the Cuban president. Torrijos has criticized the pardon.
In February, Torrijos went fishing for tuna with President Bush's father off the Panamanian coast. The two men get along famously. In May, the senior Bush threw a dinner for Torrijos at his presidential library at Texas A&M University, where Torrijos graduated with bachelor's degrees in political science and economics and had returned two decades later to give the commencement address.
There seems to be an ambivalent but ultimately approving attitude toward Torrijos within the U.S. government. Some officials who asked not to be identified said they sympathized with Torrijos' need, as one of them put it, to "take care of old-line leftist groups [within his party] that lately are flexing their muscles."
