“ It’ s ridiculous!” Wayne told reporters when asked about his involvement in the April revolt in Panama.
JUNIO DE 2017
John Wayne, against the rabiblancos
“ It’ s ridiculous!” Wayne told reporters when asked about his involvement in the April revolt in Panama.
MEMORIA
In that event his friend and partner, lawyer Roberto Tito Arias, was involved with a group of“ Panamanian revolutionaries”, who involved Cuban militiamen to overthrow the aristocratic government of Ernesto de la Guardia jr. In 1959.
A boat landed the Cubans on the beaches of Colon. Another group of young idealists rose with old weapons in Veraguas, and several cells tried to attack barracks in Chiriquí and Panama, without success.
John Profumo, former Minister of Government of Great Britain, wrote about the adventure, in which the English subject Margot Fonteyn was linked, the first dancer of the Royal Ballet of London, married to Tito Arias.
In January 1959, she and her husband visited Castro, who“ had promised to help her husband in his goal of overthrowing the regime in Panama.” In April of that year, she and her husband went to sea on their yacht Nola, as a fishing trip. This trip was intended to gather men and weapons for the revolutionary attempt.
Something went wrong, Fonteyn returned without her husband to Panama City, where she was imprisoned for twenty-four hours. Sir Ian Henderson, the British ambassador, visited her and wrote in a subsequent, somewhat irascible diplomatic telegram that she had tried to speak“ in whispers of conspiracy, to which I put a brake in front of the police.”“ She knew her husband trafficked arms, she knew he was accompanied by rebels and, at one point, used her yacht as a decoy to keep government vessels and planes away from the direction her husband was taking,“ the ambassador wrote.
“ It gave me to understand that a rather large operation had been planned but that it had gone wrong at the last moment,” John Profumo said.
“ The plan was to dock somewhere and meet in the mountains,” but they were betrayed by fishermen, she said,“ so it was hurriedly decided that the game was over and that her husband was to go underground and she returned to the city of Panama to try to mislead people.
Profumo also sought to explain how it came to associate some names of Hollywood stars with the attempted coup.“ The ill-made comedy of all this is highlighted, so Margot told me, about those rash decisions that were taken at sea at 6 a. m. of that Sunday“.
By mistake, Fonteyn tossed white bracelets“ with which the rebels would be recognized on landing” instead of“ some incriminating letters and the address book of her husband, who hurriedly packed up with some machine guns and ammunition... When, after they caught one of the rebels and questioned him, it seems that he gave them away and found all this equipment,“ including the addresses” of several personalities of Hollywood“ with whom, apparently, Arias had business.
“ That’ s how the names of John Wayne, Errol Flynn, etcetera, appeared in all this,” Profumo wrote, as Alan Cowell investigated.
Wayne Conspirator
Errol Caballero, recounts that“ after the wedding( held in 1955), Tito took up his position as Panamanian ambassador to the court of St. James in England. The life of the new marriage was never boring: through her husband, Margot met Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Aristotle Onasis, among other celebrities.
From those years, according to my researches, the author of this minihistory speaks- Tito included these artists and entrepreneurs in flagging activities of ships and corporations.
Even Wayne purchased, through his services as a lawyer, land on Taborcillo Island, where he was secluded to rest, located on the Pacific coast, 40 kilometers from Panama City. He made friends with the family of Arias, mainly with Alberto Negro Arias, who gave him a gold buckle, made by the expert hands of Francisco Aurelio Martínez, an artisan jeweler.
He even met the young officer Omar Torrijos, who decades later asked for his support to recover the Panama Canal and eliminate colonialism.
There are still few Duke Biographies with this movie adventure.
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