Former Military Officer Eugenio Magallón, Convicted of the Murder of Father Héctor Gallego, Arrested After More than 30 Years on the Run

In a joint operation between the National Police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Eugenio Magallón pictured below with police, a former military officer convicted of the murder of Catholic priest Héctor Gallego, who disappeared during the military dictatorship in Panama, was arrested this past Friday. The arrest represents a new step forward in the investigation of one of the military regime’s most emblematic crimes.  The information was confirmed by Police Director Jaime Fernández.  The Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that Eugenio Magallón, who had been sentenced in 1994 to 15 years in prison for Gallego’s murder, remained a fugitive from justice. 

The kidnapping and forced disappearance of the priest Héctor Gallego —a crime against humanity committed on the direct orders of dictator Omar Torrijos in 1971—is one of the most representative acts of the regime of terror established by the military in 1968. There have been several columns to this lamentable episode in national history, which the military and its party, the PRD, strive to conceal.  Below is a summary of publications on Gallego, on the occasion of the anniversary of the crime committed against him by the military narco-dictatorship.

The Martyrdom of the Priest

From the Quiubo website, which the late journalists Alfredo and Ramón Jiménez Vélez maintained until their sad deaths, comes the following information about Father Gallego’s apostolate in Panama:

In 1967, Héctor Gallego, a young Colombian priest, arrived in Santa Fe, a farming community in the mountains of Veraguas. In Santa Fe, the law was imposed by coffee landowners who exploited the peasants. Gallego tried to replace hard work and low pay with fair labor relations. He organized the peasants, who demanded better treatment, and founded cooperatives, which freed them from having to pay high prices in their employers’ stores.  Their threats were swift, but they didn’t stop Gallego. Harsh words turned into action, and they set fire to the ranch where he lived. The priest escaped the flames by jumping out of the rustic dwelling’s only window.

So, the landowners sought the support of the military. They organized an operation to track him down in the countryside, which Gallego roamed wearing his country hat and the glint of sunlight on his thick sunglasses. They located him on the night of June 9, 1971, at Jacinto Peña’s ranch…Two men, who identified themselves as members of the infamous G-2, the military’s most repressive group, got out of a jeep and shouted at him to get out, as they had an arrest warrant out for him. Fearing for the peasant family, Gallego got out; he was immediately attacked by the unknown men, who threw him into the jeep and fled in an unknown direction. From that moment on, Father Gallego was never seen again.

The priest was a victim of the crime against humanity known as forced disappearance, a criminal conduct eventually defined in the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons (1994) in the following terms: forced disappearance is considered to be the deprivation of liberty of one or more persons, regardless of its form, committed by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a lack of information or a refusal to acknowledge such deprivation of liberty or to provide information on the whereabouts of the person, thereby preventing the exercise of legal remedies and relevant procedural guarantees.

Furthermore, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) defines the same criminal conduct in the following terms, establishing it in its Art. 7.1(i) as a crime against humanity: the apprehension, detention or abduction of persons by a State or a political organization, or with its authorization, support or acquiescence, followed by a refusal to admit such deprivation of liberty or to provide information about the fate or whereabouts of such persons, with the intent to place them beyond the protection of the law for an extended period.

Institutionalized Brutality

The crime against humanity committed against Father Gallego is indicative of the levels of brutality and arbitrariness of a regime that from its inception became accustomed to persecuting, torturing, and killing its adversaries. It is important to remember that, at the time it ordered the priest’s kidnapping, the dictatorship had already murdered lawyer Rubén Miró Guardia, Ngäbe leader Tomás Palacios Salinas, labor leader José del Carmen Tuñón, student Dora Ceferina Moreno, university activist Floyd Britton, many Panameñista fighters in Chiriquí, and dozens of other compatriots, as Dr. Carlos Iván Zúñiga recalled in his column “La memoria civilista” (Civilian Memory) June 16, 2007.

After Father Gallego’s disappearance, the sinister tyranny of Torrijos and his chief torturer (Manuel Noriega, pictured above) faced widespread condemnation. The peasants of Santa Fe, the Jiménez brothers recall, quickly organized search parties, and Provincial Bishop Martín Legarra…pictured below, reported the incident to the local authorities.  Once the news reached the capital, a massive protest took place in front of the Church of El Carmen on July 18, 1971. Despite the prevailing fear, the terrible accusation against the military regime came from the aching and indignant voices of the people.

Faced with widespread citizen discontent, the tyranny resorted to distortion, persecution, and cover-up. In an effort to spread misinformation—as Dr. Brittmarie Janson Pérez, pictured below, has pointed out in her highly commendable work, “Panama Protests”, the military and their civilian henchmen used censored and manipulated media, run by corrupt pseudo-journalists, to distort the facts and denigrate the priest.  The dictatorship persecuted the priest’s friends and even imprisoned young Christians close to the martyred priest. The Public Prosecutor’s Office, under the control of the Janissaries, rigged the case, and its agents attempted to confuse the population with lies and falsehoods, which were widely covered by the media, assigned to the barracks. “After rigged investigations,” as Quiubo points out, “the case was closed because no evidence of the crime existed.”

The Late Dr. Brittmarie Janson Pérez, pictured above, created her highly commendable written piece called “Panama Protests”

Frustrated Hopes

With the fall of the military dictatorship (1989), Panamanians had great hope that the transition to a democratic system would bring about the necessary and urgent rectification of the judicial system. The investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the murder of Héctor Gallego pictured below, was a widespread aspiration. However, these citizens’ hopes were quickly dashed.  Already in the trial for the murder of Hugo Spadafora (1993)—another major atrocity of the military dictatorship—it had been revealed that despite the change in political regime, the Panamanian judicial system remained riddled with corruption, ineptitude, and neglect. The trial culminated in the acquittal, by a jury of conscience, of seven of the ten defendants.

After the case was reopened, the trial for Father Gallego’s disappearance took place between October and November 1993. Four agents of Torrijos’s National Guard were charged: Óscar Agrazal, Eugenio Nelson Magallón (recently re-arrested), Nivaldo Madriñán, and Melbourne Walker. Only the latter two appeared at the hearing. Magallón conveniently remained a “fugitive” from justice, likely with the support of his military comrades and PRD allies entrenched in the judiciary. Agrazal had chosen to submit to a trial under the law, at the end of which he was acquitted.  On April 29, 1994, the jury found Magallón (a fugitive), Madriñán, and Walker guilty, but the investigation and judicial process were so negligent that it was not even possible to determine the exact location of Father Gallego’s remains. Furthermore, the justice system was unable to establish who planned this abominable crime and its details. No body, no crime.

Although it was long rumored that the priest was thrown into the sea from a helicopter, as the dictatorship did with some of its victims, more recent versions indicate that he was killed in another way. Given the lack of interest from the Public Ministry, Rafael Pérez Jaramillo and Alexis Sánchez, among others, have explored the details of the case. Their conclusion is that at the time of his arrest and throughout the journey from Santa Fe to Santiago, the priest was severely beaten by his kidnappers, to the point of causing irreversible damage.  Even so, the mistreatment continued at the National Institute of Agriculture (INA), one of the stops on that journey of terror ordered by Omar Torrijos, pictured below. From there, he was transferred to the torture center known as “La Charquita,” which operated out of a house in Bella Vista, in the capital city.

General Omar Torrijos

Having been informed of the priest’s physical condition after such an ordeal, the dictator issued his final verdict: better a dead priest than a paraplegic. He was shot and secretly buried in the Los Pumas barracks (Tocumen), along with other victims of the dictatorship. It wasn’t until 1999 that this clandestine cemetery was discovered, a gruesome discovery that prompted the creation of the Truth Commission by the Mireya Moscoso (pictured below) administration (1999-2004).  In 2005, Panama’s Archbishop José Dimas Cedeño requested that the Attorney General, Ana Matilde Gómez, request that the Public Ministry conduct new DNA tests on the remains recovered in Tocumen (February 4, 2005). It had been suggested that one of the remains could be that of Father Gallego.

To support this hypothesis, it was mentioned that a one-centavo coin commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Republic (1953) was found in the pocket of a pair of pants exhumed with the remains.

Shortly before the kidnapping, a friend, Diego de Obaldía, had given the priest a one-centavo coin commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary.  Furthermore, the woman who washed Father Gallego’s clothes identified the pants and said they belonged to the priest. “Upon touching the clothes, the laundress suffered an emotional shock that still affects her. Hector only had three pairs of pants, and this woman was the one who washed them for him, so who else but her could have known his clothes?” said Nubia Gallego, the priest’s sister. Later, an informant presented the Assistant Prosecutor’s Office with a photograph showing the priest wearing pants similar to those found in Tocumen. Shortly after, the image mysteriously disappeared from the case file. No progress was made toward correctly identifying the remains. 

Five years later, on June 6, 2010, the newly installed Archbishop of Panama, José Domingo Ulloa pictured above, called in a homily for the investigation into Father Gallego’s disappearance to be “fully carried out,” adding that “a little goodwill and remembering would clarify the mystery.” Something similar can be said about the other crimes of the narco-dictatorship, both those documented by the Truth Commission and those it failed to uncover.

Galician in Memory

Years have passed since then; three decades have passed since the beginning of the “democratic” period, and many years since the murder of Héctor Gallego, but his remains have still not been located. Such negligence and complicity with the military dictatorship is unacceptable in the judicial system of a so-called democracy.  Not only have Father Gallego’s aspirations for justice been denied, the PRD has also conspired to frustrate and dismiss citizen initiatives aimed at honoring his memory. In this despicable endeavor, the indifference and pusillanimity of the opposition leadership has been very useful.

During the 1980s, a university student movement raised a banner at the main entrance to the public space dubbed “Omar Recreational Park” by the military dictatorship, bearing the following inscription: “Héctor Gallego Park.” The following day, an image of the sign appeared on front page news.  From that moment on, a conscious citizenry, committed to democratic, republican, and humanitarian values, began to call the public good in question “Héctor Gallego Park.”  The student action had a solid argument. How is it possible that a park where Panamanian children play—and where Isthmus families find healthy recreation—bears the name of a tyrant with blood on his hands, the supreme leader of a repressive regime and a violator of human rights?

Instead, it is only fair to name this public space in memory of the dictator’s most emblematic victim, a good priest whose hands, if anything, were imprinted on his hands, it was the imprint of the earth he cultivated alongside his fellow peasants. His short life, cruelly cut short by tyranny, was a testament to his solidarity with Panamanian children and the Isthmus families of our interior countryside. The proposal, evidently, resonated greatly. After the overthrow of the dictatorship, one of President Guillermo Endara Galimany’s first measures was to remove the name of the tyrant from the park on Via Porras and name it Father Gallego, in commemoration of a priest dedicated to promoting the kingdom of God and his justice among the oppressed.  However, shortly after assuming the presidency in 1994, Ernesto Pérez Balladares (PRD) pictured below, changed the name of the recreational space from Héctor Gallego to Omar Torrijos. Some unwitting individuals, in a vulgar mockery, began calling the site “Omar Gallego,” confusing both victim and perpetrator in a single designation, as if the torture and death of a priest were a big joke.

For the civil society sectors, which rejected the military dictatorship and its aftermath of robbery and arbitrary acts, Father Gallego’s sacrifice symbolizes the ongoing, yet peaceful and moral struggle that must be waged for the Republic on democratic, inclusive, and decent foundations. For this reason, and for the human rights violations that his forced, cruel, and inhumane disappearance represented, we must continue to remember Father Gallego, as his brothers in Santa Fe de Veraguas have done for almost half a century.

From the 70’s, an interesting gathering with Omar Torrijos, Manuel Antonio Noriega and Ernesto Perez Balladares