Hernández, Henríquez & the continuing tragedy of Panamanian football
The second murder of a Panamanian international footballer in just over six years is a reminder of how dangerous life can be on the streets of Colón.
It wasn’t even the first time that it had happened. Six years and four months earlier, similar gunshots had been heard around the Panamanian city of Colón, and with similar results; the death of a professional footballer and another bout of soul-searching in a city gripped by gangs, guns and drugs.
Gilberto Hernández Bultrón was 26 years old at the time of his death, on the 3rd September. He played for Club Atletico Independiente, thirty-odd miles from Colón in the city of La Chorrera. They won the LPF West Apertura earlier this year, and currently lead the Clausura by three points. He’d been with the club since 2022, when he signed from Herrera.
Earlier this year, Hernández made his debut for Panama in a 1-1 draw against Guatemala. Eleven days later he was selected again, this time as a substitute, for a 2-0 defeat against Argentina. He played 22 minutes, with Lionel Messi dinking in a cute little free-kick from twenty yards to tie up a win for the world champions.
At the time of writing, the motive for his death remains unknown, but it is not believed that this will be the case for long. It has been reported that a taxi driver was forced at gunpoint to drive to the area where the player’s mother lived before gunmen opened fire, killing Hernández and wounding a further seven. A suspect was arrested in a nearby apartment complex.
Just over six years earlier, a similar tragedy had occurred in the same city. Amílcar Henríquez Espinosa was coming towards the end of his playing career, but with 360 club appearances in Panama, Costa Rica and Colombia as well as 85 appearances for Panama it had been a career well spent.
Henríquez was 33 years old, and a father of three small children. His penalty kick had secured Panama their only ever piece of silverware. At the end of the 2009 Copa de Naciones UNCAF, his kick decided the penalty shootout in the final following a goalless draw against Costa Rica in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa.
His death on the 15th April 2017 caused an immediate commotion, with President Juan Carlos Varela condemning the killing on his Twitter account and calling for authorities in Colon to hunt down those responsible. Henriquez’s club retired his number 21 shirt. His national team was still in the middle of the CONCACAF ‘fifth round’ play-offs for a place in the following year’s finals in Russia. Eighteen days before his death, Henríquez had played the last twenty minutes of a 1-1 home draw against the United States of America.
Panama qualified for the World Cup finals for the first time four months after his death, with a 2-1 win in their final group match against Costa Rica, as the USA lost 2-1 to Trinidad & Tobago. The team dedicated their qualification to him. They failed to pick up a point in Russia, but considering that their group contained two eventual semi-finalists, in the form of both England and Belgium, perhaps this wasn’t so surprising.
And in a very real sense, while the death of Henriquez undoubtedly a shock, it could hardly be considered a surprise. His death was the 19th of a professional footballer since that of the 19-year old Miguel Tello, a prodigious talent briefly known as “The Joy of the People”, in 1989. According to a report by Sid Lowe in the Guardian on the eve of their World Cup finals appearance, Henríquez himself had previously told a story of armed robbers putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger only for it to jam.
But if “why” is an obvious question to ask whenever something like this happens, finding out the answer in any specific case isn’t necessarily straightforward. Colón is a city that is all too familiar with gun violence, and that violence breeds a reticence in discussing the exact nature of what may or may not have been going on.
Four days after Henriquez’s death, the Panamanian security minister Alexis Bethancourt suggested the most probable explanation was a “feud”. But what does that even mean? As Lowe points out, this murder was quite clearly a premeditated act, and to describe something in such broad terms is far too vague to be of much use, which may even plausibly partly be why they’re used in the first place.
The most likely explanation for this shroud of mystery and vagueness is fear. Colón province and the city which makes up the bulk of its population is situated on the north side of Panama, handily placed for the Atlantic side of the canal with which the country is so readily associated. To the north is shipping access to Mexico, the United States and the Caribbean. To the east is Venezuela. To the south-east is Colombia. Henriquez himself had played football in Medellin, a city most associated with Pablo Escobar, whose influence still hangs over the city, thirty years after his death at the hands of the Colombian police.
It is understandable that people may wish to keep quiet about specifics that they might know, in such an environment, and this sort of violence has been a major problem for the city for a very long time now. Government data shows 102 murders in 2022, down nine from 111 the year before. For comparison, there were 109 murders in London 2022, but the difference is that Colón province has a population of around 300,000, while London’s is just shy of 9m, or thirty times as many people. The government attributes most of the Colón murders to turf wars between gangs.
Location is key here. The Colón Free Trade Zone was founded in 1948 with the intention of becoming a trading hub for the Caribbean and Central & South America. But while this has happened in one sense, it has also in another, becoming a global centre for the trafficking of drugs and other contraband against, a battle which the authorities seem to be perpetually seem to be losing.
There have been small victories. In November 2022 Europol arrested 49 members of a cartel centred on Dubai which accounted for about a third of Europe’s cocaine supply. One of those arrested was the son of a director of the Colón Free Trade Zone, suspected of organising shipments from the port. In 2021 they confiscated 126 tonnes of drugs, a 54% increase on the previous year.
Stings have taken down several of Colón’s cocaine dealers. One uncovered $10m in cash behind the wooden walls of a Colón house. In December Panamanian police said they had arrested 27 members of the Clan de Gulfo, one of Colombia’s largest drug-trafficking gangs, who were accused of recruiting agents and moles in the security forces, judiciary and civil service.
But the forces of law and order should also pay attention to the law of unintended consequences. It has been widely reported some of these incidents have led to power vacuums, with a dramatic rise in violence as gangs fight out turf wars for control of different areas. According to Alejo Campos, the regional director of Crime Stoppers Latin America, “The police actions have decapitated some of the gangs and new leaders have emerged looking to position themselves in their patch, and that’s when the killings begin.”
And for all that Pablo Escobar has retained some of his self-perpetuated ‘Robin Hood’ legacy just over the water in Colombia, the reality of life for many in Colón Province is one of grinding poverty. Unemployment is estimated to run at 30% and infrastructure is crumbling. In March 2018, there were protests in the city which turned violent, resulting in injuries to four police officers and one member of the public. According to the Associated Press, demonstrators were:
...angry over what they see as the slow pace of a project to revitalise Colón’s collapsed sewer system, deficient water supply and crumbling housing. Ditches left open for protracted periods have regularly filled with dirty water and flooded streets, giving off a foul stench and making life more unpleasant in an already dilapidated city.
The riots were severe enough for the US Embassy in Panama City to issue a Security Alert. And of course, America had its role to play in the decline of the area. Anti-American riots over sovereignty of the Canal which started on the 9th January 1964 and led to the deaths of 28 people are still commemorated with an annual memorial, Martyr’s Day. The incident is considered to be the catalyst for the eventual US abolition of "in perpetuity" control of the Canal Zone and divestiture of its title to property there in 1979. The canal was fully in the control of the Panamanian government by the start of the new millennium.
But while the Panamanian economy has ‘taken’ off in recent years from a surface glance, the reality at street level seems to be a different matter. Reporting from Colón city the day after the latest murder, Juan Zamorano of the Associated Press described it thusly:
The city center is full of ramshackle wooden buildings. Sewage runs in the streets and garbage rots in fetid piles. A downpour Monday filled the streets with water. By late afternoon, the city’s main street had emptied as workers rushed from their jobs to get home before dark. There was a notably stronger police presence than usual.
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Upon the death of Gilberto Hernández, the Panamanian Football Federation sent the following tweet (translated to English below):
The Panamanian Football Federation regrets the sensitive death of Gilberto Hernández, @CAIPanama player from @LPFpanama.
FEPAFUT extends its condolences to his family and loved ones, as well as to the entire CAI and Panamanian soccer family.
PEACE TO YOUR SOUL
Even in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy corruption stalks this organisation, with the announcement just a couple of days later that Ariel Alvarado, president of the PFF from 2000 to 2011, had been found guilty of taking bribes worth $230,000 from a marketing company in exchange for the broadcasting rights for Panama's qualifying matches for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups and had been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Alvarado, who had also been a member of FIFA's ethics committee, had already been banned by the world game’s governing body for life in 2019 and fined 500,000 Swiss francs. He’d also been one of those named in the ‘FIFAgate’ scandal which led to the downfall of Sepp Blatter in 2015, as part of the executive committee of CONCACAF at that time. CONCACAF, of course, is a body “known as much for corruption as for soccer.” It’s the former stomping ground of Jack Warner.
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In the 2008 James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, Colón had the dubious honour of standing in for Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. But while Haiti had a GDP per capita adjusted for the cost of living in 2022 of $3,305 (151st out of the 176 for which such figures are available), Panama’s was $39,280 (48th). This has not gone unnoticed. In January 2022, foreignpolicy.com was describing the country’s economic progress as “one of Latin America’s most striking political and economic success stories of the past three decades.”
Elsewhere, the Colón coast remains a popular destination for tourists. In December 2022, Forbes wrote gushingly that, “From the peaks of La Amistad International Park to the tangled jungles of Darién, the Central American nation of Panama is home to truly spectacular natural beauty—and for those in search of a fascinating region that blends cultural immersion with ample opportunity for outdoor adventure, it’s tough to beat Colón.”
If tourist money is serving Panama well, Colón city isn’t seeing any of it. “Simply a no-go zone day or night, and most government agencies have issued stern warnings about travel to the coastal city”, is how worldnomads.com describes it, and the reviews are no better elsewhere. And the idea that a country can live a Jekyll & Hyde life for tourists and the wealthy against ordinary people living and working there is hardly a new one. Rio de Janeiro has been like this for decades. The same can be said for countless other tourist destinations worldwide.
And professional footballers overwhelmingly tend to come from working class backgrounds. In Panama, that may well means slums. In a city which has a host of unsavoury connections, there’s no reason to believe that players might not have found themselves getting sucked into unwelcome situations. To be clear, there is nothing definitive to connect Gilberto Hernández with crime. This may change. But for now, the tragedy of these deaths, no matter what the ultimate root cause, is that they seem to be part of a cycle that few have the political will to actually get hold of and deal with. Former colonisers have never paid for the damage they left behind. A lot of scars remain either very visible or just below the surface.