Guillermo Endara

This leader was attacked in 1989 by the paramilitary group ‘Dignity Battalions’. The news of his attack left his wife in a state of shock, which led to her death due to cardiac arrest.

At the age of fifty-four, after joining office as a president, he married Ana Mae Diaz Chen, a law student who was in her early twenties.

Guillermo was born to Guillermo Endara Paniza and Elsa Maria Galimany Codol on 12th May, 1936, in Panama City. His father had a close association with Arnulfo Arias, the founder of ‘Panameñista Party’. After Arias was removed from power, Endara and his family had to spend a few years of their life in exile along with Arias.

During the exile period, he did his schooling from institutions such as ‘Colegio La Salle Christian Brothers’ in Buenos Aires and ‘Black-Foxe Military Institute’ of Los Angeles. Guillermo excelled as a student and later graduated in Law from the ‘University of Panama Law School’. He then continued his studies in law at the ‘New York University’, after which he returned back to Panama, and got appointed as the Professor of Commercial Law at the ‘University of Panama’.

Endara got his first exposure to politics after he became a member of the anti-military leader Arnulfo Arias’ party in 1961.

In 1963, Guillermo, along with three others, founded the firm ‘Solis, Endara, Delgado, and Guevara’, and it is now one of the most prosperous law firms of Panama. A year later, he was elected to public office for the first time, but he refused to accept it because electoral frauds were involved in the process.

Under the presidency of Arias, in 1968, Guillermo assumed the post of the minister of planning and economic policy. But Arias’ presidency lasted for only eleven days because the ‘Panamanian National Guard’ (now the ‘Panama Defense Forces’) brought his downfall and this led Endara to go underground.

Subsequently, he was jailed in 1971, and thereafter sent to exile, where he remained with Arias for the next six years, until the ban on Arias was lifted.

In 1977, he arrived at Panama and started his career afresh. For a few years during the 1980s, he practiced law in Panama City and even took up lectureship at the ‘University of Panama Law School’. He was also the member of Legislative Assembly for two terms.

Panama had a deceptive democracy under the regime of the military leader Omar Torrijos, and the country’s state further deteriorated during the reign of his successor Manuel Noriega. Drug trafficking soared high and weakened the economy of the country during the tenure of these two leaders. When Endara ascended as the President, he substituted the Panamanian Military with the national police force, which helped Panama revive its democracy.