Wealth & Money Quote by Omar Torrijos Herrera

For a soldier who seized power promising nationalist reform, this line is less a political philosophy than a piece of battlefield messaging. Torrijos doesn’t bother with Marx, class struggle, or theory; he goes straight for the image that lands with ordinary people: the ration book. It’s a brilliant compression of Cold War fear into a household object. “Hands out wealth” sounds almost generous, then he punctures it with “through rationing books,” turning redistribution into scarcity management. The subtext: communism doesn’t equal abundance shared; it equals shortages administered.

That choice of metaphor matters in Panama, where Torrijos built legitimacy through a populist, state-driven agenda while simultaneously needing room to maneuver between Washington’s anti-communist expectations and Latin America’s revolutionary currents. He nationalized, invested, negotiated the Canal Treaties, and cultivated a Third Worldist posture. Calling out communism in this specific way signals: I’m not Castro, and my project isn’t a command economy that queues you for basics. It reassures the middle class and the U.S. without surrendering his “pro-poor” credentials.

There’s also an anti-bureaucratic jab aimed at authoritarianism in general. A ration book is a symbol of the state sitting between you and your daily bread, converting rights into permissions. From a military ruler, the irony is sharp: he condemns one form of control while practicing another. The line works because it frames ideology as lived experience, not abstract doctrine - and because it turns a global struggle into a local, tangible dread: not oppression in theory, but getting told what you can buy.