Hotel Melia Panama Canal, Panama review: School's out for dictators

Gentility has replaced lessons in torture at the Hotel Melia, writes Louise Southerden.

It's always fun to ask directions at a service station when the armed guard on duty obligingly tells you where to go with his pump-action shotgun. I mean, I was nervous enough before we stopped there, having read up on the history of our five-star destination, the Hotel Melia Panama Canal formerly known as the School of the Americas, the US-funded institution that trained some of Latin America's infamous dictators.

When it was set up in 1946, the School of the Americas was innocuously called the Latin American Ground School and taught good, old-fashioned nation-building skills such as well-digging and bridge-building. Within a few years, however, Cold War concerns prompted the US Government to become increasingly involved in Latin American politics, particularly around the Panama Canal. The school's curriculum added lessons in counter-insurgency and psychological warfare, sniper training and weaponry. Training manuals later made public by the Pentagon even included chapters on torture, execution and extortion.

More than 60,000 Spanish-speaking soldiers went through the school until it was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984 (it was later renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and now offers more PC courses on, for instance, the protection of human rights and democracy). Many of its former students, such as Manuel Noriega, Panama's de facto leader throughout the 1980s, went on to illustrious careers as dictators. (Despite finishing his 17-year prison sentence in 2007, General Noriega, now 75, is still behind bars, awaiting extradition to Panama and France where he will face more charges of drug trafficking and money laundering.)

All this was rattling around my heat-addled head as we drove towards the hotel. I tried to reason with myself: the School of the Americas left Panama 25 years ago and the five-star hotel in its place is owned by the Sol Melia hotel company, a kind of Spanish Club Med that has more than 300 hotels in 28 countries, making it the 13th-largest chain in the world.

I was starting to feel better until my travelling companions began joking about manacles in the mini-bar, drips coming from the ceiling onto our foreheads as we slept, bare bulbs lighting the cell-like rooms. As for the swimming pool we'd seen on the hotel website, let's just say the words "water" and "torture" were used in the same sentence.

As if on cue, another armed guard appeared, at the entrance to the hotel's walled compound. Was it a good thing that the hotel takes security seriously enough to issue guards with weapons, or should I have been worried that we needed a pistol-toting warden and high iron gates to sleep at night?

I decided Panama might not be the safest country in the world but it's far from being the most dangerous. Panama City looks more like Miami than the capital of a Central American country. Besides, the Hotel Melia is so, well, nice. As we drove in, well-dressed couples strolled arm-in-arm across manicured lawns, no doubt whispering Spanish sweet nothings into each other's ears. Children frolicked by the enormous three-tiered swimming pool and parents sipped cocktails on green and blue-striped sun lounges.

Everything seemed genteel and slow. Despite vast numbers of Americans visiting Panama every year, customer service seems an alien concept at the Hotel Melia. The only smiles we saw when checking in were on the badges worn by the surly staff at reception. But you can't always judge a hotel by its front desk and despite misgivings, the accommodation was supremely comfortable, if a little old-fashioned.