Noriega’s Death Recalls Deplorable Legacy of U.S. Panama Invasion

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On hearing of the May 29 death of Panamanian General Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno, my thoughts travelled back to December 20, 1989, when the U.S. military launched an invasion on the small Central American country. The invasion, dubbed “Operation Just Cause,” ultimately involved about 27,000 troops. Its goal was to oust Noriega from power.

The action was initiated by President George H.W. Bush, prompting a Madison teach-in titled, “When Bush Comes to Shove.”

In what journalist Christopher Dickey called “one of the costliest drug busts in U.S. history,” Noriega was captured and brought to trial in the United States. He was convicted in April 1992, after which he spent nearly twenty years in U.S. prisons and was later sentenced to another seven years in France, before finally being returned to Panama in 2011 to serve out the remainder of his sentence. He died of a brain hemorrhage, due to complications from surgery in March. He was 83.

In an editorial in the February 1990 issue of The Progressive, our editors wrote: “No single action of the Bush Administration so disgraces the United States as the December invasion of Panama. It was illegal and unwarranted, and the President callously ordered it to bolster his own domestic ratings—no matter the cost in lives to American soldiers, Panamanian soldiers, and Panamanian civilians. But you wouldn’t have learned this from U.S. television or the press. The major networks and the major newspapers, in a deplorable departure from their proclaimed ‘objectivity,’ played jingo bells throughout the invasion, applauding Bush's blunder and demonizing Manuel Noriega in almost every breath.”

If the objective of the invasion was to end drug trafficking in Panama, it was a miserable failure. In their 1998 book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair noted: “Under the U.S.-installed successor to Noriega, Guillermo Endara, Panama became the province of the Cali cartel, which rushed in after the Medellin cartel was evicted along with Noriega. By the early 1990s, Panama’s role in the Latin American drug trade and its transmission routes to the U.S. had become more crucial than ever."

Writing in The Progressive in February 1990, the late columnist Molly Ivins wrote, “The unfortunate faux pas concerning Manuel Noriega’s cocaine stash is entirely understandable. As the U.S. Army explained, it was ‘in the excitement of the moment’ that American soldiers searching Noriega’s refrigerator mistook a bunch of white powder for his ‘personal supply’ of the dreaded drug. Upon analysis, the powder turned out to be tamale flour, masa harina, which is also used for thickening chili and making tortillas and gorditas.”

Ivins quipped: “Turns out this whole invasion bidness is fraught with potential embarrassment.” She went on to note that the U.S. media “breathlessly” reported on “the color of Noriega’s underwear (red) and the nature of his pornography collection (which may yet turn out to be the family album) before they got around to mentioning that we seem to have killed several hundred civilians in the course of the glorious invasion.”

The Panama invasion was, at the time, the largest U.S. military operation since the end of the war in Vietnam. It resulted in an unknown number of civilian casualties. Writing on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the invasion, historian Greg Grandin noted that the Panama invasion was in many ways “the war that started all of Washington’s post-Cold War wars.”

The next big U.S. military operation was the Persian Gulf War, beginning in January 1991, also during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, which was similarly rapid and devastating on the civilian population. It also involved the use of press pools, embedded journalists, and a cheering TV news presentation of sanitized images.

In his reporting from Panama and afterwards, the late journalist Robert Knight wrote, “The invasion sets the stage for the wars of the 21st century.” Knight’s reporting is featured in The Panama Deception, an award-winning documentary film.

The Progressive also saw the connections. The magazine’s June 1991 issue included two articles in a special section called “The War Before Last,” about the aftermath of the Panama invasion and the Gulf War.

In her piece “Panamanians Still Feel the Pain,” author Barbara Jamison quotes Panamanian psychologist Guillermo Cohen Segovia saying that family members of those killed in the war have had to pay “for everything from coffins to more exhumations.” As he talks, he tapes children’s drawings on the wall surrounding the courtyard of Casa del Periodista, Panama City’s press club, as part of an exhibition sponsored by the Association of the Families of the Dead and the Disappeared. These are crayon and pencil drawings produced by his patients, aged three to eleven, all of whom suffer symptoms of trauma. They depict “tanks, helicopters, disembodied limbs, people running, people screaming, people in flames.”

In her article “Panamanians Still Pay and Pay,” reporter Susan Ferris looked ahead to promised reparations in Iraq: “Top officials of the Bush Administration hinted even before the war was over that the United States might one day help Iraq rebuild neighborhoods destroyed by the Gulf war’s relentless bombing sorties. Judging from what has happened in Panama since Operation Just Cause in December 1989, however, Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire should not expect much from the U.S. Government.”

Ferris interviewed numerous survivors of the U.S. invasion and found that “lawmakers . . . have thus far refused to [provide reparations] for Panamanian civilians, some of whom were gunned down even as they cheered American troops.” As one victim told her, “We didn’t like Noriega either. But we paid for whatever it was he did.”

Noriega may be gone, but the United States has yet to repay its debt for what it did to Panama.