This month marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Panama. Early in the morning of December 20th, 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Just Cause, sending tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of aircraft into Panama to execute an arrest warrant against its leader, Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking. General Noriega was once a close ally to Washington and on the CIA payroll. But after 1986, his relationship with Washington took a turn for the worse. During the attack, the U.S. unleashed a force of 24,000 troops, equipped with highly sophisticated weaponry and aircraft, against a country with an army smaller than the New York City Police Department.
That the invasion of Panama took place a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it really set the terms for future interventions in a number of ways. One, it was unilateral. It was done without the sanction of the United Nations, without the sanction of the Organization of American States, which was a fairly risky thing for the United States. It didn’t occur often, even during the Cold War. Two, it was a violation of national sovereignty, which of course the United States did often during the Cold War, but it was a violation—the terms of the violation changed. It was done in the name of democracy. It was argued—it was overtly argued that national sovereignty was subordinated to democracy, or the United States’ right to adjudicate the quality of democracy. And three, it was a preview to the first Gulf War. It was a massive coordination of awesome force that was done spectacularly for public consumption. It was about putting the Vietnam syndrome to rest.
just in the first hour, we had had 200 and—about close to 400 bombs were dropped after midnight, devastating poor neighborhoods—El Chorrillo, Marañon, Caledonia. So it was devastating, because, one, the majority of the people who suffered consequences of it were poor people in the urban areas. And the elite, who was complicit to this, were—their neighborhoods were protected. They were safe. Some of them was removed from their homes and were placed in the Canal zone. So it was two different approaches. One was intimidation and literally expressing no concern for the poor, in a way. So we think it was very devastating.
And it’s interesting that at 25 years, this is the first time one of the presidents are talking about the need to answer the question about how many people died, how many people disappeared. And on Saturday, the new president, President Varela, said that he wanted to create a special commission to investigate what happened during the invasion, how many people died, because they’re attempting to get a national reconciliation. The debate—there’s always a debate in Panama, if we’d celebrate this as a day of mourning. The president calls it a day of reflection, and there’s a sector that call it a day of liberation. So we still have a conflicting view of the impact of this invasion in Panama.
Well, my understanding was the understanding that the press reported. It was everything from attacks on or threatened attacks on our officers and men and women in the military in Panama to drug trafficking and extensive contacts with drug gangs that had grown much larger than the contacts with the CIA had ever contemplated and so forth.
But I’ve got to say that in what I teach, you could learn a lot about U.S. operations in its own hemisphere. This was an operation, not so unique, as one of the speakers just suggested. Go back and look at Marine General Smedley Butler, in his testimony to the then Armed Forces Committee in the Congress, where he essentially compared himself to Al Capone, and he said, “Al Capone operated on one continent, I operated on two. I was a criminal for American commercial interest.” We have invaded someone or interjected our military force into someone’s territory in the Caribbean about 35 times since 1850. This is our hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine is still operational. And we seem to think that we can interfere in anyone’s country at any time. 2002, we tried to foment a coup in Caracas to overthrow Hugo Chávez. This is nothing new. This is the way America operates in its own hemisphere.
I agree completely. The Cold War, though, did force the United States to operate under the legitimacy of multilateralism, and that’s what gets swept away with Panama, with the invasion of Panama. And it does set the terms for future invasions. But I agree completely.
in some ways, the Panama invasion is a capstone to Iran-Contra, to the 1980s, to the involvement of the United States in Nicaragua. Noriega was a key player in that, a shadowy player. I actually don’t know—I mean, I’m a born and raised Catholic, but the mysteries of the national security state doesn’t—you know, by far outstrips the mysteries of the trinity. I don’t know—Noriega played both sides. He passed information on to Cuba at the same time he brokered deals with the Contras. He was an intermediary with the cartels in Colombia. All of this is the deep politics behind Iran-Contra. And Hersh, Seymour Hersh, published an article, I think in 1986, before actually Iran-Contra broke, in The New York Times, outlining Noriega’s involvement in drug running and drug trafficking. And that really was the turning of the tide in terms of the U.S.’s involvement with Noriega.
It was actually under the Reagan administration that the federal judiciary issued some warrants for drug trafficking and racketeering for Noriega. And if you—actually, Brent Scowcroft, who was the national security adviser for George H.W. Bush, has a very interesting interview, where he says, “You know, Noriega wasn’t really high on our agenda.” You know, what happened was that the Bush administration was kind of pushed by domestic politics, particularly to its bumbling of an October coup in Panama that it didn’t handle very well, and it took a lot of criticism. And you go back and you actually look at the press, and the press was baiting the Bush administration for not dealing with this, for not being—for not supporting the coup plotters against Noriega. And in some ways, it’s an interesting kind of trajectory, a kind of fumbling into the invasion.
There’s a book written by Christopher O’Sullivan called Colin Powell: American Power and Intervention from Vietnam to Iraq. And he writes, “Powell was aware that Noriega had been on the CIA payroll for a quarter century. He had witnessed Noriega being feted as a savior of the Contras by Weinberger at the Pentagon. Support for Noriega had been so staunch that for a time the Reagan administration impeded investigations into allegations of his drug trafficking. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had even awarded him with a commendation for his contributions to the ‘war on drugs.’ Powell observed that the Reagan and Bush administrations should have know that ‘you could not buy Manuel Noriega, but you could rent him.'” Then O’Sullivan writes, “With the Cold War ending and the obsessive fear about Nicaragua dissipating, Noriega’s usefulness to Washington evaporated. He also took the fateful step of endorsing the Contadora Peace Process for Central America.”
Powell was deputy national security adviser and then national security adviser in the last year of the Reagan second administration, so he was up close and personal watching these things. There’s more too it. Some of it’s still classified. But U.S. machinations in that region of the world, from El Salvador to Honduras today, where we supported the heinous overthrow of the leader of Honduras and installed our man, so to speak, is well known to anyone inside the community. As I said before, this is how we deal with our hemisphere.
from an internal process of Panama itself, right, not U.S.-only foreign policy, but I think that invasion represented a move of the U.S. to make sure that when the Panama Canal was returned to Panama, that the government in power was the elite that they was accustomed to relate to. If you see who became the government installed by the U.S., was the former oligarchy and their representative. So, it wasn’t only that Noriega no longer served the U.S. interests, but the internal conflict in Panama over governance, control of the resources. There was a lot of concern that the Panamanian—if Panama Canal got transferred to Panama and you still have the military in power, that that will give them an advantage over resources, because they would have the control of the resources that you made from just administrating the canal. So it also was to shift the correlation of forces within Panama.
I also think that it’s very important when we discuss Panama, I think it’s the same problem we face today. When we discuss 9/11, we talk about the victims, and we all understand what it means to feel vulnerable and be innocent, but pay the price for the life and the people who disappear and get killed. In Panama, we still have no answers of how many people were killed. We still have families that don’t have any answers of where their family disappeared to. And now that’s the big question in Panama, I think. The U.S. occupation in Panama is a long history. From 1903, when they supported the oligarchy to become an independent country, to their intervention in every internal conflict in Panama, the U.S. was the force. For a long time in the history of Panama, the first 40 years, Panama policemen was never a force that could handle the internal process. They depended on the U.S. 14 military bases. And the U.S. defines politics and internal process of Panama. So, yes, you have the consolidation of what have been historical. The U.S. determined politics and all internal process in Panama and supported a small elite that are loyal to the U.S.
For the majority of people in Panama, it’s one of the most—what is it—traumatic experiences we have ever lived, because we’re a Catholic country. To bomb a country when people are in the process of celebrating Christmas, bomb them at midnight, is something that is—I mean, it violates every basic international law, from the Geneva Convention or any agreement [inaudible] about protecting civilian in time of war.
Manuel Noriega was on the payroll of the CIA. He was apparently working with the Cubans. He played—he played multiple roles within Panama that, as you mentioned, the CIA was willing to work with during the height of Iran-Contra. But things turned with the end of the Cold War, and he became inconvenient in some ways.
Going back to Humberto’s point, I don’t think we should downplay the racism of it—you know, Manuel Noriega coming from El Chorrillo, a neighborhood, a popular barrio, next to the Canal Zone, from migrant workers, most of them from the Caribbean, who helped build the Canal Zone. Noriega represented the lower classes, the dark lower classes. And think about the racism, if we go back and remember the way that it was presented in the press—his belief in witchcraft, his sorcery, right, the—you know, rifling through his underwear drawers.
And he is taken to the United States and imprisoned in Atlanta, Georgia. he’s still imprisoned. I mean, he’s still—he was—you know, in that piece, I used the word “extradited,” but it actually wasn’t. U.S. actually didn’t have an extradition treaty with Panama at the time, somebody corrected me. He was seized illegally and brought back to Florida, and then he was extradited to France. And he was in prison in France for a while, and then he was—now he’s back in Panama. He was put on trial in Florida in a federal court in 1992. And what’s interesting about that trial is that a number of government witnesses called actually confirmed Noriega’s defense. And Noriega’s defense was: “I was working for the CIA.” And one particular witness confirmed that Noriega helped broker a deal in which a Colombian cartel passed $10 million on to the Contras. This speaks to other issues having to do with the “Dark Alliance” series of Gary Webb that came out later. So this really kind of—you lift up the—you lift up Noriega, you lift up the Panama invasion, you both see the overt history of U.S. interventions that come later, but you see the deep politics of covert history, the national—the dark national security state that we still don’t really—you know, that’s still classified in many ways.
My students study covert and overt U.S. operations from 1947 to the present. While we might sit back and wax eloquent about international law and about human rights and so forth, what the world is really about is power. The United States exercises its power clandestinely and overtly quite frequently, since the end of the Cold War more so than during the Cold War. We can argue about the reasons, and there are complex reasons, usually, for invasions like Panama. And we always put the rhetoric, George H.W. Bush in this case, up, about liberty and democracy and freedom and so forth, and it is rarely, if ever, about those commodities. What it’s about is raw power—economic, financial, sometimes personal power. It’s about power. And that’s the way it is with great powers, and that’s the way it is in the world. We can lament it all day long. It’s still there confronting us every day.
I also said I didn’t think there was the political will or the political courage to hold those officials accountable. That’s a comment on the state of our democratic federal republic, which is not very democratic these days. And gives me great pain to say it, but I don’t see anything changing of a substantial nature until perhaps a profound crisis to us, something much more serious than 9/11, actually confronts us. I happen to think that that crisis is rapidly coming upon us. It’s called climate change. And how we deal with that and how we make it through the next generation, as it were, is going to paint our republic in either very draconian terms, collapsing of its own perfidy, or it’s going to resurrect it. I hope the latter. I’m optimistic in that regard. I hope the latter.
I agree with the comments that have just been made. I think Latin America is a very different place now. I think we’ve seen leadership after leadership throughout the hemisphere that’s changed and become more independent, and clearly wants to be more independent of what has been created by the United States in almost all of them—the rich, elite oligarchy. The most heinous case of all was Chile and putting Pinochet in place for the years that he ruled Chile, Nixon and Kissinger, of course, having brought about changes in the election process through propaganda and money and influence, and then, finally, participating, I think, in the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, and actually got General René Schneider assassinated before that. So, we have a really, really bad reputation in Latin America.
But they are becoming free of us. Mercosur, the new economic conglomerate, other things—the Summit of the Americas in April is going to see Cuba and the United States together and the other Latin American countries. And I think the United States, President Obama, is going to find a very different Latin America than in the past, a Latin America that wants to be autonomous, independent, stand up on its own, not necessarily denied trade with the United States, but have it on a very different basis, a far more equitable basis, a Latin America that’s grown up and knows the giant to the north, El Coloso del Norte, quite well now.
— source democracynow.org
Humberto Brown, former Panamanian diplomat. He is a researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.
Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University. His most recent book is The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World. His new article for TomDispatch is “The War to Start All Wars: The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005. He helped prepare Powell’s infamous speech to the United Nations claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which he has since renounced. He is now a professor of government and public policy at the College of William & Mary.