This Day in Latin American History (Narco-Dictator Noriega Surrenders to U.S. Forces)

Jan. 3, 1990—Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega surrendered to the U.S. troops who invaded his country in the most significant military action since the Vietnam War, ending 10 days when he was holed up in the Vatican embassy—and 22 years of corruption and violence by himself and his predecessor.

New York Times columnist James Reston once wrote, “The U.S. will do anything for Latin America, except read about it.” It has certainly been the case that, until—well, just the last week or so—this country had largely forgotten about Panama for the last 34 years, not paying much attention when Noriega died, still in captivity, in 2017.

The event that brought that nation back into our consciousness was a tweet by—well, You Know Who—about how Chinese soldiers were operating the Panama Canal, and that we were being overcharged for passage through it.

It’s hard to figure out what brought on this outburst, except that: 1) You Know Who likes to pick fights who allies with leaders who have been democratically elected, and 2) he might be, as former Congressman David Jolley suggests, jealous that Baby Jesus was receiving more attention on Christmas than he was.

Noriega seems like just the type of person he would have enjoyed. Actually, there is precedent for Republican Presidents keeping on good terms while he was in power—except that they did so while keeping as far away from him as possible, so as to avoid his ineradicable moral stench.

The path to power for Noriega ran through his hard-drinking, corrupt predecessor, Omar Torrijos, who seized power in a coup d’etat in 1968. From humble origins, Noriega became so indispensable to the dictator—first as an army colonel, then as his intelligence chief—that Torrijos called him “my gangster.”

Upon taking over Panama after Torrijos died in a 1981 plane crash, Noriega leveraged a comparatively small arms-and-drug trade into what journalists R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez Borbon called, in their account In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968-1990, called a "narcomilitary state."

Many of his countrymen would have privately agreed with the nickname bestowed on Noriega by his future American jailers to signify his pockmarked skin: “Pineapple Face.”

But they also would have been terrified that any one-liner—even a slight hint of a smirk—would have been noticed by the ruthless leader who, New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson commented in a 2017 podcast interview, possessed the frightening ability to observe the slightest thing out of the corner of his eyes even while seemingly focusing on someone else.

Though denying to Anderson that he was involved in drug trafficking with the Medellin drag cartel, Noriega did admit that he allowed money laundering for this crime in his country’s banks at the behest of the CIA, which wanted a means of monitoring this activity. Anderson judged this a half-truth.

Both Democratic and Republican Presidents chose to look the other way through two decades of the Torrijos-Noriega regime: Jimmy Carter needed Torrijos to take the Shah of Iran off his hands when the latter’s admission to a U.S. hospital sparked the hostage crisis, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush wanted to counter Communist influence in Cuba and Nicaragua.

As in the Philippines, a dictator’s heinous murder of a prominent dissident (in this case, Dr. Hugo Spadafora) caused such international revulsion that his American handlers felt compelled to act. When a call for him to step down went unheeded and Noriega voided the 1989 Presidential election, plans went into motion on how to remove him.

Noriega’s rash declaration of war on the U.S. and a subsequent killing of a U.S. Marine provided the Bush administration with the pretext needed to remove him in its “Operation Just Cause” December 1989 invasion.

The American casualties— 23 troops killed in action and over 300 wounded—may have seemed minimal compared to the Vietnam War, the largest previous U.S. military action. But, considering American complicity in the regime it ended up overthrowing, it was all so unnecessary.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Parks and Recreation,’ As Leslie Shows Her Incredible Zeal for Serving the Public)

Leslie Knope [played by Amy Poehler]: “These people are members of a community that care about where they live. So what I hear when I'm being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.”—Parks and Recreation, Season 1, Episode 1, “Pilot,” original air date Apr. 9, 2009, teleplay by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, directed by Greg Daniels

This post is for a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!) who is quite an admirer of Ms. Poehler.

Quote of the Day (Pat Barker, on a Story’s Voice, ‘The Breath on the Mirror’)

“I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it ‘the breath on the mirror.’ If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly.” —Booker Prize-winning English novelist Pat Barker, “The WD Interview: Pat Barker,” Writer’s Digest, January/February 2025

If you haven’t read Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy, Regeneration (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road), you really owe it to yourself to see what wonders she can bring to historical fiction.

I have not yet read a later trilogy of hers, The Women of Troy, but I have to think that it must be very good, too. And a key part of her success has to be how she brings her characters to life in dialogue, as she describes above.

(The image accompanying this post, of Pat Barker at the Durham Book Festival in 2012, was taken October 27, 2012, by summonedbyfells.)

This Day in Classical Music History (Ingmar Bergman Stages Mozart's ‘Magic Flute’ for Swedish TV)

Jan. 1, 1975—To celebrate the 50-year anniversary of Swedish Radio, Ingmar Bergman premiered his adaptation of The Magic Flute on Swedish TV, reaching an estimated one-third of the nation that night.

Though made on a comparatively modest budget of only $650,000, it was still technologically innovative, featuring the first soundtrack ever recorded in stereo for a television broadcast. And, running counter to the movies-to-TV model of the prior two decades, its premiere in U.S. theaters came 11 months after it was exposed to Swedish TV audiences.

I had heard before that a movie had been made of this Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opera, but I had never seen it before. And, I might as well confess now, I am hardly an opera aficionado, having attended less than 10 productions of any kind over the years.

But, when I saw that the movie would be played near me in northern New Jersey at the Barrymore Film Center over this past weekend, I was curious. The idea that Bergman, of all people, with his whole filmography of Scandinavian gray skies and gloom to match, might have tackled an opera—well, it struck me as a case of man bites dog.

In other words, this I had to see.

So, what was it like? As I watched, I thought that Bergman was mounting this production as a holiday from his usual anxiety and dread. And, with a new year around the corner, I experienced much the same thing—a revival of spirits that left me continually smiling.

The exterior establishing shot of a grassy outdoor scene led me to expect something naturalistic, shot on location. But those expectations were immediately overturned as the camera switched to the inside of a theater.

Instead of a long list of opening credits, the camera moves throughout the overture to close-ups of faces—and not to the conductor or orchestra musicians, but to featured audience members, especially a young blond girl continually highlighted.

To be sure, Bergman and cinematographer panned to audience members special to them, such as Bergman’s wife and son and actress-muse Liv Ullmann. But what was striking about this seven-minute sequence was the sheer variety of faces—men and women of all ages, ethnicities, and races, even individuals plucked off the street for the occasion.

By the end of the show, contemporary listeners would have appreciated that Mozart intended this work to be savored by people of all kinds.  In our time, with opera suffering from the perception that it caters to an aging, elite audience, the opening sequence can be read as a reminder of the genre’s fundamentally universal aspirations.

We see the cast and crew onstage and backstage, an injection of reality into a landscape of fantasy—with a singer, for instance, suddenly aware of his cue, rushing around, or performers reading another libretto (Wagner’s Parsifal) or far from it (a “Donald Duck” comic book).

How do you adapt a work meant for the opera house to very different audiences—television and movie theaters?

For starters, there is the matter of length. The Magic Flute has been known to stretch to nearly three and a half hours (counting intermission) in the opera house. Bergman trimmed it back to two hours and 15 minutes, including by omitting Act 2 trios and ignoring Mozart’s Masonic references.

As he recalled in Images: My Life in Film, Bergman was exposed to this opera as a child, when he "loved to roam around”:

“One October day I set out for Drottningholm (in Stockholm) to see its unique court theater from the eighteenth century. For some reason the stage door was unlocked. I walked inside and saw for the first time the carefully restored baroque theater. I remember distinctly what a bewitching experience it was: the effect of chiaroscuro, the silence, the stage. In my imagination I have always seen The Magic Flute living inside that old theater, in that keenly acoustical wooden box, with its slanted stage floor, its backdrops and wings. Here lies the noble, magical illusion of theater. Nothing is; everything represents. The moment the curtain is raised, an agreement between stage and audience manifests itself. And now, together, we'll create! In other words, it is obvious that the drama of The Magic Flute should unfold in a baroque theater."

In some ways, Bergman was like the title character in one of his films: “The Magician,” a manufacturer of illusions.  

He had hoped to film at Drottningholm Palace Theatre, one of the few surviving Baroque theatres in the world, but the scenery "was considered too fragile to accommodate a film crew.”

Upon learning this, the director set about meticulously reconstructing the stage—including wings, curtains, and wind machines—in the studios of the Swedish Film Institute. Moreover, the stage dimensions and the props color tones match the original 1791 premiere in Vienna.

In some ways, sound came in for as much care as image, with conductor Eric Ericson and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra recording the score in in an old circus building. Bergman used the “playback” method, scrutinizing prerecorded music so that lip synchronization and performers met his exacting standards.

Even with material that was already light and fluffy, Bergman was unafraid to poke viewers in the ribs. The creature who chases Prince Tamino, for example, may well be the most sorry, silliest dragon ever put on celluloid; the three spirits are borne aloft in a flying machine more out of 19^th-century sci-fi than 20^th-century aircraft; and periodically, singers hold up cue cards to prompt audiences to chant along.

Kenneth Branagh attempted his own interpretation of the opera in 2006, but it was widely regarded as inferior to Bergman’s. The latter won a BAFTA TV Award for Best Foreign Television Programme and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design.

That the great Scandinavian film director pulled it off is something of a miracle. His opera adaptation appeared in the same year as Ken Russell’s version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy. It’s hard to imagine more dissimilar approaches to the genre than these two men displayed. While Bergman’s was sprightly, Russell’s was positively surreal.

Quote of the Day (Annie Sullivan, on Beginning and Failing)

“Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose— not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.”— Irish-American teacher of the blind Annie Sullivan (1866-1936), quoted by student Helen Keller in Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955)