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.
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