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.

Quote of the Day (Dan Quayle, on Trump vs. Clinton)

"On paper, you'd say, 'Well, she's [Hilary Clinton] more qualified.' But you know what? He's [Donald Trump] more qualified in the sense that the American people, I think, want an outsider. They want an outsider this time. She is not an outsider, so if you're looking for an outsider, no she's not qualified and he is."—Former Vice President Dan Quayle, quoted in Eun Kyung Kim, “Dan Quayle Shows Support for Donald Trump on TODAY Show: 'He Can Win',” TODAY News, May 12, 2016

Welcome back, Dan Quayle! You’ve aged a little bit since George H.W. Bush named you his running mate back in 1988, but a little gray on the temples (a natural outgrowth of being 69) is great for lending you that gravitas you were not given credit for back then.

You’ve been gone too long, after that unsuccessful 2000 primary campaign for President, which you lost to a son of your old boss. You had gone so far off the radar that I believe the only news I’d  heard about you since then was that you moved from Indiana to Arizona and had hurt your back while helping one of your children move into a college dorm. I was afraid that the injury might have impaired some of your old abilities. Your appearance on Today immediately eased these fears.

There were two things I liked about your statement: 1) It shows that, at least politically, any sense that the back may have hurt your ability to maneuver is nonsense, since only a few months ago you had hosted a fundraiser for another son of your old boss, Jeb Bush--the ultimate INSIDER; and 2) your words continue to blithely ignore reality. 

If “outsider” status is sufficient reason for election to our nation’s highest office, why stop at Trump? Who, after all, is more of an outsider than John Rocker, the flamethrower for the Atlanta Braves in the late 1990s who in his prime could annoy as many groups in a single statement as Trump—and a guy who, after confirmation that he used steroids in his professional career, is even more of an outsider--at least in his old activity?

Or, if you want a female outsider to counter Hilary’s attempt at history, why not Sarah Palin? But why stop there--why not Snooki?

Everybody knows that YOU don't believe in conventional rules, Dan. Or, at least, spelling rules.

(Unfortunately, most Irish-American voters regard you as an eejit for your creative rendering of a certain staple of the the ancestral diet as P-O-T-A-T-O-E , not to mention your favorable comparison of your government experience with Jack Kennedy’s, in your 1988 debate with Lloyd Bentsen.)

 
Your fans hope that your next defiance of convention--not to mention logic--is appreciated more than your last such venture on the national stage was.

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ With the Possible Origins of Jeb Bush’s ‘Hispanic’ Status)

(In their third debate, monitored by Jim Lehrer, Al Gore and George W. Bush take questions at a town hall forum. The GOP candidate’s father, former President George W. Bush, has already tried unsuccessfully to inject himself into the contest, but he remains resourceful.)

Debate Moderator Jim Lehrer (played by Chris Parnell): “Next, a question for Governor Bush, from Mr. Jorge H.W.B.”

Former President George Bush (played by Dana Carvey): [now reappearing, disguised in Mexican garb with his Secret Service Agents] “Well, as an undecided Latino voter - mi English unbiquito here - but I'd like to ask Governor Bush here.” [Turning to his son, Gov. George W. Bush, played by Will Farrell.] “Didn't that last question seem a little biased? A little skewed? Not totally on the level? That last fellow - possible shill...possible Democratic operative over there…”

Lehrer (annoyed): “President Bush, please!!!”

George Bush: [takes off his hat] “Alright, Jim. Just trying to even things up, level that playing field. Won't happen again.”—Saturday Night Live, Season 26, Episode 3, Oct 21, 2000, Opening Skit

Quote of the Day (V.S. Naipaul, Stunned by the Old ‘New Right’)

“The ‘new right’ of 1968 had become the New Right of 1984, to which [Eldridge] Cleaver belonged. Of this New Right I knew nothing until I got to Dallas; and what I learned was bewildering. The New Right seemed to be as much a creation of modern technology as air-conditioned Dallas was.”—V.S. Naipaul, "The Air Conditioned Bubble: The Republicans in Dallas," in The Writer And The World: Essays (2002)

Thirty years ago on this date, the Republican Party renominated Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush at their national convention. A generation in the making, since Barry Goldwater’s disastrous 1964 Presidential campaign, this was a different political party—even a different conservative movement—than the one that William F. Buckley Jr. had envisioned in the 1950s: less motivated by philosophical disagreement with liberalism over the size of government, more actuated by resentment over single issues—and with its shock troops coming from an evangelical Christian movement that had come off the political sidelines in the past decade.

It was this theologically minded cohort, partnering with business interests who wanted the hand of government nowhere to be seen (unless they needed help themselves), that formed the bedrock of The New Right. And it is this group that the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist V.S. Naipaul struggled to understand that hot summer.

Type “V.S. Naipaul” into the Google search engine and you’ll not only see “conservative” pop up in the results, but even “racist” and “sexist.” To be sure, his questioning of the conduct of post-colonial Third World  nations has brought him his share of opprobrium.

At the heart of the Trinidad native’s work, however, is a feeling of alienation, not merely from racial groups but cultural norms. That sense of profound difference informs how he viewed the coalition that would, in less than three months, power Reagan and Bush to a landslide victory over Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro.

The title of one of Naipaul’s other books, Among the Believers, could serve equally well for this essay (which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books). Long resident in Britain when he observed the GOP’s quadrennial confab, he was unprepared both for the kinds of people he would find in Dallas and how these gatherings had changed, in both parties, over the last 20 years.

Yet, for all his ignorance of American politics, Naipaul was able to put his finger on something that has only become more marked in the years since: its capture by white men in what has been called the “fly-over region” (i.e., between the coasts). His astonishment that Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther turned New Right adherent, will be speaking at a panel assailing the liberal welfare state soon gives way to equal astonishment that this convert to the conservative cause, a possible refutation of the notion that the GOP is the white man’s party, is ignored as soon as he serves their temporary, narrow interests.

The “modern technology” that caused Naipaul to marvel was the direct-mail apparatus forged by Richard Viguerie that soon caused protest candidacies from the right to be launched continually. An innovation that once seemed cutting-edge, however, today seems old-hat, now that more recent elections have brought us
frankly partisan cable “news” outlets, the Web, email, and social media.

Arguably, since the 1968 Republican Convention, when Richard Nixon’s media advisers had carefully scripted the convention down to the minute, both parties’ conventions had become increasingly—well, conventional—in an attempt to avoid the kind of unseemly battles and delays well beyond prime time that had plagued the Democrats in 1968 and 1972. By the time of the GOP’s Dallas convention, Naipaul was annoyed to discover, all the speeches were pureed of any intellectual content whatsoever:

“The same speech (or very nearly), the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter's glib.”

At the time of the convention, there were some analysts still under the illusion that the Republicans had not been effectively hijacked by the New Right.  A Christian Science Monitor article from the day of the renomination of Reagan and Bush, for instance, would have it that there was “Diversity in Dallas,” noting that three-fifth of the delegates supported a nuclear freeze, and that “A third of the delegates favor the Equal Rights Amendment. Half would oppose sending troops to El Salvador to enable US-backed forces to survive. Half favor the Moral Majority; half do not.”

Wishful thinking, as it turned out. In this setting, which reminded Naipaul of “a Muslim missionary gathering I had seen five years before in a vast canopied settlement of bamboo and cotton in the Pakistan Punjab,” the GOP moderates were unable to wrest control of the party's direction from the right wing. In fact, they didn’t even try.

The “air conditioned bubble” in Dallas has been extended for the Republican Party, progressively sealing them off from contact in America with anyone who might be deemed “The Other.” “Power was the theme of the convention,” Naipaul summed up, “and this power seemed too easy—national power, personal power, the power of the New Right. Like [Ralph Waldo] Emerson in England, I seemed in the convention hall of Dallas ‘to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow.'"