Manuel Noriega — Panama’s strongman, captured in a US invasion

Summary

Shortly after midnight on 20 December 1989, some 27,000 American troops poured into Panama in the largest US military operation since Vietnam, with the explicit aim of removing one man: General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the country's de facto ruler. Noriega evaded capture for four days, then took refuge in the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Panama City. For ten days US forces blasted loud rock music at the nunciature to wear him down. On 3 January 1990 he walked out and surrendered, was flown to Miami, and became the only foreign head of government ever brought to the United States, tried in a US court, and imprisoned there.

Noriega had ruled Panama from behind the scenes since 1983, never as president but as commander of the Panamanian Defense Forces — the general who installed and discarded civilian figureheads at will. He was a creature of intelligence work: head of Panama's military intelligence under the populist strongman Omar Torrijos, and a paid asset of the US Central Intelligence Agency, on its payroll from the early 1970s. For years Washington valued him as a Cold War partner in Central America, tolerating what it knew of his corruption and ties to drug traffickers because he was useful against the leftist governments of Cuba and Nicaragua.

That bargain curdled in the late 1980s. As evidence of Noriega's involvement in cocaine trafficking and money laundering became impossible to ignore, US federal grand juries in Florida indicted him in 1988. He responded by tightening his grip, surviving coup attempts, and, in May 1989, annulling a presidential election that the opposition had clearly won. By December his rubber-stamp assembly had named him head of government and declared that a "state of war" existed with the United States; the next day Panamanian troops killed an unarmed US Marine. President George H. W. Bush, citing the protection of American lives, democracy, the Panama Canal, and the war on drugs, ordered the invasion.

The operation toppled Noriega quickly but at real cost to Panamanians. Several hundred to over a thousand civilians died, by varying estimates, and the poor Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, near Noriega's headquarters, was gutted by fire, displacing some 20,000 people. The opposition's election winner, Guillermo Endara, was sworn in as president on a US base as the fighting began. The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn the invasion as a violation of international law. Noriega spent the rest of his life in custody — in the United States, then France, then Panama — dying in a Panama City hospital in 2017.

Timeline

The intelligence officer who became the state

Manuel Noriega's power was built not on charisma or ideology but on information and force. Born into poverty in Panama City in 1934, he made his way through the National Guard and into military intelligence, the branch that watched both Panama's politics and the wider region for the United States. His patron was Omar Torrijos, the populist general who dominated Panama in the 1970s and negotiated the treaties returning the Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty. Under Torrijos, Noriega ran intelligence — and ran it for two masters, becoming a paid asset of the CIA from the early 1970s, valued for what he could report on Cuba, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the region's leftist movements.

When Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981, Noriega outmaneuvered his rivals, and by 1983 he had consolidated control of the armed forces, which he renamed the Panamanian Defense Forces and which he promoted himself to general to command. He never took the presidency. Instead he ruled through it, installing and removing civilian presidents as suited him while real authority stayed with the man who controlled the guns, the intelligence files, and the rackets. It was a model of deniable dictatorship: the trappings of a republic over the substance of one general's will.

Beneath that facade, the regime was a criminal enterprise as much as a government. Noriega turned Panama's banks and its strategic location into a hub for laundering money and moving cocaine for the Colombian cartels, while collecting payments from Washington's intelligence services at the same time. He answered opposition with violence; the 1985 torture and beheading of Hugo Spadafora, a former ally who had publicly accused him of drug trafficking, signalled what dissent would cost. For years the United States looked past all of this, judging a cooperative strongman astride the Canal worth the price of his corruption.

When the asset became the target

The arrangement that protected Noriega depended on his usefulness outweighing his criminality, and by the late 1980s that balance had tipped. As the scale of his involvement in the drug trade became undeniable and a matter of US domestic politics, his decades of service no longer shielded him. In February 1988 federal grand juries in Florida indicted him on charges of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering — an extraordinary step against a sitting foreign ruler and a US intelligence partner. The asset had become a target.

Noriega's response was to dig in. He survived internal coup attempts, purged the officer corps, and leaned harder on repression and nationalist defiance of "Yankee" pressure. The decisive break with any pretense of legitimacy came in May 1989, when Panama held a presidential election. The opposition candidate, Guillermo Endara, won by a wide margin; rather than accept the result, Noriega annulled the election, and his paramilitary "Dignity Battalions" beat the opposition candidates bloody in the streets in front of cameras. Whatever claim the regime had to represent Panamanians was gone.

The final escalation was Noriega's own. In December 1989 his loyalist National Assembly formally named him head of government and proclaimed that Panama was in a "state of war" with the United States. The following day, Panamanian forces killed an unarmed US Marine, Lieutenant Robert Paz, at a roadblock in Panama City, and detained and abused another American officer and his wife. For the Bush administration, already committed to removing him, these incidents supplied both pretext and trigger. The general who had spent his career on the American payroll had made himself, in Washington's framing, an intolerable threat astride the Canal.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Noriega's removal restored elected civilian government to Panama, abolished the Panamanian Defense Forces as a political army, and cleared the way for the orderly handover of the Panama Canal to full Panamanian control at the end of 1999 under the existing treaties. For the United States, the invasion was, in narrow terms, a success: the target was captured, an elected president installed, and the Canal secured. But it left lasting controversy over the legality of invading a sovereign state to seize its ruler, over the civilian death toll, and over the embarrassing record of Washington's long, paid partnership with the man it then went to war to depose.

Noriega's own fate was a slow legal afterlife. In 1992 a Miami federal jury convicted him of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering, and he was sentenced to 40 years, later reduced. He served his US term as a declared prisoner of war, then was extradited to France in 2010, where he was convicted of money laundering, and finally to Panama in 2011, where he faced sentences for the murders of political opponents, including Hugo Spadafora. He died in a Panama City hospital on 29 May 2017, at 83, after complications from surgery — having spent nearly his entire post-1989 life behind bars in three countries.

He is remembered as a particular archetype of the late Cold War: the intelligence asset turned narco-strongman, useful to a great power until he was not, and then made an example. His fall illustrated both the leverage a superpower could bring against a small client and the costs — to Panamanians above all — of resolving such a relationship by force.

Lessons

References

• Manuel Noriega | Biography, Facts, & Dictatorship BRITANNICA
• United States invasion of Panama WIKIPEDIA
• Manuel Noriega WIKIPEDIA
• Operation Just Cause: Noriega Surrenders U.S. ARMY