Noriega Into the Nineties
Caldwell, Christopher
Christopher Caldwell NORIEGA INTO THE NINETIES If, after the failed October coup, General Noriega is here to stay, the hapless people of Panama and the prestige of the United States will suffer...
...He is a killer, the real thing—he shot Giroldi personally...
...While Major Moises Giroldi had guns trained on General Noriega on October 3, while American helicopters hovered over the Comandancia, waiting to snatch the General off the roof, while Noriega was being herded into a truck, while U.S...
...Each passing day makes it more likely that Panama will evolve into a permanent gangster state...
...As Eisenmann says of the PDF, "People's hatred of that uniform is profound...
...Third, a blanket amnesty for all who have profited from the Noriega regime...
...and in the early 1960s Dame Margot Fonteyn, greatest of English ballerinas, staged a coup with her husband, Senator Roberto Arias, in a rowboat (a very Panamanian touch...
...Any attempt at political change that does not involve at least Noriega's exile is a pipe dream...
...Noriega is going to nominate publisher Tomas Altamirano, notwithstanding rumors that have appeared in the New York Times that the nominee will be Carlos Duque...
...Then Panamanian B will tell Panamanian C that he's seen the cadaver...
...Meanwhile, the Batallon 2,000, an elite brigade of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF), was roaring down the Transistmica, the "third road," to the Comandancia...
...Other Christopher Caldwell is a writer and editor living in Washington, D.0 tyrants express admiration for history's dictators: Noriega studies them...
...One Panama City businessman told me, "Tell Panamanian A that a friend is sick, and he'll tell Panamanian B that he's dead...
...Since, as Spadafora's friend Guillermo Sanchez Borbon has written, "holding his legs open in a damp climate such as Panama's would be a messy, sweaty business," the PDF solved the problem by using a machete to sever the tendons in Spadafora's groin...
...disinvestment is a Libyan or a Cuban or a Nicaraguan foothold...
...No one seemed to bring up the morale factor, but those most knowledgeable about the PDF think that the appear-ance of one or two U.S...
...In a country with habeas corpus, what could we say should that happen with Noriega...
...Remember that Panama combines one of the most open ports in the world with a banking system more confidential than Switzerland's...
...October's events seem to be making propaganda come true...
...each U.S...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 In January the Panama Canal Commission will get a Panamanian majority and a Panamanian head...
...Sanctions are always a blunt instrument, and the Reagan/Bush sanctions on Panama are blunter than most...
...If the big payback for the Canal treaties was to be the respect of Panamanians and other Latin Americans, then we lost...
...Whether due to Noriega's innate bravado or the fact that the General is often blitzed—Stolichnaya in the day, Old Parr at night—to the point where one associate describes him as functional about an hour a day, cojones is the operative word here, and the man is hung like a belfry...
...Like the mafia, they work by examples, the most famous of which is Dr...
...They just want you to know: We do this stuff...
...F this is the archetypal siphon state, a nation of ten-percenters...
...troops watched the whole thing from the distance of a Bo Jackson home run, the General somehow faced Giroldi down, as Giroldi's communiqué to U.S...
...Libya provided a $24-million bridge "loan" after the first U.S...
...Perhaps the February elections are appearing less and less likely, because even The General is often blitzed—Stolichnaya in the day, Old Parr at night—to the point where one associate describes him as functional about an hour a day...
...the Panamanian opposition in Miami says between 112 and 116...
...When he himself was arrested, he was told by his PDF guards that a dozen AIDS-infected prisoners would be brought in to rape him as soon as it got dark...
...As a young lieutenant, Noriega raped a Peruvian prostitute and beat her to within an inch of her life...
...Since the death of Luis Carlos Noriega, the booty goes largely to Carlos Castillo, an old chiricano friend of Noriega's, whose wife Noriega made director of immigration...
...Christopher Caldwell NORIEGA INTO THE NINETIES If, after the failed October coup, General Noriega is here to stay, the hapless people of Panama and the prestige of the United States will suffer irreparably...
...And there are objectionable ones—withholding payments to Panamanian employees of American companies, which hits poorer Panamanians first...
...Finally, under no circumstances can Noriega remain in Panama...
...His father, Roberto Suarez Gomez, who was Bolivia's largest raw cocaine producer and is now in jail for it in Bolivia, tried to cut an interesting deal—release my son and I'll pay off the Bolivian national debt...
...So I asked: "How much...
...But this man the administration describes as a "thug" is also a formidable autodidact...
...In the weeks after the coup, we were told that several of the participating officers had been taken down to the city morgue and frozen to death...
...A Taiwanese consortium is the most reliable answer I've heard, and the Taiwanese are certainly in tight with Noriega...
...Exiled editor of La Prensa Roberto Eisenmann describes the Noriega regime as "the world's first narco-military state," working like a mafia rather than a dictatorship...
...It is a measure of the international consensus against Noriega that...
...And, while most of the 80,000-100,000 Colombians who live in Panama are respectable businessmen, who do you think the guys with funny accents and $6,000 alligator-skin boots are...
...The high point of the torture involved some delicate and not-so-delicate work on his testicles...
...General Marc Cisneros stating that he didn't want Noriega extradited to the United States indicates...
...A multinational approach will be vital if it becomes necessary for foreign troops to enter Panama, to guarantee fair elections, for example...
...Sanchez Borbon writes of Carter "mewing about Human Rights" while students got clubbed at a nearby university—where clubbed does not mean invited to join the Skull 'n' Bones...
...get seen by your boss, drink a can of Soberana, and leave...
...f course, none of this would keep anyone awake at night if it didn't involve the Panama Canal...
...It was Torrijos's intervention that kept Noriega from being ousted from the army and consolidated Noriega's loyalty to, and favored status under, Torri j os...
...Nations live by the things they're proudest of: Iceland has had only one armed robbery in its history, Ireland has never invaded another country, and the United States, for a world power, has broken treaties only under extraordinary circumstances...
...The deal arrived at was that Noriega would go to Spain and keep all his money (which is in Europe, anyway...
...As the Oliver North case shows, any trial involving a prominent figure presupposes a brain-dead jury, who could effectively hold our Central American policy and our "war on drugs" hostage...
...I reached into my pocket and pulled out two loose bills, a ten and a one, gave him the ten, put the one back in my pocket, and walked off...
...We're going to hang onto you for the hell of it...
...The street signs and streetlights that were torn down during the past year's demonstrations have not been replaced (making this a scary place for an American correspondent to drive around alone at night...
...Abrogate...
...But Sanchez Borbon had friends who could make a big deal of this...
...The United States would drop the indictments...
...Negotiations were painstaking...
...I noticed two PDF guys with M16s not ten yards away, and I suddenly remembered I bad about two hundred bucks on me...
...Suarez was arrested with 854 pounds of cocaine in Miami in 1981...
...This is not the Panama we thought would be running the Canal, but American policy seems to take no account of the fact that Noriega is not the major problem in the vital matter of our keeping our word to Panama...
...on the Southern Command Network, which serves Americans in the Canal Zone, they pick up "Wheel of Fortune," where gringos smirk nonchalantly at the news that they've won $17,900, a car, and a mink coat The Panamanian equivalent, "Estrella de la Fortuna," comes on at 4:30 on Channel 4, and people clap madly when someone wins fifty bucks...
...They enjoyed a long, drunken torture orgy during which they dragged a battered Spadafora through a half-dozen Chiriqui beach towns before finally beheading him in Corozo...
...There are good sanctions—withholding our $7-million annual Canal payments, which go right into the General's pocket, and which will be released from escrow to Panama once the regime is over...
...Like Giroldi, younger officers and soldiers aren't necessarily rock-solid, either...
...the largest newspaper circulation ever recorded was 60,00070,000 by La Prensa after the Spada-fora killing...
...Some people say it was the State Department, which is preposterous—the team, led by Michael Kozak, had nothing to gain by it, and, given that Secretary Shultz was in Europe at the time, they did a spectacular job of arriving at a good deal...
...Panamanians are literally dying for fair elections, and Panama is not yet so poisoned that democracy is unviable...
...the Shah spent some of his last days here...
...And anti-Noriega sentiment in the PDF is virtually the same as in the public at large, although it's probably diminished since Noriega purged all but a handful of his senior officers after the coup...
...Teachers, who as a class are particularly opposed to Noriega, are now getting visits from PDF officials who tell them they'd look nice in a sack at the bottom of the Canal...
...Lest this sound alarmist, consider the case of Roberto Suarez Levy, as reported by Guy GugBotta and Jeff Leen in Kings of Cocaine...
...John Wayne married a Panamanian and visited often...
...At the bottom of the hill, I asked directions of a man who was sitting with his family...
...There are arguable ones—restricting access of Panamanian-registered boats to U.S...
...Two days after the coup, I took a walk through the Casco Viejo, the seventeenth-century neighborhood of Panama City...
...That Noriega eventually would have wound up in the Dominican Republic, where his son-in-law Jean Beauchamp is a successful French "businessman," is beside the point...
...The Colon free zone has been turned into a contraband emporium—stereos to Cuba, Italian bicycle parts to Nicaragua, that sort of thing...
...Most also agree that Spadafora's aristocratic bearing and striking good looks aroused spasms of jealousy in Noriega, who, whatever his charms, has neither...
...Secretary Baker was saying, "It's up to the Panamanian people to decide...
...On the episode I watched, some guy:won twenty-one dollars and a percolator, and the crowd went berserk...
...There is no sentiment in Panama that the U.S...
...Those most knowledgeable about the PDF think that the appearance of one or two armored personnel carriers on the Transistmica last October- would have led the PDF to lay down their arms...
...It's not true that Noriega opened his shirt to Giroldi's trained guns and said "iMatame, Giroldi si tienes cojonesr" (Kill me, Giroldi . . . if you have the balls...
...While Noriega's fortune has grown to half a billion dollars, by some estimates, the national debt now stands at well over five...
...The State Department says privately that it is no longer remotely possible that they will drop the indictment ("This is a was, not an is," said one official...
...Second, a demand that the ballot include a plebiscite on the abolition of the PDF, which would pass by margins one associates only with black constituencies in American mayoral elections...
...might be keeping Noriega in power as an excuse to abrogate the treaties (as one would expect in this rumor capital), but there is bafflement that the U.S...
...Endara is prodigiously fat...
...On an even more proletarian show, "Alto y Bajo,'.' the game host melodramatically counts out the prize money in grubby little one-dollar bills (iVeinte...
...But Noriega didn't even black out U.S...
...This was the weirdest mugging I had ever been through, and I didn't know how to respond, particularly in Spanish...
...when Panama has its own currency, you'll see his face on coins...
...Exactly what went on inside the Comandancia last October will remain a mystery...
...When Spadafora tried to return to Panama from Costa Rica on September 13, 1985, he was hauled off his bus and subjected to hours and hours of 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 the most spectacular torture I have ever heard of...
...No, although there was certainly plenty of torture...
...He needn't have bothered, as a Miami jury rejected the testimony of four DEA officers...
...The government-gets only four dollars an item for everything shipped, but it adds up...
...Sanchez Borbon has been eloquent on rape and its role in Panamanian politics...
...Any future U.S.-backed coup should involve a commitment on the part of the participants to four things: First, elections within a month...
...Eisenmann says that Noriega is in so tight with the Medellin cartel and other shady international interests that he can neither step down nor cede the slightest influence to the Panamanian people...
...Lying in bed with a copy of Gandhi's writings, in a country where satyagraha doesn't cut much ice, he looked rather a bozo...
...He stopped his hunger strike shortly thereafter...
...Still, breaking faith with a people who have done nothing to deserve it is unconscionable, and we must treat the Panama Canal as Panama's...
...For Panamanians, drug-dealing, and eventhe PDF, pale in comparison to the fact that the Noriega regime is wrecking the economy...
...Then they drove his body back across the Costa Rican border and threw it into a ditch...
...When Guillermo Endara, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, went on a hunger strike September 20, PDF troops spray-painted on the walls of his office: "Out to lunch . . . will be back soon...
...Not "depressing": wrecking...
...America's response to Panamanian excesses has been to sanction...
...Odd—the tenner was not so much a theft as a consulting fee...
...That these were errors of judgment rather than ill will does not make the General any less Our Bastard...
...Noriega panicked and pulled out...
...Noriega has the drug millions to hire crack legal advisers and—to be frank—buy jurors...
...Altamirano is said to be a capable man, but, as one administration official says, "It doesn't matter if he's the Virgin Mary—that nomination is dead in the water...
...But someone leaked...
...fiercely: "Hey...
...Like the mafia, this "thing" is highly diversified, cloaks itself in a number of legal financial and trading concerns,and relies heavily on intimidation and rumor...
...Unemployment in Panama stands at 35 percent...
...In February, implementation of the Canal treaties will have been put on hold for the first time...
...rr his doesn't necessarily mean kill' ing him...
...N of that they do this stuff much, by Salvadoran or Colombian standards...
...There are no public works going on, no roads being built...
...I nervously bade them hasta luego and was a few steps away when they surrounded me again and one of them said...
...but no one doubts it...
...They're not the only imports of late —the Sandinista government recently sent a team of five election consultants, not of the Ailes/Squires variety, to Panama to ask how to rig Nicaraguan elections so that international observers wouldn't notice fraud to the extent that they did in Panama last May...
...ports, which keeps contraband out but bolsters Noriega's hold over the people who make a living out of shipping (i.e., all Panamanians...
...Noriega had announced he would discipline and dock the bonuses of the public workers who were dancing and drinking in the streets when his removal was erroneously announced on Panamanian radio—not all of them, only the 42,000 he could identify...
...might change its mind and commit troops...
...y et Panamanians want Endara as their president, even though Panamanian presidents have had zero to say about the running of the country for the last few elections...
...Pay me...
...Noriega is a rumor genius, and Panamanians are rumor-crazy...
...This will be the first balk in U.S...
...When the shopkeeper asked what was in the bag, he replied, "A change of clothes...
...Panama is in fact self-sanctioning: the economy is off 25 percent, only five percent of which is due to American efforts...
...A drawback to the drug indictment is the real possibility that Noriega could be acquitted...
...During 1987 demonstrations, one soldier was seen carrying a paper bag into a tienda, where he asked for a glass of water...
...Certainly the most un-Panamanian person in Panama, the General knows his people inside-out...
...It will take time for the element of surprise to be a factor in any coup plot, and before any Panamanian opposition trusts the United States' blowy rhetoric...
...Endara continued to issue statements, but he was slow and woozy after two weeks of fasting...
...One source claims that 22,000 Chinese have entered Panama in the last two months, and that the going rate for immigration has been upped to $10,000...
...It's not true that Noriega wrote a book on the art of spreading political rumors, but he did write a long and erudite white paper, or something resembling it, for the Torrijos regime...
...The problem is an eight-year-old thug state that it will take all of the next.decade to unravel...
...Guaranteed amnesty would encourage Noriega cronies to jump ship, rather than defend the General under the presumption that their backs were to the wall...
...Taking loot for solving foreigners' problems has been elevated to a fine.art under Terrijos and Noriega...
...If this sounds like the Bitburg defense, so be it...
...We could talk all day about the sloppiness of the Canal treaties: For one, it's strange that President Carter chose Panama as his "proudest achievement," as the treaties weren't even his idea—the first treaty is merely the codification of a declaration signed by President Johnson and President Robles of Panama in 1965...
...He repliedin English: "Here is directions—turn around if you don't want to eat some steel...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 17 Noriega couldn't solve the problem...
...From training Noriega in psychological operations at Fort Bragg to keeping him in the pay of the CIA well after his drug dealing was public knowledge, the United States has done a good deal of "deciding" for the Panamanian people...
...Americans have pretty much forgotten his name since he was tortured and beheaded in October 1985, but Panamanians haven't...
...There's a huge billboard across the street from the Paitilla Shopping Center that reads, "LOS TRATADOS DEL CANAL DE PANAMA ESTAN MAS SEGUROS CON NORIEGA" (The Panama Canal treaties are safer with Noriega...
...Whatever the case, the details of the secret agreement were leaked and, on April 29, 1988, the Washington Post ran a cover story elaborating the agreement in minute detail...
...Weird things happened: Giroldi allowed Noriega to make a telephone call to his mistress, Vicky Amado, and it was she who sent the Batallon 2,000to the General's rescue...
...It could mean negotiating, using the Noriega indictments on drug charges, as was done during secret negotiations in April 1988...
...Since sanctions have worked about as well in Panama as they have in South Africa, we would do well to rememberthe Golden Rule of Sanctions: If it's not worth blockading, it's not worth sanctioning...
...sanctions after the fraudulent elections-led to a $50-million cash shortfall and the paychecks of government employees bounced...
...The man glared wildly into my eyes and said: "Two dollars...
...armored personnel carriers on the-Transistmica last October would have led the PDF to lay down their arms...
...Hugo Spadafora...
...At 11:30 a.m...
...he confides to friends that he considers himself the avatar of Genghis Khan...
...When Panamanians rallied in March 1988, one man, caught up in the melee when the Doberman brigade of the PDF brought out the truncheons and birdshot, made an outraged plea to an American camera crew to (please) come see the scratches on his car...
...iVeintiuuuuuno...
...II T he strangest assortment of people pass through Panama: Paul Gauguin helped dig the Canal...
...It reportedly cost Pablo Escobar $5 million to set up his cocaine refinery in the jungle province of Darien...
...When Noriega announces that anyone who does not turn in a traitor is a traitor himself, you'd better attend these rallies...
...television transmissions in October, as he did during the March 1988 protests, and it's not hard to see why...
...When the ten percenters use the PDF's guns to take 40 percent, there's not much left to go around, end some Panamanians are getting very poor, notenough-to-eat poor...
...implementation of the Canal treaties, and the administration must now tread cautiously to keep the move from being misinterpreted in Latin America...
...Suarez Levy walked...
...This would supply an instant international mini-consensus, and squelch any talk of "gringo imperialism...
...In a country of 2.2 million, where everyone knows each other by pet nicknames, it's easy to get someone to cave in to the regime by bringing up the subject of, say, his five-year-old daughter, and there are a lot of decent people caught up in this thing...
...At that time, Spain came forward and told the State Department it would accept Noriega if something suitable could be arranged...
...Even Noriega's president, Francisco Rodriguez, is beginning to invoke Fidel and 1959, as he did at a pro-Noriega rally I attended at Paitilla Airport on Rodriguez's return from the U.N...
...Roaring" may be the wrong word, as some sources say they were taking their time, out of worry that the U.S...
...The Noriega regime is, weirdly, based on a rape...
...Combining the drug trade, international capitalism, international Communism, and a history of U.S.-sponsored military buildup, this is unlike any government before it...
...I would hardly call it a. show of support—just four or five thousand people trying :to keep their jobs...
...Pay me...
...And the new guidelines for overthrow of foreign dictators are basically a matter of keeping Senate subcommittees from playing CIA...
...Endara fled to the Vatican nunciatura, partly because it seemed like the only embassy Noriega wouldn't violate, and partly because there aren't that many ambassadors left to choose from in Panama City, where, among American countries, only Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Ecuador recognize the government...
...Panama City T f you're waiting for the next coup in 1. Panama, you're most likely waiting in vain...
...Other than that, all's blurry, but to understand the mix of deference and stark fear that kept Giroldi from shooting Noriega would be to understand much of the Panamanian character and the Panamanian predicament...
...Last May, despite Noriega candidate Carlos Duque's superior publicity and Noriega's attempt to buy out a second candidate to split the opposition, despite the fact that the Democratic Alliance had a shallow political platform aside from being antiNoriega, the Endara/Ford/Arias Calderon ticket won by a three-to-one margin...
...Connie Mack is doing, is premature and distasteful, but he is perfectly right to bring attention to the urgency of the situation...
...He said that his greatest hope was that, being in his mid-sixties, he wouldn't appear such a tasty morsel to his potential rapists, but he had no doubt that the requisite homosexuals could, and would, be garnered...
...For another, this is still Latin America, and, for all their gentleness, Panamanians respect respect more than kindness...
...I heard him mentioned more often during the coup week than any of the coup conspirators...
...People were drifting away minutes into Rodriguez's speech...
...sanction package in March 1988...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 19...
...I continued along way down the Avenida Central until I saw lights flashing down a side street and got curious...
...Torrijos took $12 million from the Shah to grant him exile...
...does not have until 1999 to sort out its plans—it has until about 1991...
...You go...
...Administration officials were sounding dishonest, wimpish, incompetent, or all three...
...The U.S...
...It reminded me of Puerto Rico's Viejo San Juan, and I felt very safe there...
...During the October crisis, La Estrella de Panama, like all papers pro-Noriega, was running AP bulletins out of Washington uncut...
...Then a dozen young men and women jumped off the steps of an apartment building...
...American pressure must remain in a multinational context, preferably involving the Latin American alliance known as the Grupo de Ocho (rather, the Grupo de Siete, since the other states voted to expel Panama last October...
...We probably hear so little of him in the United States because he fought for the contras...
...Hopping up and down saying, "Abrogate...
...with someone who knows the rules far better than we...
...He has nothing in common with, say, "the poet" Daniel Ortega, who, however noxious his rhetoric, always looks like a high school physics nerd who's too fond of guns...
...But Panama's international flavor now comes from a pretty shady assortment of Libyan, Israeli, Taiwanese, and other money-launderers...
...Spadafora fell afoul of Noriega for informing the DEA of Noriega's drug dealing and other crimes...
...True...
...It's a story that has been often repeated, but, as it is the beginning of the end for Noriega, and perhaps for Panama and the Panama Canal treaties, here it is again: the PDF started by working with sharp instruments on Spadafora's fingernails, moved on to a bit of truncheon-work that broke a few ribs, then used the truncheon for a long period on Spadafora's rectum...
...as Sen...
...Noriega claims sixteen people died in the coup...
...is not doing anything more to clean up the mess it helped make...
...A report from our man in Panama City...
...Lozano didn't consult any of those allies first...
...It's still an excellent tax shelter...
...So I walked down Calle 25 between some awful-looking apartment blocks and—oops—the PDF barracks...
...this is not the sort of enterprise one "retires" from...
...Not that the administration isn't doing a good enough job of that itself, particularly in Panama, where we're playing a game of iQuien es mas macho...
...Earlier in the decade, when Castro was trying through Panama to broaden Cuba's access to the free world's high-tech products and military supply lines, Noriega and his brother Luis Carlos accepted thousands of pro-Castro Cubans at $3,500 apiece...
...And no one knows who came to the rescue when U.S...
...they sprang him by nightfall and he is now in Miami...
...Endara was saved only because Spanish ambassador Tomas Lozano, who was watching from his office across the Par-que Porras, called Noriega's office and said that if Endara were harmed there would be hell to pay from Spain and its European and American allies...
...They asked whether I were military, and even when I said no began to shout some pretty vile things at me...
...There are actually myriad uniforms, as the PDF is cobbled together out of all the institutions in the country that have guns, including bank guards in David and crossing ladies in Bambito...
...Two days after the coup attempt, after Endara had given a press conference, the PDF raided opposition headquarters and spirited him out the backdoor...
...my best Washington sources say between seventy and eighty...
...This is not such a big deal, as Panamanians don't read much: La Estrella is the largest paper in this country of 2.2 million, with a circulation of 15,000...
...Subtler forms of humiliation are used...
...and surrounded me...
...Give it a couple more years, and the gangsters who have already infiltrated the highest echelons of Panamanian commerce will have so institutionalized the way Panama does business that the country will be unrescuable...
...Their politeness is exquisite and excessive—people stop their cars in the inner city to allow kids to continue their soccer games, not vice-versa...
...Importantly, Noriega was to be allowed to stay in Panama for another month, so his departure would not be connected with the State Department talks—he was adamant that no one get the impression that he had left at the gringos' behest...
Vol. 23 • January 1990 • No. 1
