The invasion of Panama
Morton, Brian
Does anyone remember why the United States invaded Panama? The day after the invasion, President Bush supplied his reasons. "The goals of the United States," he said, "have been to safeguard the...
...The Nicaraguan Contras have murdered thousands, and more than seventy thousand civilians have perished at the hands of the American-trained Salvadoran Army since 1979...
...Any United States action . . . shall never be directed against the territorial integrity or political independence of Panama...
...An article in the New Yorker (January 8, 1990) provides background: In 1976, after two drug-enforcement officials had gone as far as to recommend that Noriega be assassinated to stop his drug dealing, George Bush, who was then the director of the CIA, met with Noriega personally and took no action to remove him from its rolls...
...How sad that the United States had to close out the year with an act of old-fashioned thuggery...
...Panama is a center of drug traffic because its banking laws invite money laundering, the process whereby illegal profits are deposited and then withdrawn as "clean money...
...Horrible actions—but do they justify an invasion in which more than 500 people died...
...And when was the canal ever threatened...
...To bring Noriega to justice...
...If the official reasons for the invasion were hollow, what was the real reason...
...He was a dictator, corrupt and brutal...
...As the New Yorker pointed out: [T]he uncomfortable truth is that, with the exception of Costa Rica (which does not have an army), Noriega's Panama had for years been the least violent and repressive member of Washington's Central American team...
...And we do negotiate with very unpleasant people and governments...
...According to Amnesty International, Americas Watch, and the Organization of American States, Noriega's forces had been responsible for perhaps a dozen political killings from 1983 until the coup attempt last fall...
...I directed our armed forces . . . to bring General Noriega to justice in the United States...
...A few days before the invasion, an American marine was killed by Panamanian soldiers, and another American serviceman and his wife were arrested and beaten...
...Alfred Rubin, professor of international law at Tufts University, commented that normal U.S...
...According to the New York Times, President Endara "has for years been director of a . . . bank used extensively by Colombia's Medellin drug traffickers...
...And in Guatemala, where in 1954 the CIA overthrew a democracy and put the military in power, the Army, funded and trained by Washington, has wiped out six hundred and sixty-two rural villages, and killed more than a hundred thousand civilians since 1978...
...force will be used primarily in the Third World...
...Guillermo Endara, the new president, was installed secretly, in the middle of the night, at a U.S...
...Scholars of international law, normally a straitlaced tribe, treated this justification with amusement...
...In 1983, after Noriega had joined forces with the Medellin cocaine cartel and Bush had become Vice-President and the coordinator of the Reagan drug war, Bush and Noriega met again, and Noriega's CIA contract continued undisturbed...
...Some have suggested that it was an indirect thrust at the Sandinistas, who depended on Panama for banking and trade since the U.S...
...Let's take a look at these claims...
...This kind of reasoning probably credits the administration with more sophistication than it has...
...In Honduras in the early eighties, just one military unit, the CIA-backed Battalion 3-16, was implicated in at least a hundred and forty-two death squad murders...
...International law stipulates that military force is permissible in self-defense and in the much more rare case of "humanitarian intervention...
...As Ricardo Arias Calderon, one of two new vice presidents, put it in 1986: "In all those years, they have known exactly what Noriega was doing...
...Alfred Rubin said the arrest "was no more legal than if the Ayatollah Khomeini had ordered the seizure on British soil of the author Salman Rushdie to be brought to Iran on charges of blasphemy...
...The second vice president, Billy Ford, is part-owner of a bank that was named in a recent court case "as a central financial institution for one of the biggest Medellin launderers...
...The United States has supported military dictators in Panama since 1968—first General Omar Torrijos, who overthrew an elected government, and then General Manuel Noriega...
...The president's concern about Noriega's drug connections comes late in the day...
...military base...
...Les Stone/IMPACT VISUALS with which we should be negotiating...
...But now they are against him because they feel he is a source of instability rather than stability...
...The claim of self-defense here is farfetched...
...Nineteen eighty-nine was the most remarkable year in modern history, a springtime of peoples, in which mass movements for democracy redrew the political map of the world...
...The goals of the United States," he said, "have been to safeguard the lives of Americans, to defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty...
...economic blockade...
...But one can deplore the lawlessness of the dictator while deploring the lawlessness of the invasion...
...An agreement signed by the United States and Panama in 1977 states that the United States right to defend the canal "does not mean, nor shall it be interpreted SPRING • 1990 • 149 Comments and Opinions as the right of intervention of the United States in the internal affairs of Panama...
...I know of no other case in which we have seized on such an incident as a rationale for changing the government 148 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions American soldiers in Panama during the U.S...
...Others have said that it was an example of a new post—cold war policy, in which U.S...
...As for humanitarian intervention, there are other countries that might qualify before Panama...
...With Noriega gone, will this change...
...150 • DISSENT...
...To safeguard the lives of Americans...
...A more plausible explanation was given by a White House adviser, who told the New York Times that the president "felt that Noriega was thumbing his nose at him...
...None of this should be taken as a defense of Noriega...
...To defend democracy in Panama...
...A senior lawyer at the World Court said, "I can't think of any really good [precedents] unless you go back in history about 2,000 years ago...
...To protect the integrity of the canal...
...policy during similar occasions is to "restrict our personnel to the base areas until things can be worked out...
...We were not really consulted...
...Endara, who was notified of the invasion an hour before it began, later told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the news was "like a kick in the head...
...It was not the best thing, I would have thought...
...It was like the Romans leading back defeated leaders and taking them to the circus to be displayed...
...But the politicians brought to power by the invasion— the winners of national elections last May that were brutally annulled by Noriega—have few illusions that the United States has suddenly become a champion of democracy in Panama...
...To combat drug trafficking...
...Noriega was loathed in Panama, where his ouster was celebrated in the streets...
...I would have been happier without an intervention...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
