PANAMA: Reagan's Last Stand
POLITICIANS SPECIALIZE IN TRANSFORM- ing complex world problems into symbolic bogeymen to scare up the vote. In this year's presidential campaign, no demon has proven more successful than Gen....
...O MAR TORRIJOS, WHO RULED PANAMA from 1968 to 1978, liked to say about Panama's independence that the United States behaved like the midwife who kept the baby in payment for her services...
...trade goes through the canal, and 12% of the oil the United States consumes travels by the transisthmic pipeline...
...Despite its dynamism, six of every ten families cannot satisfy their basic necessities and most Panamanians live in mud and straw shacks in the countryside, or in dilapidated slums in the cities...
...For them, nationalism is the opiate of an idealistic people...
...policy...
...From its bases there U.S...
...Like other political bogeymen, the Noriega demon was constructed from a partial and partisan reading of the facts...
...UNTIL RECENTLY, THE PRESS PAID LITTLE attention to Panama, despite the importance accorded it by U.S...
...John Dinges, foreign editor at National Public Radio and author of a forthcoming book on Noriega, shows that most of the General's involvement with drug-trafficking took place between 1981 and 1984...
...Sociologist Ra6il Leis, director of the Panamanian Center for Research and Social Action (CEASPA), points out in "The Cousins' Republic" that U.S...
...viceroyalty has given rise to a class of elite politicians who specialize in bowing and scraping before Uncle Sam...
...realism demands obedience to the imperial master...
...Along the way, Panama's relatively prosperous economy was torn asunder, the civilian opposition was outflanked and divided, and the contempt most Panamanians feel toward the United States was dramatically reinforced...
...The fact is that, except for Puerto Rico, no other Latin American country has been so dominated by the United States, suffering 18 military interventions and the continuous occupation of the Canal Zone...
...Since then, Noriega has cut back Panama's role in the drug trade and stepped up cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Agency...
...The progeny of this boom, a new class of wealthy young professionals, are at the forefront of opposition to military rule...
...John Weeks, professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College, makes abundantly clear in "Of Puppets and Heroes" that the Administration not only failed to remove its unconditional ally, it effectively consolidated the General's hold on the country and converted him into a nationalist hero in the eyes of Latin America...
...Rather than instill caution, Reagan's last stand in Panama, like Custer's at Little Big Hornm, seems to have only fueled bipartisan yearning for cheap and easy victories...
...Weeks examines why the Administration turned on its good friend and finds, as with so much of Reagan's foreign policy, that its obsession with Nicaragua was at the root...
...Army School of the Americas in Panama, shows in "Opposition Outflanked" that after the events of this year even these prosperous businessmen have come to hate the United States...
...In "General Coke...
...From the relative obscurity of being a staunch U.S...
...Panamanian nationalism is also a reaction to the extreme denationalization of the country's economy, comprised of financial and related services to transnational corporations and banks...
...Democrats take special pleasure in deploying the Noriega demon because he also symbolizes the ReaganBush Administration's major fiasco of 1988 and what may well be "Reagan's Last Stand...
...John Zindar, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information and former instructor at the U.S...
...policy makers...
...ally in a small Latin American nation, he has been thrust into the limelight as the representative sine qua non of a hitherto unidentified species: "the drug-dealing Latin dictator...
...Small wonder nationalism colors Panama's politics so deeply...
...troops and military equipment in Latin America...
...In addition, 12% of U.S...
...Manuel Antonio Noriega, commander-in-chief of Panama's Defense Forces...
...In "Serving Foreigners," economist Charlotte Elton of CEASPA examines this superdependent development in which a minority of Panamanians participate and only a select few directly benefit...
...It is the site of the Southern Command, the largest permanent station of U.S...
...forces send supplies to the contras, launch spy flights over El Salvador and Nicaragua and coordinate all military activities from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego...
...LL FACTS ASIDE, THE NORIEGA DEMON makes for a powerful image, one that seems to have built a nasty consensus in favor of a return to baldfaced intervention as a proper tool of U.S...
Vol. 22 • July 1988 • No. 4
