Jonathan Marshall and Your Watchman wrote this article.
Born in Panama City, the son of
Ricaurte Noriega, an accountant, and his maid, Maria Feliz Morena, Manuel was
brought up in a foster home from the age of five. He joined the army as a cadet
at the age of 14: since he had both African and indigenous blood, this was one
of the few institutions in Panama that
could offer him social advancement. He acquired the nickname “Pineapple Face”,
his heavily pockmarked features the result of a childhood illness.
Part of his military training was carried out in the US, where he was
recruited by the CIA. In 1967 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the
Panamanian National Guard, and in the years that followed became a supporter of
the head of the army, Omar Torrijos, who appointed him chief of military
intelligence.
Following Torrijos’s death in a
plane crash in 1981, which some claim Noriega orchestrated, he became the head
of the renamed National Defence Forces and thus the most powerful man in
Panama, where the elected president and congress did not have any real power.
His mixed race background initially gave him a popular base of support, but he
was opposed by the traditional political parties.
Under pressure from the US,
Noriega permitted presidential elections in 1984, but the results were
manipulated so that his placeman, Nicolás Barletta, was adjudged to have won.
In the 1989 elections, Endara’s victory was so decisive that even Noriega’s Fplaceman
accepted it. Nevertheless Endara and his vice-president, Guillermo Ford, were
badly beaten up when they tried to hold a parade claiming victory, and Noriega
declared the election null and void. This was the beginning of the end for him.
The
death of former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega on May 29 elicited few if
any tears. But it should have sparked more reflection in the United States on
his ugly history of service to the CIA, the hypocrisy of Washington’s sudden
discovery of his abuses once Noriega became an unreliable ally
against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and the George H.W. Bush administration’s
bloody and illegal
invasion of Panama in
December 1989.
In
fairness, many progressives and mainstream journalists have called attention to
this troublesome history over the years. But few have dared to question the
nearly universal condemnation of Noriega as a protector of international drug
traffickers. That incendiary claim — first broadcast loudly by the unlikely
trio of right-wing Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina; liberal Sen. John Kerry,
D-Massachusetts; and investigative journalist Seymour
Hersh — galvanized the
American public to support his ouster.
After the U.S. invasion, which killed hundreds of Panamanians and 23
U.S. soldiers, Noriega was arrested on Jan. 3, 1990 by armed U.S. drug agents.
President George H. W. Bush declared that Noriega’s “apprehension and
return to the United States should send a clear signal that the United States
is serious in its determination that those charged with promoting the
distribution of drugs cannot escape the scrutiny of justice.” U.S. Ambassador
Deane Hinton called the invasion “the biggest drug bust in history.”
Convicted
in 1992 on eight
felony counts following what officials called the “trial of the century,”
Noriega was sentenced to 40 years in jail. Although released early from U.S.
incarceration, he spent the rest of his life in French and Panamanian prisons.
The resulting publicity created lasting myths about Noriega and drugs.
Journalists who should know better have described Noriega as “one of the
world’s biggest drug kingpins,” to
quote Time magazine.
In fact, Louis Kellner, the U.S. attorney who oversaw his Miami
indictment and trial admitted, “Noriega was never a major player in the drug
war.”
Indeed, at worst, he was a small fry compared to the military
rulers of Honduras, whose epic protection of the cocaine trade was
tolerated by Washington in return for using that country as a staging base for
Contra operations against the Sandinista-led government of Nicaragua in the
1980s.
A few close observers of the long, expensive, and controversial trial
believe it failed to prove Noriega’s guilt at all.
Newsday’s Peter Eisner quoted Judge William Hoeveler, who presided over
the trial, as saying “the outcome could have been different” if Noriega had
been better represented.
Although the government put more than two dozen people on the stand,
their testimony was not always relevant or credible.
Paul Rothstein, Georgetown University law professor and former chairman
of the American Bar Association’s criminal evidence committee, said of the
government’s witnesses, “What promised to be the trumpeting of elephants turned
out to be the whimperings of mice.”
Big-time drug bosses enjoyed great rewards for telling the jury what the
government wanted. Observed
reporter Glenn Garvin, “To convict Noriega, the strike force had to
make a flurry of deals with other accused narcotraffickers, bargaining a
collective 1,435 years in prison down to 81.”
The fierce Noriega critic R. M. Kostner declared, “The prosecution was
shameless in its bribery of witnesses. What co-defendants got for flipping made
me sometimes wish that I had been indicted. The proceedings were almost totally
politicized. It was clear long before they opened that, regardless of evidence,
Noriega could not possibly be acquitted – a very sad thing for the United
States.”
Other witnesses who never took the stand contradicted the government’s
case years later. Retired Medellin cocaine lord Juan David Ochoa claimed
in an interview with Frontline that “at no moment did [Noriega]
protect us. . . . As far as I know he had nothing to do with the drug trade.”
Greg Passic, former head of financial operations for the DEA, said, “The
Colombians I talked to in the drug transportation business said they didn’t
deal with Noriega at all. To deal with him you would just have to pay him more
money. They didn’t need it. It would be expensive.”
In fact, DEA officials repeatedly lauded Noriega’s cooperation with their
anti-drug investigations, both in public letters of support and in private.
Recalled Duane Clarridge, former head of Latin America operations for the CIA,
“The DEA had told us that they were getting great support in Panama, and from
Noriega in particular, in interdicting drugs.”
More than a year after the U.S. invasion, when it was absolutely
impolitic to voice such sentiments, one “federal drug enforcement source” told
a reporter, “Noriega was helping us, not ten percent, not twenty percent of the
time, but in every instance we asked him to do so, one-hundred percent of the
time. . . . These were key operations . . . that struck at both the Cali and
Medellin cartels.”
Even the U.S. ambassador to Panama in the final years of Noriega’s rule,
Arthur H. Davis Jr., said in an oral history interview, “all I
know is that, all the time I was there, Noriega . . . cooperated one hundred
percent with our people. Anytime we had a ship that we wanted to be interdicted
on the high seas and we asked permission, they gave permission. . . . Anytime
there was some prominent drug man coming up and we knew about it, Noriega would
help us with it. And when we found out about things, the [Panamanian Defense
Forces] would go over there and round them up and turn them over to us.”
One of the high points of Noriega’s cooperation was Operation Pisces, a
three-year undercover probe that culminated in 1987. Attorney General Edwin
Meese called it “nothing less than the largest and most successful undercover
investigation in federal drug law enforcement history.”
Among
those indicted were Medellin Cartel kingpins Pablo Escobar and Fabio Ochoa.
Panama made 40 arrests and seized $12 million from accounts in 18 local banks.
Said one U.S. prosecutor who helped direct the case, “The Panamanian officials
we were dealing with were sincerely cooperative. . . . They could have breached
security, and they didn’t.”
The operation may have pleased the DEA, but it angered the country’s
financial elite, who directly profited from money laundering. One local bankster
warned, “this could end the Panamanian banking system, because people will no
longer believe they can count on bank secrecy.”
Within two months, spooked investors withdrew up to $4 billion of the
country’s $39 billion in bank deposits, triggering the most serious banking crisis
in Panama’s history.
A Western diplomat said of Noriega, “The bank(st)ers can bring him down.
They are complaining in Washington and they’ve got a lot of clout.” The
demonstrations organized that summer by Panama’s business elite — and Noriega’s
heavy-handed response to them — triggered his eventual slide from power.
The bank(st)ers were joined by angry cartel leaders, who viewed Noriega as
an “obstacle to the functioning” of their money laundering operations in
Panama, in the words of drug policy expert Rensellaer Lee.
A lawyer for the bosses of the Cali Cartel complained that his clients
were “frustrated by the problems” Noriega created for them in Panama.
Cali leaders later got their revenge when they paid $1.25 million to
bribe a drug trafficker to become a key witness against Noriega in his Miami
trial. In exchange for the testimony, eager U.S. prosecutors agreed to cut nine
years off the sentence of an unrelated Cali trafficker — brother of one of that
cartel’s senior leaders.
When Noriega’s defense team cried foul, a federal appeals court
declined to order a new trial, but criticized the government for
appearing “to have treaded close to the line of willful blindness” in its
eagerness to win a conviction.
Medellin leaders were just as unhappy with Noriega as those in Cali. A
pilot for one of the biggest Medellin smugglers described Pablo Escobar’s
reaction after Noriega approved a raid on one of his cocaine labs in May 1984:
“He was just really out of whack with Noriega. He was like, ‘This guy is dead.
No matter what, he is dead.”’
It would be foolish to assert that Noriega, alone among all leaders in
Central America, kept his hands clean of drugs. But much of his personal
fortune is easily accounted for from other sources, such as the sale
of Panamanian passports on
the black market.
Whatever Noriega’s involvement with drug traffickers, the Bush administration displayed
unbelievable cynicism when, even before his capture, it swore in a new
president of Panama who had sat on the board of one of the most notorious
drug-money-laundering banks in the country. His attorney general, who unfroze
the bank accounts of Cali traffickers, later became legal counsel for the Cali
Cartel’s top smuggler in Panama.
Following Noriega’s ouster, not surprisingly, cocaine trafficking began
surging in the country. A year and a half after his arrest, unnamed “U.S.
experts” told Time magazine that “the unexpected result . . . is
that the rival Cali cartel established a base in Panama and has since inundated
the country, along with Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean, with vast
quantities of cocaine destined for the U.S. and Europe.”
Friends, here is some food for thought, why do some U.S. foreign policy decisions, the war in Vietnam, the ouster of Noriego and the U.S. war in Afghanistan seem to boost the international drug trade? Your Watchman believes that the international drug trade is operated at the top levels of our government and high ranking U.S. officials were or are involved including Clark Clifford, Democrat who was an advisor to several Democratic presidents and the Bush crime family.
Although Noriega was due to be
released from prison in the US after serving 17 years of his sentence, he faced
charges of money laundering in France, and so in 2010 was flown directly from jail in Florida to Paris.
This time he was sentenced to seven years. However, he was handed over to Panama a year later as he was also a wanted
man there. After several years in El Renacer prison, near Panama City, he was
released under house arrest early this year for an operation to remove a brain
tumor.
Hence, Noriega, even death, deserves no
eulogies, but he does deserve a more balanced judgment of history.
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