CIA “asset” who became Panama’s “Maximum Leader”
Manuel Noriega 1934-2017
The brutal dictator and drug runner Manuel Noriega was for decades a key US ally in Central America, and a go-between in the region’s dirty wars. The US had assisted his rise to power, but later found it had created a monster it could not control, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. Eventually, as his crimes grew more extreme, Washington decided that Pineapple Face, as he was known, had outgrown his usefulness, and was becoming a liability. In 1989, President Bush sent in 27,000 troops to topple him. When Noriega took refuge in the Vatican’s embassy in Panama City, US forces got stadiumsized speakers and blasted the building with rock and heavy metal. He surrendered days later.
Noriega was born, in 1934, into extreme poverty, but was then adopted by a better-off family, and sent to a military academy in Peru. At some point, he was recruited by the CIA and, in 1967, he enrolled at the School of the Americas in Columbus, Georgia, – which had been set up to train military personnel from countries that backed the US in Latin America (turning out Chile’s General Pinochet, among other dictators). Noriega rose through the ranks of the Panamanian armed forces, and in 1981, after the death of Panama’s strongman leader General Torrijos in an unexplained air crash, he gained de facto control of the country. In the early 1980s, Noriega intervened on the US’S behalf in the civil war in El Salvador, and helped the Contras fighting the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. It has been claimed that he also helped the CIA traffic cocaine, to raise money for the Contras. A prized CIA “asset”, he was paid well. But at home, Noriega was growing alarmingly repressive; opponents disappeared, and in 1985 his long-time critic Hugo Spadafora was found beheaded. Washington suspected Noriega was also working for its leftist enemies in the region, and helping the Colombian cartels traffic cocaine to the US. Congress cut off aid to Panama in 1987, and in 1988, Noriega was indicted in Florida on drug trafficking charges. There was a failed coup, and in 1989 he annulled the results of a presidential election. With tensions mounting, a US soldier guarding the Panama Canal was killed, and Noriega – now styling himself as the “Maximum Leader” – was filmed waving a machete, declaring that Panama was at war with the US. The US mission to topple him that December was named Operation Just Cause.
Convicted in the US of money laundering, racketeering and drug trafficking, Noriega was sentenced to 30 years. He was released early – but was then extradited to Paris (where he’d laundered some of his drugs money). He spent a year in a French jail, before being sent back to Panama in 2011, and jailed there. In failing health, he was finally released into house arrest in January.