Noriega was indicted in a US federal court on drug-trafficking charges in and, after US observers declared he had stolen the election, President George HW Bush launched the "Operation Just Cause" invasion, sending in nearly 28, troops. Noriega sought refuge in the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Panama City.
US troops flushed him out by playing deafening pop and heavy metal music non-stop outside. By 3 January , Noriega surrendered and was flown to the US to face drug-trafficking, money-laundering and racketeering charges, serving 17 years in jail there.
While in prison he was convicted in absentia in France of money-laundering and sentenced to seven years. After the US extradited him to France, a court there approved a request from Panama in December to send him back home, where he was convicted again. In an interview on Panamanian TV two years ago, Noriega read out a statement of apology. He said: "I apologise to anyone who feels offended, affected, harmed or humiliated by my actions or those of my superiors whilst carrying out orders, or those of my subordinates, during the time of my civilian and military government.
A US Senate sub-committee once described Washington's relationship with Noriega as one of the United States' most serious foreign policy failures. Music torture: How heavy metal broke Noriega. Noriega had been all but forgotten by the world since his precipitous fall from grace, in , when U.
While the world moved on and changed, Noriega spent the past twenty-seven years in prison, most of it in a U. To an unusual extent, his rise and fall also spoke to the peculiar warps and perversities of that era. Noriega came from a modest family, joined the Panamanian National Guard as a cadet, and rose through its ranks in the fifties and sixties. At the time, Panama was a vassal of the United States, with Americans in control of the Panama Canal and the strip of land that straddled it, the U.
Canal Zone. In , in an atmosphere of rising anti-American sentiment, a charismatic National Guard officer, Omar Torrijos, seized power and installed a populist regime that pushed for negotiations for Panamanian control of the Canal Zone. Throughout these years, Noriega rose steadily through the ranks to become the ultimate useful man to Torrijos, helping him fend off coup plotters early in his rule, keeping secrets of all kinds, and eventually becoming the chief of military intelligence.
Along the way, Noriega also became a salaried C. Noriega said that his relationship with Langley began after the thwarted coup attempt against Torrijos, which he claimed had been instigated by the C. When I asked Noriega how, notwithstanding his C.
Everyone knew who was really in charge of the country. At the time, Noriega was operating with full American support. He proved especially useful when the Reagan Administration began its covert efforts to roll back Communism in the hemisphere. It felt like a half-truth. In , a Panamanian revolutionary named Hugo Spadafora emerged from the Nicaraguan jungle to tell anyone who would listen that his next battle was against Noriega. Spadafora was a dashingly handsome man, a former medical doctor from a prominent Panamanian-Italian family, who had previously fought as a guerrilla against the colonial Portuguese in Africa and then with the Sandinistas, in Nicaragua.
I met Spadafora one day that same year, in a hotel room in Costa Rica, where he spoke forcefully for several hours, seeking to convince me that Noriega was an out-and-out criminal and a drug trafficker, who should be ousted from power. Not long after our conversation, while travelling back to Panama, Spadafora was forcibly removed from a bus by a pair of National Guardsmen, who led him away and, apparently after torturing him, sawed his head off with a knife. The invasion was over quickly and relatively bloodlessly, although the number of civilian deaths in the Chorrillo neighbourhood is disputed.
A pro-American government was duly installed and Noriega was captured after a bizarre siege at the Vatican embassy in Panama City where he had sought sanctuary.
The US army used loudspeakers to blast high-decibel rock music into the compound until Noriega and the papal nuncio could stand it no longer. In effect, the Americans disappeared him. Human rights and security aside, Bush had plenty of personal reasons for wanting Noriega out of the way. As CIA director and two-term vice-president to Ronald Reagan prior to , Bush was implicated, by association, in often illegal, covert interventions in the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Noriega helped the US to combat Cuban, and thus Soviet, influence in the region. Death squads, random killings and torture characterised these murderous conflicts. Noriega was also closely associated with the Colombian Medellin drug cartel of Pablo Escobar.
Funds from drug trafficking were used to buy arms, pay fighters and suborn government officials. Noriega later claimed it was his refusal to help Lt Col Oliver North provide arms for the contra rebels in Nicaragua that triggered the US decision to drop him.
He was said to have met Bush in person on more than one occasion.
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