“Panama Is a Focus of U.S. Geopolitical Strategy” by General Manuel Noriega

On April 2, 1990, while appearing in U.S. Federal District Court in Miami for a pretrial hearing, General Manuel Antonio Noriega submitted the following comments on the invasion in writing to two members of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the U.S. Invasion of Panama, Gavrielle Cemma and Teresa Gutierrez. The translation from the Spanish is by the Independent Commission.

Facing an internal problem of political administration, the National Assembly, popularly elected in 1984 and within its legal authority, replaced President Barletta and named Mr. Del Valle president.

The government of the United States then imposed economic sanctions on Panama, freezing its financial assets in the Banco Nacional in New York and all of the financial assets of the Panamanian nation: that is to say, the property of all the people. In addition, it seized goods and seven aircraft of the state enterprise Air Panama, and gradually imposed restrictions on U.S. multinationals, ordering them not to pay taxes to the Republic of Panama, including the medical insurance of many poorly paid workers such as the employees of the Chiriquí Land Co., ESSO, Petro Terminal, Omaha, etc. Above all, the nonpayment of the Canal Annuities was in flagrant violation of international treaties.

The consequences of these arbitrary, illegal, inhuman and colonialist measures were deeply felt and still affect the economy and the life of the Republic of Panama, which is a poor a country, in the following areas:

a) Public health: The hospitals, medical supplies, and medical attention to the sick, above all to the children, were compromised and still feel the impact of the inhuman North American actions.

b) Education: The planned curriculum was interrupted and the struggle against illiteracy was suspended, prejudicing the interests of the majority of the population, the poor, those who are unable to send their children abroad to study.

c) Public works: The plan to bring the rural areas into the modern world was halted. The work on rural roads in remote areas of the country affecting the most marginalized population living in improvised housing in the cities broke down, as it did for the indigenous people of the mountains and the jungle areas.

d) The fiscal health of the government and its resources diminished and unemployment increased. That is to say, every aspect of the country was affected. Economic experts calculate that the national treasury suffered losses of over $2 billion. The reasons for the invasion of the Republic of Panama by the government of the United States include:

1. The Panamanian isthmus is of strategic importance to the United States! For that reason we see the interest in, and the phobia against Panama rather than Peru or Paraguay or Argentina or Venezuela or Guatemala; because none of them are either the passageway or the focus of geopolitical strategy, they don’t have an interoceanic canal, and they are not the geographical center of intercontinental routes.
2. Because of the military bases, the United States has an interest in continuing to maintain troops at the crossroads of the American continent that can be deployed to control South, North and Central America and the Caribbean. The only ideal country in all of the Americas is Panama, with the Atlantic and Pacific regions correlated with the transit distances for air and maritime traffic. In addition, the vegetation and ecology of a Panama provide a proving ground with terrain equivalent to that of Colombia and Venezuela and the jungles of Peru and Brazil.

III. The treaties signed by President Carter and Torrijos were to put an end to the armed presence and the military control of a Southern Command in the year 1999. The new United States administration and its “establishment” now consider that it was an error to have signed these treaties and are looking for a way to invalidate them. And for this reason they violate and continue violating their clauses.

V. The administrator of the Canal is now supposed to be a Panamanian, reversing the majority from North Americans to Panamanians. It was necessary that this should be someone dependable and manageable for the North American government officials in order to continue using their CIA with its economic resources as the source for other hidden and secret funding not reported to the U.S. Treasury, for covert actions and illegal aggression such as the Iran-Gate operations against Nicaragua.

The consequences of the invasion include:

1 The physical destruction of the country by aerial bombardment and the devastation and destruction of buildings, material goods, etc.

II. Civilian and military deaths, including North Americans, whose death toll has been kept secret and the information denied to the North American people. There are families still searching for their missing relatives who disappeared into common graves or whose bodies were incinerated by flamethrowers. The death and destruction caused by this invasion are kept at reasonable levels and scientifically controlled. Like the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one must look at the video-tapes taken during that night to be able to appreciate the magnitude of savagery and inhumanity.

III. To install a submissive government that would be committed to granting military and occupational concessions to the United States and to becoming an unconditional ally against other Latin American nations. This submissive government will go so far as supporting the destruction of the Carter-Torrijos Treaties and the ceding of military bases for expansion and technological control and installations such as Isla Galeta to be used as a listening post to eavesdrop from Panama on other countries in the region.

The United States since the signing has been gradually and increasingly violating the Carter-Torrijos Treaties, becoming more brazen in its violations since 1985 and showing less and less restraint, especially in the years 1987, 1988 and 1989.

Panama has always been a peace-loving nation regardless of its government. Its aggressive capability on the battlefield, against any nation, is completely nonexistent, much less against the United States. Any claim to the contrary is ridiculous and an insult to normal intelligence.

On April 6, 1989, President George Bush notified Congress that he had invoked the National Emergencies Act and the international laws necessary to declare “a state of national emergency” in the United States for the special and extraordinary threat to the national security, etc., etc.

On March 2, 1988, Bush implemented measures of economic warfare against Panama.

On May 17, 1989, Bush told the Washington Times that he had given orders to the Pentagon to prepare for a confrontation with the Panama Defense Forces.

On May 18, a story in the Washington Post mentions orders to put the Defense Forces to the test by threatening to have armed U.S. convoys “poking through every hole in the wall in the houses and buildings of Panama City.”

In response, Panama -its Assembly of Community Representatives, its Armed Forces, its government continually accused the United States of acting as a menacing and invasive power and saw the necessity of protecting itself and maintaining a state of alert against these actions.

The U.S. government officials who are functioning, physically, within the offices of the government in Panama imposed by the United States are a demonstration of the domination of the weak by the strong, as well as of its true interest in keeping Panama as a robot obeying the orders of Washington. This also confirms the motives for the invasion.

The attack by the North against the social and material achievements of the Torrijos period as well as those of the Noriega period in professionalizing the Defense Forces is the proof of the need felt by the United States to wipe out any patriotic, nationalist consciousness so that the youth will have neither leaders nor stimulus in 1999, when the Canal is supposed to revert to Panamanian control and the last foreign soldier is to leave Panamanian soil. That is to say, they wish to brainwash and purge the Panamanian soul of any yearning for economic, military and political liberation.

With the imposition of the new government, there has been a return to the origins of the republic and the return of those who ruled from 1904 until 1968 as a wealthy social class, under whose rule the children of the marginalized and the poor had no opportunities. They have now been returned to that same, old-style politics; now the leading positions are in the hands of other social classes and groupings who have their own idea of social justice.

The Independent Commission of Inquiry on the U.S. Invasion of Panama. The U.S. Invasion of Panama: The Truth Behind Operational “Just Cause.” 2nd ed., South End Press, 1991.