by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched an episode on
KPBS of a series called The Dictator’s Playbook, hour-long profiles of six especially nasty
dictators — Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Francisco Franco, Manuel Noriega,
Idi Amin and Kim Il Sung (current North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s
grandfather). I had hoped last night’s episode would be about Franco, but
instead it was about Noriega, and the show told Noriega’s story with an odd mix
of admiration and horror: admiration that by sheer hard work and the
educational opportunities it earned him, Noriega rose from a super-poor
childhood in the slums of Panama City to a major position in the Panamanian
military, to second-in-command to Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos and
effective power (though he ruled through figurehead “presidents” to satisfy the
U.S. precondition of turning the Panama Canal Zone over to Panamanian control
that Panama become and remain at least formally a democracy) once Torrijos died
in a still-mysterious plane crash in 1981 that a lot of people both inside and
outside Panama thought Noriega had “arranged” to take over. The program
presented what’s become the orthodox view of Noriega as basically a military
thug who used his power as Panama’s intelligence chief to sniff out and
suppress dissent before it became a threat — though at least one major
dissident, Hugo Spadafora (Panamanian-born but the son of Italian immigrants),
used the major non-government newspaper La Prensa to build opposition and expose the regime’s
excesses until Noriega had him killed in 1985. Reportedly he was tortured and
beheaded alive, and photos of Spadafora’s headless corpse circulated worldwide
and helped build revulsion against Noriega’s regime.
The film detailed
Noriega’s involvement in the cocaine industry and his willingness to allow the
Colombian drug cartels to use Panama as a transshipment center for drugs
flowing from Colombia to the U.S., while at the same time he was taking revenge
against cartels that crossed him by working as an agent of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) and turning them in. Noriega’s dangerous
double game unraveled in late 1989, when a Panamanian soldier shot the driver
of a car that had run through a government checkpoint without stopping — and
the driver turned out to be a U.S. Marine. President George H. W. Bush,
desperately looking for an international arena in which he could look “tough”
and ensure his 1992 re-election, ordered a U.S. invasion of Panama, ostensibly
to protect the lives of Americans still living and working in what had once
been the Canal Zone. The show doesn’t go into the late reporter Gary Webb’s
accusations that the CIA had allowed the drug trade in Central America to go on
with impunity because it was helping finance the Nicaraguan contras and other Right-wing paramilitaries fighting
against Left-wing resistance movements, nor does it mention the widely held
view on the U.S. Left that Noriega had been tolerated as long as he dealt in
cocaine for the U.S.’s benefit but got on our shit list and had to be taken
down when he stopped dealing in cocaine for the U.S. and started dealing in it
for himself. Noriega’s story had an odd ending in that he was arrested and
tried in the U.S. after he attempted to flee the country from a redoubt in the
Vatican embassy (the show doesn’t mention the notorious campaign the U.S.
mounted to get him out of there, including using sound trucks to blast
heavy-metal rock music at ear-splitting volumes), spending the rest of his life
incarcerated first in the U.S., then in France and finally back in Panama until
he died behind bars in 2017.
Watching a show about Noriega right now was
interesting because of the obvious parallels between him and the currently
embattled president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who like Noriega took over
from a military man (though, unlike Torrijos, Maduro’s mentor, Hugo Chávez, was
elected instead of seizing power
in a coup) who had his dictatorial
sides but also attempted to be a genuine populist. It’s the same succession
from unscrupulous but at least partially principled man to total thug the
Soviet Union went through from Lenin to Stalin, and it’s difficult to get any fix on events in Venezuela right now (with the
head of Congress claiming he should be recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate president because Maduro
prevented the most popular potential opposition candidates from running against
him — though I don’t recall anyone in the international community suggesting
that the world shouldn’t recognize Vladimir Putin as President of Russia even
though he prevented the most popular
opposition candidates from running against him — and the open question being
whether the military will intervene on Maduro’s behalf or switch sides and join
the opposition). It’s interesting that the producers of The Dictator’s
Playbook attempted to put a
positive “spin” on Panama’s history since Noriega’s fall: according to the
program they’ve run the Panama Canal responsibly and used its revenues to spark
an economic boom, they’ve become a functioning republic and they’ve attempted
to prevent the rise of another Noriega by following the example of their
neighbor Costa Rica and disbanding their army altogether.
