The Panama Deception

Director: Barbara Trent (USA, UK). Year of Release: 1992

In the Nineteenth Century, Panama had formal independence but was effectively a region inside Colombia. The USA was largely indifferent to the movement for full sovereignty until French investors initiated the Panama Canal. By 1903, when Panama finally seceded, the US was fully supportive. US officials then effectively took control, imposing Jim Crow laws – separate drinking fountains for Black people and all.

But the US’s main interest was in controlling the Panama Canal. At a time when shipping was still highly important for trade, the waterway joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was as important as the Suez Canal was going to be a generation or two later. The fact that the US had no right to the area was of little interest. When asked what authority he had to take over the canal, US President Theodore Roosevelt simply said: “I took it.”

The Panama Deception explains the background to George HW Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama. What was advertised either as a move to save the country from Manuel Noriega, who Bush denounced as a “vicious drug-lord dictator”, or as the response to the killing of a US American soldier, was rather the natural conclusion of a century of imperialist geo-politics. This is the story of how successive US governments were able to get away with it.

1977 saw the signing of the Carter-Torrijos Panama Canal treaties. Omar Torrijos was a leftist Panamanian leader, who died a few years later in a mysterious plane crash. Jimmy Carter was a largely forgettable US leader. But the treaties which they signed were of historic importance. These stated that the Canal Zone – the lucrative region around the Canal – would revert to Panamanian control in December 1999. Parts of US big business were horrified.

Enter Manuel Noriega, the CIA’s man in the region since 1967. The Carter administration had formally suspended the CIA’s links with the notorious drug lord. Under Reagan, he was reinstated and given a pay rise. The CIA paid him $100,000 a year. Following Torrijos’s death, Noriega gradually assumed power, with the help of the paramilitary Panama Defence Forces (PDF) and the tacit support of the Reagan administration, especially the vice-president – former CIA chief Bush.

As the US supplied the Nicaraguan Contras with arms, Noriega was a useful ally. Then news about the Contra affair was exposed. Oliver North stood trial and admitted that he had diverted money from illegal arms sales to Iran to fund the Contras. When Noriega was named as an intermediary, he became a liability. Furthermore, with 1999 approaching, US leaders were reluctant to leave the Canal Zone in the hands of the maverick PDF, and were looking for a way of sending in US troops.

The US government encouraged the PDF to stage a coup, and then withdrew all support, using the chaos to describe Panama as ungovernable without a rapid intervention of the US Army. US soldiers were not just able to take over the country, they also disbanded the PDF. A new US-compliant puppet government then disbanded the army, causing the US government to say that its troops must stay as someone must defend the Canal.

While all this was going on, something else was happening that is not fully addressed in the film. In 1975, the US suffered a major military defeat in Vietnam. After being kicked out of Saigon, young, working-class squaddies were no longer prepared to kill – and to die – merely to prop up US military operations in a foreign country. In the 14 years between 1975 and 1989, US troops were deployed in exactly one operation outside home soil – the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada.

The US was illegally funding the Contras because Reagan was not sure he could send in the Marines. One of the aims of the Panama invasion was to overcome this – to make US troops once more ready and willing to kill and to die for their fatherland. The fact that 2 years later, the US could invade Iraq – something which was unthinkable in the 1980s – shows that the Panama invasion achieved its goals. US imperialism was once more able to use its own soldiers abroad.

One commentator in the film describes the invasion as a “testing ground for the Persian Gulf war one year later.” In recent years, we have become used to US troops marching into any country containing resources which their government wanted to control. In the late 1970s and 1980s this was not the case. After Panama, the US started to assert itself militarily. This was made more easy by the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc which was happening at the same time.

The main losers from Bush’s strategical gambit was the people of Panama. Panamanians had no direct interest in sustaining the dictatorship, neither when it was funded by the CIA, nor when Noriega was suddenly Public Enemy #1. But the fact that Noriega was such a cartoon villain meant that he could not rely on much popular support outside the PRC. Besides which, a largely unarmed population was no match for 26,000 US troops.

The US government said that 500 Panamanians died in the invasion, most of them soldiers. All serious human rights organisations put the figure between 2,000 and 4,000+ people, mainly civilians. 20,000 were made homeless, and 18,000 sent to detention centres where they were effectively imprisoned. Later on, mass graves were found into which the US Army had almost certainly piled civilian bodies.

Did the invasion achieve its aims? If you are talking about the excuse which the US government gave to the public, absolutely not. A war which was justified in the name of the War on Drugs resulted in a doubling of cocaine traffic from Panama – much of it organised by members of the new government installed with US support. But the real aim was met, as US imperialism reasserted itself, both around the Canal, and on a world scale.

One feature of the film is the supine compliance of the US media. When the United Nations condemned the invasions, this was not even noted on NBC. CBS was slightly better – granting 10 seconds of coverage. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal all uncritically reported the government explanation for the invasion. Anyone watching recent media coverage in support of Israel should be able to see the similarities.

Some reviews have accused The Panama Deception of being biased, as if any documentary is not representative of a certain point of view. This film acknowledges its standpoint, which is surely better than claiming to be neutral but only reporting what you are told from on high. The film makes the case for the prosecution, and some of its star witnesses, like General Maxwell Thurman, openly admit that the aim of the mission was not to arrest Noriega but to overthrow the country.

At a Q&A after tonight’s showing, director Barbara Trent expressed surprise that they were able to leave the building following their interview with Thurman, let along publish his words. She underestimates the arrogance of power. Thurman told the truth because he did not believe that anyone will challenge the power structures which sustain him. Hopefully films like this, and the mobilisations from below from 1989 till today will prove him wrong.