The last Yankee invasion: Dec. 20, 1989

The writer is a sociology professor at the University of Panama and secretary general of the Popular Alternative Party.

Twenty years have passed since the bleak midnight of Dec. 19-20, 1989. Even the dead cry out silently to stop the world from forgetting them, pleading that their names be spoken and demanding justice. A fifth of a century has passed and the Panamanian people are still unaware how much damage was done to us. As with many other crimes in this country, the facts remain unclear, without any judicial inquiry, without any trial and without punishment.

Panamanians say ‘no bases’ at Dec. 20 protest in Panama city. Photo: Asociación Americana de Periodistas Bolivarianos Capítulo de Panamá

What has happened to the North American invasion of Dec. 20, 1989, is the same thing that happened to that of Nov. 3, 1903: the Panamanian ruling class keeps the event in the dark, while the pundits try to impose a historical analysis that is diametrically opposed to the truth. They try to make U.S. imperialism’s cruelest and bloodiest act of subjugation of the Panamanian nation be remembered “as a liberation,” in the words of former Archbishop Marcos G. McGrath. In the same way they managed, with some success, to pass off the separation of Panama from Colombia in 1903 as “independence,” although this act made us a colony.

One can approach the historical assessment of the invasion from two perspectives: either from the point of view of the invader’s objectives or from that of the victims, basing the assessment on the interests of the United States or on those of the majority of the Panamanian nation.

As we have already indicated in Chapter VI of our book, “Diez años de luchas políticas y sociales en Panamá 1980-1990,” (“Ten Years of Political and Social Struggles in Panama 1980-1990”), we must distinguish between the U.S. government’s public objectives and its real objectives.

It would be naive to accept a priori the arguments of former President George H. W. Bush, in the sense that Panama was invaded to “guarantee the lives of North Americans and the security of the Canal,” or that it was to bring us “democracy” and punish the “narcodictator” Manuel A. Noriega. Believing that argument is as childish as assuming that Iraq was invaded in 2003 for the nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” as President George W. Bush claimed at the time. Both son and father are proven liars and criminals.

In the aforementioned book our contention that proves that the North American objective was not to “liberate” us from the dictator was that on Oct. 3, 1989, when Moisés Giroldi and a group of officers staged a coup and arrested Noriega, offering him to the U.S., South Command troops looked the other way with contempt.

Panama in the 1980s

In our view, the invasion of Dec. 20, 1989, cannot be understood without considering the dramatic developments in Panama during the 1980s, which can be summarized as follows:

1 The signing of the Torrijos-Carter treaties in 1977 opened a controlled and gradual process of democratization negotiated between the U.S. and the Panamanian military, which was to culminate in 1984 with presidential elections. This process was clearly within the U.S. foreign policy outlined by President Jimmy Carter to impose parliamentary or presidential regimes as the best form of domination, rather than the military dictatorships imposed during the previous decade, since some of them had resulted in revolutions as in Iran and Nicaragua. Since the Washington Consensus, these regimes combined very restricted “democracies” with the implementation of a drastic neoliberal economic policy of dismantling the “Welfare State.”

2 The Panamanian democratization process was complicated in two ways: the death (accidental or not) of General Omar Torrijos in July 1981 led to a power struggle among National Guard officers; and a growing social resistance against the neoliberal policies that the government was trying to impose. So by 1984-85, under the government of President Nicolás Ardito Barletta born from the electoral fraud imposed by “an agreement” between the Panamanian National Guard and the U.S., the social and political crisis broke out forcefully, leading to the invasion.

3 Between 1981 and May 1989, General Noriega was the privileged ally of Washington, receiving political and military support to raise the Guard to a modern army in exchange for applying privatization and foreign debt policies in Panama imposed by financial institutions. The explosion of popular struggles against the government of Barletta brought the agreement between the two to a crisis. But the break between the U.S. and Noriega did not take place until February 1988, and even then it was not until the failure of the May 1989 elections that the Pentagon decided to get rid of Noriega in search of a stable political system.

Therefore, the U.S. invasion’s primary objective was to establish a stable political system in Panama with a democratic façade that would guarantee the application of the neoliberal policies which were its priority. The same process was carried out in Mexico with Salinas de Gortari, in Peru with Alberto Fujimori and in Argentina with Carlos Menem.

This objective was corroborated in July 1990, a few months after the invasion, when the U.S. government made Guillermo Endara sign the so-called Grant Treaty (Convenio de Donación), whereby some millions of dollars in economic “aid” would be given in return for the application of a strict liberalization and privatization plan dictated by the IMF and the World Bank, as the text of the treaty itself states.

From this political and economic point of view, the U.S. invasion succeeded in achieving its goals. The regime’s democratic appearance allowed the successive governments of Endara, Pérez Balladares, Moscoso and Martín Torrijos to thoroughly apply neoliberal policies. And it was not until the elections in 2009 that this regime and its policies began to show certain cracks, influenced by the global debacle of the neoliberal model.

We pointed out in our 1994 book mentioned above that another of the objectives could be related to the Canal’s reversion to Panamanian hands and the closure of military bases starting in 2000. In this respect, it would give the impression that we were mistaken, because the military bases were closed and the Canal returned as the Torrijos-Carter Treaty established.

However, favoring our argument is that though the U.S. government withdrew its troops at the beginning of the 21st century as was agreed, it took certain safeguards: a constitutional reform and an organic law that turned the management of the Canal into a “zone” under an administration in which users (the main user remains the U.S.) and financial elites have more control than the Panamanian people.

U.S. military bases

Regarding military bases, it is known that the attempt to maintain the Howard base under the excuse of “fighting drug trafficking” failed, but this deficit was adjusted by agreements such as Salas-Beker, which authorizes U.S. military units to take custody of our seas and our borders. Until now, in the second half of 2009, and in the framework of the installation of seven [U.S.] military bases in Colombia, the new government of Ricardo Martinelli has started the installation of four military bases on Panamanian territory (this could reach 11 bases, according to Minister José Mulino), with U.S. funding and advice.

From the perspective of the victims, we reiterate what was said in our book, “La verdad sobre la invasion” (“The Truth About the Invasion”): “In a single night U.S. troops killed 100 times more Panamanians than in over 21 years of military rule. In a single week there were 100 times more political prisoners than there were during the five years of the Noriega regime.”

Despite the absence of an official investigation, the Catholic Church was able to gather the names of about 500 people killed, most of them civilians. The common graves of El Chorrillo, Corozal, Arco Iris and Chepo continue unopened. Between 18,000 and 20,000 people lost their homes that night. Human rights organizations counted at least 2,000 wounded. A fact that many do not know is that about 5,000 political arrests were made. Material losses, particularly those of the Panamanian state, have yet to be added, although the Chamber of Commerce quantified their losses as $400 million, without including two years of economic sanctions that caused a 16-percent drop in GDP.

Twenty years later, when it seemed that justice was being done through the passage of a law in the National Assembly in December 2007 to establish the demanded National Mourning Day and an Investigative Commission, it was vetoed later by President Martín Torrijos, while the elected deputies who proposed the law did nothing to insist it be passed.

In conclusion, until now the historical balance remains favorable to the perpetrators and unfavorable to the victims. In the hopes that sooner rather than later, a new generation of Panamanians will erect a government that vindicates the memory of the martyrs of Dec. 20, 1989, our small contribution to the justice these dead demand is to bring the truth into the open.