LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Manuel Noriega: U.S
built 155 days ago
The 1989 U.S. invasion that ousted dictator Manuel Noriega opened this small nation's road to greater democracy and prosperity. Now Panama is bracing for his possible return, and the likelihood that he will spend little time behind bars.
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The initiation of what would become the Noriega investigation dropped out of the blue--literally--one day in 1985, when a light plane containing a shipment of smuggled cocaine made a forced landing on a Florida highway, nearly hitting a DEA agent's car. The pilot and proprietor of the air brokerage that handled the plane ultimately became informants, revealing the identity of the plane's owner, a Panamanian named Floyd Carlton. Carlton, a Noriega henchman, was apprehended--and Dick Gregorie, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, persuaded Carlton to turn informant. The author portrays Gregorie as an intrepid crime fighter who had made the war on drugs his personal jihad. He assigned a hard-working DEA agent named Steve Grilli to debrief Carlton. It was largely from Carlton's testimony that the case against Noriega was formed.
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Díaz Herrera, a former member of Noriega's inner circle, told Panama's main opposition newspaper, La Prensa, that Noriega was behind Spadafora's murder, many other killings and disappearances as well. This resulted in an immediate outcry from the public and the formation of the "Civic Crusade". Noriega claims that the Civic Crusade was the handiwork of U.S. Embassy chargé d'affaires John Maisto, who arranged for Civic Crusade leaders to travel to the Philippines to learn the tactics of the U.S.-supported movement to overthrow Ferdinand Marcos. Supporters of Noriega referred to the Civic Crusade as a creature of the rabiblancos or "white-tails", the wealthy elite of European extraction that dominated Panamanian commerce and that had dominated Panamanian politics before the advent of Torrijos. Noriega, like Torrijos, was dark-skinned and claimed to represent the majority population who were poor and of mixed Spanish Amerindian and African heritage. Noriega supporters mocked the demonstrations of the Civic Crusade as "the protest of the Mercedes Benz", deriding the wealthy ladies for banging on teflon-coated pots and pans (unlike the cruder and louder pots and pans traditionally banged by the poor in South American protests), or sending their maids to protest for them. The U.S. press... covered these demonstrations with great sympathy.
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Noriega claims to have spent his childhood in his mother’s home village of Yaviza, in Darién Province, near the border with Colombia. As a secondary school student back in Panama City, he participated in anti-U.S. protests. During the late 1950s and early ’60s, he studied at the Chorrillos Military School in Lima, Peru. Upon returning to Panama in 1962, he joined the National Guard and was assigned to a unit in Colón commanded by Omar Torrijos Herrera. During the mid-1960s he received training in counterinsurgency and jungle operations at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Canal Zone; by this time, he may already have begun working as a double agent, spying both for and against the U.S.
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Throughout the confrontation, Noriega felt immune to American reprisals or punishment. One author claimed that "the United States sent clear signals, which if evaluated correctly, could have provided warning [to Noriega! of a U.S. attack."(3) But even hours before the actual attack, Noriega did not believe the United States would use force to capture him.(4) His failure was not only the result of faulty evaluation. The evidence presented in this article shows that over a long period of time, the United States sent him mixed and confusing signals. Thus, a tougher and more unified U.S. policy that was clearly articulated and communicated from the beginning could have obviated the need for the Panama invasion.
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Noriega denounced these and other allegations as a conspiracy of right-wing U.S. politicians looking for a way to undo the Panama Canal treaties before the canal became Panamanian property on December 31, 1999. It was becoming evident that Noriega had outfoxed his U.S. benefactors. During the Reagan administration's covert war against the government of Nicaragua, Noriega helped to supply arms to the Nicaraguan resistance called the Contras (Congress prohibited any expenditures to bring down the Nicaraguan government). At the same time, he received arms from Cuba and sold them to Salvadoran leftist guerrillas and supplied Nicaraguan leaders with intelligence reports. Although Noriega was a gun-runner, money-launderer, drug trafficker, and double agent, he was still useful to the U.S. government.
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