If these were the goals, then Bush's invasion of Panama must be counted not only a
crime, but also a failure.
On April 5, 1991, newspapers all over Latin American carried details of a new report by
the US Drug Enfocrement Administration confirming that the US-installed puppet
president of Panama, Guillermo Endara, had been an officer of at least six companies
which had been demonstrably implicated in laundering drug money. These were the
Banco General, the Banco de Colombia, the Union Bank of Switzerland, the Banco
Aleman, the Primer Banco de Ahorros, Sudameris, Banaico, and the Banco del Istmo.
The money laundered came from a drug smuggling ring headed up by Augusto Falcon
and Sahvador Magluta of Colombia, who are reported to have smuggled an average of
one ton of cocaine per month into Florida during the decade 1977-87, including many of
the years during which Bush's much-touted South Florida Task Force and related
operations were in operation.
With the puppet president so heavily implicated in the activity of the international drug
mafia, it can be no surprise that the plague of illegal drugs has markedly worsened in the
wake of Bush's invasion. According to the London Independent of March 5, 1991,
"statistics now indicate that since General Noriega's departure, cocaine trafficking has, in
fact, prospered" in the country. On March 1, the State Department had conceded that the
turnover of drug money laundered in Panama had at least regained the levels attained
before the 1989 invasion. According to the Los Angeles Times of April 28, 1991, current
levels of drug trafficking in Panama "in some cases exceed" what existed before the
December 20 invasion, and US officials "say the trend is sharply upward and includes
serious movements by the Colombian cartels into areas largely ignored under Noriega."
This was all real drug activity, and not the cornmeal tamales wrapped in banana leaves
that Bush's mind war experts found in one of Noriega's residences and labelled as
"cocaine" during the invasion.
Bush's invasion of Panama has done nothing to fight the scourge of illegal narcotics.
Rather, the fact that so many of Bush's hand-picked puppets can be shown to be top
figures in the drug mafia suggests that drug trafficking through Panama towards the
United States has increased after the ouster of Noriega. If drug shipments to the United
States have increased, this exposes Bush's pledge to "protect the lives of Americans" as a
lie.
As far as the promise of democracy is concerned, it must be stressed that Panama has
remained under direct US military dictatorship and virtual martial law until this writing in
the late autumn of 1991, two years after Bush's adventure was launched. The
congressional and local elections that were conducted during early 1991 were thoroughly
orchestrated by the US occupation forces. Army intelligence units interrogated potential
voters, and medical battalions handed out vaccines and medicines to urban and rural
populations to encourage them to vote. Every important official in the Panamanian
government from Endara on down has US military "liasion officers" assigned on a
permanent basis. These officers are from the Defense Department's Civic Action-Country
Area Team (or CA-CAT), a counterinsurgency and "nation building" apparatus that