Torrijos, Noriega's patron, in 1968. Endara's base was among the "BMW revolutionaries" who had
attended anti-Noriega rallies only in the confort of their air-conditioned limousines. These wereBush's kind of people. One of Bush's soldatesca in Panama, General Marc Cisneros, boasted that the (^)
Panamanians "need to have a little infusion of Anglo values."
The US military operations, which got under way just after midight on Tuesday, were conducted
with unusual ferocity. The officers were obsessed with avoiding a repetition of the fiasco of DesertOne on 1980, or the fratricidal casualties of Grenada. Mad Max Thurman sent in the new Stealth
and A-7 fighter-bombers, and AC-13 gunships. The neighborhood around Noriega's
Commandancia, called El Chorillo, was bombarded with a vengeance and virtually razed, as was
the working-class district of San Miguelito, and large parts of the city of Colon. US commanders
had been instructed that Bush wished to avoid US casualties at all costs, and that any hostile firewas to be answered by overwhelming US firepower, without regard to the number of civilian
casualties that this might produce among the Panamanians. Many of the Panamanian civilian dead
were secretly buried in unmarked mass graves during the dead of night by the US forces; many
other bodies were consumed in the holocaust of fires that levelled El Chorillo. The Institute of
Seismology counted 417 bominvasion. For many days there were no US estimates of the civilian dead (or "collateral damage"),b bursts in Panama City alone during the first 14 hours of the US (^)
and eventually the Bush regime set the death toll for Panamanian non-combattants at slightly over
- In reality, as Executive Intelligence Review and former US Attorney General Ramsay Clark
pointed out, there had been approximately 5,000 innocent civilian victims, including large numbers
of women and children.
US forces rounded up 10,000 suspected political opponents of "democracy" and incarcerated them
in concentration camps, calling many of them prisoners of war. Many political prisoners were held
for months after the invasion without being charged with any specific offense, a clear violation of
the norms of habeas corpus. The combined economic devastation caused by 30 msanctions and economic warfare, plus the results of bombardments, firefights, and torchings, hadonths of US (^)
taken an estimated $7 billion out of the Panamanian economy, in which severe poverty was the lot
of most of the population apart from the rabiblanco bankers that were the main support for Bush's
intervention. The bombing left 15,000 homeless. The Endara government purged several thousand
government officials and civil servants under the pretext that they had been tainted by theirassociation with Noriega. Ironically, the new US puppet regime could only be described as a (^)
congeries of drug pushers and drug money launderers. The most succinct summary was provided by
the International Herald Tribune on February 7, 1990, which reported: "The nation's new President
Guillermo Endara has for years been a director of one of the Panamanian banks used by Colombia's
drug traffickers. Guillermo Ford, the second vice president and chairman of the bankingcommission, is a part owner of the Dadeland Bank of Florida, which was named in a court case two (^)
years ago as a central financial institution for one of the biggest Medellin money-launderers,
Gonzalo Mora. Rogelio Cruz, the new Attorney General, has been a director of the First
Interamericas Bank, owned by Rodrguez Orejuela, one of the bosses of the Cali Cartel gang in
Colombia." The portly Endara was also the business partner and corporate attorney of Carlos EletaAlmaran, the CIA bagman already mentioned. Eleta Almaran, the owner of the Panamanian branch (^)
of Philip Morris tobacco was arraigned in Bibb County, Georgia by DEA officials who accused him
of conspiracy to import 600 kilos of cocaine per month into the US, and to set up dummy
corporations to launder the estimated $300 million in profits this project was expected to produce.
Eleta was first freed on $8 magainst him were ordered droppeillion bail; after the "successful" US invasion of Panama, all chargesd by Bush and Thornburgh. Bush's heart had gone out in his
December 21 war speech especially to drug pusher Billy Ford: "You remember those horrible
pictures of newly elected Vice President Ford covered head to toe with blood, beaten mercilessly by
so-called 'dignity battalions.'" Bush, it would appear, has never wanted to beat up a drug pusher.