commandos operating under the cover of the mob. LaBoa and the other religious on the staff of the
Nunciatura would also be in grave danger. On January 3, 1990, ahim a letter to the Pope, Noriega, dressed in his general's uniform, left the Nunciatura andfter thanking LaBoa and giving
surrendered to Gen. Cisneros.
In Bush's speech of December 20 he had offered the following justification for his act of war,
Operation Just Cause: The goals of the United States have been to safeguard the lives of Americans, to defend democracy
in Panama, to combat drug trafficking, and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty.
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 mUnion Bank of Switzerland, the Banco Aleman, the Primer Banco de Ahorros, Sudameris, Banaico,oney. These were the Banco General, the Banco de Colombia, the (^)
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 inoperation.
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 IndeGeneral Noriega's departure, cocaine trafficking has, in fact, prospered" in the country. On March 1,pendent of March 5, 1991, "statistics now indicate that since
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 includesserious 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, thefact 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 andmedicines 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 parallels the "civic
action" teams unleashed during the Vietnam war. CA-CAT officers supervise all government