After spending much of the past quarter of a century incarcerated in three separate countries, Manuel Noriega, the former military strongman of Panama, has succumbed to ill health at 83 years old. Noriega is not particularly unique among military dictators, Central American or otherwise, with his laundry list of crimes including rigged elections, human rights abuses, and most infamously cocaine trafficking which would eventually lead to his downfall at the hands of the United States military forces in 1989. Although the straw that broke the camel’s back was that his forces killed an unarmed U.S. troop.
It is with a huge helping of irony that one can note that Ronald Reagan was so obsessed with defeating the Sandinista regime in nearby Nicaragua that he overlooked the cocaine wheeling and dealing by Mr. Noriega, while also insisting on a “War on Drugs” in the U.S. Noriega rose to power in 1981 after General Omar Torrijos Herrera (most famous for getting the United States to cede the Panama Canal back to Panama) died. Before the aforementioned United States invasion, Noriega had proven himself something of a political survivor, outlasting a coup in 1988, prior to the invasion which landed him in the U.S. Prison system.
Aside from his jail sentence in the United States for narcotics trafficking and money laundering, he also faced charges in France for money laundering and finally, in Panama he was arrested for the more serious offenses of murder, and corruption in addition to the above charges. Prior to his demise, he had been under house arrest while undergoing medical treatment for a variety of illnesses including a tumor in his brain. This almost pitiable existence was in sharp contrast to his hard-partying, ultra-nationalist reign as head honcho in Panama. With his demise, hopefully, both the United States and Panama will continue to use him as an example of the dangers of having an unfit leader, who also dabbles in the underworld.
