When Panama was in the White House's crosshairs

Now that the United States is once again interested in Panama -Donald Trump has proposed regaining control of the Canal, although without clarifying very well what he intends and whether he is really serious about it- the book by Fernando Berguido, a Panamanian lawyer and diplomat who has delved into various aspects of his country's public life in recent decades, is particularly interesting. To other previous investigations, he now adds a work on the Panamanian military dictatorship, especially the period from the time Manuel Noriega became the country's strongman, after the death of President Omar Torrijos in a plane crash in 1981, to the end of the regime with the armed intervention ordered by George H. W. Bush in December 1989.

The succession of dramatic international events that have followed - the fall of the USSR, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamic State...- may have made us forget some of the most iconic images of that final period of the Cold War: leaders of the civil service examination (in reality, the winners of the elections, whose victory the government did not want to recognize) being beaten in the street, in a bloodbath, by Noriega's henchmen; US troops patrolling among the destruction of El Chorrillo, a poor central neighborhood of the old city reduced to rubble, or Noriega himself leaving the Nunciature, where he had taken refuge, to be taken to prison in Miami.

Berguido's book is read by the reader with the eagerness that a journalistic chronicle arouses and the confidence that a well-contrasted historical account generates. Narrating the facts following their chronological evolution (each chapter specifies at the beginning the moment in the timeline in which what is told takes place), the author presents the events using the annals of the time and providing the documentary novelties that have later surfaced, with his own interviews with numerous protagonists and first-line witnesses.

The progression of the pages reflects well the growing toxicity of the exercise of power by Noriega, who had become head of the National Guard after being manager of military intelligence: how the web of his relationships with drug trafficking groups became denser and more complex, while his political flight forward - with the persecution of the civil service examination and the media, the disregard of the popular vote and the bending of all institutions - made his position unsustainable. How he went from a perfect tightrope walker who played two cards, being able to combine his illicit business with being on the CIA payroll thanks to the value of the information he provided on other capos, to a person who was already particularly damaging to Washington.

Berguido knows how to highlight the elements that converged in the decision-making process on both sides. An important break in the attitude of the United States was the assassination, ordered by Noriega, of the opponent Hugo Spadafora, an event that began to place him in the sights of some important politicians on Capitol Hill. Noriega's conviction that the White House would not order an invasion of the country (the Canal and its margins were US sovereignty, but it did not go beyond that 'zone') led him to a campaign of harassment of the US staff in the country, in response to the increase of denunciations against him from Washington, which in the end provoked the unthinkable reaction of George H. W. Bush. Noriega had negotiated his possible departure, with the mediation of, among others, the then president of the Spanish government, Felipe Gonzalez, but he found it difficult to trust the promises made to him and he was also pressured to stay by his entourage, fearful of reprisals if Noriega left. Since he did not count on the invasion, he stayed; the invasion took place in the early morning of December 20, 1989 and lasted 42 days.

With the same forensic spirit with which Berguido follows the development the confrontation between the American soldiers and the troops loyal to Noriega, and the vicissitudes of the latter's escape, moving from hiding place to hiding place until he was taken in by the nuncio, the Spaniard Jose Sebastian Laboa, also deals with the recounting of the consequences of those days. Precisely one of the contributions of the book, besides accurately recording the events that took place in such a crucial period for Panama, is the accounting of the dead. The country was slow to organize a commission to do so, since the priority was to investigate the abuses of the dictatorship; only 35 years after the invasion Panama was able to give an official issue of the dead: around 350, mostly civilians (the fallen Americans were 23). Berguido details aspects of that figure, to which he gives full credibility, far from the 3,000 that were sometimes speculated, but in any case important in a country that then had 2.5 million inhabitants.