United States invasion of Panama

Based on Wikipedia: United States invasion of Panama

At one minute before one in the morning on December 20, 1989, the largest American military operation since Vietnam began with a roar of jet engines and helicopter rotors over Panama City. Twenty-seven thousand troops, over three hundred aircraft, and billions of dollars in military hardware descended on a country of just two million people—all to arrest one man.

That man was Manuel Noriega, the de facto dictator of Panama, former intelligence asset of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and now a federal fugitive wanted for drug trafficking and racketeering. Operation Just Cause, as it was named, would last barely a month. But it marked a strange turning point in American foreign policy: the first major military invasion after the Cold War ended, and a preview of how the United States would project power in the decades to come.

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Manuel Noriega had been on the CIA payroll since 1967. For over two decades, he collected upward of one hundred thousand dollars annually—later increased to two hundred thousand—in exchange for intelligence on communist activities in Central America. He was America's man in Panama during the height of the Cold War, helping to sabotage the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the revolutionary forces in El Salvador.

George H. W. Bush personally knew Noriega from Bush's time as CIA director in 1976 and 1977. This relationship would later become deeply inconvenient.

Noriega worked both sides brilliantly. While feeding intelligence to the CIA, he also cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration to restrict illegal drug shipments through Panama. At the same time—and this is the remarkable part—he was taking enormous payments from drug dealers themselves, helping them launder money and protecting them from DEA investigations. The CIA looked the other way. Noriega was too useful in the struggle against Soviet influence in Central America.

But in the mid-1980s, the arrangement started to unravel.

When Assets Become Liabilities

In 1986, journalist Seymour Hersh published an exposé in The New York Times detailing Noriega's criminal activities. President Ronald Reagan opened negotiations, essentially asking Noriega to step down quietly. Noriega refused. He knew that extradition laws between Panama and the United States were weak, so indictments in American courts meant little to him.

By 1988, some officials in the Pentagon—including Elliott Abrams—were pushing for invasion. Reagan declined, reportedly because of Bush's personal connections to Noriega and the potential damage to Bush's presidential campaign. Instead, negotiations continued, even involving offers to drop drug-related charges if Noriega would simply leave.

He wouldn't.

As relations deteriorated, Noriega began receiving military aid from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Libya—essentially shifting his Cold War allegiance toward the Soviet bloc. American military planners started preparing contingency plans for invasion.

The Election That Wasn't

In May 1989, Panama held national elections. The opposition candidate, Guillermo Endara, appeared to defeat the pro-Noriega candidate Carlos Duque by nearly three to one, according to counts conducted by an alliance of opposition parties. The next day, Noriega supporters physically assaulted Endara in his motorcade. Noriega then nullified the election results and maintained power by force.

President Bush called on Noriega to honor the will of the Panamanian people. The United States reinforced its garrison in the Canal Zone—a strip of Panamanian territory controlled by the U.S. under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, signed in 1977. Those treaties had set in motion the process of transferring the Panama Canal to Panamanian control by the year 2000, but American military bases remained, and the U.S. retained rights to protect the canal.

Tensions escalated through the fall. In October, Noriega survived another coup attempt, this one led by Major Moisés Giroldi of the Panama Defense Forces. On December 15, the Panamanian general assembly passed a resolution declaring that a state of war existed between Panama and the United States.

The Incident at the Roadblock

The night after that declaration—around nine p.m.—four American servicemen left their base at Fort Clayton, heading to the Marriott Caesar Park Hotel in downtown Panama City for dinner. They were stopped at a roadblock outside Panama Defense Forces headquarters in the El Chorrillo neighborhood.

What happened next is disputed. The Pentagon reported that the four men—Marine Captain Richard Hadded, Navy Lieutenant Michael Wilson, Army Captain Barry Rainwater, and Marine First Lieutenant Robert Paz—were unarmed, in a private vehicle, and attempted to flee only after being surrounded by an angry crowd of civilians and PDF troops. The PDF later claimed the Americans were armed and on a reconnaissance mission.

The PDF opened fire. A round entered the rear of the vehicle and struck Lieutenant Paz in the back. He was rushed to Gorgas Army Hospital but died of his wounds. He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart.

According to U.S. military sources, a Navy SEAL officer named Adam Curtis and his wife Bonnie witnessed the incident and were detained by PDF troops. While in custody, Curtis was beaten and his wife threatened with sexual assault. Curtis spent two weeks in the hospital recovering.

On December 16, President Bush ordered the execution of the invasion plan. H-Hour—military terminology for the time an operation begins—was set for one a.m. on December 20.

Four Reasons for War

On the morning of December 20, a few hours after the invasion began, President Bush articulated the official rationale. He cited four objectives.

First: safeguarding the lives of American citizens in Panama. Bush stated that Noriega had threatened the approximately thirty-five thousand U.S. citizens living there, and recent clashes between American and Panamanian forces—including the killing of Lieutenant Paz—demonstrated the danger.

Second: defending democracy and human rights in Panama, particularly after Noriega's nullification of the May elections.

Third: combating drug trafficking. Panama had become a center for money laundering and a transit point for drugs flowing to the United States and Europe.

Fourth: protecting the integrity of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties. Members of Congress claimed that Noriega threatened the neutrality of the Panama Canal, and that the treaties gave the U.S. the right to intervene militarily to protect it.

These four reasons provided sufficient justification for bipartisan Congressional support. But some scholars have suggested Bush had domestic political motivations as well. The invasion was kept secret until it began, executed with overwhelming speed, and enjoyed eighty percent public approval. Democratic lawmakers had little opportunity to object. One study argued that there was scarce strategic reasoning for invading and then immediately withdrawing without establishing structures to enforce the stated interests.

The Invasion Begins

At 12:46 a.m. local time on December 20, the operation commenced. Over three hundred aircraft participated: C-130 Hercules tactical transports, AC-130 Spectre gunships, C-141 Starlifter and C-5 Galaxy strategic transports, F-117A Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft, and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.

This was the first combat deployment for several cutting-edge weapons systems: the Apache helicopter, the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (better known as the Humvee), and the F-117A stealth fighter.

Ground forces included elite units from across the military: the 82nd Airborne Division, the 75th Ranger Regiment, the 7th Special Forces Group, Navy SEALs, Marine reconnaissance units, and military police battalions. The force totaled 27,684 troops—more than ten times the population of the Panama Defense Forces.

Panamanian forces were rapidly overwhelmed, though scattered fighting continued for weeks. Guillermo Endara, the opposition candidate who had won the May election, was sworn in as president shortly after the invasion began—on a U.S. military base.

The Dictator in Hiding

Noriega eluded capture for several days. American forces searched for him across Panama City while psychological operations blared messages urging surrender. On December 24, Noriega sought refuge in the Holy See diplomatic mission—the Vatican's embassy—in Panama City.

For ten days, he remained inside while American troops surrounded the building. Famously, U.S. forces blasted loud rock music at the embassy in an attempt to pressure Noriega into surrendering, though the Holy See protested this as a violation of diplomatic norms.

On January 3, 1990, Noriega surrendered. He was flown to the United States, where he was tried in federal court, convicted on drug trafficking and racketeering charges, and sentenced to forty years in prison.

The Human Cost

The Pentagon estimated that 516 Panamanians were killed during the invasion: 314 soldiers and 202 civilians. Twenty-three American soldiers and three American civilians died.

Some independent organizations disputed these figures, claiming the civilian death toll was much higher—possibly in the thousands. The El Chorrillo neighborhood, where PDF headquarters was located, suffered extensive damage from fires that broke out during the fighting, leaving thousands homeless.

The United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion as a violation of international law. So did the Organization of American States and the European Parliament. The United States government maintained that it had a responsibility to protect American citizens in Panama and to enforce democracy and human rights.

A New Kind of War

Some researchers argue that Operation Just Cause was the first major American military action since 1945 not directly related to the Cold War. The Soviet Union was collapsing; the Berlin Wall had fallen just weeks before the invasion. Noriega's shift toward accepting aid from Cuba and Libya came too late to be a genuine Cold War threat.

Instead, the invasion previewed a new pattern: unilateral intervention justified by humanitarian concerns, protection of nationals abroad, and regime change. Public opinion, international legitimacy, operational execution, and the swift installation of a new government all became central to the mission's design.

The speed and success of the operation—overwhelming force, minimal American casualties, rapid withdrawal—set a template that would influence U.S. military interventions in the 1990s and beyond. But the international condemnation also foreshadowed debates that would follow later invasions: When does a nation have the right to overthrow another country's government? What makes such an action legal or legitimate?

Aftermath

The Panama Defense Forces were dissolved. Guillermo Endara governed Panama until 1994, though his presidency was marked by economic challenges and allegations of corruption. The United States transferred control of the Panama Canal to Panama on December 31, 1999, as scheduled under the Torrijos-Carter Treaties.

Noriega served seventeen years in U.S. prison before being extradited to France in 2010 to face money laundering charges. He was later extradited to Panama, where he was imprisoned for human rights violations, including the murder of Hugo Spadafora—a critic whose death in 1985 had been one of the early signs of Noriega's brutality. Noriega died in Panama in 2017 at the age of eighty-three.

For the United States, Operation Just Cause was both a military success and a legal controversy. It demonstrated the overwhelming power of American forces in a limited conflict. It also raised enduring questions about sovereignty, intervention, and the use of military force in the post-Cold War world.