| 29 May 2005 Shelf Life Latin strongmen come in various shapes and sizes and with indefinite shelf-lives. I am tempted to make a comparison between the length of the regime with the height of the strongman- tall Castro versus squat Noriega, for example- but that would be misleading. There is much more to it, and I would be curious to hear what President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela would make of my theory. I met wizened old Joaquin Balaguer, Presidente of the Dominican Republic, in 1994. He had been in power since his predecessor Rafael Trujillo was murdered nearly thirty years before. He was stooped and nearly blind and in his eighties. His personal guard had close-fitting black uniforms and Uzis. His protocol officers were spectacularly beautiful women. Trujillo, a man of ordinary height, had become a threat to regional order and Balaguer was not. I never had a chance to meet Manuel Noriega personally, but I have always had a connection to his Panama . My grandfather worked on the Ditch, providing telephones to the Canal Zone and the capital, which was actually in Panama . Under the Treaty, the Zone had been the United States , a swath of land five miles on either side of the Canal, and forty miles long. in the 1950s, there were more than a 100,000 US citizens living and working in a tropical version of small-town America . In the 1960s, riots broke out in Panama City over the provisions of the 1903 Treaty. The American presence in Panama was likened to a hostile power occupying the banks of the Mississippi River , north to south, for a century. Jimmy Carter saw the inequity, and he negotiated an orderly twenty year turnover with strongman Omar Torrijos, who had come to power after an orderly coup in 1968. He ran what he liked to call “a dictatorship with a heart.” The Canal Treaty came in two versions, one acceptable to the US Senate, and the other acceptable to Torrijos. They were never reconciled, but the Carter Administration accepted it. The night in 1979 when the gates to the Zone opened up for the first time, Panamanian taxis flooded the area, honking their horns. A giant Panamanian flag went up on Ancon Hill, flying twenty-four seven, brightly lit at night. Torrijos died in a helicopter crash in 1981, having had a shelf-life of 12 years. After three years of maneuvering, and five governments, career solider Manuel Noriega took over. In a trip in 1983 I was surprised to find his cops roughing up American officers who violated the Treaty provision that banned the wearing of their uniforms. Noriega thought he was bulletproof, figuring he could drain the upper lakes of the Canal and shut it down for years. His behavior relied on his perception of invulnerability, which was erroneous. I was an inadvertent participant in an aborted covert plot to arrest him for drug trafficking in the summer of 1989, and the 82nd Airborne arrived as part of Operation JUST CAUSE in December of that year. Noriega's National Guard fought for five days. The Canal was secured, and the strongman took refuge in the Papal Nuncio's residence, where he was surrounded by US troops who blasted loud rock n' roll music at the building until he surrendered. Then flown to Howard Air force Base, which under the treaty was still considered US soil. He was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration and eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison. That was later reduced to 30 years, and with good behavior, he is eligible for release when he is 88. They say that with the exception of a mild stroke, he has adapted well to his new life in Miami. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra |