At one time, America was a good friend of Manuel Noriega, a longtime CIA agent and dictator of Panama in the 1980s.
One day, Noriega finished his role as a servant of the empire and needed to pack up. The gringos, with a straight face, denounced him as an unforgivable criminal of drug trafficking and decided to overthrow him in 1989.
This was interesting. After all, the United States has known about Noriega's ties to the drug trade since at least 1972, and has intermittently benefited from them. Furthermore, the US president who spearheaded the removal of dictators was none other than George H.W. -W. Bush.
Regardless, endless hypocrisy has always been America's strength. And it's the name of a unilateral US military operation to bring “democracy” to Panama by mass-murdering Panamanian civilians and crushing the El Chorrillo neighborhood of Panama City to the point where the local ambulance had a flat tire. In selection, again fully exposed. Drivers began calling it “Little Hiroshima” and transported Noriega to Miami.
After much consideration, the tentative title “Operation Blue Spoon” has been changed to “Operation Just Cause.” The late Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his 1995 autobiography, The Soldier's Way, that he liked the “inspirational sound” of the revised title and wrote that he liked “the harshest critics.” He explained the fact that “even.” They will have to say “just reasons'' while criticizing us. ”
Furthermore, Powell reasoned that Blue Spoon was “hardly an evocative declaration of war…You wouldn't risk people's lives for Blue Spoon.”
Of course, the label change had no bearing on the civilian population of El Chorrillo, the site of Panama City's central military barracks, which later bore the fatal brunt of the “Cause.” Again, it wasn't their lives that Mr. Powell was concerned about risking. Shortly after midnight on December 20, 1989, the region awoke with a jolt to an American frenzy that would soon earn it the nickname “Little Hiroshima.”
The military's approach was perhaps a little too heated, as one of its commanders, Army Gen. Mark Cisneros, acknowledged in 1999 on the 10th anniversary of the invasion. Laser-guided missiles, stealth fighters, and we're dying to use them. ”
This New Year's Eve, almost exactly 34 years after my gadget fun, I visited El Chorrillo, taking an Uber ride up the hill from a friend's house in the Quarry Heights neighborhood of Panama's capital, a former U.S. military headquarters. I went down. Center of the Panama Canal Zone.
My plan to walk around and take pictures of the anti-American graffiti in El Chorrillo ended when a female Uber driver handed me over to two police officers standing on a street corner, citing concerns for my safety. This was denied. Too young to have experienced the 1989 break-in, they turned out to be talkative, even though they were less confident in their crime-fighting abilities. “Sometimes we're standing here and people are being robbed in the supermarket next door.”
One of the officers took me down the road to see a small statue of a crouching human being, a memorial to those killed in the cause. The number of Panamanian civilian deaths during this operation is estimated to range from a few hundred to a few thousand, depending on whether you ask the United States or human rights groups.
In order to politely get out of the company of the two officers, I asked them if they knew anyone who could tell me about this break-in. In fact, an elderly man named Hector lived nearby and was the only El Chorrillo resident to receive 24-hour police protection after four gang attempts on his life. Hector knew all about 1989.
A few phone calls later, I was handed over to another police officer who waited with me in front of Hector's dilapidated apartment. A young boy fires at all of us with a toy pistol shaped like a triceratops, and a group of laughing young girls shouts “knives,” “dirty teeth,” and “Santana,” the last name of one of the officers. He asked me for the word in English. .
We then cut to Hector's cramped kitchen, where a preemptive New Year's fireworks display outside provided the perfect soundtrack for the subject at hand. Hector, 77, who had a kind of joie de vivre that those of us who didn't survive four assassination attempts probably don't have access to, unearthed a 33-year-old tattered newspaper – published on Just Cause's first anniversary – and encouraged me to peruse the photographs of bodies and mass graves.
As it turns out, Hector had been expelled from Panama for political reasons several months earlier and was not present during the invasion. He returned in February 1990, shortly after Just Cause ended in swift victory, and Panama's new “democratic” forces appropriated El Chorrillo for their own money-making purposes. He became a leader in the struggle to stop this. In Hector's words, the new opportunists' thinking was: “The gringos have already burned everything down, so let's get the chorilleros out of there.''
And since most of the houses were made of wood, the fire spread easily. Coincidentally, many of them had earlier housed the workers who built the Panama Canal, another crowning achievement in America's long history of imperial exploitation. Dick Cheney, the US Secretary of Defense at the time, claimed that Just Cause was “the most surgical military operation ever undertaken,'' but there was no real surgical Hiroshima.
From the clutter on the kitchen table, Hector pulls out a pamphlet by Panamanian sociologist Olmedo Berruce, with a section on the aircraft and weapons used in the massive deployment of Justice in the First Persian Gulf War. He started reading aloud to me. -117 stealth bombers, Black Hawk helicopters, Apache and Cobra helicopters, 2,000 pound bombs, Hellfire missiles, etc.
Indeed, as historian Greg Grandin has emphasized, the road to Baghdad “passed through Panama City,” and the cause was “'democracy' and 'freedom' as both the justification and branding of the war.” It marked the beginning of an era of preemptive unilateralism that took advantage of the opportunity”.
In 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled that the United States should “make full reparations for human rights violations, including both material and moral aspects” committed during Operation Just Cause. I put it down. You can probably guess how that will play out.
On my way back to Quarry Heights on New Year's Eve, I passed the Martyrs' Day Memorial. This is not a reference to the martyr of El Chorrillo, but to the martyr of January 9, 1964. On this day, US troops are stationed there. At least 21 Panamanians were killed in a riot in the Canal Zone when Panamanian students tried to raise the Panamanian flag next to the U.S. flag.
Sixty years after Martyr's Day, the United States is still unable to break the habit of killing. This includes indirect killings in the Gaza Strip (a “mini Hiroshima” if it ever existed). Forget about the “moral aspect”. The United States operates in a strictly illegal manner.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.