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Today is an official day of mourning in Panama. It is a bank holiday and most businesses are closed.  

Americans like to think they did Panama a favor by invading and ridding the country of the dictator. If you go to the official web site, you will see cited a very LOW number of deaths due to Bush Senior’s 1989 invasion, which in fact killed thousands of Panamanian citizens.  

There was no mention in the US press that Noriega was a CIA asset, but declassified documents revealed that he was.  

He was trained at the notorious School of the Americas in torture methods. He was groomed for the position of president, and then after the mysterious plane crash that killed strongman Omar Torrijos, the extremely popular leader responsible for the handover of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians under Carter, the reins of government were turned over to the vicious dictator Manuel Noriega, all with Washington’s blessings.  

When Noriega started bad mouthing the US, Bush went after him, first organizing a coup, which succeeded, but the US betrayed the coup plotters, who were then punished by Noriega. The US then went after the army group that had tried to cooperate with the US to oust Noriega, illegally sending troops to areas outside the Canal Zone. The purpose of this betrayal was to take complete control of the military power in Panama, and this led to the bloody invasion that we are commemorating today.  

There was indiscriminate shooting of civilians, as described in the documentary linked below. The Panamanians I have spoken with all agree that the US invaders in 1989 were vicious killers, very different from the US service people in the Canal Zone, who had been very friendly with the locals, giving them well-paid jobs, which disappeared after the signing of the Carter-Torrijos treaty.  

In this web site you will see president Cortizo taking credit for making this a national Day of Mourning. In fact, I was here on Dec 20 during one of the years of the Martinelli presidency and I remember that president commemorating the Panamanians who died in the invasion.  

But lying is what politicians do, and their henchmen are journalists.  

This documentary is the closest you will get to a true picture of what actually happened, click the image below to watch the video.

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Featured image: Elements of 1st Bn, 508th Infantry parachuting into a drop zone, during training, outside of Panama City. (Licensed under the Public Domain)