Manuel Antonio Noriega (1934–2017)

NORIEGA'S OWN VERSION OF THE TRUTH ONE MAN'S CLOUDED PATH FROM PANAMA TO A
SOUTH DADE PRISON.
Subhead:
Reporter: By GLENN GARVIN, Special to the Herald
Desk:
Source:
Day: Sunday
Dateline:
Print Run Date: 3/23/1997
Text: * America's Prisoner: The Memoirs of Manuel Noriega. Manuel Noriega and Peter Eisner.
Random. 293 pages. $25.
I knew I was in trouble just 13 pages into co-author Peter Eisner's introduction, when he offered
this ringing endorsement of his writing partner Manuel Noriega: "A liar must show more tell a measure of the
truth." Now there's a cover blurb, right up there with "Most names spelled correctly!" and "Typeset in
a very attractive fashion!"
Alas, simple pleasures like those are pretty much the only ones to be found in America's Prisoner.
You'd think being military dictator of Panama, hobnobbing with the CIA, playing footsie with Fidel
Castro, cuddling up to the Colombia drug mafia, and finally getting ousted by a U.S. invasion would at
the very least provide you with some interesting stories. But Noriega's evidently saving them for the
grandkids. His tendentious book, instead, just serves up one preposterously self-serving fiction after
another:
Sure, the head somehow got chopped off my main political opponent, but I could never figure out
how it happened. When it turned out to have been done by the army I commanded, you could have
knocked me over with a feather!
Not me!
Sure, the elected president of Panama resigned and went into hiding in fear of his life, and sure, he
was replaced by a successor I hand-picked. But I didn't have anything to do with it! The guy was just
scared of our really mean congress!
Sure, the U.S. Army beat me. But only because they fought dirty and used airplanes! And sure,
most of my army broke and ran at the sound of the first shot, but we were all going to regroup in the
mountains and fight a guerrilla war. Really! Except crafty papists bamboozled me into seeking asylum
in the Vatican embassy. Even so, I was preparing a heroic last stand, me against the entire gringo
army, but somebody stole my gun!
Not that Noriega blames everything on somebody else. He does own up to the occasional mistake.
He admits that it would have been much smarter to cancel Panama's 1989 elections earlier instead of
waiting until election day, when it was obvious his puppet candidate was losing in a landslide. "I
miscalculated," Noriega says.
Bush was to blame
Otherwise, he pretty much holds George Bush responsible for everything bad that ever happened in
Panama -- including terrorist bombings of 14 U.S. targets in 1976 during an impasse in negotiations
over the future of the Canal. Well, technically speaking, the bombings were carried out by the
Panamanian army, Noriega admits, but only because Bush, who was then director of the CIA, asked
us to do it. Bush, you see, wanted the United States to hurry up and turn the canal over to Panama.
That doesn't exactly reconcile with Noriega's claim a few chapters later that Bush launched the 1989
invasion of Panama to get the canal back , but I suppose Noriega is as entitled to engage in a little
magical realism as any other Latin American author.
Not, I hasten to add, that anyone is going to mistake the prose here for Garcia Marquez's.
America's Prisoner is grim going, plodding and often barely coherent. To be fair, it does have some
moments of unintentional humor. When Noriega dismisses Bush as "once a wimp, always a wimp," I
couldn't help but smile: But he sure kicked your butt, didn't he?
A grand tradition
Lousy books by disgruntled Latin American dictators are a grand tradition in U.S. publishing, going
back at least to Fulgencio Batista's Cuba Betrayed , and ordinarily there would be no need to get
exercised about one more.
But America's Prisoner is a real disservice because its manifest falsehoods will further cloud an
important issue that U.S. journalism and political science have failed to explore: the U.S. invasion of
Panama. For the purported purpose of capturing a single drug dealer, we destroyed half a city and
killed 400 bystanders, not to mention 23 of our own soldiers. Yet there is no evidence that the supply
of cocaine on U.S. street corners dipped by so much as an ounce.
Part of the reason is that the U.S. government absurdly exaggerated Noriega's drug involvement --
he was no drug lord, just a pipsqueak player who facilitated a few cocaine shipments.
Failed drug policy
The cost of our failed drug policy has been bad enough in the United States, where it has not only
overloaded the criminal justice system but also perverted it. Exhibit A: Noriega's trial, in which
reduced sentences and immunity were handed out like penny candy to any sleazeball willing to take
the witness stand and recite the government version of events.
But in Latin America, the price has been paid in blood. Colombians, Peruvians and Bolivians are
being asked -- or, rather, told -- to lay down their lives to help suppress our drug consumption. If 400
innocent people had been killed in a drug raid in Miami or San Francisco, we would have found out
who was responsible. When it happened in Panama, no one even asked the question. Someday,
perhaps, someone will. In the meantime, won't someone over at the Metropolitan Correctional Center
please tell Manuel Noriega: Shut up, or we'll send George Bush after you again.

Glenn Garvin, The Herald's Managua bureau chief, is author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The
CIA and the Contras.
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