Noriega’s career under Torrijos and his 1983 consolidation
Noriega’s rise to power was a slow accumulation of institutional authority inside the National Guard. He was appointed chief of military intelligence in August 1970 by Omar Torrijos, and he held the position continuously until Torrijos’s death in 1981. In that role he built a parallel system of surveillance and coercion that operated alongside the regime’s public institutions: he served as head of the political police and head of immigration, and he ran files that could be used to “blackmail” the 1,300 or so Panamanians whom the regime exiled in the early 1970s [1].
The CIA had Noriega on its payroll from 1971, when he was chief of Panamanian intelligence. The 1971 formalisation of the relationship built on a single $10.70 payment in 1955, Noriega’s first receipt from the U.S., and continued through Noriega’s tenure as intelligence chief and then as commander of the National Guard. Federal prosecutors later reported that Noriega had received approximately $322,000 from the CIA between 1955 and 1986; Noriega himself claimed the total was closer to $10 million. The relationship was transactional: “The CIA valued him as an asset because he was willing to provide information about the Cuban government and later about the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.” The relationship was also professionally inconsistent. Noriega “was selling intelligence on the U.S. to Cuba while he was working for” the CIA, and his regular payments from the U.S. were “stopped under the Carter administration, before being resumed and later stopped again under the administration of Ronald Reagan” [1].
After Torrijos’s death on 31 July 1981, the National Guard went through a succession crisis that Noriega exploited over the next two years. The immediate successor was the acting commander Florencio Flores Aguilar, who gave way to Rubén Darío Paredes; Paredes was unable to consolidate control, and Noriega (who had been lieutenant colonel in 1970, colonel in 1982, and brigadier general in 1983) became the commander of the renamed Panama Defense Forces (Fuerzas de Defensa de Panamá) on 12 August 1983, the date historians treat as the start of the Noriega dictatorship proper. Law 20 of 1983 “tripled the size of the military forces” and allowed weapons imports; Noriega used the expanded PDF to intimidate opposition parties, control electoral outcomes, and run a parallel intelligence apparatus that included the DENI (Dirección Nacional de Investigación) and the G-2 military intelligence directorate [1].
Electoral fraud, press control, and the murder of Hugo Spadafora (1984–1985)
The May 1984 presidential election was the first public demonstration of Noriega’s control. The opposition candidate, Arnulfo Arias Madrid, was leading by approximately 50,000 votes on election night when the PDF intervened to halt the count; the official result, announced two days later, gave the Noriega-backed candidate Nicolás Ardito Barletta a victory margin of 1,713 votes. The fraud was sufficiently brazen that Barletta (who had been a World Bank vice president and a respected technocrat) resigned the presidency in September 1985 in protest at Noriega’s refusal to accept his economic reforms. Barletta was replaced by Eric Arturo Delvalle, a National Republican Liberal Alliance figure, who served until February 1988 [1].
The September 1985 murder of Hugo Spadafora (a doctor, diplomat, and opposition politician) was the most publicised political killing of the period. Spadafora had served as Torrijos’s ambassador and as a critic of Noriega; his dismembered body was found in a suitcase at the Costa Rican border on 13 September 1985, two days after he disappeared in Panama. The intercepted call between two PDF officers, one of whom reported “We have the rabid dog,” and Noriega’s reply “And what does one do with a dog that has rabies?” was cited in subsequent judicial proceedings as evidence of Noriega’s direct knowledge of the killing. Noriega was never tried in Panama for the Spadafora murder during his lifetime, but he was convicted in absentia in 1993 and sentenced to 20 years in prison [1].
Press control was the other pillar of the regime’s domestic control. Noriega “took control of most major newspapers by either buying a controlling stake in them or forcing them to shut down”; the La Prensa, Panama’s oldest opposition daily, was shut down at intervals in 1986, 1987, and 1988. Independent journalism that survived the shutdowns operated under sustained harassment. Reporters were arrested, equipment was confiscated, and the regime used criminal defamation prosecutions to drain opposition papers financially. The press-control campaign was effective domestically, but it also created the steady stream of information that the U.S. State Department and the international press used to build the case against the regime during 1987-1989 [1].
The regime’s crisis of legitimacy deepened sharply in 1987. Noriega had earlier made a private agreement with his deputy chief of staff, Roberto Díaz Herrera, to step down as military leader in 1987 and let Díaz Herrera succeed him; in 1987 Noriega reneged, announced he would remain at the head of the military for another five years, and reassigned Díaz Herrera to a diplomatic post. Díaz Herrera retaliated by publicly accusing Noriega of rigging the 1984 election, of murdering Spadafora, of trafficking in drugs, and of having arranged the bomb that killed Torrijos in 1981. The accusations triggered the largest opposition demonstrations of the dictatorship: on 26 June 1987 roughly 100,000 people, about a quarter of Panama City’s population, marched against the regime. Noriega charged Díaz Herrera with treason and cracked down on the protesters; the U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling on Noriega to step down, and after Noriega dispatched government workers to riot outside the U.S. embassy, Washington suspended military assistance and the CIA stopped paying Noriega his salary. Without U.S. support, Panama defaulted on its international debt and the economy contracted by roughly 20% that year [1].
The U.S. relationship, sanctions, and the 1988 indictment (1988–1989)
The U.S. relationship with Noriega deteriorated in three waves between 1985 and 1989. The first wave was the 1986 Iran-Contra revelations, which embarrassed the Reagan administration because the diversion of arms-sale proceeds to the Contras in Nicaragua had been partly facilitated by Panamanian assistance; Noriega was useful to the U.S. throughout the period but his utility was no longer unique. The second wave was the 1987-1988 Senate hearings and the 1988 indictment of Noriega by federal grand juries in Miami and Tampa on drug-trafficking charges, which transformed Noriega from a controversial intelligence asset into a formally indicted criminal defendant. The third wave was the May 1989 Panamanian election, in which Noriega’s puppet candidate Carlos Duque won amid widespread fraud and the opposition candidate Guillermo Endara was beaten by Noriega’s thugs in front of television cameras [1].
The 1988 federal indictments in Miami and Tampa charged Noriega with “turning Panama into a shipping platform for South American cocaine that was destined for the U.S., and allowing drug proceeds to be hidden in Panamanian banks”, a charge that built on DEA, Customs, and IRS evidence of drug-money laundering through Panama’s banking sector. The indictments did not lead immediately to U.S. action against Noriega, in part because the Reagan administration was balancing the Canal Treaties’ ratification momentum against the political cost of destabilising the regime, but they did provide the legal basis for U.S. military action in 1989. The 1989 election fraud and Endara’s televised beating ended the political balancing: President George H. W. Bush authorised the Panama invasion plan in October 1989, and the operation began on 20 December 1989. See The U.S. Invasion of 1989 for the military and casualty record [1].
The Panama Truth Commission: documenting 1968–1989 repression
The most rigorous post-regime documentation of the repression of the Noriega and Torrijos periods is the 2001 Panama Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad de Panamá), established by President Mireya Moscoso on 18 January 2001 and reporting in April 2002. The Commission had a mandate covering 1968 to 1989, both the Torrijos period (1968–1981) and the Noriega period (1983–1989), and was led by the lawyer and Catholic activist Alberto Santiago Almanza Henríquez. The Commission was staffed by seven commissioners appointed by Moscoso, and its work involved both investigative interviewing and the excavation of clandestine graves at military sites including Coiba Island prison and Tocumen airport [2].
The Commission’s headline findings, as documented in its final report Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad de Panamá (April 2002), were that “out of [148 cases examined], 110 were reported and documented”, and that “seventy of the victims had been murdered, forty had disappeared.” The Commission also documented that the military regime “had engaged in ‘torture [and] cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment’ of its victims.” These figures describe the documented cases that the Commission was able to investigate fully; the Commission noted approximately 40 additional cases that remained to be investigated, and the broader pattern of political killings during the 1968–1989 period included many cases (the murder of Hugo Spadafora in 1985, the murder of nine officers in the Albrook massacre of 1989, the priest Jesús Héctor Gallego’s death in 1971) that were either prosecuted in absentia during Noriega’s U.S. imprisonment or that were beyond the Commission’s mandate to investigate fully [2].
The casualty figures from the Truth Commission are documentary, not exhaustive. They cover the 110 cases the Commission was able to investigate; they do not purport to enumerate every political killing of the 1968–1989 period. The 1989 invasion’s casualty figures, which are separate, are covered in The U.S. Invasion of 1989, and the range there (Pentagon 516 vs. Americas Watch 300 vs. former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark 3,000 vs. Roman Catholic Church 673) reflects the same kind of disagreement over the documentary base that the Truth Commission’s 110 / 70 / 40 figures partially resolve. The Truth Commission’s excavation of clandestine graves at Coiba Island and Tocumen airport was the most concrete documentary basis for the casualty figures it published [2].
Noriega’s later years: U.S. conviction, French extradition, Panamanian conviction, and death (1992–2017)
Noriega surrendered to the U.S. invasion force on 3 January 1990 at the Vatican Nunciature in Panama City, where he had taken refuge. He was flown to Miami and tried in U.S. federal court; in April 1992 he was convicted on eight of ten charges of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering, and sentenced to 40 years (reduced to 17 for good behaviour). He served his U.S. sentence from 1992 to 2010, when he was extradited to France on 26 April 2010 to face a French conviction for laundering $3 million in drug proceeds by purchasing luxury apartments in Paris; the Tribunal Correctionnel de Paris sentenced him on 7 July 2010 to seven years in prison. France “refused to grant him prisoner of war status”, despite arguments by Noriega’s attorneys that the 1989 invasion had made him a U.S. prisoner of war [1].
France extradited Noriega to Panama in 2011, where he faced an accumulated 60-year sentence from three prior in absentia convictions: 1993 (Spadafora murder, 20 years), 1994 (murder of coup leader Giroldi, 20 years), and 1996 (Albrook massacre of nine officers, 20 years). He served his Panamanian sentence from 2011 until his death on 29 May 2017 at the Santo Tomás Hospital in Panama City, aged 83, two months after surgery for a brain tumor diagnosed in March 2017. Noriega’s death closed the longest-running political-violence case in modern Panamanian history, but did not close the political debate over the regime he ran from 1983 to 1989 [1].
Where to take this next
The Noriega era ended with the 1989 U.S. invasion, but the institutional and political consequences are still being worked through. For the invasion itself (the military operation, the casualty record, the international response), see The U.S. Invasion of 1989. For the canal-treaties transition that Noriega’s removal made possible, see The Canal Transfer Era (1990–1999). For the broader Torrijos-era context that produced Noriega’s power, see The Torrijos Era (1968–1981).
Last reviewed: