Panama, Haiti and the Dominican
Republic
30th Anniversary of U.S.
Invasion of Panama
Panama City during the U.S. invasion,
December 21, 1989.
Installing presidents to give the appearance that a government is
legitimate is nothing new for
the U.S. imperialists and their appeasers such as Canada. This
year will mark 30 years since the U.S. launched a
brutal invasion of Panama on December 20, 1989. U.S. President
George
H.W. Bush sent
12,000 troops with bombs and heavy firepower into the country,
striking
the capital Panama City and the city of
Colon.
Little was spoken in the monopoly-owned media of
the
death
toll or destruction from that invasion. The U.S. media
was almost entirely focused on the number of U.S. troops killed
and wounded but Panamanian health workers were quoted as saying
the Panamanian death toll was between 4,000 and 7,000 dead of
which at least 2,000 were buried in mass graves. The destruction
left at least 10,000 homeless.
After the invasion,
U.S. troops imposed martial law. Acting as a
state security force, they arrested thousands of people perceived
as
opposing the invasion or being supporters of Manuel Noriega, the
president the U.S. had previously put into power. Noriega was
later
accused of being a drug lord and deposed in the invasion when
those
arrangements no longer
suited U.S. aims. Eyewitnesses said U.S. troops went house to
house; it is believed they rounded up, arrested and then
detained nearly 7,000 Panamanian civilians in various camps and
prison facilities.
To give its invasion and occupation of Panama
legitimacy, Guillermo Endara was declared president of the
country and sworn in on a U.S. Army base in the sector of the
Panama Canal under U.S. control.
Six years before that, in 1983, U.S. President
Ronald
Reagan,
citing an alleged threat posed to American nationals on the
island of Grenada, ordered U.S. Marines to invade the island.
Some 6,000 U.S. troops were sent to secure the safety of nearly
1,000 Americans in Grenada at the time, many of them students at
the island's medical school. Prior to the invasion, the U.S. had
Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop assassinated and had the
assassin installed as Prime Minister. It then cited the people's
opposition to those actions as the reason U.S. nationals needed
defending. In little more than a week, Grenada's government was
overthrown and the U.S. installed another government to its
liking. The Reagan administration claimed a great victory,
calling it the first "rollback" of communist influence since the
beginning of the Cold War.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number 6 - February
23,
2019
Article Link:
Panama, Haiti and the Dominican
Republic: 30th Anniversary of U.S.
Invasion of Panama
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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