Part Two: How The U.S.A. Murdered Panama with Chelsea Manning

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mcast, Part two, Robert Evans Behind the Bastards, Panama, Chelsea
Manning guests, Chelsea, how are you doing? On several minutes
after we last off, Hey, how's it calling? Uh, it's
still snowing, still snowing. It is not snowing here. The
snow apocalypse is is starting to end here. So I

(00:22):
wanted to chat about something before we getting back into Panama.
I've become aware that the state of Ohio is advertising
on our podcast a lot about how how good a
place to move Ohio is. Well, that's because everywhere is Ohio,
is it? It's all Ohio. It's a it's just Ohio
straight on down. I don't know. My experience in Cleveland

(00:42):
suggests that there's something unique about Ohio. Maybe it's the
way the river repeatedly caught on fire in the seventies. Yeah,
well you know it's it's Uh, there's a vast conspiracy
that has been keeping this from you, that every every
everywhere is Ohio. It's just all Ohios. Yes, well, that's
actually the greatest tragedy I can imagine. But I'm not.
I'm not on the pro Ohio faction. Why why is

(01:05):
Ohio choosing to advertise on our podcast. I think they
think that a lot of are They're trying to get
people to start businesses in Ohio. Um, I don't. I
don't know why. I just didn't want anyone to think
that I'm a chill for Ohio. I'm this is a
firmly anti Ohio podcast. I was going to say, we're
not going to guess, according to Chelsea, means that we're

(01:25):
now anti the entire world. So because everywhere is Ohio,
I guess we're gonna have to go full joker here.
So if you are in a nuclear stilo right now
listening to a podcast that you have saved on your phone,
I guess we're now advising you to start the apocalypse.
So also, I just want the listeners to know that
I feel like I am now face timing with my

(01:47):
mom because Robert is only showing the top of his
forehead on the mid shot. I have to be in
I'm gonna Mac mansion right now and it doesn't have
a good recording room. Shout out to my mom, who's
the best person. Petty bourgeois this is this is the
pettiest bourgeois place. I mean, that's PLAINO in a nutshell right,

(02:08):
it's the land of thirty millionaires. Um, yeah, it is
where it is where all of your chips and all
of your your missile guidance systems come from my my
high school. Like most of the kids there's parents either
worked for Friedo Lay or Ray Theon. So, Um, it's

(02:28):
a great place. In other words, Um, it's not Chelsea.
Are you ready to dive into America's war on biology
in order to make Panama safe for white people? Quite
frankly no, but I think we're going to do that anyway.
That's exactly what Panama said back in the eighteen well

(02:49):
the whole time really, So when we last left Panama,
it was being turned in a canal into a canal
in order to further US financial and military interests. Obviously,
as we talked about with the Suez Canal, which killed
a hundred and twenty thousand people, building canals is a
terrible thing to do. You should never make canals. At
least they didn't have a biom to deal with Jesus.

(03:10):
I mean, yeah, it was. It was about like Panama
was not as rough as Suez obviously, but was a
rough place to build a canal. Um, and the work
couldn't be done entirely by non white people, whose desk
could be easily ignored by the United States, and this
is why they had to quest to make the canal
zone biologically safe, which mostly meant eliminating mosquitoes which could

(03:32):
cause transmit both malaria and yellow fever. Now, the man
put in charge of this Titanic effort was Dr William
Gorgeous born Gorgus I guess g O R g A S.
I don't think it's pronounced gorgeous. Born in Alabama in
eighteen fifty four to an explosives expert, Young will grew
up obsessed with the military. He later admitted to skimming
the Bible just just so he could read all of

(03:53):
the battle scenes. William tried to enroll in West Point
as a young man, but he failed to make the cut,
and instead he went to Bellevue Medical School and then
joined the army as a doctor. He served on the
frontier during the Indian Wars, particularly in South Dakota, and
then he was stationed in Cuba. After the US invasion
in eight The Americans in Cuba ran into the same

(04:14):
problem that they would later hit in Panama, disease in
Cuba's case, this was yellow fever. Gorgas was point was
put in charge of the effort of ridding the island
of mosquitoes. His first task was to mandate that all
Havannah residents cover cover cisterns, which are like open pots
of water, or pay a fine. He devoted army engineers
to the task of filling in and eradicating all standing

(04:36):
bodies of water, and in about eight months Gorgons succeeded
in wiping out yellow fever in Havana. So it seemed
like he was pretty good at this job of making
tropical islands and tropical areas safer for for white people
to live in uh and he was considered a natural
fit for the job of ending malaria in Panama. The
Canal Treaty the US had signed with some guy who

(04:56):
wasn't Panamanian gave the United States the right to administer
annotation not just in the canal zone, but in all
Panamanian cities in any land the US might later decided
wanted to use for some reason. Gorgons thus became the
director of public health for the whole nation. In effect,
at least, so this treaty where we're like yeah, we
could basically do what everyone in the canal zone. Leads

(05:17):
to us being able to put a guy in charge
of public health for all of Panama. And when I
say he's in charge of public health, he's not really
in charge of everyone's health. He's in charge of ensuring
public health of the white people in Panama. Right. His
first degree was that all man made bodies of standing
water must be eliminated. It turned out that the French
canal builders had started a practice of leaving open water

(05:39):
jugs at the base of their bed legs to keep
ants away, which probably explains why so many of them
died of malaria. The initial steps Gorge Gorgons took were
pretty reasonable, but things very quickly turned Authoritarian inspectors were
sent to enter every single home in Panama City in
Cologne to look for open barrels and jugs of water.
They did this on a regular basis, and violations were
punished by fines, so he makes like water police, basically

(06:03):
to make sure that people are not creating breeding grounds
from mosquitoes. The bulk of u S efforts, however, were
devoted to an omnocidal war on nature in order to
reduce the mosquito population, and I'm gonna quote here from
Emperors in the jungle. Much of the Sanitary Department's efforts
focused on the non human world by cutting down and
poisoning the environment in which insects and rodents lived. Puddles

(06:24):
of fresh water that formed without human aid made excellent
breeding places for mosquitoes. One of the methods employed to
eliminate such breeding places was simply to do away with
the jungle. Many square miles of jungle in the command
in the Canal zone were cut or burned during the
construction period, wrote the Chief Sanitary Inspector in nineteen sixteen,
which increased evaporation from sunlight, shortened the mosquito season, and

(06:46):
enabled the sanitary soldiers to locate hidden water. It also
facilitated sanitary social control. Clearing made it impossible for the
negroes to throw containers into the tall grass or brush,
neither houses without detection. He added. Another important tactic is
to spread oil and other larva sides on all standing water,
which killed mosquito larvae by by depriving them of oxygen.

(07:06):
The Sanitary Department devised myriad ways to distribute the oil
from sprinkling cans to horse drawn oil barrels. At the
peak of this method, the sanitation men distributed sixty five
thousand gallons of crude oil a month on the isthmus
As waters. So they are just pouring gasoline into fresh
water in order to kill mosquitoes, man versus nature. Winning

(07:27):
the wall. All the took was poisoning the thing we
need to survive with gasoline. Yeah. Now, as Gorgeous and
others pointed out, the importation of a large number of
foreigners who were not immune to yellow fever favored propagation
of disease, as the non immunes also became carriers of
the fever once it was introduced through even a single case.
The physical construction also radically disrupted the environment, leading in

(07:51):
some cases to malarial mosquito incubators of the kind that
Gorgus's sanitation department was opposing fines on Panamanians to eliminate
the canal. We're itself was constantly creating the most desirable
places for the same great biological purpose were, wrote Gorgus's widow.
Every time a steam shovel made a deep hole, water
would almost immediately collect, and the anopolies malarial mosquitoes would

(08:12):
at once seek such a depression as a breeding ground.
In nineteen twelve, for example, the suction dredgers employed to
deepen the canal Ditch and Gatton pumped immense quantities of
saltwater and silt into the jungle, killing the trees and vegetation.
The resulting mass of dead matter generated a swamp that
attracted swarms of an afolies mosquitoes. As a result, the
death rate from malaria in nineteen o six was higher

(08:33):
than it was for workers from the French Canal effort
from eighteen eighty eight to nineteen o three. So there's
a couple of fascinating things about how badly they funk up.
One of them is that they focus all these authoritarian measures,
basically building a police force to punish black people from
leading jugs of water, while at the same time they're
creating these massive miles long mosquito incubators by digging these

(08:55):
holes which fill up with water, and by poisoning huge
chunks of jungle and turning them into swamps. So they're
like they're blaming they're both blaming the mosquitoes having a
place to breed on black people having jugs of water
without covers and they're creating land for mosquitoes to breed
in order to build this canal. It's pretty rad. Yeah.
And what what I what I think is fascinating is

(09:17):
just like looking at the looking at the map here,
like the garden locks are like the shortest section of
the entire Like they have to make this huge cut
through the mountains on the on the east side, but
on the west side they have like this very short thing.
But it's like it's it's biologically treacherous, it's you know,
it's got it's got all the standing water everywhere. Yeah. Yeah,

(09:39):
it's it's a fascinating situation that I didn't realize, Like
I I assumed because I'd heard as a kid that
like the Panama and Al bunch people died from Lariay.
It assume as just because there's a ton of malario
malarialist mosquitoes like in in the area. I didn't realize that,
like number one, we brought a out of the problem

(10:00):
with malaria there by both like the kind of people
we imported to build the canal, and by the fact
that we made breeding grounds and we like poisoned the
jungle with salt water and created a rotting swamp that
the mosquitoes would love, like I I yeah, I assumed
it was just like yeah, it was just always really
dangerous before modern medicine to build stuff in Panama and
it turns out like no, no, no, yeah, it was

(10:23):
bad engineering, like we made it so dangerous, which is
rad now. It's worth noting Chelsea that yellow fever and
malaria were the only diseases that US occupiers concerned themselves
with fighting, despite the fact that pneumonia actually killed more people.
From nineteen o six to nineteen o seven, pneumonia killed
twice as many workers as malaria, but nine of the

(10:43):
people who died of pneumonia were classified by the US
as colored, and thus their deaths were considered acceptable. Gorgus
and his men were taught were tasked with fighting tropical diseases,
and in European medical literature at the time, the definition
of a tropical disease was a zase that affected white
people in the tropics. That's that's and that's interesting that,

(11:07):
I mean, that is interesting. It is yeah, I mean
it's fun, but it's also interesting, like yeah, just it
never like you know, like in terms of like how
it was like how these things were classified. Yeah, I
had no idea that like that that it was literally
down to so it's sort of like it was. It was.
So it's like it's sort of like black lung from
like being exposed to like construction dust too. Yeah, it was.

(11:31):
It was both the dust and there was another factor
in like why the pneumonia was so bad, Like obviously
like the construction by a product, all the oil and
stuff that's everywhere has an impact. Also, these colored you
know generally black Caribbean canal workers were bringing brought brought
into Panama live in these filthy converted box cars where
they sleep six dozen to a room and there's no

(11:53):
mosquito screens, right, and they often had to use jars
and bottles as their bathrooms because the actual houses were
distant and like across a swamp or something. Um so,
and and you know this is again how the the
the black Caribbean employees are being treated. All white employees
received furnished departments in the cities and they probably just

(12:15):
didn't even get a proper diagnosis for like for like
basic bacterial infections. No, of course not. And this and
this is a pre penilla. This this is pre penisilla too,
So it's not all on the Some of the difficulty
with treating it is they don't really know how. But
the fact that they don't care about these people's comfort
or sanitation is why pneumonia spread so much. And they
also don't care about pneumonia because it's not hurting white people, um,

(12:39):
which is great. Uh. And the reason and there was
like this was not just taken for granted. They spent
time to justify why white workers needed furnished departments while
black workers could live in these like filthy, crowded box cars. Uh.
And the reason that white people needed a more comfortable
living situation was to stave off degenerate. So there were

(13:02):
two schools of medical thought about how the tropics affected
white people at the time. One school believed that tropical
climates were inherently and specifically toxic to white human beings.
As one doctor named Balfour wrote, there are those who
believe that it is very doubtful if the white man
can accomplish manual work out of doors under true tropical conditions,

(13:24):
and that if he tries to do so, he will
assuredly degenerate. The settlers should drive machines rather than do
work with their own muscles. And these people form the
basis of modern medicine. Yeah, yeah, it says a lot.
It's just bad to be in the white it's toxic
just the white people. Now. Another school of medical thought
at the time, championed by men like Gorgons, believed that

(13:45):
white people could live in the tropics given proper sanitation
and segregation to quote, keep their blood pure. Children who
were blought to the tropics were thought to be put
at risk by contacts with the natives, which Navy Surgeon
General still claimed is apt to have a detrimental effect
upon children's moral and mental outlook. Now this is so

(14:07):
much worse than I think. I really bleak. Oh my god. Yeah,
I mean that we're building to the story of how
the US exported Jim Crow to Panama. So one store
one solution to the problem of like that it's dangerous
for uh white people to be in tropical conditions for
too long was to give white workers regular extended vacations

(14:30):
back north, a privilege which was not extended to non
white laborers. The perceived vulnerability of white people in the
tropics was also used as a justification for why hard
manual labor should be done only by black and indigenous workers.
Starting in nineteen ten, the international frenzy over phrenology reached
the canal zone. Doctors started to collecting autopsy data on
dead canal workers to answer questions quote concerning certain racial features.

(14:55):
They noted brain weights, skull thickness, cephalic index, skull shape,
and homicide or altercational tendencies, and they broke these down
based on race. As a result of this data, Tropical
doctors concluded that so many black people died violently on
the canal project died because they were crushed by machinery
or something you know, as opposed to death and disease.
They decided that this this was so common with black workers,

(15:17):
not because of poor safety measures or because of the
fact that black workers were used to do all manual
labor because it was considered dangerous for white workers, but
because black workers were genetic genetically had quote a striking
lack of appreciation for a dangerous environment. So the reasons
so many of them are getting crushed by machinery isn't
because we're the they're the only ones that we have

(15:39):
doing this manual labor, and because we have no safety procedures.
It's because their brains aren't capable of understanding dangers. Good
stuff real, this is it's very bleak. Uh yeah, this
was a rough read. That book Emperors in the Jungle
is a fucking bleak read. Now, the dangers of the

(16:03):
tropics for white people were not seen as a reason
to avoid colonizing tropical climates by everyone. At least Gorgons
and many like him were convinced that settlement in South
America would allow white people to avoid overpopulation in the
United States, but first tropical disease needed to be eliminated.
This would quote enable man to return from the temperate
regions to which he was forced to migrate long ago,

(16:24):
and again live and develop in his natural home, the tropics.
In his book, John Lindsay Poland notes an implicit premise
was that those already living in the tropics were not men,
which is a good point from John Lindsay Poland. Now,
the repeated failure of Gorgus and I know I'm pronouncing
his name differently every time, but fuck him. The repeated

(16:45):
failure of Gorgus another tropical doctors to actually defeat the
diseases they were trying to fight lead them to one
inescapable conclusion their failures were the result of black people,
of course, Like we're not going to admit that we
fucked up fighting mosquitoes. It's got to be the act
of all of these people that we have imported into Panama.
So there's there's layers of horrific stuff going on. It's

(17:07):
really deep. You have terraforming, you have a terraform project
and an ethnic cleansing and a sort of subjugation like
program all at the same time. And it's like and
it's like being medicalized. It's like being like given like
you know, like uh like just like just like sort
of like being in trans and sort of the trans community.
It's like, oh, you know, like you know, you have

(17:29):
to have a gate keeping doctor to like determine all
of these things and all these made up things that
are based upon the predispositions of the doctors who are
writing it. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's a it's like
a layer cake of bigotry. Like the sediment of racism
in this is very complicated and deep um, which I
think is rad uh personally that it's such a complex

(17:52):
level of horror. I am not going to use time not.
I'm not going to say that. Yeah, I mean, it's
it's it's it's obviously horrific um, which is why we're
talking about it. So I'm gonna quote from Emperors in
the Jungle because that book has a very good passage
on how Gorges and his fellow doctors blamed the black

(18:13):
Caribbeans that they were bringing into Panama for the fact
that their disease control measures failed. What was needed, according
to Dalla phrase Curry, a Canal Zone health officer in
the nineteen twenties, was a sanitary conscience, a set of
internalized rules that both individuals and nations could follow. But
while whites might be perceived as reliably civilized and obedient
to sanitary regulations, West Indians and that's those are black Caribbeans.

(18:37):
That's what they called him this period, as West Indians
were seen as disturbingly negligent as elsewhere in the world,
the enforcement of sanitation among the negroes as a gigantic task,
wrote William Deek's director of the Medical Service during the
Construction era. As long as he has a roof over
his head and a yam or two to eat, he
is content, and his idea of personal hygiene is on
par with his conception of marital fidelity in these circumstance,

(19:00):
and says only physical segregation would protect whites from black
carriers of disease which could establish reservoirs and infected West
Indians living in the bush. So, yeah, just a tremendous
amount of bigotry here, Like the entire US project in
Canal is is it's just racism all the way down.
You know, it's it's it's you can't over emphasize how

(19:22):
bigoted it is and stays until the fucking nineteen nineties. Um,
this is probably why it's not in American high school textbooks.
I just heard we built a canal and Teddy Roosevelt
was there. Yep, Yeah, didn't hear any of this. So
during the construction of the canal, which took place from

(19:43):
nineteen o four to nineteen fourteen, black people made up
at least three out of every four workers, and most
of these people were imported from the Caribbean, an act
which permanently changed the racial dynamics of Panama. Using public
health and sanitation as a justification, The US then imported
Jim C Laws to Panama as well, effectively creating a
massive new racial underclass in that country. Most white people

(20:07):
had no contact with their black co workers outside of
the jobs. Indigenous Panamanians endured somewhat less oppression, but the
United States still considered them unworthy of having any say
in the canal that was being cut through the middle
of their country. Panama was seen as a seedy, dangerous place,
and its people were inherently criminal and unreliable. One American
writer at the time described the country as a hideous

(20:29):
dung heap of physical and moral abomination. A US congressman
called the black population of Panama, which the US had
brought there in the first place, to be of no
more use than mosquitoes and buzzards. And again, these are
the people doing three quarters of the work to build
the canal. Uh, We're such a good country, really nailing

(20:54):
it forever. So the legacy of segregation in Panama began
at the express command of the United States, and it
is still with Panama today. As we will discuss later,
the nation was independent on paper, but it was a
colony and all but name, and the US acted quickly
and brutally to stifle anything that's smacked of independence. Panama
initially had its own military, a small group of two

(21:14):
hundred and fifty men led by General Estemon Huertas, a
former Colombian officer and a hero of the Panamanian independence movement.
He was competent and beloved, but not willing to have
his beloved nation exists purely for US profit. In nineteen
o four, when canal construction had just begun, he threatened
to revolt due to the United States' treatment of his people.
U S diplomatic representatives advised the Panamanian president that he

(21:36):
should fire the general, and U S Marines went in
and disarmed his forces. Panama's army was disbanded and did
not reform for half a century. Yeah, so we just
get rid of that army. Were like, you know what
if these people have an army that that might be
a problem for us doing whatever we want in Panama.
Let's just let's just xnay on the snarmy. A. I don't.

(21:58):
I'm not great at pig Latin. Hey, it's a pulling
up Paul Wolfowitz. Yeah, yeah, they got wolf of Witz. Good. Ye, Like,
we'll just disband this army and this police apprise. Yeah, No,
I mean unlike in Iraq. There's only two fifty of
these guys, So yeah, it's a lot easier, but it

(22:20):
is the same basic idea, you know. So the US
was extremely active in asserting its influence over Panamanian politics.
In nineteen eighteen, the president died suddenly and Panama announced
an indefinite postponement of elections. U S troops occupied the
cities in US General Richard Blatchford basically became the dictator.
This was never called what it was officially. The Panamanian

(22:41):
state had just delayed elections, but the reason for it
all was World War One. The US could not afford
to let the Panamanian people decided to do things that
might complicate the war effort. Of course, once he had
total unchecked power, Blatchford immediately exceeded his mandate and decided
to focus on the elimination of prostitution. Sex work was
legal in Panama at the time, but Blatchford thought it

(23:02):
was ikey, and he had all the guns. I don't
like it, Yeah, I don't. I don't like it. This
is part of my job to stop now. He also
didn't like drinking, and he decided to close the bars
that served US troops as he wrote back to Washington,
the United States has ridded the Panamanians of the evils
of yellow fever, which it hadn't and why should it
not rid them of the greater curse, which is, of

(23:23):
course alcohol. Blatchford was unsuccessful in forcing prohibition on Panama.
I'll imagine that especially with soldiers. They're like in Marines.
He did briefly succeed in getting the country to ban
opium bars and opium or banned bars and opium dims
from serving US soldiers um, but he did not shut

(23:43):
them down throughout the entire country. As John Lindsay Poland writes,
their prohibition remained an effect until Armistice Day in November,
when hundreds of soldiers broke away from the bases on
the Atlantic after months have enforced abstinence, and stormed Cologne
as a mob. That night, Blatchford mounted a podium in
Balboa Stadium to condemn the occurrence, but instead of acknowledging
the soldiers carnel behavior, he condemned Panama City and Cologne,

(24:05):
suggesting maybe renamed Sodom and Gomorrah. He wrote afterward to Washington,
if Sodom and Gomorrah were in existence, today, they would
probably sue me for slander. It's the fall of these
damn Panamanians that American soldiers want to drink in horror,
a thing American soldiers have never done anywhere else never,
It's never happened. It's never happened to every single installation

(24:26):
that we've ever had. I mean, it's it's not it's
literally the thing that every group of soldiers throughout the
entirety of world history has always done. The age bracket
of of sex of sixteen to twenty five year old. Yeah,
if you are asking these people to die for you,
you can't ask them not to drink and horr. They're

(24:47):
going to do it like it's it's they've done it
for forever. But Blatchford blames Panama and it's uniquely sinful
nature for corrupting these American boys who stormed the city
in a mob. It's pretty great. So eventually Panama got
to have its elections again, and the fiction of autonomy

(25:08):
continued until nineteen A massive renters strike had erupted in
Panama City among a population of twenty thousand unemployed black laborers.
Most of these men had been brought to Panama to
work on the canal, and when the construction finished, the U.
S had said basically just abandoned them to figure out
their own ship in the middle of an economic depression
that hit Panama after the canal was finished. Because of segregation,

(25:30):
they were only able to live in certain neighborhoods, and
their housing was uniformly squalid and ll maintained. Property owners
announced written hikes that June, and several labor unions formed
a renter's league to boycott rent. There were regular protests
over evictions, and on October tenth, a peaceful demonstration was
met with gunfire by Panamanian police, who killed two people.

(25:50):
The crowd took action and swarmed the streets, shutting the
city down by clogging every major artery of transit. The
Panamanian president begged the United States for help, and we
sent a battalion of six U S Marines into the
city with bayonets. Fixed. The protesters initially fled, but later
that night a gathering. The gathering as symboled around the
burial of one of the slain protesters. U S troops

(26:11):
showed up there and after a confrontation, charged into the
crowd with bayonets and stabbed three people to death. US
newspapers portrayed this as a reasonable response to radical extremists
who could not be reasoned with. The New York Times
neglected to talk to any protesters. Instead, their coverage focused
around the captain and passenger of a luxury cruise ship
docked in the city at the time. They quoted the

(26:32):
captain as saying, the nucleus of a revolution is a
bottle of rum to half breeds and a negro armed
with rifles and machetes. Solid journalism. Who should we talked
to you about this at all? Who should we talk
to about the fact that our soldiers stabbed three protesters
to death by a cruise ship? It was clearly just

(26:53):
whoever was drinking next to the New York Times reporter
on that boat. What do you think about this? I
gotta file something m h SO. As a rule, US
intervention in Panama tended to fall into one of two
categories interventions in order to further specific US foreign policy
goals and interventions made on behalf the Panamanian elite who

(27:13):
ruled the country on the US government's behalf. This was
got done with Gusto, the head Army general in Panama,
William Lasseter actually requested permission to stay in Panama City
after the conclusion of the rent strike in order to
oversee the massive viction of thousands of tenants. He was
overruled by the State Department. So the Canal Treaty that

(27:33):
Roosevelt had overthrown a government to get was never much
more than a convention convenient fiction. The US basically did
whatever it wanted in Panama, regardless of whether or not
the treaty gave it a right to do so. We
expropriated or stole land from Panama. On nineteen occasions from
nineteen o eight to nineteen thirty one. The US military
would take land that we decided we wanted for some reason,

(27:54):
and we would notify the Panamania the Panamanian authorities later,
no compensation was ever given. The land was necessary in
order to allow the US government to expand its military facilities.
Panama was used as a base for Latin American interventions
throughout the twentieth century. Our old friends Smedley Butler was
based there during his two trips into Nicaragua to put
down political movements that were seen as counter to u

(28:16):
s interests. YEA, Panama was also the initial Piteu. Yeah,
I heard of that guy. He would he would He
was based there whenever he would go into Nicaragua to
kill people. Um. Panama was also the site for the
School of the America's where the US train tens of
thousands of Latin American soldiers and more than a dozen
future dictators, including Panama's own future dictator, Manuel Noriega. We

(28:39):
will be chatting about in just a little bit of Timerigat.
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(29:00):
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has just informed me that we are not actually sponsored
by cocaine. This is going to radically change the direction
of the show. Yeah, this is I'm gonna have to

(29:22):
recalibrate here. So let's let's get back to Panama now.
We just we're talking about Manuel Noriega in the School
of the Americans and we will get back to Manuel
Noriega in just a little bit. But first Jelsey, how
do you feel about chemical weapons? How do I feel
a chemical weapons? Yeah? Are you a big chemical weapons stand? Well,
you know, there's there's varying degrees of chemical weapons, and

(29:44):
they're all bad. There are varying degrees of bad chemical weapons,
and the US tried all of them out in Panama,
which was its chemical weapons testing site for decades. So
I take it, I take it. We're talking about HC now,
we're talking about everything up to and include VX nerve gas. Yeah. So,
starting in the thirties, we were like, chemical weapons are awesome.

(30:07):
World War One was a hoot. We're going to use
these things more in the future. I wonder how they
work in tropical clim um. So we decided we wanted
to know how this ship worked in tropical climates, and
since we owned Panama, it was the natural place to
dump chemical weapons into. General William Siebert, a World War
One veteran and quote a staunch advocate of all forms

(30:29):
of chemical warfare in his own words, was made director
of the Army's chemical weapons program. From a write up
and so this is a true harbor stand Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he loves he loves Old Fritz, who was also a
Bastards Pod alumni. Yeah, the man who just couldn't get
enough of making chemical weapons. So I'm gonna quote from

(30:49):
a write up titled test Tube Republic, Chemical Weapons Tests
in Panama and US Responsibility. After the war, Sibbett became
a vocal proponent of the continued development of chemical weapons.
When armies were provided with masks and other defensive appliances,
something less than four percent of gas casualties were fatal.
Sibbert ruminated these figures, I think meet one of the
chief objections brought against the use of gas that of humanity.

(31:12):
So far from being inhumane, it has been proven that
it is one of the most humane instruments of warfare,
if we can apply the word humane to the killing
and wounding of human beings. Barely anyone dies in this
stuff when they have gas masks, so it's cool. Yeah.
And the kind of unstated corollary to that is that
barely in a Europeans actually died from chemical warfare once

(31:35):
people got gas masks and stuff. Chemical weapons were regularly
used on colonial populations, particularly in Ethiopia, by the Italians
who didn't have access to that. So Sibert was basically
saying it's humane and that it can't kill that many
white people. It's it's pretty good, pretty good stuff. So
in nineteen one, the Chemical Warfare Service was told to

(31:56):
draw plans for defense of the canal zone and other
outlying U S possessions. The first chemical defense plans were
thus drawn up in nineteen twenty three, and would be
updated every year through at least ninety six. The plan
involved bombing with mustard gas the trails and routes that
led inland from landing beaches on both the Atlantic and
Pacific coasts, spraying the beaches, and find firing chemical mortars
at military targets as well. So our plan was, if

(32:19):
anyone invades the Panama Canal, we just dubbed chemical weapons
all over Panama in order to make it uninhabitable. So
the Vietnam doctrine, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean this was
kind of where that idea started. Let's just murder the
jungle in order to make it impossible for it the
enemy to live here. Yeah. So US chemical weapons tests

(32:40):
continued for decades well after US forces in Panama faced
any threat of invasion. Huge chunks of jungle on San
Jose Island were regularly exposed to mustard gas and folst
gene gas just to see what would happen. Munitions were
stored in open topped buildings exposed to the elements UM
and yeah, they're like, so they just kind of left

(33:02):
this stuff there, and they would drop tens of thousands
of chemical bombs on particularly San Jose Island, and about
one ten of these weapons failed to detonate and they
were just left where they landed to be a problem
for future generations. And when the Army left Panama, we
just told them we'd taken all of the chemical weapons,
but thousands of bombs were left behind on these islands

(33:23):
that we just kind of were like, maybe they'll figure
it out, maybe they won't UM, which is rad Starting
in the nineteen sixties, VX nerve gas mines were tested
and each of these mines contained a ten point five
pounds of v X. Since ten milligrams is a fatal
human dose, this means that each one of these mines
had enough poison to kill half a million people. We're

(33:44):
just kind of detonating these in the middle of the jungle,
seeing what happened. It's pretty cool. Yeah, Now, most of
the research the Army conducted in Panama sounded less like
advancing the frontiers of science and more like the kind
of ship board Nazi scientists would have gotten up to.
Goats and rabbits were fitted with various gas, masks and
gas just to test the effect efficacy of the weapons.

(34:06):
One witness said they brought goats from Ecuador. They put
those gases on them. The skin fell off the animals,
they died, and they ended up cooked. The animal was
red red like it was cooked burnt. An US experiments
did not say limited to non human animals. The United
States partnered with the Canadian government to investigate whether or
not different ethnicities were affected differently by chemical weapons. Puerto

(34:27):
Ricans and Caucasian human beings were gassed alongside each other
to see if any differences arose. Medical historians Susan Smith
explains scientists were trying to understand the impact of mustard
gas on people. They thought there was a possibility that
some racial groups are less sensitive to mustard gas. It
turned out not at all to be true, Smith told
Chemistry World. With the military, testing involved, among other things,

(34:49):
the aerial release of mustard gas over soldiers via airplanes
in order to later examine and compare their blisters and
other injuries. Now, in PR actually tracked down a bunch
of the men involved in these race based experiments. They
found that, in addition to Puerto Ricans, black Americans, and
Japanese Americans were all gassed just to see if there
were racial differences and how they respond. My god, all

(35:10):
of the gas subjects were enlisted men, and white soldiers
constituted the control group. And this is I guess, one
situation in which people of all races suffered equally, because
again everyone responds the same way to poison gas. Imagine
that it does sound it does It does say a
lot that it does say a lot about the United

(35:31):
States and Britain. That basically, like all of these things
were pre you know, like all the things that are
we associate with, like Nazi Germany, We're being done thirty
years earlier, yeah, and him twenty years later. We keep
doing this until nineteen sixty eight. Like, yeah, it's it's
pretty great. I'm gonna quote from NPRS right up on this.

(35:52):
All of the World War Two experiments with mustard gas
were done in secret and weren't recorded on the subject's
official military records. Most do not have proof of what
they went through. They received no follow up healthcare or
monitoring of any kind, and they were sworn to secrecy
about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge in military
prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment

(36:13):
for their injuries because they couldn't tell doctors what happened
to them. Army Colonel Steve Warren, director of Press Operations
at the Pentagon, acknowledged NPRS findings and was quick to
put distance between today's military and the World War Two experiments.
The first thing to be very clear about is that
the Department of different it was a different time. Yeah,
this is the Department of Confenced does not conduct chemical

(36:34):
weapons tests any longer. And I think we have probably
come as far as any institution in America. We didn't
even have a Pentagon built, So I think particularly for
us in uniform, to hear and see something like this,
it's stark. It's even a little bit jarick. It is

(36:56):
a little bit jarring. Yes, more than a hundred experiments
were conducted by on human beings on San Jose Island.
Lopez Negron, now years old, was one of the test suspects,
and it is one of the only surviving ones. He
was bombed with mustard gas by a plane. He told
NPR we had uniforms on to protect ourselves, but the

(37:17):
animals didn't. There were rabbits. They all died. I spent
three weeks in the hospital with a bad fever. Almost
all of us got sick. It took all of the
skin off of your hands. Your hands just rotted. Pretty
good stuff there. Now, Negron was technically a volunteer, but
he but he like he'd been asked to serve as

(37:37):
a guinea pig, and he technically had the right to
say no, but he did not feel like saying no
was an option because he was a black man. N
PR rights defiance was unthinkable, he says, especially for black soldiers.
You do what they tell you to do, and you
ask no questions. He says, cool stuff. Yeah, US chemical

(38:02):
weapons test in Panama stopped in nineteen sixty eight, and
again we just kind of left everything sort of where
it was when we finally let Panama be a sovereign nation.
We were doing it because we we had we could
test it in Vietnam instead. Yeah, we just left it
behind there too, like just an uncountable number of deadly
weapons we just left sitting on an island, and we're like, yeah,

(38:23):
we took everything, we cleaned up, it's fine. There are
people who tried to build resorts on San Jose Island
and kept finding like chemical weapons. It was it was
a real problem, um, And we lied to the Panamanian
government about this. We have mostly cleaned it up now.
I think in two thousand eighteen was the last time
I was able to find a U. S C. B

(38:44):
r N Army unit being sent to San Jose to
disarmed chemical bombs. Um. But it took up until like
a couple of years ago for most of that stuff
to be cleared off. And there's probably still some bombs
lying around on the island. You know. We couldn't have
gotten everything, and they had to. There was like a
series of investigations and and like legal cases around it.

(39:05):
I found an article in two thousand one where journalists
went there and just was like picking up chemical munitions
that were covered in rust and was like, oh, this
is a VX nerve mine that just didn't go off,
that's filled with enough poison to kill. Yeah. Um, So
the end of the US domination of Panama started as
a result of things that happened on January nine, nineteen

(39:27):
sixty four. There had been protests over US violations of
Panamanian sovereignty for years at this point. In nineteen fifty five,
Dwight Eisenhower was forced to make concessions and give back
some of the land the US had stolen, but he
refused to negotiate on the portion of the U S
treaty that gave US the canal in perpetuity. Demonstrations grew
in intensity throughout the late nineteen fifties. One major cause

(39:49):
was the fight for Panamanians to have the legal right
to fly their flag in the canal zone. Things seemed
to be improving when JFK took office. He recognized that
the U S had kind of been fucking over the
Panamania in people for decades, and he told the country, yeah,
he was. He was, you know, open to negotiating with
them about concessions. Even sovereignty of the canal was on
the table. This may have been part of the reason

(40:11):
that Bernard Sanders shot Kennedy dead in nineteen sixty three.
When JFK took office, the issue of US sovereignty over
the canal was still technically on the table, but lb
J was never going to do that. To be honest,
JFK probably wouldn't have either. UM and the even discussion
of US sovereignty being given up over the canal enraged
a lot of US citizens and I'm gonna quote from

(40:31):
American heritage here, any hint of concession worried the ultra
patriotic U. S. Citizens who lived and worked in the zone.
Kennedy's declaration that the U. S. And Panamanian flag should
be flown together at all non military sites prompted Zonian students,
with the encouragement of adults, to raise the stars and
stripes outside of Balboa High School on January seventh, nineteen

(40:53):
sixty four. The teenagers guarded the flag for two days
before a group of two hundred Panamanian students marched from
nearby Panama City intent on raising their own banner. During
the ensuing scuple, the Panamanian flag was torn. Thousands of
angry Panamanian citizens took to the streets, forced their way
into the zone, and attacked American owned businesses. The canal.
Zone police were overwhelmed and the U. S. Army took over.

(41:15):
Responding to the violence with tear gas and rifle fire.
Ascanio Aros Ascanio Arosamina, a twenty year old student on
his way to a movie, stopped to help evacuate some
of them wounded. He was shot dead. Now, as you
might expect, uh, this marked sparked more protests or more demonstrations.
Protesters rallied at what they called the Fence of Shame,

(41:37):
which is a name I might have to steal. At
some point, one Columbian leader compared the fence to the
Berlin Wall, which is obviously embarrassing to the US. At
this point, Panama broke off diplomatic relations with the United
States on January tenth. There were demands that the US
hand over the canal entirely. U s and Panamanian soldiers
exchanged gunfire for days. At one point, Americans hosed down

(41:58):
an apartment building and a tempted to take out a sniper. Instead,
they killed an eleven year old girl named Rosa Landecho.
So pretty bad, pretty bad time. And by the way,
this date um which is January nine, nine four, is
still a holiday in Panama to this day because of
like this fight over the flag and all the deaths

(42:20):
that results from it. The violence continued for four days
while lb J negotiated with Panamanian leaders. He stoutly refused
to make concessions under the threat of force. Eventually, Panama
called in their national guard and quelled the unrest. The
Canal Zones Governor Robert Fleming started pressing Washington to sign
a new treaty, telling d C quote, the plain fact

(42:40):
is that we must begin treating Panamanians as people. Wow.
So the US governor of the Canals and was like, yeah,
we got it. We gotta guys, we gotta treat these
folks like human beings. Otherwise we're gonna continue having problems here.
Someone had to say that. It's pretty remarked. Couple. So yeah,

(43:01):
after you know, so that the governor of the canal
is like, we have to finally start treating Panamanians as people. Um.
And three years of negotiations follow that, but little actually
gets done. There's resistance from Americans and from elite Panamanians. Right.
A lot of the Panamanians in charge want the US
to stay because the US have been consistently they're armed

(43:21):
enforcers right, um, and they fight every effort at giving
Panama full sovereignty over the canal. The continued failure of
these efforts in the decades of violent oppression eventually generated
enough anti American sentiment to allow for a revolution against
the v She government. In nineteen sixty eight, a Panamanian
National Guard officer named Omar To Riho seized power and

(43:42):
replace the old order with a populist government committed to
getting a better deal for Panama. But even this moment
was not quite what it seemed because omar To Rijos
was a long time US military asset. He had been
recruited as a spy in nineteen paid twenty five dollars
a month to inform the US on labor unrest, student activities,
and Soviet Chinese penetration. During the nineteen sixty Flag Riots,

(44:05):
Trio's helped to suppress the popular unrest. One U S
military intelligence operative even helped him plan his nineteen sixty coup.
So Torio's was a U S asset, but he was
also willing to push for Panamanian control of the canal.
Um So he's a complicated figure and he's viewed by
as a hero still by a lot of Panamanians because
he he is a committed committed to the Panama getting

(44:26):
control of the canal. Um And by the way, basically
everyone with any power in the Panamanian National Guard is
a US military asset, and they don't all always do
what the U S says, So it's always more complex
than just he was getting paid to be a spy.
He's still like, has desires outside of US desires, which
is why certain things happened that happened later. So real

(44:49):
talks over Panamanian sovereignty of the canal took place during
President Jimmy Carter's term. Rio's lucked out that his time
in power happened to coincide with the election of the
only vaguely reasonable man for elected president of the United
States in nineteen seventy nine. It basically the last moment
such an act of baseline decency would have been possible
from the United States. Carter and to Rijo signed and

(45:10):
ratified a new Canal treaty. This promised a total handover
of the canal to Panama by the end of nine
So that's good, right, we took a medicine. It's almost
a century, but we did something that resembled the right thing. Eventually,
after a lot of death, yeah, and after profiting off
of it for nearly a century. Still a canal zone. Yes,

(45:33):
because the CIA was not happy about it. And remember
we're talking about the nineteen seventies. CIA and Latin America
was just the c I a s CIA to ever CIA,
they promptly tried to overthrow to Riho's and they failed
thanks to the efforts of a National Guard officer who
substantly rose to became Omar Tario's right hand man, Manuel Noriega. Now,

(45:56):
and by the way, Noriega was also a U. S.
Army spy asset for years, stuck back in the fifties. Now,
this is this is a running this is a running
theme in the US intelligence. It's amazing. So when the
CIA failed to unseat Rio's by blatant and shameless coup,
they decided the right thing to do was to ingratiate
themselves with Noriega, who they correctly judge was a man

(46:17):
with no principles. Noriega rose to become Panama's chief of
military Intelligence. At the same time he became a salaried
CIA asset. He would eventually receive well over a million
dollars for his work with the agency. Noriega would later
claim that his work with the CIA was Torrio's idea
in order to keep a quote open line of communication
with the agency that might stop future coatips as if

(46:39):
there there is. There's one common theme in US history,
and that is especially intelligence history, and that is that
we were the there's this tendency to arm your future enemies,
to arm and train, and this tendency that we see
in Syria, right but with you know, kind of the
differences between the CIA backing what they call the moderate rebels,

(47:00):
in the Defense Department backing Rojava this and it's the
same thing happening in Panama where the Army's got its
people and the CIA has its people, and sometimes they
overlap and sometimes they're asked to do different things by
both groups. Because one of the things I think that
has missed on a lot of left wing analysis of
like the CIA and the military is that they do
often hate each other. Oh yeah, like they're fighting as

(47:25):
much as they are working together. Um so yeah. Noriega
claims that he omar to Rios told him to be
a come up paid CIA asset so that he could
stop future coup attempts. And if this sounds like it
might be a lie. That's because Manuel Noriega was a
was a consummate liar. Now, one of Noriega's gigs for

(47:45):
the CIA was to maintain an open line of communication
with Fidel Castro. Because the CIA had repeatedly tried to
kill Castro and because the US refused to publicly deal
with the communist country, all communications between the two, which
they obviously still had, needed to take place in back channels,
and for a while, Noriega was one of the u
s back channels to Castro. Now more than anything, though

(48:07):
Noriega was a cocaine man, probably one of the most
prolific cocaine traffickers in history, the CIA was happy to
ignore his drug dealing as long as he remained their
man in Panama. This was largely because the CIA had
plans for Panama, and Night had plans and planes, and
they involved planes in cocaine. Yeah and yeah, Well, we'll
do a whole episode on the on the crack epidemic

(48:30):
and the cocaine trade and the CIA and the d
e A at some point, um, but this all intersects
with it. Now. By nineteen eighty one, oh more, or
in nineteen eighty one, Omar to Rios died in a
tragic plane accident that was almost certainly orchestrated by the CIA.
We don't know, but everyone suspects it, and it's very
much in line with ship the CIA did repeatedly in

(48:51):
this period of time. So probably we don't know, but
we don't not know. We do not know, And it's
not like it's it's not like character. That's the kind
of gray area that that intelligence operations, uh, fluidly operated. Yeah,
you can't prove we did this even though it you know,

(49:12):
we've done the same thing to other people, and you
know we would benefit from it. So Yeppie, you know what,
I also don't not know. I don't I don't know
where I'm going with this. Don't you know who won't
assassinate the leader of Panama? I don't know. Those Ohio ads, Yeah, Ohio.

(49:38):
Actually Ohio would absolutely because they're always trying to make
more Ohio. We can, but everything is already Ohio, terrible, terrible. Well,
don't move to Ohio and check out these ads. All right,
we're back. We're back, and we're shipped talking Ohio. But

(50:00):
now it's time to ship talk, which in which we
all live, in which is which is the world? Um?
All right? So whatever the truth of Omar Tario's assassination
actually is, and again it's probably the CIA killed him.
The political climate and Panama suddenly improved for the United
States after his death. I imagine that John Lindsay Poland

(50:22):
writes Panama support included the use of its territory for
joint military maneuvers and covert training, use of US basis
for logistical supply and intelligence flights to El Salvador and Honduras,
and training of troops from the region. In the School
of the Americans were more than eighteen hundred Salvadorian soldiers
took courses in combat tactics, intelligence, logistics, and other military
subjects from nineteen eight two to nineteen eighty four. According

(50:44):
to Dwayne Claric, who was the chief of the Latin
America Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, Noriega helped the
CIA set up a short lived trading camp for the
Nicaragua's contract for the Nicaraguan Contrast Southern Army in nineteen
eighty three. Noriega also provided all Over and North with
a pair of militians experts who helped blow up ammunition
storage dump in Managua, Nicaragua in March of nineteen eighty five,

(51:05):
which rocked the capital, So we use the ship out
of Panama in this period of time. In nineteen eighty four,
massive and sweeping electoral flow fraud led to the election
of President Nicolas Ardito Barletta, a close friend of US
Secretary of State George Schultz, who attended his inauguration and
went on to invest huge amounts of money and time

(51:26):
into the NOS. That that's George Scholtz. Yeah. In nineteen
eighty four, after sweeping electoral fraud, Panama elects a president
who is the close buddy of the U S Secretary
of State. And this guy is basically just a puppet
for Noriega and for the United States UM And as
a result from nineteen eight in nineteen eighties seven, Panama

(51:48):
received more than forty seven million dollars in US military
equipment and training, three times would have received in the
preceding thirty years. The goal of all this was twofold,
to turn the Panamanian National Guard into a US loyal
force and to ensure the men who rose through its ranks,
and thus we're in a position to seize power if needed.
Were sympathetic to US goals. Now that the US had

(52:09):
picked had its picked man Noriega in an advanced position
with the army, and had a whole bunch of promising
young officers who received US training in a doctrination, we
were more or less happy to let Panama have an
army again. The National Guard transitioned into a proper military
force in nineteen eighty three. Noriega was its first chief,
and that same year, nineteen eighty three, he became the
de facto military dictator of Panama. So again we elect

(52:32):
a president to be a puppet man who's the friend
of our Secretary of State. But Noriega is effectively in
charge of the country, and he was by no means
the legitimate leader of Panama through anything but brute force
in US support, and we were fine with this. At first.
There were constant complaints in Washington over his rampant cocaine trafficking,
but the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, who paid

(52:53):
him at least a hundred and sixty two dollars during
this period, successfully question to keep him safe. Yeah, real
seems kind of low. So, I mean, yeah, it's about
arranged d I A double dipping is a popular is
a popular thing among among US informants. Yeah, yeah, he's
and he's getting money from the CIA and from the
from the d i A, which is really the way

(53:15):
to do it, which compete Yeah, which compete um. And
they are the ones who keep him safe from like
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which is the
precursor to the d e A. And in fact, the
the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs had known Noriega
was a massive coke trafficker since at least nineteen eight
seventy two, when they attempted to, or they pushed to

(53:37):
assassinate him, which is a thing we used to let
them do. It's just like assassinate for leaders for drug trafficking.
UM probably still do. But again he's kept safe consistently
by his backers, first in the Army, then in the
CIA and the d i A. So in nineteen eight five,
the Reagan White House received intelligence reports that Noriega had

(53:57):
met with cartel leaders and given them permission to manufacture
cocaine and Panama. Noriega had also offered to mediate turf
arguments among different cartels. Norman Bailey, a staff member, at
the National Security Council later said of the Reagan administration's
dirt on Noriega, this wasn't a smoking gun. It was
a twenty one gun salute. But things were fine for

(54:18):
Noriega until the end of nineteen eighties six, when the
Iran contra scandal burst onto the news and North Americans
learned that our government had been selling missiles to Iran
in order to fund death squads in Nicaragua, which of
course had been trained in Panama. This was explicitly forbidden
both by an arms embargo against Iran and by the
Bowland Amendment, which made it illegal to fund the contrast.
This what made what Reagan and his cronies did at

(54:41):
least light treason, but like treason, a separate skittle for
a separate podcast. Yeah, we'll talk about that at some
point too. Because Reagan was Reagan, the fallout was relatively
minor compared to the crime. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the
Dodes Bagman, and CIA director William Casey were forced out

(55:03):
of the Yeah, really good at destroying the evidence. If
you need evidence destroyed, Bill Casey's your motherfucking guy. Yeah.
And if you need a show hosted on Fox News,
Oliver North is apparently your man or destroying uh the
largest uh you know, the reputation of the largest uh

(55:23):
gun lobby group a group of the country. Yeah, Ali,
what a great man, Ali North? Um so North. This
was a problem, the fact that North and Casey are
out of their jobs following a rand contra, because North
and Casey had been Noriega's main points of contact. It
had been them and George H. W. Bush had been

(55:44):
the guy's most responsible for defending him from the rest
of the government over his cocaine trafficking. So once they're out,
Noriega's in deep ship and things get worse and worse
for him throughout. Panicked by his loss of support, he
cut off ties with the medaine cartel in death spiration.
This was not enough to stop him from getting indicted
by Grand Juries in Miami and Tampa in February of night.

(56:07):
The US placed economic sanctions against Panama, and the goal
at this stage was to force the Man from power
from beginn From the beginning, though SOUTHCOM, the US military
command in Latin America, had plans in place for an
invasion of Panama, more U S forces were sent into
the country to prepare now. The sanctions against Noriegas Panama
did what sanctions always do. They harmed poor people by

(56:29):
making it impossible for them to get basic necessities without
actually harming the people in charge. Noriega was not forced out.
In fact, the sanctions made it easy for him to
declare a national emergency and grab more power. The sanctions
also provided Noriega with a prime opportunity to flood the
airwaves with nationalists saber rattling. It was not hard for
him to get many Panamanians on his side against the

(56:50):
US for reasons that should be obvious based on the
rest of these episodes now. During his run for Congress,
candidate George H. W. Bo was criticized heavily for the
fact that, as CIA chief and Vice president, he had
repeatedly acted to protect and use Noriega. This history was
a problem for old George. But if you're a good

(57:11):
politician like George H. W. Bush, you know that within
every problem is a solution. The month that Bush was
elected to was elected president, Newsweek published an article titled
the Crack Nation, And I'm going to quote from Emperor
and the Jungle about how this all gets tied to Noriega.
The article was focused on that country in our midst

(57:32):
but not a part of US, and distinct from people
of normal human appetites. The Newsweek's nine stories made abundantly
clear who the residents of this crack nation were, and
they were nearly all black. If crack users truly represented
a nation, surely that nation's sovereignty would have to be
violated to address the danger. The article did not say

(57:52):
whether Latin Americans were purposefully deploying cocaine to destroy the
lives documented on previous pages, but it did call on
the new administration to make some hard decisions and asserted
that America's cocaine problem in fact, has been caused by
the Colombian cartels and their US based accomplices. Attacking the
enemy high command is a good strategy, So suddenly George

(58:15):
Bush has a way out of this problem. Yeah m hm.
As crack cocaine spread through American cities, the media latched
onto the problem and succeeded in turning what was a
problem but a localized problem, into an absolute hysteria. In
nineteen eighty nine, the New York Times published an average
of a hundred and one stories about drugs per month,
three times the rate they'd published in nineteen. Drugs, particularly crack,

(58:39):
were referred to as a plague and a foreign scourge.
Breathless op eds worried about crack use crossing over, crossing
over from black neighborhoods into affluent white ones. Now there
was no evidence that this occurred because rich white people
used cocaine. But rich white people needed a reason to
care about crack that didn't make them care about poor
black people, and worrying that it was going to hurt

(59:01):
their children in mansions was the way to do that.
Time called the crack epidemic a plague without boundaries, and
as John Lindsay Poland writes, quote, a plague that respects
no sovereignty would have to be met with comparable methods.
So if the crack epidemic can spread everywhere, then US
forces are justified in going into any place, even sovereign nations,

(59:23):
in order to fight the crack epidemic. Source. Yeah, go
to the source, which you might argue with the CIA,
but in may, not that far, not that far, go
up to the guy they're paying who isn't an American citizen.
So in May of nineteen eighty nine, Noriega suspended Panamanian elections,

(59:46):
using the emergency caused by U S sanctions as a justification.
This led to mass protests and the Organization of American States,
which is like a group of Latin American states that
is designed to be kind of an overarching diplomatic organization,
put together a mediation to him to go to Panama
and try to find a solution, maybe to try and
to find a way to get Noriega to peacefully leave

(01:00:06):
power and into the crisis. The US did not think
that this was mediation was the thing to do, so
instead they sent in two thousand soldiers and a Delta
Force commando team. Now, these troops and special forces were
on special orders from President Bush to travel on Panamanian
public roads and ignore Panamanian army checkpoints. The explicit goal

(01:00:27):
of this policy was to provoke confrontations between Panamanian soldiers
and US soldiers. Now, when number of clashes followed, and
at first none of them rose to the level of
deadly violence, but that was President Bush's goal. He wanted
a fight between the Panamanian and US militaries to justify
further interventions in the country. So it didn't look like
we were just invading a sovereign nation. You need a

(01:00:49):
dead American serviceman really if you're gonna like truly fux
some ship up. So while all this is going on,
Noriega was doing standard dictators ship. He sent his soldiers
after the vice presidential candidate, a guy named Guerrimo Ford,
and he sent a lot of his supporters, and his
supporters killed Ford's bodyguard, and suddenly all these images Afford

(01:01:10):
with blood sprayed across his white shirt went viral internationally. Now,
because Noriega was a populist, he had kind of He's
been a lot of time messaging to the most downtrodden
people in Panama, which were, of course, the dark skinned
descendants of Caribbean workers imported by the United States. Because
he did ship for them, he was seen as standing

(01:01:30):
up to the United States, and so they supported them
because he helped them out and because they hated the US.
So the video of this attack, which every US news
network played for days, showed a crowd of very dark
skinned people attacking Ford, who, as a wealthy Panamanian, was
a white man. So you see how this plays on
the news. You've got this crowd of dark skinned Noriega

(01:01:53):
supporters beating a white man in the streets, and every
US broadcaster plays this footage over and over and over,
referring to this crowd of angry people as government goons,
These people who are angry because of U S sanctions
that have materially affected their lives, and angry because they
see Ford as an asient of the US government. Um.
But it works in the American news, right, it builds

(01:02:14):
this kind of race war narrative that is really helpful
in drumming Americans up for violence. So the media stokes
multiple cycles of outrage playing this alongside footage of Noriego
waving a machete, which is like a thing in Latin America.
It's like there's a lot of cultural weight to the machete,
right that everyone, Yeah, Bolivar, it's a tool of revolution,
it's also a tool of daily life. But again, when

(01:02:36):
you have this clip of this crowd of Noriega supporters
called government goons, attacking Ford in the streets, and you
switch to Noriega waving a machete, it presents this image
of Panamanians again as savages like they've been presented in
the early nineteen hundreds under Roosevelt. Right, it's the same
basic tactic, and it's the same in a lot of cases,

(01:02:57):
the same news organs that are are pushing this This
information pundit started yelling at George H. W. Bush for
not acting to intervene. They called him a wimp. And
this is there's a ton of jokes and like early
Saturday Night Live about George Bush being a wimp and
it's because he's not doesn't invade Panama fast enough. When
all this footage starts going viral on the news, it's

(01:03:19):
pretty good, pretty good stuff, Like George Bush is definitely
a bad guy in this story, but by god, he
is not the only one. Um. Nope, Yeah, it's pretty cool. So,
of course, all of this manufactured Consett manifest that's exactly
what's going on. In the documentary, The Panama Deception does

(01:03:40):
a great job of just cutting together. There will be
like thirty different like clips from different primetime news segments,
all using the same phrase government goons to refer to
this mob um and there's a bunch of different kids
because they got the same memo. Now, of course, throughout
all of this pressure to deal with the crack At
epidemic was also a building. In nineteen eighty nine, President

(01:04:02):
Bush made his first televised speech. He focused on the
crack epidemic and held up a baggy of the drug
that he said had been purchased from a black drug
dealer across the street from the White House. This was
technically true. What was left unsaid was that the d
e A had deliberately pushed the dealer to meet them
in Lafayette Park, far away from where he normally did
his business, so that Bush could claim it had been

(01:04:23):
bought within sight of the White House. That's the story
for another day, though for now, I just want to
repeat something John Lindsay Poland wrote about this whole episode. Quote.
The speech illustrates how internal ethnic minorities had become politically
expendable props in the drug war at the time. Now
An ABC poll taken after the speech found that six

(01:04:44):
of respondents believed drugs were the most important problem facing
the United States. A few days later, Panamanian soldiers attempted
a coup against Noriega, which he put down with as
much bloodshed as you would expect. More pundits called George
Bush a whimp. The President had been willing to ruin
a young black citizen life for political theater, and he
was about to prove that he would be happy to
do much worse to foreigners in advancing the same goal.

(01:05:08):
General Colin Powell, at that point, chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
later told Bob Woodward that he had never witnessed a
political fight as ugly as the debate over whether or
not to invade Panama. He said he felt like the
political class was acting as a lynch mob. War fever
was as high in the United States as it could
possibly be, and within the military itself it was damn

(01:05:30):
near boiling over. In nineteen eighties seven, it had become
clear to even the most dedicated Cold Warriors that the U. S.
S R Was not long for this world. This meant
an end of the Cold War, and thus an end
to the billions and billions that the US had spent
funding death squads and dictators in Latin America under the
guise of anti communism. The people doing this, murdering and
receiving these funds did not want to stop. Colonel John D. Wiggelstein,

(01:05:53):
who coordinated the U. S. Military intervention in El Salvador
in nineteen eighties seven, wrote that the military needed to
find quote a weapon with which to regain the moral
high ground we appeared to have lost. He suggested that
a melding in the American public's mind and in Congress
of this connection between the drug trade and insurgency would
lead to the necessary support to counter the guerilla and

(01:06:16):
narcotics terrorists in this hemisphere. Those church and academic groups
that have slavishly supported insurgency in Latin America would find
themselves on the wrong side of the moral issue. Pretty fun,
there's a yeah, there's a there's a lot going on here. Yeah,
it's fun when you say, but it all leads, But
it all leads in one direction. It does lead in
one directly. And what he's talking about we chatted about

(01:06:38):
the sum in the School of the Americas. There are
like a lot of Catholic churches are very supportive of
left wing insurgents in Latin America in the sixties and
seventies because the right wing death squads are so fucking brutal,
and because there's like a strong social justice component, two
aspects of Catholic theology. And this really pisss off the
Americans because it means that US backed groups keep murdering

(01:07:00):
nuns and raping nuns in mass and that looks really
bad in the media, and it's led to a degradation
in like US support for the military in Latin America.
And so the idea is that if we tie the
drug war to these left wing insurgents, if we blame
it on them, nobody likes drugs. They're the ultimate evil.
Just forget about the contrasts for a second. Forget about

(01:07:22):
the contrasts for a second. Think about crack. Now. By
all accounts, the strategy was a staggering success. In nineteen
eighty nine, Congress made the Defense Department the single lead
agency in the federal government for the detection and monitoring
of drug trafficking in the hemisphere. This, yeahn't that cool?
That makes sense. They should be the ones doing that now.

(01:07:44):
This explains why a lot of folks at the top
in the military wanted war with Panama. But outside of
high command, war fever was just as strong. And this
was largely because in the decades of relative peace since Vietnam,
the United States had developed a whole panoply of high
tech killing machines that we had never had a chance
to test out stuff like Apache helicopters, Abram's battle tanks,

(01:08:07):
stealth bombers, and a whole bunch of Neto rocket launchers
and new precision guided bombs. Troops and commanders were unbelievably
horny to try this stuff out. One American general even
admitted in an interview, we are mesmerized with firepower. We
have all these new gadgets, laser guided missiles and stealth fighters,
and we are just dying to use that stuff. Perhaps

(01:08:29):
that's a problem their excuse to use that. Within a
few years they will be using yeah, and it will
turn out none of it really helps when ship gets that. Nope.
So their excuse to use that stuff came in December
as a result of some of the soldiers Bush had
ordered to drive around on Panamanian roads being jackasses and

(01:08:51):
doing exactly that. The facts of the story are that
on December sixteenth, four American officers and civilian clothes in
a private car were stopped at a Panamanian checkpoint point
close to PDF headquarters. They had gotten lost downtown, or
so they claimed. A conflict arose at the checkpoint, and
the U. S soldiers drove through the checkpoint without approval,
and the Panamanians opened fire, killing one soldier and wounding another.

(01:09:12):
The Defense Department alleged that the men were unarmed and
that they had been harassed by Panamanian soldiers, and maybe
they had been We don't really know what happened. We
know what the Defense Department says has happened, and we
know that other soldiers had been given orders to ignore checkpoints.
And Furthermore, as the l A. Times reported the killing
of a U. S Marine lieutenant by Panamanian forces last December,

(01:09:33):
an event used by President Bush in part to justify
the invasion of Panama, was not the unprovoked active aggression
portrayed by the White House, according to American military and
civilian sources. Instead, it was a step in a pattern
of aggressive behavior by a small group of US troops
who called themselves the hard Chargers, and who frequently tested
the patients and reaction of Panamanian forces, particularly at roadblocks,

(01:09:55):
the sources said. And of course the Pentagon denies this.
But that's the story. Now. You can decide what you
want to believe there. Whatever the truth was present, Bush
immediately gave orders to invade, and invade. We did. The
US launched its attack on Panama a December twenty nine,
eighty nine. It would be the bloodiest war on Panamanian
soil in ninety years. The United States owned the most

(01:10:17):
advanced and deadly military apparatus and human history. At this point,
we had tens of thousands of soldiers and marines, extensive
air and naval support, and armored vehicles. The Panamanian military
numbered three thousand men. Needless to say, US forces tore
through them with basically no resistance. Most of our air
assets and artillery focused on shelling heavily populated areas. The

(01:10:39):
Panamanian military headquarters was located in the mostly black and indigenous,
densely peopled El Tario neighborhood. The US gave ten minutes
of warning for these people to abandon their homes and possessions,
and then leveled the entire neighborhood with high tech weaponry
from the sky. This marked the first time the fifty
million dollar F one seven A stealth bomber was deployed.

(01:10:59):
In that the stealth bomber was invisible to radar, which
didn't matter because Panama did not have r did not
have any radar, could have used a blimp. Americans had
been assured that the bomber was incredibly accurate, able to
drop bombs down chimneys and avoid collateral damage. In reality,
it missed its bombing target by more than three hundred yards.

(01:11:21):
That's a huge rain. Yeah, it's three football fields, which
is again every time, that's a half a bad square. Yeah.
Anytime someone in the military too says the word precision bombs,
they're lying to you. Such a thing has never been invented.
I say that as someone who has watched the United

(01:11:42):
States bomba city with my own eyes. We don't have
precision bombs. We have bombs that are more precise than
I don't know guys in were one dropping them out
of a cockpit, but it is not very precise. But like,
that's that that like three yards is huge. That's a
that's half a group. That's like a third to half
a grid square. That's you don't like like like whatever

(01:12:05):
I think. Whenever I think like precision, I'm like, oh, yeah,
like you know, a tenth of a grid square, you know,
a hundreds like ours, that's pretty good. Three is a
wide miss. Yeah, and we didn't find that out. You'd
be better off, you know, World War two bomber pilot,
you know. And one of the things that's happening here
is the US Press court that's supposed to cover this

(01:12:27):
is embedded with the Defense Department, who they're only getting
the best, and the Defense department make sure they arrived
several days late, so they missed the fighting. There are
a couple of journalists, including a local Panamanian journalists who
are there and who we get some reports from because
they're there during the fighting. But the mainstream American press
corps doesn't arrive until later, and of course they receive

(01:12:47):
a gated tour of all of this, and that's why
the initial reports from Panama are just talking about, oh
precision our weapons are, and like they're able to strike
this building and leave all of the buildings around it.
You can look at footage of Alt Tario neighborhood around
the painting and Panamanian defense. It's leveled. It looks like
they just wipe this place off the face of the
fun precisely limited this entire grid square where all of

(01:13:11):
the poor people live, where all of the black and
indigenous residents live. Um now wealthy neighborhoods were avoided and
preserved during the US invasion, and in fact, when US
forces entered Cologne, they found that business owners in the
wealthy shopping district had shot three looters dead. Obviously, when
the fighting starts, people who are starving under U S
sanctions start looting, business owners shoot them dead, and the

(01:13:34):
US forces allow these men to keep their guns and
even send in soldiers to help protect these business owners
from people who are starving due to sanctions. It's pretty
fucking cool. Um, I'm gonna quote again from Emperors in
the jungle. The impoverished community of San Miguelito was also
bombed across the town at Punta Patila. Wealthy Panamanians watched

(01:13:55):
the invasion from their condominiums and expensive high rises at
near my petit Lea Airport, Navy seals were ordered to
undertake a risky operation to disable Noriega's personal jet at
close range to avoid damage to nearby residences from crossfire.
Four seals lost their lives in the operation. No such
care was taken with a PDF headquarters next to El Jarillo,
where U S forces bombed from the air. Their tracer

(01:14:18):
bullets and flares contributed to the conflagration that incinerated the
community and many people who were trapped inside. So in
the rich neighborhood, when we're trying to disable Noriega's plane,
we send a Navy seals and we lose a lot
of Navy seals taking out his plane so that we
don't have to damage the wealthy people's houses. But in Elcheria,
where people are poor, we just fucking level it. Pretty bad,

(01:14:41):
pretty bad, pretty bad, Chelsea. But it's not the good
imagery that you know. It's it's it's it doesn't make
for a good good CNN. Yeah, this is not what
Peter Jennings talks about at the time. Now, today, the
Defense Department officially recognizes five hundred and sixteen deaths, mostly civilian,
as a result of us A actions in Panama. An

(01:15:01):
internal Army memo put the death toll it more than
a thousand. Central American Human Rights Commission estimates between two
and three thousand dead, and I've heard estimates of about
thirty five hundred. You have to expect a couple of
thousand is the likely death toll? Yeah, yeah, well, I
mean yeah, definitely more than the United States is willing

(01:15:23):
than the do O D is willing to admit. And
those deaths were just the start. More than eighteen thousand
Panamanians were rendered homeless by the invasion. More than five
thousand Panamanians were detained on suspicion of being potential insurgents
and put in concentration camps. There are multiple allegations, some
of which have been substantiated heavily, that US forces executed

(01:15:43):
civilians during the occupation. Mass graves were dug and filled
with corpses and would be uncovered for years afterwards in
Panama City. And then this is a tiny country, very
small place. Um. And the mass graves suggest that the
d D undertook extensive efforts to hide the ath told.
Some of these corpses are found in handcuffs with bullets

(01:16:03):
in the back of their skulls. Um, it's bad, It's
very bad. What happens in Panama? Um? And again Yeah,
messed up stuff. Six days in Panama. Yeah, yeah, simple, quiet, peaceful,
little war. Noriega went on the run. Of course, soldiers
searching for him found materials used in Santa Ria, a
popular religion popular in the Caribbean. The military, prodded by

(01:16:27):
the d D, used this to suggest that Noriega supportives
were devil worshippers. The military claimed that a hundred and
ten pounds of cocaine was also found in what they
called Noriega's witch house. The Los Angeles Times particularly bought
into this and wrote in one article that's of blood,
animal in trails, a picture of Adolf Hitler, spike heeled shoes,

(01:16:48):
more than a hundred pounds of cocaine all were part
of the bizarre scenes encountered by American troops as these
storms Noriega's inner sanctum. Basically, now, Chelsea, you want to
guess with that hundred and ten pounds of cocaine? Actually,
was I gonna guess sugar or something to Molly's, to

(01:17:12):
Molly's um. It took a month for us to find
out that it was to Molly's. That he just had
a house full of to Molly's. And the animal gets
were probably because they were, you know, like gutting and
preparing animals to eat. Anyway, the lie served its purpose.
Noriega was effectively made into a demon, awful enough that

(01:17:34):
whole neighborhoods had to be leveled in order to catch him,
and thousands slaughtered. The fact that Noriega never managed to
do as much damage to Panama as the Bush administration
had done went onset, and as did the fact that
the invasion gave the United States what it wanted. The
Panamanian military was destroyed, and under negotiations with the new government,

(01:17:54):
the US got the right to maintain their military presence
in Panama. After all, Panama didn't have a literry anymore,
so they were going to need protection. Convenient. Yeah, and
that's basically the end of the story. You know, eventually
the US pulls most of its stuff out of Panama.
It takes another kind of people would forget about Panama. Yeah,
and people forget about Panama. Noriega dies in US custody

(01:18:16):
in two thousand and eighteen. I think, um, and yeah,
that's that's the story of the US and Panama. Horrible.
And I'm prad being American, where at least I know
I'm free. I hated that so much. Yeah, well, Chelsea,
do you have any plugables for US? I do have

(01:18:37):
a Twitter account, it is Twitter dot com forward slash
x y Chelsea. I have a Twitch account which is
uh twitch dot tv forward slash x y Chelsea, And
those are my two social media accounts. You can figure
out all the things that I do. I am a
Twitter streamer as well as a Twitter tweet out with

(01:18:59):
your feet out and think about panamall. And I just
played video games. I just played mine Craft, a little
bit of harmless Minecraft, a little bit of harmless. Maybe
a little bit of political commentator commentators ships on from
time to time. Yeah, I mean, you have a famously
positive relationship with the US government, so I can only

(01:19:21):
imagine what some of your tweets are about. Yeah, I
try to keep I tried to. I hold my tongue
a little bit, all right, Well hold your tongues um
on Twitter or not, because there's effectively very little moderation
on that platform. Podka, let's go

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: How The U.S.A. Murdered Panama with Chelsea Manning