Did Manuel Noriega enjoy rock music?
In 2014, a man brought the video game Call of Duty to court. He sued the game makers, arguing that his likeness had been distorted and portrayed in an unflattering light.
Call of Duty has a long record of unflattering depictions of real figures, and Fidel Castro was among those featured. Castro paid it no mind. This plaintiff, however, cared deeply — his position was already ruinous. Once a head of state, he was now a prisoner held by the United States. You may defeat a man, but you ought not break his spirit.
Locking up a foreign leader sounds extraordinary, yet this leader came from a small but well-known nation: Panama.
Panama sits in southern Central America, around 75,000 square kilometres in area with a population of roughly 4.36 million. For a country this small, it might seem destined to sit quietly on the sidelines of global affairs, yet Panama carries unexpected clout. Nearly everyone who took middle-school geography remembers its name.
Panama’s fame stems from a geographic position even more strategically vital than Afghanistan’s. It is like the navel of the Americas, the most vulnerable chokepoint across two continents. North and South America span tens of millions of square kilometres, yet the Isthmus of Panama narrows to less than 100 kilometres at its thinnest point. Cut a waterway through this strip, and ships sailing between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans can shave thousands of kilometres off their voyages. Its location is priceless.
Given this obvious strategic value, France, Spain and the United States all set their sights on digging a canal here starting in the 19th century. Back then, Panama formed part of Colombia.
In 1878, the Colombian government awarded the canal contract to the French. Colombia reasoned the French knew canal-building — they had pulled off the Suez Canal in Egypt.
The United States, however, protested strongly. American diplomats warned Colombia: “The French exploited Egypt, and now they seek to exploit you. This whole scheme is a trap; do not let them ruin you.”
Sure enough, the French project collapsed. They copied the Suez design wholesale, ignoring the vastly different terrain and climate of Panama. Meanwhile, the United States worked relentlessly to sabotage French efforts, demonstrating how treacherous Latin American ventures could be. The excavation stalled one-third of the way through, half-finished and abandoned.
With the French gone, the United States offered to take over the failed project. The Colombians saw clearly: no sensible party picks up a botched megaproject for nothing. The French had pursued a commercial enterprise, but the Americans’ relentless eagerness to build the canal hid far bigger ambitions. Colombia rejected the U.S. proposal.
But Colombian refusal would not stop the United States. Far from it.
The Americans devised a solution that cut the problem off at its root. In 1903, with U.S. funding and military backing, landowners and elites in the Panamanian isthmus broke away from Colombia and proclaimed the Republic of Panama. Faced with the U.S. Navy, Colombia backed down.
For the Americans, single-mindedly focused on the canal, this removed the Colombian middleman entirely. Panama’s first president shouted as he read the declaration of independence: “Long live the United States! Long live Roosevelt!”
That same year, the U.S. and Panama struck a deal. The United States won rights to build and operate the canal — and more than that. It gained control of a narrow strip of land 16 kilometres wide on either side of the waterway, totalling roughly 1,400 square kilometres. This zone was treated as U.S. territory, governed under American law, known as the Panama Canal Zone, home to U.S. troops and U.S. Southern Command.
The newly founded Panamanian government may have put on a smile, but ordinary Panamanians did not welcome the American presence. Though the canal became one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, Panamanian citizens reaped almost none of its profits. U.S. policy toward Latin America had long followed this pattern: extract wealth sustainably until nothing remained.
The Panama Canal opened officially in 1914. Vessels from both oceans flooded through, generating tens of millions of dollars annually in tolls for Washington. How much rent did the U.S. pay Panama at first? Just 250,000 dollars per year.
That was only the starting rate. In 1936, amid widespread Panamanian protest, the rent rose to 430,000 dollars. By 1955, it climbed to 1.93 million dollars — a sum that sounded generous only on paper.
Panama itself had little domestic shipping demand, so the canal served almost no local transport needs. The surrounding land stayed under U.S. control, and canal operations rested entirely in American corporate hands. Panamanians were confined to the lowest-paid labour roles, earning one-third the wage of American workers doing identical jobs.
Worse still, the treaty granted U.S. troops free movement across Panamanian soil. Resentment simmered deeply among the public.
In 1956, Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal electrified Panamanian activists, who began demanding full control over their own canal. The United States insisted it held undisputed, full sovereignty over the Canal Zone.
On January 9, 1964, a Panamanian student carried his national flag into the zone and asked for it to be raised alongside the Stars and Stripes. U.S. soldiers beat him and tore the flag apart. The atrocity enraged the whole nation. Thirty thousand Panamanians marched into the Canal Zone, demanding their flag fly. The clash left 22 dead and 325 wounded. Angry crowds attacked U.S. information offices and the American embassy.
Driven by public fury, the Panamanian government severed diplomatic ties with the United States, and January 9 was declared a national day of mourning. Ironically, this bloody incident drew little global attention. Western media stayed silent, and the Soviet Union, pursuing détente with Washington, had its TASS news agency cover the event with minimal fanfare.
Still, the violence of January 1964 stoked anger across Latin America. The United States was forced to accept international mediation and enter fresh treaty talks with Panama. Negotiations dragged on for four years without agreement.
In October 1968, a military junta seized power in Panama. Washington saw this as an opportunity.
During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union practised hegemony, yet their logic differed sharply.
Soviet hegemony disregarded national sovereignty, ready to intervene in the internal and foreign affairs of other states. This mindset reached its peak with Brezhnev’s 1968 “limited sovereignty doctrine”: the interests of the socialist commonwealth took precedence, and individual nations’ sovereignty was secondary; Moscow could intervene when deemed necessary. The doctrine sent a chill through socialist states.
Soviet hegemony carried another side, though. If a state aligned with Moscow, the Soviet Union would support it substantially. Nations such as Cuba and North Korea received heavy Soviet support. At the height of Sino-Soviet friendship, Soviet aid to China once equalled 7% of the USSR’s national income. Soviet assistance often prioritised geopolitics over financial returns. That, however, is a separate story.
American hegemony operated by a different rulebook. Ideology mattered far less than compliance with U.S. interests. If a leader guaranteed American priorities, they became “a friend of the American people”. This standard kept figures like Pinochet, Mobutu, Duvalier and Somoza firmly in power. Washington’s assessment was simple: they were useful, and that was enough.
At first, U.S. officials were optimistic about Panama’s new strongman, Omar Torrijos. Trained at an American military academy, he seemed ripe for Washington’s influence. American policymakers believed money would turn the newly empowered junta away from popular demands and toward cooperation with the United States.
They miscalculated badly. Once in charge, Torrijos hardened his stance rather than bending to U.S. pressure.
Torrijos came from a poor background and spent his whole career as a professional soldier. Even in his youth, he despised the caudillo system of rule, built on collusion between landowners, military strongmen and the church. Early in his career, he was ordered to suppress guerrilla fighters; after meeting them, he nearly defected to their side. He remained in the military hoping one day to dismantle that caudillo order.
In 1968, his chance arrived. He overthrew the oligarchic civilian government and became Panama’s de facto ruler as commander of the National Guard.
Military juntas were common across Latin America, many of them brutal, censorship-heavy regimes. What made Torrijos’s government different?
One night, a drunk man came shouting insults outside Torrijos’s house. Guards moved to remove him, but Torrijos stopped them. “Let him be,” he said. “When he tires of shouting, he will leave.” The man kept raging, however. Torrijos dressed and stepped out onto the street to shout back — an infamous moment in Panamanian history.
Once in power, Torrijos abolished the old oligarchic system and brought farmers and workers into political life. He said: “With the old order gone, a Panamanian’s worth no longer depends on birth, hometown or family name.”
He expanded public investment, built infrastructure and carried out land reform. Most importantly, he built Panama’s public healthcare system. He ordered every new medical graduate to serve two years in rural communities and build local clinics, bringing widespread medical care to Panama for the first time.
Under Torrijos, Panama’s finance and tourism sectors began to grow — industries that would later define the country.
A man of simple habits, he usually wore military fatigues and often walked among farmers in rural Panama in plain clothes. He explained his vision to ordinary people with plain words: “Revolution is like sawing wood. Sometimes you push forward, sometimes you pull back, but overall, you cut deeper.”
So how did he deal with the United States?
U.S. envoys met Torrijos with an offer: cooperate with Washington, and he and his family would never want for money again.
They did not know Torrijos had already said: “I do not seek a place in history. I only want our canal back.”
Torrijos burned to recover the canal, yet he kept a cool head. He discouraged crowds from storming the Canal Zone, warning: “If we force our way in, only American bullets and Panamanian bodies will be left behind.”
Torrijos understood that Panama, a tiny nation, could not retake the canal by force alone. To pressure the United States, he needed to rally international support.
In the 1970s, courting Soviet backing would have been the cheapest way to counter the United States, yet Panama was already heavily infiltrated by U.S. intelligence. Torrijos feared an open Soviet alliance would trigger an immediate American invasion, so he avoided asking Moscow for help.
Starting in 1971, he negotiated directly with President Nixon, demanding a new canal treaty. Nixon dragged his feet; talks stalled for two years with no progress.
In 1973, Torrijos seized an opening and hosted a UN Security Council session in Panama City to debate the canal dispute. Though the United States vetoed any binding resolution, Panama’s cause won broad global sympathy and embarrassed Washington.
In early 1974, Henry Kissinger travelled to Panama and laid out a new U.S. negotiating framework: the United States would recognise Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone and set a firm deadline to hand over control. Panamanian negotiators were stunned by the concession.
This shift tied closely to domestic American chaos. Nixon was mired in the Watergate scandal, on the brink of resignation, with little bandwidth for a drawn-out Panama fight.
As expected, once Nixon left office and Ford became president, the U.S. backtracked, and talks stalled once more.
Negotiations accelerated only after Jimmy Carter took office in 1977.
Carter’s willingness to compromise stemmed from two factors. First, Carter was known for his peace advocacy; many of his signature diplomatic wins involved peace settlements, which partly explained his landslide defeat to Reagan after one term. Second, the Soviet Union was on the global offensive across Asia, Africa and Latin America in the late 1970s. With the Cold War balance shifting against the U.S., Washington dared not crush Panama outright.
Torrijos seized this narrow window of opportunity. In September 1977, Carter and Torrijos signed the Torrijos–Carter Treaties. The United States formally recognised Panamanian sovereignty over the Canal Zone and agreed to transfer full control of the canal to Panama on December 31, 1999. Panama, in return, guaranteed the canal’s permanent neutrality.
The treaties sparked fierce pushback in both nations. The U.S. Senate hated Carter’s concessions and only ratified the treaties after attaching many caveats.
Many Panamanians were also dissatisfied. They would still wait 23 years, and the “permanent neutrality” clause contained enough ambiguity to leave Panama short of full autonomy over the waterway.
Yet Carter and Torrijos knew neither side could concede further, and they fought to bring the treaties into force. Torrijos described the deal this way: the new treaty was like a grain of sand in a shoe — uncomfortable, but one they must wear for those twenty-three years.
Still, against overwhelming odds, Torrijos had secured Panama’s rightful claim to the canal. He became a national hero, and the United States grew to resent him deeply. Carter might accept Torrijos, but many inside the U.S. national security apparatus did not.
On July 31, 1981, Torrijos’s plane crashed. Panama was devastated. Decades later, evidence emerged confirming what many suspected: the CIA had orchestrated the assassination, and one of the men involved was Manuel Noriega.
Few humiliations compare to offering someone money and being refused. One thing is worse: someone who takes your money, then refuses to do your bidding.
Manuel Noriega may be the CIA’s most notorious “asset”, the spy handler’s worst nightmare.
Noriega’s family was destitute. Abandoned at age five, he grew up in an orphanage. His life reads almost like a rags-to-power story. A strong student, he wrote in his high-school diary: “If I become president of this republic one day, I will drive the Americans out.”
He meant those words when he wrote them. But Noriega was a man of many oaths, and his promises were as brittle as potato chips.
Despite his anti-American teenage writings, he began trading information with U.S. intelligence in his early twenties, selling student protest intelligence to the CIA for his first payment: ten dollars.
He sold intelligence cheaply because greed and lust guided his choices. When the CIA offered steady cash, Noriega agreed without hesitation.
He joined Panama’s military in the 1950s and was recruited as a CIA informant while studying at military school in the 1960s, drawing a monthly salary close to one hundred dollars. That sum was substantial for a cadet back then, yet it never covered his lavish spending.
Short and plain-featured, Noriega was a frequent client of prostitutes. Even with CIA payments, he often ran out of funds. At one point, he was arrested in Peru for refusing to pay a sex worker; U.S. agents bailed him out.
The CIA did not write him off over the incident. Instead, they saw his endless appetite for money as a guarantee he would remain a reliable ally.
After returning to Panama, Noriega rose fast thanks to his intelligence work, becoming a close aide to Torrijos while continuing to pass information to the CIA. But he was far more than a double agent.
Noriega’s rule was simple: take money wherever it appeared. He collected payment for gathering intelligence on Americans for Torrijos; he was paid to arm Nicaraguan opposition groups; he sold weapons to Nicaragua’s government for another fee; he took cash to plot against Fidel Castro for the U.S., then took more money helping Cuba evade U.S. sanctions. He embezzled CIA funds and stole from Panamanian state coffers, juggling deal after deal.
U.S. handlers never expected absolute loyalty. Their verdict: Noriega could be rented, but never bought.
As his power grew, tensions between Noriega and Torrijos worsened. Torrijos cracked down hard on gambling, prostitution and drugs, while Noriega built ties to those criminal networks and faced repeated reprimands from his superior. Torrijos never fully trusted his ruthless subordinate.
Torrijos often insisted Noriega travel on the same plane as him, watching for signs of treachery. Even so, he could not escape the fatal crash.
After Torrijos’s death in 1981, Noriega pushed rivals aside and seized full power in 1983. Washington celebrated.
Carter’s treaties had set the canal handover in motion, but Reagan, now president, had no intention of honouring that timeline. Reagan sent quiet messages to Noriega, pressing him to renegotiate and delay the transfer.
Noriega was corrupt, but sharp. Reclaiming the canal was the shared, non-negotiable goal of the whole nation, and he knew the American demand was impossible.
Now holding power and no longer desperate for cash, his dormant anti-American streak surfaced.
Once in charge, Noriega insisted the United States abide strictly by the 1977 treaties, with no room for renegotiation. He amended Panamanian law to ban any sale or lease of national territory.
Washington was stunned. The man they had bought for decades was digging in his heels on the canal. When persuasion failed, they set out to remove him.
Panama’s political structure split formal civilian leadership from the military’s real power. The United States tried using the nominal elected president to strip Noriega of authority. Every time the president moved against him, Noriega removed the president instead. Over six years, he ousted five civilian heads of state.
With internal regime change impossible, the United States resorted to criminal charges. Noriega had indeed struck deals with the Medellín cartel, turning Panama into a transit hub for cocaine.
American moral standards have always shifted conveniently. Few know the CIA was deeply entangled in the same drug trade. CIA agents once helped Colombian traffickers move cocaine into the United States to fund secret operations in Iran. In Afghanistan, the CIA taught anti-Soviet fighters how to grow opium, even distributing guidebooks, helping turn Afghanistan into a global opium producer.
You might wonder how that squared with America’s drug enforcement agencies. Large bureaucracies are siloed; different branches pursue separate priorities. One division’s mission rarely accounts for the drug crisis created elsewhere. No one in Washington faced sanctions for those operations.
But once Washington targeted Noriega, every old offence was brought forward. Starting in 1986, the U.S. indicted him on five major counts: drug trafficking, arms smuggling, human rights abuses and espionage. Every charge was true — yet every illegal venture relied on U.S. complicity. Without American backing, many of those crimes would never have happened.
Noriega dismissed all accusations as American slander. So long as he held the guns, he denied everything.
In March 1988, the United States imposed sweeping economic sanctions. It froze all Panamanian assets held in the U.S. and withheld canal toll payments owed to Panama. The damage was immediate. Half of Panama’s factories shut down, thirty percent of the workforce lost their jobs, and food shortages spread.
As Washington expected, Panamanians took to the streets demanding Noriega’s resignation to end the blockade. Yet Noriega rallied, using his reserves to buy food and distribute aid, easing hardship and urging national unity. Sanctions alone failed to force him out.
With sanctions ineffective, the U.S. plotted again. In October 1989, dissident Panamanian military officers contacted Washington, seeking U.S. support for a coup and protection for their families. The U.S. agreed, planning a coordinated overthrow.
The coup launched on October 3, 1989. Rebels arrested Noriega as he arrived for work. Hours of fighting followed, but loyalist troops counterattacked, freed Noriega and crushed the uprising.
Where was the promised U.S. support? The coup leader had acted in excitement and forgotten to send the prearranged signal. U.S. troops stood ready, waiting for word that never came. By the time Washington learned of the fighting, the revolt was nearly over. The United States offered vocal encouragement and nothing more.
By late 1989, nearly every playbook had failed: political pressure, economic embargo, coup plotting. Only one option remained: direct military invasion.
On December 15, 1989, Panama’s national assembly formally named Noriega head of state. In the early hours of December 20, F‑117 stealth bombers opened the first strikes. President George H. W. Bush ordered the invasion, codenamed Operation Just Cause. More than 27,000 U.S. troops deployed into Panama.
U.S. heavy bombing hit key sites across the country, killing hundreds of civilians. The 101st Airborne Division raced for the Panamanian Defence Force headquarters, certain Noriega had stayed there the night before. When special forces burst into his bedroom, they found only a naked Nordic woman. Noriega was gone.
Soldiers questioned her, but she could not say where he had fled. Troops searched everywhere and dragged a naked young man out of a filing cabinet — still not Noriega. It was clear he had slipped away.
A veteran intelligence operator, Noriega had foreseen the invasion and prepared escape routes. He even ordered loyal troops to don civilian clothes and launch counterattacks, striking U.S. Southern Command. The resistance could not turn the tide, however.
Panamanian troops fought bravely, yet organised resistance collapsed within three days of the invasion. The U.S. occupied most of Panama and offered a one‑million‑dollar bounty for Noriega’s capture.
Noriega drove alone, evading U.S. search parties, until the afternoon of December 24. Cornered, he sought asylum at the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See in Panama City. The Vatican mission granted him refuge on humanitarian grounds.
Word reached the White House within twenty minutes. U.S. forces ringed the embassy completely and pressed the Vatican in Rome to hand Noriega over.
To break his resolve, U.S. troops set up banks of loudspeakers outside the compound, blasting rock music on repeat. U.S. intelligence had learned Noriega preferred classical music; they hoped rock would feel like unbearable noise and wear him down psychologically.
Protesters, organised by the U.S., also gathered around the walls, shouting insults and demanding he surrender.
Noriega later said the room where he hid was windowless and sealed, with only one door; the noise barely reached him. The Vatican staff inside, however, endured the harassment for days, pushed to the brink of breakdown.
The standoff lasted ten days. Eventually, the Holy See yielded to relentless U.S. pressure and told Noriega he must leave the embassy.
At 8:30 p.m. on January 3, 1990, Noriega surrendered on his own terms: he insisted on walking out in full military uniform. He emerged from the nunciature and was taken into U.S. custody.
A U.S. court sentenced Noriega to 145 years in prison, later reduced to 17 years. When his sentence ended in 2007, he did not gain freedom. He was extradited to France to face money‑laundering charges and sentenced to another seven years. Noriega knew CIA hands were behind the sequence of prosecutions, but in his seventies, he could fight no longer.
He died of illness in May 2017, aged eighty‑three.
Noriega was a flawed, unscrupulous man, yet he never sold Panama’s sovereignty. Washington had hoped removing him would let the U.S. retain control over the canal. But Guillermo Endara’s new U.S.-backed government stuck firmly to the 1977 treaty. Fearing global condemnation, the United States dared not overthrow another recognised Panamanian administration.
On December 31, 1999, the final day of the millennium, Panama formally took possession of its canal, fulfilling the long-held dream of generations.
To hold onto the Panama Canal, the United States tried everything: invasion, regime change, backing one government after another. The leaders they toppled were oligarchs, warlords and civilian politicians. Whether principled or corrupt, none would fully submit to American demands. Behind every leader stood the Panamanian people, who refused to surrender. When the people do not fear death, what terror can you hold over them?
Torrijos had sensed his fate long before the crash. He told those close to him: “I will not die in bed. If I fall one day, lift our nation’s flag, kiss it, and carry it forward.”
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