***** Noam Chomsky, "The Victors: Part I"
Z Magazine, November, 1990
[Note: Chapter 7 of Deterring Democracy is based in part on this essay.]
...We may conclude this survey of the triumph of free market capitalism in Central America with a look at Panama, recently liberated by Operation Just Cause....
...Central American sources continued to give considerable attention to the impact of the invasion on civilians, but they were ignored in the occasional reviews of the matter here. New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter devoted a column to casualty estimates on April 1, citing figures as high as 673 killed, and adding that higher figures, which he attributes only to Ramsey Clark, are "widely rejected" in Panama. He found Panamanian witnesses who described U.S. military actions as restrained, but none with less happy tales.26
Among the many readily accessible sources deemed unworthy of mention in the Times (and the media generally), we find such examples as the following.
The Mexican press reported that two Catholic Bishops estimated deaths at perhaps 3000. Hospitals and nongovernmental human rights groups estimated deaths at over 2000.27
A joint delegation of the Costa Rica-based Central American Human Rights Commission (CODEHUCA) and the Panamanian Human Rights Commission (CONADEHUPA) published the report of its January 20-30 inquiry, based on numerous interviews. It concluded that "the human costs of the invasion are substantially higher than the official U.S. figures" of 202 civilians killed, reaching 2-3000 according to "conservative estimates." Eyewitnesses interviewed in the urban slums report that U.S. helicopters aimed their fire at buildings with only civilian occupants, that a U.S. tank destroyed a public bus killing 26 passengers, that civilian residences were burned to the ground with many apartments destroyed and many killed, that U.S. troops shot at ambulances and killed wounded, some with bayonets, and denied access to the Red Cross. The Catholic and Episcopal Churches gave estimates of 3000 dead as "conservative." Civilians were illegally detained, particularly union leaders and those considered "in opposition to the invasion or nationalistic." "All the residences and offices of the political sectors that oppose the invasion have been searched and much of them have been destroyed and their valuables stolen." The U.S. imposed severe censorship. Human rights violations under Noriega had been "unacceptably high," the report continues, though of course "mild compared with the record of U.S.-supported regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador." But the U.S invasion "caused an unprecedented level of deaths, suffering, and human rights abuses in Panama." The title of the report is: "Panama: More than an invasion,...a massacre."28...
26 Rohter, "Panama and U.S. Strive to Settle on Death Toll," NYT, April 1, 1990. 27 Excelsior-AFP, Jan. 27 (LANU), March 1990; Mesoamerica (Costa Rica), May 1990; CAR, March 2, 1990. 28 Brecha, CODEHUCA, "Report of Joint CODEHUCA-CONADEHUPA delegation," Jan.-Feb. 1990, San Jose.
<http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/chomvic1.htm> *****
***** 4. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO PANAMA IS A DIFFERENT STORY
SOURCES: Panama Delegation Report Date: 3/1/90 Authored by the Central American Human Rights Commission
SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN Date: 9/26/90 Title: "The hidden body count" Author: Jonathan Franklin
60 Minutes Date: 9/30/90 Title: "Victims of Just Cause" Author: Mike Wallace
WASHINGTON POST Date: 6/30/90 Title: "How Many Died in Panama, letter con't.," Author: Joanne Heisel
THE NATION Date: 6/18/90 Title: "The Press and the Panama Invasion" Author: Marc Cooper
According to a variety of non-mainstream but authoritative sources, the U.S. invasion of Panama on December 20, 1989, received inadequate and erroneous news coverage. It now appears that the legal implications of the invasion, the Bush-Noriega relationship and the actual post-invasion conditions in Panama have all been misrepresented to the American people. But perhaps the most fraudulent news coverage dealt with the true numbers of civilian and combat fatalities.
Official accounts spoke of 202 dead Panamanian civilians, 314 dead Panamanian soldiers, and 23 dead Americans.
The press was oddly silent two months after the invasion when a Southern Command official acknowledged to the L.A. Times that only 50 Panamanian soldiers died. And, American soldiers reported that at least 60 to 70 Americans were killed, possibly many more. Apparently some combat deaths were disguised as accidental deaths unrelated to the invasion. The new findings indicate that the U.S. lost more soldiers than Panama. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has challenged the government figure of 202 dead civilians and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has put the figure at 3,000, using the phrase "conspiracy of silence" to describe efforts to bury the true civilian death toll. The official U.S. report was based on unconfirmed battlefield observations and mortuary and hospital statistics. PHR's investigation tallied burial sites, mortuaries, hospital records, and interview with officials.
In addition to Stealth Bombers dropping 2000-pound bombs, U.S. soldiers are reported to have directly fired upon civilian homes with machine guns, rockets, and tanks in the barrio of El Chorillo surrounding Noriega's headquarters. U.S. soldiers evacuated apartments and summarily burned them to the ground. Witnesses reported U.S. troops killing wounded civilians with either gunshots or rifle-butts to the head.
CBS's 60 Minutes, in a September 1990 expose, reported the existence of at least six yet-to-be-exhumed mass graves to
conclude that Panamanian civilian deaths could run as high as 4,000. The findings of many watch groups support the 60 Minutes casualty report. Peace and Justice in Panama, The Central American Human Rights Commission, Panamanian National Human Rights Commission, Panamanian Episcopal Commission and the National Lawyers Guild all calculate the death toll to range from two to four thousand.
The actual death toll has been obscured through U.S. military practices of incineration of corpses prior to identification, burial of remains in common graves prior to identification, and U.S. military control of administrative offices of hospitals and morgues, as well as the removal of hospital and morgue registries from their original sites. The U.S. retained direct and full control of Panamanian media until mid-February. And U.S. journalists were sequestered in military barracks for the first 36 hours of the invasion and then saw only official authorized sites.
<http://www.projectcensored.org/c1990.htm#4> *****
Also, see _The Panama Deception_, dir. Barbara Trent (1992).
Yoshie