Manuel Noriega: Messed Up Details About The Notorious Dictator

Manuel Noriega, the eccentric and sadistic dictator of Panama, was once in possession of a powerful political network that included an eclectic array of allies from Cuba to the United States to the Colombian drug cartels. A friend to everyone and to no one, he fell from power in a spectacularly dramatic fashion after provoking the enmity of the U.S.

Noriega came from a relatively humble background but rose to power by becoming indispensable to another Panamanian dictator, Omar Torrijos. Exercising his sharp intelligence and moral flexibility, he helped keep Torrijos in power throughout the 1970s. Noriega was a nightmarish figure long before he took over as dictator, with a history of rape, torture, and murder preceding him. 

After Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981, Noriega became the de facto ruler of Panama, installing a series of puppet presidents to do his bidding. The state he created has often been referred to as a "narco-kleptocracy," designed to service drug dealers and those looking to launder money. Eventually, Noriega's crimes could no longer be ignored — after becoming increasingly repressive at home and aggressive toward the U.S., American soldiers arrived to remove him during a full-blown invasion in 1989. 

Here are just some of the messed-up details about the notorious dictator Manuel Noriega.

Manuel Noriega would grow up to become a classicly eccentric dictator, whose strange mix of childishness and brutality made for an unsettling personality. The Los Angeles Times highlighted that when American troops broke into his home following the dictator's fall, they found an odd mixture of teddy bears, barbie dolls, and model frogs, accompanied by pictures of sociopathic authoritarians, such as Adolf Hitler and Napoleon. Noriega's obsession with volatile strongmen is well-known — not least because he included a veritable love letter to Mongol warlord Genghis Khan in a treatise he wrote about the benefits of psychological warfare. Muammar Kadafi was another one of his idols; his home was plastered with images of the North African despot.

Apart from toys, Noriega also had an odd fascination with religion, accruing ephemera from multiple faiths, perhaps in an attempt to hedge his bets. His house contained a Christian shrine — although he was supposedly a Buddhist — and he took an interest in magic, voodoo, and protective talismans. The deeply superstitious dictator kept a personal sorcerer on hand for magical assistance. Noriega's own writings suggest that his interest in faith also went beyond the purely cultural — he regarded religion as an age-old form of psychological control, a topic that fascinated him throughout his life.

For Manuel Noriega, rape and murder were no barriers to achieving gainful employment with the United States government. While in military training in Peru, Noriega was recruited by the CIA, and his working relationship with American intelligence agencies would last for many years. By the time Noriega had become the dictator of Panama, he was still receiving payments from the CIA of around $200,000 a year.

In general, Noriega was part of the American effort to undermine leftist activity in the Americas. In his early days, he informed on the United Fruit Company workers and their unionizing activities, and later he offered to help the U.S. during the Iran-Contra scandal that unraveled under Ronald Reagan. At the time, Noriega agreed to provide training to anti-communist Contra fighters who were active in Nicaragua.

Unfortunately, America's deal with the devil also had some pretty outrageous consequences. During the Contra affair, Noriega helped ship weapons between the U.S. and Central America. At the same time, he packed the planes headed back to Texas with piles of cocaine as part of a drug-smuggling operation.

In addition to international espionage, Manuel Noriega made a great deal of money from the Latin American cocaine trade. Making an agreement with legendary Colombian narco, Pablo Escobar, Noriega allowed the Colombians to use Panamanian airstrips to move goods abroad. R.M. Koster writes in his "Life in the Time of Tyrants," that Noriega received up to $500,000 per flight (as well as little cocaine for himself) in exchange for his assistance. On one occasion, according to The Washington Post covering Noriega's 1991 trial, Escobar also once offered Noriega six French prostitutes as a deal-sweetener. Noriega's planes took the cocaine deliveries from Panama through Texas throughout the 1980s, part of an efficient supply chain that stayed under the DEA's radar for many years.

Although the U.S. was aware that Noriega had some role in the drug trade for quite some time, they looked the other way while he was a useful ally. Eventually though, as Noriega became more authoritarian in the mid-1980s, his drug smuggling became increasingly unacceptable to the American authorities. Noriega was indicted on cocaine-trafficking charges in 1988, a year before he fell from power.

When Manuel Noriega ran Panama, the country increasingly offered money-laundering services to anybody who needed them — most especially Colombian drug dealers. Panama's status as a hub for dirty money has outlived the dictator himself and is still a problem today, exposed most recently by the Panama Papers.

John Dinges, in his book "Our Man in Panama," records that Noriega's drug-smuggling operation with the Colombian cartels eventually expanded to include cleaning dirty money as well. To facilitate these cleaning trips, Pablo Escobar bought a special plane for use in the operation. The jet was fitted with false compartments in the nose, designed for hiding tons of cash.

Panama's Bank of Credit and Commerce International (the BCCI) in particular gradually became an infamous money laundering outfit for narcos, but many other Panamanian banks were involved as well. Panama has historically allowed an unusually high level of secrecy in its banking system, and the origins of dirty money are usually never investigated. Under Noriega, suspicious boxes of money regularly showed up at airports in Panama, waiting to be cleaned, no questions asked. Groups like M-19, the pro-Cuban guerrillas who terrorized Latin America in the 1980s, chose Panama to launder their money during the Noriega regime.

Manuel Noriega's authoritarianism, drug trafficking, and secret selling gradually eroded his relationship with the U.S. In 1986, the U.S. demanded his removal from Panama, and in 1988, he was indicted for drug trafficking and money laundering by the American courts.

Rather than trying to make amends, Noriega foolishly became openly anti-American, publicly launching into anti-American tirades while brandishing a machete. In 1989, the Panamanian National Assembly declared war on the U.S. in an act of suicidal hubris. However, America did not react until December of that year, when an unarmed American soldier was shot by Panamanian forces. Keen to avenge the killing, and eager to remove an unstable maniac from the vicinity of the strategically invaluable Panama Canal Zone, America went to war.

The invasion that followed proved to be extraordinarily brief. Noriega's forces were no match for American arms, and the dictator himself immediately hid and ran, sealing himself away in the Vatican embassy in Panama City. In one of the most bizarre maneuvers in history, U.S. Gen. Maxwell Thurman surrounded the building with loudspeakers and smoked him out with a playlist of classic rock anthems. Using the combined power of Guns N' Roses, Billy Idol, and Black Sabbath — music Noriega purportedly hated — the Americans forced the dictator to give up after less than two weeks of hiding. He was subsequently flown to Florida to face criminal charges.