Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How The U.S.A. Murdered Panama with Chelsea Manning

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Robert is joined again by Chelsea Manning to continue discussing the United States and Panama. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. PUDDcast. Part two, Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards, Panama, Chelsea Manning. Guess, Chelsea, how are you doing on several minutes after we last on? Hey, how's it going? It's still snowing.

Still snowing. It is not snowing here. The snowpocalypse is starting to end here. So I wanted to chat about something before we get back into Panama. I've become aware that the state of Ohio is advertising on our podcast a lot about how good a place to move Ohio is. Well, that's because everywhere is Ohio. Is it? It's all Ohio. It's all. It's just Ohio straight on down. I don't know. My experience in Cleveland suggests that there's something unique about Ohio. Maybe it's the way the river repeatedly caught on fire

in the 70s. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's a, there's a vast conspiracy that has been keeping this from you that every, every, everywhere is Ohio. It's just all Ohio's. Yes. Well, that's actually the greatest tragedy I can imagine. But I'm not, I'm not on the pro Ohio faction. Why is, why is Ohio choosing to advertise on our podcast? I think they think that a lot of our, they're trying to get people to start businesses in Ohio.

Okay. I don't, I don't know why. I just didn't want anyone to think that I'm a shill for Ohio. I'm, this is a firmly anti Ohio podcast. Yeah. I was going to say, we're not into that. Which I guess according to Chelsea means that we're now anti the entire world. So. Because everywhere is Ohio. I guess we're going to have to go full Joker here. So if you are in a nuclear silo 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 FaceTiming with my mom, because Robert is only showing the top of his forehead on the video chat. Okay. Well, I, I have to be in. Shout out my mom. I'm in a McMansion right now and it doesn't have a good recording room. Shout out to my mom. Who is the best person? Petty bourgeois.

This is, this is the pettiest bourgeois place. I mean, that's Plano in a nutshell, right? It's the land of $30,000 millionaires. It's where my chips come from. 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 Frito, Leia, or Raytheon. So it's a great place in other words. 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 1800s or 1900s. Yeah. Well, the whole time really. So when we last left Panama, it was being turned into a canal in order to further U.S. financial and military interests. Obviously, as we talked about with the Suez Canal, which killed 120,000 people, building canals is a terrible thing to do. You should never make canal.

At least they didn't have a biome to deal with. Jesus. I mean, yeah, it was, it was a bad, like Panama was a, not as rough as Suez, obviously, but was a rough place to build a canal. And the work couldn't be done entirely by non-white people whose deaths 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 cause, transmit both malaria and yellow fever. Now, the man put in charge of this Titanic effort was Dr. William Gorgias. Born Gorgias, I guess, G-O-R-G-A-S. I don't think it's pronounced gorgeous.

Born in Alabama in 1854 to an explosives expert, young Will grew up obsessed with the military. He later admitted to skimming the Bible just so he could read all of 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 U.S. invasion in 1899. The Americans in Cuba ran into the same problem that they would later hit in Panama, disease. In Cuba's case, this was yellow fever. Gorgias was put in charge of the effort of ridding

the island of mosquitoes. His first task was to mandate that all Havana residents 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 bodies of water. And in about eight months, Gorgias 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 white people to live in. And he was considered a natural fit for the job of ending malaria in Panama. The Canal Treaty the U.S. had signed with some guy who wasn't Panamanian, gave the United States the right to administer sanitation not just in the canal zone, but in all Panamanian cities and any land the U.S. might later decided

wanted to use for some reason. Gorgias just 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 whatever we want. The canal zone leads 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 decree 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 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 Gorgias took were pretty reasonable, but things very quickly turned authoritarian. Inspectors were sent to enter every single home in Panama City and 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 to make sure that people are not creating breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The bulk of U.S. efforts, however, were devoted to an omnicidal war on nature in order to reduce the mosquito population. And I'm going to 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 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 canal zone were cut or burned during the construction period, wrote the chief sanitary inspector in 1916, which increased evaporation from sunlight, shortened the mosquito season, and 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 near their houses without detection, he added. Another important tactic was to spread oil and other larvasides on all standing water, which killed mosquito larvae by depriving them of oxygen.

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 65,000 gallons of crude oil a month on the isthmus' waters. So they are just pouring gasoline into fresh water in order to kill mosquitoes. Man versus nature, we're winning the war. All it took was poisoning the thing we need to survive with gasoline. As Gorgias 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 some cases to malarial mosquito incubators of the kind that Gorgias' sanitation department was opposing fines on Panamanians to eliminate. The canal work itself was constantly creating the most desirable places for the same great biological purpose, wrote Gorgias' widow. Every time a steam shovel made a deep hole, water would almost immediately collect, and the anopheles, malarial mosquitoes, would at once seek such a depression as a breeding ground. In 1912, for example, the suction dredgers employed to deepen the canal ditch in 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 anopheles' mosquitoes. As a result, the death rate from malaria in 1906 was higher than it was for workers from the French canal effort from 1888 to 1903. So there's a couple of fascinating things about how badly they fuck 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 holes, which fill up with water, and by poisoning huge chunks of jungle and turning them into swamps. So 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 I think is fascinating is just like looking at the map here, like the Gatton locks are like the shortest section of the entire, like they have to make this huge cut through the mountains on the east side, but on the west side, they have like this very short thing, but it's like, it's biologically treacherous. It's, you know, it's got, it's got all the standing water everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's a fascinating situation that I didn't realize, like, I assumed, because I'd heard as a kid that like the Panama Canal, a bunch of people died from malaria. I'd assumed it just because there's a ton of malaria, malaria-less mosquitoes, like in, in the area. I didn't realize that like, number one, we brought

a lot of the problem 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, no. It was bad engineering. Yeah. It was 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 U.S. occupiers concerned themselves with fighting, despite the fact that pneumonia actually killed more people. From 1906 to 1907, pneumonia killed twice as many

workers as malaria. But 90% of the people who died of pneumonia were classified by the U.S. as colored, and thus their deaths were considered acceptable. Gorgas 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 disease that affected white people in the tropics. Oh, that's, that's, and that's interesting. I mean, that is interesting. It is. Yeah. I mean, it's fun, but it's also interesting. Like, yeah, 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 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 it was both the dust and there was another factor in like why the pneumonia was so bad. Right. 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 brought brought into Panama live in these filthy converted boxcars where they sleep six dozen to a room and there's no mosquito screens. And they often had to use jars and bottles as their bathrooms because the actual outhouses

were distant and like across a swamp or something. Got it. So, and, you know, this is again how the, the, the black Caribbean employees are being treated. All white employees received furnished apartments in the cities. And they probably just didn't even get a proper diagnosis for like, no, for like basic bacterial infections. No, of course not. And this is a pre-panicillin. This is pre-panicillin 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 spreads so much. And they also don't care about pneumonia because it's not hurting white people, which is great. And the reason and there was like this was not

just taken for granted. They spent time to justify why white workers needed furnished apartments while black workers could live in these like filthy crowded boxcars. And the reason that white people needed a more comfortable living situation was to stave off degeneration. So, there were 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, 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, says a lot. It's just bad to be in the white. It's toxic just to white people. Now, another school of medical thought at the time, championed by men like Gorgas, believed that white people could live in the tropics, given proper sanitation and segregation to, quote, keep their blood pure. Children who were brought to the tropics were thought to be put at risk by contacts with the natives, which Navy Surgeon General Stitt claimed is apt to have a detrimental effect upon children's moral and mental outlook. Now, this is so much worse than I thought. Oh, my God. Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, that we're building to the story of how the U.S.

exported Jim Crow to Panama. So one story, one solution to the problem of like that, it's dangerous for white people to be in tropical conditions for too long was to give white workers regular extended vacations back north, a privilege which was not extended to nonwhite 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 1910, the international frenzy over phrenology reached the canal zone. Doctors started collecting autopsy data on dead canal workers to answer questions, quote, concerning certain racial features. They noted brain weight, skull thickness, cephalic index, skull shape, and homicidal 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 a death from disease. They decided that this was so common with black workers, 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 genetically had, quote, a striking lack of appreciation for a dangerous environment. So the reason so many of them are getting crushed by machinery isn't because we're the they're the only ones that we have doing this manual labor. And because we have no safety

procedures, it's because their brains aren't capable of understanding danger. It's good stuff. Real. This is very bleak. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This was a rough read. That book, Emperor's in the jungle is a fucking bleak read. Now, the dangers of the tropics for white people were not seen as a reason to avoid colonizing tropical climates by everyone, at least Gorgas 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. 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 Gorgas, and I know I'm pronouncing his name differently every time, but fuck him, the repeated failure of Gorgas and other tropical doctors to actually defeat the diseases they were trying to fight led 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 fact of all of these people that we have imported into Panama. So there's there's layers of horrific stuff going on here. It's very deep. You have terraforming. You have a terraforming 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. Yeah. It's like being like given like, you know, like, like just like just like sort of like with being in trance and sort of the trans community. It's like, oh, you know, like, you know, you have to have a gatekeeping 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 like a layer cake of bigotry. Like the sediment of racism in this is is very complicated and deep, which I think is rad, personally, that it's such a complex level of horror. I am not going to use. I'm not going to say that. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's

obviously horrific, which is why we're talking about it. So I'm going to quote from Emperor's in the jungle, because that book has a very good passage on how Gorgas and his fellow doctors blamed the black Caribbean's that they were bringing into Panama for the fact that their disease control measures failed. What was needed, according to Dalifrey's Curry, a canal zone health officer in the 1920s, 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 those are black Caribbean's, that's what they call them as period is West Indians, were seen as disturbingly negligent. As elsewhere in the world,

the enforcement of sanitation among the Negroes is a gigantic task, wrote William Deeks, director of the medical service during the construction era. As long as he has a roof over his head and a yammer to eat, he is content. And his idea of personal hygiene is on par with his conception of marital fidelity. In these circumstances, 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 U.S. project in canal is is it's just racism all the way down. You know, it's it's it's you can't overemphasize how bigoted it is and stays until the fucking 1990s. 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. Didn't hear any of this loss over all that. Yeah. So during the construction of the canal, which took place from 1904 to 1914, 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 U.S. then imported Jim Crow laws to Panama as well, effectively creating a massive new racial underclass in that country. Most white people had no contact with their black coworkers 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 dung heap of physical and moral abomination. A U.S. congressman called the black population of Panama, which the U.S. 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. We're such a good country, really nailing 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 U.S. acted quickly and brutally to stifle anything that smacked of independence. Panama initially had its own military, a small group of 250 men led by General Esteban 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 exist purely for U.S. profit. In 1904, 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 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. Oh, wow. Yeah. So we just get rid of that army. We're like, you know what? If these people have an army, that might be a problem for us doing whatever we want in Panama. Let's just X-nay on the snarmy. I'm not great at pigletting. Hey, it's a pulling up all wolfowitz. Yeah. Yeah. They got wolfowitz good. Like, we'll just disband this army and this police apparatus. Yeah. No, I mean, unlike in Iraq, there's only 250 of these guys. Right. It's a lot easier. Yeah. It's a lot easier, but it is the same basic idea, you know? So the U.S. was extremely active in asserting its influence over Panamanian politics. In 1918, the president died suddenly, and Panama announced an indefinite

postponement of elections. U.S. troops occupied the cities, and U.S. general Richard Blatchford basically became the dictator. This was never called what it was. Officially, the Panamanian state had just delayed elections. But the reason for it all was World War I. The U.S. could not afford to let the Panamanian people decide 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 was icky, and he had all the guns. I don't like it. Yeah, 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 U.S. troops. As he wrote back to Washington, the United States has rid 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 course, alcohol? Blatchford was unsuccessful in forcing prohibition on Panama. Oh, imagine that, especially with soldiers there and Marines. He did briefly succeed in getting the country to ban bars and opium dims from serving U.S. soldiers, but he did not shut them down throughout the entire country. As John Lindsay Polin writes, their prohibition remained in effect until Armistice Day in November, when hundreds of soldiers broke away from the bases on the Atlantic after months of 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 soldier's carnal behavior, he condemned Panama City and Cologne, suggesting they'd be 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 fault of these damn Panamanians that American soldiers want to drink and whore. I think American soldiers have never done anywhere else. Never. It's never happened. It's never happened to every single installation that we've ever had. I mean, it's not just even the marriage. It's literally the thing that every

group of soldiers throughout the entirety of world history has always done. Yeah, the age bracket of 16 to 25-year-olds. Yeah. If you are asking these people to die for you, you can't ask them not to drink and whore. They're going to do it. 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 continued until 1925. A massive renter's strike had erupted in Panama City among a population of 20,000 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 shit in the middle of an economic depression that hit Panama after the canal was finished. Because of segregation, they were only able to live in certain neighborhoods, and their housing was uniformly squalid and ill-maintained. Property owners announced red hikes that June and several labor unions formed a renter's league to boycott rent. There were regular protests over evictions, and on October 10th, a peaceful demonstration was met with gunfire by Panamanian police, who killed two people. 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 600 U.S. Marines into the city with bayonets fixed. The protesters initially fled, but later that night, a gathering of the gathering assembled around the burial of one of the slain protesters. U.S. troops showed up there, and after a confrontation, charged into the crowd with bayonets and stabbed three people to death. U.S. 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 captain as saying, the nucleus of a revolution is a bottle of rum,

two half-breeds, and a negro armed with rifles and machetes. Solid journalism. Who should we talk to about this? Who should we talk to about the fact that our soldiers stabbed three protesters to death? Find a cruise ship. It was clearly just whoever was drinking next to the New York Times reporter on that boat. What do you think about this? I got to file something. So as a rule, U.S. intervention in Panama tended to fall into one of two categories. Interventions in order to further specific U.S. foreign policy goals, and interventions made on behalf of the Panamanian elite who ruled the country on the U.S. government's behalf. This was 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 mass eviction of thousands of tenants. He was overruled by the State Department. So the Canal Treaty that Roosevelt had overthrown a government to get was never much more than a convenient fiction. The U.S. 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 19 occasions from 1908 to 1931. The U.S. military would take land that we decided we wanted for some reason, and we would notify the Panamanian authorities later. No compensation was ever given. The land was necessary in order to allow the U.S. government to expand its military

facilities. Panama was used as a base for Latin American interventions throughout the 20th century. Our old friend, Smedley Butler, was based there during his two trips into Nicaragua to put down political movements that were seen as counter to U.S. interests. Yay! Panama was also the initial site. I know that guy. Yeah, I heard of that guy. He was based there whenever he would go into Nicaragua to kill people. Panama was also the site for the School of the Americas, where the U.S. trained tens of thousands of Latin American soldiers and more than a dozen future dictators, including Panama's own future dictator, Manuel Noriega, who we will be chatting about in just a little bit of time. Buffer! Noriega! Buffer, you gotta take one of those things.

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That is correct. This is going to radically change the direction of the show. Sorry. Yeah. I'm going to have to recalibrate here. So let's get back to Panama. Now, we just were talking about Manuel Noriega in the School of the Americas. And we will get back to Manuel Noriega in just a little bit. But first, Chelsea, how do you feel about chemical weapons? How do I feel about chemical weapons? Yeah. Are you a big chemical weapons stand? Well, you know, there's varying degrees of chemical weapons that are 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. I take it we're talking about HC now. We're talking about everything up to and including VX nerve gas. Wow. Yeah. So starting in the thirties, we were like, chemical weapons are awesome. World War One was a hoot. We're going to use these things more in the future. I wonder how they work in tropical climate. So we decided we wanted to know how this shit worked in tropical climates. And since we owned Panama, it was the natural place to dump chemical weapons into. General William Sebert, a World War One veteran and quote,

a staunch advocate of all forms of chemical warfare, in his own words, was made director of the Army's chemical weapons program from a write up. So this is a true hober 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 going to quote from a write up titled TestTube Republic, Chemical Weapons Tests in Panama and US Responsibility. After the war, Sebert became a vocal proponent of the continued development of chemical weapons. When the armies were provided with masks and other defensive appliances,

something less than four percent of gas casualties were fatal. Sebert ruminated. These figures, I think, meet one of the chief objections brought against the use of gas, that of humanity. 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 of 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 European Indians actually died from chemical warfare. Once 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 Sebert was basically saying it's humane and that it can't kill that many white people. It's pretty good. Pretty good stuff. So in 1921, the chemical warfare service was told to draw up plans for defense of the canal zone and other outlying U.S. possessions. The first chemical defense plans were thus drawn up in 1923 and would be updated every year through at least 1946. 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 firing chemical mortars at military targets as well. So our plan was, if anyone invades the Panama Canal, we just dump 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 U.S. chemical weapons tests continued for decades, well after U.S. forces in Panama faced any threat of invasion. Huge chunks of jungle on San Jose Island were regularly exposed to mustard gas and host gene gas just to see what would happen. Munitions were stored in open top buildings exposed to the elements. And yeah, they're like, so they just kind of left this stuff there and they would drop tens of thousands of chemical bombs on particularly San Jose Island and about one

10 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 that we just kind of were like, maybe they'll figure it out. Maybe they won't. Which is rad. Starting in the 1960s, VX nerve gas mines were tested and each of these mines contained 10.5 pounds of VX. Since 10 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 just kind of detonating these in the middle of the jungle, seeing what happened. It's pretty cool. Boom. 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 shitboard Nazi scientists have gotten up to. Goats and rabbits were fitted with various gas masks and gas just to test the efficacy of the weapons. 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. NUS experiments did not say limited to nonhuman animals. The United States partnered with the Canadian government to investigate whether or not different ethnicities were affected differently by chemical weapons. Puerto Ricans and Caucasian human beings were gassed alongside each other to see if any differences

arose. Medical historian 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 that the military testing involved, among other things, the aerial release of mustard gas over soldiers via airplanes in order to later examine and compare their blisters and other injuries. Now, NPR 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 in how they responded. Oh my God.

All of the gassed 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 say a lot. It does say a lot about the United States and Britain. Basically, all of these things were pre... All the things that we associate with Nazi Germany were being done 30 years earlier. Yeah, and 20 years later, we keep doing this until 1968.

Like, yeah, it's pretty great. I'm going to quote from NPR's right up on this. All of the World War II 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 health care 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 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 NPR's findings and was quick to put distance between today's military and the World War II experiments. The first thing to be very clear about is that the Department of... It was a different time. It was a different time. Yeah, the Department of Convinced does not conduct chemical weapons tests any longer. And I think we have probably come as far as any institution in America. We want the Department of War then. We want the Department of Defense. 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 jarring. It is a little bit jarring. Yes. More than a hundred experiments were conducted on human beings on San Jose Island. Lopez Negron, now 95 years old, was one of the test suspects and was 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 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 like he'd been asked to serve as 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. NPR writes 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 weapons tests in Panama stopped in 1968. And again, we just kind of left everything sort of where it was when we finally let Panama be a sovereign nation. Because we were doing it. Because we had, we could test it in Vietnam instead. Yeah. And we just left it behind there too. Like just an uncountable number of deadly weapons. We just left sitting on an island and we were like, yeah, we took everything, we cleaned up.

It's fine. There were people who tried to build resorts on San Jose Island and kept finding like chemical weapons. It was a real problem. And we lied to the Panamanian government about this. We have mostly cleaned it up now, I think in 2018 was the last time I was able to find a USCBRN Army unit being sent to San Jose to disarm chemical bombs. 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 like legal cases around it. I found an article in 2001 where a journalist went there and just was like picking up chemical munitions that were covered in rust. It was like, oh, this is a VX nerve mind that just didn't go off. That's filled with enough poison to kill half of the people. Yeah. Um, so the end of US domination of Panama started as a result of things that happened on January 9th, 1964. There had been protests over US violations of Panamanian sovereignty for years at this point. In 1955, 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 US treaty that gave us the canal in perpetuity. Demonstrations grew in intensity throughout the late 1950s. One major cause 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 US had kind of been fucking over the Panamanian 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 that Bernard Sanders shot Kennedy dead in 1963. When JFK took office, the issue of US sovereignty over the canal was still

technically on the table, but LBJ was never going to do that. To be honest, JFK probably wouldn't have either. And the even discussion of US sovereignty being given up over the canal enraged a lot of US citizens. And I'm going to quote from American Heritage here. Any hint of concession worried the ultra patriotic US citizens who lived and worked in the zone. Kennedy's declaration that the US 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 7th, 1964. The teenagers guarded the flag for two days before a group of 200 Panamanian students marched from nearby Panama City intent on raising their own banner.

During the ensuing scuffle, 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 US Army took over, responding to the violence with tear gas and rifle fire. Ascanio Arosimina, a 20-year-old student on his way to a movie, stopped to help evacuate some of the wounded. He was shot dead. Now, as you might expect, this sparked more demonstrations. Protesters rallied at what they called the Fence of Shame, which is a name I might have to steal at some point. One Colombian 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 10th. There were demands that the US hand over the canal entirely. US and Panamanian soldiers exchanged gunfire for days. At one point, Americans hosed down an apartment building in an attempt to take out a sniper. Instead, they killed an 11-year-old girl named Rosa Landecho. So, pretty bad, pretty bad time. And by the way, this date, which is January 9th, 1964, is still a holiday in Panama to this day because of this fight over the flag and all the death that result from it. The violence continued for four days while LBJ 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 Zone's governor, Robert Fleming, started pressing Washington to sign a new treaty, telling DC, quote, the plain fact is that we must begin treating Panamanians as people. Wow. So, the US governor of the Canal Zone was like, yeah, we got it. We got it, guys, we got to treat these folks like human beings. Otherwise, we're going to continue having problems here. Someone had to say that. It's pretty remarkable. So, yeah, the governor of the Canal is like, we have to finally start treating Panamanians as people. And three years of negotiations follow that, but little actually gets done. There's resistance from Americans and from elite

Panamanians. A lot of the Panamanians in charge want the US to stay because the US have been consistently their armed enforcers, right? 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 Vichy government. In 1968, a Panamanian National Guard officer named Omar Tariho seized power and replaced 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 Tariho was a long-time US military asset. He'd been recruited as a spy in 1955, paid $25 a month to inform the US on labor

unrest, student activities, and Soviet Chinese penetration. During the 1964 flag riots, Tariho's helped to suppress the popular unrest. One US military intelligence operative even helped him plan his 1968 coup. So, Tariho was a US asset, but he was also willing to push for Panamanian control of the canal. So, he's a complicated figure, and he's viewed as a hero still by a lot of Panamanians, because he is committed to the Panama getting control of the canal. 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 US says. So, it's always more complex than just he was getting paid to be a spy. He still has desires outside of US desires, which is why

certain things happen that happen later. So, real talks over Panamanian sovereignty of the canal took place during President Jimmy Carter's term. Tariho's lucked out that his time and power happened to coincide with the election of the only vaguely reasonable man ever elected President of the United States. In 1979, at basically the last moment, such an act of baseline decency would have been possible from the United States, Carter and Tariho signed and ratified a new canal treaty. This promised a total handover of the canal to Panama by the end of 1999. So, that's good, right? We took about, 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. Still a canal zone. Yes, because the CIA was not happy about it. And remember, we're talking about the 1970s CIA in Latin America, was just the CIA's CIA to ever CIA. They promptly tried to overthrow Tarihos and they failed, thanks to the efforts of a National Guard officer who subsequently rose to became Omar Tariho's right-hand man, Manuel Noriega. Now, and by the way, Noriega was also a US Army spy asset for years. Of course. This is a running theme in US intelligence history. It's amazing. So, when the CIA failed to unseat Tarihos by blatant and shameless coup,

they decided the right thing to do was to ingratiate themselves with Noriega, who they correctly judged was a man 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 Tarihos idea, in order to keep a, quote, open line of communication with the agency that might stop future coup attempts. There is one common theme in US history, and that is, especially intelligence history, and that is that there's this tendency to arm your future enemies,

to arm and train your future enemies. And this tendency that we see in Syria, right, with, you know, kind of the differences between the CIA backing what they call the moderate rebels in the defense department backing Rojava. And it's the same thing happening in Panama, where the armies 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 is missed on a lot of left-wing analysis of like the CIA and the military is that they do often hate each other. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, like they're fighting as much as they are working together.

So, yeah, Noriega claims that Omar Tarihos told him to become a 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 consummate liar. Now, one of Noriega's gigs for 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 US back channels to Castro. Now, more than anything, though, 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, or had plans for Noriega. And they involved planes. And they involved planes and cocaine, yeah. And yeah, we'll do a whole episode on the crack epidemic and the cocaine trade and the CIA and the DEA at some point. But this all intersects with it. Now, in 1981, Omar Tarihos 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 shit the CIA did repeatedly in this period of time. So probably. We don't know, but we don't not know. That's what you're saying.

Yeah, we don't not know. And it's not like it's not like it would be out of character. That's the kind of gray area that that intelligence operations fluidly operate. Yeah, you can't prove we did this. You know, we've done the same thing to other people, and you know, we would benefit from it. So see ya. It's great, Robert. Yeah, Sophie, 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, actually, Ohio would absolutely,

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Which we all live in. Which we all live in, which is the world. All right, so whatever the truth of Omar Torreo's assassination actually is, and again, it's probably the CIA killed him, the political climate in Panama suddenly improved for the United States after his death. Imagine that. Imagine that. John Lindsay Poland writes,

Panama's support included the use of its territory for joint military maneuvers and covert training, use of U.S. bases for logistical supply and intelligence flights to El Salvador and Honduras, and training of troops from the region in the school of the Americas, where more than 1,800 Salvadorian soldiers took courses in combat tactics, intelligence, logistics, and other military subjects from 1982 to 1984. According to Dwayne Claridge, who was the chief of the Latin American division of the Central Intelligence Agency,

Noriega helped the CIA set up a short-lived training camp for the Nicaraguan Contra's Southern Army in 1983. Noriega also provided a lover north with a pair of demolitions experts who helped blow up ammunition storage dump in Managua, Nicaragua, in March of 1985, which rocked the capital. So we use the shit out of Panama in this period of time. In 1984, massive and sweeping electoral fraud led to the election of President Nicolas Ardito Barletta, a close friend of U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz,

who attended his inauguration and went on to invest huge amounts of money and time into Theranos. That's George Schultz. In 1984, 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. And as a result, from 1980 to 1987, Panama received more than $47 million in U.S. military equipment and training, three times what it had received in the preceding 30 years. The goal of all this was twofold, to turn the Panamanian National Guard into a U.S.

loyal force and to ensure the men who rose through its ranks and thus were in a position to seize power, if needed, were sympathetic to U.S. goals. Now that the U.S. had its picked man, Noriega, in an advanced position with the army and had a whole bunch of promising young officers who'd received U.S. training in indoctrination, we were more or less happy to let Panama have an army again. The National Guard transitioned into a proper military force in 1983. Noriega was its first chief, and that same year, 1983, he became the de facto military dictator of Panama.

So again, we elect 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 U.S. 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 him at least $162,000 during this period, successfully pushed to keep him safe. Yeah, really seems kind of low. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's about the range of the CIA.

Double dipping is a popular thing among U.S. informants. Yeah, yeah, he's getting money from the CIA and from the from the CIA, which is really the way to do it. Which compete? Yeah, which compete. And they are the ones who keep him safe from like the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which is the precursor to the DEA. And in fact, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs had known Noriega was a massive coke trafficker since at least 1972, when they attempted to or they pushed to assassinate him, which was a thing we used to let them do. It's just like assassinate foreign leaders for drug

trafficking, probably still do. But again, he's kept safe consistently by his backers first in the Army, then in the CIA and the DIA. So in 1983 and 1985, the Reagan White House received intelligence reports that Noriega had 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 21-gun salute. But things were fine for Noriega until the end of 1986, 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 at Nicaragua, which of course had been trained in Panama. This was explicitly forbidden both by an arms embargo against Iran and by the Boland Amendment, which made it illegal to fund the Contras. This made what Reagan and his cronies did at least light treason. A separate scandal for a separate podcast. 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 DoD's bag man, and CIA director William Casey were forced out of their jobs. An expert shredder. 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. We're destroying the largest, you know, the reputation of the largest gun lobbying group. Gun lobbying group in the country. Yeah, Ollie, what a great man. Ollie North. So North, this was a problem, the fact that North and Casey are out of their jobs following Iran Contra because North and Casey had been Noriega's main points of contact. It had been them and George H.W. Bush had been the guys most responsible for defending him from the rest of the government over his cocaine trafficking. So once they're out, Noriega's in deep shit and things get worse and worse for him throughout 1987. Panicked by his loss of support, he cut off ties with the

Medellin cartel in desperation. This was not enough to stop him from getting indicted by grand juries in Miami and Tampa in February of 1988. The U.S. placed economic sanctions against Panama. And the goal at this stage was to force the man from power. From the beginning, though, Southcom, the U.S. 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 Noriega's Panama did what sanctions always do. They harmed poor people by 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 nationalist saber rattling. It was not hard for him to get many Panamanians on his side against the U.S. for reasons that should be obvious based on the rest of these episodes. Now, during his run for Congress, candidate George H.W. Bush 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 politician like George H.W. Bush, you know that within every problem is a solution. The month that Bush was elected president, Newsweek published an article titled, The Crack Nation. And I'm going to quote from Emperor in the Jungle about how

this all gets tied to Noriega. The article was focused on, that country in our midst, 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 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 U.S.-based accomplices. Attacking

the enemy high command is a good strategy. So suddenly, George Bush has a way out of this problem. 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 1989, The New York Times published an average of 101 stories about drugs per month, three times the rate they'd published in 1988. Drugs, particularly crack, were referred to as a plague and a foreign scourge. Breathless op-eds worried about crack use 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 their children in mansions was the way to do that. Time called the crack epidemic a plague without boundaries, and as John Lindsay Polin 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 U.S. forces are justified in going into any place, even sovereign nations, in order to fight the crack epidemic. Go to the source. Yeah, go to the source, which you might argue was the CIA, but in May of 1989. Not that far, not that far. Not that far, not that far. Go up to the guy they're paying who isn't, yeah, an American citizen.

So in May of 1989, Noriega suspended Panamanian elections 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 team to go to Panama and try to find a solution, maybe to try to find a way to get Noriega to peacefully leave power and end the crisis. The U.S. did not think that this was mediation was the thing to do. So instead, they sent in 2,000 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 of this policy was to provoke confrontations between Panamanian soldiers and U.S. soldiers. Now, a 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 U.S. militaries to justify further interventions in the country. So it didn't look like we were just invading a sovereign nation. You need a dead American servicemen, really, if you're going to truly fuck some shit up. So while all this is going on, Noriega was doing standard dictators shit. He sent his soldiers after the vice presidential candidate, a guy named Guillermo Ford, and he sent a lot of his supporters. And his supporters

killed Ford's bodyguard. And suddenly, all these images of Ford with blood sprayed across his white shirt went viral internationally. Now, because Noriega was a populist, he had kind of he'd spent 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 shit for them, he was seen as standing up to the United States. And so they supported them because he helped them out and because they hated the U.S. So the video of this attack, which every U.S. 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 supporters beating a white man in the streets. And every U.S. broadcaster placed 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 agent of the U.S. government. But it works in the American news, right? It builds 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 Noriega 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? Bolivar. Yeah, Bolivar. It's a tool of revolution. It's also a tool of daily life. But again, when 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'd been presented in the early 1900s under Roosevelt, right? It's the same basic tactic. And it's the same, in a lot of cases, the same news organs that are pushing this disinformation. 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 in 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 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. Nope. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So of course, they're all of this manufactured concept. That's exactly what's going on in the documentary, The Panama Deception does a great job of just cutting together. There will be like 30 different like clips from different primetime news segments all using the same phrase, government goons to refer to this mob. And there's a bunch of different cases like that. Because they got the same memo. Because they got the same memo. Now, of course,

throughout all of this, pressure to deal with the crack epidemic was also building. In 1989, President Bush made his first televised speech. He focused on the crack epidemic and held up a baggie 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 DEA 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 bought within sight of the White House. That's the story for another day, though. For now, I just want to repeat something John Lindsey Polin 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 64% of respondents believe 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 wimp. The president had been willing to ruin a young black citizen's 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. General Polin 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 near boiling over. In 1987, it had become clear to even the most dedicated Cold Warriors that the USSR was not long for this world. This meant an end to 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. Wagelstein, who coordinated the US military intervention in El Salvador in 1987, 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, amelding 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 guerrilla 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. Yeah, there's a lot going on here. Yeah, it's fun when you see it right now. But it all leads, but it all leads in one direction. It does lead in one direction. And what he's talking about, we chatted about 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 60s and 70s, because the right-wing death squads are so fucking brutal and because there's like a strong social justice component to aspects of Catholic theology. And this really pisses off the Americans because it means that US backed groups keep murdering 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 contrast for a second. Forget about the contrast for a second.

Think about crack. Now, by all accounts, this strategy was a staggering success. In 1989, 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 explains why- I didn't know that. Yeah, isn't that cool? That makes sense. They should be the ones doing that. Now, 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,

Abrams battle tanks, stealth bombers, and a whole bunch of Nido 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 that's a problem. They're excused to use that. Within a few years, they will be used. Yeah. And it'll turn out none of it really helps when shit gets that dark. Nope. So their excuse to use that stuff came in December of 1989 as a result of some of the soldiers Bush had ordered to drive around on Panamanian roads, being jackasses and doing exactly that.

The facts of the story are that on December 16th, four American officers in civilian clothes in a private car were stopped at a Panamanian checkpoint close to PDF headquarters. They'd 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. The Defense Department alleged that the men were unarmed and that they'd 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 LA Times reported, the killing of a U.S. Marine

Lieutenant by Panamanian forces last December, an event used by President Bush in part to justify the invasion of Panama was not the unprovoked act of 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 U.S. troops who called themselves the hard chargers and who frequently tested the patience and reaction of Panamanian forces, particularly at roadblocks, 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, President Bush immediately gave orders to invade. And invade we did. The U.S. launched its attack

on Panama on December 20, 1989. It would be the bloodiest war on Panamanian soil in 90 years. The United States owned the most advanced and deadly military apparatus in 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 3,000 men. Needless to say, U.S. forces tore through them with basically no resistance. Most of our air assets and artillery focused on shelling heavily populated areas. The Panamanian military headquarters was located in the mostly black and indigenous, densely peopled El Cherio neighborhood. The U.S. gave 10 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 $50 million F117A Stulk Bomber was deployed in combat. The Stulk Bomber was invisible to radar, which didn't matter because Panama did not have radar. Didn't have any radar. Yeah, 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 300 yards. That's a huge range. Yeah, it's three football fields. Which is again, every time. That's a half a grid square. Yeah. Anytime someone in the military to 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 States bomb a 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 World War One dropping them out of a cockpit. But it is not very precise. Well, that's like 300 yards. It's huge. That's half a grid. That's like a third to half a grid square. Yeah. That's, you don't like, like, whenever I think, whenever I think like precision, I'm like, oh, yeah, like, you know, a tenth of a grid square. Yeah. You know, 100 meters, like 100 meters, give or take. That's pretty good. 300 meters is a wide miss. Yeah. And we didn't find that out for a month. You'd be better off, you know, World War Two bomber pilot, you know. And one of the

thing that's happening here is the U.S. press corps that's supposed to cover this is embedded with the Defense Department, who make sure they're only getting the best story. And the Defense Department makes sure they arrive several days late so they miss the fighting. There are a couple of journalists, including a local Panamanian journalist 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 a gated tour of all of this. And that's why the initial reports from Panama are just talking about 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 El Churio, the neighborhood around the panamanian defense. It's level. It looks like they just wipe this place off the face of the planet. We have precisely eliminated this entire grid square. We're all of the poor people live. We're all of the black and indigenous residents live. Now, wealthy neighborhoods were avoided and preserved during the U.S. invasion. And in fact, when U.S. 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 U.S. 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. I'm going to quote again from emperors in the jungle. The impoverished community of San Miguelito was also bombed. Across the town at Puentapatila, wealthy Panamanians watched the invasion from their condominiums and expensive high rises. At nearby Patilia 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 for SEALs lost their lives in the operation. No such care was taken with the PDF headquarters next to El Cirillo, where U.S. forces bombed from the air. Their tracer bullets and flares

contributed to the configuration 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 in 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 El Cirillo, where people are poor, we just fucking level it. Pretty bad. Pretty bad. Pretty bad, Chelsea. But it's not the good imagery that, you know, it doesn't make for good CNN cuts. Not what Peter Jennings talks about at the time. Now today, the Defense Department officially recognizes 516 deaths, mostly civilian, as a result of U.S. actions in Panama. An internal Army memo put the death toll at more than 1,000.

Central American Human Rights Commission estimates between 2,000 and 3,000 dead, and I've heard estimates of about 3,500. You have to expect a couple of thousand, is the likely death toll. Yeah. Ballpark 800 to 1,700. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. Definitely more than the United States is willing than the DOD is willing to admit. And those deaths were just the start. More than 18,000 Panamanians were rendered homeless by the invasion. More than 5,000 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 U.S. forces executed civilians during the occupation. Mass graves were dug and filled with corpses

and would be uncovered for years afterwards in Panama City. And this is a tiny country. Very small place. And the mass graves suggest the DOD undertook extensive efforts to hide the death toll. Some of these corpses are found in handcuffs with bullets in the back of their skulls. It's bad. It's very bad what happens in Panama. 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 Santoria, a religion popular in the Caribbean. The military, prodded by the DOD, used this to suggest that Noriega's supporters were devil worshipers. The military claimed that 110 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, vats of blood, animal entrails, a picture of Adolf Hitler, spiked healed shoes, more than 100 pounds of cocaine. All were part of the bizarre scenes encountered by American troops as the storms Noriega's inner sanctum. I do like your L.A. Times voice. That's amazing. Now, Chelsea, you want to guess what that 110 pounds of cocaine actually was? I'm going to guess sugar or something. Tamales. Tamales. Okay. Tamales. Wow. It took a month for us to find out that it was tamales, that he just had a house full of tamales

and the animal guts 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 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 on set. 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, the U.S. got the right to maintain their military presence in Panama. After all, Panama didn't have a military anymore, so they were going to need protection.

Convenient. Yeah. And that's basically the end of the story. You know, eventually the U.S. pulls most of its stuff out of Panama. It takes another couple of decades. And people would forget about Panama. Yeah. And people forget about Panama. Noriega dies in U.S. custody in 2018, I think. And yeah, that's that's the story of the U.S. and Panama. Horrible. And I'm proud to be an 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 a Twitter account. It is twitter.com forward slash xychelsey. I have a Twitch account which is twitch.tv forward slash xychelsey87. And those are my two social media accounts.

You can figure out all the things that I do. I am a Twitch streamer as well as a Twitter. Yay. Tweet out with your feet out and think about Panama. And I just play video games. I just play Minecraft. A little bit of harmless Minecraft. A little bit of harmless Minecraft. Maybe a little bit of political commentators ships on from time to time. Yeah. I mean, you have a famously positive relationship with the U.S. government. So I can only imagine what some of your tweets are about. Ah, yeah. I try to keep... I try to... I try to... I hold my tongue a little bit. Yeah. All right. Well, hold your tongues on Twitter or not,

because there's effectively very little moderation on that platform. Let's go. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific

price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the

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