Speaker 1: Mcast, Part two, Robert Evans Behind the Bastards, Panama, Chelsea
Speaker 1: Manning guests, Chelsea, how are you doing? On several minutes
Speaker 1: after we last off, Hey, how's it calling? Uh, it's
Speaker 1: still snowing, still snowing. It is not snowing here. The
Speaker 1: snow apocalypse is is starting to end here. So I
Speaker 1: wanted to chat about something before we getting back into Panama.
Speaker 1: I've become aware that the state of Ohio is advertising
Speaker 1: on our podcast a lot about how how good a
Speaker 1: place to move Ohio is. Well, that's because everywhere is Ohio,
Speaker 1: is it? It's all Ohio. It's a it's just Ohio
Speaker 1: straight on down. I don't know. My experience in Cleveland
Speaker 1: suggests that there's something unique about Ohio. Maybe it's the
Speaker 1: way the river repeatedly caught on fire in the seventies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you know it's it's Uh, there's a vast conspiracy
Speaker 1: that has been keeping this from you, that every every
Speaker 1: everywhere is Ohio. It's just all Ohios. Yes, well, that's
Speaker 1: actually the greatest tragedy I can imagine. But I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm not on the pro Ohio faction. Why why is
Speaker 1: Ohio choosing to advertise on our podcast. I think they
Speaker 1: think that a lot of are They're trying to get
Speaker 1: people to start businesses in Ohio. Um, I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't know why. I just didn't want anyone to think
Speaker 1: that I'm a chill for Ohio. I'm this is a
Speaker 1: firmly anti Ohio podcast. I was going to say, we're
Speaker 1: not going to guess, according to Chelsea, means that we're
Speaker 1: now anti the entire world. So because everywhere is Ohio,
Speaker 1: I guess we're gonna have to go full joker here.
Speaker 1: So if you are in a nuclear stilo right now
Speaker 1: listening to a podcast that you have saved on your phone,
Speaker 1: I guess we're now advising you to start the apocalypse.
Speaker 1: So also, I just want the listeners to know that
Speaker 1: I feel like I am now face timing with my
Speaker 1: mom because Robert is only showing the top of his
Speaker 1: forehead on the mid shot. I have to be in
Speaker 1: I'm gonna Mac mansion right now and it doesn't have
Speaker 1: a good recording room. Shout out to my mom, who's
Speaker 1: the best person. Petty bourgeois this is this is the
Speaker 1: pettiest bourgeois place. I mean, that's PLAINO in a nutshell right,
Speaker 1: it's the land of thirty millionaires. Um, yeah, it is
Speaker 1: where it is where all of your chips and all
Speaker 1: of your your missile guidance systems come from my my
Speaker 1: high school. Like most of the kids there's parents either
Speaker 1: worked for Friedo Lay or Ray Theon. So, Um, it's
Speaker 1: a great place. In other words, Um, it's not Chelsea.
Speaker 1: Are you ready to dive into America's war on biology
Speaker 1: in order to make Panama safe for white people? Quite
Speaker 1: frankly no, but I think we're going to do that anyway.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what Panama said back in the eighteen well
Speaker 1: the whole time really, So when we last left Panama,
Speaker 1: it was being turned in a canal into a canal
Speaker 1: in order to further US financial and military interests. Obviously,
Speaker 1: as we talked about with the Suez Canal, which killed
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty thousand people, building canals is a
Speaker 1: terrible thing to do. You should never make canals. At
Speaker 1: least they didn't have a biom to deal with Jesus.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it was. It was about like Panama
Speaker 1: was not as rough as Suez obviously, but was a
Speaker 1: rough place to build a canal. Um, and the work
Speaker 1: couldn't be done entirely by non white people, whose desk
Speaker 1: could be easily ignored by the United States, and this
Speaker 1: is why they had to quest to make the canal
Speaker 1: zone biologically safe, which mostly meant eliminating mosquitoes which could
Speaker 1: cause transmit both malaria and yellow fever. Now, the man
Speaker 1: put in charge of this Titanic effort was Dr William
Speaker 1: Gorgeous born Gorgus I guess g O R g A S.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's pronounced gorgeous. Born in Alabama in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty four to an explosives expert, Young will grew
Speaker 1: up obsessed with the military. He later admitted to skimming
Speaker 1: the Bible just just so he could read all of
Speaker 1: the battle scenes. William tried to enroll in West Point
Speaker 1: as a young man, but he failed to make the cut,
Speaker 1: and instead he went to Bellevue Medical School and then
Speaker 1: joined the army as a doctor. He served on the
Speaker 1: frontier during the Indian Wars, particularly in South Dakota, and
Speaker 1: then he was stationed in Cuba. After the US invasion
Speaker 1: in eight The Americans in Cuba ran into the same
Speaker 1: problem that they would later hit in Panama, disease in
Speaker 1: Cuba's case, this was yellow fever. Gorgas was point was
Speaker 1: put in charge of the effort of ridding the island
Speaker 1: of mosquitoes. His first task was to mandate that all
Speaker 1: Havannah residents cover cover cisterns, which are like open pots
Speaker 1: of water, or pay a fine. He devoted army engineers
Speaker 1: to the task of filling in and eradicating all standing
Speaker 1: bodies of water, and in about eight months Gorgons succeeded
Speaker 1: in wiping out yellow fever in Havana. So it seemed
Speaker 1: like he was pretty good at this job of making
Speaker 1: tropical islands and tropical areas safer for for white people
Speaker 1: to live in uh and he was considered a natural
Speaker 1: fit for the job of ending malaria in Panama. The
Speaker 1: Canal Treaty the US had signed with some guy who
Speaker 1: wasn't Panamanian gave the United States the right to administer
Speaker 1: annotation not just in the canal zone, but in all
Speaker 1: Panamanian cities in any land the US might later decided
Speaker 1: wanted to use for some reason. Gorgons thus became the
Speaker 1: director of public health for the whole nation. In effect,
Speaker 1: at least, so this treaty where we're like yeah, we
Speaker 1: could basically do what everyone in the canal zone. Leads
Speaker 1: to us being able to put a guy in charge
Speaker 1: of public health for all of Panama. And when I
Speaker 1: say he's in charge of public health, he's not really
Speaker 1: in charge of everyone's health. He's in charge of ensuring
Speaker 1: public health of the white people in Panama. Right. His
Speaker 1: first degree was that all man made bodies of standing
Speaker 1: water must be eliminated. It turned out that the French
Speaker 1: canal builders had started a practice of leaving open water
Speaker 1: jugs at the base of their bed legs to keep
Speaker 1: ants away, which probably explains why so many of them
Speaker 1: died of malaria. The initial steps Gorge Gorgons took were
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable, but things very quickly turned Authoritarian inspectors were
Speaker 1: sent to enter every single home in Panama City in
Speaker 1: Cologne to look for open barrels and jugs of water.
Speaker 1: They did this on a regular basis, and violations were
Speaker 1: punished by fines, so he makes like water police, basically
Speaker 1: to make sure that people are not creating breeding grounds
Speaker 1: from mosquitoes. The bulk of u S efforts, however, were
Speaker 1: devoted to an omnocidal war on nature in order to
Speaker 1: reduce the mosquito population, and I'm gonna quote here from
Speaker 1: Emperors in the jungle. Much of the Sanitary Department's efforts
Speaker 1: focused on the non human world by cutting down and
Speaker 1: poisoning the environment in which insects and rodents lived. Puddles
Speaker 1: of fresh water that formed without human aid made excellent
Speaker 1: breeding places for mosquitoes. One of the methods employed to
Speaker 1: eliminate such breeding places was simply to do away with
Speaker 1: the jungle. Many square miles of jungle in the command
Speaker 1: in the Canal zone were cut or burned during the
Speaker 1: construction period, wrote the Chief Sanitary Inspector in nineteen sixteen,
Speaker 1: which increased evaporation from sunlight, shortened the mosquito season, and
Speaker 1: enabled the sanitary soldiers to locate hidden water. It also
Speaker 1: facilitated sanitary social control. Clearing made it impossible for the
Speaker 1: negroes to throw containers into the tall grass or brush,
Speaker 1: neither houses without detection. He added. Another important tactic is
Speaker 1: to spread oil and other larva sides on all standing water,
Speaker 1: which killed mosquito larvae by by depriving them of oxygen.
Speaker 1: The Sanitary Department devised myriad ways to distribute the oil
Speaker 1: from sprinkling cans to horse drawn oil barrels. At the
Speaker 1: peak of this method, the sanitation men distributed sixty five
Speaker 1: thousand gallons of crude oil a month on the isthmus
Speaker 1: As waters. So they are just pouring gasoline into fresh
Speaker 1: water in order to kill mosquitoes, man versus nature. Winning
Speaker 1: the wall. All the took was poisoning the thing we
Speaker 1: need to survive with gasoline. Yeah. Now, as Gorgeous and
Speaker 1: others pointed out, the importation of a large number of
Speaker 1: foreigners who were not immune to yellow fever favored propagation
Speaker 1: of disease, as the non immunes also became carriers of
Speaker 1: the fever once it was introduced through even a single case.
Speaker 1: The physical construction also radically disrupted the environment, leading in
Speaker 1: some cases to malarial mosquito incubators of the kind that
Speaker 1: Gorgus's sanitation department was opposing fines on Panamanians to eliminate
Speaker 1: the canal. We're itself was constantly creating the most desirable
Speaker 1: places for the same great biological purpose were, wrote Gorgus's widow.
Speaker 1: Every time a steam shovel made a deep hole, water
Speaker 1: would almost immediately collect, and the anopolies malarial mosquitoes would
Speaker 1: at once seek such a depression as a breeding ground.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twelve, for example, the suction dredgers employed to
Speaker 1: deepen the canal Ditch and Gatton pumped immense quantities of
Speaker 1: saltwater and silt into the jungle, killing the trees and vegetation.
Speaker 1: The resulting mass of dead matter generated a swamp that
Speaker 1: attracted swarms of an afolies mosquitoes. As a result, the
Speaker 1: death rate from malaria in nineteen o six was higher
Speaker 1: than it was for workers from the French Canal effort
Speaker 1: from eighteen eighty eight to nineteen o three. So there's
Speaker 1: a couple of fascinating things about how badly they funk up.
Speaker 1: One of them is that they focus all these authoritarian measures,
Speaker 1: basically building a police force to punish black people from
Speaker 1: leading jugs of water, while at the same time they're
Speaker 1: creating these massive miles long mosquito incubators by digging these
Speaker 1: holes which fill up with water, and by poisoning huge
Speaker 1: chunks of jungle and turning them into swamps. So they're
Speaker 1: like they're blaming they're both blaming the mosquitoes having a
Speaker 1: place to breed on black people having jugs of water
Speaker 1: without covers and they're creating land for mosquitoes to breed
Speaker 1: in order to build this canal. It's pretty rad. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And what what I what I think is fascinating is
Speaker 1: just like looking at the looking at the map here,
Speaker 1: like the garden locks are like the shortest section of
Speaker 1: the entire Like they have to make this huge cut
Speaker 1: through the mountains on the on the east side, but
Speaker 1: on the west side they have like this very short thing.
Speaker 1: But it's like it's it's biologically treacherous, it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's got it's got all the standing water everywhere. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a fascinating situation that I didn't realize, Like
Speaker 1: I I assumed because I'd heard as a kid that
Speaker 1: like the Panama and Al bunch people died from Lariay.
Speaker 1: It assume as just because there's a ton of malario
Speaker 1: malarialist mosquitoes like in in the area. I didn't realize that,
Speaker 1: like number one, we brought a out of the problem
Speaker 1: with malaria there by both like the kind of people
Speaker 1: we imported to build the canal, and by the fact
Speaker 1: that we made breeding grounds and we like poisoned the
Speaker 1: jungle with salt water and created a rotting swamp that
Speaker 1: the mosquitoes would love, like I I yeah, I assumed
Speaker 1: it was just like yeah, it was just always really
Speaker 1: dangerous before modern medicine to build stuff in Panama and
Speaker 1: it turns out like no, no, no, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: bad engineering, like we made it so dangerous, which is
Speaker 1: rad now. It's worth noting Chelsea that yellow fever and
Speaker 1: malaria were the only diseases that US occupiers concerned themselves
Speaker 1: with fighting, despite the fact that pneumonia actually killed more people.
Speaker 1: From nineteen o six to nineteen o seven, pneumonia killed
Speaker 1: twice as many workers as malaria, but nine of the
Speaker 1: people who died of pneumonia were classified by the US
Speaker 1: as colored, and thus their deaths were considered acceptable. Gorgus
Speaker 1: and his men were taught were tasked with fighting tropical diseases,
Speaker 1: and in European medical literature at the time, the definition
Speaker 1: of a tropical disease was a zase that affected white
Speaker 1: people in the tropics. That's that's and that's interesting that,
Speaker 1: I mean, that is interesting. It is yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's fun, but it's also interesting, like yeah, just it
Speaker 1: never like you know, like in terms of like how
Speaker 1: it was like how these things were classified. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: had no idea that like that that it was literally
Speaker 1: down to so it's sort of like it was. It was.
Speaker 1: So it's like it's sort of like black lung from
Speaker 1: like being exposed to like construction dust too. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was both the dust and there was another factor
Speaker 1: in like why the pneumonia was so bad, Like obviously
Speaker 1: like the construction by a product, all the oil and
Speaker 1: stuff that's everywhere has an impact. Also, these colored you
Speaker 1: know generally black Caribbean canal workers were bringing brought brought
Speaker 1: into Panama live in these filthy converted box cars where
Speaker 1: they sleep six dozen to a room and there's no
Speaker 1: mosquito screens, right, and they often had to use jars
Speaker 1: and bottles as their bathrooms because the actual houses were
Speaker 1: distant and like across a swamp or something. Um so,
Speaker 1: and and you know this is again how the the
Speaker 1: the black Caribbean employees are being treated. All white employees
Speaker 1: received furnished departments in the cities and they probably just
Speaker 1: didn't even get a proper diagnosis for like for like
Speaker 1: basic bacterial infections. No, of course not. And this and
Speaker 1: this is a pre penilla. This this is pre penisilla too,
Speaker 1: So it's not all on the Some of the difficulty
Speaker 1: with treating it is they don't really know how. But
Speaker 1: the fact that they don't care about these people's comfort
Speaker 1: or sanitation is why pneumonia spread so much. And they
Speaker 1: also don't care about pneumonia because it's not hurting white people, um,
Speaker 1: which is great. Uh. And the reason and there was
Speaker 1: like this was not just taken for granted. They spent
Speaker 1: time to justify why white workers needed furnished departments while
Speaker 1: black workers could live in these like filthy, crowded box cars. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the reason that white people needed a more comfortable
Speaker 1: living situation was to stave off degenerate. So there were
Speaker 1: two schools of medical thought about how the tropics affected
Speaker 1: white people at the time. One school believed that tropical
Speaker 1: climates were inherently and specifically toxic to white human beings.
Speaker 1: As one doctor named Balfour wrote, there are those who
Speaker 1: believe that it is very doubtful if the white man
Speaker 1: can accomplish manual work out of doors under true tropical conditions,
Speaker 1: and that if he tries to do so, he will
Speaker 1: assuredly degenerate. The settlers should drive machines rather than do
Speaker 1: work with their own muscles. And these people form the
Speaker 1: basis of modern medicine. Yeah, yeah, it says a lot.
Speaker 1: It's just bad to be in the white it's toxic
Speaker 1: just the white people. Now. Another school of medical thought
Speaker 1: at the time, championed by men like Gorgons, believed that
Speaker 1: white people could live in the tropics given proper sanitation
Speaker 1: and segregation to quote, keep their blood pure. Children who
Speaker 1: were blought to the tropics were thought to be put
Speaker 1: at risk by contacts with the natives, which Navy Surgeon
Speaker 1: General still claimed is apt to have a detrimental effect
Speaker 1: upon children's moral and mental outlook. Now this is so
Speaker 1: much worse than I think. I really bleak. Oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that we're building to the story of how
Speaker 1: the US exported Jim Crow to Panama. So one store
Speaker 1: one solution to the problem of like that it's dangerous
Speaker 1: for uh white people to be in tropical conditions for
Speaker 1: too long was to give white workers regular extended vacations
Speaker 1: back north, a privilege which was not extended to non
Speaker 1: white laborers. The perceived vulnerability of white people in the
Speaker 1: tropics was also used as a justification for why hard
Speaker 1: manual labor should be done only by black and indigenous workers.
Speaker 1: Starting in nineteen ten, the international frenzy over phrenology reached
Speaker 1: the canal zone. Doctors started to collecting autopsy data on
Speaker 1: dead canal workers to answer questions quote concerning certain racial features.
Speaker 1: They noted brain weights, skull thickness, cephalic index, skull shape,
Speaker 1: and homicide or altercational tendencies, and they broke these down
Speaker 1: based on race. As a result of this data, Tropical
Speaker 1: doctors concluded that so many black people died violently on
Speaker 1: the canal project died because they were crushed by machinery
Speaker 1: or something you know, as opposed to death and disease.
Speaker 1: They decided that this this was so common with black workers,
Speaker 1: not because of poor safety measures or because of the
Speaker 1: fact that black workers were used to do all manual
Speaker 1: labor because it was considered dangerous for white workers, but
Speaker 1: because black workers were genetic genetically had quote a striking
Speaker 1: lack of appreciation for a dangerous environment. So the reasons
Speaker 1: so many of them are getting crushed by machinery isn't
Speaker 1: because we're the they're the only ones that we have
Speaker 1: doing this manual labor, and because we have no safety procedures.
Speaker 1: It's because their brains aren't capable of understanding dangers. Good
Speaker 1: stuff real, this is it's very bleak. Uh yeah, this
Speaker 1: was a rough read. That book Emperors in the Jungle
Speaker 1: is a fucking bleak read. Now, the dangers of the
Speaker 1: tropics for white people were not seen as a reason
Speaker 1: to avoid colonizing tropical climates by everyone. At least Gorgons
Speaker 1: and many like him were convinced that settlement in South
Speaker 1: America would allow white people to avoid overpopulation in the
Speaker 1: United States, but first tropical disease needed to be eliminated.
Speaker 1: This would quote enable man to return from the temperate
Speaker 1: regions to which he was forced to migrate long ago,
Speaker 1: and again live and develop in his natural home, the tropics.
Speaker 1: In his book, John Lindsay Poland notes an implicit premise
Speaker 1: was that those already living in the tropics were not men,
Speaker 1: which is a good point from John Lindsay Poland. Now,
Speaker 1: the repeated failure of Gorgus and I know I'm pronouncing
Speaker 1: his name differently every time, but fuck him. The repeated
Speaker 1: failure of Gorgus another tropical doctors to actually defeat the
Speaker 1: diseases they were trying to fight lead them to one
Speaker 1: inescapable conclusion their failures were the result of black people,
Speaker 1: of course, Like we're not going to admit that we
Speaker 1: fucked up fighting mosquitoes. It's got to be the act
Speaker 1: of all of these people that we have imported into Panama.
Speaker 1: So there's there's layers of horrific stuff going on. It's
Speaker 1: really deep. You have terraforming, you have a terraform project
Speaker 1: and an ethnic cleansing and a sort of subjugation like
Speaker 1: program all at the same time. And it's like and
Speaker 1: it's like being medicalized. It's like being like given like
Speaker 1: you know, like uh like just like just like sort
Speaker 1: of like being in trans and sort of the trans community.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, you know, like you know, you have
Speaker 1: to have a gate keeping doctor to like determine all
Speaker 1: of these things and all these made up things that
Speaker 1: are based upon the predispositions of the doctors who are
Speaker 1: writing it. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's a it's like
Speaker 1: a layer cake of bigotry. Like the sediment of racism
Speaker 1: in this is very complicated and deep um, which I
Speaker 1: think is rad uh personally that it's such a complex
Speaker 1: level of horror. I am not going to use time not.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to say that. Yeah, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's obviously horrific um, which is why we're
Speaker 1: talking about it. So I'm gonna quote from Emperors in
Speaker 1: the Jungle because that book has a very good passage
Speaker 1: on how Gorges and his fellow doctors blamed the black
Speaker 1: Caribbeans that they were bringing into Panama for the fact
Speaker 1: that their disease control measures failed. What was needed, according
Speaker 1: to Dalla phrase Curry, a Canal Zone health officer in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, was a sanitary conscience, a set of
Speaker 1: internalized rules that both individuals and nations could follow. But
Speaker 1: while whites might be perceived as reliably civilized and obedient
Speaker 1: to sanitary regulations, West Indians and that's those are black Caribbeans.
Speaker 1: That's what they called him this period, as West Indians
Speaker 1: were seen as disturbingly negligent as elsewhere in the world,
Speaker 1: the enforcement of sanitation among the negroes as a gigantic task,
Speaker 1: wrote William Deek's director of the Medical Service during the
Speaker 1: Construction era. As long as he has a roof over
Speaker 1: his head and a yam or two to eat, he
Speaker 1: is content, and his idea of personal hygiene is on
Speaker 1: par with his conception of marital fidelity in these circumstance,
Speaker 1: and says only physical segregation would protect whites from black
Speaker 1: carriers of disease which could establish reservoirs and infected West
Speaker 1: Indians living in the bush. So, yeah, just a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of bigotry here, Like the entire US project in
Speaker 1: Canal is is it's just racism all the way down.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's it's you can't over emphasize how
Speaker 1: bigoted it is and stays until the fucking nineteen nineties. Um,
Speaker 1: this is probably why it's not in American high school textbooks.
Speaker 1: I just heard we built a canal and Teddy Roosevelt
Speaker 1: was there. Yep, Yeah, didn't hear any of this. So
Speaker 1: during the construction of the canal, which took place from
Speaker 1: nineteen o four to nineteen fourteen, black people made up
Speaker 1: at least three out of every four workers, and most
Speaker 1: of these people were imported from the Caribbean, an act
Speaker 1: which permanently changed the racial dynamics of Panama. Using public
Speaker 1: health and sanitation as a justification, The US then imported
Speaker 1: Jim C Laws to Panama as well, effectively creating a
Speaker 1: massive new racial underclass in that country. Most white people
Speaker 1: had no contact with their black co workers outside of
Speaker 1: the jobs. Indigenous Panamanians endured somewhat less oppression, but the
Speaker 1: United States still considered them unworthy of having any say
Speaker 1: in the canal that was being cut through the middle
Speaker 1: of their country. Panama was seen as a seedy, dangerous place,
Speaker 1: and its people were inherently criminal and unreliable. One American
Speaker 1: writer at the time described the country as a hideous
Speaker 1: dung heap of physical and moral abomination. A US congressman
Speaker 1: called the black population of Panama, which the US had
Speaker 1: brought there in the first place, to be of no
Speaker 1: more use than mosquitoes and buzzards. And again, these are
Speaker 1: the people doing three quarters of the work to build
Speaker 1: the canal. Uh, We're such a good country, really nailing
Speaker 1: it forever. So the legacy of segregation in Panama began
Speaker 1: at the express command of the United States, and it
Speaker 1: is still with Panama today. As we will discuss later,
Speaker 1: the nation was independent on paper, but it was a
Speaker 1: colony and all but name, and the US acted quickly
Speaker 1: and brutally to stifle anything that's smacked of independence. Panama
Speaker 1: initially had its own military, a small group of two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty men led by General Estemon Huertas, a
Speaker 1: former Colombian officer and a hero of the Panamanian independence movement.
Speaker 1: He was competent and beloved, but not willing to have
Speaker 1: his beloved nation exists purely for US profit. In nineteen
Speaker 1: o four, when canal construction had just begun, he threatened
Speaker 1: to revolt due to the United States' treatment of his people.
Speaker 1: U S diplomatic representatives advised the Panamanian president that he
Speaker 1: should fire the general, and U S Marines went in
Speaker 1: and disarmed his forces. Panama's army was disbanded and did
Speaker 1: not reform for half a century. Yeah, so we just
Speaker 1: get rid of that army. Were like, you know what
Speaker 1: if these people have an army that that might be
Speaker 1: a problem for us doing whatever we want in Panama.
Speaker 1: Let's just let's just xnay on the snarmy. A. I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not great at pig Latin. Hey, it's a pulling
Speaker 1: up Paul Wolfowitz. Yeah, yeah, they got wolf of Witz. Good. Ye, Like,
Speaker 1: we'll just disband this army and this police apprise. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I mean unlike in Iraq. There's only two fifty of
Speaker 1: these guys, So yeah, it's a lot easier, but it
Speaker 1: is the same basic idea, you know. So the US
Speaker 1: was extremely active in asserting its influence over Panamanian politics.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighteen, the president died suddenly and Panama announced
Speaker 1: an indefinite postponement of elections. U S troops occupied the
Speaker 1: cities in US General Richard Blatchford basically became the dictator.
Speaker 1: This was never called what it was officially. The Panamanian
Speaker 1: state had just delayed elections, but the reason for it
Speaker 1: all was World War One. The US could not afford
Speaker 1: to let the Panamanian people decided to do things that
Speaker 1: might complicate the war effort. Of course, once he had
Speaker 1: total unchecked power, Blatchford immediately exceeded his mandate and decided
Speaker 1: to focus on the elimination of prostitution. Sex work was
Speaker 1: legal in Panama at the time, but Blatchford thought it
Speaker 1: was ikey, and he had all the guns. I don't
Speaker 1: like it, Yeah, I don't. I don't like it. This
Speaker 1: is part of my job to stop now. He also
Speaker 1: didn't like drinking, and he decided to close the bars
Speaker 1: that served US troops as he wrote back to Washington,
Speaker 1: the United States has ridded the Panamanians of the evils
Speaker 1: of yellow fever, which it hadn't and why should it
Speaker 1: not rid them of the greater curse, which is, of
Speaker 1: course alcohol. Blatchford was unsuccessful in forcing prohibition on Panama.
Speaker 1: I'll imagine that especially with soldiers. They're like in Marines.
Speaker 1: He did briefly succeed in getting the country to ban
Speaker 1: opium bars and opium or banned bars and opium dims
Speaker 1: from serving US soldiers um, but he did not shut
Speaker 1: them down throughout the entire country. As John Lindsay Poland writes,
Speaker 1: their prohibition remained an effect until Armistice Day in November,
Speaker 1: when hundreds of soldiers broke away from the bases on
Speaker 1: the Atlantic after months have enforced abstinence, and stormed Cologne
Speaker 1: as a mob. That night, Blatchford mounted a podium in
Speaker 1: Balboa Stadium to condemn the occurrence, but instead of acknowledging
Speaker 1: the soldiers carnel behavior, he condemned Panama City and Cologne,
Speaker 1: suggesting maybe renamed Sodom and Gomorrah. He wrote afterward to Washington,
Speaker 1: if Sodom and Gomorrah were in existence, today, they would
Speaker 1: probably sue me for slander. It's the fall of these
Speaker 1: damn Panamanians that American soldiers want to drink in horror,
Speaker 1: a thing American soldiers have never done anywhere else never,
Speaker 1: It's never happened. It's never happened to every single installation
Speaker 1: that we've ever had. I mean, it's it's not it's
Speaker 1: literally the thing that every group of soldiers throughout the
Speaker 1: entirety of world history has always done. The age bracket
Speaker 1: of of sex of sixteen to twenty five year old. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you are asking these people to die for you,
Speaker 1: you can't ask them not to drink and horr. They're
Speaker 1: going to do it like it's it's they've done it
Speaker 1: for forever. But Blatchford blames Panama and it's uniquely sinful
Speaker 1: nature for corrupting these American boys who stormed the city
Speaker 1: in a mob. It's pretty great. So eventually Panama got
Speaker 1: to have its elections again, and the fiction of autonomy
Speaker 1: continued until nineteen A massive renters strike had erupted in
Speaker 1: Panama City among a population of twenty thousand unemployed black laborers.
Speaker 1: Most of these men had been brought to Panama to
Speaker 1: work on the canal, and when the construction finished, the U.
Speaker 1: S had said basically just abandoned them to figure out
Speaker 1: their own ship in the middle of an economic depression
Speaker 1: that hit Panama after the canal was finished. Because of segregation,
Speaker 1: they were only able to live in certain neighborhoods, and
Speaker 1: their housing was uniformly squalid and ll maintained. Property owners
Speaker 1: announced written hikes that June, and several labor unions formed
Speaker 1: a renter's league to boycott rent. There were regular protests
Speaker 1: over evictions, and on October tenth, a peaceful demonstration was
Speaker 1: met with gunfire by Panamanian police, who killed two people.
Speaker 1: The crowd took action and swarmed the streets, shutting the
Speaker 1: city down by clogging every major artery of transit. The
Speaker 1: Panamanian president begged the United States for help, and we
Speaker 1: sent a battalion of six U S Marines into the
Speaker 1: city with bayonets. Fixed. The protesters initially fled, but later
Speaker 1: that night a gathering. The gathering as symboled around the
Speaker 1: burial of one of the slain protesters. U S troops
Speaker 1: showed up there and after a confrontation, charged into the
Speaker 1: crowd with bayonets and stabbed three people to death. US
Speaker 1: newspapers portrayed this as a reasonable response to radical extremists
Speaker 1: who could not be reasoned with. The New York Times
Speaker 1: neglected to talk to any protesters. Instead, their coverage focused
Speaker 1: around the captain and passenger of a luxury cruise ship
Speaker 1: docked in the city at the time. They quoted the
Speaker 1: captain as saying, the nucleus of a revolution is a
Speaker 1: bottle of rum to half breeds and a negro armed
Speaker 1: with rifles and machetes. Solid journalism. Who should we talked
Speaker 1: to you about this at all? Who should we talk
Speaker 1: to about the fact that our soldiers stabbed three protesters
Speaker 1: to death by a cruise ship? It was clearly just
Speaker 1: whoever was drinking next to the New York Times reporter
Speaker 1: on that boat. What do you think about this? I
Speaker 1: gotta file something m h SO. As a rule, US
Speaker 1: intervention in Panama tended to fall into one of two
Speaker 1: categories interventions in order to further specific US foreign policy
Speaker 1: goals and interventions made on behalf the Panamanian elite who
Speaker 1: ruled the country on the US government's behalf. This was
Speaker 1: got done with Gusto, the head Army general in Panama,
Speaker 1: William Lasseter actually requested permission to stay in Panama City
Speaker 1: after the conclusion of the rent strike in order to
Speaker 1: oversee the massive viction of thousands of tenants. He was
Speaker 1: overruled by the State Department. So the Canal Treaty that
Speaker 1: Roosevelt had overthrown a government to get was never much
Speaker 1: more than a convention convenient fiction. The US basically did
Speaker 1: whatever it wanted in Panama, regardless of whether or not
Speaker 1: the treaty gave it a right to do so. We
Speaker 1: expropriated or stole land from Panama. On nineteen occasions from
Speaker 1: nineteen o eight to nineteen thirty one. The US military
Speaker 1: would take land that we decided we wanted for some reason,
Speaker 1: and we would notify the Panamania the Panamanian authorities later,
Speaker 1: no compensation was ever given. The land was necessary in
Speaker 1: order to allow the US government to expand its military facilities.
Speaker 1: Panama was used as a base for Latin American interventions
Speaker 1: throughout the twentieth century. Our old friends Smedley Butler was
Speaker 1: based there during his two trips into Nicaragua to put
Speaker 1: down political movements that were seen as counter to u
Speaker 1: s interests. YEA, Panama was also the initial Piteu. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I heard of that guy. He would he would He
Speaker 1: was based there whenever he would go into Nicaragua to
Speaker 1: kill people. Um. Panama was also the site for the
Speaker 1: School of the America's where the US train tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of Latin American soldiers and more than a dozen
Speaker 1: future dictators, including Panama's own future dictator, Manuel Noriega. We
Speaker 1: will be chatting about in just a little bit of Timerigat.
Speaker 1: You got to take one of those things. Speaking of
Speaker 1: Manuel Noriega. You know what, Manuel Noriega loved capitals of cocaine,
Speaker 1: but also the products and services that you can buy
Speaker 1: as a result of trafficking cocaine. And speaking of traffic
Speaker 1: in cocaine, here's some ads. Uh, we're back, and Sophie
Speaker 1: has just informed me that we are not actually sponsored
Speaker 1: by cocaine. This is going to radically change the direction
Speaker 1: of the show. Yeah, this is I'm gonna have to
Speaker 1: recalibrate here. So let's let's get back to Panama now.
Speaker 1: We just we're talking about Manuel Noriega in the School
Speaker 1: of the Americans and we will get back to Manuel
Speaker 1: Noriega in just a little bit. But first Jelsey, how
Speaker 1: do you feel about chemical weapons? How do I feel
Speaker 1: a chemical weapons? Yeah? Are you a big chemical weapons stand? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's varying degrees of chemical weapons, and
Speaker 1: they're all bad. There are varying degrees of bad chemical weapons,
Speaker 1: and the US tried all of them out in Panama,
Speaker 1: which was its chemical weapons testing site for decades. So
Speaker 1: I take it, I take it. We're talking about HC now,
Speaker 1: we're talking about everything up to and include VX nerve gas. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: starting in the thirties, we were like, chemical weapons are awesome.
Speaker 1: World War One was a hoot. We're going to use
Speaker 1: these things more in the future. I wonder how they
Speaker 1: work in tropical clim um. So we decided we wanted
Speaker 1: to know how this ship worked in tropical climates, and
Speaker 1: since we owned Panama, it was the natural place to
Speaker 1: dump chemical weapons into. General William Siebert, a World War
Speaker 1: One veteran and quote a staunch advocate of all forms
Speaker 1: of chemical warfare in his own words, was made director
Speaker 1: of the Army's chemical weapons program. From a write up
Speaker 1: and so this is a true harbor stand Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he loves he loves Old Fritz, who was also a
Speaker 1: Bastards Pod alumni. Yeah, the man who just couldn't get
Speaker 1: enough of making chemical weapons. So I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: a write up titled test Tube Republic, Chemical Weapons Tests
Speaker 1: in Panama and US Responsibility. After the war, Sibbett became
Speaker 1: a vocal proponent of the continued development of chemical weapons.
Speaker 1: When armies were provided with masks and other defensive appliances,
Speaker 1: something less than four percent of gas casualties were fatal.
Speaker 1: Sibbert ruminated these figures, I think meet one of the
Speaker 1: chief objections brought against the use of gas that of humanity.
Speaker 1: So far from being inhumane, it has been proven that
Speaker 1: it is one of the most humane instruments of warfare,
Speaker 1: if we can apply the word humane to the killing
Speaker 1: and wounding of human beings. Barely anyone dies in this
Speaker 1: stuff when they have gas masks, so it's cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the kind of unstated corollary to that is that
Speaker 1: barely in a Europeans actually died from chemical warfare once
Speaker 1: people got gas masks and stuff. Chemical weapons were regularly
Speaker 1: used on colonial populations, particularly in Ethiopia, by the Italians
Speaker 1: who didn't have access to that. So Sibert was basically
Speaker 1: saying it's humane and that it can't kill that many
Speaker 1: white people. It's it's pretty good, pretty good stuff. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen one, the Chemical Warfare Service was told to
Speaker 1: draw plans for defense of the canal zone and other
Speaker 1: outlying U S possessions. The first chemical defense plans were
Speaker 1: thus drawn up in nineteen twenty three, and would be
Speaker 1: updated every year through at least ninety six. The plan
Speaker 1: involved bombing with mustard gas the trails and routes that
Speaker 1: led inland from landing beaches on both the Atlantic and
Speaker 1: Pacific coasts, spraying the beaches, and find firing chemical mortars
Speaker 1: at military targets as well. So our plan was, if
Speaker 1: anyone invades the Panama Canal, we just dubbed chemical weapons
Speaker 1: all over Panama in order to make it uninhabitable. So
Speaker 1: the Vietnam doctrine, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean this was
Speaker 1: kind of where that idea started. Let's just murder the
Speaker 1: jungle in order to make it impossible for it the
Speaker 1: enemy to live here. Yeah. So US chemical weapons tests
Speaker 1: continued for decades well after US forces in Panama faced
Speaker 1: any threat of invasion. Huge chunks of jungle on San
Speaker 1: Jose Island were regularly exposed to mustard gas and folst
Speaker 1: gene gas just to see what would happen. Munitions were
Speaker 1: stored in open topped buildings exposed to the elements UM
Speaker 1: and yeah, they're like, so they just kind of left
Speaker 1: this stuff there, and they would drop tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of chemical bombs on particularly San Jose Island, and about
Speaker 1: one ten of these weapons failed to detonate and they
Speaker 1: were just left where they landed to be a problem
Speaker 1: for future generations. And when the Army left Panama, we
Speaker 1: just told them we'd taken all of the chemical weapons,
Speaker 1: but thousands of bombs were left behind on these islands
Speaker 1: that we just kind of were like, maybe they'll figure
Speaker 1: it out, maybe they won't UM, which is rad Starting
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties, VX nerve gas mines were tested
Speaker 1: and each of these mines contained a ten point five
Speaker 1: pounds of v X. Since ten milligrams is a fatal
Speaker 1: human dose, this means that each one of these mines
Speaker 1: had enough poison to kill half a million people. We're
Speaker 1: just kind of detonating these in the middle of the jungle,
Speaker 1: seeing what happened. It's pretty cool. Yeah, Now, most of
Speaker 1: the research the Army conducted in Panama sounded less like
Speaker 1: advancing the frontiers of science and more like the kind
Speaker 1: of ship board Nazi scientists would have gotten up to.
Speaker 1: Goats and rabbits were fitted with various gas, masks and
Speaker 1: gas just to test the effect efficacy of the weapons.
Speaker 1: One witness said they brought goats from Ecuador. They put
Speaker 1: those gases on them. The skin fell off the animals,
Speaker 1: they died, and they ended up cooked. The animal was
Speaker 1: red red like it was cooked burnt. An US experiments
Speaker 1: did not say limited to non human animals. The United
Speaker 1: States partnered with the Canadian government to investigate whether or
Speaker 1: not different ethnicities were affected differently by chemical weapons. Puerto
Speaker 1: Ricans and Caucasian human beings were gassed alongside each other
Speaker 1: to see if any differences arose. Medical historians Susan Smith
Speaker 1: explains scientists were trying to understand the impact of mustard
Speaker 1: gas on people. They thought there was a possibility that
Speaker 1: some racial groups are less sensitive to mustard gas. It
Speaker 1: turned out not at all to be true, Smith told
Speaker 1: Chemistry World. With the military, testing involved, among other things,
Speaker 1: the aerial release of mustard gas over soldiers via airplanes
Speaker 1: in order to later examine and compare their blisters and
Speaker 1: other injuries. Now, in PR actually tracked down a bunch
Speaker 1: of the men involved in these race based experiments. They
Speaker 1: found that, in addition to Puerto Ricans, black Americans, and
Speaker 1: Japanese Americans were all gassed just to see if there
Speaker 1: were racial differences and how they respond. My god, all
Speaker 1: of the gas subjects were enlisted men, and white soldiers
Speaker 1: constituted the control group. And this is I guess, one
Speaker 1: situation in which people of all races suffered equally, because
Speaker 1: again everyone responds the same way to poison gas. Imagine
Speaker 1: that it does sound it does It does say a
Speaker 1: lot that it does say a lot about the United
Speaker 1: States and Britain. That basically, like all of these things
Speaker 1: were pre you know, like all the things that are
Speaker 1: we associate with, like Nazi Germany, We're being done thirty
Speaker 1: years earlier, yeah, and him twenty years later. We keep
Speaker 1: doing this until nineteen sixty eight. Like, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty great. I'm gonna quote from NPRS right up on this.
Speaker 1: All of the World War Two experiments with mustard gas
Speaker 1: were done in secret and weren't recorded on the subject's
Speaker 1: official military records. Most do not have proof of what
Speaker 1: they went through. They received no follow up healthcare or
Speaker 1: monitoring of any kind, and they were sworn to secrecy
Speaker 1: about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge in military
Speaker 1: prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment
Speaker 1: for their injuries because they couldn't tell doctors what happened
Speaker 1: to them. Army Colonel Steve Warren, director of Press Operations
Speaker 1: at the Pentagon, acknowledged NPRS findings and was quick to
Speaker 1: put distance between today's military and the World War Two experiments.
Speaker 1: The first thing to be very clear about is that
Speaker 1: the Department of different it was a different time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the Department of Confenced does not conduct chemical
Speaker 1: weapons tests any longer. And I think we have probably
Speaker 1: come as far as any institution in America. We didn't
Speaker 1: even have a Pentagon built, So I think particularly for
Speaker 1: us in uniform, to hear and see something like this,
Speaker 1: it's stark. It's even a little bit jarick. It is
Speaker 1: a little bit jarring. Yes, more than a hundred experiments
Speaker 1: were conducted by on human beings on San Jose Island.
Speaker 1: Lopez Negron, now years old, was one of the test suspects,
Speaker 1: and it is one of the only surviving ones. He
Speaker 1: was bombed with mustard gas by a plane. He told
Speaker 1: NPR we had uniforms on to protect ourselves, but the
Speaker 1: animals didn't. There were rabbits. They all died. I spent
Speaker 1: three weeks in the hospital with a bad fever. Almost
Speaker 1: all of us got sick. It took all of the
Speaker 1: skin off of your hands. Your hands just rotted. Pretty
Speaker 1: good stuff there. Now, Negron was technically a volunteer, but
Speaker 1: he but he like he'd been asked to serve as
Speaker 1: a guinea pig, and he technically had the right to
Speaker 1: say no, but he did not feel like saying no
Speaker 1: was an option because he was a black man. N
Speaker 1: PR rights defiance was unthinkable, he says, especially for black soldiers.
Speaker 1: You do what they tell you to do, and you
Speaker 1: ask no questions. He says, cool stuff. Yeah, US chemical
Speaker 1: weapons test in Panama stopped in nineteen sixty eight, and
Speaker 1: again we just kind of left everything sort of where
Speaker 1: it was when we finally let Panama be a sovereign nation.
Speaker 1: We were doing it because we we had we could
Speaker 1: test it in Vietnam instead. Yeah, we just left it
Speaker 1: behind there too, like just an uncountable number of deadly
Speaker 1: weapons we just left sitting on an island, and we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we took everything, we cleaned up, it's fine. There are
Speaker 1: people who tried to build resorts on San Jose Island
Speaker 1: and kept finding like chemical weapons. It was it was
Speaker 1: a real problem, um, And we lied to the Panamanian
Speaker 1: government about this. We have mostly cleaned it up now.
Speaker 1: I think in two thousand eighteen was the last time
Speaker 1: I was able to find a U. S C. B
Speaker 1: r N Army unit being sent to San Jose to
Speaker 1: disarmed chemical bombs. Um. But it took up until like
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago for most of that stuff
Speaker 1: to be cleared off. And there's probably still some bombs
Speaker 1: lying around on the island. You know. We couldn't have
Speaker 1: gotten everything, and they had to. There was like a
Speaker 1: series of investigations and and like legal cases around it.
Speaker 1: I found an article in two thousand one where journalists
Speaker 1: went there and just was like picking up chemical munitions
Speaker 1: that were covered in rust and was like, oh, this
Speaker 1: is a VX nerve mine that just didn't go off,
Speaker 1: that's filled with enough poison to kill. Yeah. Um, So
Speaker 1: the end of the US domination of Panama started as
Speaker 1: a result of things that happened on January nine, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four. There had been protests over US violations of
Speaker 1: Panamanian sovereignty for years at this point. In nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: Dwight Eisenhower was forced to make concessions and give back
Speaker 1: some of the land the US had stolen, but he
Speaker 1: refused to negotiate on the portion of the U S
Speaker 1: treaty that gave US the canal in perpetuity. Demonstrations grew
Speaker 1: in intensity throughout the late nineteen fifties. One major cause
Speaker 1: was the fight for Panamanians to have the legal right
Speaker 1: to fly their flag in the canal zone. Things seemed
Speaker 1: to be improving when JFK took office. He recognized that
Speaker 1: the U S had kind of been fucking over the
Speaker 1: Panamania in people for decades, and he told the country, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was. He was, you know, open to negotiating with
Speaker 1: them about concessions. Even sovereignty of the canal was on
Speaker 1: the table. This may have been part of the reason
Speaker 1: that Bernard Sanders shot Kennedy dead in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 1: When JFK took office, the issue of US sovereignty over
Speaker 1: the canal was still technically on the table, but lb
Speaker 1: J was never going to do that. To be honest,
Speaker 1: JFK probably wouldn't have either. UM and the even discussion
Speaker 1: of US sovereignty being given up over the canal enraged
Speaker 1: a lot of US citizens and I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: American heritage here, any hint of concession worried the ultra
Speaker 1: patriotic U. S. Citizens who lived and worked in the zone.
Speaker 1: Kennedy's declaration that the U. S. And Panamanian flag should
Speaker 1: be flown together at all non military sites prompted Zonian students,
Speaker 1: with the encouragement of adults, to raise the stars and
Speaker 1: stripes outside of Balboa High School on January seventh, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four. The teenagers guarded the flag for two days
Speaker 1: before a group of two hundred Panamanian students marched from
Speaker 1: nearby Panama City intent on raising their own banner. During
Speaker 1: the ensuing scuple, the Panamanian flag was torn. Thousands of
Speaker 1: angry Panamanian citizens took to the streets, forced their way
Speaker 1: into the zone, and attacked American owned businesses. The canal.
Speaker 1: Zone police were overwhelmed and the U. S. Army took over.
Speaker 1: Responding to the violence with tear gas and rifle fire.
Speaker 1: Ascanio Aros Ascanio Arosamina, a twenty year old student on
Speaker 1: his way to a movie, stopped to help evacuate some
Speaker 1: of them wounded. He was shot dead. Now, as you
Speaker 1: might expect, uh, this marked sparked more protests or more demonstrations.
Speaker 1: Protesters rallied at what they called the Fence of Shame,
Speaker 1: which is a name I might have to steal. At
Speaker 1: some point, one Columbian leader compared the fence to the
Speaker 1: Berlin Wall, which is obviously embarrassing to the US. At
Speaker 1: this point, Panama broke off diplomatic relations with the United
Speaker 1: States on January tenth. There were demands that the US
Speaker 1: hand over the canal entirely. U s and Panamanian soldiers
Speaker 1: exchanged gunfire for days. At one point, Americans hosed down
Speaker 1: an apartment building and a tempted to take out a sniper. Instead,
Speaker 1: they killed an eleven year old girl named Rosa Landecho.
Speaker 1: So pretty bad, pretty bad time. And by the way,
Speaker 1: this date um which is January nine, nine four, is
Speaker 1: still a holiday in Panama to this day because of
Speaker 1: like this fight over the flag and all the deaths
Speaker 1: that results from it. The violence continued for four days
Speaker 1: while lb J negotiated with Panamanian leaders. He stoutly refused
Speaker 1: to make concessions under the threat of force. Eventually, Panama
Speaker 1: called in their national guard and quelled the unrest. The
Speaker 1: Canal Zones Governor Robert Fleming started pressing Washington to sign
Speaker 1: a new treaty, telling d C quote, the plain fact
Speaker 1: is that we must begin treating Panamanians as people. Wow.
Speaker 1: So the US governor of the Canals and was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we got it. We gotta guys, we gotta treat these
Speaker 1: folks like human beings. Otherwise we're gonna continue having problems here.
Speaker 1: Someone had to say that. It's pretty remarked. Couple. So yeah,
Speaker 1: after you know, so that the governor of the canal
Speaker 1: is like, we have to finally start treating Panamanians as people. Um.
Speaker 1: And three years of negotiations follow that, but little actually
Speaker 1: gets done. There's resistance from Americans and from elite Panamanians. Right.
Speaker 1: A lot of the Panamanians in charge want the US
Speaker 1: to stay because the US have been consistently they're armed
Speaker 1: enforcers right, um, and they fight every effort at giving
Speaker 1: Panama full sovereignty over the canal. The continued failure of
Speaker 1: these efforts in the decades of violent oppression eventually generated
Speaker 1: enough anti American sentiment to allow for a revolution against
Speaker 1: the v She government. In nineteen sixty eight, a Panamanian
Speaker 1: National Guard officer named Omar To Riho seized power and
Speaker 1: replace the old order with a populist government committed to
Speaker 1: getting a better deal for Panama. But even this moment
Speaker 1: was not quite what it seemed because omar To Rijos
Speaker 1: was a long time US military asset. He had been
Speaker 1: recruited as a spy in nineteen paid twenty five dollars
Speaker 1: a month to inform the US on labor unrest, student activities,
Speaker 1: and Soviet Chinese penetration. During the nineteen sixty Flag Riots,
Speaker 1: Trio's helped to suppress the popular unrest. One U S
Speaker 1: military intelligence operative even helped him plan his nineteen sixty coup.
Speaker 1: So Torio's was a U S asset, but he was
Speaker 1: also willing to push for Panamanian control of the canal.
Speaker 1: Um So he's a complicated figure and he's viewed by
Speaker 1: as a hero still by a lot of Panamanians because
Speaker 1: he he is a committed committed to the Panama getting
Speaker 1: control of the canal. Um And by the way, basically
Speaker 1: everyone with any power in the Panamanian National Guard is
Speaker 1: a US military asset, and they don't all always do
Speaker 1: what the U S says, So it's always more complex
Speaker 1: than just he was getting paid to be a spy.
Speaker 1: He's still like, has desires outside of US desires, which
Speaker 1: is why certain things happened that happened later. So real
Speaker 1: talks over Panamanian sovereignty of the canal took place during
Speaker 1: President Jimmy Carter's term. Rio's lucked out that his time
Speaker 1: in power happened to coincide with the election of the
Speaker 1: only vaguely reasonable man for elected president of the United
Speaker 1: States in nineteen seventy nine. It basically the last moment
Speaker 1: such an act of baseline decency would have been possible
Speaker 1: from the United States. Carter and to Rijo signed and
Speaker 1: ratified a new Canal treaty. This promised a total handover
Speaker 1: of the canal to Panama by the end of nine
Speaker 1: So that's good, right, we took a medicine. It's almost
Speaker 1: a century, but we did something that resembled the right thing. Eventually,
Speaker 1: after a lot of death, yeah, and after profiting off
Speaker 1: of it for nearly a century. Still a canal zone. Yes,
Speaker 1: because the CIA was not happy about it. And remember
Speaker 1: we're talking about the nineteen seventies. CIA and Latin America
Speaker 1: was just the c I a s CIA to ever CIA,
Speaker 1: they promptly tried to overthrow to Riho's and they failed
Speaker 1: thanks to the efforts of a National Guard officer who
Speaker 1: substantly rose to became Omar Tario's right hand man, Manuel Noriega. Now,
Speaker 1: and by the way, Noriega was also a U. S.
Speaker 1: Army spy asset for years, stuck back in the fifties. Now,
Speaker 1: this is this is a running this is a running
Speaker 1: theme in the US intelligence. It's amazing. So when the
Speaker 1: CIA failed to unseat Rio's by blatant and shameless coup,
Speaker 1: they decided the right thing to do was to ingratiate
Speaker 1: themselves with Noriega, who they correctly judge was a man
Speaker 1: with no principles. Noriega rose to become Panama's chief of
Speaker 1: military Intelligence. At the same time he became a salaried
Speaker 1: CIA asset. He would eventually receive well over a million
Speaker 1: dollars for his work with the agency. Noriega would later
Speaker 1: claim that his work with the CIA was Torrio's idea
Speaker 1: in order to keep a quote open line of communication
Speaker 1: with the agency that might stop future coatips as if
Speaker 1: there there is. There's one common theme in US history,
Speaker 1: and that is especially intelligence history, and that is that
Speaker 1: we were the there's this tendency to arm your future enemies,
Speaker 1: to arm and train, and this tendency that we see
Speaker 1: in Syria, right but with you know, kind of the
Speaker 1: differences between the CIA backing what they call the moderate rebels,
Speaker 1: in the Defense Department backing Rojava this and it's the
Speaker 1: same thing happening in Panama where the Army's got its
Speaker 1: people and the CIA has its people, and sometimes they
Speaker 1: overlap and sometimes they're asked to do different things by
Speaker 1: both groups. Because one of the things I think that
Speaker 1: has missed on a lot of left wing analysis of
Speaker 1: like the CIA and the military is that they do
Speaker 1: often hate each other. Oh yeah, like they're fighting as
Speaker 1: much as they are working together. Um so yeah. Noriega
Speaker 1: claims that he omar to Rios told him to be
Speaker 1: a come up paid CIA asset so that he could
Speaker 1: stop future coup attempts. And if this sounds like it
Speaker 1: might be a lie. That's because Manuel Noriega was a
Speaker 1: was a consummate liar. Now, one of Noriega's gigs for
Speaker 1: the CIA was to maintain an open line of communication
Speaker 1: with Fidel Castro. Because the CIA had repeatedly tried to
Speaker 1: kill Castro and because the US refused to publicly deal
Speaker 1: with the communist country, all communications between the two, which
Speaker 1: they obviously still had, needed to take place in back channels,
Speaker 1: and for a while, Noriega was one of the u
Speaker 1: s back channels to Castro. Now more than anything, though
Speaker 1: Noriega was a cocaine man, probably one of the most
Speaker 1: prolific cocaine traffickers in history, the CIA was happy to
Speaker 1: ignore his drug dealing as long as he remained their
Speaker 1: man in Panama. This was largely because the CIA had
Speaker 1: plans for Panama, and Night had plans and planes, and
Speaker 1: they involved planes in cocaine. Yeah and yeah, Well, we'll
Speaker 1: do a whole episode on the on the crack epidemic
Speaker 1: and the cocaine trade and the CIA and the d
Speaker 1: e A at some point, um, but this all intersects
Speaker 1: with it. Now. By nineteen eighty one, oh more, or
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty one, Omar to Rios died in a
Speaker 1: tragic plane accident that was almost certainly orchestrated by the CIA.
Speaker 1: We don't know, but everyone suspects it, and it's very
Speaker 1: much in line with ship the CIA did repeatedly in
Speaker 1: this period of time. So probably we don't know, but
Speaker 1: we don't not know. We do not know, And it's
Speaker 1: not like it's it's not like character. That's the kind
Speaker 1: of gray area that that intelligence operations, uh, fluidly operated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't prove we did this even though it you know,
Speaker 1: we've done the same thing to other people, and you
Speaker 1: know we would benefit from it. So Yeppie, you know what,
Speaker 1: I also don't not know. I don't I don't know
Speaker 1: where I'm going with this. Don't you know who won't
Speaker 1: assassinate the leader of Panama? I don't know. Those Ohio ads, Yeah, Ohio.
Speaker 1: Actually Ohio would absolutely because they're always trying to make
Speaker 1: more Ohio. We can, but everything is already Ohio, terrible, terrible. Well,
Speaker 1: don't move to Ohio and check out these ads. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. We're back, and we're shipped talking Ohio. But
Speaker 1: now it's time to ship talk, which in which we
Speaker 1: all live, in which is which is the world? Um?
Speaker 1: All right? So whatever the truth of Omar Tario's assassination
Speaker 1: actually is, and again it's probably the CIA killed him.
Speaker 1: The political climate and Panama suddenly improved for the United
Speaker 1: States after his death. I imagine that John Lindsay Poland
Speaker 1: writes Panama support included the use of its territory for
Speaker 1: joint military maneuvers and covert training, use of US basis
Speaker 1: for logistical supply and intelligence flights to El Salvador and Honduras,
Speaker 1: and training of troops from the region. In the School
Speaker 1: of the Americans were more than eighteen hundred Salvadorian soldiers
Speaker 1: took courses in combat tactics, intelligence, logistics, and other military
Speaker 1: subjects from nineteen eight two to nineteen eighty four. According
Speaker 1: to Dwayne Claric, who was the chief of the Latin
Speaker 1: America Division of the Central Intelligence Agency, Noriega helped the
Speaker 1: CIA set up a short lived trading camp for the
Speaker 1: Nicaragua's contract for the Nicaraguan Contrast Southern Army in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three. Noriega also provided all Over and North with
Speaker 1: a pair of militians experts who helped blow up ammunition
Speaker 1: storage dump in Managua, Nicaragua in March of nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: which rocked the capital, So we use the ship out
Speaker 1: of Panama in this period of time. In nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: massive and sweeping electoral flow fraud led to the election
Speaker 1: of President Nicolas Ardito Barletta, a close friend of US
Speaker 1: Secretary of State George Schultz, who attended his inauguration and
Speaker 1: went on to invest huge amounts of money and time
Speaker 1: into the NOS. That that's George Scholtz. Yeah. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, after sweeping electoral fraud, Panama elects a president
Speaker 1: who is the close buddy of the U S Secretary
Speaker 1: of State. And this guy is basically just a puppet
Speaker 1: for Noriega and for the United States UM And as
Speaker 1: a result from nineteen eight in nineteen eighties seven, Panama
Speaker 1: received more than forty seven million dollars in US military
Speaker 1: equipment and training, three times would have received in the
Speaker 1: preceding thirty years. The goal of all this was twofold,
Speaker 1: to turn the Panamanian National Guard into a US loyal
Speaker 1: force and to ensure the men who rose through its ranks,
Speaker 1: and thus we're in a position to seize power if needed.
Speaker 1: Were sympathetic to US goals. Now that the US had
Speaker 1: picked had its picked man Noriega in an advanced position
Speaker 1: with the army, and had a whole bunch of promising
Speaker 1: young officers who received US training in a doctrination, we
Speaker 1: were more or less happy to let Panama have an
Speaker 1: army again. The National Guard transitioned into a proper military
Speaker 1: force in nineteen eighty three. Noriega was its first chief,
Speaker 1: and that same year, nineteen eighty three, he became the
Speaker 1: de facto military dictator of Panama. So again we elect
Speaker 1: a president to be a puppet man who's the friend
Speaker 1: of our Secretary of State. But Noriega is effectively in
Speaker 1: charge of the country, and he was by no means
Speaker 1: the legitimate leader of Panama through anything but brute force
Speaker 1: in US support, and we were fine with this. At first.
Speaker 1: There were constant complaints in Washington over his rampant cocaine trafficking,
Speaker 1: but the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, who paid
Speaker 1: him at least a hundred and sixty two dollars during
Speaker 1: this period, successfully question to keep him safe. Yeah, real
Speaker 1: seems kind of low. So, I mean, yeah, it's about
Speaker 1: arranged d I A double dipping is a popular is
Speaker 1: a popular thing among among US informants. Yeah, yeah, he's
Speaker 1: and he's getting money from the CIA and from the
Speaker 1: from the d i A, which is really the way
Speaker 1: to do it, which compete Yeah, which compete um. And
Speaker 1: they are the ones who keep him safe from like
Speaker 1: the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which is the
Speaker 1: precursor to the d e A. And in fact, the
Speaker 1: the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs had known Noriega
Speaker 1: was a massive coke trafficker since at least nineteen eight
Speaker 1: seventy two, when they attempted to, or they pushed to
Speaker 1: assassinate him, which is a thing we used to let
Speaker 1: them do. It's just like assassinate for leaders for drug trafficking.
Speaker 1: UM probably still do. But again he's kept safe consistently
Speaker 1: by his backers, first in the Army, then in the
Speaker 1: CIA and the d i A. So in nineteen eight five,
Speaker 1: the Reagan White House received intelligence reports that Noriega had
Speaker 1: met with cartel leaders and given them permission to manufacture
Speaker 1: cocaine and Panama. Noriega had also offered to mediate turf
Speaker 1: arguments among different cartels. Norman Bailey, a staff member, at
Speaker 1: the National Security Council later said of the Reagan administration's
Speaker 1: dirt on Noriega, this wasn't a smoking gun. It was
Speaker 1: a twenty one gun salute. But things were fine for
Speaker 1: Noriega until the end of nineteen eighties six, when the
Speaker 1: Iran contra scandal burst onto the news and North Americans
Speaker 1: learned that our government had been selling missiles to Iran
Speaker 1: in order to fund death squads in Nicaragua, which of
Speaker 1: course had been trained in Panama. This was explicitly forbidden
Speaker 1: both by an arms embargo against Iran and by the
Speaker 1: Bowland Amendment, which made it illegal to fund the contrast.
Speaker 1: This what made what Reagan and his cronies did at
Speaker 1: least light treason, but like treason, a separate skittle for
Speaker 1: a separate podcast. Yeah, we'll talk about that at some
Speaker 1: point too. Because Reagan was Reagan, the fallout was relatively
Speaker 1: minor compared to the crime. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the
Speaker 1: Dodes Bagman, and CIA director William Casey were forced out
Speaker 1: of the Yeah, really good at destroying the evidence. If
Speaker 1: you need evidence destroyed, Bill Casey's your motherfucking guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you need a show hosted on Fox News,
Speaker 1: Oliver North is apparently your man or destroying uh the
Speaker 1: largest uh you know, the reputation of the largest uh
Speaker 1: gun lobby group a group of the country. Yeah, Ali,
Speaker 1: what a great man, Ali North? Um so North. This
Speaker 1: was a problem, the fact that North and Casey are
Speaker 1: out of their jobs following a rand contra, because North
Speaker 1: and Casey had been Noriega's main points of contact. It
Speaker 1: had been them and George H. W. Bush had been
Speaker 1: the guy's most responsible for defending him from the rest
Speaker 1: of the government over his cocaine trafficking. So once they're out,
Speaker 1: Noriega's in deep ship and things get worse and worse
Speaker 1: for him throughout. Panicked by his loss of support, he
Speaker 1: cut off ties with the medaine cartel in death spiration.
Speaker 1: This was not enough to stop him from getting indicted
Speaker 1: by Grand Juries in Miami and Tampa in February of night.
Speaker 1: The US placed economic sanctions against Panama, and the goal
Speaker 1: at this stage was to force the Man from power
Speaker 1: from beginn From the beginning, though SOUTHCOM, the US military
Speaker 1: command in Latin America, had plans in place for an
Speaker 1: invasion of Panama, more U S forces were sent into
Speaker 1: the country to prepare now. The sanctions against Noriegas Panama
Speaker 1: did what sanctions always do. They harmed poor people by
Speaker 1: making it impossible for them to get basic necessities without
Speaker 1: actually harming the people in charge. Noriega was not forced out.
Speaker 1: In fact, the sanctions made it easy for him to
Speaker 1: declare a national emergency and grab more power. The sanctions
Speaker 1: also provided Noriega with a prime opportunity to flood the
Speaker 1: airwaves with nationalists saber rattling. It was not hard for
Speaker 1: him to get many Panamanians on his side against the
Speaker 1: US for reasons that should be obvious based on the
Speaker 1: rest of these episodes now. During his run for Congress,
Speaker 1: candidate George H. W. Bo was criticized heavily for the
Speaker 1: fact that, as CIA chief and Vice president, he had
Speaker 1: repeatedly acted to protect and use Noriega. This history was
Speaker 1: a problem for old George. But if you're a good
Speaker 1: politician like George H. W. Bush, you know that within
Speaker 1: every problem is a solution. The month that Bush was
Speaker 1: elected to was elected president, Newsweek published an article titled
Speaker 1: the Crack Nation, And I'm going to quote from Emperor
Speaker 1: and the Jungle about how this all gets tied to Noriega.
Speaker 1: The article was focused on that country in our midst
Speaker 1: but not a part of US, and distinct from people
Speaker 1: of normal human appetites. The Newsweek's nine stories made abundantly
Speaker 1: clear who the residents of this crack nation were, and
Speaker 1: they were nearly all black. If crack users truly represented
Speaker 1: a nation, surely that nation's sovereignty would have to be
Speaker 1: violated to address the danger. The article did not say
Speaker 1: whether Latin Americans were purposefully deploying cocaine to destroy the
Speaker 1: lives documented on previous pages, but it did call on
Speaker 1: the new administration to make some hard decisions and asserted
Speaker 1: that America's cocaine problem in fact, has been caused by
Speaker 1: the Colombian cartels and their US based accomplices. Attacking the
Speaker 1: enemy high command is a good strategy, So suddenly George
Speaker 1: Bush has a way out of this problem. Yeah m hm.
Speaker 1: As crack cocaine spread through American cities, the media latched
Speaker 1: onto the problem and succeeded in turning what was a
Speaker 1: problem but a localized problem, into an absolute hysteria. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine, the New York Times published an average
Speaker 1: of a hundred and one stories about drugs per month,
Speaker 1: three times the rate they'd published in nineteen. Drugs, particularly crack,
Speaker 1: were referred to as a plague and a foreign scourge.
Speaker 1: Breathless op eds worried about crack use crossing over, crossing
Speaker 1: over from black neighborhoods into affluent white ones. Now there
Speaker 1: was no evidence that this occurred because rich white people
Speaker 1: used cocaine. But rich white people needed a reason to
Speaker 1: care about crack that didn't make them care about poor
Speaker 1: black people, and worrying that it was going to hurt
Speaker 1: their children in mansions was the way to do that.
Speaker 1: Time called the crack epidemic a plague without boundaries, and
Speaker 1: as John Lindsay Poland writes, quote, a plague that respects
Speaker 1: no sovereignty would have to be met with comparable methods.
Speaker 1: So if the crack epidemic can spread everywhere, then US
Speaker 1: forces are justified in going into any place, even sovereign nations,
Speaker 1: in order to fight the crack epidemic. Source. Yeah, go
Speaker 1: to the source, which you might argue with the CIA,
Speaker 1: but in may, not that far, not that far, go
Speaker 1: up to the guy they're paying who isn't an American citizen.
Speaker 1: So in May of nineteen eighty nine, Noriega suspended Panamanian elections,
Speaker 1: using the emergency caused by U S sanctions as a justification.
Speaker 1: This led to mass protests and the Organization of American States,
Speaker 1: which is like a group of Latin American states that
Speaker 1: is designed to be kind of an overarching diplomatic organization,
Speaker 1: put together a mediation to him to go to Panama
Speaker 1: and try to find a solution, maybe to try and
Speaker 1: to find a way to get Noriega to peacefully leave
Speaker 1: power and into the crisis. The US did not think
Speaker 1: that this was mediation was the thing to do, so
Speaker 1: instead they sent in two thousand soldiers and a Delta
Speaker 1: Force commando team. Now, these troops and special forces were
Speaker 1: on special orders from President Bush to travel on Panamanian
Speaker 1: public roads and ignore Panamanian army checkpoints. The explicit goal
Speaker 1: of this policy was to provoke confrontations between Panamanian soldiers
Speaker 1: and US soldiers. Now, when number of clashes followed, and
Speaker 1: at first none of them rose to the level of
Speaker 1: deadly violence, but that was President Bush's goal. He wanted
Speaker 1: a fight between the Panamanian and US militaries to justify
Speaker 1: further interventions in the country. So it didn't look like
Speaker 1: we were just invading a sovereign nation. You need a
Speaker 1: dead American serviceman really if you're gonna like truly fux
Speaker 1: some ship up. So while all this is going on,
Speaker 1: Noriega was doing standard dictators ship. He sent his soldiers
Speaker 1: after the vice presidential candidate, a guy named Guerrimo Ford,
Speaker 1: and he sent a lot of his supporters, and his
Speaker 1: supporters killed Ford's bodyguard, and suddenly all these images Afford
Speaker 1: with blood sprayed across his white shirt went viral internationally. Now,
Speaker 1: because Noriega was a populist, he had kind of He's
Speaker 1: been a lot of time messaging to the most downtrodden
Speaker 1: people in Panama, which were, of course, the dark skinned
Speaker 1: descendants of Caribbean workers imported by the United States. Because
Speaker 1: he did ship for them, he was seen as standing
Speaker 1: up to the United States, and so they supported them
Speaker 1: because he helped them out and because they hated the US.
Speaker 1: So the video of this attack, which every US news
Speaker 1: network played for days, showed a crowd of very dark
Speaker 1: skinned people attacking Ford, who, as a wealthy Panamanian, was
Speaker 1: a white man. So you see how this plays on
Speaker 1: the news. You've got this crowd of dark skinned Noriega
Speaker 1: supporters beating a white man in the streets, and every
Speaker 1: US broadcaster plays this footage over and over and over,
Speaker 1: referring to this crowd of angry people as government goons,
Speaker 1: These people who are angry because of U S sanctions
Speaker 1: that have materially affected their lives, and angry because they
Speaker 1: see Ford as an asient of the US government. Um.
Speaker 1: But it works in the American news, right, it builds
Speaker 1: this kind of race war narrative that is really helpful
Speaker 1: in drumming Americans up for violence. So the media stokes
Speaker 1: multiple cycles of outrage playing this alongside footage of Noriego
Speaker 1: waving a machete, which is like a thing in Latin America.
Speaker 1: It's like there's a lot of cultural weight to the machete,
Speaker 1: right that everyone, Yeah, Bolivar, it's a tool of revolution,
Speaker 1: it's also a tool of daily life. But again, when
Speaker 1: you have this clip of this crowd of Noriega supporters
Speaker 1: called government goons, attacking Ford in the streets, and you
Speaker 1: switch to Noriega waving a machete, it presents this image
Speaker 1: of Panamanians again as savages like they've been presented in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds under Roosevelt. Right, it's the same
Speaker 1: basic tactic, and it's the same in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: the same news organs that are are pushing this This
Speaker 1: information pundit started yelling at George H. W. Bush for
Speaker 1: not acting to intervene. They called him a wimp. And
Speaker 1: this is there's a ton of jokes and like early
Speaker 1: Saturday Night Live about George Bush being a wimp and
Speaker 1: it's because he's not doesn't invade Panama fast enough. When
Speaker 1: all this footage starts going viral on the news, it's
Speaker 1: pretty good, pretty good stuff, Like George Bush is definitely
Speaker 1: a bad guy in this story, but by god, he
Speaker 1: is not the only one. Um. Nope, Yeah, it's pretty cool. So,
Speaker 1: of course, all of this manufactured Consett manifest that's exactly
Speaker 1: what's going on. In the documentary, The Panama Deception does
Speaker 1: a great job of just cutting together. There will be
Speaker 1: like thirty different like clips from different primetime news segments,
Speaker 1: all using the same phrase government goons to refer to
Speaker 1: this mob um and there's a bunch of different kids
Speaker 1: because they got the same memo. Now, of course, throughout
Speaker 1: all of this pressure to deal with the crack At
Speaker 1: epidemic was also a building. In nineteen eighty nine, President
Speaker 1: Bush made his first televised speech. He focused on the
Speaker 1: crack epidemic and held up a baggy of the drug
Speaker 1: that he said had been purchased from a black drug
Speaker 1: dealer across the street from the White House. This was
Speaker 1: technically true. What was left unsaid was that the d
Speaker 1: e A had deliberately pushed the dealer to meet them
Speaker 1: in Lafayette Park, far away from where he normally did
Speaker 1: his business, so that Bush could claim it had been
Speaker 1: bought within sight of the White House. That's the story
Speaker 1: for another day, though for now, I just want to
Speaker 1: repeat something John Lindsay Poland wrote about this whole episode. Quote.
Speaker 1: The speech illustrates how internal ethnic minorities had become politically
Speaker 1: expendable props in the drug war at the time. Now
Speaker 1: An ABC poll taken after the speech found that six
Speaker 1: of respondents believed drugs were the most important problem facing
Speaker 1: the United States. A few days later, Panamanian soldiers attempted
Speaker 1: a coup against Noriega, which he put down with as
Speaker 1: much bloodshed as you would expect. More pundits called George
Speaker 1: Bush a whimp. The President had been willing to ruin
Speaker 1: a young black citizen life for political theater, and he
Speaker 1: was about to prove that he would be happy to
Speaker 1: do much worse to foreigners in advancing the same goal.
Speaker 1: General Colin Powell, at that point, chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
Speaker 1: later told Bob Woodward that he had never witnessed a
Speaker 1: political fight as ugly as the debate over whether or
Speaker 1: not to invade Panama. He said he felt like the
Speaker 1: political class was acting as a lynch mob. War fever
Speaker 1: was as high in the United States as it could
Speaker 1: possibly be, and within the military itself it was damn
Speaker 1: near boiling over. In nineteen eighties seven, it had become
Speaker 1: clear to even the most dedicated Cold Warriors that the U. S.
Speaker 1: S R Was not long for this world. This meant
Speaker 1: an end of the Cold War, and thus an end
Speaker 1: to the billions and billions that the US had spent
Speaker 1: funding death squads and dictators in Latin America under the
Speaker 1: guise of anti communism. The people doing this, murdering and
Speaker 1: receiving these funds did not want to stop. Colonel John D. Wiggelstein,
Speaker 1: who coordinated the U. S. Military intervention in El Salvador
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighties seven, wrote that the military needed to
Speaker 1: find quote a weapon with which to regain the moral
Speaker 1: high ground we appeared to have lost. He suggested that
Speaker 1: a melding in the American public's mind and in Congress
Speaker 1: of this connection between the drug trade and insurgency would
Speaker 1: lead to the necessary support to counter the guerilla and
Speaker 1: narcotics terrorists in this hemisphere. Those church and academic groups
Speaker 1: that have slavishly supported insurgency in Latin America would find
Speaker 1: themselves on the wrong side of the moral issue. Pretty fun,
Speaker 1: there's a yeah, there's a there's a lot going on here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fun when you say, but it all leads, But
Speaker 1: it all leads in one direction. It does lead in
Speaker 1: one directly. And what he's talking about we chatted about
Speaker 1: the sum in the School of the Americas. There are
Speaker 1: like a lot of Catholic churches are very supportive of
Speaker 1: left wing insurgents in Latin America in the sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies because the right wing death squads are so fucking brutal,
Speaker 1: and because there's like a strong social justice component, two
Speaker 1: aspects of Catholic theology. And this really pisss off the
Speaker 1: Americans because it means that US backed groups keep murdering
Speaker 1: nuns and raping nuns in mass and that looks really
Speaker 1: bad in the media, and it's led to a degradation
Speaker 1: in like US support for the military in Latin America.
Speaker 1: And so the idea is that if we tie the
Speaker 1: drug war to these left wing insurgents, if we blame
Speaker 1: it on them, nobody likes drugs. They're the ultimate evil.
Speaker 1: Just forget about the contrasts for a second. Forget about
Speaker 1: the contrasts for a second. Think about crack. Now. By
Speaker 1: all accounts, the strategy was a staggering success. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine, Congress made the Defense Department the single lead
Speaker 1: agency in the federal government for the detection and monitoring
Speaker 1: of drug trafficking in the hemisphere. This, yeahn't that cool?
Speaker 1: That makes sense. They should be the ones doing that now.
Speaker 1: This explains why a lot of folks at the top
Speaker 1: in the military wanted war with Panama. But outside of
Speaker 1: high command, war fever was just as strong. And this
Speaker 1: was largely because in the decades of relative peace since Vietnam,
Speaker 1: the United States had developed a whole panoply of high
Speaker 1: tech killing machines that we had never had a chance
Speaker 1: to test out stuff like Apache helicopters, Abram's battle tanks,
Speaker 1: stealth bombers, and a whole bunch of Neto rocket launchers
Speaker 1: and new precision guided bombs. Troops and commanders were unbelievably
Speaker 1: horny to try this stuff out. One American general even
Speaker 1: admitted in an interview, we are mesmerized with firepower. We
Speaker 1: have all these new gadgets, laser guided missiles and stealth fighters,
Speaker 1: and we are just dying to use that stuff. Perhaps
Speaker 1: that's a problem their excuse to use that. Within a
Speaker 1: few years they will be using yeah, and it will
Speaker 1: turn out none of it really helps when ship gets that. Nope.
Speaker 1: So their excuse to use that stuff came in December
Speaker 1: as a result of some of the soldiers Bush had
Speaker 1: ordered to drive around on Panamanian roads being jackasses and
Speaker 1: doing exactly that. The facts of the story are that
Speaker 1: on December sixteenth, four American officers and civilian clothes in
Speaker 1: a private car were stopped at a Panamanian checkpoint point
Speaker 1: close to PDF headquarters. They had gotten lost downtown, or
Speaker 1: so they claimed. A conflict arose at the checkpoint, and
Speaker 1: the U. S soldiers drove through the checkpoint without approval,
Speaker 1: and the Panamanians opened fire, killing one soldier and wounding another.
Speaker 1: The Defense Department alleged that the men were unarmed and
Speaker 1: that they had been harassed by Panamanian soldiers, and maybe
Speaker 1: they had been We don't really know what happened. We
Speaker 1: know what the Defense Department says has happened, and we
Speaker 1: know that other soldiers had been given orders to ignore checkpoints.
Speaker 1: And Furthermore, as the l A. Times reported the killing
Speaker 1: of a U. S Marine lieutenant by Panamanian forces last December,
Speaker 1: an event used by President Bush in part to justify
Speaker 1: the invasion of Panama, was not the unprovoked active aggression
Speaker 1: portrayed by the White House, according to American military and
Speaker 1: civilian sources. Instead, it was a step in a pattern
Speaker 1: of aggressive behavior by a small group of US troops
Speaker 1: who called themselves the hard Chargers, and who frequently tested
Speaker 1: the patients and reaction of Panamanian forces, particularly at roadblocks,
Speaker 1: the sources said. And of course the Pentagon denies this.
Speaker 1: But that's the story. Now. You can decide what you
Speaker 1: want to believe there. Whatever the truth was present, Bush
Speaker 1: immediately gave orders to invade, and invade. We did. The
Speaker 1: US launched its attack on Panama a December twenty nine,
Speaker 1: eighty nine. It would be the bloodiest war on Panamanian
Speaker 1: soil in ninety years. The United States owned the most
Speaker 1: advanced and deadly military apparatus and human history. At this point,
Speaker 1: we had tens of thousands of soldiers and marines, extensive
Speaker 1: air and naval support, and armored vehicles. The Panamanian military
Speaker 1: numbered three thousand men. Needless to say, US forces tore
Speaker 1: through them with basically no resistance. Most of our air
Speaker 1: assets and artillery focused on shelling heavily populated areas. The
Speaker 1: Panamanian military headquarters was located in the mostly black and indigenous,
Speaker 1: densely peopled El Tario neighborhood. The US gave ten minutes
Speaker 1: of warning for these people to abandon their homes and possessions,
Speaker 1: and then leveled the entire neighborhood with high tech weaponry
Speaker 1: from the sky. This marked the first time the fifty
Speaker 1: million dollar F one seven A stealth bomber was deployed.
Speaker 1: In that the stealth bomber was invisible to radar, which
Speaker 1: didn't matter because Panama did not have r did not
Speaker 1: have any radar, could have used a blimp. Americans had
Speaker 1: been assured that the bomber was incredibly accurate, able to
Speaker 1: drop bombs down chimneys and avoid collateral damage. In reality,
Speaker 1: it missed its bombing target by more than three hundred yards.
Speaker 1: That's a huge rain. Yeah, it's three football fields, which
Speaker 1: is again every time, that's a half a bad square. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anytime someone in the military too says the word precision bombs,
Speaker 1: they're lying to you. Such a thing has never been invented.
Speaker 1: I say that as someone who has watched the United
Speaker 1: States bomba city with my own eyes. We don't have
Speaker 1: precision bombs. We have bombs that are more precise than
Speaker 1: I don't know guys in were one dropping them out
Speaker 1: of a cockpit, but it is not very precise. But like,
Speaker 1: that's that that like three yards is huge. That's a
Speaker 1: that's half a group. That's like a third to half
Speaker 1: a grid square. That's you don't like like like whatever
Speaker 1: I think. Whenever I think like precision, I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: like you know, a tenth of a grid square, you know,
Speaker 1: a hundreds like ours, that's pretty good. Three is a
Speaker 1: wide miss. Yeah, and we didn't find that out. You'd
Speaker 1: be better off, you know, World War two bomber pilot,
Speaker 1: you know. And one of the things that's happening here
Speaker 1: is the US Press court that's supposed to cover this
Speaker 1: is embedded with the Defense Department, who they're only getting
Speaker 1: the best, and the Defense department make sure they arrived
Speaker 1: several days late, so they missed the fighting. There are
Speaker 1: a couple of journalists, including a local Panamanian journalists who
Speaker 1: are there and who we get some reports from because
Speaker 1: they're there during the fighting. But the mainstream American press
Speaker 1: corps doesn't arrive until later, and of course they receive
Speaker 1: a gated tour of all of this, and that's why
Speaker 1: the initial reports from Panama are just talking about, oh
Speaker 1: precision our weapons are, and like they're able to strike
Speaker 1: this building and leave all of the buildings around it.
Speaker 1: You can look at footage of Alt Tario neighborhood around
Speaker 1: the painting and Panamanian defense. It's leveled. It looks like
Speaker 1: they just wipe this place off the face of the
Speaker 1: fun precisely limited this entire grid square where all of
Speaker 1: the poor people live, where all of the black and
Speaker 1: indigenous residents live. Um now wealthy neighborhoods were avoided and
Speaker 1: preserved during the US invasion, and in fact, when US
Speaker 1: forces entered Cologne, they found that business owners in the
Speaker 1: wealthy shopping district had shot three looters dead. Obviously, when
Speaker 1: the fighting starts, people who are starving under U S
Speaker 1: sanctions start looting, business owners shoot them dead, and the
Speaker 1: US forces allow these men to keep their guns and
Speaker 1: even send in soldiers to help protect these business owners
Speaker 1: from people who are starving due to sanctions. It's pretty
Speaker 1: fucking cool. Um, I'm gonna quote again from Emperors in
Speaker 1: the jungle. The impoverished community of San Miguelito was also
Speaker 1: bombed across the town at Punta Patila. Wealthy Panamanians watched
Speaker 1: the invasion from their condominiums and expensive high rises at
Speaker 1: near my petit Lea Airport, Navy seals were ordered to
Speaker 1: undertake a risky operation to disable Noriega's personal jet at
Speaker 1: close range to avoid damage to nearby residences from crossfire.
Speaker 1: Four seals lost their lives in the operation. No such
Speaker 1: care was taken with a PDF headquarters next to El Jarillo,
Speaker 1: where U S forces bombed from the air. Their tracer
Speaker 1: bullets and flares contributed to the conflagration that incinerated the
Speaker 1: community and many people who were trapped inside. So in
Speaker 1: the rich neighborhood, when we're trying to disable Noriega's plane,
Speaker 1: we send a Navy seals and we lose a lot
Speaker 1: of Navy seals taking out his plane so that we
Speaker 1: don't have to damage the wealthy people's houses. But in Elcheria,
Speaker 1: where people are poor, we just fucking level it. Pretty bad,
Speaker 1: pretty bad, pretty bad, Chelsea. But it's not the good
Speaker 1: imagery that you know. It's it's it's it doesn't make
Speaker 1: for a good good CNN. Yeah, this is not what
Speaker 1: Peter Jennings talks about at the time. Now, today, the
Speaker 1: Defense Department officially recognizes five hundred and sixteen deaths, mostly civilian,
Speaker 1: as a result of us A actions in Panama. An
Speaker 1: internal Army memo put the death toll it more than
Speaker 1: a thousand. Central American Human Rights Commission estimates between two
Speaker 1: and three thousand dead, and I've heard estimates of about
Speaker 1: thirty five hundred. You have to expect a couple of
Speaker 1: thousand is the likely death toll? Yeah, yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, definitely more than the United States is willing
Speaker 1: than the do O D is willing to admit. And
Speaker 1: those deaths were just the start. More than eighteen thousand
Speaker 1: Panamanians were rendered homeless by the invasion. More than five
Speaker 1: thousand Panamanians were detained on suspicion of being potential insurgents
Speaker 1: and put in concentration camps. There are multiple allegations, some
Speaker 1: of which have been substantiated heavily, that US forces executed
Speaker 1: civilians during the occupation. Mass graves were dug and filled
Speaker 1: with corpses and would be uncovered for years afterwards in
Speaker 1: Panama City. And then this is a tiny country, very
Speaker 1: small place. Um. And the mass graves suggest that the
Speaker 1: d D undertook extensive efforts to hide the ath told.
Speaker 1: Some of these corpses are found in handcuffs with bullets
Speaker 1: in the back of their skulls. Um, it's bad, It's
Speaker 1: very bad. What happens in Panama? Um? And again Yeah,
Speaker 1: messed up stuff. Six days in Panama. Yeah, yeah, simple, quiet, peaceful,
Speaker 1: little war. Noriega went on the run. Of course, soldiers
Speaker 1: searching for him found materials used in Santa Ria, a
Speaker 1: popular religion popular in the Caribbean. The military, prodded by
Speaker 1: the d D, used this to suggest that Noriega supportives
Speaker 1: were devil worshippers. The military claimed that a hundred and
Speaker 1: ten pounds of cocaine was also found in what they
Speaker 1: called Noriega's witch house. The Los Angeles Times particularly bought
Speaker 1: into this and wrote in one article that's of blood,
Speaker 1: animal in trails, a picture of Adolf Hitler, spike heeled shoes,
Speaker 1: more than a hundred pounds of cocaine all were part
Speaker 1: of the bizarre scenes encountered by American troops as these
Speaker 1: storms Noriega's inner sanctum. Basically, now, Chelsea, you want to
Speaker 1: guess with that hundred and ten pounds of cocaine? Actually,
Speaker 1: was I gonna guess sugar or something to Molly's, to
Speaker 1: Molly's um. It took a month for us to find
Speaker 1: out that it was to Molly's. That he just had
Speaker 1: a house full of to Molly's. And the animal gets
Speaker 1: were probably because they were, you know, like gutting and
Speaker 1: preparing animals to eat. Anyway, the lie served its purpose.
Speaker 1: Noriega was effectively made into a demon, awful enough that
Speaker 1: whole neighborhoods had to be leveled in order to catch him,
Speaker 1: and thousands slaughtered. The fact that Noriega never managed to
Speaker 1: do as much damage to Panama as the Bush administration
Speaker 1: had done went onset, and as did the fact that
Speaker 1: the invasion gave the United States what it wanted. The
Speaker 1: Panamanian military was destroyed, and under negotiations with the new government,
Speaker 1: the US got the right to maintain their military presence
Speaker 1: in Panama. After all, Panama didn't have a literry anymore,
Speaker 1: so they were going to need protection. Convenient. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's basically the end of the story. You know, eventually
Speaker 1: the US pulls most of its stuff out of Panama.
Speaker 1: It takes another kind of people would forget about Panama. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and people forget about Panama. Noriega dies in US custody
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eighteen. I think, um, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's the story of the US and Panama. Horrible.
Speaker 1: And I'm prad being American, where at least I know
Speaker 1: I'm free. I hated that so much. Yeah, well, Chelsea,
Speaker 1: do you have any plugables for US? I do have
Speaker 1: a Twitter account, it is Twitter dot com forward slash
Speaker 1: x y Chelsea. I have a Twitch account which is
Speaker 1: uh twitch dot tv forward slash x y Chelsea, And
Speaker 1: those are my two social media accounts. You can figure
Speaker 1: out all the things that I do. I am a
Speaker 1: Twitter streamer as well as a Twitter tweet out with
Speaker 1: your feet out and think about panamall. And I just
Speaker 1: played video games. I just played mine Craft, a little
Speaker 1: bit of harmless Minecraft, a little bit of harmless. Maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit of political commentator commentators ships on from
Speaker 1: time to time. Yeah, I mean, you have a famously
Speaker 1: positive relationship with the US government, so I can only
Speaker 1: imagine what some of your tweets are about. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: try to keep I tried to. I hold my tongue
Speaker 1: a little bit, all right, Well hold your tongues um
Speaker 1: on Twitter or not, because there's effectively very little moderation
Speaker 1: on that platform. Podka, let's go