On December 20, 1989, the United States invaded Panama with tens of thousands of troops. It was the largest US invasion since Vietnam. The first US military action since the fall of the Berlin Wall one month before. The testing ground for the Iraq Wars. The US invading forces destroyed 20,000 homes and killed hundreds of innocent Panamanians, dumping bodies into mass graves.

And the United States government and the mainstream media ignored or whitewashed the violence. The story told to the American people was that of a tremendous success: The liberation of the people of Panama. All in the name of “democracy” and the so-called “war on drugs.”

In this episode, host Michael Fox takes us to the working-class Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, which received the brunt of the US attack. He meets with Panamanians who have long fought for justice, and visits a former US military barracks that was the first home of the US School of the Americas. This is Episode 13.

Under the Shadow is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened—a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.

Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.

This podcast is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA.

Guests: John Lindsay Poland, Olmedo Beluche, Celia Sanjur, Gilma Camargo
Grahame Russell, Pedro Silva, Efrain Guerrero, Omar Gonzalez
Edited by Heather Gies.
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido and Michael Fox. Monte Perdido’s new album Ofrenda is now out. You can listen to the full album on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever you listen to music. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Additional links/info:

  • Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama (Duke, 2003), is John Lindsay Poland’s expose on the U.S. military involvement in Panama.
  • You can watch the documentary, The Panama Deception, here.
  • Here are several links to Democracy Now! coverage, over the years, looking back at the U.S. invasion of Panama (here, here, and here).
  • El Chorrillo Neighborhood Tour: You can find out more about Efrain Guerrero’s work trying to protect the memory of El Chorrillo, plus his neighborhood tours, on his Instagram or TikTok. His organization is called Movimiento Identidad. Here’s the website to set up a tour.

Support Under the Shadow:

Transcript

Michael Fox:  Hi folks, I’m your host Michael Fox. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is the second episode about Panama. If you haven’t listened to the first one yet, Episode 12, about the Panama Canal, I recommend you go back and do that first. Also, today’s episode deals with some harsh and heavy themes from the US 1989 invasion of Panama, including killings and mass graves. If you’re sensitive to these things, or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen. OK. Here’s the show…

It’s a beautiful afternoon in December. Sun’s kind of sinking low. You can hear the birds. Blue sky, white clouds. Around me are a series of high-rise buildings. One of them is completely painted blue. Another is beige with air-conditioning units hanging out from windows. Some potted plants. Some clothes hanging out. A couple of Panamanian flags. In front of this is a park. Elderly women sitting in chairs. Someone’s walking their dogs. It’s really peaceful. 

This is a lower class community here in Panama City. Many people are afraid to come into the community. They say it’s one of the most dangerous in Panama, though people I’ve already met say that’s not the case. 

But I’m here for another reason, because in front of me are two monuments. One of them is just a small concrete block. That, on top of it says, “In memory of the fallen of December 20, 1989”. It’s just this little concrete block, a couple of feet long, with the painting of a helicopter on the side. 

Because this neighborhood was the center, ground zero, for the US invasion back in 1989, where the US just came in dropping bombs, exploding the neighborhood, setting everything on fire and killing hundreds of people. We still don’t know what the death count may have been. The US planes began dropping their bombs just after midnight on the poor working-class neighborhood of El Chorrillo.

Omar Gonzalez was 12 years old at the time. 

Omar Gonzalez:  We had been really happy that day because we were putting up our Christmas tree. And then we started hearing the engines and the planes and the people saying that the invasion was coming. But we couldn’t believe it. It was late at night.

We went out on the balcony. We heard the planes. We were there when they started shooting. And then, after a few minutes, the lights went out. We took refuge inside. We were huddled there with my mom. Bomb after bomb fell. It was terrible.

We could see the bombs fall out the window. And the wooden houses that were beside the Panamanian military barracks caught on fire. Many innocent people died there in the fires. We watched it all happen.

Michael Fox:  This was just the beginning. 20,000 people were knocked from their homes. Hundreds were killed, bodies buried in mass graves. The United States occupied the country.

President George H.W. Bush [recording]:  At this moment, US forces, including forces deployed from the United States last night, are engaged in action in Panama.

Michael Fox:  The largest US invasion since Vietnam. The first US military action since the fall of the Berlin Wall one month before. The testing ground for the Iraq Wars.

The United States government and the mainstream media ignored or whitewashed the violence. The story told to the American people was that of a tremendous success, the liberation of the people of Panama, all in the name of democracy and the so-called war on drugs.

President George H.W. Bush [recording]:  To defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking, and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty.

Michael Fox:  That and so much more, in a minute. 

This is Under the Shadow — An investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present. 

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. 

In each episode in this series, I take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today.

So, this is the final episode of Under the Shadow Season 1. For the last six months, I’ve been walking you south from the Guatemalan border with Mexico all the way to Panama at the southern tip of Central America. I’ve looked at the long shadow of the United States in the region going back centuries.

In the last episode, we walked back to the US’s role in the very creation of the state of Panama and the Canal Zone. We examined the long role of the United States in the country throughout the 20th century. Today, we are diving in head first into one of the darkest moments of that period.

This is Under the Shadow Season 1: Central America. Episode 13: “Panama. U.S. invasion”. 

President George H.W. Bush [recording]:  My fellow citizens. Last night I ordered US military forces to Panama. No president takes such action lightly. This morning, I want to tell you what I did and why I did it.

Michael Fox:  George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to begin in the early hours of Dec. 20, 1989. The goal of Operation Just Cause was to remove Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and bring him to face drug trafficking charges in the United States.

Noriega was actually formerly a staunch ally of the US — I’ll get into his complicated relationship with the United States shortly. 

But first, I want to go back to El Chorrillo, to 12-year-old Omar Gonzalez and his family, cowering and watching the bombs fall just outside their apartment building.

Omar says the US military stopped firing for a few minutes and called on residents to come out with their hands up. They called out on loudspeakers.

Omar Gonzalez:  The gringos said they had us surrounded, so everyone came pouring out with their hands up. But many people stayed behind because they were afraid.

Michael Fox:  Omar’s apartment block was just beside the main barracks of the Panamanian Defense Forces, the country’s main military force. They never had a chance. They had only about 12,000 soldiers throughout the country. The US invading force was 26,000 strong, and that doesn’t include the soldiers and the officers already stationed in the US military bases throughout the Canal Zone.

The invading US armed forces rained down missile and bomb after bomb on the barracks and the surrounding neighborhood of El Chorrillo. One of the goals was to set the area on fire, that was the strategy. They knew the whole area would go up in smoke like a box of matches. That’s what they were shooting for.

This is old videotape footage of the US forces bombarding the area from helicopters overhead and celebrating. The video is grainy, black and white. Bombs exploding below. It’s kind of hard to make out what they’re saying, but they’re basically confirming fires on several of the buildings they have been targeting.

Military Footage:  OK, we got some fires on our building. There’s number five right there. It’s burning good. There’s number two there. 54. I can’t see through the smoke. They’ll catch the building. We’re OK. OK, five’s on fire. Four. Seems like beautiful. You think we shot it enough? No. We got a fire. We got a fire.

Michael Fox:  This footage is from a series of old video tapes shot by US forces during the invasion and acquired by Panama’s National Museum. They offer a surprisingly candid inside look at the actions of the US soldiers. I’ll feature footage and sound from these videos throughout this episode.

Those fires didn’t just impact the Panamanian Defense Forces complex; They engulfed the neighborhood, which was largely constructed of one and two-story wooden homes, which had been built to house many of the workers who had helped to construct the Panama Canal and then the workers of the Canal Zone, as we looked at in the last episode.

Omar Gonzalez:  So many innocent people died. Friends of ours. Children we knew. People. Men and women. Some people who were sleeping at that moment. Elderly people who couldn’t stand up or run away because they lived close to the barracks. And this is the history. And it’s painful, more than anything else.

Michael Fox:  20,000 homes were destroyed.

John Lindsay Poland:  El Chorrillo was a massive fire in El Chorrillo, a very densely populated neighborhood right on the edge of the Canal Zone. The Black population, many people who had worked in the Canal Zone, but a poor neighborhood and, as a result, hundreds and hundreds of people died there.

Michael Fox:  John Lindsay Poland is the author of the book Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the US in Panama.

John Lindsay Poland:  But there were mass graves that the US set up. Which was catastrophic, of course, for Panamanians.

Michael Fox:  Historian Olmedo Beluche says the region looked like Gaza today. He published the first book about the US invasion of Panama to mark the one-year anniversary of the attack. 

He says some residents sought refuge in a nearby church. He says the United States promoted a strategy of looting supermarkets and stores to generate chaos and confusion. The financial cost to the private sector was estimated at $400 million US dollars.

It took the United States four days to find Noriega, during which time the US occupied the country and swore in a puppet government on a US military base. The new US-backed president was Guillermo Endara, the opposition candidate who had allegedly won elections earlier that year against Noriega’s ally. 

So, General Noriega, the de facto leader of Panama since 1983, had canceled the vote. Professor Olmedo Beluche explains that although Endara had participated in the elections, his was a puppet government because he was sworn in at the US military base while the country was under invasion.

Olmedo Beluche:  The Americans placed the US ambassador next to the president at all times. All  week, each time the president made a report, along with each minister there was a high-ranking American colonel, and they did all the public addresses. They controlled the police. They had to make reports in both Spanish and in English to control them.

Michael Fox:  The US controlled the messaging. And the media spun the story as a liberation, freeing Panama from an evil dictator. 

Documentary:  The pressed pool that went down there was managed from the day they arrived. They were only taken to see what the government, what the military wanted them to see. And there has been continuous suppression and denial of the extent of damage which was inflicted during that invasion. 

Michael Fox:  That’s the late Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll from the Center for Defense Information, in a clip from the 1992 Academy Award-winning documentary The Panama Deception. The movie looked at the US invasion and the media coverage.

With an incomplete picture from the press, both locally and internationally, the US public and many Panamians initially applauded the invasion.

Professor Olmedo Beluche.

Olmedo Beluche:  One of the things the United States learned from the Vietnam War was to control journalism. So, in Panama, journalists were prevented from accessing combat and conflict zones until US forces had cleaned up. And the only journalist who took the most damning photos was killed by US troops.

Michael Fox:  That was a Spanish photojournalist named Juantxu Rodríguez, who was on assignment for El País. He took some of the only pictures that were published of the US violence; dead bodies lined up. He was killed by a US sharpshooter on Dec. 21, the day after the start of the invasion. 

Robert Knight:  There was not a conflict, but according to the reports of colleagues and American soldiers, just up, took aim, and shot him down.

Michael Fox:  That’s the late investigative journalist Robert Knight, also from the documentary The Panama Deception.

Robert Knight:  What happened in Panama is a hidden horror. Many of the bodies were bulldozed into piles and immolated in the slums where they were collected. Other bodies were left in the garbage chutes of the poor projects from which they died from the shooting from the artillery, from the machine guns, from the airborne, from the attacks. Others were said to have been pushed into the ocean.

Michael Fox:  But almost none of this was seen or heard of in the local and international press. It was hushed up, cleaned up, controlled, and locked down by the invading US forces.

Here’s filmmaker Barbara Trent, again, from The Panama Deception.

Barbara Trent:  The US military also targeted the Panamanian media. Radio stations were immediately taken over and destroyed. US forces occupied TV stations and began transmitting their own signal. Many journalists were either arrested or fired. One of Panama’s largest daily newspapers, La Republica, was raided, ransacked, and closed down by American troops.

Michael Fox:  Those old videos that I mentioned earlier, the ones shot by US soldiers during the invasion, give a chilling inside look into the reality on the ground. 

Speaker:  Studs. You’re both studs. I hope you know that. Yeah, that’s us. We are it.

Michael Fox:  Videos from the aftermath of the invasion show bodies lying dead on the street, bloodied and shot up. Cars smashed up and crashed. People rush by quickly.

In another video from the morning of the invasion but after the sun has come up, US officers interrogate a blindfolded Panamanian man who is clearly afraid for his life. But the US soldiers can barely communicate with him because only a couple of guys speak even broken Spanish. It’s the same thing on another tape, where dozens of US soldiers surround a house with their weapons drawn. You can hear them calling for the people inside to surrender and come out with their hands up — But they’re doing it in English! 

The most powerful country on the planet launched an invasion of tens of thousands of soldiers into a Spanish-speaking nation without developing the most minimal protocol for communicating with local residents. And this is a country that, at the time, the United States had literally controlled a piece of for 85 years. 

It is shocking. And it’s a sign of just how brazen the US was in carrying out its imperial goals and how disconnected it was from the reality on the ground. 

It’s also a sign of something else: The real reason for the invasion. 

John Lindsay Poland.

John Lindsay Poland:  In Latin America, yes, for 50 years, the United States had rationalized military intervention based on the threat of communism and, essentially, on the threat of independent Latin American governments. 

And so, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, George H.W. Bush, he is a new president, he established his own credibility as a warrior through the invasion of Panama.

Michael Fox:  That is the point. The US invasion of Panama was a show of force and a training op that Washington knew would easily succeed. Of course, some people would die. That was the collateral damage for Washington’s success. This was a necessary step in re-exerting US dominance in a new world order as the Cold War was ending and the communist bloc was collapsing. Bush needed to show strength, and the US needed a new war. 

Commercial:  Is there anyone out there who still isn’t clear about what doing drugs does?

Michael Fox:  If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably remember this commercial.

Commercial:  This is your brain. This is drugs.

Michael Fox:  It shows this guy frying an egg in a skillet.

Commercial:  This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? 

John Lindsay Poland:  So the 1980s, the mid to late 1980s, the drug war of the United States becomes a major policy and material commitment of the US federal government, both within the United States and in foreign policy. And it’s responding politically to the crack cocaine epidemic, but it is also responding to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a need to reframe, reset US military postures around the world.

Michael Fox:  The US invasion of Panama showed that Washington was ready to set the new post Cold War agenda and willing to take action to carry its war on drugs abroad. 

And it didn’t stop in Panama. Over the decades, the US-backed war on drugs has driven intense militarization and human rights abuses across Latin America, most infamously in Mexico and Colombia. After the invasion of Panama, the drug war became a major excuse for the United States to meddle in countries far from its borders — And often with disastrous impacts.  

John says the US invasion was also, in part, an attempt to keep a foothold in Panama. 

President Jimmy Carter [recording]:  This agreement has been negotiated over a period of 14 years.

Michael Fox:  Remember that, according to the 1977 deal, the US had to hand over the Canal, the Canal Zone, and its bases to Panama by the end of the century — Dec. 31, 1999. But the United States was reluctant to do away with its military bases. 

John Lindsay Poland:  And so, several years later, in 1995, the United States opens negotiations to keep a US military presence in Panama after 1999. The invasion really set the stage for those negotiations. Those negotiations failed when a copy of the language for the new presence was leaked, and it was clear that the terms were hostile to Panamanian sovereignty. So that agreement failed, and ultimately the troops left at the end of 1999.

Michael Fox:  As for Noriega, his relationship with the United States is an interesting one, and not unlike that of the recently convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras. See, Noriega was “one of our guys”, as Washington operatives say.

John Lindsay Poland:  So the Noriega government in Panama was a military ally of the United States, in operational terms, and was a CIA and US Army intelligence asset for many, many years.

I think it went sour because he was playing all sides, He was in bed with the United States. He was in bed with some of the cartel operatives. He was communicating with Castro’s Cuban intelligence forces. So he was a player, he was an international player on all sides. 

Now, that can be very valuable to the United States if he’s serving their interests. But if he is his own player, which he increasingly was and also enriching himself, then at a certain point there’s a tension for US intelligence.

Michael Fox:  Then there were the canceled 1989 elections. Those were supposed to be the first free presidential elections in the country since before former dictator Omar Torrijos took power in a 1968 coup. When Noriega annulled the 1989 vote, protesters hit the streets. 

John Lindsay Poland:  And, in addition, there was a DA that indicted Noriega on drug trafficking charges, which may or may not have been coordinated by the State Department or military forces of the United States. The indictment also shifted the dynamics, because now he was an indicted, potential felon.

So all of those things led to… And the fact that Bush really needed some kind of military victory. He needed to reframe the Cold War. He needed to implement his drug war.

Michael Fox:  That’s what he did. And he didn’t look back. Neither has the United States, despite the violence, destruction, and the huge cost to the Panamanian people. But many in Panama have been demanding justice and fighting to hold the United States accountable ever since. 

That in a minute. 

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Maximillian Alvarez:  Hey, everyone, Maximillian Alvarez here, editor-in-chief of The Real News Network. We’re going to get you right back to the program in a sec, I promise. But really quick, I just wanted to remind y’all that The Real News is an independent, viewer and listener-supported, grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never, ever put our reporting behind paywalls. 

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Also, if you’re enjoying Under the Shadow, then you will definitely want to follow NACLA, the North American Congress on Latin America. NACLA’s reporting and analysis goes beyond the headlines to help you understand what’s happening in Latin America and the Caribbean from a progressive perspective. Visit nacla.org to learn more. 

Alright, thanks for listening. Back to the show.

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Michael Fox:  Protests ripple in the streets in the weeks following the invasion. They carry Panama flags, and signs and banners: “Get out Yankee troops!” “Widows and orphans demand justice.”

They hold signs with the names of those killed during the invasion. 

“Get out killers. Get out,” they chant.

Isabel Corro:  The government continues with the gringos in our land —

Michael Fox:  — Isabel Corro tells the crowd during one protest. She would go on to lead the association of family members of those killed on Dec. 20. 

Isabel Corro:  We are still invaded as if yesterday were the 20th of December. We are marching, and we will continue to march, without fear of the threats that we receive each day.

Michael Fox:  Meanwhile, a Panamanian law student at John Jay College in New York had been watching everything unfold in her country. Her name was Gilma Camargo. 

Gilma Camargo:  I am the daughter of Lucilla, the granddaughter of Gilma, an attorney that loves her work, and a person that loves her country and is dedicated to anti-imperialism. 

Michael Fox:  I sat down with Gilma in late 2023 in Panama City, where she lives now.

When the Panama airport opened in January 1990, a couple of weeks after the invasion, she was on one of the first flights down, together with a pair of lawyers from the US National Lawyers Guild and one from the Center for Constitutional Rights. 

Gilma Camargo:  It was difficult to see the destruction. It was difficult. And we need to institute a nationalist. So Santana, El Chorrillo, San Miguelito were areas which I, as a student leader, was very used to being around those areas. And so I come back and I see my country destroyed. 

Anyway, we had the opportunity to go to Jardin de la Paz, and we asked the committee for human rights in Panama. Have you seen any mass graves? And they said no, we haven’t seen anything. So we walk into Jardin de Paz and there they were.

Michael Fox:  US soldiers had buried people in body bags in numerous mass graves across the region.

Sociologist, environmentalist, and activist Celia Sanjur worked with Panama’s National Human Rights Commission, CONADEHUPA at the time. We met at a cafe in Panama City. I asked her what it was like interviewing those who had suffered and trying to identify the human rights abuses and the victims.

Celia Sanjur:  The gringos did such an excellent job at making the evidence of their violence disappear that it has been very difficult. 

I’ll tell you what I saw in El Chorrillo just after the invasion. I remember that I took many international human rights representatives to places where they said there were mass graves. For example, we arrived at Chorrillo, there was a big place there, on the little beach of Chorrillo, and you could smell the smell of death. But how could you identify it? It was hard. Very hard.

Michael Fox:  She was there the day they exhumed the bodies in the Jardin de la Paz mass grave the year after the invasion.

Celia Sanjur:  Yes, that was a crucial moment. And it was very intense, because they opened the grave and found, well, bags. Green gringo body bags. And taking all of that out was really hard, especially for the relatives of the victims of that time. 

But I will tell you this, we always came back to this question of impunity. This is what prevailed. Then you can open a mass grave. It hurts you, it kills you, but in the face of everything that happened — And we still don’t know everything that happened. But it was very hard. Really hard. 

And the people did their best to carry on. I don’t know if we’ve overcome it, but we have carried it with us. It was very, very, very, very difficult.

Michael Fox:  A few months after Jardin de la Paz was exhumed, Canadian human rights activist Grahame Russell attended an exhumation of another mass grave in Colón. At the time, he worked with CODEHUCA, the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in Central America. He wrote about his experience in this excerpt from his 1992 book The Never Ending.

Grahame Russell:  It is next to impossible to identify anything — Perhaps a gold tooth or a pair of glasses are identifiable amongst the green and gray. Despite the unlikelihood, the families line up one by one — A ghastly, mournful procession. A forensic doctor holds up a pair of shorts found on the cadaver of a six-year-old boy, and asks if anyone can identify them.  A woman collapses in tears, staring at the shorts of her nephew.  She later tells us that he and his mother had been shot by US soldiers while they were driving in Colón.

Michael Fox:  Meanwhile, lawyer Gilma Camargo and her team of lawyers collected documents and interviewed survivors.

Gilma Camargo:  We found in Colón this man, a worker, José Isabel Salas Galindo. He was already a refugee, and this woman was his wife. That’s their picture. Dunesia Meneses Salas was on Calle, Bolivar, and Cologne when she lived. It was her daughter’s birthday. It was Dec. 22. 

The Southern Command was there with a group of journalists because the journalists were manipulated to different areas, and they were doing all this propaganda that everything was fine, and be quiet, everything. 

So her husband went out to get some supplies, and she stayed to clean rice. So she starts to clean the rice at the door, and this missile comes and impacts her directly. There were three missiles fired, and they impacted her directly, destroying her body, injured everybody in the house. The other missile comes through the house beside her on the third floor and hits this house where there are children between 6 and a few months old, and the other missile hit close to more advance in the street. This is Colón City, this is in the middle of the city. Why would you use that amount of force? 

So he and the other couple, the other family with the children, were in San José Church as refugees. My partner spoke to them, and he says, listen, I just want justice. I really want something to be done, he says. My family was completely destroyed.

Michael Fox:  Gilma and the lawyers went back to New York, compiled their documents, research, and interviews, and decided to file a case against the US government with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. 

Meanwhile, Panama remained under US occupation.

Gilma Camargo:  The occupation actually lasted until 1994. Panamanians are not aware of that, but around 1993, ‘94, ‘92, the people started to get uncomfortable with the soldiers in joint custody all over the country. And so they changed and wore civilian clothes in every single occupation, every single place they were, from the presidency to the smallest local government office.

So this was the first experiment of the Pentagon organizing the country without having a blasted idea what they were doing.

Michael Fox:  Gilma says the invasion destroyed the country and set it on the neoliberal path of privatization that it has seen ever since.

Gilma Camargo:  This destroyed the country. Everything that we live in now, the corruption, the institute, the weak institutions, the financial mess that we are with people not getting paid well and not getting healthcare. That financial neoliberal concept was put into Panama without us asking for it or thinking of going there. So financially, we are in this mess because that is not the way the Panamanian people think.

Michael Fox:  Protests continued, in particular marking Dec. 20, the anniversary of the invasion.

As for Gilma’s case at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, it would take nearly three decades to get a decision. 

Finally, late 2018. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! reported on it in December of that year.

Amy Goodman:  Last month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on Washington to pay reparations to Panama over what was widely seen as an illegal invasion.

Gilma Camargo:  How did you feel when you heard the word officially that you had won the lawsuit? I had a very, very long silence. I really did. I was at home. I think I got on my knees and I had a very long, long silence.

Michael Fox:  Gilma says there were so many people she wanted to tell. People like her mom and her grandmother, who were no longer alive. She says they held a celebration and ceremony at the university, and they invited all of the victims who had participated in the lawsuit over the decades.

Gilma Camargo:  They came, and it was the first time I saw that change in their eyes and in their gestures of realizing, hey, this is. We did this. It’s not just she did it, we did it. I participated. When you see the documentation that they brought, it takes. After being bombarded that you take the effort to to think about it, how injured is my family?

Michael Fox:  The ruling was a landmark. It was the first time victims from one country had brought the government of another before the commission and won.

Gilma Camargo:  This is something serious. It’s a historical precedent that they do it to the US, that we did it without the government, that it was the victims themselves that actually put this together by putting chips of their life together. And that none of this happened before. So now it’s a sensation for a lot of people.

Michael Fox:  And the Commission ruled that the US should pay reparations.

Gilma Camargo:  The decision is marvelous because it recognizes the territorial responsibility of the US. It gives compensation, monetary compensation for deaths and injuries, for food, for vehicles, for all kinds of… And they say, and I keep on saying, from the first dead man to the last plate they broke in Panama is covered. It’s there. You’re supposed to get medical attention. You’re supposed to be paid by your psychological attention.

Michael Fox:  But the United States has just ignored it. Pretended that it doesn’t exist. And there is no legal means of making the US pay. 

But the case did help to inspire action in Panama.

In 2016, two years before the Inter-American Commission ruling, the Panamanian government created the country’s first Dec. 20 commission to investigate the victims and the human rights abuses of the 1989 invasion. The group has been charged with identifying the dead and disappeared.

José Luis Sosa oversees the commission. He goes through the archives — Rows of files on the invasion and the victims. In recent years, they’ve carried out their own exhumations at grave sites. The official death count from the US invasion is 560 people, but estimates of the actual figure vary widely. Some local groups even believe the number is closer to 1,000 or more. 

I ask José Luis why it took the Panamanian government 27 years to launch a commission to investigate the invasion and its aftermath.

José Luis Sosa: I have always felt that there was a certain fear of bothering the United States with an investigation into the invasion. Fortunately, we’ve matured, and we have made progress.

Michael Fox:  In 2022, Panama officially declared Dec. 20 “el dia del duelo nacional” or “the day of national mourning” in honor of the victims of the 1989 US invasion.

Pedro Silva walks around the offices of the Dec. 20 commission. He’s staring at huge blown-up pictures of the US invasion that line the walls. They show victims, cars driving through bombed out streets, rubble everywhere. Pedro is one of the organizers of yearly Dec. 20 marches. He’s a filmmaker who was 8 years old when the US bombs fell. 

Pedro Silva:  We survived the invasion, but others died. Our work is important so that when you meet someone who didn’t experience the invasion, you can say with clarity that this was an act of cruelty, an act of war. We cannot let this be forgotten.

Michael Fox:  He is not the only one working to ensure that this memory is never left in the past.

On a warm sunny afternoon in late 2023, I went for a walk with Pedro Silva in the neighborhood of El Chorrillo. Efrain Guerrero was our guide. He’s thin and tall, in a gray collared short-sleeve shirt, with short graying black hair that’s parted to one side. For the last two-and-a-half years, he’s been leading tours of people to El Chorrillo, the neighborhood that was devastated by the US bombs in 1989. 

But he is not just a tour guide. He’s a longtime resident. His family is from El Chorrillo. He was five when the US invaded. He moved to the neighborhood a few years later. 

He walks me down the street from his apartment and points to the side of a building. See, here in El Chorrillo, the wounds of the 1989 US invasion are still written on the walls. 

“Do you see this? This remains as a memory of the shots fired,” he says, pointing to a bullet hole left by US soldiers. He turns to the street. “Right here, there was a downed helicopter,” he says. 

He pulls out his tablet and flips to a black and white picture of a US helicopter lying in rubble on the street before me 35 years ago.

Efrain is a wealth of history and knowledge, but his tours are not just about remembering and honoring the past. They’re also about protecting the neighborhood today, against a new assault: gentrification.

Efrain Guerrero:  That is what they want to bring here: gentrification. And the people don’t know what’s happening because this term isn’t really known here in Panama. I am trying to wake people up. You can already see the change in the neighboring community, pretty buildings and things, and then you come here and things are falling apart. 

Because at the end of the day, gentrification isn’t just a process of urban displacement, but of degrading a region enough to put social pressure on the community itself so that it has to leave.

Michael Fox:  Efrain explains that public transportation, schools, trash pickup, and basic services have been gutted in El Chorrillo in recent years. He says it’s all part of a push to force people to leave so real estate prices will tank and developers can move in to cash in big.

Efrain says his tours are a way of trying to help revive the community’s connection to the past. 

I love this. In this podcast series, I’ve talked about historical memory often; Remembering the violence of the past in order to honor the victims and ensure it never happens again. For this series, I’ve taken you to visit memorials for the dead and disappeared in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We’ve walked inside museums, heard the voices from long ago radio echo in the present.

And here on the streets of Panama City, Efrain is also carrying out his own form of historical memory: A tour through the streets of the past as a means of rooting the neighborhood in the present with its thick cultural and political history. He’s even talked about putting up signs at important places so that those memories are not left in the shadows, are not forgotten.

Efrain Guerrero:  So much of the neighborhood has lost that sense of belonging. Many new generations do not know the history. Many kids don’t even know that an invasion took place here in their neighborhood because we have not shown the next generations.

Michael Fox:  He’s trying to change that one tour at a time. And it’s clear as we walk through the streets that his neighbors appreciate his actions and are on board.

It’s also clear the 1989 US invasion has left deep wounds. They are still carved into buildings and buried deep in people’s hearts. But people like Efrain and Pedro Silva won’t let them be forgotten.

Pedro Silva:  We have to use all of these things. The neighborhood stories, the pictures, to maintain the memory about the invasion alive. We need to keep it alive and to protect our identity.

Michael Fox:  Every Dec. 20, they march and continue to demand justice for the violence, the violations, and the crimes of the United States.

If this were just any episode, I’d probably end it here. But it’s not. This is, of course, the last episode of this first season of Under the Shadow. So, I have one more place to take you in Panama City. I visited it with Pedro the day before I left town.

If you drive past El Chorrillo in Panama, into the former Canal Zone, and head south toward the Pacific Ocean, you come to a rather thin stretch of land that was once known as the US military base Amador. This was once a key base for the United States to protect the Pacific mouth of the Panama Canal.

But already we’re driving, and there’s all these old military structures here that are abandoned, right in the middle of this park. And again, this is talked about in the past. This stuff is hidden in plain sight. It’s not even hidden, it’s just hanging out. And it’s all right here. Wow.

We just stepped out of the car into a huge, really, to this edge of this park, back in the day. This used to be US military base Amador, is what it was called. It’s this big park with streets all around. Nobody’s here. 

You have all these old military US buildings. They’re just falling [apart]. Big, huge, concrete buildings just falling apart in between the trees. They’re graffitied all around the bottom, which covers up what the names used to be. Apparently inside these, the same stuff, all the windows are broken, there’s no glass left. These buildings are really old. It’s basically a massive concrete shell stuck in between the trees. It’s really wild.

Pedro and I walk over to one of the buildings. This base wasn’t just to protect the Canal; It was also the location where the United States first set up what would become its Latin American police and military training facility, School of the Americas.

In telling stories, it’s often hard to find one spot that seems to wrap up so many loose ends, one location that seems to symbolize more than just the words written on a page or spoken into a microphone. This place does, for so many reasons. 

The sun is setting low in the sky. Pedro and I explore the ruins of US government buildings.

So on the side of these, one of these stairs coming into this building here is all bricked up. The window right beside it is open. I’m right beside it. This stairway rolling up — That’s the roof — Has been knocked off. And it’s covered. 

Plants, green plants and trees are taking it back, but inside there’s a big, almost like a warehouse looking thing. The whole thing is busted and broken, falling apart. Part of it is concreted up. I have no idea what this is for, although I can imagine this being some sort of an office place back at the time, but now it’s just totally busted and broken and caved in. 

This is what is left of the United States here in Panama, the memory and the legacy — At least, that’s how people feel about it. This is the legacy of Monroe. It’s the legacy of US imperialism. Buildings in shambles, wasting away underneath a canopy of trees in a park in Panama City. That is the past, and it’s a past that Panamanians do not want to return to.

That is all for Season 1 of Under the Shadow. I hope you have enjoyed this series. It has been a joy and an adventure.

Before I go, I’d like to thank everyone who helped to make this first season of Under the Shadow happen. There are a lot of people who supported this project when it was just an idea on paper, either through my Kickstarter campaign or elsewhere. Thank you all so much. This investigative podcast series could not have happened without your help. 

In particular, I want to mention a few names who deserve special recognition: Jordan Klein, Scott Bayliss, Marc Becker, Nick Cunningham, Michael Locker, Pablo Serrano, Lin Culler, Kyle Barron, Sergey Kochergan, Damon Korkin at Andean Discovery, Jennifer Waite, Phil and Sue Cortese, Ava, Sherry, and Randy, Dana Wilson, Jim Chomas, Patti Simbulan, Bernardo Poggi Leigh, and Chris Michael. In particular, a huge shout out to Cara Orscheln, my parents, Judy Hughes, and the Sawyers. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This series could not have been made without your help.

Oh, also, many thanks to my wife and girls for putting up with me and for joining me on this adventure.

That’s a good segue into what’s next. We have just started a tour of South America with my family, during which time I’m going to be visiting locations, researching and interviewing people for Season 2 of Under the Shadow, about Plan Condor, a series about lawfare, and numerous other podcast projects. 

If you’d like to support and follow along on the journey, you can do so through my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There’s a link in the show notes. I plan to bring you updates from our adventures on the road every week. 

That is also where you can see my exclusive pictures of Panama City from this episode: I have shots from El Chorrillo, the ruins at the Amador base, the Dec. 20 commission, and plenty more pictures there on Patreon. 

That’s also where you can find my new personal podcast, Panamerican Dispatch. It’s exclusively for my Patreon supporters, and it’s a window into my reporting from wherever I am in the Americas. Please consider subscribing and becoming a monthly supporter. I appreciate the help.

As always, Under the Shadow is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. Thank you so much to NACLA’s Heather Gies, The Real News’s Max Alvarez, Kayla Rivara and everyone else from the team who has pitched in to put this podcast into the world. You guys are amazing.

Many thanks, muito obrigado, to Gustavo Turck from Coletivo Catarse for the incredible sound design and engineering. I am grateful for your work.

As always, the theme music is by my band Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music. 

This is Michael Fox. Many thanks!

See you next time…

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Michael Fox is a Latin America-based media maker and the former director of video production at teleSUR English.