Manuel Noriega

• 1. Introduction

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  Manuel Noriega received his first payment from the United States in 1955, and it came to just $10.70. He belonged to a socialist youth group then, and the money is reported to have been a reward for informing on his comrades. By the 1980s the same man was running Panama from behind a screen of puppet presidents, without ever holding the presidency himself. Along the way he worked for American intelligence, profited from drug trafficking, and sold intelligence to Cuba. One question hangs over his whole career. How could a single man be an American ally and an American adversary at the same time? This documentary also asks how an unknown young informant rose to command an army, and what finally made Washington turn on him. And it asks how much anyone can truly know, because even the date of his birth and the sums he was paid are still disputed.

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• 2. Making of an Officer

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  Nobody can say for certain when Noriega was born. Records give 1934-1936 and 1938, and Noriega himself offered differing dates. The one most often cited is the 11th of February 1934. He was born in Panama City, in the neighborhood of El Terraplen de San Felipe, to a poor pardo family. Pardo means triracial, and his family had Native Panamanian, African and Spanish roots. His father, Ricaurte Noriega, was an accountant. His mother, whose family name was Moreno, never married his father and is described as a cook and a laundress. She died of tuberculosis while Manuel was a child, and by the time he was five both parents were gone. A godmother raised him in a one-room apartment in the Terraplén slum.

  The Instituto Nacional, a well-regarded Panama City high school, had produced a number of nationalist political leaders. There Noriega was an "oddly serious child", a bookish student whom his godmother always dressed neatly. At the school he met Luis Carlos Noriega Hurtado, an older half-brother he had never known. Luis was a socialist activist and a fellow student. He took Manuel in, introduced him to politics, and recruited him into the Socialist Party's youth wing. Manuel joined protests and wrote articles criticizing the American presence in Panama. Luis would later direct Panama's electoral tribunal.

  Noriega had hoped to become a doctor, but the University of Panama's medical school had no place for him. Luis, who had landed a post at the Panamanian embassy in Peru, helped him win a scholarship to the Chorrillos Military School in Lima. Noriega began there in 1958. In Lima he befriended Roberto Díaz Herrera, a student at the Peruvian Police academy. Díaz Herrera would become a close ally and, later, a dangerous enemy.

  Noriega graduated from Chorrillos in 1962 with a specialization in engineering and joined the Panama National Guard. That September he was commissioned a second lieutenant in Colón, where his commanding officer was Major Omar Torrijos. Torrijos became his patron and mentor, and Noriega needed one. In 1962 a woman accused him of beating and raping her, and Torrijos helped him avoid legal trouble. Soon after, his drinking and violence forced Torrijos to confine him to quarters for a month. Even so, Torrijos kept the two of them in the same command and brought Díaz Herrera into the unit. The two protégés became friends and rivals for their commander's favor.

  In 1964 Noriega was posted to Chiriquí province, the home of the politician Arnulfo Arias. Arias was preparing to run in the 1968 presidential election. The sitting president, Roberto Chiari, belonged to the Liberal Party, which ordered Torrijos to harass Arias's followers. Torrijos handed the job to Noriega, whose men arrested a number of people. Several prisoners said they had been tortured, and others said they had been raped. The public outrage got Noriega suspended for ten days, and American intelligence took note. In 1966 he was again accused, this time of raping a 13-year-old girl and beating her brother. Torrijos moved him to a remote posting.

  Also in 1966, Noriega spent many months at the School of the Americas, located at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone. Journalist John Dinges suggests Torrijos sent him there to "shape up". Noriega performed poorly in class, yet he was promoted to first lieutenant that year. Torrijos then found him a job as an intelligence officer in the National Guard's "North Zone". He went back to the school for courses in infantry operations, counterintelligence, intelligence and jungle warfare, and took a psychological operations course at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

  His new work meant penetrating and disrupting the trade unions that had formed among United Fruit Company workers. He proved adept at it under Boris Martínez, a fervent anti-communist who enforced strict discipline. Reports say he kept passing information about the plantation workers to the Americans. In 1967 the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson judged him a valuable asset and a "rising star" in the Panamanian military. In the late 1960s he married Felicidad Sieiro, a former school teacher, and the couple had three daughters named Lorena, Sandra and Thays. Her Basque family was reportedly unhappy with the match, and Noriega was repeatedly unfaithful. He stayed proud of the School of the Americas for the rest of his career, and he wore its crest on his uniform.

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• 3. Spymaster

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  Arnulfo Arias won the presidency in 1968 and held it for only eleven days. Soon after taking office he purged the National Guard, sending much of its general staff into diplomatic exile or retirement. Torrijos and other officers struck back with a coup. Martínez, who led the garrison at Chiriquí, set it in motion, and most officers backed it. A power struggle between Torrijos and Martínez followed, and Noriega was an important supporter of Torrijos. In February 1969 Torrijos's men seized Martínez and exiled him to Miami, which left Torrijos in control of the country.

  At the end of 1969 Torrijos took a holiday in Mexico, and a coup was launched in his absence. Noriega's loyalty let Torrijos hang on to power and greatly improved Torrijos's image. A month later Noriega was a captain. In August 1970, just eighteen months after that, he became a lieutenant colonel and chief of military intelligence. Dinges says that by then the undisciplined young officer had left his past behind. When Arias's supporters launched a guerrilla uprising in Chiriquí, Noriega's intelligence work helped put it down within a year.

  Torrijos ruled until 1981 and stayed popular despite the lack of elections. He negotiated the Torrijos-Carter Treaties with President Jimmy Carter, which ensured that the Panama Canal would pass to Panama in 1999. A new labor code added maternity leave, collective bargaining rights and bonus pay. The partnership between the two men was symbiotic. Torrijos supplied the political skill, and Noriega enforced the unpopular decisions by force when needed. Noriega's intelligence and covert operations also helped Torrijos win the canal talks.

  As intelligence chief, Noriega sent 1,300 Panamanians he saw as threats into exile. He kept files on officials in the military, the government and the judiciary, which let him blackmail them later. He also headed the political police and immigration, and observers said he did much of Torrijos's dirty work. He ordered the death of Jesús Héctor Gallego Herrera, a priest whose work at an agricultural cooperative alarmed the government. Gallego's body is reported to have been dropped from a helicopter into the sea.

  By the early 1970s American law enforcement officials held reports tying Noriega to narcotics trafficking. The evidence included the testimony of an arrested boat courier and a smuggler caught in New York. No formal investigation followed, and Dinges blames the potential diplomatic fallout. Washington considered several ways to push Noriega out of the drug trade, including assassinating him, though no attempt was made. Dinges adds that from 1972 the United States eased its efforts to catch smugglers inside the Panamanian government, possibly through an understanding between Torrijos and President Richard Nixon.

  In 1971 the Central Intelligence Agency put Noriega on its payroll while he still led Panamanian intelligence. Before that he had been paid case by case. The agency prized his information about the Cuban government and, later, about the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After the Johnny Express incident in December 1971, he served as the American emissary to Cuba. He also had access to CIA contingency funds, which reached as high as US$100,000 in some years and which he could spend with little accountability. Yet the CIA knew that he was selling intelligence about the United States to Cuba.

  Journalist Frederick Kempe wrote in 1990 that Noriega had been linked to bombings of the American-run Canal Zone ahead of the 1976 US presidential election. Those bombings followed the Ford administration's retreat from canal negotiations. Kempe said Washington knew of Noriega's involvement and looked away. In a December 1976 meeting with George H. W. Bush, then Director of Central Intelligence, Noriega flatly denied it and suggested that the CIA itself was responsible.

  Early in 1976 Noriega discovered that American military intelligence was wiretapping Panamanian officials during the treaty talks. He did not expose it. Instead he bribed the American agents and bought the tapes in person, in what became known as the Singing Sergeants affair. Some intelligence officials wanted Bush to prosecute the soldiers. Bush declined, because a trial would have revealed Noriega's role. The CIA told neither the National Security Agency nor the Justice Department. Noriega and Torrijos later used what they knew of the wiretaps to tilt the canal negotiations in their favor.

  When the Sandinistas rose against Anastasio Somoza Debayle in August 1978, Torrijos and Noriega backed the rebels. They supplied surplus National Guard equipment and let Panama serve as cover for arms shipments from Cuba. Noriega also arranged for weapons bought in the United States to reach the Sandinistas, and he made a profit. Washington found out but filed no charges, since it did not want to anger a friendly government. After the Sandinista victory in 1979, Noriega kept smuggling weapons, now selling them to leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. Torrijos reprimanded him when one shipment was captured, but the shipments did not stop altogether.

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• 4. Power and Profit

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  On the 31st of July 1981, Omar Torrijos died in a plane crash. The aircraft manufacturer later called it an accident, but Noriega's authority over the government inquiry fed speculation about his involvement. Florencio Flores Aguilar inherited Torrijos's post, yet real power lay with a trio of Noriega, Díaz Herrera and Rubén Darío Paredes. Flores was removed in a quiet coup on the 3rd of March 1982. Paredes became leader on the understanding that the military would help him win the presidency in the 1984 election.

  Noriega, meanwhile, became a full colonel and chief of staff of the National Guard, effectively the second-highest rank in the country. He reorganized the Guard as the Panama Defense Forces, or PDF, and with American financial help expanded and modernized it. Fast promotions bought him the loyalty of the officer corps. On the 12th of August 1983, Paredes handed command to Noriega, who was newly appointed a general. Paredes expected to stand for president. Noriega reneged on the deal and told him he could not run, which made Noriega the de facto ruler of Panama.

  Noriega preferred to stay behind the scenes and avoid the scrutiny that came with the presidency. He held no particular social or economic ideology and used military nationalism to unite his supporters. The Partido Revolucionario Democrático, founded by Torrijos and strong among military families, served as a political front for the PDF. Law 20 of 1983, which Noriega pushed through the National Assembly, was said to protect the canal from communists. It allowed a huge influx of American weapons and tripled the size of the military.

  When the PDF was created in 1983, it took control of Panama's customs and immigration apparatus and its entire transportation network. This growth coincided with a surge in the cocaine trade and in markets for weapons in Central America's wars. The profits gave Noriega's regime considerable financial clout. Kempe reports that capital fled Panama in large amounts, at least partly because wealthy individuals feared Noriega would seize their assets.

  Noriega also moved against the press. He took control of most major newspapers by buying controlling stakes or forcing them to close. Individual journalists and editors were harassed, intimidated or exiled. La Prensa stayed independent and often critical, but its staff were intimidated and its offices damaged, and it too was eventually forced to close.

  In May 1984 Noriega allowed the first presidential election in 16 years. He and Díaz Herrera chose Nicolás Ardito Barletta Vallarino as the PRD's candidate, intending to keep him under tight control. When early results showed Arias heading for a landslide with the backing of much of the opposition, Noriega halted the count. After brazen manipulation, the government announced that Barletta had won by a margin of 1,713 votes. Independent estimates suggested Arias would have won by as many as 50,000 votes in a fair contest. More than 60,000 votes never made it into the final count. The United States accepted the result and signaled it would cooperate with Barletta, though it knew the process was flawed.

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• 5. Ally and Adversary

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  Between 1981 and 1987, Noriega's value to the Reagan administration grew steadily. Conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador had sent Washington looking for allies in the region, and Noriega used American security worries to win favor. He passed funds and weapons to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. He let the CIA build listening posts in Panama, and he helped the Salvadoran government fight the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. American spy ships worked from Panamanian bases, where much of their intelligence was processed. The canal treaties limited those bases to protecting the canal.

  Bush, by then vice president, met Noriega again in December 1983 to discuss support for the Contras. By 1985 Noriega had a working relationship with Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. He offered to assassinate or sabotage Sandinista leaders if North would help repair his image with the American government. In June 1985 the two met in Panama, and Noriega agreed to train Contra soldiers for an invasion of Nicaragua planned for 1986. In return for Panama's help with American and Israeli efforts to arm the Contras, Washington ignored Noriega's use of weapons-shipment networks to smuggle drugs into the United States. Noriega was also reported to have played a role in the Iran-Contra affair.

  Those covert transport networks, built for the wars in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, carried cocaine north. Noriega's involvement in drug trafficking peaked in 1984. He grew intimately involved with Colombia's Medellín Cartel, collecting protection money, bribes and shares of profits. Associates such as Floyd Carlton and Cesar Rodríguez ran many of the operations. An American named Steven Kalish sold drugs, laundered money and sold hardware to the Panamanian military with Noriega's help. Dinges writes that around the 1984 election, Kalish planned to ship marijuana worth US$1.4 million through Panama. Noriega agreed to supply false customs stamps and to be paid $1 million.

  From 1984 Noriega seemed to scale back. He ordered a raid on a cocaine factory in Panama's interior and then publicized it as proof of his cooperation. He also ordered a crackdown on money laundering by the Colombian cartel figures Jorge Ochoa and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela. In 1985 Harvard University invited him to speak at a conference on the military's role in Central America's wars, and the pro-government press in Panama trumpeted the speech. In 1986 he appears to have served as an intermediary in a convoluted scheme involving the East German Stasi and the Danish ship Pia Vesta, meant to sell Soviet arms to South Africa's Armscor. He backed out when the ship and its weapons were seized at a Panamanian port.

  Noriega's loyalties were never one-sided. He kept close ties with Cuba, Libya and Nicaragua, all hostile to Washington. A 1990 book states that he sold thousands of Panamanian passports to the Cuban government for its intelligence services. Cuba also obtained hardware through Panama that the American embargo restricted, and in turn supplied weapons and military advisers. When the United States tried to remove him, Libya and some American allies sent him funds. Japan stood by him too. It was Panama's second-largest trading partner, with $8.8 billion invested, and in June 1988 Tokyo officially backed the military government. "There was a peak of relations with Japan in which they saw the importance of the Pacific in relation to the Atlantic and the need to expand the Canal," Noriega said in a 2017 interview.

  No one agrees on how much America paid him. Regular payments stopped under Carter, resumed, and stopped again under Reagan. Kempe reported in 1990 that annual payments ran around $110,000 in 1976 and rose to between $185,000 and $200,000 once he held power. Dinges said he could find no one willing to confirm the $200,000 stipend. Noriega's lead attorney, Frank A. Rubino, claimed the CIA paid him $11 million. In January 1991, federal prosecutors filed a report showing $322,000 from the Army and the CIA over 31 years, from 1955 to 1986. That total included $76,039 in gifts and incentives.

  In June 1986 the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recorded a White House official saying that curbing Noriega's activities could greatly reduce international drug trafficking. Hersh also reported, citing unnamed American officials, that Noriega had amassed a personal fortune in European banks. The reports said he owned two homes in Panama and one in France.

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• 6. Unraveling

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  Hugo Spadafora was a physician and political activist who had clashed with Noriega since both served in Torrijos's government. Though a Torrijos ally and no member of the opposition, he became a vocal critic after returning to Panama from Guatemala in 1981. He gathered evidence of corruption by questioning Noriega's associates, including Rodríguez and Carlton. In September 1985 he accused Noriega of links to drug trafficking and announced he would expose him. According to writers R. M. Koster and Guillermo Sánchez, witnesses saw the PDF detain him after he crossed the border by bus from Costa Rica. His decapitated body was later found wrapped in a United States Postal Service mail bag, bearing signs of brutal torture.

  The American National Security Agency monitored a call on the day of Spadafora's arrest. It was between Noriega and Luis Córdoba, the military commander of Chiriquí province, where the arrest took place. Córdoba told him, "We have the rabid dog." Noriega answered, "And what does one do with a dog that has rabies?" Noriega was widely believed to be responsible for the killing, and the United States held intelligence implicating him.

  President Nicolás Ardito Barletta was in New York City when Spadafora was killed, and he announced an independent commission to investigate. When he returned to Panama, the PDF forced him to resign, and Vice President Eric Arturo Delvalle took his place. Barletta was highly regarded in the Reagan administration, so his removal chilled relations. Washington now saw Noriega as a liability rather than an asset. It cut economic assistance and pressed Panama to loosen its banking secrecy laws, fight narcotics, investigate the murder and reduce the PDF's role in government.

  Díaz Herrera was the next threat. He weighed using the uproar to seize power while Noriega was traveling abroad and mobilized some troops. He backed down when he realized he lacked the support. Noriega had promised to step down as military leader in 1987 and let his deputy succeed him. In 1987 he broke that promise, announced he would lead the military for five more years, and gave Díaz Herrera a diplomatic post. Díaz Herrera went public. He accused Noriega of rigging the 1984 election, murdering Spadafora, trafficking drugs, and killing Torrijos with a bomb on his plane.

  On the 26th of June 1987, 100,000 people marched in protest, roughly 25% of the population of Panama City. Noriega charged Díaz Herrera with treason and cracked down hard on the marchers. The United States Senate passed a resolution asking Noriega to step down until Díaz Herrera could be tried. Noriega responded by sending government workers to protest outside the American embassy, and the protest quickly became a riot. Washington suspended all military assistance, and the CIA stopped paying him a salary. The resolution had tied the United States to the effort to remove him, and Noriega exploited the rising anti-American mood. Without American support, Panama defaulted on its international debt, and the economy shrank by 20% that year.

  The press had turned against him as well. Hersh wrote in 1986 that American officials suspected Noriega of selling intelligence to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Bob Woodward followed soon after in The Washington Post with even more detail, and their reputations ensured the stories were taken seriously. Spadafora had also passed some of his findings to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Several American agencies kept investigating despite resistance from the Reagan administration. In 1988 federal grand juries in Miami and Tampa indicted Noriega on drug trafficking charges. Soon afterward an army colonel and a few soldiers tried to overthrow him, but the poorly planned effort was crushed within a day.

  The presidential election of May 1989 was marred by fraud and violence. The pro-military coalition, led by the PRD, named Carlos Duque, a former business partner of Noriega, as its candidate. The opposition nominated Guillermo Endara, with Ricardo Arias Calderón and Guillermo Ford as vice-presidential candidates. Expecting fraud, opposition workers tracked the public ballot counts at local precincts. An exit poll showed the opposition winning by a wide margin, and reports soon emerged of missing tally sheets and ballot boxes seized by the PDF. The Catholic bishops conference said a quick count of public tallies showed the opposition winning 3-1. Official tallies the following day gave Duque a 2-1 win.

  Rather than publish results, Noriega voided the election, claiming "foreign interference" had tainted it. Former President Jimmy Carter, present as an observer, said the election had been "stolen". So did Archbishop of Panama Marcos G. McGrath. Noriega had first planned to declare Duque the winner regardless, but Duque knew he had been badly beaten and refused to go along. The next day Endara, Arias Calderón and Ford drove through the old part of the capital in a triumphant motorcade. Noriega's paramilitary Dignity Battalions intercepted them, and Endara and Ford were badly beaten. Images of Ford running to safety, his guayabera shirt covered in blood, were broadcast around the world.

  When the 1984-1989 presidential term expired, Noriega named a longtime associate, Francisco Rodríguez, acting president. The United States recognized Endara as the new president. In October 1989 junior officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Moisés Giroldi Vera rose against Noriega, but PDF loyalists easily crushed the rebellion. The captured rebels were taken to a base outside Panama City, where they were tortured and then executed. Afterward Noriega declared himself the "maximum leader" of the country.

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• 7. Invasion and Trial

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  In March 1988 the American government opened negotiations seeking Noriega's resignation, with Rómulo Escobar Bethancourt representing Panama. The talks collapsed after several inconclusive months. Dinges says Noriega never intended to resign. On the 15th of December 1989, the PRD-dominated legislature spoke of "a state of war" with the United States. It also named Noriega "chief executive officer" of the government, formalizing arrangements that had existed for six years.

  Washington said Noriega's forces were harassing American troops and civilians, and Bush cited three incidents near the time of the invasion. On the 16th of December, four Americans were stopped at a roadblock outside PDF headquarters in the El Chorrillo neighborhood. The Department of Defense said they were unarmed, in a private vehicle, and tried to flee only after a crowd of civilians and PDF troops surrounded them. First Lieutenant Robert Paz of the United States Marine Corps was shot dead. An American couple who witnessed it were arrested and harassed by the PDF.

  The United States launched its invasion on the 20th of December 1989. The killing of the Marine was the stated reason, but the operation had been planned for months. It was the largest American military action since the Vietnam War, with more than 27,000 soldiers and 300 aircraft. A bombing campaign opened it, aimed at Noriega's private vehicles and at PDF headquarters in Panama City. Several slums in the middle of the city were destroyed as a result. Noriega's deputy, Colonel Luis del Cid, retreated to the mountains outside David City after laying mines at the airport. He soon judged that guerrilla war against the Americans was hopeless and negotiated a surrender.

  Twenty-three American soldiers died, two of them from friendly fire, and 324 were wounded. Panamanian forces lost between 300 and 845. The American government reported 202 to 250 civilian deaths. Americas Watch estimated 300, and the United Nations estimated 500. On the 29th of December the United Nations General Assembly voted 75-20, with 40 abstentions, to condemn the invasion as a "flagrant violation of international law". A CBS poll found 92% of Panamanian adults supported the incursion. Activist Barbara Trent disputed that in the 1992 Academy Award-winning documentary The Panama Deception, arguing the surveys were taken in wealthy, English-speaking neighborhoods. Human Rights Watch called the civilian reaction "generally sympathetic".

  Noriega had received warnings of the invasion from people inside his own government. He first disbelieved them, but they grew more frequent until he went on the run. To confuse American surveillance he used lookalikes and playbacks of his recorded voice. He reportedly sheltered with sympathetic politicians, including Balbina Herrera, the mayor of San Miguelito. The last two days of his flight were partly spent with Jorge Krupnick, an arms dealer also wanted by the United States. Kempe reported that Noriega considered the Cuban and Nicaraguan embassies, but American troops had surrounded both.

  On the fifth day of the invasion, Noriega and four others took refuge in the Apostolic Nunciature, the embassy of the Holy See. He had threatened to flee to the countryside and wage guerrilla war unless given shelter. Instead he handed over most of his weapons and asked Archbishop José Sebastián Laboa, the papal nuncio, for sanctuary. Treaty obligations barred American soldiers from entering. Delta Force and part of Operation Nifty Package set up a perimeter instead. Their tactics included gunning vehicle engines, turning a nearby field into a helicopter landing pad, and blasting rock music. Special Forces Sergeant John Bishop supplied a Van Halen cassette tape. After ten days Noriega surrendered on the 3rd of January 1990 and was held as a prisoner of war.

  He was taken to a cell in the Miami federal courthouse and arraigned on the ten charges the Miami grand jury had returned two years earlier. Disputes over his prisoner of war status, the evidence, the witnesses and the cost of his defense delayed the trial until September 1991. It ended in April 1992 with convictions on eight of the ten charges of drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering. On the 10th of July 1992 he was sentenced to 40 years.

  Noriega insisted the American government had paid him close to $10,000,000 and wanted to testify about the work he had done for it. The district court ruled that evidence about those operations would confuse the jury more than it would help. Information about his CIA connections, including alleged contact with Bush, stayed out of the trial. Carlton, who had flown drug shipments for Noriega, was among the witnesses. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, calling the material's potential value "relatively marginal".

  Under Article 85 of the Third Geneva Convention, Noriega kept his prisoner of war status in prison. That earned him a private cell furnished with electronics and exercise equipment, nicknamed "the presidential suite". Two evangelical ministers, Clift Brannon and Rudy Hernandez, visited him regularly for two years. Noriega, nominally a Roman Catholic, reportedly converted to evangelical Christianity in May 1990 and was baptized in October 1992. The judge cut his sentence from 40 years to 30, and good behavior brought it to 17. His American sentence ended on the 9th of September 2007, but pending extradition requests kept him locked up.

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• 8. Return, Death, Legacy

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  Panama tried Noriega in absentia for crimes committed during his rule. In October 1993 a court convicted him and two others of murdering Spadafora and sentenced him to 20 years, which Panama's Supreme Court confirmed on the 20th of December 1995. In 1994 a jury convicted Noriega and Heráclides Sucre, a secret police agent, of killing Giroldi. A judge traveled to the United States in December 1993 to question him, and both men received 20 years. A third 20-year sentence followed in 1996, for the deaths of nine officers who backed Giroldi and were executed in a hangar at Albrook air base. That killing became known as the massacre of Albrook. Cases over disappearances in Chiriquí in 1968 and the 1971 death of Heliodoro Portugal were unresolved when he died.

  France had requested Noriega's extradition after convicting him in absentia in 1999 of laundering $3 million in drug proceeds. The money had gone into luxury apartments in Paris. France had made him a Commandeur of the Légion d'honneur in 1987. An American federal judge approved the request in August 2007, but Noriega appealed, arguing France would not honor his prisoner of war status. The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the appeal in January 2010. He was extradited on the 26th of April 2010 and held in La Santé Prison, where France denied him prisoner of war status. On the 7th of July 2010 a Paris court sentenced him to seven years, short of the ten the prosecutor wanted. It also ordered the seizure of €2.3 million frozen in his French bank accounts.

  Panama had sought his return since 1999 and asked France to hand him over after his conviction there. On the 23rd of September 2011, a French court ordered a conditional release so that he could be extradited to Panama. He arrived on the 11th of December 2011 and was jailed at El Renacer prison to serve sentences totaling 60 years. On the 5th of February 2012 he was taken to Hospital Santo Tomás in Panama City with high blood pressure and a brain hemorrhage. On the 21st of March 2012 doctors announced a brain tumor, later revealed to be benign. He was released to house arrest on the 23rd of January 2017 to prepare for surgery. On the 7th of March 2017 he suffered a brain hemorrhage during the operation, and he died on the 29th of May 2017, aged 83. President Juan Carlos Varela wrote, "The death of Manuel A. Noriega closes a chapter in our history; his daughters and his relatives deserve to bury him in peace." Noriega was cremated.

  Noriega worked hard to shape how others saw him. He allowed rumors to spread that, as intelligence chief, he held damaging information on everyone in the country. Dinges suggests that the belief among officials that he profited from every transaction may have been his own creation. Opponents in Panama called him a pervert, a sadist and a rapist. Inside the American government the images contradicted one another. He was a CIA spy, a drug trafficker, a Torrijos nationalist, a Cuban ally and an ally of Oliver North. He was a trusted partner in the drug war even while the DEA investigated him. Dinges argues those clashing pictures drove Washington's self-contradictory policy.

  Noriega called himself "El Man". Others mocked him as cara de piña, or "pineapple face", after the acne scars of his youth, and he hated it enough that the nickname later figured in a lawsuit. After his arrest, soldiers chanted "the Pineapple's in the can". An obituary described a libertine life of luxurious mansions, cocaine-fueled parties and a large collection of antique guns. After his American indictment he brandished a machete in a speech and declaimed, "Not one step back!" The mug shot taken after his capture contrasted sharply with that bravado and became a symbol of his fall. He was also described as deeply superstitious and carried several talismans.

  Assessments of his regime differ. A 2017 obituary from the BBC called him an opportunist who used his closeness to the United States to boost his power and cover up his crimes. Dinges notes that the murders under Noriega were comparable in scale to those under the authoritarian governments of Guatemala, Chile, Argentina and El Salvador. Those governments never drew the same condemnation from Washington. Others compared him to Saddam Hussein, who also enjoyed brief American support before becoming an enemy. After his death, an article in The Atlantic compared him to Castro and Augusto Pinochet. Castro had been America's nemesis, and Pinochet its ally, while Noriega had been both.

  The British actor Bob Hoskins played him in the 2000 television movie Noriega: God's Favorite. In July 2014, Noriega sued the game company Activision from prison over his depiction in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which had come out in 2012. He argued it portrayed him as a kidnapper, murderer and enemy of the state. Judge William H. Fahey dismissed the case on the 28th of October 2014. His capture drew renewed attention thirty-six years to the day after it, when Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was abducted by the American government under similar reasoning.

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