{"id":31034,"date":"2005-05-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-29T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/WP-IMPORT\/2005\/05\/29\/shelf-life\/"},"modified":"2005-05-29T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-05-29T03:00:00","slug":"shelf-life-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/shelf-life-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Shelf Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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Shelf Life<\/b> <\/p>\n

Latin strongmen\u00a0come in various shapes and sizes and\u00a0with indefinite shelf-lives. I am tempted to make a comparison between the length of the regime with the height of the strongman- tall Castro versus squat Noriega, for example- but that would be misleading. There is much more to it, and I would be curious to hear what President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela would make of my theory. <\/p>\n

I met\u00a0wizened old Joaquin Balaguer, Presidente of the Dominican Republic, in 1994. He had been in power since his predecessor Rafael Trujillo was murdered nearly thirty years before. He was stooped and nearly blind and in his eighties. His personal guard had close-fitting black uniforms and Uzis. His\u00a0protocol officers were spectacularly beautiful women. <\/p>\n

Trujillo, a man of ordinary height,\u00a0had become a threat to regional order and Balaguer was not. <\/p>\n

I never had a chance to meet Manuel Noriega personally, but I have always had a connection to his Panama . <\/p>\n

My grandfather\u00a0worked on the Ditch, providing telephones to the Canal Zone and the capital, which was actually in Panama . Under the Treaty, the Zone had been the United States , a swath of land five miles on either side of the Canal, and forty miles long. in the 1950s,\u00a0there were more than a 100,000 US citizens living and working in a tropical version of small-town America . <\/p>\n

In the 1960s, riots broke out in Panama City over the provisions of the 1903 Treaty. The American presence in Panama was likened to a hostile power occupying the banks of the Mississippi River , north to south, for a century. <\/p>\n

Jimmy Carter saw the inequity, and he negotiated an orderly twenty year turnover with strongman Omar Torrijos, who had come to power after an orderly\u00a0coup in 1968.\u00a0He ran\u00a0what he liked to call \u0093a dictatorship with a heart.\u0094 The Canal\u00a0Treaty came in two versions, one acceptable to the US Senate, and the other acceptable to Torrijos. They were never reconciled, but the Carter Administration accepted it. <\/p>\n

The night in 1979 when the gates to the Zone opened up for the first time, Panamanian taxis flooded the area, honking their horns. A\u00a0giant Panamanian flag went up on Ancon Hill, flying twenty-four seven, brightly lit at night. <\/p>\n

Torrijos died in a helicopter crash in 1981, having had a shelf-life of\u00a012 years. After three years of maneuvering, and five governments, career solider Manuel Noriega took over. In a trip in 1983 I was surprised to find his cops\u00a0roughing up American officers who violated the Treaty provision\u00a0that banned the\u00a0wearing of their uniforms. <\/p>\n

Noriega thought he was bulletproof,\u00a0figuring he could drain the upper lakes of the Canal and shut it down for years. His behavior relied on his perception of\u00a0invulnerability, which was erroneous. <\/p>\n

I was an inadvertent participant in an aborted covert plot to arrest him for drug trafficking in the summer of 1989, and the 82nd Airborne arrived\u00a0as part of\u00a0Operation JUST CAUSE\u00a0in December of that year.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Noriega’s\u00a0National Guard fought for five days. The Canal was secured, and the strongman\u00a0took refuge in the Papal Nuncio’s residence, where he was surrounded by US troops who blasted loud rock n’ roll music at the building until he surrendered. <\/p>\n

Then\u00a0flown to Howard Air force Base, which under the treaty was still considered US soil. He was\u00a0arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration and eventually\u00a0sentenced to 40 years in prison. That was\u00a0later reduced to 30 years,\u00a0and with good behavior, he is eligible for release\u00a0when he is 88. <\/p>\n

They say that with the exception of a mild stroke, he has adapted well to his new life in Miami. <\/p>\n

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.VicSocotra.com <\/span> <\/p>\n

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<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shelf Life Latin strongmen\u00a0come in various shapes and sizes and\u00a0with indefinite shelf-lives. I am tempted to make a comparison between the length of the regime with the height of the strongman- tall Castro versus squat Noriega, for example- but that would be misleading. There is much more to it, and I would be curious to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}