George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

and Sahvador Magluta of Colombia, who are reported to have smuggled an average of
one ton of cocaine per month into Florida during the decade 1977-87, including many of
the years during which Bush's much-touted South Florida Task Force and related
operations were in operation.
With the puppet president so heavily implicated in the activity of the international drug
mafia, it can be no surprise that the plague of illegal drugs has markedly worsened in the
wake of Bush's invasion. According to the London Independent of March 5, 1991,
"statistics now indicate that since General Noriega's departure, cocaine trafficking has, in
fact, prospered" in the country. On March 1, the State Department had conceded that the
turnover of drug money laundered in Panama had at least regained the levels attained
before the 1989 invasion. According to the Los Angeles Times of April 28, 1991, current
levels of drug trafficking in Panama "in some cases exceed" what existed before the
December 20 invasion, and US officials "say the trend is sharply upward and includes
serious movements by the Colombian cartels into areas largely ignored under Noriega."
This was all real drug activity, and not the cornmeal tamales wrapped in banana leaves
that Bush's mind war experts found in one of Noriega's residences and labelled as
"cocaine" during the invasion.
Bush's invasion of Panama has done nothing to fight the scourge of illegal narcotics.
Rather, the fact that so many of Bush's hand-picked puppets can be shown to be top
figures in the drug mafia suggests that drug trafficking through Panama towards the
United States has increased after the ouster of Noriega. If drug shipments to the United
States have increased, this exposes Bush's pledge to "protect the lives of Americans" as a
lie.
As far as the promise of democracy is concerned, it must be stressed that Panama has
remained under direct US military dictatorship and virtual martial law until this writing in
the late autumn of 1991, two years after Bush's adventure was launched. The
congressional and local elections that were conducted during early 1991 were thoroughly
orchestrated by the US occupation forces. Army intelligence units interrogated potential
voters, and medical battalions handed out vaccines and medicines to urban and rural
populations to encourage them to vote. Every important official in the Panamanian
government from Endara on down has US military "liasion officers" assigned on a
permanent basis. These officers are from the Defense Department's Civic Action-Country
Area Team (or CA-CAT), a counterinsurgency and "nation building" apparatus that
parallels the "civic action" teams unleashed during the Vietnam war. CA-CAT officers
supervise all government ministries and even supervise police precincts in Panama City.
The Panamanian Defense Forces have been dissolved, and the CA-CAT officers are
busily creating a new constabulary, the Fuerza Publica. During December 1990 and
January 1991, as the US-led coalition was about to launch its attacks into Iraq, large-scale
military demonstrations were staged by the US forces in the provinces of Chiriqui, Bocas
del Toro, Panama, and Colon for the purpose of intimidating the large Arab populations
of these areas, which the US suspected of sympathizing with Iraq. Radio stations and
newspapers which spoke out against the US invasion or criticized the puppet regime were
jailed or intimidated, as in the case of the publisher Escolastico Calvo, who was held in