With Head Still in Sand, We Grope for Quick Fix : Noriega’s Departure Will Make U.S. Happy, but Won’t Repair Stance in Latin America

Washington is once more absorbed in the diplomacy of discreet exits. Two officials of the State Department are said to have flown secretly into Panama City last week, their mission to arrange the departure of Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, Panama’s corrupt and drug-running strongman who has clung to power despite a U.S. criminal indictment, economic sanctions and mounting chaos in the small Central American nation.

But then the delicate negotiations reportedly hit a snag. Fresh from surviving an abortive military coup, the general was apparently demanding not only an “honorable” abdication with all felony charges dropped, but also control over the selection of his successor and other promotions in the Panamanian military, as well as continued tenure for his figurehead president, Manuel Solis Palma. The U.S. diplomats and Noriega’s opponents in Panama were stymied. Those prerogatives of government would have to stay where Noriega himself found them when he seized power with Pentagon and CIA blessings a few years ago--with the new dictator or dictators and, of course, with the patrons in Washington.

It is all a sad case of deja vu. One more awkward client of the United States has outlived his usefulness and is bound for opulent exile on the model of Cuba’s Batista, the Philippines’ Marcos, Haiti’s Duvaliers and so many others. And when he goes, whether with bloodshed or quiet assurances, there will be sighs of relief in the United States, along with assumptions that another crisis has passed and that another foreign-policy wrong has been righted.

As if the pervasive web of drugs and gun-running corruption that is encircling Noriega in Panama will not remain intact when he has gone--woven tightly through the bloated military Establishment, the banks and the business community, the government bureaucracy, the police and the powerful underworld. As if the neat surgical removal of one overreaching general will heal the root injustices, inequalities and instability in Panama any more than it has elsewhere in the region. As if the purge of this defiant, grinning little man and his collection of odd-shaped military hats will cleanse us of the people and policies in the U.S. government who secretly collaborated with Noriega for so long in a grotesque mockery of our battle against drugs and crime at home and abroad--people and policies who have for so long ignored and abided the underlying human tragedy in Latin America.

This diplomacy of discreet exits stems, of course, from a well-established tradition in U.S. foreign policy, especially in Latin America. It is called the quick fix.

Looking south on a swelling wave of violent change, on societies riven by privilege and want, we have responded almost by reflex with a congenial new regime of right-wing generals in Chile; new, more efficient U.S.-trained police interrogators in Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia and Guatemala; always a few more weapons here, a little more money there to check the tide.

“How the hell are they coming?” Richard M. Nixon would ask his military aide about the plans for a Bay of Pigs invasion, the then-vice president being anxious to dispose of Fidel Castro before the 1960 presidential campaign. Even as Noriega was balking in his barracks last weekend, we were raining paratroopers over Honduras--another quick fix for the Nicaraguan revolution and the collapse of our proxy counter-revolution with the Contras.

At the same moment there was even a nice irony in neighboring El Salvador, where the intractably corrupt regime of Jose Napoleon Duarte has been our billion-dollar quick fix and is now besieged anew by resurgent violence on both the right and the left. The anti-Duarte, anti-U.S. guerrillas proudly announced that they had been buying black-market weapons from the Contras--U.S.-supplied M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns.

It would all be a comic opera if the toll were not so gruesome. Why do we imagine that these people really fight and die and flee in such numbers, why they desperately take to the city streets or jungle hills from the isthmus to the Mexican border? Why do their ragged forces go on struggling whether the Soviets scavenge the upheaval with arms aid or not? Why must the Nicaraguan Contras on the other side be continually fed, outfitted, inspired by the CIA or wealthy patrons in the United States?

The truth is that the United States has been and remains very largely on the wrong side of this historic outpouring of human aspiration, and that, whatever our random good intentions, we have been allied in appearance and in fact with a repressive status quo throughout much of the hemisphere.

Noriega’s leaving will not alter that reality in Panama. Nor will he take in his ample baggage the simplistic and self-defeating obsession with communism and the Russian bogyman that more than ever blinds and binds the State Department, personified by the hot-headed and dogmatic views of officials like Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams.

The ultimate irony is that Noriega in his comfortable Spanish exile may be safer than we are in the aftermath, as our continuing heedlessness to change makes us the enemy of the future in Central America and truly mortgages our national security.