INSURRECTION IN PANAMA : U.S. Policy Viewed as Flawed in Wake of Another Coup Failure

The failure of Tuesday’s coup in Panama exposed a major flaw in the longstanding U.S. strategy of trying to turn that country’s military against strongman Manuel A. Noriega, according to experts on Panama’s military.

Internal dissent may be easy to foment--Tuesday’s coup began with only four officers. But Panama’s officer corps is so small and heavily salted with Noriega loyalists that conspiracies are difficult to execute successfully, the experts say.

With only half a dozen colonels and roughly a dozen lieutenant colonels in the entire army, Panama’s “is the most pyramidal officer corps in Latin America,” said one of the experts, Richard Millet, a historian at Southern Illinois University. Noriega’s intelligence agents “watch them like a hawk.”

Small Officer Corps

Keeping the officer corps small “is how they’ve maintained control all along,” said Millet.

And “the fact that these were reasonably low-level officers” who staged Tuesday’s uprising--a major and three captains--”shows that Noriega has been reasonably effective” in keeping that control intact, said Robert Kurtz of the Brookings Institution.

For several years, U.S. officials have been trying to prod the Panama Defense Forces into staging an anti-Noriega coup. A succession of U.S. officials, including President Bush, have made public statements emphasizing that the United States has a grievance against Noriega, personally, but not against the Panama Defense Forces as an institution.

U.S. officials have repeatedly told reporters that those statements, which were repeated Tuesday, were designed to send a message to the military that a coup would be looked on favorably.

Beyond Rhetoric?

There have also been reports that U.S. support for a coup had gone beyond rhetoric. Members of Congress who have been in close contact with Panamanian opposition figures said Tuesday that U.S. officials had promised to aid a coup attempt.

However, Noriega in recent months has moved to increase his control still further by promoting his own loyalists within the defense forces, forcing other officers into retirement, said Prof. Steven Ropp of the University of Wyoming, who is also an expert on the Panamanian military. Those moves may have contributed to Tuesday’s “palace coup,” Ropp said, but they also solidified support among the officers who benefited and supplied a strong incentive for the loyalist counterattack that reasserted Noriega’s control.

The techniques of control in the Panamanian military have been carefully honed by years of experience. Noriega, himself, first became a major wielder of power in Panama by playing a part in a successful coup that brought a group of captains and majors to power in 1968. One year later, he helped put down a coup aimed at his patron, Gen. Omar Torrijos, Panama’s strongman at the time. And over the years, Noriega has put down several other coup attempts and intrigues aimed at removing him from power, emerging stronger from each one.

Led by Four Officers

Tuesday’s coup attempt appears to have begun with only four officers led by Maj. Moises Giraldi Vega, a company commander in the Urraca battalion, a unit assigned primarily to guard the Panamanian Defense Forces headquarters in Panama City. The headquarters are about a half mile from the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal and a similar distance from the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command. Several junior and senior officers of the Urraca Battalion were passed over for promotions last summer.

“My best guess is what we have here is a palace coup” with no political content, said Ropp. Part of the motivation may have been disgruntlement on part of officers who have been passed over for promotion, he said. “There have been a lot of junior officers that have been retired in the last couple of months.”

Giraldi appears to have timed his coup attempt for a period when the main combat force of the Panama Defense Forces, the so-called Battalion 2000, would be away from its bases outside Panama City on a training exercise. His company, U.S. experts said, is a lightly armed unit with fewer than 200 soldiers. But, they noted, in an army as small as Panama’s--only about 6,000 troops nationwide with few heavy weapons--a force that small would be enough to get an insurrection started.

Battalion 2000, which was set up earlier in this decade to be the force that would guard the Panama Canal once Panama retakes control of the waterway, does possess some armor and enough force to put down any rebellion. On Tuesday, it did. Within a few hours after shooting had started, reporters in Panama City saw Battalion 2000 troops returning to the city and surrounding the headquarters barracks where Giraldi and his men were based.

And so long as Noriega retains the loyalty of the Battalion 2000 officers, U.S. hopes of a coup that would unseat him are unlikely to come true, military experts agreed.

“I suspect there are a lot of officers who’d like to see him go,” said Millet. “But they’re not willing to risk their own rear ends to do it.”