Noriega Promised Freedom to Rebels : Dictator Begins Crackdown on Foes in Regime

Dozens of government agents bashed their way into a political party headquarters and evicted Panama’s main opposition leader Thursday night after Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega announced a sweeping crackdown against his enemies.

The intruders, armed with clubs, pulled Guillermo Endara and at least eight supporters out of the building through broken picture windows and then released the opposition leader, witnesses said. Friends said he later took refuge in a foreign embassy, but the fate of the others was unclear.

It was the third raid on Endara’s Authentic Liberal Party headquarters Thursday after Gen. Noriega warned he would take reprisals against the supporters of a bloody coup attempt by junior officers two days earlier.

‘No Room for Traitors’

“Panama has to live a moment of emergency, and that emergency means that here there will be no room for traitors,” Noriega told a crowd of supporters in the rice-growing center of Santiago in southwestern Panama. “How can we have a democracy when we’re under so much pressure?”

Endara was in the 16th day of a fast to protest the annulment of the May 7 presidential election that international observers said he won over Noriega’s hand-picked candidate. Although the highly-publicized fast was unrelated to the coup attempt, the 51-year-old general apparently viewed it as an untimely challenge to his stability.

He reacted by sending 30 to 50 green-uniformed men to seize the party headquarters after dark.

They bent back bars over the windows and shattered the glass. When reporters converged to cover the raid, the assailants confiscated television film and equipment.

At 8:43 p.m., the U.S. Embassy received a fax from the besieged headquarters. It said: “We are surrounded by uniformed guards who are trying to enter right now. Please help. They are breaking everything.”

Aura Lazo, who lives across the street, said she saw intruders lead Endara out of the building and let him go. She last saw the politician slowly walking away.

Ivan Romero, a Christian Democratic Party leader, said Endara was safe in an embassy that he would not identify. He and other opposition leaders said they did not know the whereabouts of Endara’s two doctors, four secretaries and other people cleared out with him. Some said there were 15 people inside at the time of the raid.

“It was evident that what the regime wanted was to end the show he was putting on,” Romero said.

Day of Tension

The raid capped a day of tension in which about 20 troops of Noriega’s Panama Defense Forces, wearing camouflage fatigues and black grease paint, surrounded offices of the National Intelligence Directorate, his investigative police force. The helmeted troopers carried M-16 and AK-47 rifles and tear gas canisters.

The unusual maneuver may indicate lingering conflict within the military, buta Defense Forces spokesman said it was justified.

“We did have an emergency situation the day before yesterday,” he said.

The government has reported arresting three members of Noriega’s general staff and 34 soldiers since the coup attempt Tuesday, in which it said 10 rebels died. Civilian opposition leaders said they believed the death toll was at least 30.

Foreign diplomats said Thursday they had unconfirmed reports of new arrests of soldiers involved in the five-hour seizure of Noriega’s downtown headquarters and purges of suspected rebel sympathizers from public ministries.

Employees Fired

The Ministry of Health, where cheering was heard in the halls during the uprising, fired some of its employees, one diplomat said.

Noriega, speaking in a defiant tone before about 2,700 supporters, railed against enemies in the Defense Forces, the political opposition, the civil service, the state-controlled broadcast media and the Bush Administration, which he again accused of abetting the revolt.

While the general warned of a wide-ranging crackdown, he was most specific in his reference to disloyal employees of the government.

“We have to make a package of emergency war laws,” he declared. “We must abolish those laws that protect the enemy within the government.”

He urged each civil servant to act as a “prosecutor” and inform on disloyal co-workers. “We are going to make a list, because there are many people outside the government who need to be included.”

Teachers, he said, will be watched closely because “they are the most vicious and traitorous.” Without naming them, he said some state-controlled radio and television stations were bribed by the coup plotters to broadcast their communique and will be closed.

A diplomat said that Noriega had asked his aides for a list of people who called to congratulate him after the uprising, along with the time that each called.

In his first extensive comments on the coup attempt, Noriega did not say why his intelligence chief and two other top aides were among those arrested.

While acknowledging that he was in his downtown headquarters when the company assigned to guard it started the revolt, he offered few details of what happened there, leaving it unclear whether he was ever in the rebels’ hands.

At one point, he said that he told the rebels, who demanded his removal as Defense Forces commander in chief: “You are going to have to kill me first.” Then, warning them that loyalist forces were moving in, he recalled saying: “Not even the death of the commander can stop this movement.”

Noriega said the rebels were backed by the United States “with its money, its bribes and its advice” in what ended as “another Bay of Pigs.”

Opposition activists denied knowing in advance about the coup. They said they believed the plotters were interested only in changing the military high command and apparently did not share their goal of restoring a democracy and civilian supremacy.

Even so, they expressed a belief that the coup attempt had furthered their goals by weakening Noriega’s grip on the 14,000-member Defense Forces.

“They are in their moment of greatest weakness and disintegration,” said opposition spokesman Ricardo Arias Calderon.

Arias, who was one of Endara’s running mates in the May election, said he has been telephoning Latin American leaders to urge them to take stronger action against Panama in upcoming regional forums.

Endara, in his hunger strike to promote an opposition-led tax revolt to cut the government’s funds, had been taking only water and vitamin pills. The portly, double-chinned politician said he had lost 30 pounds and now weighs 245.

About an hour after the press conference ended, riot police appeared in the street outside while plainclothes intelligence agents entered the party headquarters. They nabbed Carlos Bares, an unarmed bodyguard, and Melvin Ceballos, a press agent for the party, witnesses said.

The police then sealed off the building for two hours, barring anyone from leaving or entering.

Later, as scores of Endara’s supporters gathered outside, eight gunmen returned, fired shots in the air, entered his office and briefly detained his secretary.

“They always want to intimidate the Panamanian people,” Endara said. “One of the reasons they did this was to intimidate not only me but the whole population.”