U.S. Lieutenant Shoots Panama Police Officer

An American Army officer shot and wounded a Panamanian policeman Monday in the latest escalation of violence in Panama since dictator Manuel A. Noriega’s rubber-stamp legislature declared that Panama is “in a state of war” with the United States.

U.S. officials said the American officer was defending himself. The shooting occurred in an atmosphere of heightened tension, after Saturday night’s fatal shooting of an unarmed U.S. Marine Corps officer by Noriega’s Panama Defense Forces.

President Bush denounced the Marine’s slaying as “an enormous outrage.” But although the Administration and Pentagon have reviewed options to protect American lives, Bush so far has refused to discuss the possibility of U.S. retaliation.

“All Presidents have options, but they don’t discuss what they might be,” Bush said in an interview Monday with news agency reporters.

The United States has 12,000 troops in Panama, primarily to safeguard the Panama Canal. The Panama Defense Forces, that country’s sole military, police and security organization, numbers about 15,000, including small naval and air branches.

A senior U.S. military officer familiar with the volatile situation in Panama said Monday that Panama offers few attractive targets for overt military action.

The officer said the country is so small geographically that it would be impossible to mount a conventional military strike without endangering civilians or damaging canal facilities. If there is retaliation, he said, it probably will be very low-key and, almost certainly, undertaken covertly.

In the latest shooting incident, an American Army lieutenant drew his pistol and fired twice after a Panamanian traffic officer approached and drew his own gun first, a Pentagon official told reporters. Traffic officers are all members of the Panama Defense Forces.

The shooting took place in a residential area in Curundu, a part of the former Panama Canal Zone, all of which was turned over to Panama under the Panama Canal Treaties of 1977.

“The transito (traffic policeman) went down,” the Pentagon official said. “He got up and left the scene, but it is believed he was wounded--possibly in the leg and the arm.”

The Army’s Southern Command in Panama said in a statement that the Panamanian policeman “signaled the serviceman to stop and then approached him.”

The statement said the American “felt threatened when he saw the Panamanian apparently reach for his weapon. The American reponded defensively by pulling a weapon and firing two shots.”

Panamanian authorities, citing an occasionally enforced requirement that foreign journalists have special work permits, barred correspondents of the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and El Nacional of Caracas, Venezuela, from entering the country on tourist visas Monday. The journalists were detained at the Panama City airport and expelled.

A Panamanian newspaper, La Estrella, published a statement by the neighborhood council in El Chorrillo, the district where the American Marine was killed Saturday night. It called the incident “another act of aggression and intimidation against our people” by the U.S. government and urged people to join army-supervised Popular Defense Committees in their neighborhoods.

“If these attacks against defenseless citizens continue,” the statement added, “we will react in the same way, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

The identity of the slain Marine has not been released.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said Monday that the level of violence in Panama seems to have increased sharply since Noriega’s People’s Assembly, a 510-member body that meets irregularly, “declared war” on the United States last week. Earlier, U.S. officials had dismissed the assembly’s declaration as bluster.

“The Panamanian declaration of war appears to have set off a pattern of indiscriminate violence,” Fitzwater said. “We are monitoring the situation there on a continuing basis, but we are very concerned that the declaration of war that was stated last weekend may have been a license for harassment and threats and, in this case, even murder of a United States citizen.”

Fitzwater said a rash of incidents--carried out by different Panamanian units in different locations in the 48 hours after the declaration of war--go beyond “any previous experience.”

“When you put all of these together, you begin to discern a certain climate of aggression that is very disturbing,” he said.

“Gen. Noriega is the commander of these forces. He sets the tone and gives the orders and gives the directions,” Fitzwater added.

On Friday, Fitzwater had scoffed at the assembly’s declaration as a hollow action that was unlikely to have any real impact.

The Pentagon said Sunday that the Marine officer who was killed was in a car carrying four U.S. military officers when Panamanian troops opened fire on them.

The Pentagon statement said the four had been on their way, in civilian clothes and in a private car, to a restaurant in downtown Panama City when they got lost and unintentionally drove onto a street near the Defense Forces headquarters. As they drove away from a confrontation with the soldiers, they were fired upon, according to this account.

The Pentagon also said a U.S. Navy lieutenant who witnessed the incident was beaten and his wife was roughed up and sexually threatened by Panamanian soldiers later that night.

Times staff writers John Broder in Washington and Richard Boudreaux in Central America contributed to this story.