Panamanians Still Tense but Bouncing Back

They swept streets, cashed checks, scanned the morning papers, swapped stories over huevos y cafe with the boys and even resumed running red lights and driving with the characteristic discipline of a pinball bounding back and forth between bumpers.

With a resilience that surprised even themselves, Panamanians were getting back to the business of being Panamanians on Thursday--not prisoners in their own homes, fearing looters or battling troops.

Food deliveries resumed, restaurant grills were fired up, homemade barricades came down in many neighborhoods, banks reopened and service stations took their first deliveries of gas after a week when vandals sucked the tanks dry.

To be sure, there were plenty of signs of the fighting that had raged between U.S. troops and the forces loyal to ousted dictator Manuel A. Noriega. The standoff at the Vatican’s embassy, the dictator’s last-gasp refuge, continued, and American tanks and rifle-toting soldiers were still out in force.

With tensions dramatically eased, Panama seemed to take a collective sigh of relief and at least made a show of getting back to normal. Still, Noriega and the unforgettable and unresolved events of the previous days weighed heavily on everyone’s mind.

As a government messenger, Maria Lopolido, didn’t take home very much--just $249 a month. Still, over the last year, she had managed to sock away $1,000, which she used to go on a pre-Christmas shopping spree to spruce up her tiny apartment across from the Comandancia, the Panamanian military headquarters in the down-and-out barrio of Chorrillo.

Lopolido, 70, bought a new dinette set, a TV stand, a mattress and a pair of rocking chairs, one for herself and the other for her husband, Ernesto Victorio. She wanted to get a new stove, too, but Ernesto talked her out of it.

“ ‘Hey, look,’ ” she recalls him saying. “ ‘It seems that things are not too well, and things might come up any minute, so we’d better save a little something.’ So I kept $200, and I hid it in the Bible.”

It hardly mattered. Lopolido’s home, and much of the surrounding neighborhood, were destroyed in a huge blaze that erupted as American invaders attacked the Comandancia to dislodge pro-Noriega forces. With gunfire and flames all around them, the couple fled out a window and down an alley and finally were rounded up by U.S. troops, who took them to a makeshift refugee camp. They have been there ever since.

When Lopolido made it home for the first time in more than a week on Thursday, she found that she didn’t have much of a home left. The dinette, mattress, chairs and other furniture were burned beyond recognition, as were all her clothes and just about everything else she owned. Even the Bible and her hidden nest egg were gone.

“My jewels, all my money, everything has been burned,” she said sadly, sifting through ashes in vain for anything that might have survived the inferno.

Nevertheless, Lopolido said she is happy that the Americans came and ousted Noriega.

“He was a crazy man,” she said. “He had $40 million in Switzerland--the radio says so--yet last month they took $30 out of my pay because they said they did not have the money. And he did all the voodoo, the santeria. That’s why people followed him, because he had all those things going on with the voodoo man.

” . . . When he first came in, I really thought he was something. I thought he was going to do things for poor people like me.”

Instead, Lopolido said, she spent much of her time shuttling to a never-ending series of rallies and parades, orchestrated by Noriega to make it appear as if he had widespread, grass-roots support.

“We, the government people, were forced to go to all those things because we were told if we did not go, he would kick us out of our jobs,” she said. “And I needed a job, so I went.”

In anxious hours after the invasion, Lopolido said she and many of the more than 6,000 other capital-area residents who became refugees were demoralized.

“Everybody at first was sad,” she recalled. “This time of year, we’re used to saying ‘Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,’ and instead, everybody was saying, ‘bitter, bitter, bitter.’ ”

But now, Lopolido said, most refugees have had second thoughts, especially since the new U.S.-backed government of Guillermo Endara has promised to rebuild their homes and guarantee their old government jobs.

“Before,” she said, “there was always tension. There was always stress. I expect good things from the new government. They’re going to build us up again. They said so.

“From now on, things in Panama will be good. . . . I trust God, and I have faith in God. He took our lives away from us, so He will bring them back.”

“It probably wasn’t the best way to do things, but we are still very, very grateful,” said German Lopez Arias, a Roman Catholic deacon. “There should be a diplomatic way, but we also recognize that we have been living under a dictator. We have to hope that this will only be for the best of the poor people, because there were so many of them who had no food, no home, no future for their children.”

One of the ironies of the crisis now gripping Panama is that the church, thrust unwittingly into the role of Noriega’s protector, has long been at the forefront of the social forces trying to oust him. And Lopez was among the dictator’s harshest critics.

“Noriega’s personality is a very rare personality, and it’s not a good one,” Lopez said. “It’s very evil.

“The church stands for justice, for humanity, for human rights, and Noriega was stepping on these kinds of things. I worked very hard to tell him this. ‘You are a dictator,’ I told him. ‘The people don’t want you. You have to give the people liberty of expression.’ He didn’t want to do that because he knew we’d be up at the pulpit preaching against him.”

With his lust for power, money and flesh, Noriega had long ago forfeited any claim to moral authority, Lopez said. “He tried to portray himself as a champion of the people. It was all part of his personality cult. He was the champion of peace, he was the champion of justice, he was the general of generals.

“He was general of nothing. He only reigned by terror. That’s the only way he could do it, by force.”

As U.S. tanks rumbled through the streets of Panama City last week, Raul Leis saw a woman stop her car, get out, and join a throng of residents who were giving the Americans a rousing cheer.

The woman’s joy turned to horror a few seconds later, however, when she saw one of the tanks rumble right over her vacant vehicle, squashing it.

Leis, a sociologist and playwright who runs an urban think tank in Panama City, said the scene was an apt metaphor for what he fears will happen to his homeland in the wake of the U.S. occupation. Eventually, he predicted, Panamanian hopes will be crushed, too.

“There is at first an emotional reaction, a feeling like we had been liberated from the immediate oppression of Noriega,” he said. “A lot of people are living with this euphoria right now.”

But that cure to Noriega, he insisted, will come at the expense of national pride and independence.

“I believe that no situation, whatsoever, can justify the invasion by a big country of a little country, if it’s the Soviet Union in Afghanistan or the U.S. in Panama,” he said. “If we accept these kind of answers to the political stresses and tensions in our societies, it will spell the end of the possibility that each country will be able to solve its own problems.”

He explained:

“It is just not possible to solve a problem such as this by armed military intervention.

“Yes, we are aware that the government of Panama (under Noriega) was authoritarian and that it did not respect human rights. But how can you develop a democratic system in a country that’s occupied? How is it going to work legally when the troops that control the streets are not subject to the national authorities? We have no true self-determination.”

Leis said the U.S. action against Noriega was hypocritical because Washington has done nothing to remove other Latin dictators as long as they did not threaten strategic American interests.

“How come they didn’t intervene in Chile and oust (Gen. Augusto) Pinochet, or intervene in Paraguay and oust (Gen. Alfredo) Stroessner? Or Nicaragua and (Gen. Anastasio) Somoza before 1979?” Leis asked “They were very long dictatorships. Pinochet was in for 15, 16 years. There were more dead people, more arrests, more repression than there ever were under Noriega.”

In the long run, Leis argued, having Washington do Panama’s dirty work will only paper over deep political and social divisions within Panamanian society.

“It’s just like when the husband and wife fight,” he said. “They need to settle their problems in bed. Let us deal with our own domestic problems. We cannot deal with it this way.”

In a sense, the looting and fighting that rocked Panama over the last week presents Guillermo Rodriguez with one of those good-news, bad-news propositions.

After the U.S. military invasion, hooligans stripped hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vehicles of tires, radios, batteries and whatever else they could grab. Rodriguez, a 55-year-old auto mechanic, could be up to his socket wrenches in repair work for months to come.

The only hitch is that vandals also took most of the replacement parts that were stockpiled in auto shops. Short of supplies, distributors have notified Rodriguez that prices for anything he will need to fix cars will be marked up at least 75%.

“I hope that we will now be able to have a free life, understanding and brotherhood,” said Rodriguez as he waited in a long line to cash a check at his bank. “But as a mechanic, I also feel sad because they are no spare parts, there is nothing with which to work. Everything is going to be at a very high price. Nobody’s going to fix their cars.”

Whatever the price of the invasion, however, Rodriguez thinks it was worth it. A native Ecuadorean, he came to Panama at the age of 16 and found it a land full of opportunity, hope and beauty. Then, he said, came a series of dictators, culminating in Noriega, who fouled things up for Panamanians.

“The paradise has been destroyed by the ambition and greed of those who want to rule over the poor people,” he said. Life under Noriega, he said, has proved very disillusioning.

“I always thought that we were all human beings, that we would live together, but I have found out that there are many people who don’t think like that and like to exploit others,” Rodriguez said. “They want to live to the detriment of poor people. They don’t help the poor--they threaten them.”

The father of four, Rodriguez said his children have been having nightmares because of all they have seen and heard on television in recent days about voodoo cults, tortures and murders linked to Noriega. He will not rest easy until Noriega is either dead or far away from Panama.

“The Americans should stay here for a long time,” he declared, “for the safety of all Panamanians.”

Let it never be said that Ignacio the Fixer is fickle. He was a Noriega rooter when Noriega was riding high, and he’ll stay a Noriega man no matter how many rotten things the ousted dictator’s critics try to dredge up.

“The invasion was a criminal, disgusting act,” said Ignacio, a boyhood pal of Noriega’s. These days, Ignacio runs a sundries stand in downtown Panama City and, for a price, helps foreigners procure cars, guides and other items.

The Noriega he knows is nothing like the man being portrayed in the media, Ignacio claimed. Noriega, he insisted, was a brave man who marched into the Vatican Embassy not to save his own hide, but rather the lives of others.

“Noriega is not a coward,” Ignacio said. “He did it to avoid more bloodshed. . . . His loyalists were planning to blow up wealthy sections of town for revenge. He opposed this.”

Whatever Noriega’s ultimate faith, Ignacio said, Washington has only given itself a black eye by reinforcing an image as an international bully trying to impose its will on weaker powers.