Outspoken General Hopes to Change Panama’s Ways

Just a few months ago, Maj. Gen. Marc A. Cisneros, commander of the U.S. Army here, found that tough talk about Panama nearly got him fired. Now maternity wards here are filled to confusion with babies named in his honor.

And even in the glow of vindication, Cisneros still does not hold his blunt words back. In stern one-on-one meetings with leaders of the new Panamanian Public Force, he points angrily to cattle prods and other old tools of military torture while repeating a single message: “No mas” --No more.

For the tough-talking man from South Texas, taunted for two years by supporters of Manuel A. Noriega as a traitor to his Latino heritage and threatened by the dictator’s paramilitary henchmen, it is an aspiration that is deeply felt.

“I think I had more dislike--I don’t want to say hatred--for what was going on here, being Hispanic,” Cisneros told senior editors and correspondents of The Times in an interview at his Ft. Clayton headquarters.

“They need to have a little change of mind-set (in Panama),” he said. “They need to have a little infusion of Anglo values. . . . You get a better product when you take the best of the various societies.”

Such damn-the-consequences frankness is characteristic of Cisneros, the son of a mechanic who rose to become a two-star general--the highest-ranking Latino in the Army. Nearly dismissed last summer for his publicly stated eagerness to turn his soldiers loose on the Noriega government, he is unabashedly proud of what his “Dobermans”--as he calls his troops--achieved once unleashed.

“The institution (in Panama) needed an enema,” he declared.

Cisneros, who will oversee the reconstruction of the Panamanian military, also made no secret of his personal determination to set Panama right. Unless the days of the jefe, or chief, could be repudiated once and for all, he said, the U.S. invasion might preclude the rise of a new military dictatorship here for only five years.

In his first extensive interview since the operation began, Cisneros also asserted that the failure of the United States to dispatch an adequate number of troops to halt looting in Panama City had been a significant shortcoming. But he declared that the operation as a whole had been “brilliantly executed” and said he expected most U.S. troops to be withdrawn from the streets of the capital by the end of the month.

And in an indication of a wide-ranging hunt for evidence against the ousted dictator, the Army commander disclosed that he entered the papal nunciature this week to conduct a three-hour interview with Eliecer Gaytan, an accused assassin and former security chief who is the top-ranking Noriega associate still under Vatican protection.

In such encounters, Cisneros--the victorious general who speaks the language of the vanquished--appears to have made great strides in easing Panamanian apprehensions since the Dec. 20 invasion. His office in the days after H-hour became the command post for telephone negotiations with commanders of the old Panama Defense Forces, many of whom surrendered after “El General” himself hoisted the receiver to add his personal guarantee.

But the role of Latino conqueror is one that the 19-year military veteran never sought. And even in the aftermath of victory, he contends that his heritage has made his job here difficult.

“Being Hispanic,” he said, “I really didn’t want to get associated with Latin America. I was dragged down here.”

In his first tour in Panama as a lieutenant colonel in the late 1970s, Cisneros was assigned the bad-cop role in Panama Canal treaty negotiations. As a newly promoted brigadier general pulled back from Alaska for a Panamanian command in 1986, he worried that his insights into the region were “not appreciated.”

And throughout his stay, capped by his promotion to major general and commander of U.S. Army South, his surname and tough-talking ways earned Cisneros notoriety in a captive pro-Noriega press that “singled me out, daily, daily, daily,” he said, and “hammered” him as a genocidal traitor determined to wipe out his Latino brethren.

The campaign of intimidation reached a climax last August, when Cisneros’ wife emerged from church to find five carloads of men blocking her path. Although she escaped with the aid of a priest, a furious Cisneros insisted that she return the next day while he waited in concealment with an armed force ready to intervene.

“I was going to take them down as terrorists,” Cisneros said. “I wanted to take them down.” The thugs did not return.

Those tough-talking ways were at the same time causing Cisneros trouble with his boss, then-U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. Frederick F. Woerner, who was attempting to accommodate Latin American concerns about American power in the region.

When a Spanish-language newspaper quoted a Cisneros declaration that Panama would be made better by a U.S. invasion, Woerner called to tell him his “head was on the block.” Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was “upset,” his boss warned; Cisneros might even be recalled.

Today, the general remains unapologetic. The military, he says, needs to be “the Doberman on the leash,” snarling with “teeth bared” in preparation for the moment that the President snaps its chain.

But Cisneros is also introspective about the forces that made his name the most popular for newborns since the heyday of Gen. Omar Torrijos, Panama’s strongman from 1968 until his death in 1981, and made him such a forthright believer in his prescription of a dose of Anglification for Panama. (“I hate to put it that way; I honestly feel that that’s helpful,” Cisneros said.)

In the hourlong interview, he repeatedly stressed the extent of his Latino heritage and its impact upon him.

The descendant of Mexicans who settled near what is now Brownsville, Tex., just after 1700, Cisneros was brought up on stories of his ancestors teaming up with their Anglo neighbors, “one fighting the gringo bandits, and one fighting the Mexicans.”

By the time he reached his senior year at St. Mary’s University, his pre-law ambitions fell victim to the lure of the Reserve Officer Training Corps and the “euphoria of the young spirit” inspired by President John F. Kennedy. “I sort of wanted to make the world safe for democracy,” he said.

His experience as a young major during the Tet offensive in Vietnam left him “absolutely disillusioned” with the eternal optimism of his superiors. But his more lasting disillusionment ripened over time, as most nations of Latin America clung fast to military rule.

“I look at the history of Latin America and see it’s been replete with tinhorn dictators like Noriega,” Cisneros said. “The caudillo, the jefe, the supremo --they are the nemesis of Latin American development.”

Even now in Panama, with Noriega long gone, Cisneros is still struck by the arrogance of power that the military still harbors.

In the midst of the invasion, Col. Acquilano Siero and other Noriega lieutenants arrived at Ft. Clayton to discuss surrender terms but continued to boast that they controlled power in the provincial military zones.

“I lost my temper,” Cisneros recalled. He ordered Siero, Noriega’s brother-in-law, handcuffed and jailed.

Later, during 20-hour indoctrination sessions designed to offer a crash course to the new police force, old PDF members have often seemed unable to fathom the new ways, he says. Many are stunned to learn that if they commit a crime, they too may be arrested.

In an effort to alter that attitude, Cisneros has spent much of his time touring the country with Col. Eduardo Herrera Hassan, the new Panamanian Public Force chief. After a cordial group meeting, Cisneros turns to the one-on-one approach to deliver “No mas!” admonishments about eliminating the vestiges of corruption and brutality.

But even dominant at last in Panama, Cisneros is far from convinced that the roots of the old dictatorship have yet been wrested from its society.

“The making (of democracy) is there,” he said. “Can I guarantee it? No.”

“What happened here was not just the military’s fault. It was the people’s fault,” he added.

“The people have to change.”