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Panama’s Troop Toll Cut: 314 to 50 : Invasion: The new U.S. estimate would mean that four times as many civilians as enemy soldiers were killed.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

The U.S. military command in Panama acknowledged Monday that only one-sixth of the 314 Panamanian soldiers reported killed in December’s invasion have been confirmed dead, a disclosure indicating that many more civilians than combatants died in the assault.

The U.S. Southern Command said it now believes that the actual casualty figure for Panamanian forces was about 50, meaning that the civilian toll exceeded it by a 4 to 1 margin.

While acknowledging that its previous estimates “may have been too high,” the Southern Command denied it deliberately inflated them.

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Nevertheless, the disclosure, prompted by a human rights group report that questioned U.S. estimates, provides a picture of the U.S. operation that is much different from what had previously been portrayed.

The U.S. estimate of 314 Panamanian enemy dead was widely reported at the time of the invasion, and was cited by military officials. They noted in comparison that only 23 U.S. soldiers were killed in action. An additional 202 Panamanian civilians were killed during the operation, according to the Southern Command.

In reporting that only 50 Panamanian soldiers had been confirmed dead, the Panama-based Southern Command said it now believes that its higher estimates, based on battlefield reports by individual units, may have included “redundancies.”

For example, a Southern Command spokeswoman said, several U.S. soldiers involved in “fast and furious” action apparently claimed individual kills for a firefight in which only one Panamanian soldier died.

“That’s the kind of thing that can lead to an inflated figure,” said the spokeswoman, Marj Boggs. She said that Southern Command officials are now “pretty confident” that the number of Panamanian military dead did not greatly exceed 50.

The indication that far more civilians than soldiers were killed in the operation comes in the wake of new disclosures that military authorities are investigating serious allegations of misconduct by 21 U.S. soldiers, including actions that caused the noncombat deaths of eight Panamanians.

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U.S. officials in Panama have acknowledged privately for at least two months that the estimate of 314 enemy dead appeared to be too high. But until Monday, the Southern Command had stuck steadfastly to that official claim.

Its retreat appeared to have been prompted by the report earlier this month from a group called Physicians for Human Rights, which also concluded that at least 302 Panamanian civilians had been killed during the U.S. invasion--far more than the U.S. figure of 202. But the Southern Command expressed some skepticism about that claim, saying it was “out of proportion” to the findings of a joint U.S.-Panamanian investigation.

That investigation was based on an actual body count, making its conclusions about civilian casualties far more reliable than the early U.S. estimates of 314 Panamanian military dead. The estimates of military dead were never endorsed by the Panamanian government.

The government coroner, known as the Institute for Legal Medicine, has positively identified only 50 bodies as having been members of the Panama Defense Forces or the paramilitary Dignity Battalions.

While a military spokesman suggested that additional soldiers may have been among those burned beyond recognition during the attack, the Southern Command acknowledged Monday that it could not substantiate that any more than 50 Panamanian soldiers were killed in the operation.

A Pentagon official described the Southern Command as the authoritative source for the casualty figures and said there would be no official comment from Washington.

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“We don’t second-guess South Com,” the official said. “We’ve known all along that those figures were soft. They may have been very soft.”

The Southern Command statement on the military casualties was provided by telephone and telex Monday in response to a March 15 Times inquiry about the findings of the Physicians for Human Rights.

In her response, spokeswoman Boggs said the questions about military casualty figures had been investigated, or “thoroughly staffed,” at the military headquarters outside of Panama City.

Times staff writer John M. Broder contributed to this article.

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