MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Deception’ Disputes Panama Invasion

Presidential election years are always auspicious times for the release of muckraking documentaries. The air is particularly thick with charges of political evasion and duplicity--which is manna for the muckraker.

“The Panama Deception,” at the Ken Cinema, is a production of the Santa Monica-based Empowerment Project, which previously released “Destination Nicaragua” and “COVERUP: Behind the Iran Contra Affair.” Together, these films constitute an ongoing indictment of alleged mainstream American media complicity in the foreign policy objectives of the Pentagon.

Shot on video and transferred to film, there’s nothing glossy or high-tech about “The Panama Deception,” which was directed by Barbara Trent and written and edited by David Kasper. The straight-ahead, no-nonsense filmmaking lays out simply and forcefully the case against the “official” version of the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. After sketching the history of U.S. involvement in the region, in which a system of racial apartheid similar to the American Deep South was instituted, the film works its way up to Manuel Noriega--who was on the CIA payroll since the 1960s before, according to the film, his power became inexpedient to the Pentagon.

The film’s central thesis is that Noriega was demonized in the American media in order to rally public support for what was, in effect, a deliberately provocative U.S. military entrance into Panamanian territory. The official explanations for the military intervention--that American citizens were in danger, that Noriega’s drug trafficking had to be smashed, that democracy had to be restored to the area--are dealt with singly and devastatingly. Certainly these purported explanations have not been borne out: Drug trafficking has doubled since the invasion and the U.S.-approved oligarchy headed by Panama’s new President Guillermo Endara is not exactly a model of democracy.

We hear in this film (Times-rated Mature) the familiar jargon of surgical strikes and “collateral damage.” Gen. Maxwell Thurman repeats the official estimate of 500 Panamanian casualties, while the Panamanian Human Rights Commission puts the figure closer to 4,000. Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams says, “I have seen no reports of U.S. troops executing anyone in Panama,” and then we see evidence (officially denied) of mass graves; we hear from the homeless and enraged whose neighborhoods, invariably poor, where destroyed. (More than 20,000 Panamanians were left homeless after the invasion; thousands more were illegally arrested as “political opponents.”)

The film maintains that the real reason for the invasion was to install a Pentagon-friendly ruling class in Panama and to destroy the Panamanian Defense Forces as a prelude to renegotiating the Carter-Torrijos Canal Zone treaties before 2000--when the United States was supposed to relinquish control of the Canal and remove its military bases. The film’s final credits note that in March, 1991, President Endara proposed a constitutional amendment forever abolishing Panama’s right to have an army; and that, later that year, the U.S. Congress passed a law to renegotiate the Panama Canal Treaties to ensure continued American military presence.

‘The Panama Deception’

An Empowerment Project production. Produced in association with Channel 4, London. Director Barbara Trent. Producers Barbara Trent, David Kasper, Nico Panigutti, and Joanne Doroshow. Written and edited by David Kasper. Music Sting, Jackson Browne. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

Unrated. Times-rated: Mature.