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Remembering Canada’s support for the US invasion of Panama

Canada was the only country in the Americas to openly support the illegal operation

Canadian PoliticsWar ZonesLatin America and the CaribbeanUSA Politics

An American armoured personnel carrier guards a street near the Panamanian Defense Force headquarters building during the second day of Operation Just Cause, December 1989. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Thirty-five years ago, Canada was the only country in the Americas to openly support the illegal US invasion of Panama. As External Affairs Minister Joe Clark stated at the time, “we understand and sympathize with the position the United States government has taken.” Meanwhile, in a phone call between Brian Mulroney and George H.W. Bush on the day of the invasion, the Canadian prime minister told Bush, “We wish you well.”

On December 20, 1989, US forces invaded Panama and overthrew the government of Manuel Noriega, a former CIA asset. By late 1989, Noriega had proven too independent for his one-time sponsors in Washington, who suddenly accused the Panamanian leader of drug trafficking and endangering American citizens in the country.

As journalist Belén Fernández writes in Al Jazeera, the US had known about Noriega’s links to the drug trade for years before they turned on him—similar to the way Washington threw their Honduran asset, former president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, under the bus when he outlived his usefulness.

“[S]ince at least 1972,” Fernández explains, “the US had known about—and intermittently benefitted from—Noriega’s links to the drug trade. Furthermore, the US president spearheading the dictator’s removal was none other than George H.W. Bush, the very same George H.W. Bush who as director of the CIA in 1976 had ensured Noriega’s preservation on the agency payroll.”

The US military dubbed their invasion “Operation Just Cause.” Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the title was chosen for its “inspirational ring,” adding that “even our severest critics would have to utter ‘Just Cause’ while denouncing us.”

On the day of the invasion, Bush called Prime Minister Mulroney and briefed him on the invasion plans. “We will be in the House of Commons tomorrow morning to answer questions and we will explain things to the Canadian people,” said Mulroney. “I certainly hope there is no further loss of life by the US military.” Mulroney expressed no concern for the lives of Panamanians, hundreds and possibly thousands of whom would be killed in the operation, their bodies buried in mass graves.

When journalists asked Mulroney if he was worried about being perceived as “a puppet of the US government,” the prime minister doubled down on his defence of the invasion. “What would you have us do?” he asked rhetorically. “I hear you’ve got a drug-runner and a thug running a country [in Panama]? He declares war on the United States? He assassinates some innocent American citizens?”

Then-US Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney claimed that Operation Just Cause was “the most surgical military operation of its size ever conducted,” but the assault was anything but surgical. Official death tolls are in the hundreds, but nobody knows exactly how many Panamanians were killed by the Americans. Grassroots sources put the number in the thousands.

“What happened in Panama is a hidden horror,” said investigative journalist Robert Knight. “Many of the bodies were bulldozed into piles and immolated in the slums where they were collected. Other bodies were left in the garbage chutes of the poor projects in which they died from the shooting, from the artillery, from the machine guns, from the airborne attacks. Others were said to have been pushed into the ocean.”

By and large, the national and international media did not report on the killing of Panamanians by US forces, who took firm measures to control the narrative. As filmmaker Barbara Trent explained: “The US military also targeted the Panamanian media. Radio stations were immediately taken over and destroyed. US forces occupied TV stations and began transmitting their own signal. Many journalists were either arrested or fired. One of Panama’s largest daily newspaper, La Republica, was raided, ransacked, and closed down by American troops.”

While promising to bring democracy to Panama, US forces turned the poor neighbourhood of El Chorrillo into “Little Hiroshima.” Author Greg Grandin describes the killings:

As Human Rights Watch wrote, even conservative estimates of civilian fatalities suggested “that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civilians… were not faithfully observed by the invading US forces.” That may have been putting it mildly when it came to the indiscriminate bombing of a civilian population, but the point at least was made. Civilians were given no notice. The Cobra and Apache helicopters that came over the ridge didn’t bother to announce their pending arrival by blasting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (as in Apocalypse Now). The University of Panama’s seismograph marked 442 major explosions in the first 12 hours of the invasion, about one major bomb blast every two minutes. Fires engulfed the mostly wooden homes, destroying about 4,000 residences… Shortly after hostilities ended, bulldozers excavated mass graves and shoveled in the bodies. “Buried like dogs,” said the mother of one of the civilian dead.


In his 1992 book The Never Ending, Grahame Russell, director of the Canadian human rights non-profit Rights Action, described his visit to El Chorrillo after the US bombing:

Half the neighbourhood was a flattened, burnt waste land of empty shell buildings, and strewn rubble. Fifteen city blocks—houses, churches, stores and warehouses—had been disappeared by the US ground-air-naval attack. Everywhere, US soldiers were driving army bulldozers, cleaning up the remains of buildings, burnt-out buses and cars, etc… I walked through the hollow shell of a blackened and bombed residential apartment, 24 de diciembre, a casualty of Apache attack helicopters. Lots of collateral damage here, never reported on in the press. The smell of death and human decay lingered in the elevator shafts and garbage drops of the “24th of December” apartment buildings, where pajama-clad Panamanians had tried to hide from the 50 millimeter bullets that cut through three walls.


Russell expressed anger toward the Canadian government for its eager support of the US invasion: “As a new member of the Organization of American States, Canada’s first act was to officially support this massive make-work project for arms dealers, the morgue, human rights workers, and the US army mop-up patrol. The Canadian government was the only government in the Americas to openly support Operation Just Cause.”

Following the American bombing campaign, Bush thanked Mulroney for his ardent defence of the invasion. In a phone call, the US president told Mulroney, “On Panama, you were magnificent. I know that a number of people in Parliament jumped on you for your support of what we were doing.” Mulroney responded with praise of his own for Bush. “You yourself brought 1989 to a very successful conclusion,” the prime minister said, “and now 1990 is off to a very fine start. Now, two weeks after your action in Panama, there are proven beneficial results.”

Bush concluded the call by saying, “Brian, I want to thank you again for your support.”

The overthrow of Noriega and subsequent US occupation of Panama foreshadowed unilateral US wars of the 1990s and 2000s. As Grandin writes:

[T]he invasion of Panama was the forgotten warm-up for the first Gulf War, which took place a little over a year later. That assault was specifically designed for all the world to see. “Smart bombs” lit up the sky over Baghdad as the TV cameras rolled. Featured were new night-vision equipment, real-time satellite communications, and cable TV (as well as former US commanders ready to narrate the war in the style of football announcers, right down to instant replays). All of this allowed for public consumption of a techno-display of apparent omnipotence that, at least for a short time, helped consolidate mass approval and was meant as both a lesson and a warning for the rest of the world.


In other words, “the road to Baghdad… ran through Panama City. It was George H.W. Bush’s invasion of that small, poor country 25 years ago that inaugurated the age of preemptive unilateralism, using ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ as both justifications for war and a branding opportunity.”

The invasion also paved the way for the introduction of neoliberalism in Panama, from which Canadian mining companies have benefitted lavishly—including First Quantum Minerals, which owned the lucrative Cobre Panama copper mine until it was nationalized late last year.

As lawyer Gilma Camargo put it: “[The invasion caused] everything that we are living now, the corruption, the weakened institutions, the financial mess that we’re in with people not getting paid well [or] getting healthcare…the financial neoliberal concept was put into Panama without us asking for it.”

In 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (ICHR) ruled that the US government must compensate victims of the invasion and their families. According to the ICHR report, the US government—which claimed to be bringing democracy to Panama—was responsible for violating Panamanians’ rights “to life, liberty [and] security.”

In later decades, the Canadian government would continue to support US-led military action against enemy nations including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), the former Yugoslavia, and Libya. At the same time, Canada supported US-backed coups against leaders on Washington’s hit-list including Honduras’s Manuel Zelaya, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and participated in US-led efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government.

While Canadian involvement in the invasion of Afghanistan, or the destruction of Libya, or regime change efforts in Venezuela are widely recognized, Ottawa’s support for the invasion of Panama is less well-known.

It shouldn’t be. While the rest of the world condemned the attack or stayed silent, Canada isolated itself on the global stage, siding with US unilateralism and the forces of imperialist violence.

By endorsing the illegal US invasion, Canadian leaders again put themselves in what is, by now, a very familiar place: the wrong side of history.

Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is the author of Canada in Afghanistan: A story of military, diplomatic, political and media failure, 2003-2023 and the co-author of Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy with Yves Engler.

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