ABSTRACT
In 1989, American forces invaded Panama, where General Manuel Noriega (previously a US ally) had seized power in 1984, manipulating a series of figurehead presidents and rigging elections or simply overruling their results. An elected civilian government was installed, and Noriega, who had been indicted in the American courts on charges of helping Colombian ‘drug barons’ to smuggle narcotics into the United States, was taken there, tried and imprisoned.
