Word: noriega
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...international shipping community prefers that the U.S. continue to play a role in running the canal. But even Panamanians who cheered the 1989 U.S. invasion that overthrew strongman General Manuel Antonio Noriega consider the completed handover a point of national pride. The best those in favor of a continued U.S. presence can hope for is a successful conclusion to current talks aimed at establishing a multinational antinarcotics center at what is now Howard Air Force Base. Those talks, however, are foundering over the issue of who would control the U.S. troops that would provide logistical support for the center...
...critics of Perez Balladares, a beefy, combative millionaire businessman known as Toro, or Bull, say his actions are out of step with his words. Heir to the helm of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, once in the grip of Noriega, Perez Balladares has appointed Noriega's former Foreign Minister, Jorge Ritter, as his Minister for Canal Affairs and chairman of the new 11-member Panama Canal Authority, the agency that will run the facility after 2000. In addition, the President has invited a storm of criticism by naming a passel of relatives and political cronies to the Canal Authority board. They...
...Perez Balladares appointment is more controversial than Ritter, who has thrived in politics despite his close association with the corrupt Noriega regime. Robert MacMillan, a New York lawyer who was a member of the Panama Canal Commission from 1989 to 1994 and its chairman for a year, says with Ritter as canal czar, "anybody who thinks that politics will be kept out of the Panama Canal is smoking pot and inhaling...
Falcoff points out that "there are troubling rumors concerning Ritter's ties to drug traffickers"--a reference to testimony at Noriega's trial in 1991 alleging that Ritter had purchased a car for a Colombian cocaine dealer. Robert Pastor, who helped negotiate the Panama Canal treaties and who now teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, agreed that Ritter was a "surprising" choice for a job "where you want a person who stands for integrity...
...Bigfoot"--he is 6 ft. 7 in. and no ectomorph--this Brooklynite is the institutional conscience of the criminal division and the investigation's acting chief. He has spent almost his entire career at Justice and has had a hand in virtually all the department's major international cases: Noriega, Koreagate, Jonathan Pollard and the Nazi prosecutions. After a diagnosis several years ago of esophageal cancer that some surgeons deemed inoperable, he asked his doctors to gamble on a rare medical procedure that saved him. Colleagues gave him a glass-encased cigarette to keep the nicotine urges...