Word: panama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Panama found $50 million in an unfrozen account in the U.S., and Washington permitted its withdrawal. Then a snag developed. "Did you ever try to get $50 million in $20 and $50 bills?" asked an American participant in the money roundup. After much scrambling, the Federal Reserve Bank in San Antonio accumulated the cash. The Pentagon supplied a C-130 transport, which was loaded from armored personnel carriers hauling the cash; other APCs awaited the plane in Panama. Deadline met -- barely...
...kennel seemed an odd venue for a watershed event in U.S. military history. But when members of the 988th Military Police Company from Fort Benning, Ga., engaged Panamanian soldiers in a firefight at an attack-dog compound near Panama City, the American platoon was commanded by a woman: Captain Linda L. Bray, 29, of Butner, N.C. Bray, one of 771 Army women who took part in the Panama operation, had added a page to the annals of American warfare: for the first time women, who compose almost 11% of the U.S. armed forces, had engaged hostile troops in modern combat...
American women are excluded by law and regulation from assignment to units, such as infantry, armor and artillery, that are likely to be engaged in combat. But Panama demonstrated how such distinctions blur when the shooting starts. Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder argued last week that "once you no longer have a definable front, it's impossible to separate combat from noncombat. The women carried M-16s, not dog biscuits...
Brian Mitchell, author of Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military, argues that the use of female troops in Panama proved nothing. "The sorts of things they were doing could be done by a twelve-year-old with a rifle," he says. He and other critics contend that women are not capable of performing critical battlefield functions: women Marines, for example, are not allowed to throw live grenades because the corps does not believe they can toss them far enough to avoid injury. But recent Army studies indicate that women's physical strength develops rapidly during training...
With tension already high between Washington and Managua, the politically tinged charges were hardly surprising. Long-strained relations soured further last month when the U.S. invaded Panama -- which the Sandinistas predictably denounced as Yanqui imperialism. To make matters worse, U.S. soldiers burst into the residence of the Nicaraguan Ambassador to Panama and searched it for weapons, a blatant violation of diplomatic immunity. Managua retaliated by expelling 20 American diplomats. Still bristling last week, Ortega drew a nasty parallel between the ambush and the November slaying of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador, a crime many believe was committed...