Word: panama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ordinarily Monsignor Jose Sebastian Laboa, the Vatican's Ambassador to Panama, greets visitors with a tray of coffee and cake. But when General Manuel Antonio Noriega strode into the papal embassy on Christmas Eve, such hospitality was hardly appropriate. The fugitive strongman was agitated, pacing the nunciature's marble floors like a caged tiger. The four aides who accompanied him were carrying suspicious vials of injectable liquids and an assortment of guns. Laboa demanded that Noriega relinquish the weapons. At first he refused, but then he apparently complied -- although a submachine gun was later found under...
...Chorrillo neighborhood, where many poor people live. Air attacks on the San Miguelito area were devastating. The U.S. embassy said 300 Panamanian civilians died (unofficial estimates go as high as 800), an alarming toll. Many Panamanians criticized the failure of the Americans to move against the looting that engulfed Panama City. "There should have been troops placed along commercial arteries," complained Steve Maduro, a past director of Panama's Chamber of Commerce. "Our police force was nonexistent, and it was utter chaos for three days...
...removed Noriega from power and gave a new government a chance to take root. As a bonus, it recovered some 48,000 weapons that might one day have been turned against Americans or sent off to El Salvador as part of Noriega's gun running to rebels there. In Panama, American . servicemen fully earned the kind of medals that were so lavishly dispensed after Grenada...
COVER: In Rumania, an unfinished revolution. In Panama, a diplomatic standoff...
...wreckage. -- Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena are summarily executed, and a self-appointed National Salvation Front takes charge of the country. But the shape of the new order is far from clear. -- In Timisoara, cradle of the revolution, people ricochet between agony and elation, fear and hope. -- Panama's strongman has fallen, but Manuel Noriega takes refuge in the papal embassy, sending Washington and the Vatican into diplomatic deadlock. -- As a military operation, the U.S. invasion gets a glowing assessment from the brass and the experts...