Word: panamanian
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...would be unacceptable.) The monsignor pointed out that the troops surrounding the embassy made an escape from the building impossible. Noriega was told he had only two choices: to walk out and surrender to the Americans or to let Laboa arrange for him to be delivered to the new Panamanian government. Asked Noriega: Did it really matter...
Then, on the afternoon of Jan. 3, a huge rally organized by the Civic Crusade, an anti-Noriega group that held similar protests in 1987 and 1988, drew some 15,000 Panamanians to the Avenida Balboa. "Kill the Hitler!" some shouted. Waving white handkerchiefs, they jeered at "Pineapple Face" and raised pineapples skewered on sticks. Only barbed wire and U.S. troops separated the demonstrators from Noriega's shelter. Panamanian officials had tried to discourage the rally, fearing the crowd might try to attack the nunciature and grab Noriega -- an effort that might be prevented only by U.S. gunfire. Noriega decided...
...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...
...Noriega received payments of more than $4.6 million from Colombia's Medellin cartel. Prosecutors claim that in return he permitted the drug lords to use Panama as a refining and transshipment point for cocaine and as a sanctuary for themselves while the profits were laundered in Panamanian banks and false- front companies, usually with a suitable cut for the general...
Inevitably there were mistakes. Many paratroopers missed their landing zones. The shelling of Noriega's Comandancia headquarters destroyed houses in the adjacent 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...