What happened to manual noriega machete
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Remembering Manuel Noriega and His Capture
When my book on the history of manhunts was published, I was often asked by friends and family which of the military operations would make the best film. Although Gen. Frederick Funston’s daring raid 100 miles behind enemy lines to capture Philippine insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901 would make a great period drama, I usually replied that the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama to capture Gen. Manuel Antonia Noriega would make an excellent black comedy. With the infamously acne-scarred dictator’s death in a French prison last week, it is worth revisiting the unique combination of malice, self-delusion, and sheer absurdity that made Operation Just Cause one of the most unique campaigns in U.S. military history with exponentially more potential for satire than the lame War Machine.
Noriega rose to power in 1983 and initially served as an important conduit for U.S. aid supporting the Nicaraguan contras. Then again, he was simultaneously s
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In an era that surges with new monsters and tyrants, the former Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega, who died in a hospital on Monday, at the age of eighty-three, seemed an almost quaint throwback to another time. Noriega had been all but forgotten by the world since his precipitous fall from grace, in 1989, when U.S. military forces invaded Panama to remove him from power. While the world moved on and changed, Noriega spent the past twenty-seven years in prison, most of it in a U.S. federal penitentiary, after being convicted on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges, then briefly in France, for money laundering, and finally, since 2011, back home in Panama, for murder.
In a lengthy interview inom had with him in September, 2015, Noriega’s first conversation with a reporter in many years, he showed han själv to be a willing, wily, and often humorous interlocutor. At the time, he was incarcerated in Panama, and he expressed unrepentant pride in his past career as the co
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Manuel Noriega, obituary: Panama dictator worked with CIA while murdering political opponents
Disgraced former Panamanian General Manuel Noriega was a ruthless dictator, domestic spook, convicted murderer, money-launderer, big-time drug runner for Colombian cocaine druglords and a double agent between the CIA and Fidel Castro's Cuba. To some of his friends, however, including English ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, he was a loveable rogue. In the 1980s, when he was nicknamed “Pineapple Face” because of severe acne, he stood up to the US but went one step too far when he swung a machete around his head and declared Panama was “in a state of war” with America.
Not great timing. For one thing, the major US networks filmed the machete incident, which was never going to go down well with a US President from Texas, George HW Bush. What's more, another anti-US dictator, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, was in dispute with neighbouring Kuwait and was building up his forces with a possible view to in