Noriega faces release from US prison

Manuel Noriega, the former military dictator in Panama, is preparing to return to his homeland to face prosecution for his murderous eight-year reign after being granted early release from a prison in the United States. The US Parole Commission has ruled that he will be set free from the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami on Sept. 9, having served close to two-thirds of a 30-year sentence for drug trafficking and racketeering. His freedom is unlikely to last beyond his first steps outside the jail, however. Noriega, 70, who was forced from power after the US invasion of Panama in 1989, is wanted there and in France for crimes perpetrated during his de facto rule. He has already been convicted and sentenced in both countries–in France for money laundering, and in Panama for two murders, including that of Hugo Spadafora, a political foe whose severed head was found dumped in a US Postal Service mailbag in 1984. In 1969, he was appointed chief of intelligence, beginning a wave of terror and oppression that left him the most feared man in Panama. Trained at the notorious US Army School of the Americas, Noriega was recruited by the CIA, acting as a double agent. Noriega conducted a ruthless campaign against peasant guerrillas and masterminded the "disappearances" of numerous political opponents before promoting himself to general and imposing himself as de facto leader in 1984. He turned the 12,000-strong Panama Defense Force into a Mafia-style operation, demanded a cut of every crime-related dollar deposited in Panamanian banks and founded the Western hemisphere's first "narco-kleptocracy"–a regime powered and propped up by drug profits. Colombia's notorious Medellín drug cartel paid him multimillion-dollar bribes for his assistance in shipping tons of cocaine to the US. Yet the US looked the other way, retaining him on the CIA payroll to the tune of $100,000 a year in return for favors that spanned two decades and four presidencies. He allowed Washington to channel funds, and reportedly weapons, through him to pro-US forces in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and assisted the US in finding safe refuge for the exiled Shah of Iran. But the US-Panama love affair ended after Noriega attempted to rig elections in 1989 and unleashed hit squads to suppress demonstrations. After US soldiers poured into the country, he sought sanctuary in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City. He eventually surrendered and, in Miami in 1992, was found guilty of drug trafficking.