Manuel Antonio Noriega, the brash former dictator of Panama and sometime ally of the United States whose ties to drug trafficking led to his ouster in 1989 in what was then the largest American military action since the Vietnam War, has died.
During the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, he was removed from power, captured, detained as a prisoner of war, and flown to the United States. Noriega was tried on eight counts of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering in April 1992. On September 16, 1992, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison, which was later reduced to 30 years.
Noriega worked with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the late 1950s until the 1980s.[19] The relationship became regularized in the 1970s, when Noriega was on the CIA payroll;[4] it has been suggested that Noriega began to be employed by the CIA as early as 1971.
[SIZE=4]Murder of Spadafora[/SIZE] Hugo Spadafora was a physician and a political activist who had first clashed with Noriega when they were both members of Torrijo’s government. He was a vocal critic of Noriega. In September 1985 he accused Noriega of having connections to drug trafficking and announced his intent to return to Panama to oppose him. He was seized from a bus by a death squad at the Costa Rican border. Later, his decapitated body was found, showing signs of extreme torture, wrapped in a United States Postal Service mailing bag. His family and other groups called for an investigation into his murder, but Noriega stonewalled any attempts at an investigation. Noriega was in Paris at the time of the murder, which was alleged by some to have been at the direction of his Chiriquà Province commander, Luis Córdoba. A conversation captured on wiretap between Noriega (in Paris) and Córdoba included an exchange in which Córdoba says “We have the rabid dog,” to which Noriega responds “And what does one do with a dog that has rabies?” The murder of Spadafora was among the reasons for the U.S. beginning to view Noriega as a liability rather than an asset, despite his ongoing support for U.S. interventions elsewhere.
There were rumors that he was used by the CIA to bring cocaine into America. Lakini the U.S. interfered a lot with the operations of several countries in Central America.
The USA has had a hand in most failed states that they had interests like Libya, Iraq, Syria just to name a few. They are responsible for creating the monsters terrorizing the world.