Downtown, some people could be heard banging pots and honking car horns, a symbolic gesture of repudiation that activists had suggested to show their rejection of Noriega. Most of the people in the capital were holiday shoppers.
Noriega, who has served drug sentences in the United States and a money-laundering term in France, was taken by helicopter to the El Renacer prison to serve out three 20-year sentences for the slayings of political opponents in Panama in the 1980s.
An elevated platform was set up at the prison so journalists could watch him enter, giving Panamanians what will probably be their only glimpse of the man who once ran the country like his private fiefdom.
President Ricardo Martinelli said Noriega, who is 77, “should pay for the damage and horror committed against the people of Panama.’’
Noriega’s lawyers in Panama have said they plan to request house arrest for the former general under a law that allows those over 70 to serve their sentences at home. Noriega’s legal team says he has blood pressure problems and is paralyzed on the left side as a result of a stroke several years ago.
Noriega returned to a country much different from the one he left after surrendering to US forces Jan. 3, 1990. The government, once a revolving cast of military strongmen, is now governed by its fourth democratically elected president.
El Chorrillo, Noriega’s boyhood neighborhood and a downtown slum that was heavily bombed during the 1989 invasion, now stands in the shadow of luxury high-rise condominiums that have sprung up along the Panama Canal since the United States handed over control of the waterway in 2000.
The rotting wooden tenements of the community have been replaced by cement housing blocks. Noriega’s former headquarters have been torn down and converted into a park with basketball courts.
Noriega became a valuable ally to the CIA in the 1970s and ’80s. He helped the United States combat leftist movements in Latin America by providing information and logistical help, and also acted as a back channel for US communications with unfriendly governments such as Cuba’s.
