Look up “Just Cause”, and you’ll receive images of a video game series, a political shooter created in 2006, with 4 games in its lifetime. They build on Cold-War themes, and feature nations run by corrupt dictators and killers who only care for their island nation’s resources, and you, the righteous international intervention and rebellion, fly around and shoot the government’s soldiers and tanks and planes and you bomb the bad guys enough till the big bad evil guy runs away or dies. But “Just Cause” has a deeper meaning than just the video game. Just Cause was chosen as the series name for a reason – Operation Just Cause, also known as the United States invasion of Panama, deposing General Manuel Antonio Noriega on January 3, 1990. 36 years to the day before Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro was captured by the US Government.
Panama holds a special place in Central America’s political landscape; the Panama Canal is quite possibly the most important thing in the hemisphere, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans together. Without the transoceanic canal, trade would be much more treacherous and long. In 1903 Teddy Roosevelt decided to attempt to build the canal after the French failed at it in 1880, completing it in just over 10 years, in 1914 the revolution of oceanic trade & travel finally finished. In 2025 alone, 13,404 ships passed through the canal, and it has serviced a total of 815,000 vessels.
General Manuel Noriega did not start as a thorn in the US’ side. Originally, Noriega was actually a CIA informative, a disciple of Omar Torrijos, a National Guard major – turned de facto dictator and “Maximum Leader of the Panamanian Revolution.” Torrijos dragged Noriega to the top with him, where he served as Omar Torrijos’ head of Intelligence as Torrijos snuggled up to the US & eventually even President Jimmy Carter, with moves to prioritize foreign corporations and banks, including signing the Carter-Torrijos treaties, which allowed US bases & federal buildings to remain in the canal zone, even the US planned to return the zone to Panama by 2000.
Noriega was suspected of dealing in narcotics by the CIA during his tenure in intelligence, but was ultimately seen as not enough of a threat to warrant assassination, though they did consider it. By 1971, Manuel Antonio Noriega was on the payroll for Panamanian informants of the CIA. A double-dealer at his heart, Noriega had gone behind the back of the CIA many times and lived, including supporting the Sandinista rebellion in Nicaragua against US interests. Yet, Noriega was not killed or disappeared because of his preeminent role in a friendly government. So when Omar Torrijos died in a plane crash in 1981 – accident or not – Manuel Antonio Noriega, son of Native Panamanians, Europeans and Africans, who grew up poor in Panama City, found himself the single most powerful man in Panama. Noriega ruled from the shadows, not as president, but puppeteering the predominant Panamanian political party and making ungodly amounts of money off of the illicit trades of 80s Panama, which almost certainly included drugs, specifically cocaine. Noriega expanded the military into the infrastructure business, profiting off of immigration and natural resources; under him, Panama’s military tripled in size. By the mid-1980s, Noriega’s administration became more and more repressive, closing and rigging elections and intimidating journalists. Manuel Noriega allowed the US to support their Contras and other allied factions in Central America through Panama & even directly supported the Contras and US-backed El Salvador, even playing a role in the Iran-Contra affair. Despite close ties to the US, Noriega would make profits off of deals with their bitter rivals like Libya, Cuba and Nicaragua.