This week in 1989, George H.W. Bush sent 27,000 troops to invade the small Central American country of Panama to overthrow former CIA asset Manuel Noriega, killing 5,000 Panamanians, making 20,000 people homeless. 
During the invasion, US troops systematically torched homes, ran over civilians with tanks, conducted systematic executions of civilians and soldiers & paid locals to bury the dead in mass graves. Bodies were also piled up in the streets and burned.
Spanish photographer Juantxu Rodríguez of El País was shot and killed by an American soldier after he took photographs of a row of bodies of those killed by US troops.
US forces indiscriminately bombed the poor neighborhood of El Chorillo, home to housing projects and the headquarters of the country’s military. 400 bombs were dropped in first hours of the war, concentrated in poor urban neighborhoods like El Chorillo.
Fires engulfed the mostly wooden homes of El Chorrillo, destroying about 4,000 residences. Some residents began to call El Chorrillo “Guernica” or “little Hiroshima.” Shortly after hostilities ended, bulldozers dug mass graves and shoveled in the bodies.
Mural in Panama City reading:
“The 20th of December 1989 Day of Mourning. The Yankee Army invaded this country and killed innocent people. To this day, it is not known how many were killed and the wound is still open”
“The 20th of December 1989 Day of Mourning. The Yankee Army invaded this country and killed innocent people. To this day, it is not known how many were killed and the wound is still open”
The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution strongly deploring the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, calling “it a flagrant violation of international law." In 2019, the Panamanian government declared 20 December (anniversary of invasion) to be a National Day of Mourning.
Noriega was a long-time CIA asset and well-known for trafficking enormous amounts of drugs. His drug trafficking and human rights abuses were fine with the U.S. as long as he was helping the U.S. crush left-wing movements in El Salvador and Nicaragua...
But when he began dragging his feet on assisting the US in the Contra war in Nicaragua and threatening U.S. control over the Panama Canal, Bush decided Noriega had to go.
