Operation Just Cause and Venezuela

Welcome to 35 West. I'm Chris Hernandez-Roy, Deputy Director of the Americas Program at CSIS and co-host of the 35 West podcast. Welcome to 35 West. I'm Chris Hernandez-Roy, Senior fellow and deputy director of the Americas program at CSIS, and a co-host of the 35 West podcast. This episode with Ambassador Luigi Einaudi comparing the invasion of Panama in 1989 with the situation in Venezuela was recorded on December 22, 2025, two weeks before the daring raid into Venezuela by U.S. forces to capture President Nicolás Maduro. Both missions successfully removed the respective dictators. But for now, the democratic opposition has not been restored in Venezuela, like it was quickly in the Panamanian context 37 years ago. Even though these events have unfolded, the episode still contains insights and lessons comparing the two U.S. actions to remove illegitimate presidents, both accused of narco-trafficking and of impeding elections. I hope you enjoy it. Today we reflect on Operation Just Cause, the United States intervention in Panama to depose General Manuel Noriega, and what lessons that intervention might teach us about the current situation between the United States and Venezuela. On December 20th, 1989, the U.S. began its largest military operation since the Vietnam War with an invasion of Panama. Operation Just Cause is regarded as a successful military operation, yet it remains highly contentious internationally as it raised enduring questions around U.S. imperialism, the legitimacy of military interventions, and regime change tactics. The invasion caused significant civilian casualties and destruction, particularly in densely populated neighborhoods like El Chorillo, where General Noriega's Panama Defense Forces were headquartered, that led to humanitarian and ethical concerns. Importantly, the operation achieved its primary objectives, including the removal of General Noriega, who was accused of drug trafficking, human rights abuses, and undermining democracy. It swore in civilian leaders whose election had been denied by Noriega and helped secure the Panama Canal, a vital strategic and economic asset. The intervention also demonstrated U.S. military effectiveness with relatively low American casualties and rapid control of key areas. What can we learn about Operation Just Cause as the Trump administration telegraphs its desire to depose the de facto authoritarian ruler of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro? Can the United States deploy a similar strategy when dealing with Venezuela? To help us unpack these questions, we're joined today by Ambassador Luigi Anaudi, a former director of policy planning for the Americas at the State Department in the lead-up to Operation Just Cause, and subsequent U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, and later, Assistant Secretary General of the OAS. Thank you for joining us, Ambassador, and welcome to 35 West. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be with you again and on a subject that really is very relevant right now. Well, let's jump right into it, Ambassador. Panama's independence from Colombia in 1903 was made possible by support from the U.S. Navy. In return for their support, the United States and Panama signed a treaty that gave the United States rights quote, in perpetuity as if sovereign, unquote, to a 10-mile strip of land, which would later become the Panama Canal, uniting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and forever changing global trade. Ambassador DeStart, could you sketch a scene setter for our audience? What were the implications of the United States running and defending the canal as if it were American territory? Well, I think, first of all, it's important to reach back in time to the building of the canal and realize that that was an extraordinary event, really something that demonstrated the power of man over nature. In terms of the public imagination, it probably had just as big an impact as the atomic bomb did in its time. In a sense, it makes it very easy to understand why pre-World War I development caught the American imagination, American pride, and can be remembered and was thought of throughout the world as sort of extraordinary American achievement. Now, the fact is that, of course, it was an achievement that reflected all the aspects of its times, including some of the negative ones. The actual building of the canal was largely undertaken by imported laborers from the Caribbean. And since most of them were Black, they were treated the way Blacks were in the American South at that time. And in fact, there was even double wage scales. Nonetheless, the canal was an engineering accomplishment and a source of pride, the home to a very large American managerial and technical colony. By the time we get into the 1960s and beyond, we're talking about 50,000 Americans, including dependents, many of them living inside the canal zone, that 10-mile strip that cut Panama in half and became a major source of growing resentment as time passed. Think back, 1960 was sort of the year of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean, and yet the canal structure seemed to ally the United States with colonial ways of doing things. And in 1964, there was really an extraordinary explosion of violence, anger, really of a very primitive kind, when a group of Panamanian students demonstrating at Balboa High School in the Canal Zone were fired upon by American citizen-zonians. And that created a three-day period of violence. I actually happened to be in Panama at the time and was able to judge some of that because I was doing research for the military in the canal zone, but I also was in touch with Panamanian students, having myself once been a student activist. And it was really quite an extraordinary moment. And from then on, interestingly enough, The United States and Panama both tried to get out of that mess. The problem is that Americans were unhappy about turning the canal over to Panama, and Panamanians were unhappy about allowing the United States to still maintain a right to defend it through a neutrality arrangement. So the negotiations really went on for a very long time. Let's unpack that you just said about the U.S. and Panama trying to get out of that mess. You were the director of policy planning for the Americas at the State Department at the time, and you were asked by the incoming Carter administration in January 1977 to start drafting a policy review on Panama. That eventually led to the administration's presidential review memorandum number one, titled simply Panama. What was the Carter administration trying to accomplish? They were trying to get rid of a major sore spot, and it was a sore spot not just with Panama, but with other Latin American countries, and in fact, on the world stage. As I mentioned before, in 1960, which is 20 years before then virtually, a generation before then, had already been a period of global anti-colonial achievement, if you will. and the simmering situation in Panama had continued to be very bad, and there was no doubt among the governing groups in both countries, in the United States and in Panama, that this situation somehow needed to be solved. But in both cases, they were running up against public opinion. In the United States, that was really symbolized by Ronald Reagan, who said, you know, we bought it, we built it, and by Jove, it's ours. In Panama, the feeling was very strongly that not only does the canal there is, but the U.S. has no right to maintain a military presence and to continue to claim that it could control everything. Against public opinion, you had a very strange situation in which the governments would meet. They would pledge to solve things. The Republicans did so. Henry Kissinger met with Juan Antonio Tach, the Panamanian foreign minister, and they both signed a set of principles, etc., but things died there. And when the Carter people came in, there was a strong little lobbying group called the Inter-American Dialogue that was headed by Saul Linowitz, who was very much a Washington foreign policy insider. And they decided they would try to get rid of this, that if they could get rid of this, it would sort of be an early symbol of the Carter administration being different than the previous governments and so forth. And in fact, they finally did follow through on the negotiation, overcoming a great deal of mistrust on all sides. And actually, the Senate ratification was only by one vote. I think it was helped along everywhere. At the end, not only did the Republicans support it, but at the end, John Wayne came out in favor of the Panama Canal treaties. And if you have a symbol of American machismo, that was it. And so the treaties were signed. Interestingly enough, there was still mistrust on both sides, and therefore they were signed at the OAS in the presence of the heads of government of the whole hemisphere. And the idea generally was that with all those witnesses, you could be relatively sure that the small country Panama would abide by the treaty and that you wouldn have the lock suddenly being closed as somebody would say at the time by some Panamanian colonel wanting to have a birthday party for his daughter And on the other hand, that the big United States would not take over the canal militarily for its own purposes. So the thing was done, and it was, I think, a very significant achievement. can you think of what things would have been like if we had had a violent, unsettled situation in Panama at the same time that you had all of the violence and civil wars breaking out in Central America, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, as the Soviet bloc attempted to exploit the soft underbelly of the United States and ultimately failed. But that failure was in part set up by the fact that we had peace in Panama. General Omar Torrijos, he presided over the negotiation of the 1979 treaties and then he governed the country until his death in 1981. That year, his intelligence chief, Manuel Noriega, gradually consolidated power, becoming Panama's de facto leader by 1983. His involvement in drug trafficking, money laundering, among other activities, severely strained relations with Washington. Ambassador, how did Noriega escalate tensions with the United States? And how did the U.S. react before the invasion? It seems that before 1989, U.S. policy towards Panama was undermined by deep interagency divisions. Yeah, it certainly was. In fact, the commanding general of the U.S. Southern Command, Fred Werner, got into deep trouble because he made a speech in which he said that he thought there was a vacuum of American policy caused by interagency differences. Well, the problem is that Noriega was, in a sense, the ultimate power centralizer and opportunists. Unlike the situation in today's Venezuela, which has its origins in politics and ideology and strong left-wing sentiments, Noriega really was simply a power-hungry opportunist who grew up in the intelligence world and exploited it to the hilt. In fact, He was, to all intents and purposes for a long time, a U.S. agent. He was paid by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Drug Enforcement Administration at various points for his services and the services of his people. He was a supporter of the Contras in Nicaragua, for example. And that meant that those agencies tended to look upon him, of course, favorably. He was one of their assets. Well, at the same time, Noriega was selling himself to all the other international bidders, including the Cubans, to whom he sold U.S. intelligence, technology and information. So you had a crazy situation in which Noriega was sort of sitting there as the Panamanians like to think of themselves as being at the center of the world, because in a sense, the world comes to them for the canal. There he was in everybody's pay, working for everybody. And in this situation, the US government, which is a pretty messy operation anyway. I mean, the number of persons, groups, institutions, agencies that are involved in American policy on any given subject is really much more than most people outside the government can appreciate. In Panama, what you had was a divided, multi-headed monster, as usual, the Panama Canal Commission, which was responsible for the canal. And actually, they were also responsible for running the canal zone, which was being run as part of the United States. Then you had the embassy, which was in Panama City, outside the canal zone and responsible for the relations with Panama. Then you had the military with U.S. Southern Command occupying a number of major bases around and near the canal. And then, of course, within the embassy and in Panama, you had the CIA, the DEA, and military intelligence. So you had a situation in which each of these agencies had their own interests and their own views. And naturally, Some were perfectly happy to use Leliega for the sources of information that he was getting for them. And the State Department tended to be sort of waffling, didn't know which way to go. And then another factor happened. In the Reagan administration, with the increase in the conflicts in Central America, the divisions within the government got to be so sharp that the interagency system and coordination just sort of broke down, and the national security system wasn't working very well. And that's why General Werner, the head of Southern Command at the time, thought there was a policy vacuum in Washington. Problem is that Werner was a foreign area specialist. He wasn't the regular general officer raised up through the normal general officer path, and he didn't have friends in Congress, and he didn't have friends in the general staff. And the result is he was isolated, and as things got worse inside Panama, he was trying to sort of do a dance with the Panamanians. He began to look unfit in Washington and was finally replaced. Since this past summer, the U.S. has amassed an armada in the Southern Caribbean opposite the coasts of Venezuela. It's been used to destroy almost two dozen alleged drug boats while the administration ramps up military and economic pressure on Nicolás Maduro, including by saying he's the head of an amorphous Cartel de los Soles drug trafficking network, which the administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Many analysts say the drug trafficking charges are cover for the administration's real goal of regime change. Ambassador, in what ways does Noriega's involvement in drug trafficking, money laundering, and dealing with other U.S. adversaries, as you mentioned, how does that parallel or differ from the case of Maduro? Yeah, well, I think, first of all, Maduro has never had any relationship with any part of the U.S. government. And Maduro comes, as I noted earlier, as the heir of Hugo Chavez. He's the heir to a left-wing, Bolivarian, anti-American dream. So his politics and his coordinations are all elsewhere. and untied to the United States. So that is one enormous difference. Another enormous difference is that at this point, although the United States company corporations were heavily involved in the early development of Venezuela's oil fields, over the years, the gradual transfer of those properties to the Venezuelan government and working with the Americans, working first under contract, primarily, greatly reduced the number of Americans. Today, I was trying to check. I don't think there are a thousand Americans in all of Venezuela. The Venezuelan government's holding eight Americans as prisoners. It's really just a handful of Americans left there. Whereas in Panama, At the time of the invasion, there were over 50,000 Americans in an infinitely smaller country. And not all of them were living in the canal zone, although many were, but there were quite a few that were spread out living in Panamanian territory itself. And actually, that was one reason why General Werner and the people in Panama didn't want to invade, because they figured that there was no way that they could save American lives in an invasion and with the reactions that would come from the Panamanians. So that was another reason why there was a lot of resistance to any kind of American intervention. Now, finally, what's interesting is that when all was said and done, the spark that set off the American invasion that led President Bush to say, well, simply let's do it, was that an American citizen was killed by the Panamanian forces. An American soldier was killed, and another American soldier and his wife were arrested and mistreated. This coming on top of a long period of tension where the U.S. had tried in a number of ways to get Noriega out, just as the current administration has been, and the previous one, were attempting to get Maduro out. And it just hadn't worked. And so finally, as I say, the situation was snapped by the murder of an American. So as you said, there were extraordinary efforts, first to negotiate Noriega's departure, than to get the military in that country to give him up. And the trigger, as you said, was finally the murder of a U.S. citizen. In terms of the extraordinary efforts then, there seems to be parallel with the current situation, with the Trump administration applying all sorts of military pressure with the presence of this armada and flights close to Venezuelan shores, certainly economic pressure with sanctions and more recently with the seizure of oil tankers, and also diplomatic pressure through US diplomacy with friendly countries that are also putting pressure on Maduro But this has never at least not yet escalated to the point of using force directly against the regime So in the Panamanian case the trigger was the murder of U.S. citizens. What would be the trigger for kinetic action to remove Maduro if he refuses to leave? Well, I don't know. Whatever it might be, it would probably be a disaster. the difference on precisely that point between Panama and Venezuela could not be greater. Because what happened, first of all, let's be very clear. Venezuela is a significant country, much larger than Panama, and it does have a certain amount of organized military power and sophisticated weapons. So, if it comes to fighting, the chances are that it would be rapidly bloody, even if we were to fairly readily win, which would, of course, be likely. I'll come back to that in a minute. In Panama, what happened is that when General Werner was replaced, he was replaced by a very tough-minded military planner who took one look at the Panamanian situation, realized that we had probably 10,000 troops already inside Panama, ready to move. And he developed an all-military services plan to hit every single Panamanian base so as to paralyze the Panama defense forces and make them incapable of defending Noriega. And once he had developed that, he had just developed that plan when the murder of the American officer took place. So we were able to move with massive resources inside Panama, as well as those that were airlifted in from the United States. And we did it in a situation in which Noriega himself, though he had been taking special measures, similar to those that Maduro is reported to be taking now, sleeping in different places, being careful about how he moved around and trying to be secretive about it. So, Llega himself was confident that because of his relationships with American intelligence, that the Americans would not invade. And I was told at the time that it wasn't until he actually saw the first parachuters coming down out of the sky that he realized that the invasion was really happening. Now, the invasion took place against the Panamanian Defense Force, that was beginning to be militarized, but not much, and was quite quickly neutralized by this American invasion plan, which was a deficient one except for a couple of spots. And the net result is the U.S. only suffered about, if I remember correctly, 23 dead. One always says one death is too many, but in a military operation of this kind, that was a very low number. The situation in Venezuela is totally different. Venezuela had not only a regular army, navy, and air force, but also the tradition in Venezuela long before this regime of divide and rule when it comes to paralyze the military, not by not having a military, but by having other military forces around so that you have militarized police under separate command, etc. And in Venezuela, don't forget, Venezuela is the inheritor immediately next door of the long Colombian civil war. There are several thousand Colombians, many of them members of Colombian guerrilla groups who live in Venezuela. And the Venezuelan government, the current government, Maduro, has also engaged in another divide and rule and repress tactic, which is large non-military, non-official, non-police gangs, civilian gangs that have the capacity to do a lot of the on-the-street repression so that the police and military don't need to dirty their hands. Now, Noriega had some of this, too. He had a group of something called Dignity Battalions, which were private groups allied to and working with Noriega and the Panamanian Defense Forces. And they're the ones that had beaten the winners of the election in May, bloody scenes that had turned the world very much against Noriega. But they were the ones who were in the Chorillos neighborhood where some of the destruction that you referred to earlier took place. But still, nothing in comparison to the situation in Venezuela, where even if Maduro were to be taken out, the ensuing anarchy would be very likely among the variety of different armed groups and interests that exist in that country. So given the relative strengths of Panama versus a much bigger Venezuela and the different conditions that exist on the ground between the two cases, also given the size of the Armada today off the coast of Venezuela, while certainly impressive and the largest we've seen in a generation deployed in the Americas, is still not enough to invade Venezuela. would the U.S. limit itself to perhaps precision strikes? Would that be sufficient to dislodge Maduro? I don't know. I tend to doubt it. I don't know where Maduro goes. And more than that, I don't know if his own people and the people immediately around him will let him go. One of the experiences that we had in the past, including with Noriega himself, was that at one key point in negotiations with us, when actually a number of people in our government thought that Noriega was on board and was going to leave, it turned out that his colonels didn't let him leave. In other words, the gang around him felt that his departure meant that they were being put at risk. And we've seen precisely that pattern before. The dictator Samosa in Nicaragua did leave. He did flee, but he was able to do so only by telling his colonels his military guys that he was sacrificing himself by leaving and that the Americans were going to come in and get rid of the Sardinistas and defeat the left by invading in as soon as he had left, that as soon as they could say that they were coming in to save a dictatorship but to save a democracy. So he left in his plane heading south to Paraguay in exile, and his staff turned and looked to the north for the planes that were supposed to be coming in from the United States to save them, which, of course, never showed up and had never been meant to show up. It was all a ruse by Samosa to get out from under himself. I don't think Maduro has anywhere to go. The most likely possibility I've heard is something like Turkey. But I think that Turkey has other fish to fry. Also, that he would be uncomfortable there. And most importantly, I don't think his people will let him leave. I think basically they're going to hold on forever. Now, forever is a fancy word, and obviously I can't say it. And if I say it, I can't mean it, because the fact is that it is possible, it is barely possible, that the maximum pressure policy that is being applied now by the Trump administration is stronger than the maximum pressure policy that they tried to impose during the first term, which might have survived handily. This seizure of oil tankers is too fresh to tell how successful it is going to be, but certainly it threatens Venezuela's oil income lifeline the way nothing else has. It is short of putting people on the ground, of putting boots on the ground, or of so-called precision strikes. I am always skeptical of precision strikes in the sense that I don't know what the targets are. I'm not sure the people who are sending in the strike order know for sure what the targets are, and I don't know what the collateral damage will be. nor do I think that in all likelihood the Venezuelans have arranged to have people out there, bad guys, isolated so they can be taken out in a precision strike. My guess is that's much more a situation similar to that which we have been living through in Gaza, where you could take a precision strike, and you may be getting an awful lot of Hamas soldiers, but you're also going to be getting an awful lot of civilians and other people who were not involved directly So we have here a situation that without even considering the fact that I think that the use of force against land targets inside Venezuela is something that would awaken both the domestic U opposition and international opposition out of their lethargy and fear and lead them to oppose the U.S. action. So my suspicion is that the administration is heading down a very, very dangerous road that will see massive pressure exerted in unimaginable ways around the edges of actually striking Venezuela without doing so, But that if it does so, it could unleash real problems for it, which I think it would be wise and we would be wise to avoid. Ambassador, I would be remiss if I did not ask you a question about the OAS. The invasion of Panama gave impetus for the approval in June 1991 of OAS Resolution AG Res 1080, a new multilateral mechanism for the defense of democracy that you played a really leading role in getting approved, and which was the precursor for the Inter-American Democratic Charter approved a decade later, which is a sort of democratic constitution for the Americas. What do the Panamanian and Venezuelan cases reveal about the evolution of hemispheric norms on regime change, on intervention, and the limits of the OAS in defending democracy in the region? Well, let's start by remembering what I said earlier, that in fact, the OAS played an important role as witness to the Panama Canal treaties themselves. And let us also pay tribute to Operation Just Cause for, in effect, securing the Panama Canal by removing the fact created by the corrupt Noriega regime. So there's no doubt that there was general hemispheric relief that that finally happened. As one person said at the time, one government leader said, we did the right thing even though we had no right to do it. Now, the opportunity to strengthen and pro-democracy jurisprudence in the hemisphere was, in effect, a form of reaction against our having had to use the military to achieve that intervention. A lot of people felt that if we could only organize something that would support democracy effectively, then you would be ahead of the game and you wouldn't have to see military interventions again. And that was one reason, one of the forces that was behind getting all of this done. Now, in fact, what has happened since then has been perfectly obvious that we haven't been serious about it. And there are at least two reasons for the lack of seriousness. One is it takes money to build and support a democratic network in the hemisphere. It's not just a question of electing observation, of observing elections. It's also a question of training people in democratic methods and supporting those who do and so forth and the like. So nobody was willing to put, including the United States was willing to put any money into the OAS. In fact, the OAS got all these extra mandates to do and no money to do them with. But there's another factor involved, and Venezuela was a key part of that factor. And that was, what is democracy anyway? Do we mean a representative democracy, or do we mean a popular democracy? Do we mean a democracy that is different in every country, or do we mean adopting a model that is just like that of the United States? And anyway, ask the Mexicans who have stuck to this position of principle for a century and are not likely to give it up, what right does any government have to say about what is going on inside another government? You know, in a funny way, the international order since the 17th century has been based on the idea that a cuius regu eius religio, or as the Latin would go, that countries are entitled to their own government and their own religion. The sovereign state is the basis of international relations. So you don't have any right to go and force democracy on others. So the OAS, partially because a lot of its countries, all of whom are weaker than the United States have a tendency to band together to try to non-intervention. Well, the more the U.S. throws its weight around, the more they become unwilling to cooperate in any effective way. And that, in effect, is what is happening, I think, to the OAS. I think there's probably There's a post-al silence over there as the Americans throw their weight around. Ambassador, before we close, is there something we haven't covered that you think is important for our audience? Yeah, I think, interestingly enough, again, I am one who strongly believes that I believe in the OS. I believe in an organization to which all the countries belong. so that I've always hoped that we could get over our unhappiness over Cuba and see a democratic Cuba return to the OAS. Having said that, let me say very bluntly that we have not paid attention and do not realize the extent to which the Cubans have supported and are supporting effectively the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Indeed, had our invasion of Panama been delayed even by just a few months, it is quite possible that the Cubans would have been able to make our invasion much more costly to us. The after-action report of the U.S. military on Panama points out that there were missiles and the teams to operate them that were being delivered through Cuba to Panama, but that hadn't become yet operational when our invasion took place. In Venezuela today, there is absolutely no doubt, first, that Maduro is surrounded by a coterie of heavily Cuban security officers and teams replying the very high level of skilled Cuban support and intelligence to try to keep him safe. And think about this, who might not be happy to ever see him leave. So he could be prisoner not just of his colonels, but also of Cuban intelligence. Secondly, that there is probably a lot of effective Cuban support to enough small units militarily to make an American action costly to our people. But most importantly, what we have seen is the application of the Cuban security model to Venezuela. Cuba has, as we all know, developed the system of the committees for the defense of the revolution. In effect, block committees that can watch out for and help secure the efficiency of the party and the state. What exists in Venezuela, in addition to the military and police services, are these armed private gangs that can act as the first line of enforcement of the regime. If you look at the whole thing like this, you realize that you don't even have to talk about the Colombian guerrillas or the uncertainty of who is running the oil wells and of their condition to realize that Venezuela is a country where a military action from the outside, and particularly a military action that can be portrayed as an attempt to seize their oil, which unfortunately is the way things can be presented now, would be an extremely difficult operation. And again, the only way to defeat the Venezuelans and the Cubans is to do something that we have not been thinking about, but was thought of during the Reagan administration and applied to the Central American conflict, which is something like the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which turned into a multilateral effort to gradually find ways to work together on economic development, as well as the control of illicit arms and drugs. but that requires a whole new different world than the one we're currently living in. Ambassador, thank you for joining us on 35 West. We truly appreciate your time and insightful perspective. Thank you. And that's it for this week's edition of 35 West. We hope you enjoyed listening and that you'll stay tuned for future episodes.