On December 20, 1989, the United States invaded Panama with tens of thousands of troops. It was the largest US invasion since Vietnam. The first US military action since the fall of the Berlin Wall one month before. The testing ground for the Iraq Wars. The US invading forces destroyed 20,000 homes and killed hundreds of innocent Panamanians, dumping bodies into mass graves.
And the United States government and the mainstream media ignored or whitewashed the violence. The story told to the American people was that of a tremendous success: The liberation of the people of Panama. All in the name of “democracy” and the so-called “war on drugs.”
In this episode, host Michael Fox takes us to the working-class Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, which received the brunt of the US attack. He meets with Panamanians who have long fought for justice, and visits a former US military barracks that was the first home of the US School of the Americas. This is Episode 13.
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Under the Shadow is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened—a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.
Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.
You can watch the documentary, The Panama Deception, here.
Here are several links to Democracy Now! coverage, over the years, looking back at the U.S. invasion of Panama (here, here, and here).
El Chorrillo Neighborhood Tour: You can find out more about Efrain Guerrero’s work trying to protect the memory of El Chorrillo, plus his neighborhood tours, on his Instagram or TikTok. His organization is called Movimiento Identidad. Here’s the website to set up a tour.
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Transcript
Michael Fox: Hi folks, I’m your host Michael Fox. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this is the second episode about Panama. If you haven’t listened to the first one yet, Episode 12, about the Panama Canal, I recommend you go back and do that first. Also, today’s episode deals with some harsh and heavy themes from the US 1989 invasion of Panama, including killings and mass graves. If you’re sensitive to these things, or you’re in the room with small children, you might want to consider another time to listen. OK. Here’s the show…
It’s a beautiful afternoon in December. Sun’s kind of sinking low. You can hear the birds. Blue sky, white clouds. Around me are a series of high-rise buildings. One of them is completely painted blue. Another is beige with air-conditioning units hanging out from windows. Some potted plants. Some clothes hanging out. A couple of Panamanian flags. In front of this is a park. Elderly women sitting in chairs. Someone’s walking their dogs. It’s really peaceful.
This is a lower class community here in Panama City. Many people are afraid to come into the community. They say it’s one of the most dangerous in Panama, though people I’ve already met say that’s not the case.
But I’m here for another reason, because in front of me are two monuments. One of them is just a small concrete block. That, on top of it says, “In memory of the fallen of December 20, 1989”. It’s just this little concrete block, a couple of feet long, with the painting of a helicopter on the side.
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Because this neighborhood was the center, ground zero, for the US invasion back in 1989, where the US just came in dropping bombs, exploding the neighborhood, setting everything on fire and killing hundreds of people. We still don’t know what the death count may have been. The US planes began dropping their bombs just after midnight on the poor working-class neighborhood of El Chorrillo.
Omar Gonzalez was 12 years old at the time.
Omar Gonzalez: We had been really happy that day because we were putting up our Christmas tree. And then we started hearing the engines and the planes and the people saying that the invasion was coming. But we couldn’t believe it. It was late at night.
We went out on the balcony. We heard the planes. We were there when they started shooting. And then, after a few minutes, the lights went out. We took refuge inside. We were huddled there with my mom. Bomb after bomb fell. It was terrible.
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We could see the bombs fall out the window. And the wooden houses that were beside the Panamanian military barracks caught on fire. Many innocent people died there in the fires. We watched it all happen.
Michael Fox: This was just the beginning. 20,000 people were knocked from their homes. Hundreds were killed, bodies buried in mass graves. The United States occupied the country.
President George H.W. Bush [recording]: At this moment, US forces, including forces deployed from the United States last night, are engaged in action in Panama.
Michael Fox: The largest US invasion since Vietnam. The first US military action since the fall of the Berlin Wall one month before. The testing ground for the Iraq Wars.
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The United States government and the mainstream media ignored or whitewashed the violence. The story told to the American people was that of a tremendous success, the liberation of the people of Panama, all in the name of democracy and the so-called war on drugs.
President George H.W. Bush [recording]: To defend democracy in Panama, to combat drug trafficking, and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty.
Michael Fox: That and so much more, in a minute.
This is Under the Shadow — An investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time to tell the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.
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This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.
I’m your host, Michael Fox — Longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America.
I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years.
In each episode in this series, I take you to a location where something historic happened — A landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today.
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So, this is the final episode of Under the Shadow Season 1. For the last six months, I’ve been walking you south from the Guatemalan border with Mexico all the way to Panama at the southern tip of Central America. I’ve looked at the long shadow of the United States in the region going back centuries.
In the last episode, we walked back to the US’s role in the very creation of the state of Panama and the Canal Zone. We examined the long role of the United States in the country throughout the 20th century. Today, we are diving in head first into one of the darkest moments of that period.
This is Under the Shadow Season 1: Central America. Episode 13: “Panama. U.S. invasion”.
President George H.W. Bush [recording]: My fellow citizens. Last night I ordered US military forces to Panama. No president takes such action lightly. This morning, I want to tell you what I did and why I did it.
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Michael Fox: George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to begin in the early hours of Dec. 20, 1989. The goal of Operation Just Cause was to remove Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and bring him to face drug trafficking charges in the United States.
Noriega was actually formerly a staunch ally of the US — I’ll get into his complicated relationship with the United States shortly.
But first, I want to go back to El Chorrillo, to 12-year-old Omar Gonzalez and his family, cowering and watching the bombs fall just outside their apartment building.
Omar says the US military stopped firing for a few minutes and called on residents to come out with their hands up. They called out on loudspeakers.
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Omar Gonzalez: The gringos said they had us surrounded, so everyone came pouring out with their hands up. But many people stayed behind because they were afraid.
Michael Fox: Omar’s apartment block was just beside the main barracks of the Panamanian Defense Forces, the country’s main military force. Theynever had a chance. They had only about 12,000 soldiers throughout the country. The US invading force was 26,000 strong, and that doesn’t include the soldiers and the officers already stationed in the US military bases throughout the Canal Zone.
The invading US armed forces rained down missile and bomb after bomb on the barracks and the surrounding neighborhood of El Chorrillo. One of the goals was to set the area on fire, that was the strategy. They knew the whole area would go up in smoke like a box of matches. That’s what they were shooting for.
This is old videotape footage of the US forces bombarding the area from helicopters overhead and celebrating. The video is grainy, black and white. Bombs exploding below. It’s kind of hard to make out what they’re saying, but they’re basically confirming fires on several of the buildings they have been targeting.
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Military Footage: OK, we got some fires on our building. There’s number five right there. It’s burning good. There’s number two there. 54. I can’t see through the smoke. They’ll catch the building. We’re OK. OK, five’s on fire. Four. Seems like beautiful. You think we shot it enough? No. We got a fire. We got a fire.
Michael Fox: This footage is from a series of old video tapes shot by US forces during the invasion and acquired by Panama’s National Museum. They offer a surprisingly candid inside look at the actions of the US soldiers. I’ll feature footage and sound from these videos throughout this episode.
Those fires didn’t just impact the Panamanian Defense Forces complex; They engulfed the neighborhood, which was largely constructed of one and two-story wooden homes, which had been built to house many of the workers who had helped to construct the Panama Canal and then the workers of the Canal Zone, as we looked at in the last episode.
Omar Gonzalez: So many innocent people died. Friends of ours. Children we knew. People. Men and women. Some people who were sleeping at that moment. Elderly people who couldn’t stand up or run away because they lived close to the barracks. And this is the history. And it’s painful, more than anything else.
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Michael Fox: 20,000 homes were destroyed.
John Lindsay Poland: El Chorrillo was a massive fire in El Chorrillo, a very densely populated neighborhood right on the edge of the Canal Zone. The Black population, many people who had worked in the Canal Zone, but a poor neighborhood and, as a result, hundreds and hundreds of people died there.
Michael Fox: John Lindsay Poland is the author of the book Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the US in Panama.
John Lindsay Poland: But there were mass graves that the US set up. Which was catastrophic, of course, for Panamanians.
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Michael Fox: Historian Olmedo Beluche says the region looked like Gaza today. He published the firstbook about the US invasion of Panama to mark the one-year anniversary of the attack.
He says some residents sought refuge in a nearby church. He says the United States promoted a strategy of looting supermarkets and stores to generate chaos and confusion. The financial cost to the private sector was estimated at $400 million US dollars.
It took the United States four days to find Noriega, during which time the US occupied the country and swore in a puppet government on a US military base. The new US-backed president was Guillermo Endara, the opposition candidate who had allegedly won elections earlier that year against Noriega’s ally.
So, General Noriega, the de facto leader of Panama since 1983, had canceled the vote. Professor Olmedo Beluche explains that although Endara had participated in the elections, his was a puppet government because he was sworn in at the US military base while the country was under invasion.
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Olmedo Beluche: The Americans placed the US ambassador next to the president at all times. All week, each time the president made a report, along with each minister there was a high-ranking American colonel, and they did all the public addresses. They controlled the police. They had to make reports in both Spanish and in English to control them.
Michael Fox: The US controlled the messaging. And the media spun the story as a liberation, freeing Panama from an evil dictator.
Documentary: The pressed pool that went down there was managed from the day they arrived. They were only taken to see what the government, what the military wanted them to see. And there has been continuous suppression and denial of the extent of damage which was inflicted during that invasion.
Michael Fox: That’s the late Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll from the Center for Defense Information, in a clip from the 1992 Academy Award-winning documentary The Panama Deception. The movie looked at the US invasion and the media coverage.
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With an incomplete picture from the press, both locally and internationally, the US public and many Panamians initially applauded the invasion.
Professor Olmedo Beluche.
Olmedo Beluche: One of the things the United States learned from the Vietnam War was to control journalism. So, in Panama, journalists were prevented from accessing combat and conflict zones until US forces had cleaned up. And the only journalist who took the most damning photos was killed by US troops.
Michael Fox: That was a Spanish photojournalist named Juantxu Rodríguez, who was on assignment for El País. He took some of the only pictures that were published of the US violence; dead bodies lined up. He was killed by a US sharpshooter on Dec. 21, the day after the start of the invasion.
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Robert Knight: There was not a conflict, but according to the reports of colleagues and American soldiers, just up, took aim, and shot him down.
Michael Fox: That’s the late investigative journalist Robert Knight, also from the documentary The Panama Deception.
Robert Knight: What happened in Panama is a hidden horror. Many of the bodies were bulldozed into piles and immolated in the slums where they were collected. Other bodies were left in the garbage chutes of the poor projects from which they died from the shooting from the artillery, from the machine guns, from the airborne, from the attacks. Others were said to have been pushed into the ocean.
Michael Fox: But almost none of this was seen or heard of in the local and international press. It was hushed up, cleaned up, controlled, and locked down by the invading US forces.
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Here’s filmmaker Barbara Trent, again, from The Panama Deception.
Barbara Trent: The US military also targeted the Panamanian media. Radio stations were immediately taken over and destroyed. US forces occupied TV stations and began transmitting their own signal. Many journalists were either arrested or fired. One of Panama’s largest daily newspapers, La Republica, was raided, ransacked, and closed down by American troops.
Michael Fox: Those old videos that I mentioned earlier, the ones shot by US soldiers during the invasion, give a chilling inside look into the reality on the ground.
Speaker: Studs. You’re both studs. I hope you know that. Yeah, that’s us. We are it.
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Michael Fox: Videos from the aftermath of the invasion show bodies lying dead on the street, bloodied and shot up. Cars smashed up and crashed. People rush by quickly.
In another video from the morning of the invasion but after the sun has come up, US officers interrogate a blindfolded Panamanian man who is clearly afraid for his life. But the US soldiers can barely communicate with him because only a couple of guys speak even broken Spanish. It’s the same thing on another tape, where dozens of US soldiers surround a house with their weapons drawn. You can hear them calling for the people inside to surrender and come out with their hands up — But they’re doing it in English!
The most powerful country on the planet launched an invasion of tens of thousands of soldiers into a Spanish-speaking nation without developing the most minimal protocol for communicating with local residents. And this is a country that, at the time, the United States had literally controlled a piece of for 85 years.
It is shocking. And it’s a sign of just how brazen the US was in carrying out its imperial goals and how disconnected it was from the reality on the ground.
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It’s also a sign of something else: The real reason for the invasion.
John Lindsay Poland.
John Lindsay Poland: In Latin America, yes, for 50 years, the United States had rationalized military intervention based on the threat of communism and, essentially, on the threat of independent Latin American governments.
And so, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, George H.W. Bush, he is a new president, he established his own credibility as a warrior through the invasion of Panama.
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Michael Fox: That is the point. The US invasion of Panama was a show of force and a training op that Washington knew would easily succeed. Of course, some people would die. That was the collateral damage for Washington’s success. This was a necessary step in re-exerting US dominance in a new world order as the Cold War was ending and the communist bloc was collapsing. Bush needed to show strength, and the US needed a new war.
Commercial: Is there anyone out there who still isn’t clear about what doing drugs does?
Michael Fox: If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably remember this commercial.
Commercial: This is your brain. This is drugs.
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Michael Fox: It shows this guy frying an egg in a skillet.
Commercial: This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?
John Lindsay Poland: So the 1980s, the mid to late 1980s, the drug war of the United States becomes a major policy and material commitment of the US federal government, both within the United States and in foreign policy. And it’s responding politically to the crack cocaine epidemic, but it is also responding to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a need to reframe, reset US military postures around the world.
Michael Fox: The US invasion of Panama showed that Washington was ready to set the new post Cold War agenda and willing to take action to carry its war on drugs abroad.
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And it didn’t stop in Panama. Over the decades, the US-backed war on drugs has driven intense militarization and human rights abuses across Latin America, most infamously in Mexico and Colombia. After the invasion of Panama, the drug war became a major excusefor the United States to meddle in countries far from its borders — And often with disastrous impacts.
John says the US invasion was also, in part, an attempt to keep a foothold in Panama.
President Jimmy Carter [recording]: This agreement has been negotiated over a period of 14 years.
Michael Fox: Remember that, according to the 1977 deal, the US had to hand over the Canal, the Canal Zone, and its bases to Panama by the end of the century — Dec. 31, 1999. But the United States was reluctant to do away with its military bases.
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John Lindsay Poland: And so, several years later, in 1995, the United States opens negotiations to keep a US military presence in Panama after 1999. The invasion really set the stage for those negotiations. Those negotiations failed when a copy of the language for the new presence was leaked, and it was clear that the terms were hostile to Panamanian sovereignty. So that agreement failed, and ultimately the troops left at the end of 1999.
Michael Fox: As for Noriega, his relationship with the United States is an interesting one, and not unlike that of the recently convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras. See, Noriega was “one of our guys”, as Washington operatives say.
John Lindsay Poland: So the Noriega government in Panama was a military ally of the United States, in operational terms, and was a CIA and US Army intelligence asset for many, many years.
I think it went sour because he was playing all sides, He was in bed with the United States. He was in bed with some of the cartel operatives. He was communicating with Castro’s Cuban intelligence forces. So he was a player, he was an international player on all sides.
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Now, that can be very valuable to the United States if he’s serving their interests. But if he is his own player, which he increasingly was and also enriching himself, then at a certain point there’s a tension for US intelligence.
Michael Fox: Then there were the canceled 1989 elections. Those were supposed to be the first free presidential elections in the country since before former dictator Omar Torrijos took power in a 1968 coup. When Noriega annulled the 1989 vote, protesters hit the streets.
John Lindsay Poland: And, in addition, there was a DA that indicted Noriega on drug trafficking charges, which may or may not have been coordinated by the State Department or military forces of the United States. The indictment also shifted the dynamics, because now he was an indicted, potential felon.
So all of those things led to… And the fact that Bush really needed some kind of military victory. He needed to reframe the Cold War. He needed to implement his drug war.
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Michael Fox: That’s what he did. And he didn’t look back. Neither has the United States, despite the violence, destruction, and the huge cost to the Panamanian people. But many in Panama have been demanding justice and fighting to hold the United States accountable ever since.
That in a minute.
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Alright, thanks for listening. Back to the show.
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Michael Fox: Protests ripple in the streets in the weeks following the invasion. They carry Panama flags, and signs and banners: “Get out Yankee troops!” “Widows and orphans demand justice.”
They hold signs with the names of those killed during the invasion.
“Get out killers. Get out,” they chant.
Isabel Corro: The government continues with the gringos in our land —
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Michael Fox: — Isabel Corro tells the crowd during one protest. She would go on to lead the association of family members of those killed on Dec. 20.
Isabel Corro: We are still invaded as if yesterday were the 20th of December. We are marching, and we will continue to march, without fear of the threats that we receive each day.
Michael Fox: Meanwhile, a Panamanian law student at John Jay College in New York had been watching everything unfold in her country. Her name was Gilma Camargo.
Gilma Camargo: I am the daughter of Lucilla, the granddaughter of Gilma, an attorney that loves her work, and a person that loves her country and is dedicated to anti-imperialism.
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Michael Fox: I sat down with Gilma in late 2023 in Panama City, where she lives now.
When the Panama airport opened in January 1990, a couple of weeks after the invasion, she was on one of the first flights down, together with a pair of lawyers from the US National Lawyers Guild and one from the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Gilma Camargo: It was difficult to see the destruction. It was difficult. And we need to institute a nationalist. So Santana, El Chorrillo, San Miguelito were areas which I, as a student leader, was very used to being around those areas. And so I come back and I see my country destroyed.
Anyway, we had the opportunity to go to Jardin de la Paz, and we asked the committee for human rights in Panama. Have you seen any mass graves? And they said no, we haven’t seen anything. So we walk into Jardin de Paz and there they were.
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Michael Fox: US soldiers had buried people in body bags in numerous mass graves across the region.
Sociologist, environmentalist, and activist Celia Sanjur worked with Panama’s National Human Rights Commission, CONADEHUPA at the time. We met at a cafe in Panama City. I asked her what it was like interviewing those who had suffered and trying to identify the human rights abuses and the victims.
Celia Sanjur: The gringos did such an excellent job at making the evidence of their violence disappear that it has been very difficult.
I’ll tell you what I saw in El Chorrillo just after the invasion. I remember that I took many international human rights representatives to places where they said there were mass graves. For example, we arrived at Chorrillo, there was a big place there, on the little beach of Chorrillo, and you could smell the smell of death. But how could you identify it? It was hard. Very hard.
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Michael Fox: She was there the day they exhumed the bodies in the Jardin de la Paz mass grave the year after the invasion.
Celia Sanjur: Yes, that was a crucial moment. And it was very intense, because they opened the grave and found, well, bags. Green gringo body bags. And taking all of that out was really hard, especially for the relatives of the victims of that time.
But I will tell you this, we always came back to this question of impunity. This is what prevailed. Then you can open a mass grave. It hurts you, it kills you, but in the face of everything that happened — And we still don’t know everything that happened. But it was very hard. Really hard.
And the people did their best to carry on. I don’t know if we’ve overcome it, but we have carried it with us. It was very, very, very, very difficult.
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Michael Fox: A few months after Jardin de la Paz was exhumed, Canadian human rights activist Grahame Russell attended an exhumation of another mass grave in Colón. At the time, he worked with CODEHUCA, the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in Central America. He wrote about his experience in this excerpt from his 1992 book The Never Ending.
Grahame Russell: It is next to impossible to identify anything — Perhaps a gold tooth or a pair of glasses are identifiable amongst the green and gray. Despite the unlikelihood, the families line up one by one — A ghastly, mournful procession. A forensic doctor holds up a pair of shorts found on the cadaver of a six-year-old boy, and asks if anyone can identify them. A woman collapses in tears, staring at the shorts of her nephew. She later tells us that he and his mother had been shot by US soldiers while they were driving in Colón.
Michael Fox: Meanwhile, lawyer Gilma Camargo and her team of lawyers collected documents and interviewed survivors.
Gilma Camargo: We found in Colón this man, a worker, José Isabel Salas Galindo. He was already a refugee, and this woman was his wife. That’s their picture. Dunesia Meneses Salas was on Calle, Bolivar, and Cologne when she lived. It was her daughter’s birthday. It was Dec. 22.
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The Southern Command was there with a group of journalists because the journalists were manipulated to different areas, and they were doing all this propaganda that everything was fine, and be quiet, everything.
So her husband went out to get some supplies, and she stayed to clean rice. So she starts to clean the rice at the door, and this missile comes and impacts her directly. There were three missiles fired, and they impacted her directly, destroying her body, injured everybody in the house. The other missile comes through the house beside her on the third floor and hits this house where there are children between 6 and a few months old, and the other missile hit close to more advance in the street. This is Colón City, this is in the middle of the city. Why would you use that amount of force?
So he and the other couple, the other family with the children, were in San José Church as refugees. My partner spoke to them, and he says, listen, I just want justice. I really want something to be done, he says. My family was completely destroyed.
Michael Fox: Gilma and the lawyers went back to New York, compiled their documents, research, and interviews, and decided to file a case against the US government with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
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Meanwhile, Panama remained under US occupation.
Gilma Camargo: The occupation actually lasted until 1994. Panamanians are not aware of that, but around 1993, ‘94, ‘92, the people started to get uncomfortable with the soldiers in joint custody all over the country. And so they changed and wore civilian clothes in every single occupation, every single place they were, from the presidency to the smallest local government office.
So this was the first experiment of the Pentagon organizing the country without having a blasted idea what they were doing.
Michael Fox: Gilma says the invasion destroyed the country and set it on the neoliberal path of privatization that it has seen ever since.
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Gilma Camargo: This destroyed the country. Everything that we live in now, the corruption, the institute, the weak institutions, the financial mess that we are with people not getting paid well and not getting healthcare. That financial neoliberal concept was put into Panama without us asking for it or thinking of going there. So financially, we are in this mess because that is not the way the Panamanian people think.
Michael Fox: Protests continued, in particular marking Dec. 20, the anniversary of the invasion.
As for Gilma’s case at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, it would take nearly three decades to get a decision.
Finally, late 2018. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! reported on it in December of that year.
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Amy Goodman: Last month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on Washington to pay reparations to Panama over what was widely seen as an illegal invasion.
Gilma Camargo: How did you feel when you heard the word officially that you had won the lawsuit? I had a very, very long silence. I really did. I was at home. I think I got on my knees and I had a very long, long silence.
Michael Fox: Gilma says there were so many people she wanted to tell. People like her mom and her grandmother, who were no longer alive. She says they held a celebration and ceremony at the university, and they invited all of the victims who had participated in the lawsuit over the decades.
Gilma Camargo: They came, and it was the first time I saw that change in their eyes and in their gestures of realizing, hey, this is. We did this. It’s not just she did it, we did it. I participated. When you see the documentation that they brought, it takes. After being bombarded that you take the effort to to think about it, how injured is my family?
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Michael Fox: The ruling was a landmark. It was the first time victims from one country had brought the government of another before the commission and won.
Gilma Camargo: This is something serious. It’s a historical precedent that they do it to the US, that we did it without the government, that it was the victims themselves that actually put this together by putting chips of their life together. And that none of this happened before. So now it’s a sensation for a lot of people.
Michael Fox: And the Commission ruled that the US should pay reparations.
Gilma Camargo: The decision is marvelous because it recognizes the territorial responsibility of the US. It gives compensation, monetary compensation for deaths and injuries, for food, for vehicles, for all kinds of… And they say, and I keep on saying, from the first dead man to the last plate they broke in Panama is covered. It’s there. You’re supposed to get medical attention. You’re supposed to be paid by your psychological attention.
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Michael Fox: But the United States has just ignored it. Pretended that it doesn’t exist. And there is no legal means of making the US pay.
But the case did help to inspire action in Panama.
In 2016, two years before the Inter-American Commission ruling, the Panamanian government created the country’s first Dec. 20 commission to investigate the victims and the human rights abuses of the 1989 invasion. The group has been charged with identifying the dead and disappeared.
José Luis Sosa oversees the commission. He goes through the archives — Rows of files on the invasion and the victims. In recent years, they’ve carried out their own exhumations at grave sites.The official death count from the US invasion is 560 people, but estimates of the actual figure vary widely. Some local groups even believe the number is closer to 1,000 or more.
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I ask José Luis why it took the Panamanian government 27 years to launch a commission to investigate the invasion and its aftermath.
José Luis Sosa: I have always felt that there was a certain fear of bothering the United States with an investigation into the invasion. Fortunately, we’ve matured, and we have made progress.
Michael Fox: In 2022, Panama officially declared Dec. 20 “el dia del duelo nacional” or “the day of national mourning” in honor of the victims of the 1989 US invasion.
Pedro Silva walks around the offices of the Dec. 20 commission. He’s staring at huge blown-up pictures of the US invasion that line the walls. They show victims, cars driving through bombed out streets, rubble everywhere. Pedro is one of the organizers of yearly Dec. 20 marches. He’s a filmmaker who was 8 years old when the US bombs fell.
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Pedro Silva: We survived the invasion, but others died. Our work is important so that when you meet someone who didn’t experience the invasion, you can say with clarity that this was an act of cruelty, an act of war. We cannot let this be forgotten.
Michael Fox: He is not the only one working to ensure that this memory is never left in the past.
On a warm sunny afternoon in late 2023, I went for a walk with Pedro Silva in the neighborhood of El Chorrillo. Efrain Guerrero was our guide. He’s thin and tall, in a gray collared short-sleeve shirt, with short graying black hair that’s parted to one side. For the last two-and-a-half years, he’s been leading tours of people to El Chorrillo, the neighborhood that was devastated by the US bombs in 1989.
But he is not just a tour guide. He’s a longtime resident. His family is from El Chorrillo. He was five when the US invaded. He moved to the neighborhood a few years later.
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He walks me down the street from his apartment and points to the side of a building. See, here in El Chorrillo, the wounds of the 1989 US invasion are still written on the walls.
“Do you see this? This remains as a memory of the shots fired,” he says, pointing to a bullet hole left by US soldiers. He turns to the street. “Right here, there was a downed helicopter,” he says.
He pulls out his tablet and flips to a black and white picture of a US helicopter lying in rubble on the street before me 35 years ago.
Efrain is a wealth of history and knowledge, but his tours are not just about remembering and honoring the past. They’re also about protecting the neighborhood today, against a new assault: gentrification.
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Efrain Guerrero: That is what they want to bring here: gentrification. And the people don’t know what’s happening because this term isn’t really known here in Panama. I am trying to wake people up. You can already see the change in the neighboring community, pretty buildings and things, and then you come here and things are falling apart.
Because at the end of the day, gentrification isn’t just a process of urban displacement, but of degrading a region enough to put social pressure on the community itself so that it has to leave.
Michael Fox: Efrain explains that public transportation, schools, trash pickup, and basic services have been gutted in El Chorrillo in recent years. He says it’s all part of a push to force people to leave so real estate prices will tank and developers can move in to cash in big.
Efrain says his tours are a way of trying to help revive the community’s connection to the past.
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I love this. In this podcast series, I’ve talked about historical memory often; Remembering the violence of the past in order to honor the victims and ensure it never happens again. For this series, I’ve taken you to visit memorials for the dead and disappeared in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. We’ve walked inside museums, heard the voices from long ago radio echo in the present.
And here on the streets of Panama City, Efrain is also carrying out his own form of historical memory: A tour through the streets of the past as a means of rooting the neighborhood in the present with its thick cultural and political history. He’s even talked about putting up signs at important places so that those memories are not left in the shadows, are not forgotten.
Efrain Guerrero: So much of the neighborhood has lost that sense of belonging. Many new generations do not know the history. Many kids don’t even know that an invasion took place here in their neighborhood because we have not shown the next generations.
Michael Fox: He’s trying to change that one tour at a time. And it’s clear as we walk through the streets that his neighbors appreciate his actions and are on board.
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It’s also clear the 1989 US invasion has left deep wounds. They are still carved into buildings and buried deep in people’s hearts. But people like Efrain and Pedro Silva won’t let them be forgotten.
Pedro Silva: We have to use all of these things. The neighborhood stories, the pictures, to maintain the memory about the invasion alive. We need to keep it alive and to protect our identity.
Michael Fox: Every Dec. 20, they march and continue to demand justice for the violence, the violations, and the crimes of the United States.
If this were just any episode, I’d probably end it here. But it’s not. This is, of course, the last episode of this first season of Under the Shadow. So, I have one more place to take you in Panama City. I visited it with Pedro the day before I left town.
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If you drive past El Chorrillo in Panama, into the former Canal Zone, and head south toward the Pacific Ocean, you come to a rather thin stretch of land that was once known as the US military base Amador. This was once a key base for the United States to protect the Pacific mouth of the Panama Canal.
But already we’re driving, and there’s all these old military structures here that are abandoned, right in the middle of this park. And again, this is talked about in the past. This stuff is hidden in plain sight. It’s not even hidden, it’s just hanging out. And it’s all right here. Wow.
We just stepped out of the car into a huge, really, to this edge of this park, back in the day. This used to be US military base Amador, is what it was called. It’s this big park with streets all around. Nobody’s here.
You have all these old military US buildings. They’re just falling [apart]. Big, huge, concrete buildings just falling apart in between the trees. They’re graffitied all around the bottom, which covers up what the names used to be. Apparently inside these, the same stuff, all the windows are broken, there’s no glass left. These buildings are really old. It’s basically a massive concrete shell stuck in between the trees. It’s really wild.
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Pedro and I walk over to one of the buildings. This base wasn’t just to protect the Canal; It was also the location where the United States first set up what would become its Latin American police and military training facility, School of the Americas.
In telling stories, it’s often hard to find one spot that seems to wrap up so many loose ends, one location that seems to symbolize more than just the words written on a page or spoken into a microphone. This place does, for so many reasons.
The sun is setting low in the sky. Pedro and I explore the ruins of US government buildings.
So on the side of these, one of these stairs coming into this building here is all bricked up. The window right beside it is open. I’m right beside it. This stairway rolling up — That’s the roof — Has been knocked off. And it’s covered.
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Plants, green plants and trees are taking it back, but inside there’s a big, almost like a warehouse looking thing. The whole thing is busted and broken, falling apart. Part of it is concreted up. I have no idea what this is for, although I can imagine this being some sort of an office place back at the time, but now it’s just totally busted and broken and caved in.
This is what is left of the United States here in Panama, the memory and the legacy — At least, that’s how people feel about it. This is the legacy of Monroe. It’s the legacy of US imperialism. Buildings in shambles, wasting away underneath a canopy of trees in a park in Panama City. That is the past, and it’s a past that Panamanians do not want to return to.
That is all for Season 1 of Under the Shadow. I hope you have enjoyed this series. It has been a joy and an adventure.
Before I go, I’d like to thank everyone who helped to make this first season of Under the Shadow happen. There are a lot of people who supported this project when it was just an idea on paper, either through my Kickstarter campaign or elsewhere. Thank you all so much. This investigative podcast series could not have happened without your help.
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In particular, I want to mention a few names who deserve special recognition: Jordan Klein, Scott Bayliss, Marc Becker, Nick Cunningham, Michael Locker, Pablo Serrano, Lin Culler, Kyle Barron, Sergey Kochergan, Damon Korkin at Andean Discovery, Jennifer Waite, Phil and Sue Cortese, Ava, Sherry, and Randy, Dana Wilson, Jim Chomas, Patti Simbulan, Bernardo Poggi Leigh, and Chris Michael. In particular, a huge shout out to Cara Orscheln, my parents, Judy Hughes, and the Sawyers. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This series could not have been made without your help.
Oh, also, many thanks to my wife and girls for putting up with me and for joining me on this adventure.
That’s a good segue into what’s next. We have just started a tour of South America with my family, during which time I’m going to be visiting locations, researching and interviewing people for Season 2 of Under the Shadow, about Plan Condor, a series about lawfare, and numerous other podcast projects.
If you’d like to support and follow along on the journey, you can do so through my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There’s a link in the show notes. I plan to bring you updates from our adventures on the road every week.
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That is also where you can see my exclusive pictures of Panama City from this episode: I have shots from El Chorrillo, the ruins at the Amador base, the Dec. 20 commission, and plenty more pictures there on Patreon.
That’s also where you can find my new personal podcast, Panamerican Dispatch. It’s exclusively for my Patreon supporters, and it’s a window into my reporting from wherever I am in the Americas. Please consider subscribing and becoming a monthly supporter. I appreciate the help.
As always, Under the Shadow is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. Thank you so much to NACLA’s Heather Gies, The Real News’s Max Alvarez, Kayla Rivara and everyone else from the team who has pitched in to put this podcast into the world. You guys are amazing.
Many thanks, muito obrigado, to Gustavo Turck from Coletivo Catarse for the incredible sound design and engineering. I am grateful for your work.
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As always, the theme music is by my band Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music.
This is Michael Fox. Many thanks!
See you next time…
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Katie Martin A great moment in history has arrived. Rob Armstrong was right about something. Quite against the run of play — shush, Rob — quite against the run of play, the Federal Reserve has cut interest rates — hurrah — from the highest level in decades, and for the first time since the pandemic. And what’s more, it went large, cutting by half-a-point, precisely as my esteemed colleague had predicted.
What kind of voodoo is this? Does the Fed know something horrible we don’t? Cutting by half-a-point is normally a crisis measure, a cry for help. Should we panic about a recession? And really, Rob was right. End times.
Today on the show, we’re going to explain how come investors are ignoring the usual script and taking this bumper cut as a good thing. This is Unhedged, the markets and finance podcast from the Financial Times and Pushkin. I’m Katie Martin, a markets columnist here at FT Towers in London. And listeners, I must tell you, the saddest of things has happened. I’m joined by Rob Armstrong, lord of the Unhedged newsletter. But the sad thing is he’s dialling in from his sickbed. Rob, I’m sorry, you’re poorly.
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Robert Armstrong I am poorly. It’s terrible. But on a 50-basis-point day, the dead shall rise from their graves. The angels shall sing. And we all . . . we’re all gonna talk about it.
Katie Martin Yes. Good, strong Barry White vibes I’m getting from this voice you’re busting out today. So, as you say, half a percentage point from the Fed; that’s 50 basis points in market money. Normally central banks love being super boring and they normally move by quarter-point increments. So, I mean, was it the shock of being right about the 50-basis-point thing that pushed you over the edge into sickness?
Robert Armstrong It could have been. I’m so accustomed to getting this wrong now that it was really paralysing. However, I think, you know, you mentioned earlier, why is the market kind of taking this in stride and seeing this as a good thing? And I think it’s a bit of a communications success by the Fed in that they told the story about this, that they’re not doing this because they have to, because it’s an emergency. They’re doing it because they can.
Katie Martin So gangster.
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Robert Armstrong And the reason they can is because they’ve kind of beaten inflation. Right?
Katie Martin So for people who, unlike us, have a life and don’t sit around watching central bank press conferences, the way this works is they do the decision, they say, here you are, here’s your 25 or 50 whatever basis points, or we’re on hold. This time around, it was 50 basis points.
And then just a little while later, there’s a press conference where the chairman, Jay Powell, gets up in front of like all of the kind of most pointy headed Fed journalists in the world and fields whatever questions. There’s a statement, and then he field whatever questions they want to throw at him. And this for him was the point of highest danger, because the risk of giving the impression somehow that . . .
Robert Armstrong Yes.
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Katie Martin Yeah, we’re really worried. That’s why we’ve done 50. That was a serious risk, right? But instead, what happened?
Robert Armstrong Well, right from the press release announcing the 50 basis cut, they tweaked the language in the press release so that it was more affirmative and strong on the topic of inflation. We’re really pleased how it’s going on inflation.
Katie Martin Right, right.
Robert Armstrong And then in the press release, I mean in the press conference, he just reinforced that point again and again. The line he repeated was the labour market is fine, it’s healthy. It is at a good level. We don’t need it to get any better. We’re not trying to improve it, but we have the freedom to make sure it stays as good as it is.
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And that message seems to have gone through. Markets didn’t move yesterday afternoon. And as a very, you know, opening minutes of trading this morning, stocks are up. So that message seems to have gotten through.
Katie Martin Yeah. That is skills, actually. You know, I will hand it to them. Because, you know, it’s . . . we’ve said this before on this podcast. Like, it’s so easy to like throw stones and peanuts at the Fed or the European Central Bank, the Bank of England or whatever and say they messed this up. But, like, this stuff is hard. Getting the markets to come away with that sort of impression is not to be taken for granted.
Robert Armstrong It’s not to be taken for granted. I agree. However, I will note any time you’re trying to spin a narrative and you want people to believe it, one thing that really helps is if the narrative is true. And in this case, I think it broadly is.
I think inflation really does look like it’s whipped. It’s really either at or very close to 2 per cent. And look, with an unemployment rate of 4.2 per cent and basically no increase in lay-offs and the economy is still adding jobs, I think the economy is pretty good. So it’s not like he had to spin a magical tale of unicorns and wizards here. He just had to, you know, make a case based on the facts.
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Katie Martin Yeah. And and that kind of goes back to the fact that the Fed is not quite like all the central banks in that it has to look after inflation, but it also has to look after the jobs market. And so, you know, again, the risk is that you come away from a decision like this and think, well, you know, those little cracks that we’ve seen in the jobs market, maybe they’re the start of something really big and hairy and awful, but he seems to have massaged this one away.
Robert Armstrong Indeed. Impressive performance.
Katie Martin And so the other thing they do in this press conference is they give the general public and sad nerds like us a little bit of a taster about what’s coming next from the Fed, right. So they’re always, like, central bankers are at pains to say none of this stuff is a promise. This is just our kind of best current understanding of the state of the universe. But so, then you end up with this thing called — drumroll — the dot.
Robert Armstrong The dot plot.
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Katie Martin The dot plot. Explain for normal people what the dot plot is.
Robert Armstrong OK. So it’s kind of a grid. And along the bottom are the years 2024 through 2027, and then another column for the infinite future. And then there’s a range of interest rates going up and down on the side. And every member of the monetary policy committee puts a little dot in each year column where they think the rate is gonna be in that year. Cue much speculation about what all this means, how they’ve changed their mind since the last dot plot and, you know, the implications of all of this.
Katie Martin Whose dot is whose? We’ll never know.
Robert Armstrong They don’t reveal whose dot is whose. That’s an important point. And by the way, Katie, according to everything we hear out of the Fed, having invented this device, which was supposed to increase clarity and make everyone’s life easier, everyone in the Fed now hates it and wishes it would go away . . .
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Katie Martin Damn you, dot plot!
Robert Armstrong Because it just causes endless, idiotic little niggling questions from people like me and you. But once you’ve invented something like this, if you take it away, people get upset.
Katie Martin So you look at the dots and you look at what Jay Powell was saying at the press conference and what does it all add up to? Does it mean that, like, OK, they’ve started with 50 basis points, so like 50 is the new 25? Get used to it, boys and girls?
Robert Armstrong If you look at the dot plot and their kind of aggregate expectations of where rates are gonna go, it is not that 50 is the new 25. The implication is that the rate of cuts is going to be very measured — or might I say stately, from here until they reach their target.
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Katie Martin Right, right.
Robert Armstrong And, you know, another point to mention here is where they think they need to go is very important. That’s the kind of last part of the dot plot is, like, where should interest rates be when everything is normal again?
Katie Martin Because that will happen one day. And . . .
Robert Armstrong Yeah, that will happen. They think it’s gonna happen sometime around 2026, 27. We’ll get to where it’s about normal and they’re looking for about 3 per cent rates in the long run and that . . . so that’s where we’re going to. Just to set the context, we cut from 5.5 per cent to 5 per cent yesterday. And the map of the dot plot shows us moving towards a little under 3 per cent over time. And it’s a matter of how quickly are we going to get there, and along the way, are we going to change our mind and decide we have to go somewhere else?
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Katie Martin Yeah. So is there a kind of joyful hope that maybe the Fed could be, like, boring again and it can just sort of do 25 basis points here and there and just take this kind of glide path lowering rates that doesn’t get people excited any more?
Robert Armstrong Well, this is the problem about the future is that it is hard to predict and particularly hard to predict with interest rates. The issue is that the economy, the structure of the economy has changed a lot in the last couple of years because of the pandemic and for other reasons. So that final destination point I talked about, which economists call the neutral rate, which is the just normal, everything is boring and steady rate of interest in the economy where everyone has a job, there’s no inflation, everything’s cool, the neutral rate. We don’t know what that number is.
And Jay Powell has this line about it. We know it by its works. And what that means, stated less calmly, is we know it when we screw it up. In other words, we hit it, we go past it. We push interest rates above the neutral rate and stocks have a big puke and the economy starts to slow down and people get fired or we travel too far below it and inflation starts again. So like the Fed over the next couple of years is like walking down this passage in the complete dark and it knows it can’t touch the wall on its left or the wall on its right. Right? But it doesn’t know the shape of the passageway, what direction it’s supposed to go. So it’s just like, well, I sure hope we’re going this way. Dee-dee-dee. And hope it doesn’t hit too low or too high along the way.
Katie Martin Hope it doesn’t just walk into a wall.
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Robert Armstrong The history of interest rates is history of feeling your way along in the dark.
Katie Martin Rob, that’s the most lyrical thing I’ve ever heard you say.
Robert Armstrong Isn’t it? It’s poetry. It’s because I’m so ill. These could be the final words of a dying man.
Katie Martin What meds are you on for this cold you’ve got?
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Robert Armstrong This could be my legacy, Katie. (Laughter)
Katie Martin I feel like we should kind of wrap up quite soon before you just like expire during the recording.
Robert Armstrong I do. As much as I like you, I’d like to have a few words with my wife before I shove off.
Katie Martin But I will ask you, are we ever going back to like zero interest rates, do you think? Or are we gonna look back on that…
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Robert Armstrong I feel like I’ve been asking a lot of questions. This is a great question, Katie, but let me push it back on you. We had this wild period in the last decade where there was like a gajillion dollars of sovereign bonds issued at a negative interest rate.
Katie Martin I think that was something like $18tn or something.
Robert Armstrong Money was free. It was bonkers. And it was like the Fed funds rate was up against zero. Money was free. We were all in Silicon Valley inventing start-ups whatever, doing our thing. Do you think we’re going back to that? Like once this incident, the pandemic and everything after is over, are we going back?
Katie Martin I mean, I can’t see it. I buy the narratives that are kicking around about inflation now being structurally higher, right? There’s a climate emergency. There’s a global defence emergency. There is all sorts of things that governments need to spend lots of money on, borrow lots of money for, all things being equal. And then there’s the whole supply chain thing after COVID and with geopolitics yada-yada.
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Robert Armstrong And the world is getting older, right? And so when old people create demand for savings, that drives interest rates up, right?
Katie Martin Ah, old people. Yeah.
Robert Armstrong Old people.
Katie Martin But I think also before we wrap up, we should note that although you were right, about 50 basis points, I was right about the timing. I said on this here very podcast back in, I think it was June 2023, the . . . Not 24. 23. That the Fed is not gonna cut rates till the third quarter this year. So what I’m saying is I’m the genius here. You’re just like a (overlapping speech) took a coin flip.
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Robert Armstrong You’re basically Cassandra. Doomed to see the future and not be believed.
Katie Martin I’m going to . . .
Robert Armstrong Do I have the right mythological figure there? I think that was Cassandra.
Katie Martin Absolutely no idea. But I’m going to set up a hedge fund called like hunch capital where I can invest your money for two and 20. (Laughter) Based on nothing but pure hunches. Do you want in? Because like my hunch on that, your hunch on the other. I think we’re going to make good money.
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Robert Armstrong We could. We could be rich people, Katie. But I will answer your question seriously. I think interest rates are higher now. We’re not going back to zero. I will end on that serious point.
Katie Martin Yeah, yeah.
Robert Armstrong Governments are spending too much. They have to spend too much. There’s loads of old people. There’s the green stuff has to be funded. Productivity might be rising possibly because of AI. We are going into a higher interest rate world. And by the way, the Fed thinks that. If you look at the history of the Fed’s view of what the long term normal interest rate is, that has been steadily ticking higher over the last year and a half or so.
Katie Martin So rates have come down already pretty hard, but don’t get yourself carried away with thinking that we’re going back to zero, because ain’t . . . I mean.
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Robert Armstrong No. Ain’t gonna happen. Nope.
Katie Martin Ain’t gonna happen.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
On that bombshell, we’re going to be back in a sec with Long/Short.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, now it’s time for Long/Short, that part of the show where we go long a thing we love, short a thing we hate. Rob, I feel like you should go first before you completely lose your voice. (Laughter)
Robert Armstrong Well, I’m going to go short wellbeing. And I say this not because my wellbeing is poor right now, but because of an article our colleague Joshua Franklin, wrote in the Financial Times yesterday that says, I’m quoting here, JPMorgan Chase has tasked one of its bankers with overseeing the company’s junior banker program, a response to renewed concerns about working conditions for young employees. And it goes on that this poor person is gonna have to make sure all these young investment bankers are happy and have work-life balance. I think investment bankers owe it to the rest of us to be miserable.
Katie Martin Right.
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Robert Armstrong They make a lot of money. They are the lords of the universe. They should not be happy. Their wellbeing should be awful. And that’s what you’re getting paid for. So I think JPMorgan Chase is doing the wrong thing here. And they need to appoint a banker to oversee the what’s the opposite of wellbeing. Unwell being of their junior bankers.
Katie Martin You’re a very, very mean person and you just want everyone to be sad like you.
Robert Armstrong No, if you want to be happy, become a journalist and make no money. If you want to be rich, become a banker and like get divorced and have your kids hate you. It’s just the normal way of life. (Laughter)
Katie Martin Well, I am long European banking merger drama. So if you’ve missed it, the German government is, like, quite scratchy and unhappy about a potential takeover of Commerzbank by Italy’s UniCredit. It’s the talk of the town. Everyone is kind of, you know, huddled around in bars in the city asking like, how the hell did UniCredit manage to amass like a nine per cent stake in this thing? Like that doesn’t seem like a good strategic move. There’s a lot of excitement over the motives. My interest here is that this is just like the good old days of European banking mergers with like very important European bankers wearing gilets under their jackets going around in like big fast cars and, you know, chatting away on their mobile phones and being masters of the universe.
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Robert Armstrong I just wish they would get along with it. As far as I know, in continental Europe, there’s actually more banks than people.
Katie Martin Yeah, it’s like sheep in New Zealand. You’ve just got . . . (Laughter)
Robert Armstrong They just need. I mean, as long as I’ve been in finance, people have been rattling on about how banking in Europe was going to consolidate. The industry was finally going to make some. They just need . . . I mean, as long as I’ve been in finance, people have been rattling on about how banking in Europe was going to consolidate. The industry was finally going to make some money and it was going be able to compete with the US. And then it’s like, you know, some Germans get mad at some Italians, it never happens and the cycle turns again.
Katie Martin Yeah, it’s like we want consolidation, but no, no, no, no, no. Not like that.
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Robert Armstrong Not like that.
Katie Martin Anything but that.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And I am here for the drama is all I’m saying.
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Robert Armstrong Right on. I love it.
Katie Martin OK, listeners, we are going to be back in your feed on Tuesday if Rob makes it that long, but listen up anyway, wherever you get your podcasts.
Unhedged is produced by Jake Harper and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. We had additional help from Topher Forhecz. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Special thanks to Laura Clarke, Alastair Mackie, Gretta Cohn and Natalie Sadler. FT premium subscribers can get the Unhedged newsletter for free. A 30-day free trial is available to everyone else. Just go to FT.com/unhedgedoffer. I’m Katie Martin. Thanks for listening.
Republicans in North Carolina and nationally are assessing the potential fallout for former President Donald Trump from a bombshell report alleging that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the party’s gubernatorial nominee, posted disturbing and inflammatory statements on a forum of a pornographic website.
CNN reported Thursday that Robinson, behind an anonymous username he allegedly used elsewhere, made the comments more than a decade ago, including supporting slavery, calling himself a “black NAZI” and recalling memories of him “peeping” on women in the shower as a 14-year-old.
ABC News has not independently verified the comments were made by Robinson, and he insisted in a video posted to X prior to the story’s publication that “those are not the words of Mark Robinson.”
But Robinson, a Donald Trump ally, already has a history of incendiary remarks about Jews, gay people and others, and elections in North Carolina, one of the nation’s marquee swing states, rest on a knife’s edge, raising questions of how much the latest news will impact his race and other Republicans on the ballot with him — including the former president.
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“I think this only heightens the level of toxicity that the Robinson campaign has, and the real question becomes, what’s the radioactive fallout at the top of the ticket along with down the ballot for Republicans here in North Carolina?” asked Michael Bitzer, the Politics Department chair at Catawba College.
“This cannot be something that the voters aren’t going to recognize and probably play more into softening the Republican support. Is it isolated only to Robinson’s campaign, or does it start to impact Trump? Does it impact other statewide executive Republicans as well? We’ll just have to wait and see, but this feels like a pretty significant event in North Carolina politics.”
Robinson, who casts himself as a conservative family man and is running for North Carolina’s open governorship against Democratic state Attorney General Josh Stein, is already behind in the polls.
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PHOTO: Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, R-NC., speaking on the first day of the Republican National Convention, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
While he holds statewide office and has broad name recognition, Robinson boasts a highly controversial record, including calling the Holocaust “hogwash” and homosexuality “filth,” and he drew claims of hypocrisy when he admitted this year that he had paid for his wife to get an abortion, seemingly in contrast with his stated opposition to the procedure, which he’d previously likened to “murder” and “genocide.”
North Carolina’s gubernatorial race is still considered competitive given the state’s tight partisan divide, but Republicans in the state told ABC News they had already viewed him as trailing, and that Thursday’s report won’t help.
“He’s already got a lengthy history of publishing comments like that on the internet. These are perhaps a little more graphic. In terms of does this by itself serve as a guillotine, I don’t know. But it feels like the cumulative weight is starting to add up now,” said one North Carolina GOP strategist. “It flies in the face of everything he presents of himself publicly. So, cumulatively plus the hypocrisy of this, it’s obviously hurtful to him.”
Republicans were more divided on what it means beyond Robinson’s own candidacy.
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North Carolina is a must-win state for Trump, and losing it would impose significant pressure on him to perform in other swing states.
Trump is already running ahead of Robinson — while polls show Robinson trailing, they also show a neck-and-neck race in the state between the former president and Vice President Kamala Harris. The main question now is whether the news depresses Republican turnout in a state where even a small nudge in turnout one way or the other can make decide the victor.
“[Robinson] was already toast. The question is if it hurts Trump, something the campaign is very worried about,” said Doug Heye, a veteran GOP strategist with experience working in North Carolina. “It doesn’t directly cost him voters, but his endorsed pick continues to be a big distraction and has no money to drive out the vote.”
“He’s a baby blue anchor around Trump’s chances in the Tar Heel State,” added Trump donor Dan Eberhart. “This is not good news for Trump’s campaign at all.”
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PHOTO: North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson speaks at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton on June 21, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, FILE)
Democrats are already seizing on the news to try to connect Robinson to Trump, who has repeatedly praised him, even calling him at one point “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Kamala HQ, an X page that serves as one of the Harris campaign’s rapid response tools, posted a slate of videos featuring Trump speaking positively about Robinson.
“His campaign was toast before this story, so the real impact is on all of the Republicans who have endorsed and campaigned alongside him,” said Bruce Thompson, a North Carolina Democratic fundraiser.
However, Trump has been able to navigate his own headwinds, including felony convictions in New York, questioning Harris’ race and more to remain the leader of his party and a viable presidential candidate, leading some Republicans to doubt that Robinson’s struggles will impact the presidential campaign.
“Doubt it impacts at all down-ballot,” said Dave Carney, a GOP strategist who chairs a pro-Trump super PAC.
“I don’t think it helps, but it won’t hurt,” added Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary.
PHOTO: Mark Robinson, Lt. Governor of N.C. and candidate for Governor, delivers remarks prior to Republican presidential nominee former President Trump speaking at a campaign event at Harrah’s Cherokee Center on Aug. 14, 2024 in Asheville, N.C. (Grant Baldwin/Getty Images)
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt sounded a confident note, saying in a statement that the former president’s team would “not take our eye off the ball.”
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“President Trump’s campaign is focused on winning the White House and saving this country. North Carolina is a vital part of that plan. We are confident that as voters compare the Trump record of a strong economy, low inflation, a secure border, and safe streets, with the failures of Biden-Harris, then President Trump will win the Tarheel State once again,” she said.”
Still, sources familiar with the matter said the Trump campaign was bracing for a story to come out about Robinson and is planning on putting more distance between the former president and the embattled nominee Robinson — but initially did not have plans to call on him to drop out.
“He seems to not be impacted by what’s going on down-ballot underneath him,” the North Carolina Republican strategist said of Trump. “There’s no way it helps him. But does it hurt him? I don’t know, I think that’s an open question.”
According to a 2022 report by Article 19, an international organization that documents and champions freedom of expression, 80 percent of the world’s population lives with less freedom of expression today than did ten years ago. The eradication of basic freedoms and rights is partly due to the pervasive normalization of censorship. Across media platforms, news outlets, schools, universities, libraries, museums, and public and private spaces, governments, powerful corporations, and influential pressure groups are suppressing freedom of expression and censoring viewpoints deemed to be unpopular or dangerous. Unfortunately, physical assaults, legal restrictions, and retaliation against journalists, students, and faculty alike have become all too common, resulting in the suppression of dissenting voices and, more broadly, the muffling and disappearance of critical information, controversial topics, and alternative narratives from public discourse.
We collaborated with an accomplished group of international scholars and journalists to document this disturbing trend in Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression (Peter Lang 2024). Our collective work analyzed contemporary and historical methods of censorship and anti-democratic impulses that threaten civil society, human rights, and freedoms of information and expression around the world today. The collection explains how a rising tide of political tyranny coupled with the expansion of corporate power is stifling dissent, online expression, news reporting, political debate, and academic freedom from the United States and Europe to the Global South.
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The Assault on Press Freedom
Our volume reveals an epidemic of censorship and attacks on journalists and free speech around the globe. Although completed prior to the horrifying atrocities of October 7, 2023, in Israel, the text provides context for understanding that Israeli violence against Palestinians since October 7, including the murder of journalists, has been decades in the making. This strategy initially took hold with the assassination of the veteran Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American, as she documented Israel’s occupation of Jenin. The world has now witnessed the full flowering of the Israeli-state aggression against Palestinians that led to her murder. To date, Israel has killed more than 100 media workers in Gaza, raising the concern and outrage of numerous press freedom organizations and seventy UN member states that have now called for international investigations into each one of the murders. As the International Federation of Journalists reported, “Killing journalists is a war crime that undermines the most basic human rights.”
Journalists around the globe are repeatedly targeted because their profession, which is protected constitutionally in many nations, exists to draw attention to abuses of power. Thus, it is no surprise that the rise in global censorship has entailed the targeting of journalists with violence, imprisonment, and harassment. In Russia, journalists are jailed and die in custody, as they do in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, and Hong Kong. In Mexico, there are “silenced zones,” controlled by a deadly collaboration between drug gangs and government corruption, where journalists are routinely killed. In 2022, Mexico was the most dangerous country for journalists outside of a war zone.
The assault on press freedom has also been normalized in self-proclaimed democracies such as the United Kingdom, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been imprisoned for more than five years, and in the United States, which has targeted Assange with espionage charges simply for promoting freedom of information. Although US presidents and other national figures often refer to the United States as “the leader of the free world,” the United States now ranks 55th in the world on the Reporters without Borders 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
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Repression of Artists and Academics
News outlets and their workers are not the only targets of the current wave of repression. Hollywood has long been shaped—and censored—by government and corporate power. For example, our book includes a chapter on the Pentagon’s long-standing influence on Hollywood, which has resulted in the film industry abandoning production of hundreds of films deemed unacceptable by the military.
In addition to media, educators and academics are increasingly subject to repressive measures that muzzle freedom of information and expression. Scholars and institutions of higher education sometimes produce research that challenges the myths and propaganda perpetuated by those in power. And even when they don’t, autonomy from micromanagement by government authorities and private funders is a prerequisite for the integrity of scholarly research and teaching, which tends to make elites exceedingly nervous. This is why universities and academic freedom are increasingly under siege by autocratic regimes and right-wing activists from Hungary to Brazil and from India to Florida.
Alarmingly, the latest Academic Freedom Index found that more than 45 percent of the world’s population now lives in countries with an almost complete lack of academic freedom (more than at any time since the 1970s). In Brazil, the government of right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro attempted to ban education about gender and sexuality, slashed budgets for the country’s universities, and threatened to defund the disciplines of philosophy and sociology. In 2018, Hungary’s conservative Fidesz government shut down graduate programs in gender studies, forced the country’s most prestigious university, the Central European University, to relocate to Austria, and sparked months of protests at the University of Theater and Film Arts in Budapest by making unpopular changes to the school’s board of trustees. Something similar happened in Turkey, where, since 2016, the ruling regime has suspended thousands of professors and administrators from their university posts for alleged ties to the outlawed Gülen movement and shut down upwards of 3,000 schools and universities. Meanwhile, in the United States, several Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted draconian laws prohibiting or severely limiting teaching about race, sexuality, and gender in college classrooms. Under the influence of its arch-conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, Florida eliminated sociology as a core general education course at all of its public universities.
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Big Tech Censorship
Censorship is nothing new, but the pervasive influence of the internet and the development of so-called artificial intelligence (AI) have created new, more nefarious opportunities to crack down on freedoms around the globe. So-called smart platforms and tools have created new forms of Big Tech control and content moderation, such as shadowbanning and algorithmic bias. Regimes have set up a form of quid pro quo with tech companies, demanding certain concessions such as removing unfavorable content in exchange for government access to otherwise private information about tech platforms’ users. For example, in the United States, tech companies depend on largegovernmentcontracts and, as a result, often work with government officials directly and indirectly to censor content. Nor do they block only false or misleading content. Social media platforms have also been found to censor perfectly valid scientific speculation about the possible origin of COVID-19 and instances of obvious political satire.
These restrictive practices are at odds with Big Tech PR campaigns that trumpet the platforms’ capacity to empower users. Despite this hype, critical examination reveals that privately controlled platforms seldom function as spaces where genuine freedom of information and intellectual exchange flourish. In reality, Big Tech works with numerous national regimes to extend existing forms of control over citizens’ behaviors and expression into the digital realm. People are not ignorant of these abuses and have taken action to promote freedom across the globe. However, they have largely been met by more censorship. For example, as social media users took to TikTok to challenge US and Israeli messaging on Gaza, the US government took steps to ban the platform. Relatedly, Israel raided Al Jazeera’s office in East Jerusalem, confiscated its equipment, shuttered its office, and closed down its website.
Our book also details the complex history and structures of censorship in Myanmar, Uganda, and the Philippines, and popular resistance to this oppression. To this catalog of examples, we can add India’s periodic internet shutdowns aimed at stifling protests by farmers, the blocking of websites in Egypt, and the right-wing strongman Jair Bolsonaro’s persecution of journalists in Brazil. Each of these cases is best understood as a direct result of a rise in faux populist, right-wing authoritarian politicians and political movements, whose popularity has been fostered by reactionary responses to decades of neo-liberal rule.
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What Is to Be Done?
Censorship is being driven not only by governments but also by an array of political and corporate actors across the ideological spectrum, from right-wing autocrats and MAGA activists to Big Tech oligarchs and self-professed liberals. Indeed, when it comes to censorship, a focus on any one country’s ideology, set of practices, or justifications for restricting expression risks missing the forest for the trees. The global community is best served when we collectively reject all attempts to suppress basic freedoms, regardless of where they emerge or how they are implemented.
To counter increasing restrictions on public discourse and the muzzling of activists, journalists, artists, and scholars, we need global agreements that protect press freedom, the right to protest, and accountability for attacks on journalists. Protection of freedom of expression and the press should be a central plank of US foreign policy. We need aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up giant media companies that today wield the power to unilaterally control what the public sees, hears, and reads. We also need to create awareness and public knowledge to help pass legislation, such as the PRESS Act, that will guarantee journalists’ right to protect their sources’ confidentiality and prevent authorities from collecting information about their activities from third parties like phone companies and internet service providers.
Moreover, widespread surveillance by social media platforms and search engines, supposedly necessary to improve efficiency and convenience, ought to be abandoned. All of us should have the right to control any non-newsworthy personal data that websites and apps have gathered about us and to ask that such data be deleted, a right that Californians will enjoy starting in 2026.
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In addition, we should all support the efforts of organizations such as the American Association of University Professors, Article 19, and many others to fight back against encroachments on academic and intellectual freedom.
Supporters of free expression should also vigilantly oppose the ideologically motivated content moderation schemes Big Tech companies so often impose on their users.
Rather than trusting Big Tech to curate our news feeds, or putting faith in laws that would attempt to criminalize misinformation, we need greater investment in media literacy education, including education about the central importance of expressive rights and vigorous, open debate to a functioning democracy. The era of the internet and AI demonstrates the urgent need for education and fundamental knowledge in critical media literacy to ensure that everyone has the necessary skills to act as digital citizens, capable of understanding and evaluating the media we consume.
Steven Everts makes numerous important and laudable points on the need for the EU to seriously recalibrate both its capacities and posture in foreign policy (Opinion, September 12).
It’s worth adding that in a foreign policy area on the bloc’s very borders, the EU has led the west into a dead end of failure, in which official pronouncements have never been more at variance with the on-the-ground reality.
The western Balkans is the only region in which the US consistently defers to a democratic partner’s leadership — that of the EU.
Nowhere else does the west, if united, wield greater leverage or have a wider array of policy instruments. Yet for far too long, the EU has addressed the region almost solely through its enlargement process, neglecting its foreign policy commitments — including a deterrent force in Bosnia and Herzegovina mandated by the Dayton Peace Agreement and authorised under Chapter 7 by the UN Security Council.
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This force remains well below the brigade-strength required to pose a credible deterrent to threats to the peace and territorial integrity. In addition, the EU states it will support local authorities, who have primary responsibility to maintain a secure environment — defying the reason the mandate exists to begin with: namely to thwart attempts by local authorities to upend the peace.
The desire to maintain the fiction that the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue is still alive compels the EU into all sorts
of contortions which in effect reward Serbia, despite allegations of Serbian involvement in recent violence, and periodic (and ongoing) threats of invasion. By straying from its original declared purpose to achieve mutual recognition between Serbia and Kosovo, as well as serving as a shield for Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić, the dialogue serves as a diversion from genuine problem- solving.
Incoming EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has demonstrated leadership and vision for Europe and the wider west as Estonia’s prime minister, particularly with regard to the response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
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One hopes she will undertake the overdue task of making the policies of the EU and the wider west more consistent with the values of democracy and human dignity we proclaim to hold dear. She can begin by leading the west to a restoration of credible deterrence in the Balkans, and start to counter the backsliding of democracy long visible there.
Kurt Bassuener Co-Founder and Senior Associate, Democratization Policy Council, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
It’s early summer in Moldova, and the cherries are already ripe. Fellow journalist Marian Männi and I pick and pop them into our mouths as we follow our chosen tour guide up a hill. We are exploring Old Orhei, a famous Moldovan landmark and archaeological site. It consists of three villages: Trebujeni to the north, Butuceni to the west and Morovaia to the east. The area is built on a green field, and the Răut River runs through it.
Following the guide’s lead, we climb a hill to find one of many cave monasteries. This one is rather hidden, so most tourists miss it entirely.
My guide showcases a cave monastery above the Răut River, where tourists rarely find their way. Author’s photo.
A picture from the inside of the cave looking out. Author’s photo.
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The surrounding area is an unusual sight. The sloping bank of the Răut River emerges from a perfectly flat field, looking almost man-made. However, it is a natural reminder of how landscapes evolve. You can find perfect seashells on the limestone bank in a country with no coastline, much like on a sandy beach. Millions of years ago, the Răut River was part of the ancient Sarmatian Sea, just like the lands of today’s Moldova.
Scenic views of Old Orhei. One can barely see the river under the hill. Author’s photo.
My guide, Professor Sergiu Musteață, knows this site incredibly well. He is a renowned historian from Moldova and a professor at the Faculty of Philology and History at “Ion Creangă” State Pedagogical University. He has worked to educate locals about the history of Old Orhei and how to develop tourism businesses. He has also guided them in creating guesthouses and writing proposals for funding to build flushing toilets in their homes.
Old Orhei has been one of the main subjects of his research since 1996. “I know everyone in Orheiul Vechi [the Romanian version of the name]!” he laughs. He also knows all of the approximately 300 caves in the area and has personally researched many of them.
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Professor Sergiu Musteață says that people working in Moldovan tourism need to understand that the basis of it is history and heritage. Author’s photo.
A scenic journey through unknown sites
Musteață leads us along a hidden path lined with cherry trees from an old student’s base. Researchers have been excavating this area for decades, as the unique landscape reveals layers of settlements dating back to prehistoric times.
“When we come here with students, we usually clean the neighborhood and cut the grass first,” Musteață says, pushing branches away from the path. If only tourists knew about this shortcut hidden in nature.
Professor Musteață peers through a rustic gate. Author’s photo.
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“We have organized 20 years of summer camps for the locals during the excavations, including summer schools for local kids. Lots of students, both locals and internationals, participated!” he states emphatically.
Despite many efforts, only a few locals have made a name for themselves in the tourism sector. “I don’t know why. There is not so much interest. It should be the most prominent place among tourists,” Musteață comments.
Unlike other visitors, we walk past the Peștera cave monastery, the main tourist attraction of Old Orhei. The current underground tunnels date back to 1820. However, the caves in these limestone hills have existed since the 14th century. Orthodox monks found solitude and a place for spiritual retreat in this isolation.
“There is another cave monastery here. Locals know about it, but only a few tourists will visit it,” says Musteață. This is where we are heading.
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We walk past the Peștera cave monastery and head off-road to find another lesser-known monastery. Author’s photo.
We walk on the bank, passing through the Church of Ascension of St. Mary. The view of the valley and fields is breathtaking. Turning left, the professor leads us onto an almost unrecognizable road downhill from the bank. Our slippers aren’t ideal footwear for this leg of the journey, but nevertheless, we climb down the limestone bank to a land of grazing cows.
Musteață guides us onto a new path, leading down the limestone bank. Author’s photo.
After walking, we climb again to another obscure cave monastery of Old Orhei, built above the Răut’s waters. There isn’t a single soul up here now, but historically, monks isolated themselves in this cave. As a result, the monastery is covered in signs of human habitation.
The church’s facade is engraved with Slavonian writing: “This church was built by the slave of Bosie, pircalab (Chief Magistrate) of Orhei, together with his wife and his children, to cherish God, to forgive his sins.”
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The professor shows us around. We see where the monks would sleep and where they built their fireplace. All the caves are in remarkably good shape, with few signs of dripping rocks.
We view the monastery’s exterior, which has endured for centuries. Author’s photo.
This structure often goes unexplored by tourists. “It’s a bit too far and difficult to access. That’s why people don’t know much about it and wouldn’t end up here,” Musteață explains.
Musteață teaches us about the monastery. Author’s photo.
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On the whole, Old Orhei is a fascinating, history site. And its antiquity is richer than one might expect.
Mankind has loved this region since ancient times
The surroundings have been populated since the Paleolithic era due to good location — the river protects Old Orhei from three sides. The land is suitable for agriculture and flowing water is nearby.
Archaeological findings suggest that the Getians built some fortresses and settlements in this region during the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE, taking advantage of the natural fortifications provided by the rocky outcroppings and riverbanks.
In the 14th century CE, Old Orhei became part of the medieval state of Moldova (Țara Moldovei) after the collapse of the Golden Horde, a Mongol-Tatar state that controlled this territory as well.
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After the Tatar period in the 12th to 14th centuries, an Orthodox Christian community developed during medieval times. Political stability and the protective embrace of nature made Old Orhei an important center. Moldovan hero and ruler Stephen the Great, whose rule lasted from 1457 to 1504, appointed his uncle, Peter III Aaron, to rule there. The area was fortified with strong defensive walls and towers.
Life in Old Orhei slowly faded in the 17th century. The administration moved to neighboring New Orhei, and gradually, the monastic community began to disappear. The last monks are believed to have left Old Orhei at the beginning of the 19th century. By this time, many monastic communities in the region faced significant challenges due to political changes, invasions and pressures from the expanding Ottoman Empire. The decline in monastic life at Old Orhei was part of a broader trend affecting many religious sites in the region.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a new Virgin Mary Church was built atop the bank near a cave monastery to revitalize the area’s spiritual significance. It serves as a symbol of Old Orhei’s continued religious heritage, even after the original monastic community dispersed.
Though the region’s religiosity remains, Old Orhei’s authenticity, unfortunately, has recently declined.
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The loss of authenticity in a historic land
Many historical sites in Old Orhei face the problem of random preservation efforts, which are not concerned with preserving the site’s authentic look.
In 2023, the road from Butuceni village in the Cultural-Natural Reserve was asphalted, which led to an investigation by the Ministry of Culture. It ruined the village’s authenticity but gave locals more logistical freedom.
Climbing on the bank, we notice a brand-new red-roofed dwelling that, from a logical viewpoint, should not have been built in the reserve. But there it is, like the newly constructed path to the Peștera cave monastery and the asphalted road in Butuceni village.
This modern tampering is one thing preventing Moldova from having its first United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.
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“There is too much industrialization in a place where authenticity is worshiped,” Musteață laments. The Old Orhei Reserve has been on the UNESCO tentative list for years but is not moving forward any time soon. “I don’t think there is much hope at the moment,” Musteață admits honestly.
The situation saddens him. He and other researchers have worked for years to put this site on the world map as a part of humanity’s historical cradle, to no avail.
“The landscape and the density of settlements since prehistory is special. You can see the changes in this part of the world, moving from East to West. The Golden Horde, the Islamic period, Christians — there is a huge variety of artifacts describing how people lived in this area,” Musteață explains.
Life has moved on from this relic. The Orthodox Church still holds significant power in the small country of Moldova, but only traces of the glory the church once had in Old Orhei remain. In the 1940s, the Soviet Union started excavations in the region, which also disrupted the old sites; they built a new road through the Golden Horde citadel and cut it in half.
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“A historic road should go around the citadel. It’s completely doable,” Musteață says.
The professor feels that many of Moldova’s stories remain untold, even that of such a landmark as Old Orhei. “It is frustrating. We need to tell our story!” Musteață suggests.
He thinks the country itself should put Orhei at the top of the list of tourist destinations in Moldova. After all, it’s the most important tourist site in the country. “It should be declared a state priority, a national strategy,” he says. “People working in this field in Moldova need to understand that the basis of tourism is history and heritage.”
That is another reason why Moldova’s Old Orhei is not on the UNESCO list. “Our country overall is underrepresented,” Musteață believes.
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According to UNESCO, the organization is not in a position to comment on what is missing for Old Orhei to receive its World Heritage Site title. Moldova first proposed the area as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 but withdrew its nomination the following year.
In September 2015, Moldova submitted a new version of the nomination dossier as “Orheiul Vechi Archaeological Landscape,” a cultural site. Following the evaluation process and a recommendation by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, Moldova withdrew the nomination again.
Luckily, Moldova appears on the UNESCO list as part of a group of countries with the Struve Geodetic Arc, a chain of survey triangulations spanning ten countries and over 2,820 kilometers. This chain reaches from the world’s northernmost city — Hammerfest, Norway — to the Black Sea. The listed site includes 34 points across all ten countries, one of which is in Moldova. The country is eager to earn its very own World Heritage Site title, even if it isn’t Old Orhei.
Neri Zilber’s piece “Far-right minister accused of politicising Israeli police” (Report, September 17) eloquently describes the crisis in the West Bank. Israel’s current government and its unsavoury allies in the settler movement stand accused, but in truth every government since 1967 has favoured illegal settlement.
The first settlements — the so-called Nahal settlements — in September 1967 were supposedly military and so did not, Israel argued, contravene international law. The west did nothing, so Israel then went ahead with brazen colonisation. When the first Oslo Accord was signed in 1993, there were in the order of 110,000 settlers in the West Bank.
A central principle of Oslo was that neither party would takes steps that would prejudice final status talks five years later. But Israel’s so-called moderate leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, immediately inaugurated the most intensive phase of settlement to date. By January 1996 settlers numbered 140,000. Rabin told his electorate not to worry — the Palestinians would not get a state. Meanwhile, Rabin and Peres accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. The west did nothing. The Palestinians knew they had been stitched up.
So we should be under no illusions. This isn’t simply Benjamin Netanyahu and his associates, it is the long-standing thrust of the majority of Israelis across the political spectrum. Western governments have known this all along and even now appear unwilling to ensure respect for international humanitarian law as they have undertaken to do.
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The UN General Assembly is likely to agree that the July 19 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, which spells out Israel’s lawbreaking in detail, must be applied.
If it isn’t, in the Middle East the killing will continue while in New York the UN may face an impasse given the unwillingness of the US and its allies to uphold the international order they themselves helped put in place.
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