Panama ex-dictator Manuel Noriega flies home

Panama’s former dictator, Manuel Noriega, finally returned home on Sunday almost 22 years after surrendering during a US invasion.

Noriega, 77, who last set foot in Panama in 1990 and had been in prison in France since 2010, touched down at Panama’s international airport at 6.07pm local time, according to reports in the local media.

The former dictator, who has spent most of the last two decades behind bars, now faces jail for crimes committed during his notorious 1983-89 regime.

“Mr Noriega has to see out his sentence in Panama [and] will go to jail like any other convict, without any privileges,” Panama’s president Ricardo Martinelli told reporters.

The former dictator had to pay for “all the damage, all the horror, all the shame, all the death,” Martinelli added.

Noriega had left Orly airport in Paris on Sunday morning before boarding Iberia flight 6345 in Madrid to Panama.

Authorities in Panama said Noriega would be punished for crimes that included the brutal murders of several opponents during the 1980s.

On the eve of his long-awaited extradition, those close to the former dictator said he was eager to return home.

“He was very impatient, very happy. He’s going home,” one of Noriega’s French lawyers, Antonin Levy, told the Associated Press on Saturday.

In an interview with Panama’s La Estrella newspaper, Mario Rognoni – a friend and former minister – said Noriega had been unfairly treated. “Society fell into the North American trap of demonising Noriega,” he claimed.

Despite the suggestion that Noriega might be allowed to serve his six sentences – totalling more than 67 years – under house arrest, authorities said his immediate destination would be a high-security jail near the Panama Canal.

In a statement, the Panamanian government said that Noriega would be flown by helicopter from Tocumen international airport to the 401-capacity El Renacer prison near the town of Gamboa.

He would be given his own cell in the prison – originally built for North American prisoners – and held “in similar conditions to other prisoners”.

Born in Panama in 1934, Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno studied at a military academy in Peru before returning home to join the armed forces.

He became a treasured CIA asset and cold war ally in the US fight against communism in Latin America and particularly against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

But his relationship with the US was never straightforward. Washington grew suspicious that their man in Panama was working with the Medellín cocaine cartel in Colombia, helping them smuggle huge quantities of the drug into the US.

By the late 1980s, the US had had enough. In December 1989, George Bush ordered an invasion and sent in 20,000 troops to topple Noriega.

“We can safely conclude that this [operation] ends his career as a drug trafficker,” William Bennett, a White House drug policy chief, told US reporters at the time. “He’s not running drugs, he’s not running Panama, he’s just running – and that’s good.”

Noriega took refuge from the US offensive inside Panama City’s Vatican embassy but eventually handed himself in on 3 January 1990. Troops had reportedly bombarded the building with rock music including the Clash and Guns N’ Roses, forcing his surrender.

Flown to the US, Noriega was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1992 for racketeering and drug offences. Noriega claimed the charges were politically motivated. In 2010, he was extradited to France to face money-laundering charges.

Activists hope his return will shed light on unsolved cases of human rights abuses during the 1970s and 1980s and pave the way for further prosecutions.

Patria Portugal, a human rights ombudsman whose father Heliodoro Portugal was killed in 1970, told La Estrella newspaper: “Noriega did not commit all these acts alone. He must say who else took part, and if they have to be punished they must be made to pay for what they did.”