full name Manuel Antonio Noriega Morena (1936?–    ), former Panamanian military dictator, removed from power when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989.

Details of Noriega’s early life are fragmentary. According to U.S. Army intelligence files he was born in Panama City on Feb. 11, 1936; other sources give his birth year as 1934 or 1938. Noriega claims to have spent his childhood in his mother’s home village of Yaviza, in Darién Province, near the border with Colombia. As a secondary school student back in Panama City, he participated in anti-U.S. protests. During the late 1950s and early ’60s, he studied at the Chorrillos Military School in Lima, Peru. Upon returning to Panama in 1962, he joined the National Guard and was assigned to a unit in Colón commanded by Omar Torrijos Herrera. During the mid-1960s he received training in counterinsurgency and jungle operations at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Canal Zone; by this time, he may already have begun working as a double agent, spying both for and against the U.S.

After Torrijos led a coup that ousted President Arnulfo Arias in 1968, Noriega provided crucial support to the new Panamanian junta. Torrijos rewarded Noriega by placing him in charge of G-2, the National Guard’s intelligence branch. As head of G-2, Noriega regularly supplied intelligence information to the U.S.; he also ruthlessly suppressed the enemies of the Torrijos regime and, according to U.S. investigators, exploited his position to profit from drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering. Torrijos stepped down as head of government in 1978, but he remained Panama’s top military leader until he was killed in a plane crash in 1981. With Torrijos gone, Noriega emerged as the nation’s military strongman. He became commander of the Panamanian Defense Forces in 1983, using his unchecked powers both to assist the U.S. in supporting the contra guerrillas in Nicaragua and to establish ties with Colombian cocaine cartels. In 1984 he engineered the election of a civilian president, Nicolas Ardito Barletta (1938–    ), an economist who had been a protégé of U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. That same year, Dr. Hugo Spadafora Franco (b. 1940)—who, like Noriega, had been a Torrijos loyalist—accused Noriega of drug dealing and other crimes. Spadafora’s body was found tortured and beheaded in September 1985. When Barletta said he would consider appointing a commission to investigate the murder, Noriega forced him to resign.

During the next three years, as opposition to Noriega mounted, the Panamanian dictator maneuvered to retain power. In February 1988 he was indicted on drug-related charges by two federal grand juries in Florida. That same month, Eric Arturo Delvalle (1937–    ), whom Noriega had installed as president after ousting Barletta, announced that he had fired Noriega, but his action was thwarted by the National Assembly, which voted to remove Delvalle instead. In May 1989 an opposition candidate, Guillermo Endara (1936–    ), was elected president with U.S. backing, but Noriega had the vote nullified. Noriega suppressed a military coup attempt in October, but two months later the U.S. military launched Operation Just Cause, invading Panama and installing Endara as president.

Captured and flown to the U.S. in January 1990, Noriega was found guilty in April 1992 of racketeering and cocaine trafficking, making him the first foreign head of state ever convicted in a U.S. court. He was classified as a prisoner of war in December 1992, and his 40-year prison sentence was reduced to 30 years in March 1999. In Panama, meanwhile, Noriega was tried in absentia and found guilty in 1993 of having ordered Spadafora’s murder eight years earlier. He is the coauthor of America’s Prisoner: The Memoirs of Manuel Noriega (1997).