Despite French Sentence, Noriega Could be Home Soon

[Judi Lynn]

Despite French Sentence, Noriega Could be Home Soon
By Vivienne Walt Wednesday, Jul. 07, 2010

General Manuel Noriega may have once been cast as an arch-villain in a tale of narco-trafficking and authoritarian brutality, but the former Panamanian dictator looked more like a victim as he awaited his fate, stooped and shaking slightly, in a Paris courtroom on Wednesday. A French judge sentenced Noriega, 76, to seven years in prison and a 10 million-euro fine for laundering drug money in France during the 1980s by buying luxury apartments in Paris; she also ordered his assets in France seized, and demanded that he pay more than 2 million euro in legal expenses. That's an extraordinarily severe sentence for an ailing septuagenarian who has spent the past 17 years in a Miami jail, says Noriega's French lawyer Yves Leberquier.

Defense attorney Leberquier believes that French prosecutors offered weak evidence, and that there was no proof that the apartments were purchased with drug money. Still, back in Noriega's home country, many believe he got off lightly. "The former dictator faces much more serious charges in Panama," says Miguel Antonio Bernal, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Panama. While many young Panamanians have little memory of Noriega's iron-fisted rule, Bernal says many others want him in jail on home soil.

He may have run a brutal dictatorship, but General Noriega had been on the CIA payroll and was a crucial U.S. ally in the regional dirty wars against leftist movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the 1980s. He also became one of the world's biggest drug kingpins, and as the Cold War waned, he found himself wanted for cocaine trafficking in the U.S. Noriega's eight-year rule finally ended when he surrendered himself to the U.S., which had sent thousands of troops to invade Panama in 1989. While Noriega languished in a Miami jail, a French judge sentenced him in absentia to 10 years for money laundering, and Panama's judges convicted him on charges of murder and human-rights abuses committed while president. He remained in the Miami prison after his sentence ended in 2007, while fighting extradition requests from France and Panama. But last April, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed Noriega's extradition to France, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case.

"The crucial issue was of course politics", said Noriega attorney Antonin Levy. "They (U.S. officials) will do everything possible to let him stay inside a jail and not go back to Panama." The lawyers argue that U.S. officials fear a Noriega return might stir up old hostilities, and also lead to disclosures that embarrass some current and retired officials. U.S. officials reject that claim, insisting that Noriega's extradition was a legal matter based on an existing treaty.

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