Remember "Regime Change" in Panam in 1989? There is another parallel: The US used and tested chemical weapons in Panama for decades and left 2 tons of VX gas behind. J. Lindsay-Poland found out.
Producer: Maria Gilardin Uploaded by: Maria Gilardin
Emperors in the Jungle The hidden presence of US chemical weapons in Panama
The war on Iraq is not be by any stretch of the imagination the first invasion of a foreign country by the US. In fact the tiny country of Panama had already been invaded 20 times, when in 1989 a US raid was launched in the name of regime change. This time it was to arrest the Panamanian president Manuel Noriega.
But the parallels did not end there. We learned that the US used and tested biological and chemicals weapons routinely in Panama and actually left behind 2 tons of VX nerve agents when it finally vacated the Canal Zone in 1999. While the people on San Jose Island in Panama don't dare touch the rusting mustard gas bombs on their beaches the US makes the case against Saddam Hussein for possession of some of the same materials they left behind in Panama. While Iraq is being punished for possession of weapons that they may or may not have, the US government refuses to help in the cleanup of Panama where they left enough chemical and biological weapons to poison the country for generations to come.
John Lindsay Poland had come that night to talk to us about his research into this suppressed history. His book, Emperors in the Jungle is now becoming big news. It is more than a report on chemical weapons, although Lindsay-Poland did most of the original research and detective work on this. It is a history of Panama around the legacies of US intervention, beginning with the building of the Panama Canal to the poisoning of the rainforest to "protect" the canal to the School of the Americas - much of this unknown to most people in the US and even to many Panamanians.
John Lindsay-Poland is author of Emperors in the Jungle and the Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation's task force on Latin America and the Caribbean.
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