In Washington
the White House strategists made it manifestly clear
to John Ingersoll that the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs was expected to arrest and bring to trial at least
one major international trafficker, to give the entire
foreign crusade credibility. Up to this point, Ingersoll's
agents had not netted any such international trafficker
because, as Ingersoll explained to Attorney General
Mitchell, "Major traffickers do not usually violate
the laws of the country that they reside in, and even
if they do, they are usually protected there by local
officials whom they pay off." According to the
bureau's deputy director, John Finlator, the attempt
of two American narcotics agents to "snatch"
a major heroin supplier in Mexico had resulted in the
agents' fatally shooting five Mexican traffickers with
M-1 carbines; but since the agents had no authority
to be in Mexico, the shoot-out had to be hushed up (and
Mexican police were given credit for killing the bandits).
To achieve the visible success that the White House
strategists desired, Ingersoll realized that a foreign
trafficker would have to be legally lured to American
soil.
The opportunity presented itself
in December, 1970, when two United States narcotics
agents, posing as members of the Mafia, made a "connection"
in Panama with Joaquim Him Gonzales, who was then chief
of air traffic control and deputy inspector general
of civil aviation in Panama. The forty-two-year-old
Panamanian had also been identified by the BNDD as "the
man everybody had to know in Panama" to transship
narcotics through Panama's Tecumen International Airport.
The undercover agents thus arranged to have Gonzales
witness an arrangement they made with a Texas pilot
to obtain one hundred kilos of cocaine for them. Although
they never received their cocaine, they flew back to
Dallas, Texas, where they presented their evidence of
a "conspiracy" to a federal grand jury, which
promptly indicted Him Gonzales as a member of the conspiracy.
Although Ingersoll initially hoped that the indictment
of a major trafficker would suffice, the White House
made it clear that they still wanted the traffickers
arrested and tried in the United States, with all the
attendant publicity that it would create. Panama, however,
did not have a conspiracy law, and was unwilling to
extradite the chief of air traffic control to the United
States for trial. A few enterprising officials of the
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs thus carefully
arranged a trap for the Panamanian official. Since Him
Gonzales frequently played in a softball game between
Panamanian aviation employees and American officials
stationed in the Canal Zone, a narrow strip of land
along the Panama Canal which is administered by the
United States government and policed by a United States
Army military garrison, the agents arranged to arrest
him during one of the softball games. Thus, when Him
Gonzales arrived at the softball field on February 6,
1971, a narcotics agent pointed a gun at him and announced,
"You are on United States territory and we are
putting you under arrest on a charge of conspiring to
smuggle narcotics."
The American ambassador to
Panama, Robert Savre, was not told of the plan to arrest
a high Panamanian official in the Canal Zone. At the
time, he was in the midst of delicate negotiations for
renewing the United States lease on the Panama Canal,
and one of the main issues to be resolved was the question
of sovereignty over the Canal Zone. When the Panamanians
read in their newspapers that their air traffic controller
had been arrested by American narcotics agents in the
Canal Zone, they exploded, Ambassador Sayre later recalled.
The Panamanian negotiators demanded that Him Gonzales
be released and that American police control in the
Canal Zone be limited and put under the supervision
of Panamanians. Suddenly the whole Panama Canal treaty
was beclouded by the act of narcotics agents trying
to deliver to the White House an international trafficker.
The State Department advised the White House of the
new crisis in Panama, but the BNDD refused to release
the alleged conspirator. Meanwhile, the narcotics agents
placed Him Gonzales on a Super Starjet Air Force plane
and delivered the bewildered Panamanian to U.S. marshals
in Dallas. Newspapers in Panama reacted by charging
that the United States had kidnapped an official of
their government. Panama's foreign minister protested
to Ambassador Sayre not only that the arrest was illegal
but that United States undercover agents had come to
Panama with false identification papers in order to
entrap a Panamanian official. Letters from Attorney
General Mitchell and an "embassy" from the
director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs
failed to mitigate the anti-American campaign generated
by this incident. Ambassador Sayre said he found that
it became difficult "to renegotiate ... the Panama
Canal in this atmosphere." With the government-controlled
press of Panama featuring stories about how Joaquim
Him Gonzales's ten-year-old daughter was waiting for
America to return her kidnapped father, it became difficult
for Panamanian politicians to agree to a new treaty
which granted the United States de facto sovereignty
over the Canal Zone. Unable to complete the renegotiations
of the treaty, the dispute dragging on, Ambassador Sayre
returned to Washington in 1973 to become inspector general
of the State Department. (Gonzales was sentenced in
Texas to five years in prison.)
In less than two years the
Nixon crusades managed to interfere seriously with the
objectives of American foreign policy. In Mexico the
Good Neighbor Policy was confused by Operation Intercept.
In Turkey the NATO arrangements to defend the eastern
Mediterranean area were undercut by our demands that
the Turks suppress poppy flower cultivation. In France
the American embassy was embarrassed by the attempts
to find local heroin laboratories. And in Panama the
vital Panama Canal was nearly lost by the pirating away
of one alleged international trafficker.
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