WASHINGTON — It is a story Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro surely knows well. A Latin American strongman was in hiding, surrounded by U.S. troops, heavy metal blaring through the night.
In December 1989, Gen. Manuel Noriega’s run as dictator of Panama was reaching a humiliating end. U.S. troops had invaded the country, with orders to capture Noriega and bring him to trial.
They would wind up surrounding his final hideout, tormenting him for 10 days with loudspeakers blasting songs from the likes of Black Sabbath and Guns N’ Roses until he surrendered into handcuffs.
Today, as President Donald Trump considers military action in Venezuela, the parallels between Noriega and Maduro grow more and more significant, and some Trump officials hope the Venezuelan president will meet a similar fate.
Like Noriega more than 30 years ago, Maduro has been federally indicted on drug trafficking charges. And U.S. officials maintain that the Venezuelan is not a foreign leader but a criminal who must be “brought to justice,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said.
In a national address announcing the invasion of Panama, President George H.W. Bush laid out his grounds for moving against Noriega, a defiant nationalist who brandished a machete in public and hosted cocaine-fueled parties at his lavish mansions. They included Noriega’s dictatorial rule, concerns about the security of the Panama Canal, and the brash general’s increasing hostility toward the United States. (In a final straw, Noriega’s forces had killed a U.S. Marine at a roadblock.)
But Bush also stressed Noriega’s status as a wanted criminal. The Justice Department had indicted him on charges of taking huge bribes in return for letting drug traffickers ship cocaine through his country.
“I directed our armed forces to protect the lives of American citizens in Panama and to bring Gen. Noriega to justice in the United States,” Bush said.
For Noriega, escape was never an option. As Operation Just Cause began, a team of Navy SEALs crept onto an airfield and blasted Noriega’s personal Learjet with an anti-tank gun. SEAL divers sank a potential getaway boat with explosives. In all, some 27,000 U.S. troops deployed.
As the assault began, a panicked Noriega, accompanied by a mistress, wove through Panama City in an unmarked Hyundai and went into hiding. At one point, he ducked incognito into a Dairy Queen before taking refuge in the embassy of the Holy See in Panama City. Delta Force commandos and U.S. Army tanks quickly surrounded the building, which they could not storm, and demanded his surrender.
When he refused, the music kicked in. The playlist was designed for maximum stress — and ridicule: Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” Van Halen’s “Panama,” Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
Brent Scowcroft, who was serving as national security adviser to Bush, later called the tactic “a low moment in U.S. Army history.”
But Noriega eventually surrendered and was hauled to Florida for trial. (The general’s years of service as a secret CIA asset providing intelligence about Latin America were not enough to save him.) He was convicted and spent the rest of his life in prison until just before his death in 2017 in a Panamanian hospital after brain surgery.
Noriega may be gone, but his story has not been forgotten — not by Maduro or Trump administration officials, many of whom have spent years trying to topple the Venezuelan leader.
Noriega’s capture sometimes came up during debates in Trump’s first term about how to deal with Maduro, according to two former officials from the time. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, then the national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence and now a presidential envoy to Ukraine, had firsthand experience in Panama as an infantry assault commander during the operation.
Among the options Trump officials considered at the time were a large-scale U.S. invasion of the country and “a smaller, special operation targeted directly at Maduro,” Trump’s former defense secretary Mark Esper wrote in a 2022 memoir.
But the similarities between Panama 1989 and Venezuela 2025 are dangerously misleading, some analysts warn. Any U.S. effort to apprehend or kill Maduro, they say, would be far more treacherous than the operation to corral Noriega.
“When people talk very loosely and say, ‘Well, we’ll just take him out,’ it’s useful to recall 1989,” said Michael Shifter, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service with extensive experience in Latin America.
“When one confronts the realities of what it would require, you conclude how crazy it would be to commit American troops for regime change in Venezuela,” he added.
Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. efforts to depose hostile Latin American rulers have largely been failures. They include Trump’s own unsuccessful first-term push to oust Maduro, which sought to capitalize on the street protests across Venezuela in 2019.
Still, experts say the similarities between 1989 and today must be unsettling to Maduro.
“There are parallels,” said Elliott Abrams, who served as U.S. special envoy for Venezuela during Trump’s first term. “One is that the guy running the government is someone we do not view as a legitimate head of government. And both are drug traffickers.”
In September, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro was “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world.” The Venezuelan leader, she added, “will not escape justice.”
And like Noriega, who ran Panama though puppet politicians, Maduro is considered an illegitimate ruler by the United States because of the fraudulent elections that have kept him in power since 2013. Trump officials say he is more accurately described as a criminal cartel leader.
As a Republican senator from Florida in 2019, Rubio posted images on Twitter of several toppled dictators in what was widely seen as a warning to Maduro, as domestic unrest and U.S. pressure mounted. They included before-and-after shots of Noriega — first waving his machete before a crowd, next posing for his federal mug shot.
More recently, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., an ally of Rubio, warned in a late September interview that Maduro might “rot in jail for the rest of his life like Noriega.”
Trump may be deterred from major military action in Venezuela by the scale of the challenge. Panama was an easy target — a small country with a weak military, and in 1989, U.S. troops were already stationed there guarding the Panama Canal. Venezuela is about 12 times larger than Panama, with a population more than 10 times greater than Panama’s in 1989.
And even the puny Panama Defense Forces put up enough resistance to kill 23 U.S. troops, including four of the elite Navy SEALS who carried out the assault on Noriega’s jet. The United States has estimated that 314 Panamanian soldiers and 202 civilians died during the operation.
Maduro also enjoys a “highly skilled” inner ring of protection, Abrams said, with an elite force of bodyguards supplied by his close political allies in nearby Cuba.
Maduro, in other words, would be unlikely to be found hiding out in a Dairy Queen.
But like Maduro, Noriega was also defiant to the end. In April 1988, he thrilled a crowd when he concluded a fiery anti-U.S. speech by smashing a podium with his machete.
“This machete represents the dignity and courage of the Panamanian people,” Noriega said. “It says, ‘Not one step back.’”
Just as Noriega rejected U.S. efforts to negotiate his exit from power, Maduro has similarly refused to step down, instead offering Trump a U.S. stake in his country’s mineral wealth.
The Venezuelan leader has also invoked the memory of 1989, weaving it into a larger narrative about his defiance of what he calls American imperialism.
During a visit to Panama City in 2015, Maduro stopped to lay a wreath at a memorial to Panamanians killed in the U.S. invasion.
“Never again a U.S. invasion in Latin America,” he declared.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
