It's no fun being an ex-dictator
It’s interesting (well, for me at least) to see what happens to former dictators, and it might also be interesting to do an analysis to understand different outcomes—freedom, exile, arrest, assassination, etc. Manuel Noriega is about to get out of prison and his lawyer says he wants to live a “quiet retirement” in Panama. However, both the French and Panamanian governments want him to do some more jail time so he will stay in the “arrest” category for the foreseeable future.
Or maybe I should make a pitch for a “Where Are They Now?” VH1 type of show.
4 comments:
That's actually a great idea for a journalistic piece. Impunity is such a problem in the region.
Just in the past year, Pinochet and Stroessner died without ever standing trial (though Pinochet was under house arrest a lot). Now let's see what happens with Fujimori too.
Incidentally, Panama itself is still quite the place for exiled Presidents with various sordid histories, Raoul Cedras from Haiti, Abdula Bucaram from Ecuador, y Jose Serrano from Guatemala. I don't know what Martin Torres' policy is or would be now, but Panama in the past has abetted the concept of impunity.
Noriega himself is a very strange and homicidal guy; I don't think he should be set loose anywhere, least of all in Panama.
That's interesting--I'd love to see where all those exiles ended up.
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