Michael Durant watched through night-vision goggles as two 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs slammed on to the Panamanian airbase while he hovered off the country’s south coast in a Black Hawk helicopter.
“A gigantic flash, followed by a boom … [like] the largest lightning strike you’ve ever seen in your life,” the retired US army pilot recalled of the opening salvo of the Battle of Rio Hato Airfield in December 1989.
The stealth bomber blitzkrieg and subsequent army ranger assault marked the start of the US invasion of Panama – Operation Just Cause – designed to dethrone Panama’s military dictator, Manuel Noriega.
Durant and his colleagues had orders to capture the Panamanian Defense Force (PDF) base to stop troops coming to Noriega’s rescue. Over the coming days, the pilot and more than 25,000 other American troops hunted the autocrat, who finally surrendered on 3 January 1990.
Related: US ‘Night Stalkers’ seen in Caribbean as fears of regime change rise in Venezuela
“Noriega was a bad, bad man … and he needed to be removed,” said Durant.
Memories of Just Cause have resurfaced in recent weeks after Donald Trump ordered the largest US military buildup in Latin America and the Caribbean since that invasion almost four decades ago.
A seventh of US naval assets – including the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford – have been sent to the region since August, with B-52 bombers and special forces spotted off Venezuela’s northern coast. Airstrikes on alleged drug boats in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea have killed more than 60 people.
Officially, the deployment of warships, Reaper drones and about 10,000 service personnel is part of a crackdown on Latin American narco-traffickers who Trump accuses of flooding the US with drugs. But many suspect Trump’s real goal is toppling Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, just as George HW Bush toppled Noriega before he was tried and jailed in the US.
Some members of Venezuela’s opposition appear keen for a replay of Just Cause, on an even greater scale. The exiled politician Leopoldo López recently voiced support for a US attack to unseat Maduro, who is widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election. But many observers, including Trump backers, question the wisdom of invading a country 12 times larger than Panama, and more politically and geographically complex.
“Not to be the bearer of bad news, but it looks like we are about to embark on another regime change war, like, next week,” Tucker Carlson declared last week, flagging Iraq as a prime example of the US’s ignominious track record of regime changes gone wrong.
“It never works – but we are doing it again, apparently,” Carlson said.
A recent YouGov poll found almost half of Americans opposed using military force to overthrow Maduro with only 18% supportive.
Durant also had reservations, despite considering Just Cause the most successful mission of his two-decade military career. He was certain US troops could overthrow Maduro, as they did Noriega. “We have tremendous capability and great people. But is it worth putting all that at risk?” wondered Durant, who was shot down and held captive for 11 days in Somalia during a 1993 operation that left members of the 18 US military dead.
Before Just Cause, thousands of US troops were stationed in Panama, Durant noted, but it has no such presence in Venezuela.
It was also unclear how capable Maduro’s Bolivarian armed forces were of fighting back. “That to me is the biggest wildcard,” Durant said. “They do good parades. But what can they really do? Are they trained? Are they resourced? Are they willing to fight? Are they loyal?”
Michael Grow, a historian who wrote a book about US presidents and Latin American cold war interventions, saw “intriguing similarities” to past operations.
In 1988, on the eve of Just Cause, the US indicted Noriega for drug smuggling – just as they have with Maduro who recently had a $50m bounty put on his head for allegedly running a “narco-terrorist” cartel. “So … they’ve established a convenient pretext if they choose to pursue a military route,” Grow said.
“But I don’t think it’s on the cards with Trump … These people are not neocons. They’re much more America First … I just don’t see the US getting involved in a land war in South America,” Grow added, although he did not rule out “surgical strike drone warfare”.
James Story, the US’s top diplomat for Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, also doubted a Just Cause-style onslaught was coming: “We always like overwhelming force and it would take 100,000 troops – and that’s not Trump.”
But the former ambassador – who initially considered Trump’s military buildup sabre-rattling – now saw an 80% chance of “some proactive action” on Venezuelan soil in the next 30 days, probably an airstrike. “The amount of assets that have been arranged in the zone indicate to me that we’re going to do something,” Story said.
Grow thought a better analogy than Panama was what happened in Guatemala in 1954 when the US brought down its democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, with what the historian called “a masterpiece of psychological warfare and bluff”.
Operation PBSuccess – ordered by Dwight Eisenhower to extinguish a spurious communist threat – involved using a CIA-funded disinformation and sabotage campaign to convince Guatemalan military officials they were on the brink of being attacked by “a powerful liberation army” and should abandon Árbenz to avoid “devastating US retribution”.
“[Árbenz was] in effect deposed in a military coup produced by US intimidation and deception,” wrote Grow, who suspected something similar might be afoot with Venezuela, as Trump waged a war of nerves hoping “the Venezuelan armed forces will take him out for us”.
Last month Trump confirmed he had authorized covert CIA operations in Venezuela.
Story also believed Trump’s desired outcome was for “somebody close to Maduro” to do one of three things. “Send him into exile; send him to the US; or send him to meet his maker.”
But the US has spent years trying to break Maduro’s regime, most memorably during Trump’s first term when he recognized the opposition leader Juan Guiadó as Venezuela’s rightful president. Such efforts have repeatedly failed.
Last weekend, Trump claimed Maduro’s days were numbered. But John Polga-Hecimovich, a Venezuela expert from the US Naval Academy, said Maduro’s foes had been claiming “his days were numbered” almost since he succeeded Hugo Chávez in 2013.
Maduro has remained in power, thanks to a masterful strategy of regime “coup proofing” which involved packing the military with Cuban and Venezuelan spies and using torture, purges, promotions and largesse to ensure loyalty, he said.
“He has promoted 2,200 officers to the positions of general or admiral over the past 12 years. That’s basically three times as many generals and admirals as exist in the US,” said Polga-Hecimovich, the co-editor of a book about the Maduro regime.
“Getting the military to overthrow him is not as easy maybe as his opponents might portray it – that’s not to say that it’s impossible,” added Polga-Hecimovich noting how none of more than half a dozen military mutinies had snowballed.
Durant hoped Trump’s deployment was about intimidating Maduro and the military, not a prelude to invasion. “Actually putting boots on the ground, I would not support that at this point,” said the pilot, calling a coup “the perfect solution”.
Even if Maduro was successfully toppled, that would not necessarily usher in a brighter future. “[Sometimes] you just remove one problem and replace it with another,” Durant said, highlighting the 2001 Afghanistan invasion as “a cautionary tale” of how interventions sometimes veered off course. “No one went in there thinking we’d be there for 20 years,” he said.
Grow recalled how, from Washington’s perspective, the 1954 Guatemala gambit had “worked astonishingly well”. Eisenhower was said to be “immensely pleased” and his CIA chief, Allen Dulles, “exuberant”.
But for the Central American country the CIA-sponsored coup was a disaster: Árbenz’s resignation ushered in more than four decades of dictatorship and civil war during which more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared.
Polga-Hecimovich feared a US intervention in Venezuela might also “unleash a great deal of chaos” and provoke “an enduring low-intensity conflict”.
“What happens the day after?” he asked. “I sure hope people are considering this.”
