Pit Viper
As late spring arrived and summer beckoned, Washington's attention turned to special elections to fill a number of open House seats in the aftermath of Carey's staffing his Cabinet, and the Democrats did fairly well. They held, narrowly, Tom Foley's right-trending seat in Eastern Washington, though it would finally flip Republican in the 1982 midterms, and in Maryland the widower of the late Gladys Spellman, who had slipped into a coma shortly before the election in 1980, won a seven-way primary (including defeating Steny Hoyer, the Lieutenant Governor of the State) before comfortably winning the seat itself. The only result to go south was in Arizona; the 2nd stood empty thanks to Udall's appointment to the Interior Department and the race between Jim McNulty and Jim Kolbe turned heated for the seat anchored by booming Tucson and the Sonoran Desert along the Mexican border. Udall, while certainly no "Pinto Democrat," had been a good fit for his native seat but McNulty came across awkwardly and Kolbe won with a surprisingly decisive six-point margin in a state that had effectively split her results in 1980. Two out of three wasn't bad, and DC Democrats largely chalked the loss up to McNulty's poor candidacy and anticipated a significantly redrawn Arizona map in 1982 that would likely afford Kolbe a safe seat anchored exclusively in the right-trending, suburban-heavy Tucson area.
[1]
One reason why Democrats remained optimistic after the special elections went through was that the debate over healthcare reform had only just begun to bubble up, with Ted Kennedy pushing for televised hearings. While the debate would turn somewhat more acrimonious in the fall as it intensified and a target of January or February of 1982 was circled for passing "Teddycare," in whatever form it took, it provided Americans a unique look at the machinery of Congress, for the idea of using C-SPAN to televise committee hearings and floor debates was fairly novel at that time. Though a number of Northeastern Democratic Congressmen were swept up in a corruption sting nicknamed "Abscam" due to the FBI posing as Arab sheiks to hand out bribes, the fact that the majority of those ensnared were from New Jersey seemed to simply be par for the course, and though there were plenty of jokes on late night television it didn't seem to have any particular impact on general perceptions of the party as a whole.
[2] But the big news of the summer that gave the Carey White House a spring in its step heading into what promised to be a fall that would be much tougher than the debate around the ESA was not domestic, but rather stemmed from Panama - Operation Pit Viper.
One of the great regrets of Gerald Ford had been that he had never captured either Omar Torrijos or Manuel Noriega following
Huele a Quemado and the intervention in Panama that by mid-1981 had claimed seven hundred American lives even as the country was mostly pacified and the Canal back up and running at the start of the year in full, a remarkable engineering feat that was a huge credit to the resources and expertise the United States threw at it. Still, guerilla hit-and-run attacks against both the US and post-Torrijos Panamanian government had plagued the country for three years now, and to many poorer Panamanians, Torrijos remained a populist and nationalist Robin Hood figure, and to the increasingly revolutionary Latin American left he was approaching Fidel Castro's status as secular socialist saint.
That he was captured not in Panama but rather El Salvador in a Delta Force operation codenamed Pit Viper was something of a PR coup for the Americans, then, as was the fact that he was caught with both gold bullion and suitcases of cash totaling together close to four million dollars - quite the man of the people. A brief firefight that saw six of his bodyguards killed ended with Torrijos in handcuffs at an airport near San Salvador where the US had to fend off Salvadoran security forces and rebels fighting in tandem to free him, and "Flight O" was forced to land in Jamaica to refuel as there were rumors that Cuban operatives would have attempted to shoot the plane down upon approach to Guantanamo with surface-to-air missiles on Castro's orders rather than allow Torrijos to stand trial in the United States (it should be said that these rumors ought to be taken with a grain of salt, considering how cautious and tactical Castro generally was about when and how he poked the bear).
While Noriega
[3] remained at large, the intellectual and spiritual leader of the great late 1970s left-wing revolt against American influence in the region arrived in Miami on July 28th, 1981, and was handed over the FBI to stand trial on international terrorism and money laundering charges. The Carey administration made a great show, spearheaded by Attorney General Byron White, of the fact that it regarded Torrijos primarily as a criminal rather than as an enemy combatant, and that he would be treated as such and that "the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind very fine, and we will see justice done." It was hard to find many people in America who were not excited about Torrijos' capture; Pit Viper was applauded just as loudly by the New Left in Congress as it was by the New Right.
That was not the case in Latin America, of course. For many, the capture of Torrijos - and the circumstances in which it happened - deflated their energies, while others had a newfound, steeled resolve. It was already the case that the epicenter of anti-imperialist, anti-American violence in the region was shifting south and east out of Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador and into Colombia, where the FARC and ELN movements had substantially increased their activities throughout late 1980 and into 1981, more than tripling the number of attacks carried out - primarily hit-and-run shootings of National Police officers, violent bank robberies and hostage situations, and kidnappings of prominent Colombians, especially the children of wealthy businessmen or powerful politicians. The FARC and Communists had together formed a new unified movement, the
Union Patriotica, headed by Jaime Pardo Leal, a name that would soon be very well known both in Bogota and Washington. The Ford administration had perhaps prematurely drawn down its military presence in Colombia with relative peace in Panama, and now revolutionary cadres growing in power in both Colombia and Venezuela could transit the border at will to and from jungle training camps and hideouts. It became apparent, too, that Noriega was somewhere among them, and Cuban advisors were in the trans-Andean bush of both states. The insurgency in Latin America had not ended, it had simply entered a new stage...
[1] Tucson, like Phoenix, is basically just a giant suburb in the desert after all
[2] Sorry, Garden Staters!
[3] For being a central figure in a very minor conflict (my professor of military history at UW, an active Colonel in the US Army, quipped that Operation Just Cause is referred to inside the armed forces as Operation "Just 'Cuz"), its interesting how many movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s had very explicit Noriega stand-ins and how he rose in American popular culture.
Die Hard 2 and
License to Kill in particular come to mind
