Updated February 24, 2025 at 15:26 PM ET
EL CHORRILLO, Panama – At the top of a hill in this working-class neighborhood in Panama City, Efraín Guerrero tells an American tour group how his parents responded when the U.S. government invaded these streets 35 years ago.
“They hid us under the bed,” Guerrero, 39, says through a translator.
In December 1989, thousands of U.S. troops came to Guerrero’s neighborhood and opened fire. Troops were looking for Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who was wanted by the U.S. government for racketeering and drug trafficking charges.
Now, 35 years later, the U.S. government is once again focused on Guerrero’s home. President Trump has threatened to “take back” the Panama Canal. When a reporter recently asked whether he’d consider using the military to take back the canal, Trump said, “I’m not going to commit to that now.”
Experts say the U.S. is unlikely to seek a violent conflict with Panama, but to people who survived one American invasion already, those assurances aren’t much comfort.
Julissa Jaramillo remembers what the grown-ups told her when she was 16.
“They kept telling us the wolf is coming, the wolf is coming,” Jaramillo says through a translator.
For people in this neighborhood, the U.S. invasion, known as Operation Just Cause, was a dividing line in their lives. There was a before and an after.
“They say it was a just cause. It was not a just cause,” she says. “They say it was an intervention. But it was an invasion.”
Another resident, 63-year-old Samuel Ricaurte Castañeda, remembers trying to reach his mother on the other side of town when the first wave of gunshots rang out.
“I don’t want this to happen again,” he says through a translator. “With all my heart, I don’t want this to happen again … I would give my life for Panama.”
Preserving a unique piece of Panamanian history
Guerrero founded a cultural heritage group, Movimiento Cultural Identidad, that works to preserve the history of El Chorrillo. He also conducts walking tours that he calls an “immersive museum.”
During a recent tour, Guerrero showed bullet holes where fighting was the fiercest, the repurposed ruins of Noriega’s military infrastructure, and cenotaphs to commemorate civilians killed in the crossfire. He also stopped at street corners and shared photographs on his tablet from the same intersection 35 years ago — images of American soldiers bearing down on civilians contrasted with today’s backdrop of luxury apartments.
The reality is that this neighborhood is changing. Once home to immigrants working on the construction of the Panama Canal, it was heavily damaged during the invasion and later became a place known for criminal violence. Now, luxury high-rises are beginning to tower over the streets.
More so than ever, Guerrero says, the community is willing to defend a neighborhood once destroyed — to preserve not only a unique piece of Panamanian cultural heritage but also their homes, on their own resilient terms.
“I grew up here. I don’t want to see a world where my daughter doesn’t know her roots,” he says. “Or be in a world where the old timers lose theirs.”
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