On Sunday evening, a commercial airliner landed here with much less fanfare, carrying him back. After flying more than 15 hours from Paris, where he had served additional time for money laundering, Mr. Noriega arrived at El Renacer Prison, a former American facility, to complete a 20-year sentence for three convictions stemming from several deaths and await possible further judgment in Panama’s courts.
As the plane descended, a doctor checked Mr. Noriega, 77, who appeared to react to seeing the capital city from the air for the first time in years, a correspondent on the plane said.
Mr. Noriega was kept out of public view after he landed at 6:08 p.m. aboard Iberia Airlines Flight 6345. A photo released by the Panamanian government showed him at the prison in a wheelchair, with a thin smile and wearing a dark suit, a red tie and a dark windbreaker slung partly over him.
Later, prison officials, responding to rumors that Mr. Noriega was not really in Panama, wheeled him to a doorway and Mr. Noriega, now in a red long-sleeve shirt and white sweatpants, gestured to reporters kept far away. The prison director, Ángel Calderón, said Mr. Noriega was declining interviews and close-up pictures, as his right.
The limited glimpse just added to many Panamanians’ sense of Mr. Noriega as a cipher. Three-quarters of the citizens were young children when he was seized, so he often comes across as someone parents may talk about but one who arouses little passion either way.
Panama has clearly moved on. It has held four presidential elections declared clean by international observers. An economic boom has altered the skyline with gleaming skyscrapers. Even longtime opponents concede that public rancor has faded, although many who lost loved ones or were tortured under the Noriega dictatorship, from 1983 to 1989, said they would fight for him to face additional trials here and demand his accomplices pay, too.
Relatives of Dr. Hugo Spadafora,
a popular opponent whose decapitated body was found in 1985, recently demanded that Mr. Noriega disclose the location of Dr. Spadafora’s skull. Others believe Mr. Noriega can shed light on dozens of murders and disappearances, and there is speculation he harbors political secrets that can damage the elite.
Still, he is largely the obsession of longtime Noriega watchers, not Panamanians in general.
“There is no hatred among the public,” said Guillermo Sanchez Borbon, a co-author of the Noriega biography “In the Time of the Tyrants.” “We Panamanians are the kind of people to make a fuss for a couple of days and then move on.”
Demonstrations leading up to his return were small, and on Sunday people flocked instead to the annual holiday children’s parade on Calle 50, a major thoroughfare here that was a hotbed of protest when he ruled.
Renata Flores, 52, said she had waved white flags and banged pots in protests in the months before Mr. Noriega’s departure but shrugged off his return now.
“He has been in prison and is probably not going to have a big impact now,” she said, holding the hand of her niece, Florencia, 12.
Florencia said she knew little about Mr. Noriega.
“The truth is,” she said, “I only know they used to call him Pineapple Face,” a reference to his severe acne and resulting scars.
It was, then, a somewhat anticlimactic end to an extraordinary odyssey.
Mr. Noriega rose through the ranks of the military during the 1970s and 1980s, eventually assuming command and essentially running the country through threats, intimidation and force.
He was an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Drug Enforcement Administration, historians have written, but also took payments from Colombian drug traffickers to allow cocaine to pass through Panama to the United States, American prosecutors said.
As tensions grew, President George Bush ordered an invasion on Dec. 20, 1989, of more than 27,000 troops, then the largest American military action since the Vietnam War.
Mr. Noriega, exhausted and tormented by deafening heavy metal music that troops played outside the Vatican Embassy, where he had taken refuge, surrendered on Jan. 4, 1990. He was convicted on drug and racketeering charges in 1992 and, at the conclusion of his prison sentence in Miami, was
extradited to France in 2010.
With his French sentence completed, Mr. Noriega could have walked free had Panama not requested his extradition, Foreign Minister Roberto Henriquez has said, batting away suggestions from critics of Panama’s president, Ricardo Martinelli, that he orchestrated Mr. Noriega’s return to distract attention from political scandals at home.
Those who had fought his regime said they hoped his arrival reminded people that democracy should not be taken for granted.
“Society should remember again that the military cannot return to power,” said Roberto Arosemena, a former opposition party leader repeatedly beaten by Mr. Noriega’s police in 1987.
PANAMA
