Academy‑winning exposé The Panama Deception provokes bans, PBS censorship and a fraught debate over alleged mass graves and ‘experimental’ weapons

Scandals & Feuds3/5 wildness

Academy‑winning exposé The Panama Deception provokes bans, PBS censorship and a fraught debate over alleged mass graves and ‘experimental’ weapons

The Panama Deception (1992 documentary, dir. Barbara Trent) / 1990s

When The Panama Deception premiered in the early 1990s it read less like a conventional documentary and more like a political grenade: directed by Barbara Trent, written and edited by David Kasper, narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery and produced on a shoestring $300,000 (with Channel 4, Rhino Entertainment, the Rex Foundation, Michael Moore and others among its funders), the film argued that the United States’ 1989 invasion of Panama—Operation Just Cause—was motivated not primarily by the U.S. indictment of General Manuel Noriega but by a desire to crush the Panama Defense Forces and secure U.S. control over the Canal ahead of the Torrijos–Carter Treaty retrocession. The film presented footage it said showed burned neighborhoods, uncovered mass graves and even alleged ‘experimental’ laser‑type weapons, and it accused large segments of the U.S. press of systematic underreporting of civilian casualties.