Guillermo Endara
Guillermo Endara was president of Panama from 1989 to 1994, the lawyer whom the opposition had run against Noriega's candidate in May 1989 and who had won by three to one by every count but the government's, which annulled the election. After that Noriega's Dignity Battalions beat him and his running mates bloody in the street with iron bars in front of the cameras. He was sworn in as president on the night of 19 December 1989 at Fort Clayton, an American base in the Canal Zone, an hour before the twenty-six thousand American troops of Operation Just Cause went in to remove Noriega. That made him the president the invasion installed, an origin the country never quite forgave and he never quite lived down. The four and a half years were the reconstruction of the Chorrillo district the fighting had burned, the abolition of the Defence Forces and their replacement by a police under civilian control, written into the constitution in 1994, the return of the banks and the flight capital, and the growth of eight per cent a year after the sanctions years' collapse. There was the hunger strike he went on in 1990 for two weeks to demand the American aid Washington had promised and not sent, and the coalition of his own Panameñistas with the Christian Democrats that broke up in 1991 and left him governing with a party that his vice-president Arias Calderón had taken out. He was born in Panama City in 1936, studied law at New York University and Panama, was a protégé of the three-times president Arnulfo Arias, who was overthrown three times. He was Arias's planning minister in the eleven days of his third presidency in 1968 before Torrijos's coup. He practised law through the military years and took the Panameñista party's candidacy in 1989 when Arias died. The country's judgment was delivered in the election of 1994, which the PRD, the party Torrijos had founded and Noriega had used, won with Pérez Balladares, five years after the invasion that had removed it. Endara ran for the presidency again in 2004 and 2009 with a party of his own and lost both times, the second with two per cent. He died in Panama City in September 2009 of a heart attack, at seventy-three, and the country gave him the state funeral it had not been sure he deserved. The invasion's dead, some three hundred by the American count and several times that by others, were the number the anniversary always returned to. 20 December was made a day of national mourning in 2022.
- Lived: 1936 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: Panamanian
- Roles: president, politician
