Panama Deception

Shock. Disgust. Outrage. Disbelief. These were the words that kept replaying in my head after seeing "Panama Deception." Director Barbra Trent uses both her ideology  and camera techniques such as juxtaposition to provoke extreme emotions within the audience and shows how skewed American media really is.

Rather than shooting a documentary of the U.S. invading Panama from American media's view, Trent reveals the other side--showing how skewed American media is. Before and during the invasion, the U.S. citizens were led to believe that the purpose of the invasion was to liberate Panama from its harsh dictator, General Manuel Noriega, and bring democracy to the struggling country. In contrast, "Panama Deception" shows that the intent of the U.S. gov. was to weaken panamanian army, thus destabilizing the country, and test new, highly developed machinery on them for future conflicts and wars.

The New York Times review describes the movie as, "canny film making. Its images are moving in themselves and beautifully edited. It really doesn't need a lot of Elizabeth Montgomery's instructive narration, which constantly tells the audience what it's supposed to think. The pictures and the testimony do quite well on their own."

This editing largely made up of juxtaposed images put one right after the other--linked by the narrator like a cause and effect--creates an entirely new intended idea for the audience. For example, in the early scenes of the film, Trent juxtaposes noble military men with terrified and angered civilians of Panama, saying the opposite things about the invasion. This is trying to let the audience make the assumptions and come up with their own answers rather than shoving it down their throat. Another powerful image was when civilians told the camera crew that "everything that moved, Americans shot" but they thought that the intent was to only capture Noriega and save the civilians from his dictator ship. This image was juxtaposed  with U.S. soldiers opening fire at men, women, and children. Yet another example of this juxtaposition is shown first with a professional Representative of the U.S. government denying that Americans systematically burned houses. The juxtaposed image is of a Panamanian saying the exact opposite and then showing an entire city burned to the ground. These juxtapositions show many contradictions with what American media says. Everything about the Panama invasion was neither legal, moral nor constitutional.

After watching this documentary, it opened my eyes to its ideological point of view. It showed that the U.S. made this terrible mess because of its own greed as an empire, then tried to fix it by putting the blame on others and made it seem like they were the hero's when they came in.

When comparing this documentary to one of the History Channels, one can truly see the skewed perception of media and the control the government has on media. After watching the History Channels documentary on the Vietnam War, I was intrigued by how it never showed any actual action of the war. It only statistics of the dead rather than any footage of dead bodies and went through the series of events like it was supposed to happen and that it wasn't a big deal that we went to war without a cause. These major points in the film detached the emotional aspect to viewers and made it easier for them to just accept and move on. But uunlike "Panama Deception," they showed real footage of war, dead bodies and stories of individuals who's lives were ruined.


"Panama Deception" is a powerful documentary with many techniques and ideologies to get their message across--media always has a skewed perception. That is why as individuals with individual thoughts, we should be constantly questioning what the media says, never accepting and believing its inaccuracies.