Quart helps negotiate Noriega's surrender in Panama

Quart helps negotiate Noriega's surrender in Panama, a crisis remembered as both a model of Vatican diplomacy and the source of the only professional scar he carries. The operation establishes his capacity for controlled, unconventional action: he manages a crowded diplomatic refuge, helps secure Noriega’s surrender, and arranges an escape for one endangered guest, yet a soldier who knows nothing of the secret agreement breaks Quart’s shoulder despite his clerical collar and Vatican passport. Years later, the scar beneath his left collarbone remains a physical record of how little formal protection can guarantee.

Mission and Setting

The U.S. invasion of Panama had begun only hours before Quart arrived at the Vatican nunciature, following a hazardous flight from Costa Rica. His official assignment was to assist the nuncio; his actual task was to take control of the negotiations and report directly to the Institute for External Works, replacing Monsignor Héctor Bonino in that role. Bonino was an Argentine-Italian outside the diplomatic service and lacked the full confidence of the Secretariat of State in handling unconventional matters.

The nunciature had become a refuge for a disparate group caught inside the crisis: a Nicaraguan head of Noriega’s counterintelligence, five Basque members of ETA, a Cuban economic adviser who repeatedly threatened suicide unless he could return safely to Havana, a Spanish intelligence agent, three Colombian drug traffickers, and Noriega himself. Outside, U.S. soldiers had placed barbed wire and anti-tank barriers around the building and set up loudspeakers that played hard rock around the clock to wear down the nuncio and those sheltering with him. The diplomatic mission thus unfolded under both political pressure and deliberate psychological harassment.

Negotiation and the Nunciature

In exchange for asylum, Bonino required the refugees to attend Mass each day. The account makes the requirement vivid through the incongruous congregation it produces: the Cuban, the traffickers, the ETA members, the Nicaraguan, and the Spanish agent exchange the sign of peace, while Noriega recites prayers and beats his breast beneath the nuncio’s stern gaze. Outside, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in U.S.A.” pounds through the siege. The scene places a religious rite inside a political refuge, where people divided by national and criminal affiliations are temporarily gathered into a common ritual.

Quart’s work was not confined to formal mediation. On the critical night, when Delta Force commandos with blackened faces attempted to storm the nunciature, he kept in telephone contact with the archbishops of New York and Chicago until they secured President Bush’s order against the assault. Noriega eventually surrendered without imposing many conditions. The Nicaraguan and the ETA members were discreetly moved out of Panama; the traffickers disappeared and later resurfaced in Medellín. The surrender was therefore part of a wider effort to manage the fates of everyone sheltering in the building, not simply to conclude Noriega’s standoff.

The Secret Escape and the Injury

A separate, secret arrangement concerned the Cuban adviser, Girón. A Spanish intelligence agent helped Quart smuggle him out of the nunciature in the trunk of an old rented Chevrolet Impala, risking his career in the process. The secrecy of the arrangement had a direct consequence: the U.S. soldier Kowalski did not know about it. When the Cuban’s presence in the trunk was detected, Quart’s attempt at mediation ended in a blow that broke his shoulder, notwithstanding his clerical collar and papal passport. The incident turns the symbols of diplomatic and religious standing into inadequate shields against a soldier acting without the relevant information.

Girón’s later fate further complicates the episode. He spent a month in a Miami jail, did not carry out his repeated threat to kill himself, and obtained political asylum in the United States after giving an interview to Reader’s Digest under the headline “I too was deceived by Castro.” The secret extraction achieved his departure from the nunciature, but not an uncomplicated return to Cuba or an immediate release from danger.

The Scar and Quart’s Discipline

When Quart recalls the operation, the scar beneath his left collarbone is its lasting bodily consequence. He acquired it when Kowalski struck him with a rifle butt after Quart displayed his Vatican diplomatic passport at the nunciature. Monsignor Spada treats the scar with irony, calling it a red badge of courage or a martyr’s palm, and jokes that the American soldier was another Pole. Quart, by contrast, would have preferred Kowalski to take the passport seriously. The injury is at once an impressive credential to Curia officials and a reminder, for Quart, that the credentials failed at the decisive moment.

The memory also clarifies Quart’s self-conception. He measures time carefully, prizes self-control, and regards obedience to his own rule as more reliable than spontaneous feeling. Spada euphemistically describes his willingness to cross other codes as operating on the outer edge of legality; Quart nonetheless sees himself as an honest, quiet Templar whose faith is the soldier’s faith. Panama supplies that identity with an emblem: a wound earned in service, but also an encounter with the limits of rule-bound procedure and institutional protection.

Ritual, Protection, and the Seville Church

The recollection of Panama sits beside Quart’s later experience of Mass at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. There, he observes Father Príamo Ferro celebrate with old-fashioned vestments, including the amice and a guitar-shaped chasuble, and use Latin for portions of the Mass that church regulations since Paul VI prescribed in the local language. Quart initially approaches Ferro with skepticism, but the ritual’s solemnity moves him. He recognizes that the congregation’s attention to the priest’s hands and words offers comfort, whatever their certainty about divine reward or punishment.

That ritual has material force as well as spiritual and emotional meaning. The church remains protected from demolition so long as a Mass is said for Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija each Thursday at eight in the morning, the hour and day of his death in 1709. Father Ferro in fact celebrates Mass every day, twice on Sundays and holy days, while the Thursday observance carries the specific condition on which the church’s protection depends. An archbishop’s representative and a notary paid by Pencho Gavira watch from the back pews for any mistake or lapse. In the remembered Panamanian refuge and the threatened Seville church alike, recurring religious observance operates within institutional conflict: in one case as a condition attached to asylum, in the other as a safeguard for a building and the community gathered inside it.