Manuel Noriega spends six years as Panama's military strongman, holding the power of life and death over a country he never formally leads as president. The film traces how he builds that power through the National Guard, cultivates loyalty with staged rallies where crowds cheer him on, and quietly works both sides of the Cold War as an intelligence asset for Washington even as he runs cocaine through Panama into the United States. That contradiction catches up with him: after years of shielding his private life behind rumor and secrecy, he becomes the target of a US drug indictment and, when American forces invade Panama in 1989, ends up in an unusual legal category, treated as a prisoner of war rather than an ordinary defendant. The film follows that arc from adulation to arrest, using it as a case study in how a strongman's usefulness to bigger powers can run out. It closes with Noriega facing trial in an American courtroom, the mystery he cultivated finally stripped away.