By the second day of rioting, there were more than five hundred reported injuries, hundreds of fires, and close to $250 million in estimated damage. The conflagration, which began to lap at other parts of the city, soon persuaded state and federal authorities to send in troops—six thousand National Guardsmen and a thousand federal agents. Two hundred of those agents belonged to a special operations force of the US Marshals that President Bush had recently dispatched to Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega.
