Combat In Panama : Vigilantes in Panama Take Back the Streets From Looters, Mobs : Law and order: Hundreds of armed citizens patrol capital. But they find that the stores have been stripped bare.

PANAMA CITY —  With handcuffs on his belt loop and a pistol on his hip, Ricardo de Ovaldia stood guard at a street-corner barricade in the middle-class Cangrejo neighborhood Saturday trying to impose order on a city without a police force.

“There is no law and order, so it’s the law of the strongest,” De Ovaldia said. “But we just shoot in the air and the people run away.”

The 37-year-old doctor was one of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Panamanians who turned out to take back the capital from the bands of civilian looters and paramilitary mobs who reigned during the first days of a U.S. military invasion to oust Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel A. Noriega.

The capital was the calmest it had been since the occupation began with air strikes and ground combat at 1 a.m. Wednesday. Many people left their homes for the first time to take stock of the trashed and battered city, and to look for food for their hungry families.

What they saw were scenes of jubilation, fear and anger, a city that had been transformed since they went to bed Tuesday night.

The vast majority of warehouses and department stores were looted out--there was nothing left to steal--and naked mannequins lay among mounds of garbage in the street.

The municipal market opened, with overripe oranges and green bananas for sale. The traffic of wounded civilians slowed at public hospitals, allowing doctors and nurses to rest, many for the first time in three days. Meanwhile, grieving families arrived at hospital morgues to collect their dead.

Garrisons that once belonged to Noriega’s Panama Defense Forces were under U.S. control, and, surrounded by American troops, the new government of President Guillermo Endara went to work in the Foreign Ministry building in Plaza Porras.

“Restoring law and order is our No. 1 priority,” said Vice President Guillermo (Billy) Ford. “We hope to have everything cleaned up in the next 72 hours--the paramilitary out and no more shooting in the streets.”

Outside the still-smoldering ruins of Noriega’s military headquarters, poor residents of the leveled El Chorrillo neighborhood swarmed journalists and their American military guides.

“ Viva President Bush!” cheered 18-year-old Alejandro Bullen.

Most of the men and women had lost their homes or shops to the blaze that broke out after the American air attack, and yet they expressed conviction that the powerful United States--the country that ousted their dictator--would right the rest of their nation’s ills.

“Work, clothes and food,” said a smiling Bullen, who has never held a job.

Dr. Alonso Alvarado, an emergency room surgeon at the Social Security Hospital, strained his bloodshot eyes looking for the list of those who had been treated for gunshot wounds, burns and cuts since the invasion began. The tally: adults, 358; children, 153.

“Even before this invasion, the economic blockade had reduced our capacity to operate--now this,” Alvarado said. “We have no glucose, medicines, oxygen, sutures. And there’s not enough food in the hospital for the sick or us.”

Upstairs, the morgue is overflowing with scores of bodies--three to a refrigerator drawer, and others lying on the floor.

“Many died of lesser wounds because they couldn’t get to the hospital through the fighting,” said Dr. Juan Mejia. “We aren’t used to war here and weren’t prepared. We had no transportation, nothing to treat people at the scene. We don’t have enough surgeons, and many of our doctors couldn’t get to work.”

Many doctors and nurses were angry with the U.S. government for using military force to solve a political problem. Others indicated they had supported Noriega and considered him a nationalist.

The invasion, they said, was a historical error.

“To install a government and hunt for one man, they have destroyed a nation,” said nurse Silvia Fernandez. “While Europe is uniting, they (the United States) are destroying us here. This is something out of the last century.”

If anxiety and tension were the order of the day, so too was boredom. With the military threat eased but shops closed, huge throngs of people spent their day aimlessly strolling up and down the streets of their towns.

“They’re all just walking because there’s nothing else to do,” explained Pedro Pimentel in La Chorrera, 20 miles west of the Panama Canal.

To be sure, not everyone was an idler. In La Chorrera, hundreds of hungry residents stood in line seeking admission to the two grocery stores that looters had missed and were reopened Friday by U.S. troops. Soldiers stood guard at the door and let shoppers in one by one.

“It’s the price to pay for freedom,” said Roland Zamora, who had been standing in an even longer grocery line of a thousand shoppers for more than three hours in Panama City.

Residents of some smaller communities were not as lucky.

Trapped between two strategic American roadblocks on the Pan American Highway, the people of Arraijan were unable to venture very far to search for food. Many milled in the center of town, staring, and frequently cheering, at U.S. troops while all the time asking them for something to eat.

“We have no rice, we have no flour, we have no gas, we have no milk,” said an exasperated villager in similar straits in the Pacific Ocean hamlet of Veracruz.

“How am I going to feed my family? The stores aren’t open.”

American officials had long raged about the greed and utter cheek of Manuel A. Noriega and his pals. But Rigoberto Paredes may have taken the cake.

Paredes, Noriega’s political boss in Arraijan and the reputed head of a local goon squad who beat up those who got in his way, made a lot of enemies in the village, which sits near the Panama Canal on the Pan American Highway.

As soon as American troops marched into town early Wednesday, Paredes fled and villagers began flooding soldiers with tips and rumors about his whereabouts.

In the process, troops also took over Paredes’ mansion on the outskirts of town. On Thursday night the phone rang in the house, and when an American soldier picked it up, there was Paredes on the other end.

“Paredes called his house and he said he wanted it back,” said Cpl. Jeff Newsome, a Marine platoon leader stationed in the town. “He was told he would get it back when he surrenders.”

The fugitive hung up and has not been heard from since.

Soldiers pulled out of the house later that night, and the next morning residents of Arraijan ransacked it and burned it to the ground.

In La Chorrera, 3,000 townsfolk surrounded the headquarters of the defunct Panama Defense Forces--now a U.S. army command post.

American A-7 fighter planes armed with 20-millimeter cannons took out the base Wednesday night and came in with ground troops Saturday morning. Curious men, women and children moved in behind the gringos .

Like spectators at a holiday parade, they lined the road and gawked from rooftops and tree limbs.