INVASION AFTERMATH: THE VICTIMS : Panama Family Mourns Taxi Driver, Absolves U.S. Troops : Invasion: Kin say the Americans had no choice but to fire, and they hope survivors will be compensated for losses.

By DOUGLAS JEHL

Jan. 10, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PANAMA CITY — There are gaping holes in the roof where Roberto Rivera once lived, and a streak of bloodstains on the floor where he died.

One minute, the 26-year-old taxi driver had been standing by his closet that early Wednesday morning, gleefully saying how happy he was that the Americans had invaded at last.

Then came the hail of metal from the sky as a U.S. helicopter gunship opened fire on the San Miguelito barrio below. Its targets were two Dignity Battalion members who had been taking potshots at the massive chopper and now were fleeing through the back alleys.

The snipers got away. But the fearsome strafing left the housebound civilians below with no such chance. As his four brothers watched from their beds in the tiny room all of them shared, Rivera was cut down in a volley that shredded the corrugated-metal roof and left a line of bullet holes across his chest.

Exactly how many Panamanians like Rivera became innocent victims during the U.S. invasion here last month remains a matter of contention and dispute. But what is known about those casualties would suggest that the young taxi driver, whose blue Lada sedan was still parked at the curb Tuesday as his family and neighbors told how he died, was in important ways typical of the more than 200 civilians freshly buried in the tropical soil.

Like the vast majority of other victims, Rivera died from gunfire and not from the fires once thought to have been the cause of many civilian deaths. Like others, he fell victim to bullets that went astray--proof that war is rarely surgical, no matter how carefully it is waged.

And for all the horror of the accidental death, there was an echo also in the acquiescence with which Rivera’s relatives greeted it, shedding tears of anguish but insisting, as did other grieving families, that they harbored not the slightest anger at those who pulled the trigger.

“It wasn’t the Americans’ fault,” said Alina Varela, the mother of the taxi driver’s two toddlers, Amarys and Robertito. “The Dignity Battalions were shooting. The helicopter had to shoot back.”

“It was an accident,” said Rivera’s brother Ricardo, his own leg still swathed in bandages after being ripped open by shrapnel in the same attack.

A similar forgiveness emanated from the house next door, where the same attack on the first full morning of the U.S. invasion left Aida de Aviles with a shoulder full of shrapnel as she dived to the concrete floor, the safer spaces beneath the beds already occupied by her husband and children.

Although De Aviles spent four days in the hospital after an operation to remove the American shell fragment, and her family has amassed a metallic handful from others that were embedded in walls and furniture, their only concern Tuesday was whether Mutual of Omaha would reimburse their medical costs of well over $1,000.

The problem they and their neighbors on Calle L faced lay in the fine print of insurance policies that disavowed responsibility in the case of war. And the official explanation for the horror stared bluntly at them from the pages of Roberto Rivera’s death certificate.

“How did it occur?” the document asked. “Guerra” (war) was the official answer.

“How am I going to care for these babies?” asked a teary-eyed Varela, the mother of the dead taxi driver’s two children, who said she had never held a job.

She and the rest of the family said that despite reporting the circumstances of the accident to hospital officials nearly three weeks ago, they had heard nothing from U.S. military authorities. And while absolving the soldiers of any blame, they held out hope that the United States might offer some sort of compensation.

Even those whose wounds were more minor said in interviews around the city Tuesday that their contentment with the American invasion might turn to anger if their economic hurts were not redressed.

On Via Cincuentario in Panama Viejo on the first full night after the invasion, residents found themselves under fire when a careening Toyota failed to obey a U.S. Army patrol’s order to halt.

The car, filled with a looters’ treasure of tables and chairs, was made barely recognizable when the troops halted its flight with an anti-tank shell, killing the three young occupants.

But a row of modest houses bore similar scars, with windows shattered and walls riddled with hundreds of holes large and small.

“I’m not angry,” said Dimas Perez, who showed a reporter a list itemizing the damage that he said he intended to deliver today to the U.S. Army’s Southern Command headquarters. “I just want to get paid.”