Chapotraphouse

Mohammad Reza wanted to go back to Mexico, saying he had pleasant memories of Cuernavaca, but was refused. Mexico was a candidate to be a rotating member of the UN Security Council, but needed the vote of Cuba to be admitted, and the Cuban leader Fidel Castro told President José López Portillo that Cuba's vote was conditional on Mexico not accepting the Shah again.

He left the United States on 15 December 1979 and lived for a short time in the Isla Contadora in Panama. This caused riots by Panamanians who objected to the Shah being in their country. General Omar Torrijos, the dictator of Panama, kept Mohammad Reza Shah as a virtual prisoner at the Paitilla Medical Center, a hospital condemned by the former Shah's US doctors as "an inadequate and poorly staffed hospital", and in order to hasten his death allowed only Panamanian doctors to treat his cancer.

General Torrijos, a populist left-winger, had only taken in Mohammad Reza under heavy US pressure, and he made no secret of his dislike of Mohammad Reza, whom he called after meeting him "the saddest man he had ever met". When he first met Mohammad Reza, Torrijos taunted him by telling him "it must be hard to fall off the Peacock Throne into Contadora" and called him a chupon, a Spanish slang term for "someone who is finished".

Torrijos added to Mohammad Reza's misery by making his chief bodyguard a militantly Marxist sociology professor who spent much time lecturing Mohammad Reza on how he deserved his fate because he had been a tool of the "American imperialism" that was ostensibly oppressing the Third World, and charged Mohammad Reza a monthly rent of US$21,000, making him pay for all his food and the wages of the 200 National Guardsmen assigned as his bodyguards.

President Carter did not wish to admit Mohammad Reza to the US but came under pressure from Henry Kissinger, who phoned Carter to say he would not endorse the SALT II treaty that Carter had just signed with the Soviet Union unless the former Shah was allowed into the United States, reportedly prompting Carter more than once to hang up his phone in rage in the Oval Office and shout "Fuck the Shah!".

On 22 October 1979, President Jimmy Carter reluctantly allowed the Shah into the United States to undergo surgical treatment at the Weill Cornell Medical Center. While there, Mohammad Reza used the name of "David D. Newsom," Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs at that time, as his temporary code name, without Newsom's knowledge. Mohammad Reza's time in New York was highly uncomfortable; he was under a heavy security detail as every day, Iranian students studying in the US gathered outside his hospital to shout "Death to the Shah!", a chorus that Mohammad Reza heard.