Panama is, perhaps, the country in Central America that has suffered under the longest US shadow, right from the very beginning. The country and its famous canal would grow to become the United States’s most important asset in the region. During World War II, the US installed as many as 100 military bases throughout Panama, and it was the base of Washington’s Latin American military training apparatus. Panama became the heart of the United States in Latin America, and the US ripped apart the country to do it, clearing and flooding whole cities, installing its own walls and fences, segregating its new territory into an apartheid system on foreign soil.

In this episode, host Michael Fox walks us from present-day Panama to the very beginning, to the genesis of what was once the United States’s most important asset in Latin America. This is Episode 12 of Under the Shadow.

Under the Shadow is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.

In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened—a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.

Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.

This podcast is produced in partnership between The Real News Network and NACLA.

Guests:
John Lindsay Poland
Marixa Lasso
Olmedo Beluche
Celia Sanjur
Gilma Camargo
Claire Nevache-Weill

Edited by Heather Gies.
Sound design by Gustavo Türck.
Theme music by Monte Perdido and Michael Fox.
Other music from Blue Dot Sessions.

Additional links:

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Fox:  Panama City is so weird. Because you have. Like normal Panama, like what you would see from any Latin American country. You know, city streets and. Stores in downtown and then you have the Colonial. History, right? And then you have what used to be the Canal Zone. Which was a gringo enclave right here, right? So you’re driving and within two minutes, suddenly you’re passing into what used to be a former U.S. military base and you get all these big grassy knolls and these big huge buildings. It was just past the electoral court, the electoral council here. And it’s this massive building That’s in US style architecture that just totally seems out of place.

Literally, there, there were 12 military bases just within this Canal Zone. So I’m passing what used to be Holbrook right now, which was an Air Force Base. It’s now a mall, right? So I’m passing this mall with every. US Gringo. Company, restaurant. You can imagine, you know. Uh. Wendy’s and Papa John’s, and this is all built on top of what used to be this former U.S. military base. It’s just so strange. There’s no place like this. That I know of in the rest of Latin America, because of the. The fact that this was this, this piece, this enclave was essentially a US colony for. Almost 100 years.

It’s hard to describe this feeling driving around Panama City. This feeling like you’re half in the United States. Half in Panama.

You can tell the legacy that this comes from…. Long manicured yards, big parks, big trees, huge homes, these long streets and wide streets that look like they’re straight out of the United States, you know? It’s really crazy. It’s really crazy. 

It’s just it’s shocking to find these almost mansion style neighborhoods. U.S. homes in the middle of Panama, and this is part of the Canal Zone right which was an area that. That Panamanians were not allowed to come to this was they were forbidden. This was this is for Gringos and those people working the canals and they had their little enclave, their little fiefdom inside of Panama. It’s just, it’s just shocking still. But it’s like, you know, going back to United Fruit and Tiquisate, but on a huge, huge. Huge scale, and in a way, it’s kind of interesting that, you know, we began this series in Tiquisate

And we’re ending in it in, in a, in another place, another enclave, right? Only this case, it’s actually the US government that’s controlling it, and not just the US corporation. Wow, this place is huge…

This is Under the Shadow — an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, to tell the story of the past, by visiting momentous places in the present. 

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcast Brazil on Fire. I’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the U.S. government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: Invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. 

In each episode in this series, I will take you to a location where something historic happened — a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument or a museum. But every place I’m going to bring you was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives and left deep marks on the world. I’ll try to discover what lingers of that history today. 

So… throughout this series, I’ve walked us south from the Guatemalan border with Mexico all the way to Panama, at the Southern tip of Central America: The gateway South, or North. 

And Panama is, perhaps, the country in the region that has suffered under the longest U.S. shadow of all…. right from its very inception. Remember, Panama was part of Colombia, before the United States took steps to split it apart. The U.S. role in the country, still reverberates today. 

In this episode, I’m going to walk up from the beginning, and take us to what was once the United States’s most important asset in Latin America. 

This is Under the Shadow. Season 1: Central America. Episode 12. Panama Canal

So… you cannot talk about the U.S. role in Panama without mentioning the Panama Canal. The dream of it… or something like it, stretches back far before the United States was the United States. 

John Lindsay Poland is a writer, activist, and researcher who has worked on human rights and demilitarization in Latin America since the 1980s. He’s also the author of the book, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama. We’ll hear from him often in this episode.

John Lindsay Poland:  Panama is an isthmus, right? It’s a very narrow strip of land between Central America and South America, between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And that has meant that.

Global powers have been interested in it since, you know, the the first efforts at colonization and invasion by by Europeans because it’s its the narrowest point to cross from 1 ocean to another. 

Marixa Lasso:  Panama is a very important strategic point in the Americas.

Michael Fox:  Marixa Lasso is a Panamanian historian and the author of Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal.

Marixa Lasso:  It’s the key to the traffic between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It was important during Spanish times and therefore it was heavily militarized under the Spaniards and very strategic for the Spanish crown. That’s why also we had constant. Attacks by British Pirates. And things like that. That is what makes Panama one of the most intervening places in the Americas.

Michael Fox:  In this sense, it was pretty similar to Nicaragua. Remember, we looked at that in Episode 8 about William Walker. Narrow isthmus. Important transit route. Same deal in Panama. 

John Lindsay Poland:  When the United States began to become more of a global power. In the mid to late 1800s it became much more interested in Panama and. With US capital constructed a railroad across the isthmus in the 1850s that was partly in response to the gold rush in California. And that was the, the time of the first US military interventions in what was then part of Colombia. And there were a number of other interventions over the rest of the 19th century.

Whenever that transit route was. Quote interfered with or at risk from people who live there who maybe they wanted to change their governments to one that might not have been as friendly to outside interests. And so there were, there were successive interventions.

Michael Fox:  Something curious happens here, though. See… at the time Panama was still part of Colombia. It was like another province. Since there were no roads between Panama and Colombia’s capital, Bogota, communication was often hard, and the country’s armed forces weren’t as robust as say the United States’s. So Colombia, or New Granada as it was known until 1856, signs a treaty with the U.S. to keep an eye on Panama for it. 

Marixa Lasso.

Marixa Lasso:  That allows the US to intervene in Panama. Why would New Granada do that? So that it will secure Panama as part of Colombia. That was the protection it was seeking from the US because Panama was kind of a rebel province that every once in a while will dislike Colombia centralism and it was it was one of those regions of Colombia that always wanted to be federalist and have.

Some control of its own destiny. So that was the first time we have a treaty that allows US intervention. 

And that coincides with the Panama Railroad, which is the first railroad that connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in the Americas. So it’s very important, very strategic for the US that has just Conquered California.

Michael Fox:  Remember this was at a time that the United States wasn’t yet the empire it is today. That despite the U.S. war with Mexico and the robbing of half of it’s territory, the United States was still seen of as a potential force for solidarity or good with the new Latin American countries. Remember, as we talked about in the first episode of this series, when president James Monroe made his Monroe doctrine, in 1823, telling Europe to keep its hands off of the Americas, that was applauded by the newly independent Spanish nations.

Anyway, in Panama, the French tried their hand at constructing a canal. It came on the heels of their success building the Suez Canal in Egypt, in the 1860s. In Panama, they worked at it throughout the 1870s and 80s, but the cost was tremendous. The work was slow. Living and working conditions were atrocious. Malaria and yellow fever took a tremendous toll. Tens of thousands of canal workers died. Work stopped in 1889, when the French company went bankrupt. 

The United States had their eyes on the prize. 

But there was back and forth debate in Washington about where exactly the U.S. would build the canal. In Panama or in Nicaragua. Nicaragua, if you remember, already had the largest fresh water lake in Central America, through which large steamships could pass. 

The story of how the U.S. Congress chose Panama could take up an entire episode by itself. I’ll just say this. Congress was almost unanimously on board for Nicaragua. But in an incredible tale of lobbying and propaganda, they ultimately went with Panama, because it has fewer active volcanoes. The men who helped lawmakers change their minds? Corporate lawyer William Nelson Cromwell and French engineer and investor Philippe Bunau-Varilla. Remember this guy. He’ll be important later. His fortunes would remain tied to the success of the American project in Panama.

In 1902, Washington lawmakers approved the Spooner Act.. This authorized buying the assets of the French company that had done the work on the canal so far. That is, if the U.S. could negotiate a satisfactory treaty with Colombia. Easy enough… Right? Wrong.

What unfolds is both the unraveling and the creation of a nation… all at the behest of U.S. interests that would grip the region for a century. 

OK. Here we go… the U.S. tries to negotiate a deal with Colombia, but the United States doesn’t just want to build the canal, it wants to control the area around it. Colombian lawmakers say no way.

Historian Marixa Lasso.

Marixa Lasso:  “They wanted the US to build the canal the way the French built it. They built it. They had a company, but they did not control the towns, the area, the land around it.”

Michael Fox:  Separatist movements began pushing for Panama’s independence from Colombia…  of course, with the help of the United States.

Remember, for more than a half-century before, the U.S. had an agreement with Colombia that it would remain independent in internal conflicts like this. 

This time, however, the U.S. sided with Panama. 

The United States dispatched a fleet of warships to the Panama coast, blocking Colombian troops. U.S. Panama Railway authorities slowed the arrival of other Colombian soldiers to Panama City. 

Panama announced the province’s independence from Colombia on November 3rd, 1903. The U.S. was the first country to recognize its independence and succession from Colombia days later.

Colombia, coming off a devastating civil war, couldn’t match U.S. forces.

Just two weeks after Panama declared its independence, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay and a Panamanian representative signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. It basically gave the United States what Colombia would not. Not just the right to build the canal in Panama, but also the permanent concession of the land around the canal, roughly 10 miles wide and stretching across the isthmus. This would come to be called the Canal Zone: Sovereign U.S. territory, in the heart of Panama. 

Panamanian Historian Olmedo Beluche told me that a future Panamanian leader would later joke, “Panama is the only country in the world that borders to the North with the Caribbean, to the South with the Pacific, to the east with Colombia, to the west with Costa Rica and in the center with the United States.” 

Oh… as for the Panamanian representative that signed the treaty. His name was Philippe Bunau-Varilla. You’ll remember him as the French engineer and investor, who had lobbied the U.S. Congress the previous year to build the canal in Panama instead of Nicaragua. 

He pretty much bought the post of diplomatic representative of Panama, for bankrolling the Panamanian separatists. What did he have to gain? 

Bunau-Varilla had a large stake in the French company behind the canal operation in Panama, which he had ran in the 1880s and tried to resuscitate in the following years. The United States purchased it for $40 million — equivalent to nearly $1.4 billion U.S. dollars today.

Bunau-Varilla made a ton of money. Panamanians celebrated their independence. But historian Marixa Lasso says most people were not happy with the idea of handing the sovereign right to a chunk of their country over to the United States. 

Marixa Lasso:  “Panamanians also wanted that. They wanted the US to build the canal, but to keep control over the lands and the towns and the territory around it.”

Michael Fox:  The U.S. role in breaking Panama off from Colombia was no secret to anyone. There was an incredible cartoon published in the New York World in 1903 that depicted then president Theodore Roosevelt with an arsenal of weapons facing down tiny Colombia, armed with just a machete. 

The United States got pushback both in Panama and across Latin America.

Now, remember, this is also the time of the Banana Wars. Just a few years before, in 1898, the U.S. had walked away with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, after defeating Spain in the Spanish American war. Over the coming decades, the United States would invade and occupy multiple times Nicaragua, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes.

The justification for the widespread U.S. action in the region stems from the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Remember, I talked about this in the first episode to this series. The Roosevelt Corollary was essentially Monroe on steroids. A warrant to police and to invade. 

Marixa Lasso:  The Roosevelt Corollary. It is a 1904 speech that is a justification in many ways of what happened in Panama, which is that he supported the separation of Panama from Colombia. And then taking control of an area of the isthmus. In what many people saw as an aggression from one Republic to another, from the U.S. towards Colombia. So he needs to justify that. 

Let’s say instead of being equal republics like we could argue as the original Monroe Doctrine, he separates between civilized and non-civilized and the civilized nations and societies have the right to intervene in the ones that are not. And that’s his justification and that’s what he writes after. After the intervention in Panama, no. And that’s when he calls the US. Sort of the police of the Americas…

Michael Fox:  If you remember, back in episode 1, we had a voice actor read part of the speech.

Marixa Lasso:  Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

He says that certain circumstances may force the United States to the exercise of an international police power to protect the world from the general loosening of the ties of civilized society. Those are his words.

Michael Fox:  The impact of this new Monroe Doctrine 2.0 still reverberates across the hemisphere today.

And this new corollary underlines just how important Panama and the canal were for the United States at the time. I mean… Panama is sometimes kind of the forgotten country, in Central America. In fact, for much of its existence, it wasn’t even considered part of Central America, because of its long history as a province of Colombia But for the United States, Panama and the canal were its most important asset in the region. A country that would grow to house as many as 100 U.S. military bases during the World War 2 era, and the heart of Washington’s  Latin American military training apparatus: School of the Americas. U.S. Southern Command. Hell… even the communications between South America’s dictatorships under Plan Condor were routed through U.S. bases in Panama.

It was the heart of the United States in Latin America and as we will see, the U.S. ripped apart the country to do it: cleared and flooded cities, installed its own walls and fences, segregated its new territory into an apartheid system on foreign soil.

That… in a minute

[ADVERTISEMENT BEGINS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hey, everyone, Maximillian Alvarez here, editor-in-chief of The Real News Network. We’re going to get you right back to the program in a sec, I promise. But really quick, I just wanted to remind y’all that The Real News is an independent, viewer- and listener-supported, grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never, ever put our reporting behind paywalls. 

But we cannot continue to do this work without your support. It takes a lot of time, energy, and money to produce powerful, unique, and journalistically rigorous shows like Under the Shadow. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to therealnews.com/donate and donate today. It really makes a difference. 

Also, if you’re enjoying Under the Shadow, then you will definitely want to follow NACLA, the North American Congress on Latin America. NACLA’s reporting and analysis goes beyond the headlines to help you understand what’s happening in Latin America and the Caribbean from a progressive perspective. Visit nacla.org to learn more. 

Alright, thanks for listening. Back to the show.

[ADVERTISEMENT ENDS]

Michael Fox:  That’s the wake from a boat. Slapping against the shore from the boats out in the channel. It creates a huge wake. In late 2023, I visited a former U.S. military base in Panama City. It was built there to protect the Pacific mouth of the canal. Just off the coast, the lights of endless tankers shine in the twilight.

Panama Canal. This was just a dream for. Generations of leaders, right? Find a way from the Atlantic the Pacific. Cut the trip. Around the Horn of South America into nothing. And they achieved it. But man, at what cost?

It would take the United States a decade to complete the 48-mile canal. 

Documentary:  Now we are traveling along some of the 160 miles of track that were laid down on the bottom of the canal.

Michael Fox:  That’s an old documentary titled “Building the Panama Canal”. The footage is from 1912. he audio description was added years later. It’s pretty incredible to see these old grainy black-and-white images of the workers carving out the canal. The camera is set on a train running along the rail lines at the bottom of what seems to be a huge ravine, the rock walls of the future canal rising up beside it. It shows steam shovels carving, workers digging their way through rock and dirt, in an area that for more than a century now has been filled with water. 

Documentary:  This looks like a desert spring in early spring. But it’s really the first water ever to enter the Panama Canal proper finding it’s way into it from the Chagres river. The Charges basin is now filled by Gatun Lake, formed by the man-made low-lying Gatun dam act the Atlantic end of the canal.

Michael Fox:  The U.S. work on the canal transformed the Panamanian countryside. Not just along the canal itself,  but also the entire region… making it unrecognizable. Cities and towns were flooded to make way for the waterway, and more… 

Marixa Lasso:  The thing that is going to be completely different from the 19th century canals and railroads. Is the creation of the Canal Zone. That is going to be new. Because the Panama Railroad was American. The French canal French and both existed with the traditional historic Panamanian towns that were there and Colombian authorities. Panama was then part of Colombia, were in control of the town’s next to the canal and the railroad. This is going to change with the US.

Michael Fox:  Marixa Lasso’s book, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal, looks at the tens of thousands of people that were removed from the new U.S. Canal Zone. Not just to make way for the canal, but the new U.S. enclave in Panama.

Marixa Lasso:  With the depopulation order of 1912, after the canal works were almost done. All those towns are depopulated. And the Canal Zone becomes a huge company town owned by the federal government. From the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean control. There’s no private property, with no private businesses, with no private land. And all that was there before in what used to be the most important and most densely populated part of Panama. Ceases to be Panamanian and become part of the US.

Michael Fox:  The concept of the company town was clearly a thing during this period. Like I’ve mentioned before, that’s what United Fruit was rolling out across Central America. Another example is Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s Mid-western rubber town in the middle of the Amazon. But this was on a whole new scale, and EVERYTHING run by just one entity — the U.S. government.

Marixa says she knows of no other U.S. attempt at anything similar, except of course, the occupation and removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. 

Marixa Lasso:  Empires do this. You know, the Spaniards did it in Mexico City. They put their cities on top of previous cities. I mean, this is the way empires work. So in that sense, it’s not. Surprising. It’s important symbolic point. When the US controls it, it controls it in all the ways, symbolically, in its own buildings, its own symbols, its own people.

Well, how many people are removed around? What I found in my research, it was about around. 40,000 people. More and less are removed. And all the towns that was the most densely populated part of Panama. At the time, and it makes sense because it was the most, I mean it was where all the trade took place since Spanish times. So it had towns along the river, towns along the railroad, very important strategic point full of people, lands, farms. So it had enormous impact.

Michael Fox:  There was something else the United States imported alongside its Canal Zone and its way of life: segregation.

John Lindsay Poland

John Lindsay Poland:  So the Canal Zone was an apartheid enclave within Panama. It was a 10-mile zone along the banks of the canal and the the United States decided that to construct the canal and to run it. They were not going to use primarily Panamanian labor. They mostly used Caribbean black labor and brought people from Jamaica, Barbados, other black majority population Caribbean nations, then also colonies, most of them and then established a racial racially segregated zone in which.

White people coming from the States primarily were at the top. Had totally different provisions and housing, and within the canal zone. And then Black people who were the majority of the canal labor, uh, had totally different provisions and accommodations.

Many people died during the construction of the canal from disease. But at the end once the canal was completed in 1914. That racial regime continued all the way through the 20th century.

Olmedo Beluche

On this side here, the poor area, was Panama. On the other side over there, everything was pretty, manicured. The parks were well maintained, that was the United States. It was apartheid. The white gringos lived in the Balboa area, here in the center. The people of color, who were left living within the zone…. the workers, were separated into other communities. So they segregated the population.

Michael Fox:  The canal opened in 1914. 

Documentary:  Opening to ships of all nations relief from the long haul around cape horn.

Michael Fox:  It transformed not just Panama, but international shipping. For the first time ever, boats could travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, or visa versa in the same day. Previously, it could have taken months to go around the tip of South America.

But Panama saw little of the benefit.

Olmedo Beluche says the Panamanian economy lost its top source of revenue — the money from the transit route and shipments across the country via rail.

Olmedo Beluche:  We became completely dependent on the gringos. But we couldn’t even sell to the ships that passed through the canal. Nothing, because it was all controlled by the United States. The U.S. even controlled the ports.

Michael Fox:  Olmedo says it took the U.S. thirty years just to allow Panamanians to sell meat and beer in the Canal Zone. 

Olmedo Beluche:  Many people said that the only prosperity the Canal Zone brought to Panama was in brothels and bars, because they were the only thing that the soldiers consumed. The soldiers received clothing, food, and everything inside the barracks. All of it from the United States. So, when they had time off, they would look for two things they didn’t have: prostitutes and alcohol.

Michael Fox:  This is really reminiscent of the town of Comalapa, Honduras, which I mentioned in Episode 6. That was transformed by the arrival of U.S. soldiers stationed at the U.S. Palmerola Air Force Base there in the 1980s.

The difference was that throughout Panama’s Canal Zone, there were 12 different U.S. military bases.

Sovereign U.S. territory in the middle of Panama. 

Army Report:  Today, the latest weapons coupled with the fighting skill of the American soldier stand ready on the alert all over the world to defend this country, you, the American people against aggression.

Michael Fox:  The U.S. army produced this black and white report on its role in Panama. It’s titled “Soldier in Panama”. It paints an idyllic picture of the U.S. Canal Zone. Black and white images show soldiers marching with bayonets and pristine landscaped fields with American-styled buildings set beside palm trees and tropical plants.

Army Report:  Maintaining the security of this indispensable waterway against attack from land, sea and air is the main job of the defense establishment down here. The services work in close cooperation….  The country receives protection from foreign invasion through the Monroe Doctrine and other treaties, which guarantee hemispheric aid.

Michael Fox:  John Lindsay Poland says for the United States, Panama and the canal were as important militarily as commercially.

John Lindsay Poland:  Well, it, it, it was a major facilitator of U.S. trade with, uh, China and other Pacific powers, economic powers, and it was a, a major area for to project military power. And whether that was in the Pacific, during World War Two and at other times or whether that was in Latin America. So the military bases were a major. Platform outside of the territorial United States to project that power.

Army Report:  Five miles of land on either side of the canal is American territory. And today into the hills that sweep the whole 47 mile length that sweep the waterway and today they’re rehearsing what would happen if any foreign power dared to attack this part of America.

Michael Fox:  During World War II The United States drastically increased its presence in the country, setting up as many as 100 bases.

John Lindsay Poland:  They were spread throughout the country because Panama was the platform for the United States in Latin America and also to project into the Pacific. So those bases. Were communications stations that were Gathering information using electronics. What existed at the time, there were training bases for troops that were going to be going off to the Pacific War. There were weapons testing sites. There were just places where troops would be sit, you know, in transit between the Pacific and coming back to the United States or vice versa.

And there were intelligence this bases. So there were all kinds of functions that those bases played after the war, at the end of the war. Panama negotiated an agreement for the basis to leave. When they didn’t leave, there was a kind of an uprising and most of those bases closed. And so they were restricted to bases around the canal after 1948.

Michael Fox:  But there were still 12 U.S. military bases across the roughly 550 square miles of the Canal Zone. They had names like Howard Air Force Base, Fort Amador, Fort Clayton, Fort Randolph. And they  would last for more than a half-century more. During this time the U.S. military would not only protect the canal and U.S. interests in the region, but also train tens of thousands of Latin America’s top military officers. Military men who would go on to be involved in some of the region’s worst atrocities, massacres and murders. The facility that would later be called the School of the Americas opened at Fort Amador, in the Canal Zone, in 1946, just a year after the end of World War II. The school remained there until it was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia in the 1980s. 

Documentary:  The United States Army, Navy and Air Force maintain a special intimate kind of elder brother relationship with the armed forces of Latin America that exists with no other foreign service.

Michael Fox:  This black-and-white documentary from the 1960s begins with the word “confidential”. It shows Latin American officers in uniform touring the U.S. bases, getting a show of modern U.S. weapons, and sitting in classrooms.

Documentary:  It’s the only U.S. Army school exclusively for foreigners and taught in a foreign language. To Latin American civilians who have reason historically to distrust their own armed forces and who know the power of the US Army, the militaristic solidarity implied in the school slogan has perhaps an ominous sound. ‘It’s all for one. One for all.’

Michael Fox:  In her 2004 book on the School of the Americas, author Lesley Gill wrote the United States  didn’t just train the officers at the school, but also brought them into the quote “ideology of the ‘American way of life’ by steeping them in a vision of empire that identified their aspirations with those of the United States.”

Documentary:  The students here in the Command and General Staff course are pro-American. It’s widely conceded that the Latin American officer corps is the most pro-American sector of society.

Michael Fox:  And the Canal Zone was good PR. 

The residents there were called Zonians. Theirs was painted as a life of luxury. First class. This is how the U.S. Army described it.

Documentary:  Most of us find that life here in the Canal Zone is to our liking. We live in comfortable barracks and find plenty of ways to enjoy ourselves in off duty hours. American-style radio programs are brought to us by the Armed Forces radio stations. The mechanics of living here is just about the same as back home. Our supermarket is the Army Commissary store sells everything and it doesn’t take long for the latest fashions to arrive and make the ladies happy. Sports are the major recreation for most and there are many good facilities. The golf links and the tennis courts get a good play. There are some excellent bowling alleys in the zone and some darn good bowlers to play them.

Michael Fox:  Meanwhile, just across the fence was Panama.  For Panamanians, the story of the Canal Zone isn’t something forgotten in history books. It’s real and lived experience from people who are alive today.

Historian Olmedo Beluche says that entering the Canal Zone was like entering another country. 

Olmedo Beluche:  I remember when I was a child. I’d Go with my father to Amador. “It was at the entrance to the canal. We couldn’t go inside, because it was a U.S. military base. There was a sentry box there and since my father liked to check things out. On Sundays, we try to go. He’d tell me… it depends on who the soldier at the door is, if they let you go in or not.

Michael Fox:  Olmedo says there was a fence, like Panama’s Berlin Wall. That’s a description I heard often from people in Panama. It ran down the entire length of what was then called July 4th Avenue —  today, the Avenue of the Martyrs.

Neighborhoods and towns spring up just outside the wall, where canal workers lived… those that helped to build the waterway, and then worked in the zone. We will hear a lot about one of them, El Chorillo, in the next episode about the 1989 U.S. invasion.

That’s where sociologist and human rights activist Celia Sanjur grew up. Her grandparents on her mother’s side immigrated to Panama from Peru to work on the canal.

Celia Sanjur:  I was born in a house on the corner, just across from the wall. If you got up very early, 5, 6, 7am, you would see a wave of workers going to the canal zone. Tons of people going. Walking to the neighborhood of Balboa, or going to catch the buses to different areas of the Canal Zone.

My dad drove one of those buses that entered the bases. And our little pastime was to go with him, enter the military bases and see everything. We had a ton of stories. But we were used to seeing this swell of people. And you knew it when payday came every 15 days, because this was a very poor area and when people got paid every other Friday, the cantinas were packed. We lived just above one, and there were 3 just on our block. And that was our childhood,” she says.

Michael Fox:  Celia says the wall was a clear dividing line running right through the middle of her country… A division between the U.S. and Panama. Between white and Black. Between rich and poor. Between comfort and poverty.

Celia Sanjur:  You felt it every day. Sometimes the boys went into the zone to collect and eat mangos, because there were mango trees everywhere. But there were clearly two different rules. Two different codes. Gringo police and Panamanian police. Two countries in the same place. You just crossed the street and you were in the Canal Zone and when you arrived back to the Panama side you relaxed a little, because we had our own idiosyncrasies and we didn’t have all of the rules they had there and you didn’t want to get into trouble on that side.

Michael Fox:  Tension was growing. Panamanians resented the U.S. enclave in their territory. They demanded that the Panamanian flag be flown in the Canal Zone. Everything came to a head in 1964.

Documentary:  The wind of change is blowing half a Gale in the Panama Canal Zone. Americans had to defend themselves as students and other rioters demanded an end of the 61-year-old Canal Zone treaty with the United States.”

Two years before, John F. Kennedy and Panamanian president Roberto Chiari had agreed that beginning on January 1st, 1964, Panama’s flag would fly alongside the Stars and Stripes in the Canal Zone. But authorities there balked. 9 days later, Panamanian students marched to Balboa High School in the zone to demand that the Panamanian flag be hoisted. 

Zonian students protested. The Panamanian flag was ripped, unleashing a wave of riots that would last for three days. Zone police fought with tear gas and bullets. Hundreds were injured. More than 20 people were killed. Today, they’re honored every January 9th in Panama, which is now called Martyr’s Day. July 4th Avenue, which ran alongside the U.S. canal zone is today called Avenue of the Martyrs.

Michael Fox:  It’s funny that a flag would be the spark that would set change alit across Panama, but it was. And it’s a sign of just how important the idea of Panama’s sovereignty became to citizens over the years, 6 decades after Washington first called this sliver of Panamanian land its own.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke with Roberto Chiari in the days following the violence. It would still take more than a decade for the United States to agree to hand the canal and the canal zone over to Panama.

Former President Jimmy Carter [recording]:  This agreement has been negotiated over a period of 14 years, under 4 presidents of the United States.

Michael Fox:  In September 1977, then U.S. president Jimmy Carter finally signed treaties with Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos in Washington. They repealed the 1903 deal through which the had U.S. gained control of the Canal Zone. The U.S. promised to hand the canal over to Panama by the year 2000.

Plenty would still happen over the next 23 years, as we’ll look at in depth in the next episode.

And even then… the United States waited until the last minute.

On December 31st, 1999, the U.S. finally handed over the canal zone and the keys to the canal. They held an official ceremony two weeks before, at the Miraflores Locks. That’s one of the main viewing areas of canal. The event was attended by leaders from across the globe, and of course, former president Jimmy Carter.

This is Miraflores Locks today. 

Late last year, I visited it and spent a few hours at the viewing platform. There are several rows of stadium seats. It’s packed with hundreds of tourists from all over the world. Almost a million people visit the canal each year and this is the country’s top tourist destination. It feels a lot like a U.S. national park, complete with an Imax theater and a Panama Canal movie narrated by Morgan Freeman. 

Morgan Freeman [narration]:  In August of 1914, the SS Ancon made the first official passage through the canal. More than a million ships have passed through since.

Mic Guy [narrating]:  As we observe right now look at the prop wash on the stern…

Michael Fox:  And there’s this guy on the mic narrating it all in a blow-by-blow of the ships and the lock process in perfect English and Spanish. 

Today, we’re watching a huge white and black liquid propane gas tanker work its way out of the Pacific toward the Atlantic. It’s clear that though the United States handed over the canal,  it still has a lasting presence.

Driving around  Panama City and the former U.S. bases, the signs of the U.S. Occupation throughout the 20th Century are profound and just everywhere. 

And lingering just beneath the surface. In some cases. They’re even barracks and forts that are. That are like hidden in the forest or the forest and the jungles have been have taken it back. And we’re talking about an area that’s, you know, in one of the most densely populated places in Central America. Definitely in Panama. It’s obviously no longer under US control. But. Much of those areas still remain, and in some cases they’ve been revamped, rebranded.

Those spots, like the Holbrook mall I mentioned at the very beginning, are like I’ve said, hidden in plain sight. Intertwined into the landscape. Panamanian now… but with a clear U.S. essence and a feel that doesn’t really fit — like the United Fruit homes in Tiquisate, Guatemala.

Gilma Camargo:  The fence is still in my mind.

Michael Fox:  Gilma Camargo is a Panamanian-American Human Rights lawyer who grew up in Panama.

Gilma Camargo:  I go to see other Clayton, I go to Holbrook and I’m never comfortable in those areas. I still feel they still feel their presence and I am angry at the fundamental destroying all the evidence of the gates and all the stuff because I think we should have at least a symbolic one so people can know what we’re talking about.

Michael Fox:  But there are other places, you can’t return to… Places you can’t hear… 

Remember Marixa Lasso’s book Erased about the removal of whole communities and towns to make way for the Canal Zone? Those are places that were largely just wiped off the map. Places she’s tried to recreate, but which can only exist in our minds.

Marixa Lasso:  The towns were removed. So you cannot see them. They don’t exist. They were removed. So you can go to the mouth of the Chagres River and you see nothing, if you can. If you look at the old pictures, there are the pictures on the town. And now there is nothing.

Michael Fox:  Marixa says some archeologists are now working on some of the areas. Doing excavations. Digging into the more distant past.

Marixa Lasso:  So we’re beginning to study not only the history and the documents that I needed for my book, but also to look at the archaeological remains. If you go to Cruzes… In the middle of the forest you can find the ruins of the old Church of Cruzes too. But the other towns, you cannot really go back to them. It’s something my work as a historian was to recreate those towns and look at the documents so I can, so I could sort of describe what they looked like.

Michael Fox:  I want to show you one more thing before I go. The U.S. enclave, as they call it, here in Panama, left another legacy: 

A deeply-rooted attitude of defiance. And a clear, united sense among the country’s citizens that they will fight tooth and nail to defend their sovereignty.

I was in Panama for several months in the fall of 2023, when the country’s government approved a new contract with the Canadian mining company, First Quantum, to operate the largest open-pit copper mine in Central America. Protesters responded, rippling into the streets, blocking highways and shutting down the country for a month and a half. 

“While the government does not rescind this law, we will remain in the streets, united,” one protestor told me. “Because a united people will never be defeated.”

They said the contract essentially handed over a piece of Panama to the Canadian corporation, with terms that were reminiscent of the U.S. control of the Canal Zone. 

Now, First Quantum had already been operating the mine since 2019 under a decades-old contract with a previous firm. But in 2021, the Supreme Court had definitively ruled that contract unconstitutional, for not benefiting the public good. This one, protesters said, was no better.

“They’re stealing our country,” said one impassioned man I interviewed in a march. His name was Samuel Rodriguez. He had a white beard and wore a yellow rain jacket. “In reality, they are just giving things away to this company. The ports. Our minerals. The sovereignty of the country is at risk. That’s why we’re here and we will defend our country.”

The protesters were united, across every sector of society, particularly in the beginning. A massive movement the likes of which are not common.  People told me it was the most widespread and grassroots protest movement the country had seen since the 1964 student protests to demand that the flag be raised. 

Claire Nevache-Weill, from Panama’s International Center for Political Studies, told me you cannot understand this protest movement, without looking at the history of the United States in the country. 

Claire Nevache-Weill:  From 1903 to 1999, Panama had an enclave in the middle of its territory, which was the Panama Canal Zone. Throughout the 20th century, Panamanian citizens fought to get rid of that enclave of the most powerful country of the world, which was the United States. It was stuck in the middle of Panamanian territory, but where Panamanian citizens could not enter. Where they couldn’t manage the most valuable asset of the country, which was the Panama Canal and its geographical location. So this is something that is very, very present in the Panamanian psyche.

Michael Fox:  She said Panamanians fought for a century to rid themselves of the U.S. enclave and they refused to hand over another chunk of their country to a foreign entity. 

Claire Nevache-Weill:  For Panamanian citizens, this is impossible to accept. It’s humiliating and it’s a feeling of returning to a moment of neocolonialism in which part of the country is being sold again to a foreign power. And that is something that the majority of Panamanian citizens are not willing to accept.

Michael Fox:  They didn’t. They fought. And they won. 

On November 28, 2023, the country’s Supreme Court of Justice ruled that Panama’s new mining contract with the Canadian company was unconstitutional. Protesters danced in the streets in front of the Supreme Court. They waved the red, white and blue Panamanian flag and sang the national anthem.

One victory… inspired by a century of struggle against the United States and it’s imperial presence in the country. 

That is all for today’s episode of Under the Shadow. 

Next time, we stay in Panama, but shift to the 1980s. To look at the 1989 U.S. invasion, that destroyed 20,000 homes and killed hundreds of people. At the time… the largest U.S. invasion since the end of the Vietnam War and there are still unanswered questions.

That’s next time… on Under the Shadow. 

Just a few quick things to say before I go… 

You can see my pictures of the Panama Canal, the former U.S. bases in the Canal Zone and so much more, on my Patreon page: patreon.com/mfox. There you can also find my new personal podcast, Panamerican Dispatch. It’s exclusively for my Patreon supporters, and it’s a window into my reporting from wherever I am in the Americas. Please consider subscribing and becoming a monthly supporter. I appreciate the help.

Under the Shadow is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. 

The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music or wherever you listen to music. 

This is Michael Fox. Many thanks!

See you next time…

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Michael Fox is a Latin America-based media maker and the former director of video production at teleSUR English.