Ninety-three years after that historic visit, the United States is sending another delegation to Panama–this time to give away Roosevelt’s dream. The mood this time is very different. Panamanian officials belatedly realized that few world leaders would feel like visiting on the last day of 1999, when–at precisely noon–the canal, and the virtual American colony that grew up around it, will officially belong to Panama. This Tuesday dignitaries will gather on the Miraflores Locks near the Pacific Ocean to celebrate the handover. Panama invited a presidential delegation, but neither Bill Clinton nor Al Gore seems eager to be associated with the return of such a large chunk of real estate. Instead, the administration will send a delegation that includes former president Jimmy Carter. It was Carter who negotiated the 1977 treaty that made him a hero in Panama but the bane of U.S. conservatives, who charged that he was giving away an important strategic point in the fight against communism.
The end of the cold war hasn’t put all the conservatives’ fears to rest. Some Republicans insist that China is plotting to take the canal over and block American ships. It is true that a Hong Kong company now operates ports at both ends of the canal, but Panama itself will control traffic through the waterway, and the United States has reserved the right to intervene militarily to protect the neutrality of the canal. A more serious problem is the loss of U.S. military bases, which served as headquarters for U.S. drug-fighting efforts in the region. About 2,000 planes a year took off from Howard Air Force Base to hunt out drug labs and mysterious landing strips in Central and South America and the Caribbean. The flights are now being conducted out of Ecuador, Aruba and Curacao as the Clinton administration looks for a new headquarters. Meanwhile, U.S. authorities worry that Colombian guerrillas will help drug traffickers ship more cocaine through Panama en route to the United States.
Mostly, the United States is giving up a slice of itself. Panama owes its very existence to Roosevelt, who engineered its independence from Colombia in 1903 so he could build the canal. Its opening in 1914 gave rise to a new species: the Zonian. That was the name given to the thousands of inhabitants–mostly Americans–of the Canal Zone, the 10-mile-wide strip of land that flanked the canal. It was fenced off from the rest of Panama and run like a U.S. colony, with its own police force and schools. Anyone born there became a U.S. citizen. The zone became a Mayberry in the heart of Central America. Picket-fence neighborhoods sprouted up. English became widespread. Panama never got around to printing its own currency, relying on the greenback instead. Servicing it all was the port of Colon, the world’s second largest duty-free zone, behind Hong Kong. There were two employers in town: the canal and the U.S. military bases. Together they pumped millions of dollars a year into the economy.
That didn’t satisfy future generations of Panamanian nationalists. By the 1960s, after several violent protests, a new strain of thinking emerged in Washington that the best way to ensure the security of the canal was to hand it over to the Panamanians. Dictator Omar Torrijos once declared: “I don’t want into history. I want into the Canal Zone.” When the U.S. Senate approved the treaty he had negotiated with Carter–by a single vote–Torrijos stripped down to his underwear and dived into the canal in celebration. “It was the most difficult political challenge of my life,” Carter reflected in an interview last year for an Organization of American States documentary. “But the main consideration was to do what was right. It was the most courageous vote that was taken by the United States Congress in the history of our country.” Panama’s love-hate relationship with the United States continued in 1989, when George Bush invaded the country and removed its loathed dictator Manuel Noriega. A longtime CIA informant, the general was convicted of drug trafficking in 1992 and is now whiling away in a Miami federal prison. He recently wrote an article for Men’s Health magazine on jail-cell exercises entitled “How to Become a Strongman.”
Next week’s party is the anti-climax of the millennium. Under Carter’s treaty, the United States has been pulling out of Panama for the last 20 years. Most Americans were gone by August of this year. More than 97 percent of the 9,000 canal jobs–including the top one–are now occupied by Panamanians. The Balboa High School, which graduated its final class last spring, is being turned into Panama’s Foreign Ministry. The last of the 10 military bases shut down this month.
Panamanians don’t appreciate everything the United States is leaving behind. Since the 1920s the U.S. military has conducted target practice in the jungle along the canal’s banks. About 30,000 acres have been swept clean, but the hundreds–possibly thousands–of unexploded munitions, including chemical weapons, remain buried in 7,000 acres that the Pentagon says are essentially impossible to clean up. Military officials say that the dense rain forest would have to be clear-cut, which would increase erosion into the canal, already plagued by silt. So instead those areas will be fenced off, and warning signs will be posted–a response that upsets Panamanian officials. Several people have been killed over the years when they wandered onto the firing ranges in search of firewood.
But the biggest damper on this week’s party is the chiseling effect of history. The canal has lost its glory. When it opened for business–after a 10-year construction that cost $352 million and the lives of 5,609 workers–it was a new wonder of the world. The ocean journey between New York and San Francisco was suddenly 8,000 miles shorter, a fact that revolutionized the flow of goods. Today cargo planes and tractor trailers have robbed the canal of much of its business. In fact, about 7 percent of the world’s 50,000 cargo vessels are too big to fit through the canal. From our vantage–an age when shiploads of information flow through fiber-optic lines in fractions of seconds–it is clear that Roosevelt was wrong about the sea as the last frontier.
