As he prepares to retake the presidency of the United States this month, Donald Trump has started spontaneously threatening recapture the Panama Canal.
According to the recent arrival of the new president tantrums on social media, Panama is “ripping off” the US with “ridiculous” fees for using the interoceanic waterway and main channel for global trade. As Trump sees it, the behavior of that Central American country is particularly undesirable “given the extraordinary generosity that the US has given to Panama.”
Trump also unsubstantiatedly claimed that Chinese troops currently operate the canal. In reality, of course, the Panama Canal was previously operated by none other than the United States, which built the canal in the early 20th century and only handed control over to Panama in 1999.
As for the “extraordinary generosity” allegedly provided to the country by a friendly local superpower, let’s just recall the so-calledOperation Just Cause”, launched in December 1989, thanks to which the poor neighborhood of El Chorrillo in the Panamanian capital, Panama City, was nicknamed “Little Hiroshima“.
Up to several thousand civilians were killed in the maniacal display of firepower, practice for the upcoming US war against Iraq. For his part, Panamanian leader and former US friend Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces on January 3, 1990, after his stay at the Vatican embassy in Panama City was abruptly cut short by a musical torture list fired from US tanks parked outside. Selected songs included “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood and “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi.
Noriega was transferred to Miami to face drug-trafficking and other charges – despite his long history on the CIA payroll despite full US knowledge of said drug activity. His removal, meanwhile, paved the way for far greater involvement of the Panamanian ruling class in the international drug trade.
Just call it “extraordinary generosity.”
As for earlier bouts of largesse, from 1903 to 1979 the US presided over a de facto colony called the Panama Canal Zone, which encompassed a significant portion of Panamanian territory and maintained a system of racial segregation that persisted even after such things were officially abolished in the USA itself. The Canal Zone also hosted every conceivable US military base and other facilities such as the infamous US Army School of the Americas, attended by many Latin American dictators and death squad leaders, as well as Noriega himself.
The United States completed construction of the Panama Canal in 1914—an endeavor that claimed countless thousands of lives and relied heavily on black labor and indentured servitude. An exercise in world domination rather than “generosity,” the construction of the canal began during the reign of US President Theodore Roosevelt, who was obsessed with the idea that the waterway was “a vital—indispensable—route to global destiny for the United States,” as historian David McCullough puts it. notes in his book The Path Between the Seas: The Making of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914.
When Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1901, Panama still belonged to Colombia, but negotiations between the Colombian government and the US over the proposed canal were far from smooth. And voila: the new nation of Panama was thus born in 1903, which Midwife Roosevelt was more than delighted to cede part of her territory as well as national sovereignty to the USA.
As John Weeks and Phil Gunson put it in their book Panama: Made in the USA, the country was “carved out of the heart of Latin America to serve the purposes of a foreign power.” To this day, Panama bears the scars of the carving. One prominent thoroughfare in Panama City still bears Roosevelt’s name, although Fourth of July Avenue was renamed Martyrs Avenue in honor of the victims of the January 1964 anti-flag riots. On that occasion, US forces killed around 21 people after Panamanian students tried to display their flag next to the American one at Canal Zone High School.
As it happens, Trump has his own connection to the Panama City landscape in the form of a luxury waterfront condo formerly branded as the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, and still locally referred to as “Trump” despite the elimination of his last name from the sign. In 2017, NBC reported that the Trump Organization had licensed its name to the 70-story building, which was “riddled with ties to drug money and international organized crime.”
Still, it’s not as if Panama is an issue Trump has always been on the lookout for. Instead, the sudden threats to reopen the Panama Canal are simply consistent with the President-elect’s “America First” approach to whipping up his fan base into a delirium of pompous entitlement—all with the help of hallucinatory insults to American “generosity.”
As if America was not already “first” in terms of devastation all over the world. But hey, when you’re the world’s number one imperial superpower, you can have your cake and be a victim too.
McCullough writes that, in the midst of unsuccessful negotiations about the canal in Washington in 1902, the Colombian diplomat dr. José Vicente Concha made the following observation regarding his fellow gringos: “The desire to show that as a nation they have the highest regard for the rights of others compels these gentlemen to play a little with their prey before devouring it, although when all is said and done, they will one way or another.”
And while Trump can hardly be bothered to feign respect, the US certainly hasn’t lost its appetite for toying with its prey.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
