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U.S. is finally leaving the canal and its mixed legacy to Panama
Monday, December 06, 1999 By Jack Kelly, Post-Gazette National Bureau
COROZAL CEMETERY, Panama -- The last plaintive notes of taps hung heavy in the tropical air, signaling the end of the Veterans Day observance and of America's century in Panama.
A corporal's guard unit from Bravo Company, Sixth Marines -- all that remained of what had once been more than 10,000 U.S. troops -- fired a salute. In a few days, they, too, would be on an airplane for home. Soon the only American military personnel in Panama will be the ones buried in this cemetery.
At noon on Dec. 31, ownership of the Panama Canal will pass from the United States to Panama under the terms of the Panama Canal treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1978. The only U.S. property left will be Corozal Cemetery, operated by the American Battle Monuments Commission.
The Panama Canal, which stretches 43 miles from Colon on the Caribbean to Panama City on the Pacific, is still one of the most impressive engineering feats in history. It spared ships traveling between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans an 8,000-mile journey around the tip of South America and took 10 years to build, from 1904 to 1914, at a cost of more than 5,000 lives.
The amount of concrete poured to make the flight of locks at Gatun Lake alone could make a wall eight feet thick, 12 feet high, stretching from Pittsburgh to Cleveland. More than 262 million cubic yards of dirt and rock were excavated. The Pittsburgh steel industry got an enormous boost as foundries and mills throughout that region churned out structural steel, rivets, bolts, gates, and bearings.
The Panama Canal made medical as well as engineering history. It could not have been built if Dr. William Gorgas, an Army physician, hadn't figured out how to eradicate the mosquitoes that carried yellow fever and malaria.
Its construction required President Theodore Roosevelt to perform political miracles.
The Isthmus of Panama was located in Colombia, which was cool to the idea of a canal, so Roosevelt made other arrangements. He created a new country.
The republic of Panama was conceived in Room 1162 of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City by an American lawyer, Nelson Cromwell, and a French adventurer, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who had been associated with an earlier French effort to build a canal in Panama.
A revolution was organized, and in 1904 Panama became independent. A short time later, the original Panama Canal treaty -- with Bunau-Varilla signing on behalf of the Panamanians -- gave the United States breathtaking authority to govern "as if it were sovereign" a strip extending five miles from each bank of the canal.
So began a century of U.S. colonialism in Panama that produced the closest thing to state communism ever implemented. Everyone who worked in the Panama Canal Zone worked for the U.S. government, lived in government-provided housing, shopped in government commissaries. Free enterprise was prohibited.
Four generations of Americans, often called Zonians, were reared in that 10-mile-wide strip, many never bothering to learn more than a few words of the language of the country in which they lived.
"Zonians tended to keep to themselves," said Kurt Muse, an American whose family owned a printing company in Panama City. "They tended not to socialize with the U.S. soldiers sent to protect them, or with expatriates like me, much less with Panamanians."
Perhaps because of the dubious parentage of their country, Panamanians tend to be passionately nationalistic. Many have a love-hate relationship with what they call "the colossus of the North."
An Army intelligence operative, one of the last U.S. soldiers to leave Panama, remains sympathetic: "It had to be galling for residents of Panama City to wake up each morning to see the Stars and Stripes fluttering over them from the top of Ancon Hill."
Panama pulls away
An adolescent prank laced with imperial contempt led to the negotiations which resulted in the U.S. handover of the Panama Canal.
A 1955 treaty required the United States to fly the flag of Panama alongside the American flag. On Jan. 7, 1964, American students at Balboa High ran up the Stars and Stripes without its Panamanian companion. This triggered three days of rioting in which 21 Panamanians died. Panama broke off diplomatic relations, which were not renewed until the United States promised major concessions.
The essence of the treaties President Jimmy Carter eventually signed with Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos in 1977 was worked out long before, during the Johnson administration. And after acrimonious debate, the Senate approved by the narrowest possible margin. With 67 votes required, it ratified the treaties with two votes of 68-32 in March and April of 1978.
One treaty turned the canal over to Panama; the other authorized U.S. bases to remain until 2000. Many in Congress assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that yet another agreement would be reached to extend U.S. military protection beyond 1999.
That would have been in accord with popular sentiment in Panama. In 29 surveys conducted since 1991, support for a continued U.S. military presence has never fallen below 64 percent.
"The Americans were a more stable people," said Coralia de Cerda, 38, a housewife in Coco Solo, which was a U.S. naval base until 1990. Physically, the place has visibly deteriorated. "Living conditions were better. There were not so many crooks."
Cerda said Panamanian police solicit bribes and smoke crack in front of children. Drug runners she thinks are from Colombia come to her neighborhood every night.
"When the Americans were here, everything was normal," said Carmen Tomas, 26, a secretary. "Now the narcotraficantes come."
Luis Ibarra, 61, a carpenter, doesn't want the Americans to leave because they have provided jobs. Juan Acosta, 44, a waiter, said, "The Americans kept the land neat. Now the bush grows." Merced Linares, 41, a Roman Catholic nun in Porto Bello, liked the way the Americans ran the canal.
But even though two-thirds of Panamanians may want Americans to stay, Panamanian politicians do not. In the recent presidential election, candidates argued over who would most forcefully reject U.S. influence.
Panama's 2.7 million people are a rich ethnic mix, including West Indians who helped build the canal, French who settled during earlier attempts to build a canal, and Chinese, who immigrated during the California gold rush. But these groups do not hold a share of political power.
For the politically connected, support for a swift and permanent American departure is enhanced by the prospect of economic gains. The Americans have turned over to Panama an estimated 364,000 acres of land and 7,000 buildings, property valued at $5 billion.
But while a few have got rich from land transfers, many have been made considerably poorer by the U.S. pullout. In 1994, spending by the Panama Canal Commission, the U.S. military and 32,000 American dependents accounted for a tenth of Panama's gross domestic product.
Closing the military bases has cost 18,000 jobs. The out-of-work range from skilled professionals such as Ray Bishop, who was an engineering technician, to the "grass ninjas" whose weed whips kept the jungle at bay.
At least 110 banks do business in Panama, which became a center of money laundering and drug smuggling during the dictatorships of Torrijos and Manuel Noriega. The United States arrested Noriega in 1989, and he now sits in a U.S. prison convicted of drug smuggling.
Many Panamanians are sure that corruption remains rampant. A government minister recently was fired amid charges he sold thousands of U.S.immigrant visas to Chinese for as much as $20,000 each.
Panamanians also must worry about pending environmental catastrophe.
Each ship transit in the canal requires 52 million gallons of fresh water. Water flows out when the locks are opened. Fresh water is needed because salt water would destroy the inland ecosystem.
This causes severe water shortages in the dry season, when canal operators often must limit the draft of vessels transiting the canal. Meanwhile, demand for water is increasing exponentially due to rapid population growth in Panama City and Colon, which draw on the same reservoirs as the canal.
Squatters practicing slash and burn agriculture aggravate the problem. Deforestation reduces rainfall. In 1952, some 85 percent of the Chagres river basin was forested, falling to less than 30 percent by 1983, and maybe no more than 20 percent today. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has measured a drop in average annual rainfall of one inch per year in interior portions of the watershed.
Growing Chinese presence
U.S. officials appear concerned by a growing Chinese presence.
In 1997 the Panama Canal Co.'s ports on the Atlantic and Pacific were sold to Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate with ties to the People's Liberation Army. Construction is booming at both ports, and Chinese security guards do not welcome American photographers.
Retired Admiral Thomas Moorer, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Senate GOP leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., are among those who have publicly worried that the Chinese military might try to build bases in Panama. Intelligence sources, however, say that is unlikely and point out that the Chinese have every interest in ensuring that the canal operates efficiently because its exports flow through it.
"Security is not enhanced by handing the canal port facilities over to a potentially hostile power, but it is not particularly degraded, either," according to STRATFOR, a private intelligence service. "The port facilities are large, but certainly not large enough to hide a missile complex or a division of PLA soldiers."
At any rate, an amendment to the Panama Canal treaties provides the United States the right to unilaterally intervene to protect the canal or keep it open.
Terrorism is a more likely threat. A shoulder-fired missile could sink a ship in transit, bringing traffic to a standstill. A few pounds of plastic explosive could disable the massive steel gates that operate the locks. If the Gatun Dam, which maintains the huge reservoir of water needed to operate the canal, were damaged, it could flood the canal and disable it for years.
Since Panama no longer has an army -- the United States disbanded the Guardia Nacional when it deposed Noriega in 1989 -- there is not much that could be done to deter a determined attack.
Marxist narco-guerrillas from Colombia are operating ever more boldly in Darien province, adjacent to Colombia. "The guerrillas from Colombia are coming," warns Pietro Medina, a street vendor in Colon. "When the Americans were here, they stayed away."
Corruption poses another problem for the health of canal commerce.
The Panama Canal is an engineering marvel, but an aging one. More than a quarter of its budget is devoted to maintenance, a proportion that will have to rise substantially in the near future if present levels of efficiency are to be maintained.
No bonanza
The canal is Panama's greatest asset. But it is unlikely to be the bonanza some Panamanians expect it to be.
"Many Panamanians thought the power and prosperity of the United States were due precisely and perhaps even exclusively to its control of the canal," says Mark Falcoff, a Latin American expert with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
But the United States has been running the canal on a break-even basis, and there is little economic latitude for Panama to raise tolls. In the last four years, the canal has run deficits, despite toll increases of 8.2 percent in 1997 and 7.5 percent in 1998.
The State Department and the Panama Canal Company commissioned a study to project traffic and revenues. Ely Brandes, the economist who conducted it, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during hearings on the Panama Canal treaty, that traffic would begin to drop off if tolls were raised as little as 15 percent. If there were a 50 percent increase, the loss of customers would nearly offset the increased charges per ship.
Just under 14,000 ships go through the Panama Canal each year, about five percent of global maritime commerce. Some 60 percent of those ships start from, or are headed to, a U.S. port. But it is unclear whether, in the long run, it would be economically harmful to U.S. shippers to have the Panama Canal close.
Containerization, and improvements in ship-to-rail transit make it nearly as economical to offload cargo in New Orleans or Galveston and ship it by rail to San Diego or San Pedro, there to load it onto another ship, as it is to transit the canal.
The United States likely could not have fought a two-ocean war in World War II without the Panama Canal. But now that air power is a far larger component of U.S. military power, the importance of the canal to the U.S. military is much diminished.
Panama's political leaders regard noon on Dec. 31 as the hour at which their country finally will be liberated from a stifling foreign influence. But the nation most freed by the final implementation of the Panama canal treaties might be the United States.
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