Support
anti-war,
anti-racist
news

:: Donate now ::

Email this article 

Printable page

Email the editor

Canal and U.S. military bases turned over

Panama regains its national territory

By Carl Glenn

There was something oddly casual about the Dec. 15 ceremony in which the United States symbolically surrendered the Panama Canal and former U.S. military bases to the government of Panama. Organizers of the activity had moved it up two weeks from the date the Canal's ownership legally passes into Panamanian hands, so the act wouldn't conflict with New Year's Eve partying.

It was a great historical moment. The last of the U.S. troops who have occupied this country for most of its history were departing. The national territory was unified for the first time and Panama was at long last achieving independence and sovereignty. Yet the ceremony seemed sterile and somehow embarrassed.

"It's yours," was all former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said, as he handed a document to Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso.

It is not hard to understand why it happened this way. For one thing, the ceremony took place in the shadow of the 10th anniversary of the murderous U.S. invasion of Panama, launched on the night of Dec. 19, 1989. Since then, neither the Pentagon nor the U.S. right wing has ever stopped repeating that it reserves the "right" to intervene whenever it chooses.

On June 22, for example, in testimony before the U.S. Senate, Gen. Charles Wilhelm, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Southern Command, repeated the Pentagon's readiness to invade Panama once again. He made this statement in reference to the supposed threat to the canal's security.

Even as U.S. troops were leaving the territory--previously off-limits to Panamanians in the heart of their country-- Panamanians faced residual violence in the form of live explosives and other weapons the United States is leaving behind. Washington refuses to clean up.

Panama was a staging area for U.S. military actions against other Latin American nations and the former home of the terror institute, the School of the Americas. Also, like Vieques in Puerto Rico, Panama was used for target practice and weapons experimentation.

U.S. legacy of murder

Thousands of rounds of live bombs and other explosives lie buried, waiting to be accidentally detonated by farmer or child.

In March, Cleotilde Cárdenas, a justice of the peace from a small town adjacent to one of the firing ranges, told John Lindsay-Poland of the Fellowship of Reconciliation about four Panamanians killed during the last eight years.

Two of these were children aged 9 and 6. They had found an explosive device, which they accidentally set off. The children were blown to bits.

Lindsay-Poland has uncovered in U.S. military documents evidence of the extensive testing in Panama of chemical and biological weapons such as VX land mines and mustard gas. Even though obligated by treaties to clear all hazards from the area, the Pentagon has refused, saying it was "impractical."

Also missing from the ceremony were the people who struggled to make this transfer possible. These include generations of Panamanian patriots, students, workers--women and men who fought the continued presence of U.S. soldiers who lived on a 10-mile-wide strip of land flanking the canal and cutting Panama in two.

Panama's natural resources

It is not the canal, however, but Panama's geographical position and its shape that are its most precious natural resources. These resources can be used as a nation with oil or mineral resources might hope to use its natural wealth to bring prosperity to its native inhabitants.

Before the canal was built, the United States exploited Panama's geographical resource by building a railroad across the isthmus in the 1840s, greatly accelerating its "manifest destiny."

This was during a period in which U.S. politicians were promoting westward expansion, in part to defend the system of slavery. The U.S. government was also in the process of stealing millions of square miles of the North American continent from its native inhabitants and from Mexico.

At the end of Panama's War of 1,000 Days to free itself from Colombia, the United States seized the opportunity to rush in as Panama's unwanted "savior." This was only a few years after the United States had declared war on Spain, seizing Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines after patriots there had fought bitter wars for their independence.

Construction of the canal began almost immediately. But who really built the canal? Thousands of workers, many of whose descendents continue to live in crushing poverty in the most oppressed neighborhoods of Panama City and Colon.

After the canal was built and was being used at great profit by U.S. companies to ship goods from the East Coast to the West Coast of North and South America and Asia, the United States intervened frequently in the internal affairs of Panama. Once, in 1925, U.S. soldiers were called in to help suppress a rent strike in Panama City.

After World War II, the hatred and resentment of the U.S. military occupation and the apartheid-like system existing between the U.S. "Zonians" and the native Panamanian workers mounted. It reached a climax in 1964, when 28 students were shot to death during a rebellion over the right to raise the national flag of Panama.

The mass struggle of the Panamanian people finally forced the U.S. government to begin serious negotiations on the ownership of the canal.

Torrijos and the treaties

In 1968 Omar Torrijos led a progressive nationalist military government to power in Panama, displacing the white-racist oligarchy. The Torrijos government brought Panamanian Black and Indigenous people into the national life of the country for the first time. His government also supported the Sandinista insurgency, then growing in strength in Nicaragua.

The Torrijos-Carter treaties, under which Washington ultimately conceded ownership of the canal and the zone surrounding it, were signed in 1977. That was just two years after the heroic people of Vietnam defeated U.S. imperialism and two years before the Nicaraguan people toppled the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship.

The masses in El Salvador and Guat e mala were also fighting wars of armed resistance to U.S.-supported tyrants. This was the context in which the United States reluctantly signed the treaties, and only after onerous conditions and qualifications were added unilaterally by the U.S. Senate.

Freight traffic through the Panama Canal continues to increase yearly. It has great importance in world commerce. There can be no doubt of the importance the Pentagon attaches to the canal. As mass movements weaken U.S. imperialism's grip in Colombia and Venezuela--both oil-producing nations and Panama's two biggest neighbors--Panama will continue in the shadow of U.S. military calculations.

Copyright © 1999 workers.org