MADRID- Americans are not good at giving away their territorial possessions, few though they’ve had. The renunciation of their ownership of the Panama Canal Zone has been handled with as much grace as a sack of potatoes. Refusing to attend if the ceremony were held at noon on December 31st as the treaty mandates, the celebratory party was advanced a couple of weeks to mid-December. Even then only ex-president Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 negotiated the treaty ending U.S. jurisdiction, made the relatively short journey.
New situation, but the same reflexes. In the words of Ronald Reagan, who helped nearly cripple the young Carter presidency with a vitriolic anti-Canal Treaty campaign, “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours”.
But, despite all the second thoughts in Washington and the whispering campaign about a future Chinese grab for the canal via the Hong Kong company that has won the lease to run the ports at either end of the great international waterway, the canal will be formally in Panama’s hands by the afternoon of the last day of the millennium.
The substance will have finally changed; alas, the style has not. In 1903 all the White House had to do, without consulting any Panamanians, was to contact the editor of the New York World and ask him to publish a communique. It read: “Information has reached this city that the state of Panama stands ready to secede from Colombia and enter into a canal treaty with the U.S..” Six months later a rebellion was duly organized to firm up the secession and the first canal treaty was signed- without bothering to ask for the Panamanian signature, although it granted the U.S. in perpetuity all rights and authority in the canal zone “which it would possess if it were sovereign to the territory.”
It was an unsustainable interposition in a now largely de-colonized world. And it was to Carter’s credit that he realized that the canal hung like an albatross around America’s neck – even though his timing was naively wrong, given the then priority of wooing the Senate to ratify the upcoming arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. America’s ownership of the canal zone not only was poisoning the U.S. relationship with the proud and eminently successful state of Panama- it had achieved by this time a level of all round economic and social well-being second to none in Latin America- it complicated America’s dealings with all of Latin America. Rightly, these proud and headstrong countries who had fought so hard in the previous century to win their independence from Spain and Portugal, had a profound hostility to gringo colonialism.
The bitterness ran very deep. A taste of it can be found in Graham Greene’s chronicle, “Getting to know the General”. In it Greene recounts one of his many intimate conversations with General Omar Torrijos, the military president who negotiated the Panama Canal Treaty face to face with Carter. “The Canal is easy to sabotage”, said Torrijos, “Blow a hole in the Gatun dam and the canal will drain down to the Atlantic. It would take only a few days to mend the dam, but it would take three years of rain to fill the canal. During that time it would be guerrilla war waged from the jungle”. (The forest and mountains that link Panama and Colombia are among the most impenetrable in the world; and all attempts to link the two countries with a road have failed.)
Greene became the friend and confidante of Torrijos during the difficult days of the treaty negotiations. He observed that Torrijos “would not be entirely unhappy if the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty (as it nearly did). He would be left with the simple solution of violence, which had often been in his mind, with desire and apprehension balanced as in a sexual encounter.”
Torrijos died in a mysterious plane crash and was succeeded by Manuel Noriega, his friend and fellow party-giver, who also enjoyed the juxtaposition of sex and violence, authenticating his masculinity with the urge to tell America to go and be damned. But, unlike Torrijos, he was corrupted by the drug trade and Washington was able to build a case against him that at least convinced itself, if less others, that the U.S. was within its rights, as the protector of free passage in the canal, to depose this malevolent and unstable character. In due course he was sentenced in a Miami court and remains incarcerated.
That the U.S. got away with this without provoking a serious reaction in Panama was because of Carter’s earlier success (although the then president George Bush would never have admitted to it). It had defused Panamanian hostility and indeed measurably improved Washington’s fraught relationship with the whole of Latin America.
It is more the pity that present day Washington seems intent on throwing away Carter’s legacy. The U.S. should be stepping out of Panama with style and its head high. George Bush, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton himself should all be there on the 31st to salute the transition. It will be an historic opportunity missed. And the rest of the world will see it as one more of many recent instances of the Clinton Administration demonstrating the arrogance of power.
