The Panama Canal was an integral part of the expansion of U.S. global power at the dawn of the 20th century. It served as a transit for American commercial and strategic interests, allowing the establishment of a marina with two oceans in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Considered one of the wonders of the modern world, the Panama Canal opened its doors this Friday 100 years ago, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and providing a new route for international trade and military transport.
When built, the canal was an engineering marvel, since it relied on a series of locks that lift ships (and their thousands of pounds of cargo) above the mountains. However, thousands of workers died during its construction, and its history has not been without controversy, including a controversial transfer of authority from the United States to Panama in the 1970s. Work has recently begun on a substantial expansion effort that will allow the channel to adapt to modern charging needs. Recently, PBS NewsHour interviewed several regional experts to talk about the channel's first 100 years and to get an idea of what lies ahead. Richard Feinberg is a professor of International Political Economy at the University of California, San Diego, and a non-resident senior member of the Bookings Institution's Latin America Initiative.
He served as special assistant to President Clinton and senior director of the Office of Inter-American Affairs of the National Security Council. In addition, the economic impact was enormous. Now trade between the two oceans can be united. From the 1890s until World War I, world trade was as important as it is now, so it was important to have a transport route that crossed the continent.
That's why Wall Street was very supportive and helped finance it. With such a large amount of labor, it probably employed a third of the population of Central America and the Caribbean, and the United States was heavily influenced by that workforce and by the money that flowed through Wall Street, banks and insurance companies. The United States was based on a vast system of racial and ethnic segregation, the Gold and Silver Scrolls. White American workers were paid in gold and had better housing conditions and conditions.
The majority of Afro-descendant workers in the Caribbean were on “silver lists”. They lived in shacks and ate outside or under porches during torrential rains. Not surprisingly, they were based on segregation, but the demography of the Canal Zone was not black or white. Thousands of Spaniards arrived and discovered that they were referred to as “semi-white Europeans” and that they were being excluded from hotels and cafés for white people.
They were quite upset and built a vast network of anarchist policies and would go on strike even if they were not allowed to do so. So the United States realized that it had to constantly manage problems stemming from its own policies. And there's something more important, which I call the element of peace. The channel gives us something that no neighbor has, and that is political stability. The neutrality clause of the Torrijos-Carter treaty says that the United States has the right to intervene in Panamanian internal affairs if the channel's security is ever threatened.
Why isn't there corruption? Why does the channel work with the precision of a Swiss watch factory? Because Americans always have it in their sights. You know it's not going to be ruined. However, there are challenges even though ecological ideals were taken into account. If ships cross quickly, that will put pressure on Gatun Lake and harm its environment a little, so it is debated whether they should slow down to protect the lake. The other thing is that it's going to change trading patterns.
Right now, most trade between Asia and the United States goes through Long Beach. Most maritime trade will be directed to ports in the south and northeast. This has implications for railroad companies, trucking companies, and entire cities. Joe Biden said that this could cause inflation to decrease, making the United States more competitive in its exports to China.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and brevity. Check your inbox to confirm. Learn more about Friends of the NewsHour. Many recognize Panama as the small tropical nation located on the isthmus, a narrow strip of land with sea on each side, which forms a link between two larger areas of land in Central America.
Panama has a history of colonization and neocolonization that can be similarly related to many Latin American countries. I intend to highlight and discuss the historical problems that have arisen from such facets. This article will be an accumulation of my research on the history of Panama. It is important to note that I seek to address the question of how the intervention of the United States in Panama's struggle for independence from Colombia affected the country's ideological aspirations.
The structure of the document will be based on the historical context, the means of United States intervention, and the results of the United States intervention. And Panamanian relations after the war for independence. The section on the historical context will briefly cover Panamanian history as it relates to the general themes of Latin American history. This section will also focus on the political and ideological aspirations of Panamanians before a revolution. The following section will address the reasons for the existence of the U.S.
UU. Intervention in the political affairs of Panama and Colombia. The final section provides a comparative analysis of the results of the relationship between the United States and Panama and the means by which the United States and the United States. The final section is where my historical question will be answered.
Ultimately, the purpose of my independent research project is to exemplify intervention in Panama's struggle for independence as a result of the United States. In addition, I seek to describe how these implications diverted the purpose of the Panamanian insurrection in Colombia to adapt it to the interests of the United States. The long history of Panama is often related to that of Colombia. During the colonial era (1492-18), Panama was simply a province of the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
The liberation of New Granada during the Latin American wars of independence would allow Panamanian independence from Spain. When Simón Bolívar's forces campaigned in the northern part of South America in the early 19th century, many peninsulars fled to Panama, but as the battles progressed, the peninsulars and the colonizers began to abandon the province of Panama. Panama would witness a “bloodless revolution”, as the separatists faced zero casualties when they formally gained independence from Spain. On November 10, November 18, the racist leader José de Fábrega declared Panama a free state; however, the fear that Spain would retaliate against a militarily and economically weak Panama caused the new nation to join the Republic of Gran Colombia.
Panama's historical trajectory would be limited to Colombia for the rest of the century. The decades that followed the wars of independence would prove to be plagued by political unrest. The central government of Gran Colombia was weak and disputes between federalists and centralists caused significant political divisions that could not be mediated. Gran Colombia would dissolve and the Republic of New Granada would take its place, and Panama would maintain its status as a province for the new governing republic.
Political altercations and dissolutions of central governments would be commonplace in Colombia and its states throughout the 19th century. This common overthrow caused resentful attitudes among the provinces of the republic. Panama and other states in the region would constantly challenge central power. Panamanian politician Justo Arosemena would dedicate his career to demanding the autonomy of Panama.
Arosemena wrote many articles detailing the specific experiences of Panama, the most famous of which, The Federal State of Panama (185), would give Justo Arosemena the title of father of Panamanian nationality. Many of Arosemena's articles called for the reorganization of Latin American sovereignty and an end to “Yankee intervention” in Latin America. The declaration in favor of Latin American confederations, in which states would maintain their respective autonomy but would function in a unified way to prevent foreign intervention, was an integral part of Arosemena's ideology. It is important to note that the drafting of Arosemena would be key for Panamanian separatists and would be invoked countless times during the second half of the 19th century.1 In the 1880s, Panamanian insurgents were advancing at full speed in their movement for succession.
Depending on the party in power, the Panama statute was the subject of debate, whether sovereign or departmental. Panamanians committed themselves to fully self-governing and to cease their subordination to Colombia. Colombia's military power was greater than that of the Panamanian insurgents, and military occupation of major Panamanian cities became common in the 1880s. Naval troops and ships had been dispersed across the region to defend many of their own commercial and business interests.
The separatist movement was supposed to diminish, which would end Panamanian aspirations for self-government and that political purgatory would continue. 2 The construction of the canal across the Central American isthmus had been sought for a long time, even in the days of Bastida, when he established control of the territory. However, the excessively ambitious presidency of Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, whose desire for war coincided with that of the so-called Warhawks of almost a century earlier, and some aspects of empire-building and the explicit ideologies of Western superiority over Latin America, had made it possible to create ample conditions for beginning an American overshoot of the Panamanian war effort. To clarify, the induction of “legitimate intervention” proposed by the Monroe Doctrine (182) allowed the participation of the United States in foreign policy during the 19th century, which gave rise to the intrinsic practices and methods described with those of neocolonialism and imperialism on Latin American nations. These examples can be seen with the imposition of the American occupation or the participation in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, one of them being the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty (184), the same treaty that allowed the interaction of the United States in the fight for the independence of Panama.
In the same way, the ideology of the superiority of the United States over Latin America was widely accepted. These sentiments of Westerners were common at the time and can be seen in works such as Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem The Burden of a White Man, in which he addresses the need for American neocolonial practices as a need to save nations of “colored people” through an intervention that would lead to modernization.3 These aspects of what was exemplified in the previous paragraph are reasons for the establishment of an international environment that implied that it would be moral and unfair to the United States. Intervening in Latin American affairs would be beneficial to the United States, to a large extent, in military and economic terms. In addition, with this reasoning, the United States had a great interest in establishing some degree of control over the Central American isthmus. The sole ownership of a channel across the isthmus would be a great addition to the United States economy, since they could set the cost of access fees and traveling through a Central American channel would be faster and more profitable for a company that delivers its goods “around the horn, around Argentina and across the Strait of Magellan”.Access to a canal would allow the United States to combine its naval forces in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to connect.
This aspect was as important as the Spanish-American War, which ended in 1898, a year before the official start of the struggle for independence in Panama, since a victory demonstrated to the United States that they needed to be able to transfer military resources between the oceans more quickly, especially to maintain control of their newly acquired territories, Hawaii and the Philippines. In the same way, the creation of an isthmic channel would instantly add great prestige to American engineering, since the channel had only been imagined and theorized for 500 years. There was only one problem between the United States and its channel, access, 4.The Colombian government entered into negotiations with the United States However, due to access to land in Panama for the construction of canals, ratification of agreements often failed. Many times, Colombian politicians in the legislative body failed to ratify treaties such as the Hay-Herrán Treaty (190).
The Hay-Herrán Treaty, if ratified in early 1903, would have allowed the United States to access a channel in exchange for payments and the repression of Panamanian insurgents. As negotiations with Colombia became increasingly tedious for the United States, this choice was largely calculated, since an insurgent victory would allow the United States to carry out negotiations with a fledgling nation and, in the hope, obtain greater concessions for a channel. They had their own intentions of neutrality, but they began to strive to take advantage of the means to create a channel. Foreign policy, ideologies of superiority and an imperious president had allowed the United States to create an environment to participate in such practices of intervention between countries for personal interests.
Ultimately, the United States backed the Panamanian insurgency, hoping to facilitate channel concessions to The United States helped Panamanians to become independent from Colombia by establishing the Republic of Panama in 1903 and announcing a long and bloody struggle; however, the implications for Panamanian ideology would be enormous. The means of these concessions are not left to the imagination. The 19th century is full of examples in which the United States obtained major concessions for the war through what some call “gunboat diplomacy”. An example of this is the “independent nations” of Puerto Rico and Cuba after the end of the Spanish-American War, the result of a U.S.
government that led negotiations to end the war and inculcated legislative provisions to effectively maintain control over the islands. Something similar happened with the new Panamanian Republic, since most of the negotiations between the United States and Panama were led by the former Secretary of State John Hay. The question is not whether Hay had directly threatened to use U.S. military forces to obtain adequate concessions for the United States.
Without a direct threat, Panamanian politicians could conclude that the United States had been helping one after the other out of personal interests and, if they were not satisfied with their spoils of war, they could easily aim for direct annexation. The best option for Panamanians was to give in to the fear of another war with a fighter greater than Colombia's. In the same way, it is described that the former Panamanian ambassador to the United States, the American pressure groups and the continued practice of negotiating without authorization on channel 5, most of these aspects of the negotiations to end the war would affect not only the treaties but Panamanian legislation as a whole. First, the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty (190) effectively established a construction zone of 16 km across Panama for the United States. To create a channel, the area would later be known as the Channel Zone.
The agreements on the treaty allowed the United States to take defensive measures to protect its area. In the same way, provisions such as Article 136 of the Panamanian Constitution (190) would grant the United States “the right to intervene anywhere in Panama to restore public peace and constitutional order”, and to the United States,I would exercise the rights of this constitutional article to carry out actions such as deploying U.S. troops to manage political unrest in Panamanian cities or abolishing the Panamanian army. The land for the construction of the canal and access to Panama was exchanged for payments and rents to Panama.
Indeed, the results of the treaties and negotiations on ending the war between the United States and the United States. And Panama made Panama a de facto protectorate for the United States. What remains to be evaluated is the question of Panamanian political ideologies. As I said, Panamanian independence was an ideology of self-government and autonomy compared to that of Colombia.
Of course, the addition of U., S. Successive assistance resulted in the total separation of Colombia and the establishment of the Panamanian Republic. However, the fact is that Panama's position in relation to the United States. Panama became a protectorate and, as such, became governed with respect to the United States.
In short, Panama's aspirations for self-government were diverted because of the total autonomy of the United States, Panama and its people would not be granted as subjects of the United States. And that reality could be seen in the following years, when the canal area became inaccessible to Panamanians and the occupation and deployment of U.S. troops in Panama became relatively common. Panama would not secede from the United States until the late 20th century, and the successonist ideology seen by Arosemena and other Panamanians would not fully materialize. Steam shovels carry rocks swept along twin tracks that remove soil from the bed of the Panama Canal around 1908. The problem was how that achievement was achieved, which essentially consisted of subordinating part of its territory to an extraterritorial power, through a treaty that no Panamanian signed.
However, the crux of the matter is Panama's position in relation to the U. However, the channel has remained fundamental to the American national identity, in part because it is considered to exemplify that beneficial self-image. In the same way, provisions such as Article 136 of the Panamanian Constitution (190) would grant the United States “the right to intervene anywhere in Panama, to restore public peace and constitutional order”, and the U.
