Though seemingly unintentional, President Donald Trump’s comments on the Panama Canal just happened to coincide almost perfectly with the 25th anniversary of the final turnover of the waterway from American to Panamanian control at the end of 1999. Trump’s threat to “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, quickly and without question” elicited unsurprising resistance from Panama, whose economy is deeply dependent on it. Pro-U.S. Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino declared, “Every square meter of the Panama Canal and the surrounding area belongs to Panama and will continue belonging [to Panama].” Local demonstrators blocked the entrance to the U.S. Embassy on Christmas Eve, which, thankfully, had minimal impact, given then-President Joe Biden’s executive order providing federal employees the day off.
The controversy also provoked the predictable bevy of corporate media commentary criticizing Trump: Pundits explained, as if uninformed Americans thought otherwise, that he cannot simply “take it back.” Others argued his remarks aimed at a U.S. ally, which has demonstrated a recent willingness to cooperate on stemming waves of illegal migrants moving through the Darién Gap, amount to a “distraction from real issues.” But perhaps the most incredible piece of journalism regarding what may ultimately be little more than one more Trumpian flash in the pan comes from the keyboard of the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak, the paper’s new “Retropolis” columnist, writing on historical curiosities related to current events.
In a column titled “The troubled history of the Panama Canal’s racial and social divide,” Dvorak explains how the legacy of the U.S.-built shipping route “includes segregation and violence.” She describes the notorious segregated system of pay that existed both during the U.S. construction of the canal (1903-1914) and for decades afterward in the U.S.-administered Panama Canal Zone, a stretch of land 5 miles on either side of the 50-mile canal governed as sovereign U.S. territory. “Gold dollars for the high-ranking, mostly white workers, silver pesos for workers of color,” she writes. That “racial disparity,” Dvorak claims, was what sparked Panamanian riots in 1964 that killed 22 Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers. And those riots, she implies, are what led to racial desegregation in the Panama Canal Zone.
I have lived in the former Panama Canal Zone for almost two years. The neighborhood across the street from my own was previously inhabited by the 193 Infantry. In that time, I’ve written a variety of stories for many publications regarding the history of Panama, including the construction of the canal and the subsequent canal zone, and contemporary Panamanian politics and religion. I’ve spoken to almost a dozen Zonians, the name for those (mostly) American citizens whose families lived and worked in the canal zone, as well as members of multiple elite Panamanian families. I’ve spoken to Zonian canal tugboat captains and pilots, teachers, medical professionals, and the son of a former dredger. Their accounts differ from Dvorak’s commentary.
For example, there was indeed a segregated system of pay, and, in practice, it did generally result in a division along racial lines. But the “silver roll,” as it was called, was not for “persons of color.” It was for non-U.S. citizens. One Zonian I recently interviewed was descended from a white English immigrant who was on the silver roll during canal construction, working as a superintendent. French citizens who had earlier worked on their own disastrous attempt to construct a canal across the isthmus in the late 19th century were also on the silver roll, as were white Spanish speakers from various Latin American countries.
And while it’s true that racial segregation existed in the Panama Canal Zone, with separate bathrooms, water fountains, and schools, this is not what caused the 1964 riots. Rather, it was a sovereignty problem. Panamanian students, expressing sentiments held across Panamanian society, bristled at the fact that a strip of land in the middle of their country — as well as the canal, which had the possibility to be a cash cow — was governed by a foreign power. Things came to a head over the attempted raising of a Panamanian flag at a canal zone high school, which, while something the Kennedy administration had earlier agreed to, was not something widely communicated to Zonian students, who were surprised and insulted by the prospect.
The protests and subsequent violence were not motivated by Panamanian anger over the existence of genuinely contemptible Jim Crow-style laws within the canal zone. Panama then, as now, had many soft forms of racial discrimination. The “rabiblancos,” as they’re called, are a small, European-descended upper crust of Panamanian society who still control much of the nation’s wealth and live in its toniest neighborhoods. Nor were the 1964 protests the impetus for desegregation in the canal zone: Enforcement of the Civil Rights Act did not occur there until the 1970s.
Dvorak imparted this advice about the importance of journalists wearing out their shoes while walking their beats in her farewell piece as one of the Washington Post metro columnists: “Get out of the office, get out of downtown, talk to people, walk the streets, listen, let their voices and experiences guide your voice. Don’t try to write an opinion piece sitting at your desk.”
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Granted, Dvorak could hardly be expected to fly to Panama and interview the few hundred Zonians still living in the former canal zone — though she could have contacted some through their Zonian association or Facebook group. Despite the fact that the former canal zone is a fascinating artifact of American 20th-century imperialism, there is a surprising dearth of scholarship on the subject. The best book on the Panama Canal Zone I have found is a now-out-of-print memoir of two left-leaning educators who taught there.
Nevertheless, this was largely an attempt to portray Trump’s interest in the Panama Canal as a “signal back” to some American jungle paradise for white supremacists. Perhaps it’s not terribly surprising, given Dvorak’s penchant for liberal bias. But both the history and certainly the Zonians, many of whom hold positive views of Panama’s quarter-century of control of the canal, deserve better.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at the Federalist and an editor and columnist at New Oxford Review.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
