A century later, US hands over Canal to Panama

The importance of Tuesday’s ceremony, which was on the verge of becoming an informal summit of the Americas, was lessened when US President Bill Clinton cancelled his visit. A string of Latin presidents also announced their cancellations. US Vice President Al Gore and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will also be absent. Incidentally, the handover ceremony had been set for December 31 at midnight, but was rescheduled forDecember 14 following a request from the White House.

Spain’s King Juan Carlos is expected to be at the event, along with the presidents of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, Colombia, Andres Pastrana, and Bolivia, Hugo Banzer, the only sitting President who was at the 1977 ceremony at which Washington pledged to turn over control. Presidents Jamil Mahuad of Ecuador and Miguel Angel Rodriguez of Costa Rica will also be present. But the star of most of such hemispheric summits, Cuban President Fidel Castro, was not invited.

Each year, the canal is used by some 17,000 vessels, 70 per cent of which are either coming or going to a US port or travelling between US ports. About 14,000 are cargo ships moving about 200 million tonnes of goods a mere four per cent of the world’s trade. Panama is confident that it will run the canal well. Regarded as one of the engineering marvels of the 20th century, the canal was built by the US from 1903 to 1914 and has been under US administration ever since. A former province ofColombia, Panama was born as an independent country in 1903 following a US-supported secessionist movement. Two weeks after independence, Panama granted a strip of land crossing the nation to the US to build and protect a trans-oceanic canal.

The Canal Zone was home to the Southern Command, which coordinated US military activities across the hemisphere, among other tasks. It was also home to the infamous US Army School of the Americas that graduated, among others, some of the hemisphere’s worst human rights violators the former military strongmen of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, Argentina, Jorge Videla, and the late dictators of Paraguay, Alfredo Stroessner, and Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. The school relocated from Panama to Fort Benning, Georgia in 1984.