(DV) Stephens: The Memory of Military Occupation in Panama

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The Memory of Military Occupation in Panama
by Gregory Stephens
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 13, 2007

While the Bush Administration was revealing plans to send another 20,000 troops to Iraq, I was observing Martyr’s Day, a national holiday celebrated in Panama on January 9. This national memorial to blood shed during a protest against symbols of American military occupation gave me plenty of food for thought about the complex legacy of American Empire, past and present.

Student protests that led to violence beginning on January 9, 1964, were a just demand that the US occupants of the Canal Zone observe the law of their own military authorities. On December 30, 1963 -- just five weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy (probably blowback for United States interference in Cuba) -- Robert Fleming, governor of the Canal Zone, announced that in the New Year, the Panamanian flag should be raised alongside the Stars and Stripes. This was one of those slight movements towards “equal rights and justice” that, in retrospect, seem entirely reasonable. But like the Civil Rights laws of the same era requiring voting rights and equal access to transportation and educational institutions for African Americans, it occasioned a good deal of bone-headed resistance.

Many residents of the Canal Zone defied the new order. One place where the Stars and Stripes flew solo was Balboa High School. A group of around 200 students from the National Institute, then the most prestigious high school in Panama, marched to Balboa, under the leadership of a 17-year-old student activist named Guillermo Guevara Paz.

The students carried the Panamanian flag, and pamphlets proclaiming Panama’s sovereignty over the Canal Zone. They had notified all the relevant authorities, and were given permission to proceed to Balboa to raise their flag. But a group of North American counter-protesters rejected the agreement that their own military authorities had engineered. They sang the American anthem, and then surrounded the Panamanian students. In the following melee, the Panamanian flag was shredded. Protests quickly spread across the Canal Zone, sometimes morphing into burning and looting. Firefights erupted between armed Panamanian youths and US military authorities who, predictably, responded with excessive force. Some 22 Panamanians and four US citizens lost their lives.

News coverage of the events did not help the image of the United States in Latin America. A lasting image was of a group of uniformed Panamanian students at Ancón, carrying a Panamanian flag as they climbed over the fence separating the Canal Zone from Panama proper. The majority opinion in Latin America was expressed by the Colombian ambassador before the Organization of American States: “In Panama today exists another Berlin wall.”

These events are now considered to be a catalyst that led to the signing of the Torrijos-Carter treaty in 1979, which dissolved the Canal Zone, and turned over US military institutions to Panama on the last day of 1999.

One could even interpret these events as prefiguring the leftward drift that has now led most of Latin America out of the United States’ political orbit. Most of the governments in the Americans that had previously supported United States foreign policy refused to back up the Yankees in the Panamanian affair.

The Panamanian president, Roberto Chiari, broke diplomatic relations with the US, declaring that he would not restore relations until negotiations were opened for a new treaty. It wasn’t long before President Lyndon Johnson sent envoy Robert Anderson to Panama to begin the negotiations that would eventually lead to the Torrijos-Carter Treaty.

A brief historical note: the United States had supported Panamanian independence from Colombia precisely so that it could construct the Panama Canal. Article II of the Hay-Bunau Varilla Treaty signed in 1903 conceded the 10-mile-wide strip of the Canal Zone to the United States in perpetuity. (The US government began construction of the canal, originally begun by the French in 1881, in 1904). This division of the new nation into two halves generated a growing reservoir of resentment.

During the 1950s, students led protests demanding revision of the Canal treaties, such as "Operación Siembra de Banderas" (Operation Flag-Sowing) in 1958, when students planted 75 Panamanian flags throughout the Canal Zone. Such acts led to recognition by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959 that the Panamanian flag should be flown alongside the US flag. Thus began negotiations that resulted in the Chiari-Kennedy Accord in 1962, which gave more social and economic liberties to Panamanians living in the Canal Zone. But as the protests of 1964 made clear, Panamanians often felt they suffered from something similar to an apartheid system.

For most young Panamanians today, January 9 is just another holiday, about like July 4 in the US. It seems that Panama has gained what it demanded -- not the rejection of the United States, but coexistence on more equal terms. The US dollar is still the national currency. But when I shop in the supermarket, I hear salsa or cumbia. The strong influence of Latin America coexists with a genuine admiration for the can-do spirit of the gringos -- a term that Panamanians apply to North Americans of all colors.

Panamanians seem to feel that the US presence, on the whole, was and is a positive thing. At one point in time, they had to shed blood to set limits to that presence, but they are not obsessed. But among the US right, one can still hear talk that Carter “gave away” Panama in 1979. Only by traveling does one see how little attitudes have changed in the US and, by contrast, how eager most of our neighbors are to dialogue with us, despite our long history of not knowing how to listen, as Octavio Paz once said. Surely if we knew the meaning of dialogue, we would realize that we have no more right to occupy Guantánamo in perpetuity than Panama. Much less to go on justifying military occupations of countries halfway around the planet.

Gregory Stephens is Lecturer of Cultural Studies & Film in the Department of Literatures in English, University of West Indies-Mona (Kingston, Jamaica), and the author of On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison and Bob Marley (Cambridge UP, 1999). He has taught at the University of California and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of North Carolina. Formerly an award-winning songwriter in Austin, Texas, his journalism has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and has been syndicated by the Pacific News Service. He can be reached at: gregoriostephens@hotmail.com.