The Canal is off the table: Latin America closes ranks with Panama in face of Trump’s threats

It was an off-the-cuff idea aired at the beginning of the Christmas holidays, but within hours its impact triggered a chain reaction throughout Latin America. The intention of the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, to regain control of the Panama Canal was not only met with immediate rejection by the president of the Central American country, José Raúl Mulino, but also gave rise to a wave of far-reaching solidarity, from Mexico to Chile to Colombia. The response was practically unanimous: “The interoceanic route belongs to the Panamanians.” But the underlying argument was just as clear: the sovereignty of the territories in the region is not to be touched.

“Every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zone belongs to Panama and will continue to do so,” Mulino said, days before the 25th anniversary of the complete handover of the infrastructure to Panama City agreed upon in 1977 with the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, referring to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Colonel Omar Torrijos. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, the governments of Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela, and the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, demanded compliance with these agreements. Even so, Trump’s suggestion was enough to sow concern in broad political sectors of Latin America.

First, it was through a message on his social network, Truth, on Saturday in which Trump reopened the debate on about the management of the canal, an issue that is not on the table. The following day, before 20,000 of his supporters at a conference of an ultra-right youth political campaigning organization in Phoenix (Arizona), he raised the tone by demanding that the Central American country reduce the fees for U.S. shipping crossing the canal or return its management to the United States. “This complete rip-off of our country will immediately stop,” he promised, thus adding another pending issue for his in-tray when he returns to the White House on January 20, the day of his inauguration.

Trump then threatened the Panamanian president, who flatly rebuffed the suggestion as an affront to the country’s independence, and even posted a meme with an American flag flying over the infrastructure in the background with the message “Welcome to the United States Canal.” In a message to the nation and the international community, Mulino stressed that “rates are not a whim” and explained his criteria: “They are and will be established, publicly and in an open audience, considering market conditions, international competition, operating costs and the maintenance and modernization needs of the interoceanic waterway.” Mulino, a right-wing politician who was catapulted to power last May promising a heavy hand on the back of a campaign with many parallels to that of the Republican magnate, insisted that “the canal is not under direct or indirect control, neither by China nor by the European community, by the United States or by any other power,” and offered to cooperate with Washington on “security issues such as illegal migration, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

Trump, however, did not give up. On Christmas Day, in another post on Truth, he wished everybody a merry Christmas “including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making sure that the United States puts up billions of dollars in ‘repair’ money but will have absolutely nothing to say about anything [relating to its management].” In the message, Trump also took the opportunity to address Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the authorities of Greenland, two targets of an outbreak of expansionist fever that seems to have taken hold in the president-elect.

Trump also named an ambassador to Panama on Christmas Day: Kevin Marino Cabrera, who meets two essential requirements to be part of the new president’s team: his loyalty to Trump (before serving as commissioner of the Miami Dade district, he worked on the 2020 Republican presidential campaign) and the fact that he is from Florida, the state that is contributing the largest number of recruits to the president-elect’s administration. “I am committed to supporting President Trump’s America First vision and will work tirelessly every day to defend his bold approach to international diplomacy,” Cabrera, who speaks Spanish, said in a statement Wednesday.

Trump’s argument for the canal’s return to U.S. control rests on two exaggerations. China does not control the infrastructure, even though a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchinson Holdings operates two ports at the canal’s Caribbean and Pacific entrances, respectively. Nor did 38,000 Americans die during the construction of the 51-mile (82-kilometer) man-made shortcut, which, when it came into operation in 1914, revolutionized international shipping by allowing vessels to pass from one side to the other without having to go all the way around the continent. “That is a ridiculous figure,” University of Maryland history professor Julie Greene, author of The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin, 2010), says in an email. “The official statistics have 5,800 people dying during the US construction of the canal. Most likely the numbers were higher than that, as it was difficult for the US government to keep close track of all its workers and their causes of death. In any case, the vast majority of deaths were suffered by the Black Caribbean workers, not the US citizens. The figure of US citizens dying during the construction may have been as low as 1,000 to 1,200 people —lower rates than in some industrial sites in the US,” explains Greene, who is about to publish another book about the Panama Canal next January.

In his series of broadsides, Trump also criticized former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 last September, for “foolishly giving away the canal for a dollar” when the accords were signed in 1977. “If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America, in full, quickly and without question,” the president-elect said in Phoenix.

Greene disagrees with this idea of a “magnanimous gesture.” “It resulted from careful negotiations, corrected many decades of colonialism, and returned full sovereignty over its territory to the Republic of Panama,” which “allowed its territory to be divided by the creation of the Panama Canal Zone ―a vast region that cut through the heart of the nation― that became US property. In addition to providing the land, Panama supported the project by contributing workers as well as providing economic and political resources”. The decolonization processes of the 1960s and 1970s made it clear that “the denial of sovereignty to Panama could not be sustained.”

In that perspective, Trump’s threats fall, for the historian, “into a long pattern of the U.S. treating Latin America as territory to be exploited and resources to be stolen away, rather than nations to be respected“. “And it fits into Trump’s fundamental gangsterism of trying to seize assets wherever and whenever he can. The disrespect he is showing to the Republic of Panama is shocking. I don’t know of a precise precedent to this ―seeking to change the treaty itself. However there are many precedents of the US making demands on Panama, before and after the Carter-Torrijos treaty was passed in 1977. For example, the US invaded Panama in 1989 to depose [ruler] Manuel Noriega.”

The dispute, for the moment rhetorical, over the interoceanic route contributed to rekindling a feeling of national pride in some neighboring countries as well. Beyond support for Panama, Colombian President Gustavo Petro took advantage of the opportunity to put the emphasis on the development and autonomy of the region, rejecting precisely the exploitation that Greene points to. “If the new United States government wants to talk business, we will talk business, face to face, and for the benefit of our people, but dignity will never be negotiated. President Trump has made a mistake and contradicted himself. If he does not want myriads [of migrants] crossing the Darién, increased by millions from Panama to Mexico, he must understand that it will depend on the prosperity and freedom of our people. If it seems expensive to pay to pass through the Panama Canal, in the hands of the Panamanians, it will be much more expensive to plunge Panama, South America, Central America, or Mexico into poverty,” he wrote in a long message on X, before concluding: “If they do not want us in the United States, we must make all the Americas prosperous.” Following his inauguration on January 20, this will be just one of the Republican magnate’s open fronts in Latin America.

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