Page 299 - The Rough Guide to Panama (Travel Guide)

History CONTEXTS 297
officers had been tricked into captivity by the rebels. On November 3, 1903, the Republic
of Panama was declared and immediately recognized by the US, whose gunship standing
offshore prevented Colombian reinforcements from landing to crush the rebellion.

The Canal
A new canal treaty was quickly negotiated and signed on Panama’s behalf by the
slippery Bunau-Varilla, who had managed to get himself appointed a special envoy,
theoretically only with negotiating powers. The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty gave the US
“all the rights, power and authority … which [it] would possess and exercise as if it
were the sovereign”, in perpetuity over an area of territory – the Canal Zone – extending
five miles (8km) either side of the canal. In return, the new Panamanian government
received a one-off payment of $10 million and a further $250,000 a year. (Of
particular interest to Bunau-Varilla was the $40 million the French canal company
received for all its equipment and infrastructure.) Even American secretary of state
John Hay admitted the treaty conditions were “vastly advantageous to the US and we
must confess … not so advantageous to Panama”. Panama’s newly formed national
assembly found the terms outrageous, but when told by Bunau-Varilla that US support
would be withdrawn were they to reject it – a claim he invented on the spot – they
ratified the treaty, and work on the Panama Canal began.
It took ten years, 56,000 workers from 97 countries and some $352 million to
complete the task, an unprecedented triumph of organization, perseverance, engineering
and, just as crucially, sanitation, during which time chief medical officer Colonel William
Gorgas established a programme that eliminated yellow fever from the isthmus and
brought malaria under control. As a result the death toll – though still numbering some
5600 workers, predominantly of West Indian descent – was substantially lower than it
would otherwise have been. Meanwhile the two men in charge, John Stevens, a brilliant
railway engineer, and his successor George Goethals, a former army engineer, managed
to solve the problems that had stymied the French. The idea of a sea-level canal was
quickly abandoned in favour of constructing a series of locks to raise ships up to a huge
artificial lake formed by damming the mighty Río Chagres. Stevens was responsible for
maximizing the potential of the railway, devising an ingenious pulley system that
enabled them to excavate over 170 million cubic metres of earth and rock, three times
the amount removed at Suez. The 13km Gaillard Cut, which ran through the continental
divide, required a mind-boggling 27,000 tonnes of dynamite. The end result, overseen
by Goethals, was the largest concrete structure, earth dam and artificial lake that the
world had ever seen, accomplished with pioneering technology that set new standards
for engineering. On August 15, 1914, the SS Ancón became the first ship to officially
transit the Canal, which was completed six months ahead of schedule.
An enormous migrant workforce, at times outnumbering the combined populations
of Panama City and Colón, was imported to work on the Canal’s construction, and
many of these workers – Indians, Europeans, Chinese and above all West Indians –
stayed on after its completion, indelibly transforming the racial and cultural make-up
of the country. Work was carried out under an apartheid labour system, where white
Americans were paid in gold and the rest – the vast majority of whom were black – in
silver. Employees were “gold roll” or “silver roll”, a categorization that permeated every

1936 1940 1953
Despite a treaty limiting US Fascist president Arnulfo Arias Madrid sets The first comarca is legally
rights, tensions continue to about disenfranchising Afro-Antillean and established in Panama
build between Panama and the Chinese-Panamanians while pursuing under the authority of the
US territory of the Canal Zone. racist immigration policies. Guna General Congress.

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