“We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it.”
The topic was the Panama Canal, the speaker was presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in March 1976.
The following year, however, President Jimmy Carter signed agreements to hand over control of the vital waterway to Panama. Half a century after debate over ownership of the canal first animated Washington, the issue has once more bubbled up, with incoming U.S. President Donald Trump hinting at getting the landmark back, claiming China “has basically taken it over.”
The canal is currently operated by Panama, but Matthew Parker, the author of a book on the famous channel told RFE/RL, “Chinese companies have controlling stakes in the ports at either end of the Panama Canal.” That, he says, is part of a wider trend, in which Beijing, “has been expanding its interests in international maritime infrastructure” worldwide, including “in the United States’ southern ‘backyard.’”
Another claim by Trump, that the United States lost “38,000 people to malaria,” during the canal’s construction, Parker says, skips over the tragic role of another country in the origins of the waterway.
For centuries, sailors had sought a shortcut that would link the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the Panama isthmus to avoid the arduous route around the tip of south America. In 1881, buoyed by the success of his Suez Canal, French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps officially opened work on a Panama Canal. The route would cut some 60 percent off the sea distance between America's eastern and western coasts.
De Lesseps raised the equivalent of billions of dollars for the project, money used in part to bribe journalists and politicians to drum up public support and encourage investment. But the French plan to cut a sea-level canal through Panama was doomed from the start.
Workers landed on a tropical isthmus rife with poverty, political unrest, and disease. In an era in which illnesses were believed to be spread by mysterious “vapors,” the real culprits -- mosquitos -- descended on the newcomers in clouds so thick one worker recalled watching swarms “put out a lighted candle with their burnt bodies.”
At the lethal peak of the French effort, as many as forty workers were dying each day, most in the throes of yellow fever or malaria.
Unskilled laborers were sourced largely from the Caribbean, but the human cost of the French project was illustrated most vividly by the story of its chief engineer Jules Dingler. The Frenchman brought his family with him to Panama and watched as, one by one, his daughter, daughter’s fiancée, and son were killed by disease.
“We attach ourselves to life by making the canal our only occupation,” the bereft engineer wrote of existence with his wife. When his wife also succumbed to yellow fever Dingler finally returned, a broken man, to France.
When the French canal company eventually collapsed in 1889 hundreds of thousands of investors lost their savings in what was one of the largest financial scandals in history. The departing French left behind vast stocks of hardware, and the remains of some 20,000 workers.
A decade after the French disaster at Panama, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was voted into office. Driven by a belief that the United States should dominate the waves economically and militarily, the 26th President pushed for the United States to pick up where France left off.
When negotiations for a canal concession between Washington and Colombia -- of which Panama was a province -- stalled in 1903, the U.S.-backed Panamanian revolutionaries who seceded from Colombia as American gunboats stood by offshore. Washington swiftly recognized the new country, and an agreement to build a canal through Panama’s territory followed.
Instead of slicing a sea-level passage from coast to coast as the French had attempted, American engineers opted to flood the center of the Panama isthmus by damming the Chagres River.
The manmade lake would sit 26 meters above sea level and a series of locks would lift boats up to the lake, then lower them to sea level at the other end.
Critically for the American planners, the role of mosquitos in spreading disease was understood by the time their work crews arrived in Panama. Such intensive efforts were taken to eradicate mosquitos on the isthmus that one engineer claimed each dead mosquito cost the U.S. taxpayer $10.
The American effort was also blessed with construction leaders who were respected by their teams. Racial segregation was enforced between unskilled black labor, mostly from Barbados, and white Americans, but one observer reported that the men were generally “treated like human beings, not like brutes.”
With morale-building efforts such as a newspaper for the workforce and baseball tournaments, the men “responded by giving the best service within their power.”
Some 5,800 workers died during the decade that the United States worked on the project.
As the men carved through the Panama landscape, however, death continued to carve through the workforce. Many were killed in landslides, others by dynamite explosions. “The flesh of men flew in the air like birds many days,” one West Indian worker recalled.
But work ran ahead of schedule and under budget. In the autumn of 1913, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button on his desk in Washington that blasted a sea dyke in Panama, some 3,300 kilometers away. As water rushed into the canal bed, The New York Times reported "the dream of centuries became a reality."
By the time the canal was formally opened, on August 15, 1914, the news barely registered. That summer, the world's attention was firmly fixed on Europe and the escalating conflict that would soon be known as World War I.
After decades of the canal's operation, which transformed the world's trade, tensions began to grow between well-paid Americans living inside the zone of the canal under U.S. control, and Panamanians.
In January 1964, mutual hostility exploded into deadly violence after a Panama flag was ripped amid a scuffle between the two groups.
The 1964 incident amplified voices in Washington calling for the canal to be ceded to Panama. President Jimmy Carter's controversial concession saw the waterway handed over to the central American country on December 31, 1999.
Historian Julie Green, who authored a book on the canal's history told RFE/RL that any U.S. attempt today to take back control of the canal would almost certainly lead to conflict. "It is difficult for me to imagine the Panama Canal returning to the U.S. without an all-out war against Panama," she says.