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A Few Drops of Context: On Snatching the Panama Canal
And why Trump is talking about trans people too
In addition to Trump’s usual comments about not wanting people to be trans, he’s now making noise about snatching back the Panama Canal.
I perceive a connection, and if you stick with this, you’ll find it at the end.
The last 120 years of the Panama Canal
Marixa Lasso, who grew up in Panama, wrote Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard University Press, 2019).
As background: In early 1903, U.S. and Colombian diplomats signed a treaty so that the US could build the canal, but the Colombian senate refused to ratify it. Finding Colombia uncooperative, the US supported Panama’s secession from Colombia and signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty with Panama.
Originally, Lasso tells us, the US “sought to regulate, civilize, and tax” the Panamanian residents, most of whom were Black and were “the descendants of the various waves of peoples who had worked in Panama’s transport economy since the sixteenth century.” However, the US later changed course and decided to clear out all the people. Its reasons were political.
The US strove to make it appear as if “the canal had been built in a jungle”…
