One weekend last December, Donald Trump suddenly became fixated on reviving a ghost of US empire—control of the Panama Canal. He has since warned that he may forcibly “take back” the canal, which he claims has fallen under Chinese influence. These capricious threats, as Miriam Pensack writes in the NYR Online, have set off “shockwaves” across Panama, where since 1999 local sovereignty over the canal has been celebrated as “a triumph of Latin American self-determination in the face of centuries of US hegemony.” Panama, she relates, has experienced a long history of interference by the US, which for the majority of the twentieth century administered towns in the Canal Zone according to a Jim Crow-like system of segregation that kept white American canal workers—known as Zonians—apart from local, African-American, and other foreign workers, who were paid a lower wage.
Pensack is a historian of Latin America, and her writing on Panama, Guantánamo Bay, humanitarian refugees, Cuban history, and other subjects has been published in The Nation and The New Republic in addition to the NYR Online.
I e-mailed Pensack this week to ask her about migrant detention, the new cold war with China, and the “imperial encounter.”
Willa Glickman: I recently watched Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Canal Zone, which offers a fascinating and disturbing picture of the Zonians’ world in the 1970s. It looked essentially like any suburban town in the US. What is the area like today?
Miriam Pensack: Huge swaths of the former zone have been turned into national parks and nature reserves, and some of the former American military bases have been converted into commercial logistics hubs, which makes sense for an economy built around services and shipping. Fort Clayton, the base where the Washington-friendly president Guillermo Endara was sworn in during the 1989–1990 US invasion of Panama, has since been transformed into a business park called Ciudad del Saber (City of Knowledge), which houses the offices of several international NGOs and academic programs as well as the headquarters of some private companies.
Some of the former barracks and civilian housing complexes were sold to individuals and families; owning a home in the áreas revirtides (reverted areas) carries with it a certain social standing, as prices were steep for your average Panamanian, though still quite accessible by middle-class US standards. And perhaps most remarkably, the former US Army School of the Americas at Fort Gulick, the training ground for military officials implicated in some of the Latin American cold war’s worst human rights abuses, was transformed into a luxury hotel. It has an enormous pool and stunning views of the canal, but the building itself still very much looks like a military installation. (The School of the Americas, unfortunately, lives on at Fort Benning, Georgia, as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.)
Did Trump’s focus on retaking the Panama Canal come as a complete surprise, or had the idea been brewing in right-wing circles for a while?
The issue of US control over the Panama Canal does have a robust history in the neocon playbook, but it’s still a rather deep cut, and I think people from across the political spectrum were surprised to hear of Trump’s designs on the waterway, although his posturing is perhaps less shocking given the broader bipartisan push for a new cold war with China. Project 2025 explicitly addresses China’s Belt and Roads Initiative, Beijing’s sweeping global infrastructural aid project that encompasses 150 countries. Panama was the first Latin American nation to sign on to the program, and given the country’s geostrategic importance, it makes sense that it would become a linchpin in Trump’s hemispheric anti-China push. That said, I certainly did not foresee the canal’s sovereignty reemerging as a geopolitical issue in 2025.
Panama’s current president, José Raúl Mulino, is an ally of former president Ricardo Martinelli, the right-wing supermarket magnate whose corruption trial and antidemocratic behavior you wrote about for the NYR Online. Has Mulino’s administration been similar to Martinelli’s?
Mulino was strategic about distancing himself from Martinelli when he became president in 2024. By the time Mulino launched his presidential campaign under the banner of Martinelli’s party, Realizando Metas (Realizing Goals), Martinelli had been found guilty of laundering $44 million of taxpayer money to purchase a media conglomerate that he subsequently used to publish self-serving political propaganda. Martinelli’s legal team appealed the guilty verdict, hoping to avoid a ten-year prison sentence. When those attempts failed, Martinelli sequestered himself in the Nicaraguan embassy for a year to avoid jail time. There he remained effectively stuck in Mulino’s craw, taking to social media to bemoan his plight and criticize the president. This past May, Martinelli’s fortunes changed when Colombia extended him political asylum. The Mulino administration discreetly granted him safe passage—perhaps a sign of lingering loyalty to Martinelli, or else a desire to be rid of the legal and diplomatic headache that Martinelli had become.
As far as Mulino’s politics go, like Martinelli, he has taken a right-wing pro-business line, but that really seems to be where the similarity ends. Mulino has worked hard to reestablish the country’s financial regulatory credibility on the international stage and to undo the damage wrought by the Panama Papers and other offshore financial scandals.
In March his administration also passed legislation reforming the country’s social security and pension system. Though the reforms were predictably unpopular—they required employers to increase their contributions to the government system and maintained a proviso allowing the government to potentially raise the retirement age in the coming years—Trump’s belligerence may have bolstered Mulino’s support, helping him push through a polemical piece of legislation.
What brought you to study Panama and Cuba, and what are some of the connections between their histories?
I arrived at my work on the Panama Canal Zone through archival research on Guantánamo Bay. I began my Ph.D. thinking I would work on the Cuban history of the Guantánamo base, but once I got into the archives, I came across sources detailing meetings between Cuban and Panamanian nationalists strategizing how to reclaim the territories in their respective republics that the US had coercively maintained.
Though Guantánamo and the Canal Zone met divergent outcomes—the American military still maintains their base in Cuba, after all—their origin story is shared. Both enclaves came under US control at the turn of the twentieth century—Guantánamo in 1898 and the Canal Zone in 1903—when Washington was emerging as a global overseas empire. As part of its imperial designs, the US intervened in Cuban and Panamanian independence movements against Spain and Colombia respectively. Over the course of those interventions, it secured leases to the Guantánamo base and the Panama Canal Zone via agreements that stipulated near-identical terms: Washington henceforth held rights to both territories “in perpetuity,” and the leases could be annulled only upon the agreement of both the US government and its Cuban or Panamanian counterpart.
These shared historical forces and political imperatives made Cuba and Panama distinct from other Ibero-American countries, which, with the exception of Puerto Rico, had gained national independence from Spain and Portugal in the first decades of the nineteenth century. And though those republics had to contend with Washington’s expansionist and hegemonic tendencies, Cuba and Panama were the only nominally sovereign Latin American countries to have coercively established US territorial enclaves within their borders.
These exceptional geographic configurations offer a window onto the borderlands of empire. I am fascinated by the imperial encounter, whether at the level of states or of individual human beings whose lives were enmeshed in these powerful governing forces. Studying Guantánamo and the Canal Zone has been a way to examine how people and governments reconstitute themselves both metaphysically and politically through ongoing imperial encounter.
History seems to be repeating itself at Guantánamo, too, with the detention of migrants, and particularly Haitians. Could you tell us a bit about the history of migrant detention there?
Guantánamo first became a site of mass incarceration in 1991, when the US government used the base to detain 40,000 Haitian refugees who fled their country in the aftermath of a violent coup that ousted the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. As these asylum seekers set out by boat across the Windward Passage in hopes of reaching the United States, the US Coast Guard implemented a policy of intercepting their vessels and summarily transporting the rafters to hastily assembled detention camps at Guantánamo Bay. Conditions within the camps were dismal: sanitation and potable water were lacking, and some of the refugees spent as long as three years languishing in sprawling tent cities in eastern Cuba’s extreme heat.
In 1994, after most Haitian refugees were either granted asylum in the US or else repatriated to violent conditions in Haiti, a separate wave of Cuban refugees who fled the island in makeshift rafts were intercepted in the Straits of Florida and brought to Guantánamo. Almost all of them were eventually granted entry to the US, a policy in line with the unique privileges Washington has historically bestowed upon Cubans fleeing the Castro regime.
During both the Haitian and Cuban internments at Guantánamo, the US government tested the bounds of its obligations to uphold international asylum law, pointing to the base’s ambiguous sovereignty in order to skirt legal mandates that it would have otherwise respected on US soil. The George W. Bush administration seized upon this logic at the onset of its “war on terror,” arguing that the base was under Cuban sovereignty and that, consequently, US constitutional protections or obligations to international agreements don’t apply there.
Today we are seeing a serious development in the US government’s use of extraterritorial incarceration. The Trump administration’s flagrant violations of domestic and international immigration and asylum protections build on Washington’s long history of human rights abuses in spaces of ambiguous sovereignty—whether at Guantánamo, overseas military bases like Bagram during the US invasion of Afghanistan, or along the US-Mexico border. The policy of deporting immigrants to what are effectively gulags in El Salvador without applying due process has taken this phenomenon to a new extreme. The same slippery logic of how legal obligations can be changed with relation to sovereignty is at play, but as history has shown us in similarly fascistic paradigms, these legal and democratic erosions will not stop with immigrants or legally ambiguous spaces. Look no further than the reports already emerging of abuses at Trump’s recently christened “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention facility in Florida, or the arbitrary ICE arrests of US citizens in recent months: what first looks like an assault on a so-called marginalized community is already accelerating into an assault on all of us.
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