‘The Canal Is Ours’

On the morning of December 31, 1999, hundreds of people gathered at the base of the Panama Canal Administration Building, a sweeping, colonial-style beige edifice carved into a steep hill on the edge of Panama City and flanked by an imposing staircase that descends from the entrance to the plaza below. The building projects both power and exclusion. For most of the twentieth century it was the administrative seat of the former Panama Canal Zone, a US enclave to which most Panamanians were denied access.

The canal—one of the infrastructural marvels of the twentieth century and a crucial artery of global trade—became the epicenter of US power in Latin America when Teddy Roosevelt secured control of its surrounding territory in 1903. It retained that distinction for nearly three quarters of a century, until Jimmy Carter signed a treaty with Panama’s military leader, Omar Torrijos, that gradually ceded the Canal Zone to the Republic of Panama. The cession was to be completed by 12:00 PM on that December day in 1999. When the morning arrived, heavy rains drenched the isthmus, but a sea of people turned out all the same. At the strike of noon the crowd rushed up the hill to the Administration Building, waving Panama’s tricolor flag. “The canal is ours,” Panama’s president, Mireya Moscoso, proclaimed from atop the stairs.

That celebration echoed this past December, when hundreds of people gathered at the Administration Building to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the canal transition. The Panama Canal Authority, the semiautonomous entity that has overseen the maritime passage since 1997, placed a plaque on the front of the structure commemorating the achievement, which many in Panama and across the hemisphere consider a triumph of Latin American self-determination in the face of centuries of US hegemony.

The festivities were not without anxiety. A week earlier, at an event hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, then–president elect Donald Trump proclaimed that the US was being “ripped off at the Panama Canal”—presumably a reference to the tolls that container ships pay to traverse the passage. Trump complemented the speech with a series of posts on his social media platform, Truth Social, alleging that China was running the waterway and announcing that, consequently, the US would be taking it back. The comments sent shockwaves through Panama. President José Raúl Mulino flatly rejected them, asserting the country’s “nonnegotiable” sovereignty over the passage and insisting that “every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjoining zone is Panama’s and will remain so.”

But even as Panamanian society recoiled at Trump’s rhetoric, other sectors saw an opportunity for vindication. When Carter negotiated the Panama Canal Treaties in 1977, he met stiff resistance from the Zonians, US citizens whose families had lived in the Canal Zone for generations, running the waterway and maintaining the slice of middle-class American society that cropped up around it. Carter is effectively a national hero in Panama, but many of the Zonians have long considered him an enemy. “I just hope Jimmy Carter stays alive long enough to see Trump take back the Panama Canal,” one participant posted in a Zonian group on Facebook after Trump’s initial provocations.

Carter died that same week. Even amid the funeral rites, Trump continued to disparage Carter’s cession of the US colonial enclave in Panama as “a very big mistake.” For the Panamanians who showed up at the Administration Building on December 31, such language was deeply alarming. But it held an appeal for some of the Zonians, who recall the canal transition as a personal epic of paradise lost.

At the time of the treaty negotiations, many Zonians rallied behind the burgeoning neoconservative movement, donating to right-wing politicians and collaborating with organizations like the American Conservative Union and the Heritage Foundation—the latter going on to design Project 2025, the policy playbook that has informed much of the second Trump administration’s governance.¹ By ceding the canal, they thought, Carter had demonstrated a weakness that, as the arch-conversative Republican senator from North Carolina Jesse Helms warned at the time, “could literally destroy America.” Bound to the Zonians’ plight, then, was the question of America’s global standing. The US’s decline from its postwar grandeur has many causes, but for the Zonians and Trump alike, some answers might be found on the isthmus of Panama.

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In 1903 Teddy Roosevelt sought rights to construct a sea-level canal across Panama, then a province of Colombia. When Bogotá refused, he pivoted to Panama’s oligarchy, which had repeatedly agitated for independence over the course of the nineteenth century. Roosevelt promised to recognize and defend the new Panamanian nation, with his gunboats if necessary; in exchange the Panamanian elite gave Washington control over a ten-mile-wide stretch of territory that would encompass the canal. The agreement was enshrined in the 1903 Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which leased US rights to the territory “in perpetuity.” In November of that year, Washington gained the Canal Zone and Panama gained nationhood in one stroke.

The task of excavating the canal brought tens of thousands of workers from around the world: European and Chinese émigrés, migrants from surrounding Latin American countries, West Indian laborers seeking opportunity in the face of the stagnation then plaguing former plantation slavery economies. Among the “ditch diggers” were thousands of white US citizens (the hiring of Black US citizens during the construction period was limited), hailing from all corners of the country but especially from northeastern and midwestern industrial centers like New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The meaning of the term “Zonian” has evolved in the past half-century: depending on whom you ask, it could refer to military personnel stationed in one of the fourteen US military bases that once lined the canal, or to US civilians who moved to the Zone over the mid-twentieth century to work for the Panama Canal Company. But in its most restrictive use the term applies to the white US canal builders and their descendants. The first generation of Zonians came from a range of backgrounds—some were engineers, others manual laborers—yet all found themselves on a preferential end of a system of Jim Crow–style segregation that the US exported to the isthmus in the early twentieth century.²

At the base of that system was a two-tiered wage hierarchy. White laborers got paid in gold American dollars (the “gold roll”) whereas other laborers, largely West Indian and Panamanian, got paid in local coin, typically Colombian silver pesos (the “silver roll”). That distinction, in turn, shaped the rest of economic and social life: there were gold towns and silver towns, gold schools and silver schools, movie theaters, recreation areas, drinking fountains, and so on. The Isthmian Canal Commission, the administration overseeing the canal’s construction, claimed to be distinguishing merely between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, but many gold and silver positions demanded identical responsibilities and duties. A “gold-roller” could make somewhere between two to four times as much as a “silver-roller” for effectively the same job.

This system of segregation drew on some of the mechanisms of Jim Crow, as well as its animating spirit, but was complicated by the international setting of the Zone. To preserve white Americans’ primacy, race was “mapped onto nationality,” as the historian Rebecca Herman has written.³ To be American was, in effect, to be white; by extension, “to be a non-U.S. citizen was to be defined as non-white.” European canal builders and white Latinos were relegated to the silver roll; Black US citizens had been restricted precisely because they complicated the logic of the gold–silver hierarchy. By the 1930s some twenty worked civilian jobs in the Zone, almost all of them on the silver roll. The Canal Zone Government didn’t, moreover, extend birthright citizenship to children born to non-US citizens in the Zone, ensuring that even babies born in the Zone’s Gorgas hospital would be denied gold-roll status unless their parents were US citizens.

In 1948, to accord with the Truman administration’s civil rights reforms, the Canal Zone administration changed the dual payment system from gold and silver to “US-rate” and “local-rate” (or in some instances “Latin American” rate). A 1955 bilateral agreement prompted lukewarm efforts to unify the wage system, but the Zone’s personnel bureau largely ignored the mandate. By 1961 only 240 Panamanians received US-rate wages, and the discrepancy between the two schedules persisted at a rate of four to one. It would not be until December 1977, two years before the implementation of the treaty and twenty-three years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, that the Zone’s last segregated “Latin American” school would officially close.⁴

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As the century progressed, successive Panamanian administrations sought to reclaim the Zone, forging a series of new bilateral agreements that modified but never annulled the 1903 treaty. By midcentury, nationalist sentiment boiled over into a series of violent clashes between Panamanian citizens and the Zone’s military and civilian populations. Perhaps the most significant occurred on January 9, 1964, when a group of Panamanian students marched into the Canal Zone and attempted to raise a Panamanian flag outside the enclave’s Balboa High School. Their efforts were met with violence, first from the Zone’s residents and police force and then from the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM)—the arm of the US Department of Defense headquartered in the Canal Zone. The confrontation ignited widespread riots that left three hundred people wounded and two dozen dead.

Amid the upheaval, Panamanian President Roberto F. Chiari suspended diplomatic relations with the US; the terms of their resumption three months later included initiating a process to negotiate a new treaty, which would replace the Hay-Bunau-Varilla agreement. Former president Aristedes Royo, who helped negotiate the Torrijos-Carter treaties and served as the civilian face of Panama’s dictatorship when the agreements went into effect, told me that by trying to keep the Panamanian students from raising their flag that January day in 1964, the Zonians ultimately benefited the Panamanian cause. Royo and I spoke in late 2023, as he was completing his tenure as minister of canal affairs. We met in his wood-paneled office, which was converted from a former Canal Zone school and located only a short distance from where the flag riots broke out. As he recalls it, the 1977 treaties owe a debt of gratitude to “the Zonians’ poor conduct that day.”

The road from the riots to the Torrijos-Carter treaties was hardly straight. Successive US administrations delayed, uneager to cede any control over such a strategic foothold. Only in the aftermath of Washington’s catastrophic war in Vietnam, when Carter took office seeking a foreign policy rooted in respect for international law and the self-determination of other nations, did Panama’s fortunes change.

At the time of treaty implementation, some 3,500 “true” Zonians—white US civilian laborers with multigenerational histories on the isthmus—and their families resided in the enclave, a select minority among the 14,500 total US and Panamanian workers employed by the Panama Canal Company and the Canal Zone Government. To these Zonians, whose daily reality depended on Washington’s forcible presence in Panama, the 1977 agreement spelled the end of a way of life. Those that remained over the transition period would be tasked with training a Panamanian workforce to take over their jobs.

When the treaties entered into force on October 1, 1979, it marked the formal dissolution of the Canal Zone as such: the Republic of Panama immediately assumed jurisdiction over much of the ten-mile-wide territory. US military bases and personnel in Panama came under a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), an accord establishing a legal framework to dictate the rights and privileges of military-affiliated foreign nationals stationed in another country. US personnel began gradually turning over townsites, military bases, and infrastructure in the former Zone, to be completed over the following decades. In accordance with the Panama Canal Act of 1979, the legislation that implemented the treaties, Canal Commission employees were allowed to retire as early as forty-eight with eighteen years of service, or at any age after twenty-three years of service, effectively ensuring that all workers employed at the time the Torrijos-Carter Treaties were signed would be able to start collecting pensions upon the completion of the transition in 1999.

The possibility of early retirement was not enough to placate the Zonians. Even before the ink had dried on the Panama Canal Treaties, negotiation efforts sparked what some in the community have called “the exodus.” A world was ending, and Jimmy Carter was the horseman of their apocalypse. On September 30, 1979, they went to bed under US jurisdiction and awoke under the government of Omar Torrijos, a mestizo general from the hinterlands of Panama.⁵

The vast majority of the community left Panama and resettled elsewhere, predominantly in the southern climes of the US. They were under no legal obligation to depart; Torrijos had extended citizenship to the Zonians in the years leading up to the treaty, and many of them became dual citizens. Nevertheless, as H.B. Twohy, a fourth-generation Zonian, told me, many felt an expectation to “go back home to a place I’ve never lived before.”

There is a general feeling among the Zonians of having been unjustly abandoned by a federal government that had for years administered every facet of their lives, from housing to employment to grocery shopping at subsidized commissaries. There is a prevailing notion, too, that the media has dealt them an unfair hand, particularly in its portrayals of the Canal Zone’s racial segregation. “When the treaty came about, everybody was pissed,” recalled Mike Andrews, a onetime cooling and refrigeration foreman who lived and worked on the Atlantic side of the Zone. Despite his opposition to the transition he decided to remain in Panama, where both his parents are buried. Andrews departed the former Zone in 1991 to run a fishing lodge in Panama’s Darién province and has since retired. We spoke in January of 2024 at a Zonian reunion at the Elks Lodge, a beloved Zonian haunt a short drive from the Administration Building just outside Panama City. The mounted antlers of countless bucks lined the walls.

“There are few places that the Americans who stayed after the treaty have to go to,” he told me, other than the lodge where we were talking. Before the transition, Andrews said, he used to hunt and fish freely in the Zone’s thick jungles and abundant waters, but now he was irked by Panama’s tighter gun regulations. “We had a utopia,” he told me. “It’s sad what happened…since the treaty. Panamanians have destroyed this country.”

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The Zonians did not go down without a fight. At the time of the Torrijos-Carter Treaty negotiations, they pinned their hopes on Ronald Reagan, who as a Republican primary candidate for the 1976 presidential elections gave a fervent, oft-repeated stump speech that made him a hero to US citizens in Panama:

[The] Canal Zone is not a colonial possession. It is not a long-term lease. It is sovereign United States Territory every bit the same as Alaska and all the states that were carved from the Louisiana Purchase. We should end those negotiations and tell the General: We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it. 

That the claim was inaccurate—in fact the 1903 treaty leased the Canal Zone territory to the United States in perpetuity rather than transferring ownership—made little difference to the Zonians and their neoconservative allies in the metropole. “We thought he was going to be our salvation,” Andrews recalled of Reagan, who lost the 1976 primary to Gerald Ford but went on to oust Jimmy Carter from the White House in a landslide four years later. After Reagan won the presidency, in Andrews’s telling, he had too much “political pressure put on him” to thwart the canal transition.

And yet the US hardly stayed out of Panamanian politics after 1980. The Department of Defense maintained its Southern Command headquarters in the Canal Zone neighborhood of Quarry Heights and continued training Panama’s military, the Panamanian Defense Forces, at the US Army School of the Americas, located in the former Zone’s Fort Gulick. One of the school’s graduates, Manuel Noriega, became the de facto dictator of Panama in 1983 following Omar Torrijos’s death in a suspicious plane crash two years prior. Noriega was a crucial collaborator in the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, funneling information to the Drug Enforcement Agency and the CIA even as he forged his own narcotrafficking empire. By 1982 he was charging runners from Pablo Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel $100,000 per trip to use Panamanian airstrips to transit their wares, sending members of the PDF to coordinate the operations and payments.⁶

By mid-decade the US–Panamanian relationship was fraying, in part as a result of Noriega’s illegal activities, which the journalist Seymour Hersh detailed in June 1986 in a bombshell investigation for The New York Times. As Panamanians took to the streets in opposition and the dictatorship meted out increasingly violent repression, the general came to seem more like a liability than an asset. Finally, in 1989, the US Department of Defense unleashed some 26,000 troops on the isthmus to depose and capture Noriega.

Washington helped install the US-friendly president Guillermo Endara, who was sworn into office on one of the remaining US military bases in the early morning hours of December 20 at the very moment that Operation Just Cause—as the US called the invasion—descended upon the country. Eighteen thousand Panamanians lost their homes to the operation; the Pentagon reported 516 Panamanian casualties, but independent human rights groups estimated that civilian deaths were in the thousands. Many of the slain were residents of El Chorrillo, an Afro-Panamanian neighborhood in downtown Panama City that was also home to the PDF headquarters. The Department of Defense all but razed El Chorrillo to the ground in an indiscriminate bombing campaign in the first hours of the invasion; thousands of Chorrilleros had to be resettled in temporary housing, and many found themselves in active or defunct US bases along the Canal. Twenty-five-hundred people would ultimately spend two years living in improvised shelters fashioned from airplane hangars that were previously part of the Albrook Air Force Station.⁷

Despite the carnage, much of Panamanian society was relieved to be rid of Noriega. In the years leading up to his ouster the Cruzada Civilista (Civil Crusade), a dynamic coalition drawing from all sectors of the country’s citizenry, assembled a peaceful movement against the strongman. Some of its members would go on to have prominent government positions in post-invasion Panama, including José Raúl Mulino. The country rebuilt, democracy returned, and those exiled by the dictatorship could at last return home.

In the following decades relations between Washington and Panama City have been amicable and robust. All the country’s heads of state since 2000 have received their higher education in the US, and the two countries have signed numerous security and free trade agreements since the end of the canal transition. Even as the canal’s administration became solely Panamanian, US presence remained palpable: a retired naval admiral and former commander in chief of the US Atlantic Fleet chairs the Panama Canal Authority’s advisory board. The US has also remained the canal’s primary customer: roughly 40 percent of all the country’s container shipping moves through Panama each year.

The Zonians, for their part, largely adapted to life in the continental US, resigned to commemorating their history at reunions in Florida or, for the more committed, returning to Panama for annual events. Some have purchased reverted buildings in the former Canal Zone and fixed them up as vacation stays for part of the year. Many maintain their dislike for Carter and incline toward conservative politics. Mike Andrews, for one, considers Reagan the best president of his lifetime, even if he failed to recover the Canal Zone. “This is a very strong Republican populace,” he told me about his fellow reunion attendees in 2024.

Most Zonians have by now come to accept the transition as an inevitable part of history. At this year’s Elks Lodge reunion, however, the enclave the Zonians came to commemorate had reemerged as a major news story. The newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was about to land in Panama for his first official trip abroad. “Did you pick out your house yet?” some of the pro-Trump attendees half-joked, suggesting that perhaps their past was not quite past after all.

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Rubio arrived on February 1. In Panama City there was a nervous mixture of dread and excitement. More progressive sectors of society were predictably incensed. The historically radical University of Panama held an emergency teach-in following Trump’s inauguration, where students and faculty posted enormous signs proclaiming that “Panama Is and Will Remain Sovereign and Neutral”—both refuting Trump’s claims that China was operating the canal and stressing that Panama has no legal obligation to kowtow to Washington. (One of the original 1977 Torrijos-Carter agreements, the Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal, stipulates as much.) The labor union conglomerate SUNTRACS led protests that shut down large swaths of Panama City; some members trampled signs portraying Rubio in an SS uniform and standing before a Nazi flag.

Not everyone was as quick to condemn the new administration. Many Panamanians were intrigued that the first Latino US secretary of state was visiting their country. On the morning of Rubio’s meeting with President Mulino, onlookers gathered near the presidential Palacio de las Garzas in the neighborhood of Casco Viejo, a small outcropping of lowlands perched on the Bay of Panama. Before the meeting Rubio attended mass in a nearby cathedral that housed an image of the Caridad del Cobre, the Virgin of Charity and Cuba’s patron saint—a nod to his Cuban heritage. The area was swarmed with press and onlookers, some of whom posed to take selfies with Rubio, who spoke to Mulino’s staff and ministers in Spanish.

For Rubio, the trip was intended to christen an era of resurgent US dominion in the Americas—one in which the United States would unilaterally dictate other nations’ immigration and trade policy. Panama is of outsized importance to both issues. The southeast end of the country is flanked by the Darién Gap, a treacherous strip of jungle separating South and Central America through which more than 300,000 migrants passed last year on their way north toward the US–Mexico border. Then, of course, there is the country’s relationship with Beijing. China is the Canal’s second-largest customer and has significantly increased direct investment in Panama over the last decade.

At a press conference after his meeting with Rubio that February morning, Mulino announced the first of what would in the coming months grow into a cavalcade of concessions to the Trump administration. He assured his constituents that no US military invasion was imminent—an understandable preoccupation for a citizenry that watched Black Hawk helicopters swarm their neighborhoods decades ago—but announced that he would modify Panama’s anti-immigration efforts to accord with the Trump administration’s demands. SENAFRONT, Panama’s corollary to the US Border Patrol, has collaborated with the US government for years on anti-immigration initiatives, receiving direct training from the US Army; there is even an ICE office in the US embassy in Panama City. But Rubio’s visit made plain that Washington expected still more draconian measures. Among other things, Mulino announced that he had offered the US the use of an airstrip to facilitate deportation flights for migrants attempting to pass through the Darién Gap. Before Rubio left the country in the following days, he personally oversaw a deportation flight leaving from the former US airport at Albrook, outside Panama City.

Mulino also announced that Panama would withdraw from the Belt and Road initiative, Beijing’s sweeping global infrastructure program encompassing 150 countries around the world, including more than twenty in Latin America. Panama became the first country in the region to sign on to the initiative in 2017, the year it established formal diplomatic relations with Beijing. That rapprochement occurred during the first Trump presidency, during which the state department failed to appoint a US ambassador to the country, leaving, as Mulino put it, “many empty seats” into which China easily slid.

And yet China’s presence in Panama is nowhere near as extensive as Trump has claimed. Panama’s relationship to the US remains far more longstanding and robust, and the Mulino administration has made clear which side it’s taking in the emergent new cold war. In a particularly telling move, the week before Trump’s inauguration, Mulino’s government announced that it would audit the Panama Ports Company, a subsidiary of the Hong Kong multinational CK Hutchinson Holdings, owned by the billionaire Li Ka-Shing. In 1997, when the canal’s incoming Panamanian administration offered foreign governments and multinationals leases on concessions to some of the ports along the passage, Ka-Shing vastly outbid his American competitor for control of the ports of Balboa and Cristóbal, offering Panama $22 million in annual rent and 10 percent of its port revenue for a duration of twenty-five years. Panama renewed those contracts as recently as 2021, but the announcement suggested that Mulino’s administration might be hoping to find inconsistencies in Panama Ports’ bookkeeping that could give Panama legal cause to sever the agreements—a development that would permit it to cut one of its principal ties with China at its own discretion.    

As the audit dragged on, the US sought its own workaround: On March 4 the US asset management firm BlackRock announced an agreement with CK Hutchinson Holdings to purchase 90 percent of the Panama Ports Company. Trump lauded the deal as a foreign policy victory. The Chinese government, for its part, was quick to denounce the agreement as a “hegemonic act” that thwarted “the legitimate rights and interests of other countries through coercion, pressure, inducement, and other despicable means.” Beijing has a series of legal mechanisms it may draw on to probe the deal, including the use of a sweeping National Security law passed in 2020 in response to protests that had erupted in Hong Kong the year prior.

Panama, meanwhile, struggling to assert some self-determination, announced that its audit had turned up evidence of misconduct that may lead it to deem the 2021 contract illegal and void. In the event that Panama manages to annul its concessions agreements with CK Hutchinson Holdings, the Panama Ports Company could be ousted from the ports of Balboa and Cristóbal regardless of who owns it, potentially allowing for bids from foreign governments and multinationals on Panama’s terms. The strategy, if it works, will allow Panama to maintain a semblance of autonomy even as it placates Washington by extricating China from its ports.

Mulino’s attempted balancing act has yielded dubious results. His pivot away from Beijing and his deference to the US on immigration policy have not stopped Washington from pursuing physical encroachments on the isthmus. Shortly after the BlackRock deal was announced in March, Trump ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for military actions in Panama—a perplexing move, since Panama demilitarized after the US invasion and has no standing army. And in April Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, fresh off accidentally leaking information about military strikes in Yemen to the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic via Signal, returned to the isthmus to exact still more concessions. During his visit the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding permitting the US to deploy troops to some of Washington’s former military installations along the waterway, which Panama transformed into commercial logistics hubs after the transition. The deployments are rotational, with US troops moving through sites that will remain under Panama’s full administrative authority. The memorandum stopped short of allowing the US to establish its own bases in the country or to retake control of the installations it had vacated by 1999. All the same, it dealt a remarkable blow to Panamanian sovereignty.

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As Marco Rubio terminated his February trip to Panama, I met again with Aristedes Royo, this time in a cafe in the business district of Obarrio in downtown Panama City. Royo had concluded his term as minister of canal affairs roughly a year earlier, and that day he was holding court for a cortege of reporters from around the world who had come to the isthmus to cover Rubio’s visit. When Royo and I first spoke in 2023, he concluded the interview with an emphatic affirmation of the good will between Panama and the US—a happy ending to a personal and national saga, one he assumed would not be undone. At our recent meeting, however, he sang a different tune. “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy,” he said with a slow shake of his head, quoting a line attributed to Henry Kissinger, “but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Royo spent much of our second conversation explaining in painstaking detail how the Panama Canal functioned—the role of the Panamanian citizens who pilot small vessels to guide container ships through the locks system and the structure of the Panama Canal Authority, which employs more than eight thousand Panamanians to administer and run the waterway. The operation was Panamanian through and through, he emphasized: Panama would be able to limit the access of vessels from any nation if they posed a threat to the canal’s security and neutrality. It felt as though he were attempting to speak to the Trump administration through me, that if he could convince me that China was not running the canal, then the US government would understand it, too.

In the following months Panama’s security minister, Frank Ábrego, and its canal administrator, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, offered similar assurances to visiting US officials. And yet none of them have seemed to stop the Trump administration from reiterating its claims about Chinese incursion. Some in the Zonian community have echoed the allegation. “You can go throughout Panama and see big road signs all in that squiggly Chinese writing,” Mike Andrews told me.

In Zonian groups on social media, Trump’s language and policies have inspired debate. Some members celebrated the prospect of renewed US control over the waterway, while others seemed resigned to the idea that there would be no return to the Zone they once called home. (“As a czbrat I loved the cz. But get over it,” one posted in a Facebook group after Trump’s inauguration.) If there was a consistency across the community, however, it was the prevailing sense of historical grievance. “It has hurt many a Zonian that Panama has not erected any monument or memorabilia thanking the USA for the Canal,” Andrews said over e-mail.

Panamanians, meanwhile, took to the streets in response to April’s memorandum of understanding, claiming that the president had signed away the country’s autonomy. Mulino has since informed his constituents that he will not renegotiate the security deal. “Panama’s sovereignty is not at stake, it’s not handed over, it’s not given,” he said in his weekly national press conference on May 8. And yet now that US troops are positioned to deploy to three of Washington’s former military bases on the isthmus—Fort Sherman, Rodman Naval Station, and Howard Air Force Base—the country’s military will have a presence on Panamanian soil without parallel since the last century. The installations are nestled in las áreas revertidas (“the reverted areas”), a large stretch of which Panama decades ago transformed into a bucolic nature reserve and rechristened Sovereignty National Park.