Word: canal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...port of Balboa, workmen nailed up a sign reading BIENVENIDO AL PUERTO DE BALBOA-BRIDGE OF THE WORLD. As evening fell, a solemn, subdued crowd of Americans watched as the Stars and Stripes was lowered-for the last time-at the U.S.-operated headquarters of the Panama Canal Co. Next morning an animated group of Panamanians cheered as their country's white, red and blue banner was run up a new flagpole atop bush-covered Ancon Hill. The Panama Canal Zone, the 648-sq.-mi. enclave that had been under U.S. sovereignty since 1903, had ceased to exist...
...been worse. The furor at home over the Soviet combat troops in Cuba was an uncomfortable reminder that the Caribbean was no longer an "American lake." Those troops, as well as the leftist tinge of the Cuban-assisted revolution that overthrew Nicaraguan Strongman Anastasio Somoza, raised fears that the canal faced a remote threat...
...Panamanians, recovering the Canal Zone, as one local paper quaintly put it, was like liberating a child who had been kidnaped for a long time. "Only five more days," exulted the Panamanian daily El Matutino, awaiting the ceremonies that marked the change in sovereignty. To ensure a large crowd at the festivities, the government declared a national holiday; Panamanians were urged by radio, proclamation and word of mouth to enter the zone and attend a rally at the field of Albrook Air Force Station. There were a handful of anti-American outbursts; shortly after midnight...
...ceremony was a nostalgic but bitter occasion for the 3,500 American canal workers in the zone. The Zonians, as they are called, were witnessing the end of their cherished home away from home, a small piece of America transplanted to a well-tended tropical setting beside the beloved waterway. Anti-American propaganda held that the Zonians had reveled in colonial splendor amid the surrounding squalor of Panama. In truth, their homes were modest by U.S. standards and their incomes only adequate. Said one longtime Zonian, on his way for a last rum punch at the historic Spanish colonial-style...
...Zonians' dismay at the Carter Administration's "giveaway" of the Canal Zone burst into the open at a flag-lowering ceremony at Balboa High School. "Jimmy stinks," chanted a group of American students standing outside the school as the U.S. flag was lowered. Zonians joked that Foul Play, the film showing at the local theater, was grimly appropriate; the movie was replaced the day after the turnover by El Expreso de los Espias, a spy film starring Robert Shaw and Lee Marvin that was titled Avalanche Express in the U.S. Shortly before the switch in sovereignty, many Americans...