Word: canalized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since former President Jimmy Carter signed treaties with Panama in 1977 that provide for the canal to be handed over in 1999, Americans have been leaving at a steady clip. In 1979, when the treaties went into effect, there were 2,455 Americans on a payroll that had already been cut sharply by the transfer of schools and other responsibilities to the U.S. Army. Now there are fewer than 1,200 U.S. citizens employed by the commission. This year, and every year until the handover, about 100 more will pack their bags. By the year 2000 only a tiny handful...
Farewells are perhaps hardest of all for people like Cotton, whose ties go back to the beginning, when the canal was still an American dream. His greatgrandparents were railroad folks from New Jersey who came to Panama in 1905, the year after the U.S. under President Theodore Roosevelt began digging. Cotton's grandparents married in Panama, and his mother was born in a construction town...
Cotton himself was born 51 years ago in Colon, at the northern end of the 51-mile-long canal. "Born and raised here, right alongside the canal, and so were my kids," he says. "It is tough to say goodbye when you are fourth generation...
...joined the original Panama Canal Company in 1962 and later served as civil affairs director, a kind of mayor for the whole zone. Anti-Americanism occasionally turned ugly in the years leading up to the signing of the historic agreement. Cotton was a leading opponent of the treaties, earning him the enmity of many Panamanians and the respect of large numbers of his fellow Americans. "It was a period of great trauma," he now says simply. "When people lost their jobs, they lost their way of life. Emotions ran pretty high...
...their lowest ebb ever. This is not true. In 1964, we broke relations with the U.S. As far as I know, President Delvalle's government has no intention of doing that. What is true is that no Panamanian accepts external interference in his own affairs and that the 1977 canal treaty has to be implemented. We also believe the American people will not support military intervention that certain people in Washington are seeking...