Word: colombia
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...latest sign that drug smuggling along the region's seacoast has swelled to a high and threatening tide. In the past twelve months, the feds have captured 14 vessels destined for New England carrying a total of 82 tons of marijuana. Most of the pot comes from Colombia, Jamaica and Mexico, and it is usually transported on small boats from southern waters (although two years ago a light plane flying grass from South America was seized after landing in Bedford, Mass...
...tolls are increased and service deteriorates under Panamanian control, Latin American nations will be particularly damaged. Half of Ecuador's trade, 41% of Peru's and 77% of Nicaragua's moves through the canal. Accordingly, while these and other Latin American countries such as Colombia and Chile publicly supported U.S. cession of the canal, they conducted "back channel" talks with Washington to make sure that there would be American guarantees of uninterrupted operation...
During the 1880s, Bunau-Varilla worked for a private French company that attempted to dig a canal through the muddy, mosquito-filled tropical jungle of Panama, then a province of Colombia. Any canal across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan...
...Senate vote, Bunau-Varilla sent every Senator a Nicaraguan five-peso stamp picturing an erupting volcano that could have been Mount Momo-tombo, near the proposed canal line. The Senate switched to Panama on June 19, 1902. Soon afterward, Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay began to press Colombia to agree to a treaty. Their offer: $10 million in gold, plus an annual rent of $250,000. Colombia would retain sovereignty over a six-mile-wide Canal zone, but the U.S. would have the right to enforce its own regulations there. The U.S. Senate approved the treaty, but Bogota...
...allowed permanently to bar one of the future highways of civilization," Roosevelt wrote Hay. Earlier that summer the New York lawyer for the French company, William Cromwell, left a meeting in Washington with the President to issue a press release stating that the province of Panama might secede from Colombia, in which case the U.S. would recognize Panama as an independent nation and conclude a treaty with the new state. This scheme seemed to violate an 1846 U.S. agreement to guarantee the sovereignty of Colombia in the isthmus. Violation or not, the plot was shortly put into effect...