Word: panama
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Soon after canal negotiators reached agreement last week, Panama's strongman, Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera, lunched at his Pacific Coast hideaway known as Farallon (meaning "small rocky island in the sea ") with TIME Correspondent Jerry Hannifin. Following a meal of sancocho (Panama's national soup) and hot chili sauce, Torrijos offered the following comments...
...orders came to squeeze the [demonstrating] students between the U.S. military and the [Panamanian] guard, and I was ashamed. We used sticks on children. And I could do nothing. I began to think. I decided to do something for my people, to lead the decolonization of Panama...
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...
...organizer of the French company was Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, and who preferred the Panama site because he believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that a Suez-style sea-level canal without locks could be built there...
...level canal required far more voluminous and difficult digging in mountainous Panama than had been necessary in the Middle Eastern sands. Few of the celebrated French engineers De Lesseps invited to inspect his plan approved it (among the doubters: Gustave Eiffel, the tower builder). The doubts were soon borne out: in 1889, De Lesseps' company went bankrupt. By that time, the French had moved 50 million cubic meters of earth?two-thirds of the amount moved at Suez. In the process, some 20,000 workers died of malaria and yellow fever (whose causes were thought to be noxious jungle vapors...