Word: panama
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Theodore Roosevelt considered its acquisition "the most important action I took in foreign affairs." Laying claim to the 550-sq.-mi. Panama Canal Zone indeed entailed a classic shake of the Big Stick-and so it may again. At his press conference in Minneapolis last week, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger worried aloud that the quasi-U.S. colony, which straddles the strategic waterway that links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, could become the focus of "a kind of nationalistic, guerrilla type of operation that we have not seen before in the Western Hemisphere." He was referring to the very...
...acquired sovereignty over the zone "in perpetuity" in 1903, as a reward for helping Panama to achieve its independence. Roosevelt had sent U.S. gunboats to protect a Panamanian national uprising-funded by private American and French interests-against the territory's Colombian rulers. In exchange for control of the Canal Zone, the U.S. paid a total of $10 million to the fledgling national government and agreed to pay $250,000 annually in rent. Building the canal cost the U.S. an additional $336,650,000. It is now an international commercial convenience rather than a U.S. military necessity; in fiscal...
Slow Steps. Last year Panama and the U.S. signed an eight-point agreement in principle on how to proceed with the negotiations. Brigadier General Omar Torrijos, Panama's dictatorial but populist strongman, hopes for a "step-by-step and orderly process of demilitarization and neutralization of the canal." But the steps have been slow, and the two sides are still well apart...
...through Chief Negotiator Ellsworth Bunker, has offered, in essence, a gradual ceding of partial sovereignty and Panamanian participation in the canal's operation and defense, but it wants to retain unlimited access for both civil and military aircraft to some zone airports. Panama wants all U.S. military installations phased out and, equally unacceptable to the U.S., total control of the zone and the canal itself...
...Administration hopes the Senate will kill the measure; if it does not, a veto is likely. But one-third of the Senate has endorsed a resolution opposing changes in the Panama treaty. Since the Senate has to approve all treaties by a two-thirds majority, the Administration faces hard times in advancing toward what Kissinger described to the Panamanians as "a new and more modern relationship between our two countries...