Word: waterways
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Getting the first Panama Canal treaty through the Senate last month was roughly the equivalent of putting a big tanker through the waterway: there was no room to spare. The second treaty, providing for the gradual transfer of authority to Panama by the year 2000, is expected to have an equally narrow passage when it comes up for a vote on April 18. Opponents of the treaty have intensified their pressure on wavering Senators, and a defeat of the second treaty would force renegotiation of the entire agreement, with potentially explosive consequences. Seldom, in fact, has a project that...
...opponents vow to keep up the pressure. The fact that one treaty has been approved, however, makes it somewhat easier to pass the other. Moreover, the point has been made-and reinforced by the reservations-that the U.S. has the perpetual right to come to the defense of the waterway. A treaty solidly in the national interest has become even more advantageous...
After a long year of keeping his political distance from Carter, Byrd plunged into the treaty battle. At his urging, Carter and Torrijos issued a joint statement clarifying two points in the treaties: that the U.S. would permanently retain the right to defend the waterway's neutrality, and that in an emergency U.S. Navy vessels would "go to the head of the line" through the canal...
...present anomaly remains: a small but proud nation cut in half by a huge waterway under the control of a foreign power. The arrangement may once have been economically justified, even a historical necessity, but it is a current indignity for Panamanians. As Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez told Carter: "The Panamanians feel exactly about the Canal Zone as North Americans would feel if the British owned the Mississippi River." In fact, Americans had much the same attitude as contemporary Panamanians when the Spanish and French (not the British) controlled the Mississippi...
...very easily, say the people who should know: the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They believe it is in the national interest to cede control of the waterway. Acting alone, surrounded by a hostile population not only in Panama but in the rest of Latin America, the U.S. would need an estimated 100,000 troops to put down a determined guerrilla effort. And even that sizable a force could not seal off the waterway's lock mechanisms, dams and power plants from some kind of sabotage. A band of skilled terrorists, for example, could approach the Gatun Dam through...