Erased

The Untold Story of the Panama Canal

Marixa Lasso

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674239753
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The Panama Canal's untold history—from the Panamanian point of view. Sleuth and scholar Marixa Lasso recounts how the canal's American builders displaced 40, 000 residents and erased entire towns in the guise of bringing modernity to the tropics. The Panama Canal set a new course for the modern development of Central America. Cutting a convenient path from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, it hastened the currents of trade and migration that were already reshaping the Western hemisphere. Yet the waterway was built at considerable cost to a way of life that had characterized the region for centuries. In Erased, Marixa Lasso recovers the history of the Panamanian cities and towns that once formed the backbone of the republic.Drawing on vast and previously untapped archival sources and personal recollections, Lasso describes the canal's displacement of peasants, homeowners, and shop owners, and chronicles the destruction of a centuries-old commercial culture and environment. On completion of the canal, the United States engineered a tropical idyll to replace the lost cities and towns—a space miraculously cleansed of poverty, unemployment, and people—which served as a convenient backdrop to the manicured suburbs built exclusively for Americans. By restoring the sounds, sights, and stories of a world wiped clean by U.S. commerce and political ambition, Lasso compellingly pushes back against a triumphalist narrative that erases the contribution of Latin America to its own history.

1

The Port and the City

The Port of Panama

THE PORT OF Panama is the oldest Pacific port built by Europeans in the Americas. It has never been quaint or traditional. From the galleon fleets and mule trains of the sixteenth century to the steamships, railroads, and telegraph lines of the nineteenth, the port has always been at the forefront of global transportation technology. Since its beginnings it has been an international port from which important global commodities have departed or arrived. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was silver, slaves, and textiles; today, it is oil, cars, and other industrial products.

When canal construction started in 1904, the ports of Panama and Colón already had a very active trade with merchandise arriving from Europe, China, and the United States.¹ The Pacific telegraph line arrived in the Port of Panama and the West Indian line in the Port of Colón, and from both ports telegraph companies transmitted to North and South America and to Europe.² The Port of Panama also received small steamers and sailboats that connected the city with Panama’s countryside. Continuous international trade, constant contact with foreigners, and the frequent arrival of immigrants had shaped the habits of the people of Panama City. In 1823, the French explorer Gaspard Mollien observed that the people of Panama were very different from the people of the Colombian Andes and more similar to people of other Pacific ports, like Manila and Lima. Like them, they sold everything at very expensive prices; and, like them, they preferred coffee to chocolate. He noted the good organization and abundant supply of Panama City stores, which offered a large variety of items imported from the United States, as well as wines and liquors of all types.³ In 1904, the Valdés geography—the first of Panama—commented proudly that Panamanians were noted for “their great aptitude to speak foreign languages,” and that many spoke “with enough fluency English and French.”⁴

Although the shape, location, and relationship of the Port of Panama to its environment changed over time, some things remained constant: its marshes, its global trade, and the islands of Naos, Perico, and Flamenco, which are located 2.5 miles away from the port. From the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, marshes near the port forced large ships engaged in long-distance trade to anchor in the deep waters off Naos, Perico, and Flamenco. There, passengers and merchandise were transferred to smaller boats that carried them to the city’s port during high tide. This method of loading and unloading continued even after the arrival of steamboats and the inauguration of the Panama Railroad in 1855. Like their wind-powered predecessors, steamboats continued to anchor near Naos and Perico. Tenders belonging to the Panama Railroad and the Pacific Steam Navigation Company carried passengers and cargo to their wharves in Panama City.⁵

Each subsequent incarnation of the port—the colonial Spanish, the nineteenth-century republican, and the American—reflected a different urban understanding of the relationship between port, city, and power. Of particular relevance are the changes that took place during the construction of the Panama Canal. During this period the relationship between Panama City and its port underwent a dramatic transformation when for the first time the city was separated from its international port.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the relationship between the port and the city was intimate. From the walls of the city, onlookers could watch the arrival of ships to Naos and Perico. Government officials, merchants, sailors, and stevedores all lived in the city and walked its streets. The institutions that organized and regulated the port’s trade were located in the city, the urban layout of which reflected the close relationship between civic power and trade. During colonial times, the customs house was near the sea door (puerta de mar) of the walled city that opened to the port. The city’s political and religious center—the cathedral, the main square, and the town council—was located two blocks away. New economic actors continued to follow urban patterns established when the Spanish Empire controlled Panama. The offices of the French canal company and the British telegraph agency were located in Panama City near the municipal building and the governor’s house.

In the late nineteenth century, there was still a close spatial connection between local and international trade. The wharves of the Panama Railroad and the Pacific Steam Navigation Company were built farther east, not too far from the old sea door. International and local trade shared the port. Tenders with international passengers and merchandise landed next to local boats trafficking in native products. The four large wharves (the American wharf, the English wharf, the coal wharf, and the market wharf) that connected Panama City to the world were located close to each other and close to Panama City’s public market.⁶ The spatial use of the port reflected dominant liberal ideologies of free trade. Different companies from different countries mixed together. In the Bay of Panama, small boats like cayucos mingled with scows, sloops, and schooners. Carriages and wagons constantly traveled between the center of the city and market and the wharves. A new coaling station was established on Taboga Island nearby, and steamers were also repaired on a sand bank of the same island during low tide.⁷ The words quaint or primitive could hardly have described a city where “the noise caused by the railroad and by the carriages and wagons … lend this place the lively aspect and air of greatness peculiar to all busy ports.”⁸

The French attempt to construct a canal in the 1880s brought the first disruption to the close spatial connection between Panama City and its port. When the French canal company built a wharf at the town of La Boca at the entrance of the Río Grande, about three miles away, it relocated an important part of international trade from the wharves near the public market in Panama City to the mouth of the Río Grande, which was connected to Panama City by a branch of the railroad. This location would be the one eventually selected for the construction of the American port of Ancón (later named Balboa) when the mouth of the Río Grande became the Pacific terminus of the Panama Canal. Changes in railroad and port technology had allowed the French to overcome the old problem of tidal marshes that rose and fell more than twenty feet. Thanks to continuous dredging, steamers did not have to stop at Naos anymore, and could dock at La Boca regardless of the tide. By the beginning of the twentieth century, vessels docked at a wharf that was “constructed wholly of steel, with a roof and sides of corrugated iron.” La Boca harbor had a large pier that “contained facilities for docking three large ships at the same time.” It had sixteen steam cranes and four electric cranes on the dock. On the end of the pier there was a “large 20-ton crane.”⁹ The landscape of large steam cranes that would symbolize American modernity and innovation at the Panama Canal was already in place as a result of the French canal construction.

In spite of these changes, Panama City remained the spatial center of power of the isthmian route. The headquarters of the French canal company were located in the traditional center of political and economic power: the main square of Panama City. Political control of the new Port of La Boca continued to be in the hands of Colombia’s government and located in Panama City. La Boca was only a new location within the historic range of the international Port of Panama, which went from Panama City to Naos, Perico, and Flamenco. With the creation of the Republic of Panama and the signing of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty in 1903, the relationship between the city and the port would change dramatically. This change was not immediate, and during the year after the treaty came into force the port’s future became one of the most important subjects of negotiations between the governments of the United States and Panama.

Losing the Port of Panama

The first major controversy between Panama and the United States arose over the question of which country would control the canal’s port. In the 1903 treaty, Panama had given in perpetuity to the United States a five-mile zone on either side of the canal, with one exception: “the cities of Panamá and Colón and the ports adjacent to these cities would not be included … in this concession.” However, not two months had passed since Panama had officially handed the Zone to the US government before great differences over the meaning and definition of “ports adjacent to the city” arose. The United States interpreted that phrase in the narrowest sense. The Port of Panama included the docks next to Panama City and a small part of the Bay of Panama, between Punta de Chiriquí and Punta Paitilla. According to Panama’s secretary of foreign relations, Tomás Arias, this interpretation was absurd. Exasperated, he stated that this area “was not properly a port, but barely an inlet.”¹⁰ For the government of Panama, “the ports of Panamá and Colón are, because of the characteristics of the land, the very entrances of the Canal.”¹¹

Arias was only repeating what was common knowledge among his contemporaries. Just a few years earlier, in 1890, a Colombian traveler and politician had written that “the islands of Perico and Flamenco … were the city’s true port.”¹² The Zone’s governor, General George W. Davis, had a very different interpretation of the canal treaty. He considered the port at the mouth of the canal to be different from the Port of Panama and gave it a new name: the Port of Ancón. On June 25, 1904, US Secretary of War William Howard Taft ordered the renaming of La Boca as the Port of Ancón, designated it as one of the ports of the Zone, opened it to international commerce, and established a customs house that would charge the same import duties as other US ports.¹³ The dispute over the Port of Panama and the diplomatic correspondence between Panama and the United States reveal their contrasting views about Panama’s history and identity. Was Panama a modern city that could continue to control its international port as it had done during the past four centuries? Or was it backward, incapable of managing the ports of one of the greatest engineering feats of the twentieth century? In 1904, the answer was not obvious.

To understand Panama’s position about the ports we need to appreciate how Panamanians at the turn of the twentieth century viewed themselves and their history and how this view contrasted with US ideas about the tropics and tropical peoples. The legal mind behind Panama’s defense of its right to control the canal’s ports was the brilliant lawyer and politician Eusebio A. Morales (see Figure 1.1). To understand him and other Panamanians of his generation and to appreciate how they saw their nation’s place in the world, we need to understand the years and events that preceded the signing of the 1903 treaty, when Panamanians suddenly found themselves negotiating alone with one of the most powerful nations on earth.

FIGURE 1.1 Eusebio A. Morales

Credit: Photo by Carlos Endara. Courtesy of the Ricardo López Arias / Ana Sánchez collection.

Morales was born in 1864 in Sincelejo, in what was then the Colombian department of Bolivar, and belonged to a generation of politicians who came of age at a time when Colombia and Panama were part of the same republic. He grew up during a crucial period in Colombian history, when the Liberal Party, his party, had led Colombia to a series of political changes, placing it at the vanguard of global democratic politics.¹⁴ In 1851, the Colombian Congress declared the abolition of slavery, more than ten years before the United States did. Two years later, it enacted laws that granted freedom of the press, the separation between church and state, and universal manhood suffrage. These reforms were of particular importance in a place like Panama, where the majority of the population was black and the climate tropical, two traits that since the eighteenth century the scientific community—including Francisco José de Caldas, Bogota’s foremost scientist in the eighteenth century—had considered incompatible with civilization.¹⁵

Panamanians found themselves in the unlikely situation of being at the center of political innovations in a world that increasingly considered them incapable of civilization. Educated black Panamanians like Jose Domingo Espinar and Carlos A. Mendoza challenged these views with their words and actions (see Figure 1.2). They became staunch advocates of democracy and universal manhood suffrage. Espinar wrote in 1851 that the nineteenth century was the “century of the majorities” and asked “whoever does not abide by its sovereign decisions, to leave the country forever.” He was fully aware of the ramifications of such statements in places like Panama, where these majorities were not white. He also challenged the idea that skin color had any influence on human nature, as everyone had “their own skin tone,” one “that nature and happenstance had bestowed [upon] them at birth.”¹⁶ A member of the Liberal Party, Mendoza also emphasized in his writings and actions his belief in Panama’s right and ability to progress and modernize according to the democratic ideals of the nineteenth century.¹⁷

FIGURE 1.2 Carlos A. Mendoza

Credit: Photo by Carlos Endara. Courtesy of the Ricardo López Arias / Ana Sánchez collection.

Another Panamanian, the famous politician and diplomat Justo Arosemena, also confronted the geographic and racial determinism of his time. Unlike Mendoza and Espinar, he was a member of Panama’s traditional white elite, but like them he was a stro...