Ronald reagan was right
DEFRANK, THOMAS M.
Ronald Reagan Was Right The Panama Canal, Twenty Years Later By Thomas M. DeFrank Panama City, Panama Every American schoolkid knows the story. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt essentially...
...The real reason was that the Panamanians hadn't prepared their own electorate for the prospect of an extremely tricky political U-turn...
...A recent poll shows that three-quarters of the Panamanian people want the United States to stay, mostly for economic reasons...
...Today the restaurant sits vacant...
...In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt essentially stole the province of Panama away from Colombia, used American troops to guarantee its independence, and committed U.S...
...I took Panama," TR would later crow...
...Even adjusting for Latin machismo, this demand was too much for the Clinton administration...
...As a matter of sovereign pride and political necessity, Perez Balladares is wary of antagonizing the vocal nationalist minority that wants America out—Panama craves Uncle Sam's real estate...
...Panama won't be so selfless when it takes over management of the canal...
...On paper, the long goodbye for America's last colony has three years left to run...
...The Panamanians and their struggling economy aren't remotely ready to absorb those installations, which brings up the question: How right was Ronald Reagan, whose crusade against the Panama Canal treaty was a key to his growing national popularity in the 1970s...
...They simply don't believe we're going to walk out of a country we built and not pay them rent," a senior American policy-maker says...
...If the United States pulls out entirely, Panama's struggling treasury will have to eat the entire cost of maintaining the bases...
...dollar, the nationalists seem hellbent on ignoring the value of the greenback to its struggling economy...
...Adding insult to injury, Jimmy Carter's negotiators further agreed to abolish the Panama Canal Company and all its commercial enterprises...
...Panama could raise tolls inordinately or, still worse, skimp on maintenance to steer money into government programs or the pockets of corrupt Panamanian politicians...
...taxpayers $80 million a year just to operate and maintain the bases Panama will be getting...
...Economic benefit, not nostalgia or altruism, is the overwhelming rationale...
...We think we're leaving—in fact, we know we're leaving—unless they sign a partnership with America that's beneficial to us and extremely beneficial to them...
...Army Corps of Engineers culture—no flaps, and flawless attention to detail...
...I absolutely loved it," McCaffrey says of his days as a junior officer...
...It's easy to see why the Panamanians are skittish about visitors...
...Having abolished their army after Manuel Noriega was toppled by the 1989 U.S...
...bases remain all-American enclaves, with their swimming pools, ball fields, and fast food drive-thru restaurants...
...Just before these talks-about-talking were to happen a year ago, the Panamanians asked for a postponement...
...Reeder says that "the era of Big Brother is over in this hemisphere...
...And these expenses are only about 4 percent of what it's going to cost Panama just to maintain all the bases they'll be getting at the end of the century...
...bases was a failure...
...His coalition government is fearful of the nationalists, who see the issue as a matter of simple sovereignty and enjoy political muscle out of proportion to their minority status...
...The administrator, a majority of the board, 92 percent of the commission's 7,500-man work force, and twothirds of its managers are Panamanian...
...Why is that...
...Perez Balladares's European trip last fall to drum up foreign investment to develop the U.S...
...To this day, a lot of Panamanians feel like outsiders in their own country...
...Already it is beginning to go to seed...
...If we have to deploy to Brazil, we'll do it from Bragg or Hood or Bliss [in the United States], not from Fort Clayton [in Panama...
...It was a paradise," sighs a third-generation Zon-ian, and it looked the part...
...at the end of their talks, the two leaders agreed to launch "preliminary exploratory talks" to see whether it made sense for the United States to keep some of its bases...
...Some Americans still boycott the place in protest...
...But Clinton's offer presents the Panamanian government with an enormous political dilemma...
...In recent months, thieves have breached security at Quarry Heights, the headquarters of U.S...
...After an emotional debate, the U.S...
...officials, in fact, are interested in hanging on to seven of the ten installations they still own, including Howard Air Force Base, a naval station, the jungle school at Fort Sherman, military housing at Fort Clayton, and a logistics base at Corozal...
...At the moment, the non-negotiations are at a perilous point...
...Security at bases in the old U.S...
...Many senior American officials believe the Panamanians don't understand that their window of opportunity is closing...
...In other words, simply maintaining U.S...
...The U.S...
...Gaillard Highway, named for the Army engineer who supervised the hellish nine-mile cut through the shale and rock of the Continental Divide, is now the Avenida Omar Torrijos, after the military dictator who finally forced the gringos out...
...After being repeatedly warned I'd be wasting my time trying to gain entry without permission, I drove onto two of them without being challenged by guards...
...Those jobs would evaporate and aren't easily replicated in the domestic economy...
...His jaw dropped," says an official present at McCaffrey's briefing...
...Southern Command and now President Clinton's drug czar, invited Perez Balladares to his headquarters at Quarry Heights for a friendly, Dutch-uncle talk...
...A better bet is that the Panamanians will send America packing, suffer more economic woes, let the canal languish and decline, and prove Ronald Reagan a prophet...
...But many party leaders, including Perez Balladares, an American-educated banker, want to make a deal...
...the huge coastal artillery guns at the entrances were pulled out decades ago...
...A breathtakingly beautiful boot-shaped piece of prime real estate at the south end of the canal, Fort Amador was divided into American and Panamanian zones in 1979...
...It was a distortion of reality that had to end...
...Like the grizzled Texas Ranger captain in Lonesome Dove who drinks a toast to "the sunny slopes of long ago," the dwindling band of Zonians mourns a way of life that was doomed long before the treaty was signed and ratified...
...official says, "but they want billions...
...So it appears Ronald Reagan was right when he declared in 1976 that Americans not only built and paid for the canal but are needed to keep it operating efficiently...
...Instead, they talk about the mutual benefit of the counter-drug operation run out of Howard...
...There's also a dreadful McDonald's sign at the graceful but defunct Balboa rail station...
...government agency, the zone was Main Street, U.S.A., circa 1930...
...Over the next three years, the last 7,400 U.S...
...The 1903 treaty gave the United States sovereignty "in perpetuity" over a ten-mile-wide swath of Panama spanning the isthmus...
...Indeed, the Panamanians still believe—mistakenly—that the United States desperately needs the bases...
...The political sensitivities are so great that before Clinton and Perez Balladares met in Washington in September 1995, the Panamanians insisted on a face-saving arrangement...
...A constitutional amendment and other legal changes to guarantee the canal's independence from the Panamanian government are in the works, and Panamanian president Ernesto Perez Bal-ladares is committed to safeguarding the canal's autonomy...
...In the spring and summer of last year, the Clinton administration quietly debated whether it made sense to reopen the issue of the U.S...
...It's hard for me to believe we cannot successfully manage this transition working together," Clark says...
...But many Panamanian leaders are privately skeptical such measures can effectively insulate the canal...
...The Panamanians have been fully warned...
...It's too distasteful for them to admit publicly, but senior Panamanian officials understand full well that a post-2000 American presence implies a political stability critical to attracting overseas capital...
...This is all the more true since the last American combat units pulled out of Panama last year...
...Could it be abrogated...
...We have to be satisfied with taking pride in what we've accomplished here...
...As a young captain in the late sixties, McCaffrey was the aide-decamp to the commanding general of Army troops and lived in quarters at Fort Amador...
...The message he came home with was this: If the United States hangs around, there's less chance of Panama succumbing to a new dictator or the drug lords...
...The United States has run the canal as a nonprofit, international utility, which was not only generous but necessary for world commerce...
...side remained as perfectly manicured as a Singapore neighborhood, while the Panamanian zone became littered with trash and debris and blighted with empty barracks...
...Except for speeding tickets, handed out with stern dispatch by the redneck Canal Zone police force, crime was virtually nonexistent...
...military presence is very much in doubt...
...We're a force-projection army these days," says a top military planner...
...bases to Panama by the end of the century, the 1977 treaty abolished the Canal Zone and turned over all its governmental functions to Panama...
...Some Panamanians still believe the United States will find a reason to renege at the last moment and keep the canal and bases...
...Now we're giving it back...
...The U.S...
...military to remain either...
...The entire zone was so beautifully kept that from the American towns of Cristobal on the Atlantic to Balboa on the Pacific it resembled one enormous golf course...
...military...
...Is the canal itself next...
...In its heyday, Panama was such a dream posting for Americans that the wife of a young Green Beret officer burst into tears in 1972 when her husband was reassigned from Fort Sherman to a hardship post— Hawaii...
...Should the treaty be abrogated...
...It's a smokescreen," one U.S...
...Parts of Roosevelt Avenue have become Avenida Ascano Arosemenea...
...It was always clear to most of us," McCaffrey muses, "that you couldn't continue to have a colonial status in Panama...
...The Panamanians will have to choose...
...It's time to move forward...
...The Canal Zone was a Little America unto itself...
...This place used to be heaven," says a high-school junior pumping iron at the Balboa fitness center...
...Several autos have been hot-wired and brazenly driven off post, and even the homes of general officers have been burglarized...
...McCaffrey emphasized to the Panamanian leader that it costs U.S...
...Getting out has been U.S...
...But we are...
...its passenger cars now rot and rust in barns or along abandoned tracks...
...The president obligingly gave his guest the requisite cover...
...That should have been a message that the United States really doesn't need the bases anymore, but it didn't register...
...Locals call it the Bay of Cholera...
...two-thirds of the cargo that passes through the waterway is either coming from or going to the United States...
...A wonderful place," says Barry McCaffrey, who was literally conceived in the zone when his father, also a retired Army general, was stationed there in the 1940s...
...But he did understand the math...
...The trouble is, Panamanian leaders want both the nationalist satisfaction of watching American forces depart and the prosperity that depends on their staying...
...Ironically, for a country whose official currency is the U.S...
...In 1995, Gen...
...The whole place was run by the U.S...
...Canal Zone controlled by Panamanians ranges from lax to non-existent...
...military presence in Panama...
...Next door, the Balboa Theater, an art deco classic, is also a wistful memory of Saturday matinees for a quarter, just like the padlocked bowling alley across the street the Panamanians pledged to keep open...
...But the pay-to-stay idea is an absolute deal-breaker...
...After two visits to the isthmus in the summer and more than sixty interviews, I'm convinced that a post-1999 U.S...
...More than 16,000 jobs depend on the Americans, including those of more than 3,000 Panamanians who work for the U.S...
...At the precise instant the canal goes over, the American military is also supposed to be out of Panama—lock, stock, and Burger King...
...So with no vital national-security interests left in Panama, the conventional wisdom favored the status quo...
...We're one team with one mission," he says, "and that mission is to make sure the canal operates as effectively and efficiently in the next hundred years as it has in the first hundred...
...Except for critical geopolitical hot spots like Germany, South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, Pentagon doctrine is rapidly moving away from the notion of forward basing...
...If these things happen, says an American diplomat who helped negotiate the treaties, "they'll kill the golden goose dead...
...The transition is already a fait accompli...
...But crime is an increasing problem...
...At some point fairly soon, the pullout will reach the point of no return...
...If people don't know you're there, you aren't going to sell any hamburgers...
...Senate ratified the treaty by a 2-vote margin, and since then three American presidents, including Reagan himself, have stood behind it...
...The Panama Canal was more than an engineering wonder of the world, however...
...The Panama Canal Railroad died a few years after Panama took it over...
...The Panamanians don't believe it...
...The ports at both ends of the canal have Thomas M. DeFrank, a veteran White House correspondent, collaborated with James A. Baker III and Ed Rollins on their memoirs...
...If we allow [the canal] to fall into the hands of the politicians," says Fernando Man-fredo, Jr., the first Panamanian deputy administrator, "that will be the end of it...
...Predictably, the quality of life took a nose dive...
...Many of the most fervent supporters of a deal in both nations are increasingly pessimistic...
...Now that they've reclaimed most of the real estate, the Panamanians have also begun renaming the streets...
...the waterway generates nearly $500 million in annual revenues, an irresistible cash cow for a poor country...
...The American drawdown proceeds apace and is in fact accelerating...
...For fear of spooking the Panamanians, they don't admit this publicly...
...I didn't even have to roll down the window for a cursory explanation of my intentions...
...But the contractor had never been paid and got a check for several months of back pay only after Panamanian officials learned this article was being prepared...
...Besides, there's no real external threat to the canal anymore...
...The Panamanian lawyer who owns the restaurant promised canal officials he wouldn't put it up, then reneged...
...The canal has been off the American political screen since the days in the late 1970s when Reagan liked to thunder, "We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours, and we're going to keep it...
...The Americans have protested, to no avail...
...The School of the Americas, where the U.S...
...There's no urgent strategic reason for the U.S...
...troops will ship out, and Panama will inherit 3,600 buildings and 71,000 acres of military real estate...
...It's more like hell every day...
...Negotiations are in limbo, and time is the greatest enemy of an agreement...
...But the United States may exit anyway...
...territory...
...Their fig-leaf explanation: New U.S...
...Barletta, by the way, has grandiose schemes to create a resort, a casino, a hotel-management school, an industrial park, and more on former U.S...
...He had no idea what just the housekeeping will cost him...
...At high noon on December 31, 1999, under terms of the 1977 treaty negotiated by President Carter, the Panama Canal becomes the sole property of the Republic of Panama...
...It was very stable and quiet...
...In economic terms alone, keeping some U.S...
...Barry McCaffrey, then commander in chief of the U.S...
...About that same time, the Panamanians began telling their American interlocutors that the only way the PRD could justify allowing the gringos to stay was if the United States agreed to pay rent...
...We ran this country for them, and now they've run it into the ground...
...In April, former president Nicolas Barletta, chairman of Panama's Interoceanic Regional Authority, told me his agency was spending $250,000 a month to mothball facilities already turned over by the U.S...
...For the last 17 years, Latin America has been watching to see if the United States would live up to its treaty obligations, and they've seen that our word is good," says Joe Reeder, the forceful under secretary of the Army who moonlights as chairman of the Panama Canal Commission and is Panama's firmest friend in the Clinton administration...
...soldiers because of rampant crime and drugs...
...Panama, after all, isn't the only country whose national dignity counts for something...
...The golden goose is already tarnished in America's Hong Kong...
...ambassador William Hughes wasn't up to speed on the issue...
...It's fantasyland," says a skeptical Panamanian official...
...The new Southcom commander, Army general Wesley Clark, thinks they'll opt for a continued American role...
...Officially, the ruling Democratic Revolutionary party (PRD) wants the United States out...
...The jungle has reclaimed parts of Fort Gulick (now Fort Espinar...
...Unless an agreement in principle is reached by early next year, the American withdrawal is probably irreversible...
...It's a ludicrous argument—the American bases are pristine—but even some pro-American politicians are trumpeting it...
...Colon, the Atlantic port city where many American servicemen and their families once lived, has been declared off-limits to U.S...
...Bound by treaty to leave anyway, and stretched to the limit as peacekeeping duties escalated and budgets shrank, the Army was dead-set against staying after 1999...
...Stripping is our national sport," says a Panamanian security guard...
...In July, Perez Balladares trotted out the idea of creating a regional anti-drug center based at Howard, a sign he's trying to find a rationale to keep the Americans...
...Army once trained thousands of Latin American soldiers, is a gutted hulk, plucked to its foundations by looters...
...By law, Reeder can overrule his board, but he never has and never will...
...Perez Balladares would like to find a way to let the Americans stay, and a huge majority of his countrymen agree with him...
...He argued that the American military presence, while not absolutely crucial to U.S...
...Dollars," he grins between munches on a Whopper with cheese...
...invasion, Panamanians fear the Colombian drug cartels could quickly undermine the nation's tender democracy if the Americans ship out...
...If soldiers leave," a cab driver says, "Panama cries...
...even the wiring, light sockets, and plumbing are gone...
...The idyllic lives of the civilians who ran the canal and the soldiers who protected it have gone steadily downhill ever since...
...And more to the point, the confidence of shippers who use the canal and foreign companies and governments considering an investment in Panama will be shaken...
...interests, would nevertheless be useful to maintain at reduced levels...
...Zonians had their own commissaries, hospitals, schools, churches, service clubs, Little League, restaurants, railroad, mortuary, even their own postage stamps and federal district court...
...The jewel in the crown of American properties almost certainly will be next...
...Through bureaucratic mismanagement and indifferent maintenance, Panamanians have spent 17 years letting the former Canal Zone deteriorate...
...military...
...Since then, the negotiations have gone nowhere...
...hands...
...It was a national icon, a symbol of the ingenuity, determination, and benevolence of the United States of America...
...Crisply administered by the Panama Canal Company, a U.S...
...The turn of the century will also bring an end to the American military presence in Panama, a constant since the first Panama Canal treaty was signed in 1903...
...There was no way Perez Bal-ladares could touch this hot potato unless Clinton raised it "spontaneously...
...From cradle to grave, the company handled everything...
...technological prowess to building a great ditch linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans...
...Both are ridiculous notions...
...The Prado, the elegant palm-flanked thoroughfare leading from the steps of the canal Administration Building to Stevens Circle, the monument to the canal's second chief engineer, is now Avenida Pres-idente Chiara...
...Panama's cut on canal shipping tolls was $80.2 million last year—all of which goes directly into the strapped national treasury...
...In addition to returning the canal and U.S...
...But the government can't afford to maintain it...
...But for old-timers in the zone, paradise lost began in October 1979, when the treaty went into effect...
...It's a matter of business," he shrugs...
...Even Americans sympathetic to local political realities worry that Panama, in the time-honored tradition of manana, will continue to miscalculate the degree of urgency and come on board a day late and a dollar short...
...The man who persuaded the Pentagon and ultimately the president otherwise was McCaffrey...
...bases is a slam-dunk proposition...
...troops in Latin America...
...On September 30, the United States turned over its portion of Amador to Panama...
...bases in the short term will wipe out the cash the canal generates for Panama's national coffers...
...national policy since 1977...
...Eighty-two years old, fastidiously maintained by a highly professional work force, the canal is still in splendid operating condition...
...fallen into disrepair...
...They still think they're in a negotiation with us...
...That's the easiest sell for keeping the United States around...
...The Bay of Panama off Fort Amador is dangerously polluted and gives off a terrible stench...
...And it would keep American pressure on the Panamanian government to hesitate before diverting the canal's proceeds for its own purposes...
...That might assure investors that Panama won't fall prey to another dictator or drug cartel...
...Southcom headquarters will move to Miami next summer, a year ahead of schedule...
...Maybe so, but negotiations are underway to keep a 4,000-person American military force in Panama and leave some bases in U.S...
...The service center, a popular cafeteria where kids from Balboa Elementary and the high school hung out after classes, was taken over by the Panamanians, who jacked up the prices so high the kids stopped going...
...And anti-American politicians have recently begun to play the environmental card, charging that the United States must pay to clean up the mess it's leaving behind...
...The American presence pumps more than $350 million a year into the Panamanian economy, roughly 8 percent of its gross domestic product...
...Clinton decided that the United States would be willing to keep around 4,000 troops in-country beginning in 2000 if the Panamanians were agreeable...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 9
