Keith Schneider, senior editor of Circle of Blue writes outstanding articles on Panama where he looks into current events and historic perspectives that are spot on.
PANAMA CITY, Panama – The Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa was so inspired by Christopher Columbus’s four voyages to the New World, including Columbus’s last trip to Central America in 1502, that Balboa undertook his own expedition.
In 1510, Balboa and his men set ashore in the Caribbean rainforest near present-day Colombia and established Santa María la Antigua del Darién, the first permanent European settlement in the Americas.
Three years later, Balboa, setting out on a search for stores of gold, marched through the rain forest to the summit of Cerro Pechito Parao — in what is today Panama’s magnificent Darién Province — and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean.
For 91 years a heroic statue of Balboa that recreates his claim to the Pacific for the Spanish crown has occupied an iconic spot along Balboa Avenue, Panama City’s impressive Pacific shoreline drive. The statue — in one hand a scepter outstretched like a cross while the other clutches his nation’s flag — emphasizes a central idea about Panama: A Spaniard is the nation’s principal hero.
Indeed, until December 31, 1999, when Panama gained full control of the Panama Canal from the United States, all of the region’s previous 490 years were largely influenced by governments beyond the isthmus. Spain relinquished its hold after 200 years and the isthmus became part of Colombia. Colombia, in turn, ended its oversight in 1903, when with the help of the United States, which was about to start construction of the famed canal, Panama established itself as a republic.
Panama’s relationship with the United States is, shall we say, complicated. Unlike the allegiance to Spain and Balboa, there are no iconic statues of Americans in prominent public spaces. No statues of Teddy Roosevelt, the American president at the start of canal construction in 1904; or Woodrow Wilson, president at the opening of the canal in 1914; or Jimmy Carter, the president who initiated the process of turning over the canal to Panama in 1977; or George H. W. Bush, the president who launched the 1989 invasion that pushed Manuel Noriega and the generation-old military dictatorship from power.
It’s not that Panama shows America the back of its hand. It doesn’t. Americans retire here in droves now. Panamanians are warm and very much interested in American visitors. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were stationed in Panama to protect the Panama Canal during World War Two. Hundreds of thousands more transited the canal in troop carriers and other Navy vessels to take on the Japanese in the Asian theater.
By and large Panama also recognizes the contemporary value of the United States – a country responsible for two thirds of the cargo that transits the canal — to the logistics infrastructure investments that are the foundation of the remarkable 10 percent annual GDP growth that has unfolded here over the last decade.