Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal by Marixa Lasso is about the legacies of a U.S. view of the world “in terms of tropicality, Western Civilization, and Progressive Era ideas of social improvement.”
She summarizes:
“Global trade and global labor had been at the center of Panama’s economy since the sixteenth century. Spanish ships and galleons brought European merchandise and Andean silver to its ports, and African slaves transported them across the isthmus. In the 1850s, American capital and West Indian and Chinese labor built the first transcontinental railroad in the Americas, and Panama’s ports were serviced by steamships, railroad, and telegraph lines — the latest in nineteenth-century transport technology.”
The opening sentences of the book:
“My earliest memories of the Zone are as a child looking out the window of my father’s car. It was the 1970s, and the Zone — a ten-mile strip of land, five miles on either side of the canal — belonged to the United States, which had acquired it through the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903. The treaty gave the United States the right to build and control the canal and to rule over the Zone as if it were a sovereign. Running down the middle of the Republic of Panama, the Zone bordered Panama City and divided the country in two…”
Yesterday I wrote: A Few Drops of Context: On Snatching the Panama Canal: And why Trump is talking about trans people too. It's a 6-min read on Medium.
See this video (1:23): ‘Gross ignorance’: Panamanians react to Trump’s threats to retake canal
On Christmas Day, Trump announced Miami-Dade County Commissioner Kevin Marino Cabrera as his pick for U.S. ambassador to Panama.
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