Panama: 47 Miles
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Panama: 47 Miles
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About this listen
The Panama Canal didn't begin with construction. It began with a clause in an 1846 treaty granting the United States the right to land troops on the Isthmus whenever it saw fit. Over the next five decades, Washington would invoke that clause at least 13 times. By 1903, the Roosevelt Corollary had given the U.S. a self-declared mandate to intervene anywhere in Latin America where order was in question, and when Colombia's Senate rejected the canal treaty, order was very much in question.
In Part 2 of our Banana Wars series, Max and Jess trace the gunboat diplomacy that delivered Panamanian independence on Washington's timeline, the backroom dealing of a French engineer with $40 million riding on the outcome, and the racial labor hierarchy that determined who built the canal, who survived it, and whose deaths were carefully recorded and whose weren't.
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