Panama: Self-Determination and National Popular Unity in the Face of Imperialist Irredentism

Abdiel Rodríguez Reyes

05 Feb 2025

Panamanian protesters hold a banner saying: "Neither gringos nor oligarchs, the canal for the homeland." Photo: Pedro Silva.

President Donald Trump's recent antagonisms toward Panama have illustrated the need for the Panamanian people to build power through popular unity.

Originally published in Orinoco Tribune.

The peoples have the right to decide their own collective destiny as established by the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which was not gratuitous but a product of the struggle of the peripheral countries for their decolonization. Amid this reality, the United States never gave up extending the Monroe Doctrine to the present day. Making the situation worse, imperial irredentism becomes explicit with President Donald Trump. The Panamanian people’s distrust of the political elite at this juncture is being reproduced in the collective imagination in a marked disinterest in Trump’s imperial irredentism. He is looking for the annexation of territories, even if they do not share borders with the US, as in the case of Greenland and Panama. And it is not the whim of one person, in this case of Trump, but an imperialist rationale.

In the face of Trump’s threats to annex territories, “recover” others such as the Panama Canal, and outrage countries like Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela with false claims and sanctions, one way to resist is the organization of the peoples and the implementation of a common agenda whose content is the self-determination of the peoples, regional integration, and popular national unity. The Panamanian political elite will not necessarily defend the best interests of our people. The United States is our main trading partner, and we maintain a relationship of dependence with the colossus of the North. Our elite is the sepoy in that relationship. It shows its servility every time it can. With the noose around its neck, it kicks the ground. Recently, given the altercation on social media between Presidents Gustavo Petro and Trump, the government of the Republic of Honduras, occupying the pro tempore presidency of CELAC, called an urgent meeting to address the situation, but it was cancelled due to “lack of consensus.”

In the case of Panama, the Panamanian political elites have more than a century of negotiating with the Americans for their own benefit. It will be up to the people to organize themselves to protect their own, just as they did on January 9, 1964. The interests of the people are not necessarily the same as those of the elite, although they may coincide at times. The underlying problem is not Trump but imperialist irredentism. Today, it is Trump; tomorrow, it will be another president, and that irredentist rationality underlies in the background. Therefore, it is necessary to tactically and strategically design defense and resistance mechanisms. It is imperative to direct actions towards a different regional correlation of forces in terms of Latin American unity until the constitution of a new “historical bloc,” as Gramsci would say.

Following the irredentist spirit expressed by President Trump on his social network Truth Social and in his presidential inauguration speech, the United States Federal Maritime Commission convened a hearing to discuss the alleged Chinese presence in the Panama Canal. Internationalist Julio Yao analyzed the Commission’s resolution. He concluded with the need to consult the International Court of Justice if the US requests do not constitute a violation of international law. These requests are clearly interference. In particular: “The US cannot urge Panama to take action against the United States. The US cannot urge Panama ‘to reaffirm its commitment to the Treaty of the Permanent Neutrality of the Canal’ since Panama has always done so, contrary to the US, which has violated it every time and exclusively to satisfy its security interests for its armed forces.”

That is the basic argument of imperialist irredentism, invoking the Treaty of the Permanent Neutrality of the Canal and the Operation of the Panama Canal, in particular the DeConcini Amendment, which makes it possible for the United States “to take military measures on Panamanian soil without the consent of the government of Panama.” To justify this action, the US has resorted to falsehoods about the Chinese presence in Panama up to the number of deaths in the construction of the Canal by the Americans in 1914. Historian and diplomat Omar Jaén Suarez clarified this last point in a recent article: “Mortality in the construction of the Interoceanic Canal… between 1904 and 1914, there are only 350 American deaths (6%) according to the Isthmian Canal Commission, while Afro-Antillean employees killed were 4,049 (72%)… The data do not show more than 6,280 deaths among the employees of the French canal companies from 1881 to 1903.” Thus, imperialist irredentism is based on fallacies to justify its interest in recovering the Canal.

As Greg Grandin, a professor at Yale, points out in a recent article in the New York Times, the “uninhibited language [that Trump uses] increases the volatility of an already volatile world.” This shock tactic, in which one of Trump’s main weapons is social media, seeks to cause destabilization in order to achieve its goals. Ultimately, MAGA (Make America Great Again) is Trump’s dream for “a new American empire,” as Grandin put it. To do so, he will need to bend his already kneeling partners further to his will. This is where the anti-imperialist and decolonization positions become important—when many had given them up for dead. It is not a question of taking out a Panamanian flag at the last minute and invoking an abstract patriotism, unlike the Panamanian people, who are organized and conscious of their history of struggle and remember their martyrs of the generational struggle to recover our sovereignty.

In the same line as Grandin, Panamanian lawyer and academic Alonso Illueca wrote in El País: “Based on a tradition buried in the mid-twentieth century, Trump relaunched on January 20, 2025, the expansionist policy of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine.” This is not only to our detriment, particularly given his “criteria” for the management of the Canal, but also, as the world policeman, he starts a crusade against the left as in the days of the Cold War. It is no coincidence that the presidents present at Trump’s inauguration have something in common: they hate the left. His inauguration was a full portrait of his ideology, surrounded by billionaire tech moguls. We will see a display of digital capitalist fetishism and harassment of the left and human rights defenders.

We do not see a political elite defending the best interests of the Panamanian people in the face of imperialist affront. Instead, they are busy protecting their own privileges. Popular unity is nothing more than unity based on collective interests. Without the self-determination of the peoples, regional integration, and national popular unity on the table, the abstract patriotism of the political elite will negotiate its privileges within the framework of imperialist irredentism.

Abdiel Rodríguez Reyes is a professor and researcher at the University of Panama.

(Council on Hemispheric Affairs)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

Panama

Panama Canal

Donald Trump

Self-Determination

Working Class

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