Donald Trump and the Grand Panama Canal tantrums | Opinions

As Donald Trump prepares to reclaim the presidency of the United States this month, Donald Trump is off to a casual start to threaten To restore the Panama Canal as well.

For every incoming president recently Tantrums On social media, Panama is “deceiving” the United States with “ridiculous” fees for using the inter-oceanic waterway and the main channel for global trade. As Trump sees it, the behavior of this Central American country is particularly objectionable, “given the extraordinary generosity that the United States has extended to Panama.”

Trump also baselessly claimed that Chinese forces currently operate the canal. In reality, of course, the Panama Canal was previously run by none other than the United States, which built the canal at the beginning of the 20th century and only handed over control to Panama in 1999.

As for the “extraordinary generosity” allegedly extended to the country by the friendly local superpower, just remember the so-called “extraordinary generosity” unleashed on the country by the US military.Just cause process“, launched in December 1989, thanks to which the poor neighborhood of El Chorrillo in the Panamanian capital, Panama City, received the title of “Little Hiroshima“.

Up to several thousand civilians were killed in the maniacal display of firepower, a training exercise for the next US war on Iraq. For his part, Panamanian leader and former US friend Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces on January 3, 1990, after his stay at the Vatican embassy in Panama City was severely disrupted by a torture music playlist blasting from US tanks parked outside. Selected tunes included Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.”

Noriega was transferred to Miami to face drug trafficking and other charges – not to mention his long history on the CIA payroll despite full American knowledge of said drug activity. At the same time, his dismissal paved the way for much greater involvement in the international drug trade by Panama’s ruling class.

Just call it “extraordinary generosity.”

As for previous bouts of generosity, from 1903 to 1979 the United States presided over a de facto colony called the Panama Canal Zone, which included much of Panamanian territory and adhered to a system of apartheid that persisted even after such matters. It has been officially canceled in the United States. The Canal Zone also hosted all sorts of US military bases and other installations such as the notorious US Army School of the Americas, which was attended by numerous Latin American dictators and death squad leaders as well as Noriega himself.

The United States completed construction of the Panama Canal in 1914 – a project that claimed untold thousands of lives and relied heavily on dark-skinned labor and chain gang slavery. As an exercise of global dominance rather than “generosity,” construction of the canal began under US President Theodore Roosevelt, who was obsessed with the idea that the waterway was “the vital—indispensable—path to the world’s universal destiny.” United States of America,” as historian David McCullough points out in his book The Road Between the Seas: The Construction of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914.

When Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1901, Panama still belonged to Colombia, but negotiations between the Colombian government and the United States over the proposed canal were not smooth. Thus the new nation of Panama was born in 1903, aided by Roosevelt and very eager to cede part of its territory as well as its national sovereignty to the United States.

As John Weeks and Phil Johnson put it in their book “Panama: Made in the USA,” the country “was carved out of the heart of Latin America to serve the goals of a foreign power.” To this day, Panama still bears the scars of the sculpture. One prominent street in Panama City still bears Roosevelt’s name, although Fourth of July Avenue was renamed Avenue of the Martyrs in honor of the victims of the January 1964 riots. On that particular occasion, US forces killed about 21 people after Panamanian students tried to raise their flag Next to the American flag at a high school in the Canal District.

As it happens, Trump has his own connection to the Panama City landscape in the form of a luxury waterfront condo formerly called the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel & Tower and still referred to locally as “TrumpAlthough his surname was removed from the tag. In 2017, NBC reported that the Trump Organization lent its name to the 70-story building, which was “riddled with ties to drug money and international organized crime.”

However, it’s not as if Panama is the issue that keeps Trump up at night. Indeed, sudden threats to restore the Panama Canal are only consistent with the president-elect’s “America First” approach, which aims to excite his base into a delirium of boastful entitlement – ​​all with the help of hallucinatory insults to US “generosity.”

As if America was not already “the first” in terms of spreading chaos throughout the world. But hey, when you become the number one imperial superpower in the world, you get to have your cake and be the victim too.

McCullough writes how, in the midst of the failed canal negotiations in Washington in 1902, Colombian diplomat Dr. José Vicente Concha made the following observation regarding his Latin American counterparts: “the desire to show themselves, as a nation, respectful of the rights of others.” These masters are forced to play a little with their prey before devouring it, though they will do it one way or another after all.

Although Trump is not bothered by feigning respect, the United States has certainly not lost its appetite for manipulating its prey.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.