EL PAÍS English By Iker Seisdedos & Francesco Manetto
It was an off-the-cuff idea aired at the beginning of the Christmas holidays, but within hours its impact triggered a chain reaction throughout Latin America. The intention of the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, to regain control of the Panama Canal was not only met with immediate rejection by the president of the Central American country, José Raúl Mulino, but also gave rise to a wave of far-reaching solidarity, from Mexico to Chile to Colombia. The response was practically unanimous: “The interoceanic route belongs to the Panamanians.” But the underlying argument was just as clear: the sovereignty of the territories in the region is not to be touched.
“Every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zone belongs to Panama and will continue to do so,” Mulino said, days before the 25th anniversary of the complete handover of the infrastructure to Panama City agreed upon in 1977 with the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, referring to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Colonel Omar Torrijos. The Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, the governments of Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela, and the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, demanded compliance with these agreements. Even so, Trump’s suggestion was enough to sow concern in broad political sectors of Latin America.
First, it was through a message on his social network, Truth, on Saturday in which Trump reopened the debate on about the management of the canal, an issue that is not on the table. The following day, before 20,000 of his supporters at a conference of an ultra-right youth political campaigning organization in Phoenix (Arizona), he raised the tone by demanding that the Central American country reduce the fees for U.S. shipping crossing the canal or return its management to the United States. “This complete rip-off of our country will immediately stop,” he promised, thus adding another pending issue for his in-tray when he returns to the White House on January 20, the day of his inauguration.
Trump then threatened the Panamanian president, who flatly rebuffed the suggestion as an affront to the country’s independence, and even posted a meme with an American flag flying over the infrastructure in the background with the message “Welcome to the United States Canal.” In a message to the nation and the international community, Mulino stressed that “rates are not a whim” and explained his criteria: “They are and will be established, publicly and in an open audience, considering market conditions, international competition, operating costs and the maintenance and modernization needs of the interoceanic waterway.” Mulino, a right-wing politician who was catapulted to power last May promising a heavy hand on the back of a campaign with many parallels to that of the Republican magnate, insisted that “the canal is not under direct or indirect control, neither by China nor by the European community, by the United States or by any other power,” and offered to cooperate with Washington on “security issues such as illegal migration, drug trafficking and organized crime.”
Trump, however, did not give up. On Christmas Day, in another post on Truth, he wished everybody a merry Christmas “including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal (where we lost 38,000 people in its building 110 years ago), always making sure that the United States puts up billions of dollars in ‘repair’ money but will have absolutely nothing to say about anything [relating to its management].” In the message, Trump also took the opportunity to address Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the authorities of Greenland, two targets of an outbreak of expansionist fever that seems to have taken hold in the president-elect…
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