ReThink History: Panama: Crossroads of Empires

In 1903 a Frenchman signed away a ten-mile strip of a country fifteen days old. For ninety-six years that strip was governed as American territory, and a border ran through the middle of Panama City. A boy who lived in the Zone and went to school on the other side of that border was sitting in a Panamanian classroom on the morning of 9 January 1964 when a dispute over a flag at Balboa High School turned lethal. That boy compiled this series. Episode 24 closes Crossroads of Empires. At noon on 31 December 1999 the strip ceased to exist and Panama took the canal. Twenty-six years later there are American troops on Panamanian ground again — under a memorandum, not a treaty; on Panamanian bases, not in a zone; teaching alongside Panamanian instructors, not over them. And there is a constitutional challenge Panama's Supreme Court has not answered in seventeen months. The finale asks the only question the compiler is entitled to ask, and then declines to answer it: this is not the Zone, and the difference is real — but the presence has outlived the mission it was announced for, and something else now keeps it there. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ly8Ai6OKjyE

Washington's return to Panama was justified by two things: drugs and migrants. Episode 23 tests that justification against the numbers, and the numbers do not resolve cleanly in either direction. The migration crisis that anchored the first half of the argument ended almost entirely — and it ended before the military posture grew. Darién Gap crossings fell from 520,085 in 2023 to 3,091 in 2025 to 421 by 23 August 2026, and the flow now runs southbound at roughly fifteen to one. The trafficking that anchors the second half is real, enormous and undiminished: 122.04 tonnes of drugs seized in Panama in 2025, six concessioned ports with about ten percent of containers inspected, and roughly fifty criminal organizations assessed to be working them. Between those two facts sits a lethal campaign at sea — approximately 65 to 69 strikes and about 227 people killed in the year after 2 September 2025, with no official total published anywhere and, with three exceptions, no identities known. Panama's documented role in that campaign is political, not operational. The episode asks what measurement would show the campaign working, and reports what the command itself says about that question. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yb5w7chmyyQ

For a year Washington said a Chinese-linked company controlled the Panama Canal and demanded it be removed from the ports at either end. In March 2025 a removal mechanism appeared: CK Hutchison would sell 43 ports in 23 countries — Balboa and Cristóbal among them — at an enterprise value of $22.8 billion, to a BlackRock-led consortium. Beijing set out to stop it, and stopped it. Episode 22 follows the deal that never closed: lapsed exclusivity, a Chinese state shipping group invited in and asking for a veto, and a finance director telling analysts eighteen months later that there was "absolutely nothing to report." And yet the operator is gone — removed on 24 February 2026, not by a transaction and not by a treaty, but by a court in Panama City that found a 1997 law had given away the state's money in a way the Constitution of Panama does not permit. Three words carry the ruling: *no existe concesión.* No concession exists. This is what it looks like when the outcome a superpower demanded is delivered by somebody else's court, for somebody else's reasons — and it ends on the statement six governments signed the next day, praising a court whose next big ruling may not suit them at all. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UW1-V1KO7L8

On 9 April 2025, Panama's Minister of Public Security and the U.S. Secretary of Defense signed a document letting American troops train, exercise, store equipment and build at Panamanian military installations along the canal. It was called a memorandum of understanding. Panama's constitution says an agreement about defending the canal must pass the National Assembly and then a national referendum. Episode 21 is about the word "memorandum." We lay out the constitutional text — including the clause voiding any reservation or understanding that dodges the referendum — and then the government's answer, at its strongest: that a memorandum is not a treaty, creates no obligations under international law, and that the U.S. Senate in 1978 expressly preserved the right to make arrangements of exactly this kind. A citizens' movement sued a week after the signing. Seventeen months later the Supreme Court of Justice has said nothing — while the same court found time to void a canal-adjacent port concession on constitutional grounds, and to see that ruling enforced. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/d3VijHgjRkA

In December 2024 an incoming American president began saying that China was operating the Panama Canal and that the United States would take it back. The canal has been operated since noon on 31 December 1999 by the Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous Panamanian constitutional body. What a Hong Kong company held was a concession to run two container terminals at the entrances. Episode 20 separates a waterway from a wharf, then follows what happened when the two were confused. Its central exhibit is the first week of February 2025: the U.S. State Department announced that American government vessels could transit without charge, and the Panama Canal Authority said publicly and immediately that it had made no such adjustment. We read what the SOUTHCOM posture statement of 13 February 2025 actually says, and what it is usually said to say; we give the concentration-risk argument its strongest form, from the analysts who make it best — including the ones who wrote plainly that China does not operate the canal; and we close on 9 April 2025, on the phrase "first and free," and on what the canal authority described instead. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Smrix-7NIPA

In 1999 the United States walked away from the finest jungle-warfare school it had ever built — 23,000 acres of Panamanian coast where roughly 9,000 soldiers a year learned to move, survive and fight in terrain no American training area can imitate. In April 2025, American troops went back. Episode 19 opens Part Five: The Return. We trace what the Jungle Operations Training Center actually taught and why losing it mattered — twenty-six years of the Army making do with twelve days in Hawaii and the Marines with Okinawa — then follow the April 2025 memorandum that put American soldiers back on that ground, and the service-wide tab the Army was awarding for the course by the summer of 2026. The capability is real and it really was lost. So the episode asks the plain question underneath the announcement: is the school the mission, or is the school the reason for everything else that arrived with it? Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AOlToH_eWHc

A century after the canal opened, who is Panama — and can it stay sovereign at the center of everyone else's ambitions? Closing Part Four, we take the measure of modern Panama: a glittering logistics-and-banking powerhouse, and a country wrestling with a tarnished name, a water crisis, and a new tug-of-war between Washington and Beijing. Episode 18 of Crossroads of Empires (current as of mid-2026) covers the modern identity built on the canal and the Colón Free Zone; the 2016 Panama Papers and the surprising 2024 acquittal of the Mossack Fonseca defendants; the U.S. port-dredging boom the expansion triggered; and — handled even-handedly — the 2025–26 flashpoint over the canal's ports, as President Trump warned of Chinese control, CK Hutchison was pushed toward a BlackRock-led sale, and Panama's Supreme Court voided the concessions. We face the deepest modern threat — fresh water and drought — and the people on the front lines: the Guna, Emberá, and Ngäbe-Buglé, the climate relocation of Gardi Sugdub, and the fight over the Cobre Panamá mine. Then we hand off to Part Five: The Return (Episodes 19–24), which follows what happened next — American troops back on Panamanian ground, the port concessions voided, and a constitutional challenge still unanswered. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/wfDuzaD8G34

By the 2000s the canal Panama had fought a century to reclaim faced obsolescence — the world's giant ships no longer fit. So a country of four million made an audacious bet: it put a $5.25 billion plan to widen the canal to its own people in a referendum, and they said yes. How did Panama dig a third set of locks the size of a new canal — and reshape global trade doing it? Episode 17 of Crossroads of Empires centers Alberto Alemán Zubieta, the engineer who ran the canal from 1996 to 2012 (and, by a quiet coincidence of this series, the narrator's classmate at the school the 1964 riots forced him to leave). We trace how he turned a break-even American utility into a business pouring billions into Panama's treasury; the 2006 referendum (78% yes); the nine-year build with its Italian-made rolling gates and water-recycling basins — and its bruising cost-overrun fight that briefly halted work in 2014; and the June 2016 opening, led by the COSCO Shipping Panama, that tripled capacity and sent U.S. ports scrambling to dredge. We end honestly, on the shadow over the triumph: the fresh water the canal drinks, and the droughts now threatening it. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_cRe0tGsNOg

For most of a century the United States ran a strip of Panama as if it owned it — and as the handover deadline neared, plenty of people in Washington were sure Panama would wreck the canal the day it got the keys. They were wrong. How did Panama rebuild from invasion, abolish its army, and take back the canal everyone said it couldn't run? Episode 16 of Crossroads of Empires is the emotional summit of the series: the 1990s rebuilding under Endara, the 1994 constitutional abolition of the military (making Panama, like Costa Rica, a nation with no army), the creation of the autonomous Panama Canal Authority in 1997, and the training that put Panamanians in over 90% of the jobs. Then the day itself — and we get the dates right: the grand ceremony with Jimmy Carter and President Mireya Moscoso on December 14, 1999, and the quiet legal transfer at noon on December 31, ninety-six years after the 1903 treaty. We note the bittersweet detail that President Clinton stayed away, and that Moscoso was the widow of the president overthrown in 1968. The payoff: the Canal Zone vanished, Panama was whole again, and the canal ran flawlessly and profitably under Panamanian hands. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yInj3ErlDgk

Just after midnight on December 20, 1989, 27,000 American troops fell on Panama in the largest U.S. combat operation since Vietnam — to capture one man, Manuel Noriega. Was it the rescue of a democracy from a tyrant, or a superpower invading a small nation it had controlled for a century? And how many Panamanians died? Episode 15 of Crossroads of Empires is a measured account of Operation Just Cause: the 1988 indictments and sanctions, the failed Giroldi coup, the Dignity Battalions and the beating of Billy Ford, Noriega's "state of war" and the killing of Marine Lt. Robert Paz. We tell the rescue of American hostage Kurt Muse — a pirate-radio operator (and the narrator's Balboa High classmate) pulled off a prison roof by Delta Force in six minutes — and the fire that consumed the packed neighborhood of El Chorrillo, "Little Hiroshima." Above all we're honest about the dead: 23 Americans, a U.S. official count near 500 Panamanians, Physicians for Human Rights finding most were civilians, and the Ramsey Clark commission estimating over 3,000 — a number no one can verify, and that's part of the story. It ends with the surreal rock-music siege of the Vatican embassy, Noriega's surrender, and a hard question left open. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/73hHUPjNV0w