Walter LaFeber’s updated Panama Canal tells the squalid story of a country that has not yet recovered from the trauma of its birth. LaFeber goes beyond the well-known tale of how Teddy Roosevelt created Panama; he describes the earlier stirrings of a Panamanian independence movement not created by the United States. In Panama, as in Cuba, the United States proved a treacherous midwife: Panama was born unfree. Over the decades that followed, this poison seeped through the country’s body politic, the fiction of independence masking what was, in reality, a colony. LaFeber conveys with sensitivity and compassion the drama of this poor, warped country—subject to the whims of a United States that, in arrogance and ignorance, prides itself on its anticolonial tradition. As LaFeber mentions, in 1975 two-thirds of North Americans polled did not even know who owned the canal.
After an outstanding discussion of the treaty negotiations under Carter, LaFeber analyzes the Reagan years with grace and clarity. He vividly describes how Noriega perpetrated blatant electoral fraud in the 1984 presidential elections and how the United States graciously averted its eyes.
Although LaFeber’s story ends with Reagan, it casts light on the policy of the Bush administration. The U.S. outrage at the 1989 presidential elections in Panama is exposed in all its hypocrisy, and the intervention is seen in its tawdry inevitability. As LaFeber shows, Noriega was just as unsavory when he basked in Washington’s favor as when he was ordered by the United States to step down. Instead, he challenged the United States, and the more he resisted, the more offensive he became—to the nation’s hubris, that is, not to its democratic sensibilities.
