An era ends, as the U.S. quits the Canal Zone
In the port of Balboa, workmen nailed up a sign reading BIENVENIDO AL PUERTO DE BALBOA—BRIDGE OF THE WORLD. As evening fell, a solemn, subdued crowd of Americans watched as the Stars and Stripes was lowered—for the last time—at the U.S.-operated headquarters of the Panama Canal Co. Next morning an animated group of Panamanians cheered as their country's white, red and blue banner was run up a new flagpole atop bush-covered Ancon Hill. The Panama Canal Zone, the 648-sq.-mi. enclave that had been under U.S. sovereignty since 1903, had ceased to exist. Its absorption by Panama was the first step in a process that will give that country control of the Big Ditch by the year 2000.
For many Americans the timing of the ceremonies—even though they were mandated by a treaty that the Senate had passed and President Carter had signed —could not have been worse. The furor at home over the Soviet combat troops in Cuba was an uncomfortable reminder that the Caribbean was no longer an "American lake." Those troops, as well as the leftist tinge of the Cuban-assisted revolution that overthrew Nicaraguan Strongman Anastasio Somoza, raised fears that the canal faced a remote threat.
To Panamanians, recovering the Canal Zone, as one local paper quaintly put it, was like liberating a child who had been kidnaped for a long time. "Only five more days," exulted the Panamanian daily El Matutino, awaiting the ceremonies that marked the change in sovereignty. To ensure a large crowd at the festivities, the government declared a national holiday; Panamanians were urged by radio, proclamation and word of mouth to enter the zone and attend a rally at the field of Albrook Air Force Station. There were a handful of anti-American outbursts; shortly after midnight on the day of the turnover, a small band of poor Panamanians tore up an American flag.
Most Panamanians, however, were in a rejoicing mood. More than 150,000 of them (out of a population of 1.9 million) showed up at the Albrook rally, which was attended by Vice President Walter Mondale and the leaders of many Latin American governments. They shrieked in joy as Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo, fresh from his summit with Jimmy Carter, praised "the disappearance of the humiliating injustice of the enclave that has long divided" Central America. Notably absent from the ceremonies was Panamanian Strongman Omar Torrijos Herrera, who had negotiated the pact with the U.S. He apparently did not wish to upstage his hand-picked successor as President, Aristides Royo.
The ceremony was a nostalgic but bitter occasion for the 3,500 American canal workers in the zone. The Zonians, as they are called, were witnessing the end of their cherished home away from home, a small piece of America transplanted to a well-tended tropical setting beside the beloved waterway. Anti-American propaganda held that the Zonians had reveled in colonial splendor amid the surrounding squalor of Panama. In truth, their homes were modest by U.S. standards and their incomes only adequate. Said one longtime Zonian, on his way for a last rum punch at the historic Spanish colonial-style Washington Hyatt Hotel in Colon: "We saved the best things of the American way of life."