Two Nights in Panama, Two American Stories: Night 1

I knew it was coming, sooner or later. And, last night, it did – the dreaded “American imperialism” talk. Nooooooo…

It started innocently enough. I initiated a conversation by asking Ricky (my portly, cheerful host-father who bears more than a passing resemblance to Chef Boyardee) about a trip that I was planning to take on the Panama Railroad, originally built in the 1850s to transport gold rush migrants headed to California from ships on the Atlantic to others awaiting them on the Pacific side. Millions of the Americans that headed west in the mid-19th century chose the Panama route rather than travel overland and risk being attacked by the “warlike” indigenous people that still controlled much of American Midwest at the time. I was planning to follow the tracks of my gringo forbearers in reverse, traveling along the Canal from Panama City to the city of Colon.

Ricky and I started off talking about the natural beauty and fascinating history of the Atlantic/Caribbean Coast. In another, perhaps more magical time, these brilliant turquoise waters and mangrove-lined shores were patrolled by the likes of the pirate Sir Francis Drake – he who mercilessly plundered the Spanish gold that the conquistadores had themselves worked so hard to pillage from the Inca. This area of the country, commonly referred to as la Costa Arriba (the upper coast), remained for centuries an on-again-off-again center for New World trade in gold, silver, and other fetishized tropical commodities.

And, in some ways, it still is. Here, in modern Colon, sprawls the “free zone,” an industrial-scale duty-free zone where $10 billion dollars of wholesale goods are traded annually. There has always been magnificent wealth moving through Colon – heaped in the holds of Spanish galleons, strapped on the backs of donkeys, or neatly stacked in Maersk cargo container ships – but none of it tends to stick around for long. Historians have written that geography is the blessing of this particular narrow strip of land. Perhaps it is also a curse.

Colon is by most accounts a dangerous city these days. If you consult the Lonely Planet or other guidebooks, they advise you to stay away or, if you absolutely must, pass through quickly (always keeping one eye on your bags) en route to less dilapidated, more amenable beach destinations. Ricky was of this same mind and advised: “If you have a friend in Colon with a car who can take you out of town and show you around, go. Otherwise, there is nothing there. It is dangerous – not for me because I’m negrito [dark], but definitely for gringos.”

And I am, as Ricky was so very subtly pointing out and you all know, the uber-gringo. I couldn’t possibly look less Latin American.

I had been silent for a while and now felt compelled to contribute something – anything – involving gringos and robbery, I started to pull out an old chesnut from the sack: a story about when I was mugged at knifepoint by a scarfaced teenager in Ecuador. “Quito,” I began soberly,” is also a very dangerous city these days…especially for gringos.” “Do you know why?” he interrupted.

A few pet theories crossed my mind:

1) The Ecuadorian obsession with violence which manifests itself in a perverse national love affair with the work of Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme? 2) Colonialism (always a safe guess)? 3) A particularly nasty string of losses to Peru in soccer? 4) Or maybe, just maybe, the fact that tall white people are generally carrying around the per-capita GNP of Ecuador in their North Face backpacks?

I felt pretty confident that at least one of these had to be right.

¨Neoliberalism,¨ said Ricky point blank. Well, #4 was maybe half-right. He then outlined the long string of clandestine power plays made by the U.S. government in Latin American politics during the Cold War era. The stories of American imperialism that he told, most well-documented and others less so, are repetitive and form a single deeply disturbing trope: an idealistic, populist Latin American leader rises and threatens to unify Latin America against U.S. imperialism. Fearing the spread of communist ideology in the “backyard,” the U.S. government assassinates said leader and replaces him with a military dictator, who in nearly every case ends up being a homicidal lunatic. But, that isn´t neoliberalism itself, I thought but didn´t say aloud. These Cold War-era interventions paved the way for neoliberalism, provided a fertile ground for the economic language of open markets and free trade.

Like all master narratives, the typical telling of this “story” is somewhat flawed, not because the deeply disturbing events provided as evidence are historically inaccurate (we know that they aren’t) but because these events – which happened unbeknownst to most – are chosen selectively and confuse the actions of the CIA with the beliefs of ordinary Americans. I like to tell myself that the average American citizen was complicit in acts of terrorism only in his or her laziness toward understanding and engaging with the world beyond our borders – not out of malice. These moments of friendly confrontation always make me feel very uncomfortable when I am living in someone else´s country. While both Ricky and I know that Americans have done a lot of good in the world, I have to admit that I don´t know how it feels to have a president I admire assassinated by the Panamanian government.

Oh, and then last night i saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (with Spanish subtitles) on TV. More on that soon.