Courts of World Opinion: . Trying the Panama Flag Riots of 1964

Abstract

In January 1964, riots broke out along the so-called border between Panamanian cities and the U.S.-run Canal Zone, resulting in loss of life among Panamanians and U.S. citizens and serious economic and political damage on both sides. While historians have mainly focused on the causes of the riots and the U.S.-Panama diplomacy that followed, a close look at the lesser-known international investigations of the violence adds texture and detail to the riots themselves as it also uncovers broader cultural and political dynamics surrounding the episode. This essay, informed partly by interviews with Panamanian participants and by documents from the Panamanian government, argues that Panamanians expressed a potent anticolonial discourse during the investigations, one that allowed them to conceal their government’s substantial irresponsibility during the riots and help convince the U.S. government to negotiate the devolution of the canal into Panamanian hands. A nagging question still hangs over the Panama Flag Riots of January 1964: Who won? To be sure, the United States had military might on its side, and only four U.S. soldiers, as opposed to twenty-one Panamanians, died in four days of fighting. But how the confrontation altered the balance of power in this most imbalanced of relations is far less obvious. To be sure, there were no immediate payoffs for either the U.S. or Panamanian governments. With dozens of lives lost, hundreds of belligerents and innocents wounded, millions of dollars in property destroyed, and relations between their two countries broken, Presidents Roberto Chiari and Lyndon Johnson faced an unwelcome crisis at the outset of an election year for both men. To most Panamanians, the most positive potential outcome of such a tragedy would be the transfer of the Panama Canal, for long a U.S. asset, into Panamanian hands. It was a long shot. Chiari had not demanded devolution before the riots, conceding that Panamanians were not ready to run the canal.2 No U.S. president, meanwhile, had ever even considered in public handing over the canal. On 18 December 1964, however, less than a year after the riots, Johnson promised that the United States would not hold on to the waterway “in perpetuity,” as the Treaty of 1903 between the two countries stated. Johnson’s statement proved a major breakthrough: it led to the signing of two 1977 treaties in which President Jimmy Carter promised to hand over the canal to Panama by 2000. Certainly, in 1964 the canal was already not the economic or military treasure that it once had been. Nevertheless, a less valuable canal was still a valuable canal. What exactly compelled Johnson even to consider giving it away?