With covert American naval support blocking Colombian troops from reaching the isthmus, Panamanian separatists declared independence on November 3, 1903. Washington recognized the new nation within days, and two weeks later the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty granted the United States control over a canal zone in perpetuity. The episode remains a defining case study in American intervention in Latin America.
Colombia's Senate had just rejected the Hay-Herrán Treaty, which would have let the United States build a canal across Panama, then a restive Colombian province. President Theodore Roosevelt, furious at the delay, quietly signaled support for Panamanian separatists already agitating for independence. When the revolt broke out, the USS Nashville sat conspicuously offshore at Colón, and American commanders invoked an old treaty obligation to keep the isthmus transit route open, a pretext that stopped Colombian reinforcements from landing to crush the rebellion.
The revolution itself was almost bloodless. A Colombian garrison commander in Panama City was bribed into compliance, and by the following day the separatists controlled the isthmus without a serious fight. Roosevelt recognized Panama's independence within 72 hours, an unseemly speed that scandalized Latin American diplomats and fed lasting suspicion of U.S. intentions in the region.
Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a French engineer with financial stakes in the canal project, then negotiated the treaty on Panama's behalf without any Panamanian officials present, granting the U.S. a canal zone in perpetuity. Panama would spend the next century trying to renegotiate those terms, finally regaining full control of the canal only in 1999.