Weeks after Panama declared independence from Colombia with covert American backing, its assembly ratified a treaty granting the U.S. a 10-mile-wide zone across the isthmus and rights to build a canal, in exchange for $10 million and annual payments. Negotiated by a French engineer acting as Panama's envoy without ever setting foot back in the country, the treaty shaped a century of resentment before Panama regained full control in 1999.
The treaty's negotiator, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, was not even Panamanian — he was a French engineer with financial stakes in the earlier failed French canal effort, appointed Panama's minister to Washington by a revolutionary junta desperate for American protection. He signed the agreement on Panama's behalf without consulting Panamanian officials on several key terms, granting the U.S. more territorial control than Panama's own negotiators had authorized.
When the terms reached Panama City, many officials were horrified by concessions like the 'in perpetuity' clause, but with a Colombian invasion still feared and no other protector in sight, the assembly ratified it anyway.
The canal opened in 1914, transforming global shipping, but the treaty became a lasting symbol of U.S. intervention in Latin America. Anti-American riots in 1964 killed over 20 Panamanians. Not until the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, fully implemented on December 31, 1999, did Panama regain sovereignty over the canal it hosted for nearly a century.
Key people: Philippe Bunau-Varilla