The Other Canal

The Suez Canal crisis echoed in a surge of discontent from tiny Panama (pop. 900,000). Miffed at not being invited to the London conference on Suez, the government of President Ricardo Arias issued a defiant communique notifying the world that "this republic will not consider herself obliged to respect any of the decisions or recommendations adopted by the conference.'' Panama should have been invited, said the communique, because 1) the Panama Canal "is in some respects similar to the Suez Canal," and 2) a large merchant fleet flies the Panamanian flag.* On a visit to Cairo last week, Panama's Ambassador to Italy, doubling as Minister to Egypt, declared that Gamal Abdel Nasser had the right to nationalize the Suez Canal Company, and that Panama would never accept international control of its canal--comments that afforded Nasser & Co. some small aid and comfort.

"Titular Sovereign." For their country's exclusion from the Suez conference, Panamanians are angry at the U.S. rather than Britain. They are convinced that Secretary of State Dulles vetoed Panama because he wanted to keep from getting the Panama Canal even remotely mixed up with the Suez crisis. Panamanians point out that their country is the "titular sovereign" in the Canal Zone.

Despite Panama's pique, there is no detectable sentiment, even among feverish nationalists, for attempting to take the canal over, Nasser-style. The Panama Canal handles less traffic than Suez (40.6 million tons in 1955 to 115.7 million), but it is even more complex to run because ships have to be raised and lowered by locks. And Panamanians are leary of bolstering arguments, commonplace in naval circles, that the U.S. ought to punch a new, broad, sea-level canal elsewhere through the narrow waist of the Americas.*

"In Perpetuity." Not only are Panama's technical and geographical realities different from Suez's, but so is the juridical status. The Suez Canal was owned and operated by an Egyptian-chartered private company under a 99-year franchise. The Panama Canal is owned and operated by the U.S. Government under a 1903 bilateral treaty in which Panama granted the U.S. "use, occupation and control" of the ten-mile-wide Canal Zone "in perpetuity," plus "all the rights, power and authority . . . which the U.S. would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory."

The only major international agreement that limits the U.S. in its control of the canal itself is a pact not with Panama but with Great Britain: the 1901 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, in which the U.S. promised to keep the canal "open to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations . . . on terms of entire equality." and to practice "no discrimination . . . in respect of the conditions or charges of traffic, or otherwise."

* Nearly 4,000,000 tons of shipping, virtually none of it owned or manned by Panamanians, operates under Panamanian registry to escape home-country taxes, labor unions or maritime codes.

* At the turn of the century Congress earnestly debated whether the U.S. should build the projected canal through Panama or Nicaragua. One highly imaginative but possibly decisive argument against Nicaragua was that its volcanoes might menace the canal, and an enterprising Panama-route lobbyist drove the point home by sending members of the U.S. Congress Nicaraguan postage stamps showing a volcano in eruption.

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