A note of thanks to a brave and wise Panamanian, 45 years overdue.

It is a sultry Sunday in early July and I am seated on a shady lanai on the Banana River just south of Cape Canaveral, the guest of one of my high school classmates. Across from me are Lionel and Mark, the spouses of two other of my Balboa High School classmates, class of ’75.

Three sips into a mango margarita—and well into a conversation about how a bunch of gringos wound up in Panama going to a high school that no longer exists—I share a story about a confrontation that changed my life. It happened 45 years ago. It goes like this:

My summer job in 1976 was as a tennis court monitor. I wore a gray t- shirt with the Panama Canal Company emblem and drove a white government van. My assignment was to patrol company-owned tennis courts on the Pacific side of the Isthmus and remove tennis players who were not U.S. citizens.

One late afternoon, not far from Panama City, I parked my van next to the courts at Curundu, where I’d gone to junior high school. There I found a talented player I’d not met before. Let’s call him Roberto. When I approached and questioned him he was unable to produce U.S. ID or authorization.

A standoff ensued. Without raising his voice, he said he would not leave the court. I told him he would have to; that if he didn’t I would have to summon police. I also knew, because we were in the shadows of a U.S. Air Force base, that the police who’d arrive would be military police. They would come with dogs. The optics of this would not be good. Neither would the outcome. But it was my job to make the call and I did.

As we waited for the MPs, Roberto asked if we could talk. He walked with me to a corner of the court, and motioned for me to sit with him. He addressed me as “Tim,” spoke to me in English, and said he wanted to share his point of view, as a Panamanian, of what was happening. He was a lawyer, and he clearly knew his law and his history, and I knew enough to know that what he was saying was true. He summed up by calmly asking me, more than once, “is this right?”

I would only repeat what my orders were. Within a few minutes,  the MPs arrived with their dog. Roberto waited until they came through the gate, and then quietly announced he was leaving. “Goodbye Tim.”

Nearly a half century later I’m telling Lionel and Mark how this civil and haunting conversation stayed with me, as much as for what he said as how he said it. I mention that, from time to time, I will reach out to people who have affected my life for the better and thank them. And if I knew who “Roberto” was and where to write him, I would.

“You should write him anyway,” Lionel said.

I looked up from my libation with a puzzled look on my face.

“Just do it,” Lionel said. “Just put it out there.”

So that is this.

— Thank you Roberto, for having the courage to make your stand and treat me with civility and respect. I heard your truth and eventually became the better for it. Bless you and your family.
———

A few hours earlier I’d been in Orlando, at a sprawling convention center near Disney World. Graceful folk dancers were performing, in flowing polleras for the women and long-sleeved, cotton montunos for the men. On a riser behind them were Panamanian musicians in traditional straw hats, pumping out percussion and zydeco-like strains from an accordion, a guitar and a violin. It was the Despidida, (“farewell” in Spanish) the grand finale of nearly a week of events at the Panama Canal Society Reunion, 2021. I was among 1,700 people who attended the gathering, which encompassed the pandemic-delayed 45th reunion of our BHS class of ’75.

I’d been ambivalent about making the trip, all the way across country and decades into my past. A few years after my encounter with Roberto I made it known that I supported the Panama Canal treaty that, at noon on the last day of the 20th century, would transfer control of the U.S. Canal Zone to the Republic of Panama. The reaction from some of my old friends was bitter and hostile. On account of my upbringing, I understood why.

I am a third generation Zonian, from a family that fled New York on the heels of the Great Depression. My grandpa Charlie was an underemployed construction worker, a blaster, when he learned the Panama Canal Company was hiring. For him—with only an eighth grade education—it was the break of a lifetime. He got the job, boarded a ship to Panama, and eventually relocated with his wife and two sons (my father Don was the oldest of the two) to the town of Gamboa, deep in the rainforest, home to the canal company’s vaunted dredging division.

Visiting Charlie at the Gamboa docks was like visiting Whitey Ford or Roger Maris in the New York Yankees locker room. He was a commanding presence and the importance of the work—continuously blasting and dredging the canal’s notoriously unstable channel through the cordillera—was a deep source of pride. A vital artery of world commerce depended upon this work and men like my grandfather.

As you would expect, we Zonians saw ourselves through the lens of experiences like Charlie’s. Any notion that there was anything illegitimate about our presence in Panama was incomprehensible and would commonly be dismissed with indignation and colorful, bilingual profanity.

’Roberto’ was a lawyer, and he clearly knew his law and his history. I knew enough to know that what he was saying was true. He summed up by calmly asking me, more than once, “is this right?

There is, of course, another side to this story. It’s the one Roberto shared with me in Curundu that day. It’s not just his truth, it is the greater truth, a Panamanian truth, and now an American truth, dryly acknowledged in the official annals of the U.S. State Department.

A fuller version is recounted in historian David McCullough’s 1977 book, The Path Between the Seas. In short, the U.S. was eager to build and operate a canal at Panama and we used our economic and military power to muscle our way in. We did this first by paying off the French (whose canal project ended in bankruptcy in the 1890s) and then by orchestrating the secession of the Columbian province of Panama, so that we could bargain with a new Panamanian government rather than the recalcitrant Columbians.

The arm-twisting culminated with a 1903 treaty that empowered the U.S. to govern the 550 square mile Canal Zone in perpetuity—“as if it were the sovereign.” The 1903 was the work of U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, and Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, a French citizen with a financial interest in securing the American purchase of French canal assets. A delegation authorized by the new Panamanian government to negotiate with the U.S. was traveling to Washington as Hay and Bunau-Varilla finalized their agreement. They rushed to have the treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate before the delegation arrived.

In a contemporaneous letter to a supportive U.S. senator, Hay confided “we must confess, with what face we can muster” that the new treaty was “vastly advantageous to the United States” and “not so advantageous to Panama.” Moreover, “(y)ou and I know too well how many points there are in this treaty to which a Panamanian patriot could object.”

The Canal Zone was not the biggest slice of Panama, just the most important. It encompassed the nation’s most lucrative asset—the shortest distance for an isthmian canal—and became home to several U.S. military installations. It also split Panama right in the middle. To get from one side of the country to the other you had to cross the canal and the Canal Zone and come under scrutiny from U.S. police agencies.

The smoldering resentment about the unjust treaty finally burst into flames in January 1964. As it happened, the flashpoint was Balboa High School. My dad was among several U.S. teachers hastily assembled to defend the doors when a large procession of Panamanian high school students marched on BHS to try to raise the Panamanian flag on the school’s flag pole. In the scrum that ensued with BHS students and other Zonians, a vintage Panamanian flag was ripped, and word of the melee and alleged desecration touched off several days of rioting.

I was a seven year-old at the time. I remember the sounds of gunfire and a convoy of armored U.S. personnel carriers from Fort Clayton roaring past our house toward Balboa and Panama City. A week later I put my fingers in bullet holes in the facing of the Tivoli Hotel, the centerpiece of canal company society, where President Roosevelt (Teddy, not Franklin) had stayed in 1906 on his historic visit to tour the canal’s construction.

More than twenty Panamanians were killed in the 1964 riots, as well as four U.S. soldiers. In Panama the tragedy is marked as “Martyr’s Day.” But it set the course toward the new treaty (technically two of them, but I’ll refer to them singularly) that, 36 years after the riots, would transfer sovereignty to Panama. Although President Carter got most of the credit (and blame) for the new treaty, the initiative gathered momentum under a Republican administration. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger counseled President Ford in 1975 that if the treaty negotiations failed it would fuel riots not just in Panama but throughout Latin America.

“You should write him anyway,” Lionel said. I looked up from my margarita with a puzzled look on my face. “Just do it,” he continued. “Just put it out there.”

In June of 1977, as the new treaty was being finalized, I showed up in Pullman, Washington to complete my degree in Journalism at Washington State University. As it happened, my roommate at Wazzu was also a Zonian—like me a former BHS football player. We both felt the same way about the impending treaty, which was only months away from being signed by President Carter and submitted to the U.S. Senate for ratification. We didn’t like it.

An ad in a local newspaper brought us to a sparsely attended forum in Pullman to rally public support against the treaty. In a hall decked out in red, white and blue bunting the gathering began with the pledge of allegiance, followed by “God Bless America” sung by a young woman, rosy cheeks and all, who looked like Lady Liberty in rodeo garb. It was our introduction to the right wing of the Republican Party, with its breathless warnings about a world full of communists who, of course, had designs on taking “our” canal. Aside from being Marxists, we were told, the Panamanians were also lazy and unreliable. This was something the keynote speaker—a California rancher—said he understood very well because he regularly hired Mexicans, and had found them to be lazy and unreliable.

There’s nothing quite like a hot breath of racism to focus the mind. Up until that evening I’d had no problem identifying myself as a Zonian who opposed relinquishing our slice of Panama. In my self-centered and blinkered perspective, I’d given myself permission to think from the inside out. If a nostrum supported my point of view, I wouldn’t hesitate to borrow it. It was self-serving and morally corrosive. It was only when I heard a racist California rancher offering me his bigotry that the better part of the person my parents raised began to wake up.

And that’s when I remembered and began to reflect more deeply on my encounter with Roberto. It wasn’t just about admitting to myself that he’d been right on the facts. It was about my enduring admiration for the manner in which he’d engaged me—defiant but respectful, aiming more at my heart than my brain. I think of this now as Roberto’s whale song—not just a primer about our history but a much deeper plea for human decency and mutual respect. It just took me a couple years to get my head and heart around it, and to embrace it.

A few years after my encounter with Roberto I made it known that I supported the Panama Canal treaty that would transfer control of the U.S. Canal Zone to the Republic of Panama. The reaction from some of my old friends was bitter and hostile. On account of my upbringing, I understood why.

The sequel to this long chapter in my life is better than I thought it would be.

I’ve not been back to Panama since I visited on Christmas break in 1978, a few months after the new treaty was ratified. On my last day there, a friend with a motorboat took my sister Nancy and me water skiing on one of the rainforest-wrapped lakes that serve as reservoirs for the canal locks. We both got sunburned and, within a few hours, we were flying back into deep winter, to where a blizzard had closed the road up to my uncle’s house in the woods west of Spokane. We walked up the hill in deep, powdery snow, beneath a blanket of stars.

Five years later my father took early retirement and all the Connors relocated to the U.S. mainland. Not long after that, my sister Betsy met and married the son of a talented writer I’d worked with at Spokane Magazine. They settled in Redmond, a rapidly growing city east of Seattle where—on account of the Microsoft boom—getting to and from work on gridlocked roads was becoming a major headache. So they sold their home and moved to Panama where, because she was born in the Canal Zone, Betsy has dual citizenship.

They had only been there a month when the 20th century ended, and the day came to formally transfer the Canal Zone to Panama. Ancon Hill, where Betsy lived at the time, is a place you’d expect to find in a Garcia-Marquez novel. It is a high wedge of earth with an intact jungle canopy that rises between the intense honk and hum of Panama City and the busy port of Balboa near the Pacific entrance to the canal. The forested slopes are a buffer and a sanctuary, home to monkeys, sloths, and a wide variety of tropical birds, including toucans. On this historic day, Betsy’s two story residence offered an ideal perch as she watched a procession of very happy Panamanians make their way to Balboa to witness and celebrate at the ceremony—not far from Balboa High School—where the transfer would become official.

I was sitting at my desk in Spokane when her vivid account of the scene arrived via email. It’s among the most uplifting messages I’ve ever read. She captured all the colors of the crowd, and the emotions, including her own mixed emotions. And what prevailed in her was “a sense of pride and hopefulness.” As fate would have it, Gorgas Hospital, the hospital in which she was born, was right along the parade route to Balboa. My sister walked down the hill to the hospital and began trading high-fives with her fellow Panamanians as they passed on the sidewalk. This conga-line of catharsis, 36 years after the tragic 1964 riots, was a remarkable triumph. Half a world away, reading my sister’s email, there was a weightlessness to the joy I felt that is still difficult to describe.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, it was an open question as to the nature of the Zonian diaspora and the direction it would take. Ronald Reagan’s rise to the Presidency in 1980 was fueled, in large part, by his outspoken opposition to the canal treaty. “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours and we’re going to keep it,” he said as the treaty headed for Senate ratification.

The treaty cleared the senate only by a single vote, but two years later Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide.

Reagan’s rise and his simplistic rhetoric encouraged Zonian hardliners, the loudest of whom posed both as superpatriots and defiant victims of the U.S. Government. I remember receiving one cartoon depicting an eagle, talons outstretched, swooping in on a mouse wearing a Zonian t-shirt. The mouse was flipping the eagle off.

By that time, I’d lost sympathy and patience with my former tribe, especially in their self-serving rationalizations for perpetuating U.S. control. Among other things, it ignored any number of well-documented and disturbing abuses of U.S. power, not just in Panama but throughout Latin America.

Part of that larger truth is that the Canal Zone wasn’t just home to an engineering marvel and a tropical paradise of beaches, islands, yacht clubs and rain forests. It was also a central cog in a clandestine enterprise that wreaked havoc and nurtured resentments well beyond Panama. The darkest chapter in the enclave’s history was the use of U.S. military bases to host the School of the Americas, a CIA-influenced training program for military leaders throughout Latin America. Dozens of the school’s graduates (including Panama’s notorious Manual Noriega) went on to become leaders in vicious campaigns–often including torture, and often with assistance from the CIA–to suppress dissent and popular uprisings in their home countries. The decades-long initiative, which one Panamanian newspaper dubbed the “School of the Assassins,” was ultimately disbanded in 2000 after drawing intense criticism in the U.S. and abroad.

You didn’t have to be a scholar or a human rights activist to notice the gulf between the U.S.’s expressed commitment to democracy and human rights and what it was actually doing to prop up repressive regimes and bad actors like Noriega who, for decades, was on the CIA’s payroll. The Panama Canal treaty wouldn’t and didn’t absolve the U.S. of its barely concealed involvement in human rights abuses in Latin America, but it was an important step toward rehabilitating American credibility and good will.

On a personal level, I’ll have to admit to having a chip on my shoulder for what is now most of my life. I have indelible memories of growing up in Panama and deep affection for many of my ex-classmates and teammates. But I don’t abide obscenity-laced rants, in person or in social media. Zonian political culture has leaned to the right since Ronald Reagan’s rise, and Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement reignited and amplified grievances that have the tenor of die-hard confederacy culture. It’s not something I care to be around, which is why I had misgivings about going to Orlando this summer.

That said, part of what I learned on this journey is, if anything, I was the one stuck in the past. With the exception of one ugly and mercifully brief encounter with an old friend (who was beyond his first drink) I had a wonderful time. As importantly, I began to notice something that hadn’t drawn nearly enough of my attention over the years. I’d missed it in large part because it takes place below the radar of politics and journalism. It’s not of the visible and audible exchanges of grievances, arguments, tear gas, or bullets. Rather it’s in the eloquent, daily dance of coexistence and affection; the evolving and deepening relationships between Zonians and Panamanians, especially in the years since the treaty was ratified. Over time it doesn’t drown out the rancor, it just steadily and quietly removes it.

In retrospect, it all makes sense. As Betsy reminds me, she’s a Zonian who was born in Panama. While she grew up in an American family, it was a family—like so many other Zonian families—that embraces Panamanian apparel, art, dance, and cuisine. (Given the pounds of virtual empañadas I receive, weekly, in my Facebook feed, I would say especially cuisine.) And, of course, we literally embrace each other, not just through our friendships but often enough in marriages uniting American and Panamanian families. All of this was visible, on both large and intimate scales, in the halls, hallways, and shade of pool deck umbrellas at Orlando.

It wasn’t just about admitting to myself that Roberto been right on the facts. It was about my enduring admiration for the manner in which he’d engaged me—defiant but respectful, aiming more at my heart than my brain. I think of this now as Roberto’s whale song—not just a primer about our history but a much deeper plea for decency and mutual respect.

After the first four days of intense visiting I went looking for my brother Tommy who was there, somewhere, in the sprawling, bar-ringed pool near the front of the Caribe Royale resort. It was just so crowded with Zonians that I couldn’t find him. I wandered back to the rear of the campus-like complex to a smaller but less crowded pool. It was situated in an alcove between five-story towers of suites, all of which were occupied by people attending the canal society’s reunion. When I finished swimming I retreated to a lounge chair in the shade of palm trees. As I sat back in the chair my eyes went up to the balconies above the alcove where, in every direction, there were Panamanian flags affixed or hanging from the glass doors and windows. I texted the scene to my daughter in Portland. I thought about the long-ago lesson from Roberto and imagined what I would say to him. And he to me.

—Tim Connor, BHS Class of ’75