The 1977 Panama Canal Treaties can only be truly understood by examining the century-long history of the canal.
"Panama and the
United States are closely intertwined by history. Panama, a poor neglected backwater province of Colombia, was
coveted by European powers as well as by the U.S. during the nineteenth century
because of its location on a narrow isthmus of Central America separating the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
In 1903, Panama became nominally independent
through American intervention but discovered that in most respects it had
merely traded one master for another. In 1904 the U.S. began work on what
became Panama’s most distinguishing feature, an interoceanic canal, which was
completed in 1914.
These events—and those of the ensuing sixty years—set the
stage for the difficult and often painful negotiations of the 1960s and 1970s,
pitting the security concerns of a superpower against the nationalist
aspirations of a small, geographically divided country."
~The Good Neighbors: America, Panama, and the 1977 Canal Treaties