Beyond the Eagle's Shadow: New Histories of Latin America's Cold War

Introduction

1 Introduction 5 Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno It all started with rebellious teenagers. On January 7, 1964, American students ran the U.S. flag up a flagpole on the grounds of Balboa High School, near the western end of the Panama Canal Zone. The gesture was intensely provocative. The question of where the U.S. and Panamanian flags could be flown in the canal zone had stirred controversy for several years, reflecting growing tensions between Americans and Panamanians over sovereignty in the ten-mile-wide strip of territory that the United States had controlled for more than sixty years. In late 1963, the U.S. governor of the canal zone had tried to defuse the situation by declaring that neither flag would fly over schools or other civic buildings. But the ploy backfired. Outraged by what they considered a cave in to Panamanian pressure, the Balboa students, backed by many parents and other “Zonians,” took matters into their own hands. Predictably, Panamanian high schoolers quickly retaliated. On January 9, 150 students from the nearby Instituto Nacional marched to Balboa High and attempted to fly their flag alongside the stars and stripes. Scuffling ensued. The Panamanian flag was torn. Word of the incident spread and, by nightfall, rioting had broken out along the borders of the canal zone, where thousands of U.S. troops were mobilized to safeguard the waterway. When the unrest ended three days later, twenty-one Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers lay dead. Panamanian President Roberto Chiari severed relations with the United States, demanding that Washington agree to scrap the old treaties governing control over the canal and negotiate a new deal.1 Introduction 2 The violence and the diplomatic fallout deeply alarmed U.S. policymakers . President Lyndon Johnson and many of his advisers suspected communists of stirring up all the trouble. “Kids started it and the communists got into it,” Johnson complained.2 The Central Intelligence Agency fueled Johnson ’s fears as the diplomatic standoff continued into February, asserting that the Panamanian communists were dictating “practically every idea” expressed by Chiari and that if the confrontation lasted another month “it is probable that Panama will be the second socialist country in America.”3 This assessment was, as U.S. leaders soon came to realize, wildly off the mark. While leftists no doubt sought to exploit the unrest, the Panamanian communist party remained small and ineffective. The rioting and the diplomatic confrontation that ensued resulted from deep anger across the Panamanian political spectrum about treaties viewed as a grotesque remnant of U.S. quasi-colonialism in the days of Teddy Roosevelt. Indeed, as negotiations opened to restore diplomatic relations and ultimately to rewrite the canal treaties, leftists played no important role outside of stirring fear among Americans. Rather, Chiari and his successor Marco Robles—both of them representative of the conservative, land-owning oligarchy that ruled Panama—joined in various ways with the repressive National Guard and corporate leaders such as the head of the local Coca-Cola Company to play the key roles in advancing Panamanian demands. When Washington agreed at the end of 1964 to renegotiate the canal treaties, the Panamanian foreign minister rejoiced that the concession, far from emboldening the left, would send the communists “al carajo”—to hell.4 The flag riots and their aftermath neatly illuminate the complexities of the Cold War in Latin America. Observers, especially in the United States, readily viewed the confrontation through the lens of the East-West struggle. They were not, of course, entirely wrong to do so. Although Panamanian, Cuban, and Soviet sources remain mostly inaccessible, it is not difficult to imagine that communists and Castroites inside and outside of Panama sought to exploit the clash to serve their larger goals. Yet the episode in Panama was no simple proxy confrontation between the democratic-capitalist West and the communist East. The crisis originated, after all, with teenagers acting on nationalist impulses rooted in grievances that long predated the Cold War. The mundane location of the flagpole confrontation suggests that hostilities sprang from tensions woven into everyday life for demonstrators on both sides of the issue, not from the dictates of distant superpowers. Perhaps the most striking feature of the crisis, however, was the extent to which Washington Introduction 3 found itself sharply at odds with centrist and even right-wing elements in Panama, the very groups that shared...