PANAMA CITY — A Panamanian nationwide vacation remembering the killing of 21 protesters by police and U.S. troops in 1964 is taking up new resonance this 12 months as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump threatens to take again management of the Panama Canal.
On Jan. 9, 1964, college students protested within the then-U.S. managed canal zone over not being allowed to fly Panama’s flag at a secondary faculty there. The protests expanded to normal opposition to the U.S. presence in Panama and U.S. troops received concerned.
Historians say what has come to be generally known as Martyrs’ Day was a key level of inflection that led to the signing of an settlement greater than a decade later by U.S. President Jimmy Carter to show over management of the canal to Panama on Dec. 31, 1999.
This 12 months the vacation coincided with Carter’s funeral in Washington. The previous president died Dec. 29 on the age of 100.
However Trump is bringing an expansionist perspective to his second time period and on Tuesday, refused to rule out the usage of navy power to grab management of the Panama Canal. Trump has complained in latest weeks about rising costs for ships to transit the canal and instructed the U.S. ought to take it again.
It’s a proposal roundly rejected by Panama President José Raúl Mulino.
On Thursday, Esmeralda Orobio, the niece of a kind of killed in 1964, stated throughout a ceremony that “The Panama Canal is ours and we’re going to defend it.”
Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washinton and an adjunct professor at Georgetown College, known as Trump’s rhetoric an “empty menace.”
“The concept that Trump would resort to power to retake the canal isn’t lifelike,” he stated.
