BRICK BY BRICK

HYDRAULIC NOSTALGIA: AMERICA, THE CANAL, AND THE LONGING FOR LEVERAGE

AROSE MENA

May 29, 2025

In the age of supply-chain anxiety and geopolitical nostalgia, the Panama Canal has reentered the American imagination. But to reclaim it is to misread it—again. From the Spanish conquest to Cold War suburbia, from jungle resistance to hydraulic dreams, this is the story of a waterway that was always more than just a canal, and never entirely American.

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Not long ago, murmurs resurfaced in Washington about “reclaiming” the Panama Canal. The exact nature of this desire—rhetorical flourish, geopolitical posturing, or something else entirely—remains unclear. But the symbolism is hard to miss: an aging superpower casting a backward glance at one of its greatest infrastructural romances. To speak of reclaiming the canal is to imagine history not as a river but as a lock—mechanical, reversible, waiting to be reset. As if you could rewind the twentieth century with a treaty, or a flag, or a drone.

God made oceans. We made shortcuts.

Why now? Why dredge up this long, sun-bleached strip of dominion? Because history has become a border again. Because supply chains are delicate, and nostalgia is weaponized. Because globalization—once the story of seamless flow and liberal optimism—now looks more like a chessboard, each port a pressure point. Because American decline doesn’t just haunt domestic politics; it performs itself abroad, like an aging starlet demanding to be recast. To look at the Panama Canal today is to see a mirror—not just of the past, but of the phantom limbs of power we still pretend to move.

And so, we rewind. Not just to Jimmy Carter promising to hand over the canal in 1977. Not to the Cold War, when US families lived in pristine Canal Zone military suburbs flanked by jungle. Not even to the day in 1904 when the United States officially took over construction from a failed French venture.

Long before the Spanish arrived, the isthmus was home to thriving Indigenous cultures—the Cuevas, Ngäbe, Buglé, Kuna, Emberá, and Wounaan among them. They lived in decentralized societies, practiced subsistence agriculture, traded with neighboring peoples, and moved through the dense tropical corridors with the kind of ease no colonial engineer would ever achieve. The land was already a place of passage, of flow—geographically narrow, but culturally expansive. Then arrived Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who in 1513 crossed the Isthmus of Panama on foot and became the first European to lay eyes on the Pacific having come from the Americas. He did so with blood on his hands—Balboa was not a benign explorer but a conquistador, a man who used dogs to tear Indigenous people apart and whose expeditions were marked by brutality and enslavement. Yet today, statues of him still stand tall in Panama City, casting long shadows across plazas and boulevards. History, after all, tends to confuse conquest with courage, and public memory has a way of polishing even the most violent boots.

Colonial diplomacy, canine edition

Back to Columbus’s fourth voyage in 1502, when he landed on the Panamanian coast and saw not gold, but geography. What he saw—what they all saw—was a shortcut. A way to redraw the world.

Panama was never the destination. It was always the hinge. For the Spanish Crown, it became a vital overland corridor. Gold and silver plundered from Peru made their way to the Caribbean coast via mule and human back, to be loaded onto galleons bound for Spain. The isthmus was the bottleneck of dominion—and also its soft underbelly. Pirates, storms, tropical disease, and rebellion were constant threats. It was lucrative, but leaky.

Centuries later, the French tried to bypass that bottleneck by cutting through it. In 1881, under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who had overseen the Suez Canal, France launched a grand engineering project to build a sea-level canal through the Panamanian jungle. It failed catastrophically. Tens of thousands of workers died of yellow fever, malaria, and exhaustion. The jungle swallowed equipment, budgets ballooned, and the project collapsed in scandal. What the French underestimated was not just the engineering challenge, but the rainforest itself—a kind of ecological insurgency. Panama didn’t want to be carved. Gatun Lake, created by damming the Chagres River, remains one of the largest artificial lakes in the world—a flooding that submerged entire villages and displaced Indigenous and Afro-Antillean communities. The rainforest didn’t just resist excavation; it avenged what was lost beneath the waterline.

Before the ships could pass, bodies had to break the earth

The United States stepped in. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a brash industrial power—flush with ambition and hungry for a hemispheric stage—saw an opportunity too strategic to ignore. But Panama was still part of Colombia, and Colombia was reluctant to sign over the rights to the strip of land needed for the project. So the States helped stage a geopolitical puppet show: it backed a Panamanian rebellion in 1903, sent warships, and recognized the new country within days. In return, the States received a ten-mile-wide strip of land—the Canal Zone—to govern as its own territory, in perpetuity. A deal made over Panama’s head, for Panama’s spine.

The canal was completed in 1914, a marvel of modern engineering and imperial choreography. It used a lock system, rather than the sea-level approach that had doomed the French. What followed was a triumph not just of excavation, but of invention. The construction gave rise to a range of pioneering technologies: massive hydraulic gates engineered to withstand oceanic pressure, a movable lock system that defied sea-level logic, and the first large-scale use of mechanized dredging. Even the electric locomotives—called “mules”—used to guide ships through the locks were innovations of scale. The entire enterprise was a choreography of steel and water, guided by punch-card logistics and the fevered optimism of modernity.

It was built on the labor of West Indian workers, many from Barbados and Jamaica, who lived in segregated housing and were paid less than white Americans. The US imported a racial caste system along with its engineers. Workers were divided into “Gold Roll” (white Americans and Europeans) and “Silver Roll” (Afro-Caribbean laborers), with segregated pay scales, housing, and hospitals. Disease became another site of asymmetry: the famed physician William Gorgas’s mosquito-eradication campaign dramatically reduced yellow fever, but those medical efforts focused overwhelmingly on protecting US workers. For the Black laborers who laid the concrete and dug the earth, life was cheaper, treatment slower. 

Smile for the camera

For much of the twentieth century, the Canal Zone was a tropical suburbia of uncanny Americana. It had golf courses, Chevrolet billboards and Campbell’s soup signs, Protestant churches, Little League. A curiously complete microstate with its own postage stamps, license plates, Boy Scout troops, even a local newspaper. Some Zonians—a term locals used without irony—lived their entire lives there, cradle to grave, without ever learning Spanish or stepping outside the border. A theme park of benevolent empire, complete with Fourth of July parades and PTA meetings. Mayberry with malaria pills. Panamanians, for the most part, were barred. To live in the Zone was to live in a gated narrative—a self-contained fiction of American benevolence. But fiction, like sovereignty, tends to leak. In 1964, anti-American riots broke out when Panamanian students attempted to raise their flag in the Zone. Twenty-one people died. The myth was ruptured. 

Scout’s honor: We only occupy it for a century

Beyond the suburbs, the Zone was also a cockpit of Cold War operations. The US Southern Command, based in Panama, coordinated interventions across Latin America. CIA operatives passed through on their way to Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Chile. The canal was not just a shipping lane but a geopolitical backroom—its locks oiled with logistics, coups, and quiet deals.

In 1977, after years of protest and diplomatic choreography, President Jimmy Carter signed the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, laying out the process for the gradual transfer of the Canal Zone to Panama. The canal itself was handed over on December 31, 1999. But before the handover came one final, violent punctuation mark: Operation Just Cause in 1989. Ostensibly to oust dictator Manuel Noriega—a former CIA asset gone rogue—the United States launched its largest military operation since Vietnam. Entire neighborhoods in Panama City were flattened. The Pentagon put the death toll in the hundreds; locals say thousands. The invasion is barely remembered in the States, but its scars remain etched into Panama’s urban and psychological landscape. The handover was a slow exhalation—the US letting go of its most symbolic overseas possession of the twentieth century, and perhaps winding down its own geopolitical fantasy. 

Operation Just Cause: another photo opportunity

Or did it? In 2024, whispers emerged in Washington about reasserting control over the canal. The language was murky, but the motives were familiar. Some lawmakers began to float the idea of “reclaiming” the canal, as if Panama were a lapsed client, or a pawn who had wandered off the board. Much of the recent noise comes from discomfort with China’s growing presence in Panama. In 2017, Panama cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan and embraced Beijing. A Chinese firm helps operate ports at both ends, and in an era where geopolitics increasingly hides behind the veil of infrastructure, that fact alone was enough to spark panic. There are whispers—some grounded, others spectral—about Chinese surveillance equipment, Belt and Road ambitions, and deep-water strategy. What’s being “reclaimed,” then, isn’t just metal gates and concrete chambers, but the right to define paranoia.

The claim is vague, the logistics implausible, but the nostalgia is potent. The canal has always been more than a route for ships. It’s been a stage for projection, a moat of fantasy and control, a valve for anxieties about sovereignty, influence, and access. To bring it back under the Stars and Stripes is less a policy proposal than a tropical dream of hydraulic dominance—a fantasy that the world might still be plumbed like it was in 1950.

The future arrived quietly, holding two flags and wearing a hard hat

So here we are, at the hinge of a new century, staring into the lock chamber of history, wondering which way the water will flow—and who will hold the lever. The canal, once a technological marvel of imperial engineering, now flickers between symbol and bargaining chip. In a world rethinking borders, pipelines, rare earths, and deep-sea cables, it feels newly legible as a pressure point in an anxious, interconnected order. Among the stranger legacies: The Canal Zone’s legal code still lingers in obscure court precedents. One judge once ruled on a maritime dispute citing Canal Zone law—decades after the territory had ceased to exist. Like a ghost in the machine, the Zone occasionally reaches out through bureaucracy, a dead jurisdiction that refuses to stay buried. It stands as a reminder that globalization is not just flows and freedoms, but choke points and control panels. It was never just a ditch. It was always a lever disguised as a mirror, held by whomever could convince the world they knew which way to pull.

Arose Mena (b. 1987 in Panama) studied engineering and political science at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción in Paraguay. She lives in Panama City and works at the National Archives, in a room with no windows and too many keys—some of them to cabinets, some to ghosts, and a few still waiting for the right lock.

Cover image: 250,000 tons of steel pressed through a fast-tracked geopolitical back door