Panama: Crossroads of the World

A century after the canal opened, who is Panama — and can it stay sovereign at the center of everyone else's ambitions? In this series finale, we take the measure of modern Panama: a glittering logistics-and-banking powerhouse, and a country wrestling with a tarnished name, a water crisis, and a new tug-of-war between Washington and Beijing. Episode 18 of Crossroads of the World (current as of mid...

By the 2000s the canal Panama had fought a century to reclaim faced obsolescence — the world's giant ships no longer fit. So a country of four million made an audacious bet: it put a $5.25 billion plan to widen the canal to its own people in a referendum, and they said yes. How did Panama dig a third set of locks the size of a new canal — and reshape global trade doing it? Episode 17 of Crossroads...

For most of a century the United States ran a strip of Panama as if it owned it — and as the handover deadline neared, plenty of people in Washington were sure Panama would wreck the canal the day it got the keys. They were wrong. How did Panama rebuild from invasion, abolish its army, and take back the canal everyone said it couldn't run? Episode 16 of Crossroads of the World is the emotional sum...

Just after midnight on December 20, 1989, 27,000 American troops fell on Panama in the largest U.S. combat operation since Vietnam — to capture one man, Manuel Noriega. Was it the rescue of a democracy from a tyrant, or a superpower invading a small nation it had controlled for a century? And how many Panamanians died? Episode 15 of Crossroads of the World is a measured account of Operation Just C...

When Omar Torrijos died in a 1981 plane crash, the man who emerged from the shadows wasn't a charismatic leader — it was his spymaster, Manuel Noriega, a paid CIA asset who knew everyone's secrets. How did America's indispensable man in Panama become its most wanted dictator? Episode 14 of Crossroads of the World tells the Cold War noir of Noriega's rise (1981–1987): the bargain that made him, as...

In 1968 a coup swept away Panama's old oligarchy, and a cigar-chewing general named Omar Torrijos turned the country's oldest grievance — the American Zone slicing through its heart — into a global crusade. How did a small country, unable to match U.S. firepower, talk a U.S. president into giving the canal back? Episode 13 of Crossroads of the World follows the Torrijos era (1968–1981): the populi...

On January 9, 1964, a dispute over which flag could fly outside a Canal Zone high school set off three days of rioting that left about two dozen Panamanians and four American soldiers dead, drove Panama to break relations with the United States, and renamed the border street the Avenue of the Martyrs. How did a flag become the day the Canal Zone was doomed? Episode 12 of Crossroads of the World —...

For half a century, a ten-mile-wide strip of the United States ran straight through the middle of Panama. Inside the Canal Zone, Americans built an orderly, green world they loved; outside it, Panamanians lived as outsiders in their own country. What does it do to a nation to have a piece of another country running through its center? Episode 11 of Crossroads of the World holds two truths at once...

On August 15, 1914, the SS Ancon made the first official transit of the Panama Canal — and the world barely noticed, because Europe had just gone to war. Behind the engineering marvel was something uglier: a segregation system the U.S. government built into the Canal Zone from the first shovel. How did the "Gold Roll" and "Silver Roll" turn a payroll into Jim Crow on foreign soil? Episode 10 of Cr...

The French were destroyed by Panama's jungle. The Americans, from 1904, beat it in ten years. But the victory remembered as a triumph of engineering was first a triumph of medicine — and the doctor who won it was nearly fired for it. What actually beat the jungle that beat the French? Episode 9 of Crossroads of the World tells the construction story with an honest correction at its center: Dr. Wil...

By 1903 Theodore Roosevelt wanted a canal across Panama — and Colombia, which owned Panama, had just refused to sell him the right. So a revolution was arranged. How did a French engineer, a $100,000 check, and a U.S. warship create a brand-new country in three days, and a treaty no Panamanian ever negotiated? Episode 8 of Crossroads of the World — the hinge of the series — follows the 1903 plot:...

Ferdinand de Lesseps had cut the Suez Canal and become the most celebrated engineer-promoter on Earth. So when he turned to Panama in 1880, he was certain the jungle would yield like the desert. It did not. How did the hero of Suez lead 22,000 people to their deaths and 800,000 ordinary investors to ruin? Episode 7 of Crossroads of the World is a measured account of a triple catastrophe: de Lessep...

Gold was found in California in 1848, and suddenly the fastest way across America ran through fifty miles of Panamanian jungle. How did a gold rush a continent away turn Panama into the deadliest engineering project of the 19th century — and lay the blueprint for the Canal Zone's segregation? Episode 6 of Crossroads of the World follows the "Argonauts" across the isthmus, the building of the Panam...

In 1821 the most strategic strip of land on Earth severed itself from a dying Spanish Empire without firing a shot — its merchants simply paid the royalist garrison to sail home. Free and defenseless, Panama joined Simón Bolívar's grand new Republic of Gran Colombia. Bolívar himself had called the isthmus "the emporium of the world." So why did the next eighty years leave it neglected, taxed, and...

Twice in thirty years, the Isthmus of Panama destroyed those who reached for it. In 1671 the buccaneer Henry Morgan marched a starving army across the jungle and burned Panama City to ash. A generation later, Scotland bet a fifth of its entire wealth on a colony in the Darién — and roughly two thousand settlers died of fever. How did a pirate and an investment scheme both break themselves against...

For 150 years, the silver that made Spain the richest power on Earth crossed a single fifty-mile neck of Panama jungle — carried on the backs of mules and enslaved men. How did one trail between the oceans become the logistical heart of an empire, and what did it cost the people forced to build and carry it? Episode 3 of Crossroads of the World is a measured look at the machine: Panama City and th...

In 1510 a bankrupt adventurer escaped his creditors hidden aboard a ship — and three years later he stood on a mountain in Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean. How did Vasco Núñez de Balboa's single glimpse of a "South Sea" prove the Americas were a new continent, not the edge of Asia? Episode 2 of Crossroads of the World runs on the toxic rivalry between Balboa — the rou...

Three million years ago a strip of jungle rose from the sea, rerouted the planet's oceans, and became both a bridge and a wall between two continents. Who lived on the Isthmus of Panama before Europe ever saw it — and why was this the most strategic land on Earth long before the canal? Episode 1 of Crossroads of the World opens with the land itself: the contested geological birth of the isthmus, t...