Word: isthmus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Historically, at least, not much of one. The U.S. will be ceding the canal to Panama but not "returning" it, since Panama never really possessed it. If anything, Colombia was the aggrieved party. With American connivance, Colombian rebels "liberated" the isthmus from the Bogota government in 1903 and turned the rights to build the canal over to the U.S. Panama and its canal came to life together; without the canal, Panama could scarcely exist as a viable nation. Canal revenues account for some 25% of Panama's gross national product, 20% of its employment and almost...
...across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan canal would feed into Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River...
...press release stating that the province of Panama might secede from Colombia, in which case the U.S. would recognize Panama as an independent nation and conclude a treaty with the new state. This scheme seemed to violate an 1846 U.S. agreement to guarantee the sovereignty of Colombia in the isthmus. Violation or not, the plot was shortly put into effect...
...package to fend off the radical threat. Torrijos has sent his National Guardsmen, many of them graduates of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas on Gatun Lake, on operations to hone their effectiveness against potential guerrillas. Last spring 1,000 guardsmen spent five days traversing the Isthmus. When they arrived in Colon, they were greeted by the cheers of the populace...
...isthmus became known as "De Lesseps' graveyard." A bloc in the U.S. Senate urged a new canal site in Nicaragua-a longer but healthier route. The Panama lobby won out, partly on the argument that Nicaragua had too many active volcanoes. With the payment of $10 million to Panama and $40 million to the defunct French company, the U.S. entered into the most expensive peacetime undertaking in its 128-year history. The final bill was $352 million...