Panama’s leaders and even some of Donald Trump’s allies are still scratching their heads over his threats to reclaim control over the Panama Canal, but he has apparently been seething over the issue since hosting a Miss Universe pageant in that country two decades ago.
While the aggressive public posture may be new, interviews by CNN with more than a dozen sources in Washington and at Mar-a-Lago, as well as in Panama, found that Trump has long been skeptical of the Central American nation and the 1977 agreement to hand over control of the canal.
“He said more than once that the U.S. got ripped off,” said one of two sources who regularly interacted with Trump during the pageant. “It wasn’t a grand statement, just an observation he wasn’t shy about sharing.”
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Trump discussed his interest in Panama in a 2009 promotional video for a new hotel development in the country where he’d hosted the Miss Universe contest six years earlier.
“My interest in Panama really began when we had the Miss Universe contest in Panama,” Trump said in the video. “I was there for quite a bit of time with the Miss Universe and I fell in love with the place.”
The Trump Ocean Club, which remains the tallest building in Central America, was completed in 2011 and was his first major international property licensing deal, but he outraged locals that same year by complaining that the U.S. had “stupidly” returned the canal to Panama “in exchange for nothing,” but the Trump Organization eventually lost control of the property, which now operates as JW Marriott Panama.
“People focus on the canal, the canal, the canal,” said Ilya Espinosa de Marotta, deputy administrator of the Panama Canal Port Authority. “But what made the country of Panama – the people of Panama – wanting the canal to be transferred to Panama wasn’t just the canal. This was like a US territory inside a country. So there were barriers. There was US police, there were US schools. It was a completely other country within our country, and there were many military bases.”
She became animated while discussing the president-elect’s threats to seize the canal by force.
“That’s not going to happen,” Quijano said. “I’ll be on the streets myself defending our sovereignty because the canal is over sovereign land.”
Panamanians aren’t sure what to make of Trump’s comments or how seriously to take them, but they aren’t dismissing them as ridiculous.
“A lot of people just think that there are those remarks that have no fundamental truth in it, so they disregard it,” said Jorge Eduardo Ritter, the former foreign minister of Panama. “I don’t like to disregard what President Trump says, because when he says something, he might not mean exactly what he is saying, but he is looking for something.”
Ritter, who noted the irony of conducting his interview at the former Trump hotel in Panama City, wasn’t sure whether the president-elect’s private business experience in the country had anything to do with his fixation on the canal, but he said they sent a clear and worrying signal.
“This fixation with Panama — I sense that something is going to happen,” Ritter said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a military invasion or he will take over the canal, but something is going to happen.”