Behind the Bastards - Part One: How The U.S.A. Murdered Panama with Chelsea Manning

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Robert is joined by Chelsea Manning to discuss the bastardly history of United States and Panama.FOOTNOTES:1.    https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-Jungle-American-Encounters-Interactions/dp/08223309892.    https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-12-22-mn-6183-story.html3.    https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/manuel-noriega-a-thug-of-a-different-era4.    https://www.americanheritage.com/content/panama-holiday5.    https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/us-to-clean-up-race-test-chemical-weapon-relics-on-panama-island/3007758.article6.    https://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/1386 7.    http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/teachers/lesson_plans/pdfs/unit8_4.pdf8.    https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/americas-devious-dream-roosevelt-and-the-panama-canal/9.    https://www.americanheritage.com/content/panama-holiday10. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2968/058004014 11. https://www.npr.org/2015/06/22/415194765/u-s-troops-tested-by-race-in-secret-world-war-ii-chemical-experiments 12. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/31/the-truth-behind-us-operation-just-cause-in-panama13. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/our-forgotten-invasion-panama-key-understanding-us-foreign-policy-today/14. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/panama-noriega-operation-just-cause-reagan-imperialism Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's warring my crimes? I'm Robert Evans, a host behind the bastards podcast about the worst people in all of history. And consequently, we've had an awful lot of war crimes, which is what we're going to be talking about today more or less with our special guest, Sophie Coope the Airhorns. Coope the Airhorns, like seven or eight of them, eight or nine,

eight or nine Airhorns. Chelsea Menning! Chelsea. Hey. How are you doing today? How am I doing today? It's all right. It's a little cold and snowy out here in New York. We've got the lovely Brooklyn weather, but I have at least, at least I have power and some kind of functioning, functioning emergency services and transportation and water and basic essentials. All those Yankee things. Those carpet, bag, or luxuries that we don't have down in Texas. All we need is to freeze to death. Yeah. And if we don't freeze to death to be built tens of thousands of dollars for several days of natural gas, because that's how freedom looks. I'm in Texas, by the way. Yes. Chelsea, what do you know? What do you know about Panama?

What do I know about Panama? Yeah, Panama. Whenever I think about it, whenever I think about it, I usually think of like Teddy Roosevelt and steam shovels. So, yeah, yeah. That's part of Panama. Yeah. That's what I usually think of. I don't know much about the actual, I don't know much about it beyond like imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, naval strategy and engineering. That is a lot of the history of Panama. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. Today, our bastard is the United States of America, a little country you might have heard of, I don't know. And specifically, we are talking about the relationship between the United States of America and Panama, which is one of the most abusive relationships

in the entire history of geopolitics. It's really outstanding. Hey, that's a nice isthmus you got there. Yeah. Be a shame if America were to happen to it. North America. Yeah, so this was all inspired when a friend advised me to take a look at a documentary called The Panama Deception, which was made in like 1994 and is quite good. And so I decided to start looking a little deeper into the history of Panama. I found a book length study on the history of US Panamanian relations and a bunch of articles. And my God, it is, it is, Chelsea, it is as fucked up as, I don't know, Sophie, what's something that's fucked up? Like a like a like a bed lash to the ceiling? I mean, that makes sense. I was going to say when people put their beds in their closets

and then like then they can't get into it, get stuck. And then you just it's just like then you have no bed or closet. Yeah, it's as fucked up as a bed closet, Chelsea. Well, I usually I usually think of somebody who like uses the toilet and then doesn't flush and then come back three or four days later. Yeah, you could say I just choked on coffee. You could you could say that the history of US Panamanian relations would be embodied as like if Panama is like a small apartment in the US is a guest at a party in that apartment. The US has just like continuously been leaving upper deckers for the last 150 years or so. Just just just shitting in the water tank. That's that's America as regards Panama and also drinking

all of their beer. It's good stuff. It's just really good stuff. So Panama is one of those countries you can look at on a map and immediately know is just kind of completely fucked in a historic sense, right? It's a beautiful place. But in terms of geopolitics, it's just doomed because of where it is in the world. It's sort of like how you can look at Ukraine with its fertile soil and its position like right between the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Western Europe and be like, boy, I bet those people got their shit fucked up constantly because other folks needed wheat. Panama is in the same kind of position. Their northern neighbor is Costa Rica and their southern neighbor is Colombia. The nation is the bridge between central and South

America. And more to the point, it is the narrowest land mass in Central America. So if you wanted to say dig a big trench through a country to let people travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean without sailing around an entire extra continent, it's basically the best place to do it. And people realize that pretty much as soon as they found Panama in the 1700s and 1800s, travelers who wanted to go from New York to San Francisco would generally go by way of Panama. So if you were trying to get to like, if you were doing like the New York to San Francisco route, traveling through the middle of the United States was just, you would probably die horribly, right? We all played Oregon Trail or some version of that. So your best bet was to sail down to Panama

from New York, then spend like three days going across Panama on the back of a burrow, and then sail from Panama's Pacific Coast up to San Francisco. That was how you did like, went from East Coast to West Coast back in the day. And I think if things were still that way, rent would probably be cheaper in Los Angeles. So you've got this perfectly situated country. And from kind of the beginning of the United States being a thing, American or US leaders are looking down there and being like, boy, I bet we could fucking cut a hole in the middle of that country. And that would really make it easier for us to colonize North America. So like most of Latin America, Panama was owned by Spain for centuries. And Spain used its resources to buy

gold for their various kings and spices to make better paella. In 1821, Panama freed itself from its now alien colonial master. There was a strong independence movement in the Isthmus, but they were overruled by the folks who wanted to join the Grand Columbia Federation. So yeah, Panama and like Columbia, a whole bunch of Central and South America separates from Spain in 1821. And a bunch of guys in Panama are like, hey, you know, it'd be rad if we were our own country. But more of them are like, you know, it would probably be a better idea if we were part of Columbia, because we're tiny and Columbia is real big. And they're probably just going to take us over if we're not, if we don't get on board the Columbia train. It's the story is oldest time. Now, Panama subsequently

tried to free itself from Columbia and like 18, they were a bunch of different independence attempts in the 1830s and up to 1840, but it never quite worked out. And the region's separatist tendencies were boosted by the fact that they were very isolated. There were no roads connecting them to Columbia. There were a couple of cities and towns in Panama. It was not heavily populated. And they didn't really trade with Columbia. They mainly traded with the Caribbean and other parts of like South America rather than their countrymen in Bogota. From the beginning of Panama, Americans saw the isthmus as something to exploit. In 1846, the USA signed the Bidlack Treaty with Columbia. And this basically in the Bidlack Treaty, the US promised to protect Columbia's control over

Panama in exchange for access to any future canal that might be dug through the country. So we were like, hey, hey, Columbia, you know, you guys are a new country. You don't have much of a military yet. This place is real isolated and valuable. We'll take we'll protect it for you. We're a big country. We've got a whole lot of develop. We got ships and everything. You just chill out, let us protect Panama. And if someone happens to build a canal there, we get free access to it. Like as it was, you know, surely a deal without any sort of ulterior motives to it that will never be abused by the United States. Right. But it wasn't the United States of the time still considered by the rest of the world to be a young upstart with. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like in

comparison, it compares it to the European powers of the time, like France and France and Spain. For reference, the USA in this period is younger than Nancy Pelosi. So yeah, we are a young upstart, but we've got more resources than Columbia, which which has nothing in Panama, which has like less than nothing. So yeah, the US signs this this wonderful treaty that will never have any, any ulterior consequences. And it was kind of like there wasn't really a lot of other options that Columbia had at the point, because Panama barely anyone lived there. And they didn't have any sort of ability to stop someone from invading them. And Columbia didn't have any roads connecting them to Panama, so they couldn't do anything.

And in the 1840s, everyone knew that somebody was going to figure out how to dig a canal through Panama. So it kind of made sense. Like trusting in the United States is basically our best bet. Maybe they won't fuck us over, which is never a good bet to make with the United States. Nope. So the deal was inked right at the end of the US Mexican war, and it established a pattern that would hold true for more than a century, which was that Panama was to become a pawn of United States power politics. And not just the United States, really just in general, white people were going to continue to come in and fuck around in Panama, because we wanted to get to the Pacific Ocean more easily. So after the Bidlak Treaty,

the US government felt free to act as if the isthmus was basically their property. In 1850, we signed the Clayton-Boward Treaty with England, which guaranteed US-British cooperation to build a canal in Panama in the future. Neither Columbia nor the Panamanian government were referenced in the treaty or consulted in this. So as soon as the US signs this treaty to protect Panama, we make a deal with the British to build a canal, and nobody talks to the people who live there at all. Like it's just the white people being consulted here. Because who else do you really need? They don't have shovels, not our shovels, not steam shovels. Yeah, steam shovels. Clean coal. Clean burning coal.

The California Gold Rush of 1849 set the first massive wave of US citizens in the Panama. Most of these people were just traveling through, but a sizable minority settled in Panama, mainly to establish businesses in Panama City and Cologne. And these businesses just serviced white people who are on their way to strike it rich in California. So you get all these white people traveling through Panama to get to California to dig for gold near San Francisco. And you also get a whole bunch of white people who settle in Panama because they're like, it seems like everyone's going to die panning for gold. And it's better to just take their money before they make it to the West Coast, which is the smart play, right? Those are the people who

really made bank off of the Gold Rush. Now, since the US had just won a nasty little colonial war in Mexico and taken a third of the country for the United States, most of the whites who settled in Panama did so assuming that it was going to be a part of the United States. At this point in time, a lot of Americans are like, well, of course, we're going to own all of Central and South America at some point. They're connected to us. Why wouldn't they be our property? Which, yeah, you know, yeah. Manifest, destiny goes south. That was the goal. I mean, there was a lot of talk even in like the early stages of the Civil War among the Confederacy about like, once we once we beat the Union, why wouldn't we go down and take? Yeah, let's get Cuba. Let's get Mexico. Let's take it all,

baby. It was, you know, we don't talk so much about that anymore. So yeah, all of these Americans who moved to Panama to make money off of 49ers are like, eventually this will be like the the I don't know at this point on what that one would have been like the 30th state or something. But they were sure it was going to be a state. Now, at around this time, the Pacific Mail steamship company inked to deal with the Colombian government to build a railroad through the region. And the goal of this was to speed up the journey from East Coast to West Coast. And I'm going to quote now from a wonderful book titled, Imperers in the Jungle about the United States relationship with Panama. The company imported workers from China, Ireland and elsewhere for the job. But most workers

were blacks from Jamaica or Cartagena. The imported workers gave rise in 1853 and 1855 to epidemics of yellow fever, which previously had been rare, exploited sick and full of despair. Hundreds of Chinese workers and their families killed themselves in Moss in 1854. More than 6000 laborers, perhaps twice that many died in the railroad's construction. Completed in 1855, the railroad allowed passengers to cross the isthmus and leave Panama more quickly in three hours instead of three days required by muller boat, charging $25 in gold per passenger. And with 40,000 passages annually, the railroad was a cash flow for its New York owners and netted more than seven million in its first six years of operation. So this is the kind of thing like I heard as a

kid that we built a railroad for Panama. You never hear about like the human cost. Like one of the things is there used to be a sizable Chinese population in Panama, but they committed mass suicide because of how miserable the work was. It's just like that didn't make it into the history books that I that I came across as a kid. Probably should have. So the fact that two, nine, eleven's worth of laborers and maybe more died making the railroad. We also, I mean, that was every railroad. They were just like, they were just like built in blood and bones. It's pretty cool stuff, railroads. Anyway, so the human shrapnel from this railroad through Panama didn't stop at just like the mass of death toll that was made to build it. Because when they

built the railroad, there had been this whole industry in Panama, writing white people across the country for three days or so to get them to the port on the west coast of Panama. And that industry dies. So all of the money that used to be going to Panamanians is now going to this U.S. owned railroad. So instead of flowing into the country, it flows to New York where you live. Yeah. So it's basically a cycle where it's just like it's a it's a reinvestment cycle. Yeah. A reinvestment away from away from the place where the railroad actually exists to the United States. It's a siphoning of wealth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. So this is an absolute disaster. They invented neoliberalism. Yeah, they figured it out real early. Panama

was the test case. So yeah, it's it's kind of a fucking disaster for Panama. And an economic depression strikes the isthmus as soon as the railroad really like gets going. This leads to a simmering anti U.S. sentiment, which was stoked by news that bastards pod alumni William Walker had recently conquered nearby Nicaragua and declared it a slave state. We did a couple episodes on him back in the day. But yeah, that he was like an American who conquered Nicaragua briefly in order to spread slavery there. So this really freaked out people in Panama because a ton of black slaves in Panama had been freed. Well, in Colombia had been freed in 1852. There were huge numbers of them in Panama to build the railroad, and they started to worry

that America was coming for them, right? We just got freed. This American just conquered Nicaragua to make slavery legal there. It's not far away from us. Clearly they're getting ready to take us over and re enslave us again. And all of these tensions boiled over in April 19th, 1856 into what came to be called the watermelon riot. The gist of the story was that a drunken man named John Oliver, and I'm pretty sure it's a different John Oliver than the guy who has a TV show. So television's darling John Oliver was on his way to California in 1856, waiting at a train station in Cologne, and he decided he wanted some watermelon. So he walks over to a fruit stand and because he's wasted, he just steals it. Now the fruit stands owned by a guy named Jose Manuel

Luna. And Luna gets angry that John Oliver NBC's darling has just walked off and stolen water. Is it HBO? They're the same thing. They are, but they're not. They're not at all. I'm sorry. So John Oliver with his big Hollywood salary steals some fucking watermelon. And this guy, Luna gets really angry. And he chases after him being like, what the fuck, dude? You make millions of dollars a year. John Oliver pulls a gun on him. Luna pulls a knife in return, which takes some balls for someone to pull a gun on you and you just pull a knife right back. That's a move. And thankfully, there's a lot of panamanians around. It's a crowded market area. And as soon as John Oliver pulls a gun, another man pulls, like grabs the gun away from Oliver and takes it

from him. And it fires in the process of this, but it doesn't injure anyone. So John Oliver runs like hell. But word of the theft in the confrontation spreads quickly and everybody's already angry at the United States here. So this kind of sparks a mob and the mob heads to the train station protesting the U.S. in general and protesting American travelers in particular. They assault people along the way and they loot travelers' luggage. By the time the violence dies down, 16 passengers had been killed and another 16 had been injured. And one or two locals were also killed and just like the general melee that breaks out. So yeah, they kill a bunch of people. This causes an uproar in the United States. Yeah, this is a country that was founded

basically on like they massacred nine people in Boston. Time to start a war. Yeah, it doesn't take much. I mean, and it's, you know, obviously America has changed since then because now we're still in massacred nine people in Boston. We wouldn't do anything. You know, it's just Boston, right? It's not like, I don't know, Pittsburgh. Shout out to Pittsburgh. So yeah, we're a different country then and we get angry over this, but we don't go to war because again, America is a lot chiller in these days. We do, however, demand reparations from Columbia, which is broadly reasonable. 16 citizens get murdered in a riot. You kind of sparked the riot by being shitty, but it's not unreasonable to be like, Hey, you should give us some money because

a bunch of our people got killed better than going to war. So at this point, the United States is old US is getting a better grade than I think new US would have gotten because if 16 Americans got killed in Panama today, well, we will talk about what happens when one American gets killed in Panama in 1989. So the next couple commenced five months later. So they pay off the United States and we chill out. The next couple happens five months later due to internal unrest that started in the Panamanian General Assembly. The blacks, which were Panama's opposition party, threatened to take up arms over a political dispute. William Mervin, commanding the US Pacific Squadron, landed troops in Panama under the ages of protecting US citizens who lived in Panama

from unrest. The whole situation ended uneventfully, but Mervin unwittingly established a pattern that would repeat itself more than a dozen times up to 1989. In fact, the United States intervened militarily on at least a dozen occasions in Panama just during the later half of the night of the 1800s. So this guy, Mervin, he sends in US troops for the first time just to protect American citizens from unrest and local Panamanian politics. And that just keeps happening forever up until like literally the 1990s. In 1860, violence breaks out in the Panamanian legislature again. Black Panamanians take up arms against the government. US railway agent William Nelson writes worryingly to the US consul, the inwards are at the railroad bridge. And I fear that if they

get out of ammunition, they may come here to take our arms. Nelson begged the government to send in the Marines to protect the railroad. The Panamanian government also begged the US to send in the Marines. And again, a popular domestic political movement was clamped down on with the help of North American soldiers. So this is the first time that we actually send in troops to shut down like a popular uprising that's a local uprising. The blacks as a political party are heavily dominated by like Caribbean immigrants who are brought in to build the railroad. And they're agitating for better like treatment from the government. And because they're threatening the government, which is friendly to the United States, the US sends in Marines to crack some

skulls and stop them from, you know, protesting. This would again continue to happen. That's what the Marine Corps, that's the whole history of the Marine Corps. That Spedley Butler would agree with you. And he spends a lot of time in Panama. Yeah. So the civil war breaks out back in the United States. And after a year or two, it was pretty clear that to Abraham Lincoln that the United States wasn't going to get out of this thing without proclaiming, you know, some emancipation. Now, Abe was a bit of a racist himself. And he was still convinced that white people and black people could not coexist together in the same country. The only solution he could see was to find a big empty foreign land that he could ship

all of the United States as black people to. And this is how we got Liberia, as I think most people know. But Abe's first idea was actually Panama. See, it was filled with coal mines. And in Lincoln's head, this made it the perfect place to send freed slaves. And I'm going to quote again from Emperor's in the Jungle by John Lindsay Poland. Coal mines, he told a room full of free blacks in August 1862 will afford an opportunity to the inhabitants for immediate employment till they get ready to settle permanently in their homes. Columbia, however, saw the plan as a kind of subtle invasion. Central American countries were also opposed. And many free blacks in the United States greeted Lincoln's proposal with hostility. It was scrapped. So yeah, that was that was Abe's

first idea is like, you know, you know what these freed slaves are going to need to do? Coal mining. That'll make him happy. Fill the fill the mines up. Send him to Panama. Not a good time, bro. No, no. I mean, it counted as woke for the day. Because he did think they should be able to earn money. So I guess I mean, fair, but for fuck's sake, good on good on you. Wow. No, it's bad. No. So the Civil War ends. And yeah, I mean, everybody's like it's it's it's the drill tweet right there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, with Abraham Lincoln taking the role of ISIS. So the Civil War ends and, you know, pretty pretty much the best case scenario if you're going to have a civil war, the worst people don't win. But then comes

reconstruction, which is pretty much the worst case scenario. The US never gives up on its dream of a Panama Canal controlled controlled for the profit of the United States. But for a while, devastated by war, it had no ability to pursue that goal. So France steps in because France, you know, they're doing a lot better at this point. And they do have the ability to go into Panama and try to make a canal of their own. And they have experience in colonies. Yeah, they've got they've got a lot more experience in colonies. They've got a better navy at this point. They're really good at imperialism in these days. But you know what they're bad at, Chelsea? Building a fucking canal. Yeah.

And it's not the only it's not the only canal that they failed at building. No, no, this might be the worst failure of canal building, probably that anyone has. Yeah, second to the Suez Canal. Second. Well, we'll see that they finished the Suez Canal, though, right? I don't think the French did. Oh, yeah, you're right. This is the same story because the I think the British had to fit. Yeah, France has a proud history of fucking up canals, getting thousands of people killed and then someone else finishes it. Well, here's another story of that. I'm going to quote from a write up by Thomas Leidenberg of the University of Houston. In the 1870s, a brilliant French engineer by the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps was put in

charge of a project to replace the railroad link connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific with a sea level canal. De Lesseps won worldwide acclaim for completing the Suez Canal and he fervently believed that he was the best man to meet the new challenge. Paying scant attention to reports by the American Army engineers that the obstacles in the mountains and jungles of Panama were too numerous. The great engineer determined to build a sea level canal like the one at Suez. De Lesseps attempted canal building in Panama was a disaster from the beginning to end. Malaria and Yellow Fever carried away the lives of French engineers, their families, and the hapless workers who took part in the project. Altogether, 20,000 people died in the

eight years, including the best young engineers graduating from French universities. Nature itself conspired against the French canal builders. Within hours, slippery soil filled up with holes which had taken days to dig. Machines rusted in the rain and broke under heavy loads. The River Chagra rose up more than its normal 40 feet and even wiped out the railroad tracks built above it 30 years earlier. De Lesseps was forced to give up on his projected sea level canal after eight torturous years. By this time, it had already cost twice the original estimate of 131 million dollars. With less than one-third of the canal completed, the famous canal company declared bankruptcy. De Lesseps and the company's directors had lied about or covered up the many factors that

plagued the canal's progress. Its costs, the deaths, caverns, malaria, broken machinery, and the pickled corpses sent to French medical schools to help pay the bills. Yeah, they sent the corpses of the people who died building the canal to medical schools. Yeah, pickled them and mailed them over. I thought you used the word pickled. I wasn't 100% sure. Yeah, all of like France's young engineers die and they just pickled the corpses and send them to medical schools because they're trying to make ends meet. It's so expensive. The thing that's most valuable about the canal winds up being the corpses of the men who try to build it. It's pretty great. The corpses, the pickles. Yeah, what are you going to do? How are you going to preserve a corpse

in 1870? I don't know. I just don't like the word when you're talking about like a human no pickle. I mean, they didn't have refrigeration yet. No, they did not. They have pickles though. They have a lot of pickles. Oh, Robert, I don't like that. Those are your options back in the day. So this like almost leads to the collapse of the French government because it was such a big project that basically everyone in French society of any position of power was involved, not just like politicians, but journalists and editors of newspapers and business leaders. All of these guys have been bribed by members of the canal company in order to provide positive coverage and in order to like get the government on board. And when this thing fails so disastrously,

it like almost collapses the French government. It's hard to exaggerate how big of a fuck up this canal is. It fucking rules, in other words. It's a very fun story. Minus the pickled part? That's the best part of it. That's literally not the best part of it. You know, you've really succeeded in building a canal when the corpses of the men who worked on it are the most valuable part of it. That's just awesome to me. Robert, well, you know what the most valuable part of our podcast is? Are we selling pickled corpses, Sophie? We are absolutely not selling pickled corpses. I don't think you can guarantee that. I can guarantee we're not selling pickled corpses. I mean, look, who knows what ad is going to come on after this? I'm sure the French

don't have a couple of barrels. Please don't be a bravillian. Raytheon? I mean, that could be a new... Raytheon makes a lot of corpses. You're leaving money on the table by not pickling them. Let's just see what the ads happen to be. Okay. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who

found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. We're back and Chelsea just finished doing a little on the spot research while y'all were hearing all those wonderful ads for pickled corpses on the Suez Canal because we were talking out of our rears a little bit there. Although it's a nice... Anyway, Chelsea, why don't you throw out

what you found? I found that the French did maintain control of the Suez Canal for at least a few years, but it basically had enormous difficulties and was a financial and economic sort of disaster for a few years. I just wanted to double check that because I was like, I'm pretty sure it didn't end up well for the French either there. Do you know what the death toll on the Suez Canal was? No, I don't. I don't have that on front of me. I'm curious. It must have been astronomical because it's basically a desert. It's not like you have equatorial rains constantly. Holy shit. I just looked it up. 120,000. Wow. Yeah, it didn't work out pretty well. Yeah, 120,000 deaths among 1.5 million workers. Jesus Christ. Yeah, canals are brutal.

Yeah, that's so many dead people. That's like a war. I don't know. So I guess we're really having trouble when we're trying to determine which canal is more of a fuck up because way more people died on the Suez Canal, but at least they got a canal out of the deal. Oh boy. I mean, but maintaining control of it seems to be an issue. Yeah, that was also a problem for them. Good God Almighty. Don't build canals is the message I'm taking out of this history. Yeah, just refurbish the existing ones endlessly. Leave the land where it is. Dredge them. Don't build them. Sail around fucking wherever. Just stop this. It's a terrible idea. It doesn't. It's bad. Don't build canals. That's going to be my only motto now. So French

efforts in Panama end in disaster and the US government was still really... So the French obviously failed to make this canal and even though they fail, their efforts there really worry the United States because we assumed that like, OK, France didn't make it happen this time, but one of these fucking Europeans is going to figure out how to make a canal and then they're going to be making all that sweet canal money and we in the US are going to be left to sit and spin. And this is the era of the Monroe Doctrine when President Monroe had been like, all of Latin America is basically our backyard. And if Europe fucks around there, then we'll come we'll come beat them up. And it was not like a, we want to protect Latin America thing. It was a,

we want to profit off of Latin America. You guys, you guys steal Africa. And President Rutherford Hayes, after French failure in the canal, warned Europe that when it came to Panama, the policy of this country is a canal under American control. Now, obviously, Panamanians were not consulted in this declaration, but Rutherford Hayes didn't really care what they thought. He was trying to scare Europe away from building a canal. And to this end, he warned them that if they did succeed in building a canal there and local unrest threatened their control of it, they would have to send in their Navy and their soldiers. And since this would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States would get involved to fight Europeans

trying to regain control of the canal. So a little bit of, I don't know, pre-gunboat diplomacy there. And right around the same time, the United States is like the 1880s, 1870s, 1880s, the United States sends in a flotilla of ships to scout out the area around the Panamanian isthmus. And this is so that the United States can start making plans to construct a canal of their own. Again, the Colombian government was not consulted. Neither was anyone in Panama. We just send some boats over to scout shit out. And the president gives the ship's captains orders to open fire on any local boats that try to stop them. This pisses off the Colombian government's representative in Washington, D.C. And he complained in writing, when governments attempt to acquire land in foreign countries

for construction or enterprises such as that under discussion, they normally begin by obtaining the consent of the sovereign of the country in which the land is located, which is a fair point. But the United States is not going to do that in the mid 1880s. This piece of metal right here is sovereign. Yeah, we have we have cannons. The last argument of kings. Yeah, it is the cannon. And it also is the last argument of people who don't really care if you have a king because yeah, we got democracy guns, baby. They're better than your king guns. I don't know. Anyway, in the mid 1880s, Columbia was convulsed by a civil war with between the conservative government and an insurgent liberal army. The rebel leader, a guy named Preston,

was ordered ordered a shipload of weapons from the United States. And we sold them to him. But when the shipment arrived in Central America, the US customs clerk refused to release them at the pressuring of Columbia's right wing government. This provokes a riot and Preston briefly took US citizen hostage to try to get his guns released. The US Marines were sent into Panama again, and the resulting situation degenerated into a war riot. Some rioters looted property owned by the French Canal Company, who asked and received the help of US Marines to round up and execute looters. The New York Times reported at the time, 58 persons among whom it is believed were several innocent people were thus summarily dispatched. Just good solid report. They were probably innocent,

but, you know, we shot. Summary execution. Yeah. I mean, there's so much that's in that that is just classic United States right up to today. Like, oh, there's this rebel and he wants guns. We'll sell them to him, but then we won't let him take them because he's going to fight against the government that that we broadly support because they acquiesce to our needs. Yeah, it's it's it's the it's the equivalent of the military-age male today. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's fucking around Contra shit. Yeah. I mean, it's everything. It's everything American in one perfect little package. We're just always been the irrepressible little scamp that we are today. So the war turned against the rebels and in March, they fled the city of Cologne, leaving it burning behind them.

The fires tore through Panama's largest city, leaving thousands of mostly Black Panamanians homeless and launching a refugee crisis. The United States Secretary of the Navy saw this all as a great opportunity to make the case that the U.S. Navy deserved a bigger role in Latin America and thus more money. He dispatched ships to Colombia to apprehend the rebel leader. He also sent in Marines to protect the railroad and U.S. property from unrest. The Commodore in charge of all this was given special orders to involve the press and give them all of the access they wanted so that Navy could keep the country with us in the matter. The guy, the Commodore was also ordered to scout out good potential sites for new Navy bases.

No attempt was taken to help refugees or to eliminate or to alleviate the crisis. No humanitarian aid was dispensed, but the Civil War led to the start of what would become a century-long U.S. Navy presence on the Panamanian isthmus. Now, this should make it clear that from the beginning, the only value Panama held to the United States government and military was due to its location. The people who actually lived there were an afterthought at best. And I meant it when I said at best, because when U.S. officials spent time thinking about Panamanians, they tended to get really fucking racist about it. Here's how the New York Herald wrote about Panamanians in this period. I'm going to try to put on my old-timey voice, my old-timey racist voice. Oh, it's a

very reliable newspaper, too, because it's the fake zoo incident, I think was the New York Herald. Wait, what was the fake zoo incident? Oh, it's an interesting, like, do your thing, do your bit first while I go grab this. Okay, so here's the New York Herald writing about Panamanians. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the isthmus have never emerged from a half-savage condition, or else have relapsed into that state. But no one can afford to underestimate the prowess of the savages when they are mustered in swarms, as they can be here from the miserable morass and the jungle-clothed mountains. That's some good racist prose right there. Yeah, so this is coming from the same newspaper that did the fake zoo incident. Yeah, so apparently there was a awful calamity,

was like the headline on November 9th, 1874. Oh, right around the same time. Yeah, the Herald filled this entire front page news to an account of an escape from the Central Park Zoo by basically like a herd of animals, like tigers, bears, and that 12 of the wild carnivorous beasts are still at large, the Herald warned, and left in a very tiny little bit of small print and said that all of this sounds true, but it's not. Wait, what? They just wrote a fake article and said that it's not true, by the way, heads up. This was a joke. Yeah, amazing. Just a little bit of light liable. It's history like that that makes you proud to be a journalist. Just lying about a zoo breakout for nothing. Oh, God, that's good. That's good. It really serves to point out how

respectable journalism has always been as a discipline. It just makes my heart swell. Pamphletier was the original Twitter. Yeah, I mean, there's actually a lot to say about how the old kind of like, and this is in Europe too, like the network of pamphlets and newsletters and stuff that were just like these cheap little kind of mimeographed things printed out. We're like what 8chan became today, right? It's where all of your anti-Semitic conspiracy theories would, this is actually happening in this period of time, 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. This is like the spread of all of the toxic shit that we have today that goes through Twitter and Parler and stuff like that. It was spreading in these little shitty pamphlets and these yellow press magazines and

stuff like the New York Herald, you know? It's cool, I guess, is what I'm saying. This has been a problem we've had forever. It's pre-industrial Twitter, and then you have like the industrial area era of like circulated newspapers, widely circulated newspapers, and now we're going back, you know, from mass media to a decentralized platform. Anyway. Well, I want to dig into this a little because part of why this is a good comparison to make is that the purpose of all of the racist propaganda spreading in places like Parler and Twitter right now is to build up a kind of xenophobic and explicitly kind of exterminationist far right. And the purpose of all of the racism that like U.S. newspapers were writing about Panamanians

in the 1880s and 90s was to justify the U.S. taking over the country to build a canal. These people are savages, they're monsters, and they have this, they don't deserve this valuable land. We have to take it from them because they're too incompetent and dangerous to manage it themselves. It is, it's the same basic process, right? It's the same thing as scaring people about Mexican immigrants in order to, you know, distract from the damage that neoliberal capitalism is doing from the working class and blame it on immigrants and stuff like it is or a fake, or a fake, you know, Central Park Zoo escape or a fake Central Park Zoo escape, which I guess has less of a political purpose to it. I think it did, but I don't want to, I don't want to dig

into that. Yeah, I'm sure there was some bizarre, bizarre racist underpinning of that whole story. Anyway, so yeah, all of these interventions by U.S. soldiers had been firmly one-sided affairs up until this point through the 1880s. The U.S. would either gun down or capture and execute people with very little resistance. And this didn't look good in the media, right? Nobody, nobody wants to see their soldiers as just shooting a bunch of defenseless people protesting for better living conditions. So the American media made sure to build a narrative of Panamanian natives as terrifying, violent monsters. Irving King of the New York Tribune wrote that the people of Panama were, quote, to all intents and purposes, savages. The Isthmian,

the Isthmian Indians are an expert in a kind of savage warfare and are always aided by a mob of Negroes. Some bad stuff. Cringe, Pete Cringe. Yeah, King was an expert propagandist for U.S. interest. And while the locals were slavering beasts in his articles, U.S. soldiers were described as having captured the place as if by magic. Their neat and clean appearance and quick and precise movements elicited the admiration and respect of men of all nations, even that of those who are most opposed to the proceeding. I think about, like, when Trump shot missiles at Syria and that, was it an NBC anchor? Was, like, talking about the beauty of our weapons? Yeah, it's this constant need to, like, contrast U.S. military intervention as, like,

shining and clean and precise to the violent savages that we're deploying our weapons against. It's, again, something that has now not changed in a hundred and, what, 40 years? 50? Something like that? It's rad. Yep. So a lot of powerful, rich, white North Americans had a vested interest in getting and keeping other Americans, U.S. citizens, interested in Panama. Obviously, a Panama Canal would have both military and economic benefits, but those were not the only reasons for such a venture. U.S. naval strategist Alfred Mayhem was one of the first to suggest building a canal in order to make it easier to people the U.S. West Coast with white Europeans. From John Lindsay Poland, quote, Mayhem, who strongly influenced the young Theodore Roosevelt,

believed that control of the sea determined the world's struggles for power and had done so throughout history. Mayhem's strategic thinking about the Panama Canal also had a racial dimension. A canal would allow Europeans to reach Oregon and California without even stepping off the coast en route, thus avoiding contact with savages in the western plains or along the Panama Railroad. The greatest factor of sea power in any region is the distribution and numbers of its population and their characteristics. Mayhem wrote in an essay about the canal two years before its completion, the foremost question of the Pacific, as affecting sea power, is the filling up of the now partly vacant regions, our own Pacific Coast, by a population of European derivation. It is most

desirable that such immigration should be from northern Europe. So a big part of why the Panama Canal, why there's such immediacy to it, is that in this period of time, it's actually easier in some cases for people from China, from Japan, from Asia, to migrate to the U.S. West Coast, or to the North American West Coast, because it's kind of a more direct route for them, because you got to go all the way through fucking Panama to get there from the East Coast. And that makes it harder for Europeans to fill up California, Oregon, and Washington. And so Mayhem and guys like Roosevelt start to think that we, in order to stop the Asiatic hordes from dominating the West Coast, we have to cut a hole through Panama. That's another major

factor in this. Asian immigration threatened political efficiency in Mayhem's view, because of the different ethnic people's ideas, quote, do not allow intermingling, and consequently, if admitted, are ominous of national weakness through flaws in homogeneity. Roosevelt shared Mayhem's thesis, no greater calamity could now befall the United States that they have the Pacific slope filled up with a Mongolian population. Peak cringe. Peak Roosevelt. I mean, he's this, it's, there's, there's two Roosevelt's in history. One of them is the Roosevelt you learn about when you're a 14 year old boy in the Boy Scouts,

who is rad. And like every young man who likes knives and the wilderness is hero, right? He and John, the rough writers and like hiking with John Muir and he's like exploring the Amazon and he is, you know, getting shot in the middle of a speech and getting malaria. Well, the Amazon does finally get it's like Latin America gets its revenge on Roosevelt in the end. But you, when you learn about him as a young, like as like, I'm literally holding a machete right now as the young kind of boy that I grew up, like you grew up idolizing Teddy Roosevelt. And then my adulthood, and I think a lot of people's adulthood is a long process of learning. Oh my God, he was one of the worst people who ever lived. Just a,

not just racist within a time of racism, but like an arch, an arch bigot of his day. Like it's so, so bad. And he's, he did split the vote and allowed somebody even worse to come into power. Yeah, he did. He did. He did. He fucked up in a lot of ways politically. He did also give us the national park system, which is, I mean, that's the thing about America. It's like with Eisenhower, where there's a lot of horrible stuff, including the military industrial complex that you can. But there's the interstate highway system. But we got the interstate. Yeah. It's very frustrating. Which is just a copy-paste job of the auto. Yeah. I mean, we will talk about the only US president that you can even sort of feel good about in this episode too.

Who's, who's the only US president who doesn't fuck over Panama? Jimmy, Jimmy Carter. I'm sure that's not a surprise to anybody. So Columbia had another civil war from 1899 to 1902. This one was again between liberal and conservative factions in the government. The liberals were particularly popular in rural areas among the peasantry. Before long, the war became a fight between the left-wing masses of peasants in the country and poor laborers on the left in Panama cities and wealthy conservative central conservatives who ran the central government of Columbia. Liberal troops gained control of most of Panama in 1901. And again, they're fighting against the government in Bogota at this point. And the government in

Bogota goes to the US to beg for help, taking advantage of the Bidlak Treaty, which again gives the US the right to use force to defend its railroads and the canal zone or the zone that they think will be the canal. So the Bidlak Treaty was just meant so the US could protect a future canal and protect the railroad that they have. Right. But as soon as Bogota calls in them for help, they use it to justify going into crackdown on a left-wing populist movement that's threatening to free Panama from Colombian control. Captain Thomas Perry and his gunboat, the Iowa, sail up and warn the liberal military leaders that he's going to send in the Marines if liberals interfere with the railroad. Because of how things were laid out geographically, this made it impossible for

the liberals to kick the central government out of the Isthmus and complete their victory because of where the railroads located. It basically lets the US Marines wall off government-controlled Panama from the regions that the liberals control. So they're forced to sign a peace settlement, which is written out under the watchful eye of US Navy officers. The treaty did not last though, and fighting started up literally a month later. The liberals quickly took again all of Panama, except for the big cities. And again, Columbia asked the United States to intervene. Marines were sent in to protect Cologne and Panama City. At this point, the US threw out the bid-like treaty entirely and started stationing troops on trains, saying that only US soldiers were

allowed to use the railways and basically acting as armed enforcers for the failed Colombian government. US intervention stopped a liberal victory, which would have led to Panama separating and establishing itself as an independent nation. By the end of the Civil War, which could have ended fairly quickly but was elongated by years due to the United States, Panama was completely fucking devastated and the Colombian government was broke. 60% of Panama's cattle were killed during the fighting. Thousands of civilians were turned into refugees. Agriculture broke down and the local economy shattered entirely. The only places that were left sort of intact were the cities, which were dominated by conservative elites, who had by this point learned well

that their continued comfort relied on pleasing the North Americans. Now, right, yeah, it's not great. Now, right before the start of the Colombian Civil War in 1898, the US had gone to war with Spain. This had been a fairly quick and easy victory, but there had been one major snack. The USA's most powerful battleship, the Oregon, had been docked in San Francisco. Now, the Oregon had never been used in war and obviously North American people were really excited to see how good the ship was going to be at killing foreigners, but it was far away and it took it weeks to actually get to Cuba and so it missed all of the fun fighting and stuff. And like the news as it's sailing, the news is breathlessly covering

how far the Oregon's made it because everybody's just got such a boner to see how this modern warship fucking kills people. And because the Oregon gets there so late, all of these pundits in the news are like, you know, if we had a canal in Panama, this 8,000 mile journey would have just been 4,000 miles and we could have watched this boat kill Spaniards. Really, wouldn't that have been nice? Priorities. So the fact that the Oregon takes so long to get into the fight is the last straw for hawks in the US defense establishment. With a canal in Panama, they argued, and this was actually like militarily is a good point, the same fleet would be able to protect both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, right? You don't need two fleets if you can

sail one around both sides. Now, when Teddy Roosevelt became president, he'd made that building a canal in Panama one of his top goals. That this canal would be in Panama was not yet a foregone conclusion, though. Many in Congress wanted to build through Nicaragua, which would be, you know, it would be a longer canal, but it would also probably be easier and safer to build because of Nicaraguan geography and stuff. Yeah. So enter the new Panama Canal Company, which was run by the same people who had managed the disastrous Fridge Canal project that could kill 20,000 people. One of these people was Philippe Bonovaria. He and one of his shareholders warned the United States to pick Panama because they'd gone to all that wanted the United States

to pick Panama because they'd gone to all the trouble of purchasing a canal's worth of land from the Colombian government. If they could sell it to the USA, it would mitigate the horrible financial losses they had suffered failing to build a canal for France. Thomas Leidenberg writes for the University of Houston, quote, by prior agreement, the new Panama Company had until December 31st, 1903, before the areas approved by the old canal company, as well as the construction machinery, railroad track, locomotives, and so forth, would be deeded to the Columbia. Then Columbia and not the new Panama Canal Company could sell these rights for which the new canal company was demanding $40 million from the United States. Congressmen serving on a committee to

inspect the sites where the canal might be built were invited to talk with officials in France, where they were entertained lavishly and presented with the French perspective on the doomed canal project for five weeks. Then their French hosts brought the congressmen to Panama, where canal company officials showed them only what the company wanted them to see. As luck would have it, a volcano in Nicaragua erupted in 1902 for the first time in 68 years. Yeah. And Bueno Varia quickly made postage stamps as a reminder of the eruption and sent them to members of Congress. Not surprisingly, Congress selected the Panama route. Jesus Christ. It's a really convenient volcano eruption. A historically significant natural occurrence.

Yeah. This is why the Panama Canal is not in Nicaragua. Well, also would have been the Nicaraguan Canal. But yeah. And of course, Bueno Varia, being a smart guy, is like, oh yeah, we got to remind them of how dangerous Nicaragua is. Can't build a canal there. It'll get volcanoed. So obviously, the whole situation was not quite as simple as Bueno Varia made it out to be, though. For one thing, the French were selling land, they didn't have the right to sell. Because under their agreement with Colombia, that land was supposed to revert to Colombian control and all of the equipment pretty soon. And they also legally did not have the right to sell that land to a foreign power,

because it was not their land. Obviously, the United States did not care about this. Yeah, I was going to say America doesn't give a shit. No, we do not give one solitary fuck about what Colombia's contract with the French says. Yeah. And obviously, so the government in Bogota is really unhappy with the fact that the US is talking with the French like this. But their effective count, like they can't really counter this because Bogota is kind of in the middle of nowhere, right? In this period of time, they don't have reliable telegraph connections. It takes other representatives a while to get messages anywhere. And when they eventually get in touch with the US government

and let them know that they don't agree to the purchase, Washington said, like by the time Colombia is able to get a message out that like, hey, the French don't have the right to sell you this stuff. Negotiations have already progressed. Now, the US does try to make a deal with Bogota. They're like, what if we give you 10 million of the 40 million that we're going to give to the French and a quarter of a million dollars a year in rent? So we send this offer back to Bogota. And there's no response for what Teddy Roosevelt considers to be an unacceptable length of time. The president starts to get afraid that they're going to have to be forced to go back and pick Nicaragua after all. And angry, Teddy gets racist at a staff meeting yelling. This is like,

like so America right now. It's not. Yeah. Peak United States. Peak USA right now. And again, peak Teddy, those contemptible little creatures in Bogota ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future. I'm sorry, contemptible little creatures. That's so this is so this is the this is the this is the dawn of the the big stick of the yeah, he is about to use his big stick. Yeah. Yeah. And he doesn't speak softly either. That always goes together in the quote, but he's a pretty loud guy. Yeah. You know who does speak softly while carrying a big stick, a big stick that they will sell you for a reasonable price. Raytheon. Oh God, I knew it was coming. Raytheon does speak softly. You rarely hear statements

from the Raytheon Corporation. They prefer to speak through their missiles that are made out of knives. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of

guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down

on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're... Thank you for that, Chelsea. I was out of breath from yelling products still. So the reality of the situation, so obviously like the US is like trying to at least kind of sort of do the right thing when Columbia points out that the French don't have the right to sell this caliber. Okay, we'll pay you a quarter of what we were going to pay the French company and

they send this out and they don't get a response for a long time. And part of the reason why the response is delayed is the fault of a lawyer for the French company, Cromwell, who is deliberately trying to gum things up in order to make the Americans angry at the Colombians. And one of the things he wants to avoid because he's getting a cut of what the French company makes, he doesn't want the company to part with any of the 40 million dollars they're being paid by the Americans. So he doesn't want the Colombian government to get paid off. And he both like kind of jams up the works within the Colombian government. And he has several meetings in Rose with Roosevelt where he tries to convince him basically that, hey, you know, the Panamanians don't even want to be a part

of Colombia. And if Panama is an independent country, this whole process of negotiation is going to be a lot easier. He also pays like journalists in the United States to write articles on this same like in this same line. He bribes the New York world to put out an article because he knows that Teddy reads the New York world. And the article announces, the state of Panama stands ready to secede from Colombia and enter into a canal treaty with the United States. So the final straw comes in late 1903, when the Colombian government rejects the US offer and demands more money in exchange for the canal. The Colombian government is very reasonably like, why is a French company getting three quarters of the money you're paying for this canal when it's our

fucking land and they don't have the right to sell it to you. And this really pisses off Roosevelt because he doesn't want any delay. He calls the Colombian people jack rabbits and a corrupt Pythagorean community undeserving of the rights and privileges enjoyed by Europeans. And this causes Teddy Roosevelt to give the green light for a US backed separatist coup in Panama. Now, Roosevelt and his cronies had been chatting for a while about how much easier this whole business would be if Panama were its own country conveniently dominated by the United States. And obviously Cromwell had stoked these conversations. No one seemed to think it was ironic that the United States had just intervened repeatedly in a civil war to stop Panama from separating from Colombia.

Now, though, the United States supported Panamanian independence from a write up by the BBC quote, there was indeed an independence movement in Panama centered around the American owned railroad between Cologne and Panama City. This also happened to be represented by Cromwell. And it was Cromwell who sent a man he believed to be one of Panama's conspirators, Gabriel de Boch, to see Hey, who was like the Secretary of State at the time. During that meeting, Hey claimed that if revolutionaries were to seize power in Panama, the United States could stop Colombian troops from intervening under the guise of protecting the railway. And again, this is like the Bidlak Treaty. Unfortunately for Cromwell, de Boch reported everything to the Colombian legation.

Double crossed, exposed and unnerved, Cromwell disowned the genuine Panamanian rebel he had also been dealing with, Manuel Amador Guerrero. But Amador was quickly taken up by Buen Ovarilla, who sent him back to Panama with a revolution kit, a proclamation of independence, draft constitution, a homemade flag and a promise of $100,000 to underwrite the new government. It was quite by chance, the Frenchman later insisted, that he bumped into the US Secretary of the Navy while strolling around Washington, who told him that an American gunboat was on its way to Cologne. Buen Ovarilla sent Amador and his accomplices a coded cable giving them the news, which convinced them of American support for their revolution. So a lot is happening here. But just if it is, the French find a

Panamanian rebel, give him a flag that they made themselves, a constitution that they made themselves and $100,000 and say, go start a revolution, we'll take care of the rest. And then the same French representative of the canal company goes to the US Secretary of the Navy and is like, will you shoot the Colombians if they try to stop this? And the Secretary of the Navy is like, yeah, why the fuck not? Yeah, let's go. It's rad. So the Panamanian... You're on our side now. So now everyone's fine with an independent Panama. And that is what happens. The Panamanian rebels use the money the US had given them to bribe the Colombian military in Panama. And on November 3rd, 1903, Panama declares its independence. More US money

and silver coins was handed out to hundreds of Colombian soldiers who'd all been bribed to go along with it. Amador gave an Independence Day speech where he declared, the world is astounded at our heroism. Yesterday we were slaves of Colombia. Today we are free. Long live President Roosevelt. Oh, didn't age well. No, did not age well. Yeah, free would be a little bit much to state about the status of Panamanians in the new order of things. I didn't like that very much. So the US State Department recognizes Panama as an independent nation several hours after the declaration. The press who weren't very corrupt all attacked Teddy Roosevelt for this, pointing out that basically he had stolen Panama from Colombia and blatantly violated US treaties with

Colombia. Now the New York Times called it an act of sordid conquest. Roosevelt responded by pointing out that no US troops or ships had been in Panama City when it was taken. So how could this be an act of conquest? Roosevelt told Congress that the people of Panama rose literally as one man. A senator responded, the one man was Roosevelt. That's a good, that's a good one. That's a solid Congressing guy. So Roosevelt immediately authorized the negotiation of a new canal treaty with the new government of Panama. The negotiation was handed by Buenaviria, who had been permitted by the new government to discuss arrangements with the US. So the new Panamanian government says to Buenaviria, who is the guy who had told the people who became the new Panamanian government

to start a revolution, they're like, you can start negotiations with the United States. But he had not been approved to actually sign a treaty or conclude negotiations. Buenaviria ignored this. He and the United States decided that actual Panamanians were still not a necessary part of the negotiations. They concluded a treaty which was ratified by the new Panamanian government after Teddy Roosevelt threatened to let Colombia invade if they didn't ratify it. No Panamanians actually signed the treaty, giving the US the right to build a Panama canal. Hey, it sounds like how foreign policies worked for the last, basically the 20th century. Yeah. I mean, this is, we're definitely like Teddy is establishing a lot of how US foreign relations and interventions will work

for more than a century afterwards. It's pretty great. Now under the treaty, the United States was given control and sovereignty over territory, including and around the canal zone. And it was supposed to be in perpetuity, right? So basically forever, we get this territory. Roosevelt was over the moon with the deal, but he had no trouble justifying the blatant and shameless contempt for a people's right to self-determination. He said, quote, reasons of convenience have been superseded by reasons of vital necessity, which do not admit acts of infinite delays. If ever a government could be said to have received a mandate from civilization, the United States holds that position with regard to the inter-oceanic canal. So yeah, we stole this land from Panama.

Yeah, we didn't ask them or like, and we violated our principles of democracy. But divine right. Divine right. Not just divine right. All of civilization demands that we make this canal and then it be us the profit from it, right? Of course, the United States was not building a canal in Panama purely for the good of civilization. We were doing it for profit, for military advantage and to extend the white race across the west coast of North America. The agreement Washington and Panama side was heavily influenced by the fact that the Isthmus had been devastated by war and that Panama's continued existence was contingent upon US goodwill. In their new constitution, Panama was officially a protectorate of the United States, who had the power to

intervene militarily, quote, in any part of the Republic of Panama to reestablish public peace and constitutional order in the event of their being disturbed. So we take the bid-lack treaty and we just extended it to, now that we're building a canal, we can send our soldiers anywhere in Panama for any reason. That's rad. US efforts in Panama started with the removal of nearly 100 million cubic yards of soil, which were dumped just sort of wherever. 423 square kilometers had to be flooded for the project, which led to the creation of Gatton Lake. This required the displacement of thousands of Panamanians who had previously lived in the territory were digging up. Many of these people were made homeless by the early stages of the

construction product. And of course, they were not paying anything for this. We just forced them off of their land and destroyed their homes. The creation of Gatton Lake, though, created a problem for the white occupiers. Mosquitoes breed in water and Gatton Lake was basically a giant puddle of still water and mosquitoes bred like crazy in it. Oh, wow. I see it. Yeah. It's a bad idea. It was not a great call for us. So soon, all of the white people that we had sent to Panama to build this canal started dropping like flies because we basically built a giant mosquito incubator. Many of the workers who died, of course, were black Africans, but that was not what concerned anyone in the United States.

It was the death of white workers that was really a problem. This was a part of the problem because the US plans in Panama, this was not like a normal colonial venture, right? This was not just about resource extraction. It was not a situation of like, yeah, we're going to lose some white people, but eventually we'll get all of the good stuff out of there and we can just abandon it. The canal is always going to be valuable. So you need to have a population of white people there to maintain it. And that meant that Panama would need to be made safe for white people to live in. And that meant that essentially what was going to follow was a war on biology itself on behalf of the white race because like all of these tropical diseases

needed to be eradicated. John Lindsay Poland describes it as the transformation of the canal zone to make it biologically safe for white men. And in part two, Chelsea, that's what we're going to talk about. Oh, wow. Yeah. This is going in a fascinating direction that I'm not familiar with. The sort of like bio, the sort of like terraforming of the region or the attempt to terraform. Yeah. This is like a terraforming project. And spoilers were bad. We do everything wrong. Yeah. Which is probably why I don't know much about it. No. Yeah. It's very funny. But we'll have to wait until Thursday for that. Until Thursday, Chelsea, people find you on the interwebs.net.com. You have socials to plug. You got plugables. Oh, I have socials? What?

Yeah. So I, yeah. So I have a Twitter account. I have X, Y, Chelsea on Twitter. I am also X, Y, Chelsea 87 on Twitch. I do Twitch streams, mostly video games and a little bit of some text of some tech related stuff. So yeah, you know, I just play video games and chat about technology. So check Chelsea out there and check out Panama when there's not a fight or not. I mean, I don't know. I assume they have a hybrid tourist industry that's been suffering from this. This food is awesome for sure. Their food's great. Just mail the money. We really owe Panama. We fucked them up pretty bad. So send money to Panama. Just stick it in the mail, write Panama on an envelope and send them $40. Yep. Hell yeah. Yep. Let's go.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.