Panama breaks from Colombia; an American warship sits off Colón
More than nine months after Colombia's Senate rejected the Hay-Herrán canal treaty, Panamanian separatists in Panama City proclaimed an independent Republic of Panama on November 3, 1903. The Municipal Council confirmed the new republic, and a provisional junta took shape behind it. The USS Nashville had landed at Colón the day before, and the Colombian generals who might have crushed the revolt had been steered away from their troops. That night the Colombian gunboat Bogotá shelled Panama City, and Wong Kong Yee was mortally wounded.
Washington never fired a shot at Panama, yet Theodore Roosevelt's navy decided the outcome. The episode became the standard American example of gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, and it gave the United States the land for the Panama Canal. Roosevelt later boasted about it, and historians still dispute it.
QWho arranged the train ride that kept two Colombian generals away from their troops?
María de la Ossa, the wife of independence leader Manuel Amador Guerrero, organized it. She devised the plan, and Amador enlisted two Panama Railway officials, Herbert G. Prescott and James Shaler, who persuaded Generals Tovar and Amaya to travel to Panama City on a railway train, leaving their soldiers behind in Colón. The generals' separation from their men was the hinge of the whole revolt, because Colombian troops without their generals lacked the commanders who might have ordered an attack. The plan needed a railway schedule and a few trusted hosts, not a battalion of rebels. The Panama Railway, the same line the Nashville's landing was meant to protect, supplied the trap.
QWhy did Bogotá hear that Panama was gone three days after it happened?
Trouble with the submarine cables delayed the news, and it did not reach Bogotá until November 6, 1903. By then Panama City had a junta, the Colombian generals had been arrested, and the United States was extending its first, unofficial recognition that same day. Colombia did not accept the loss for years. It formally recognized Panamanian independence in 1909, after receiving a payment of $500,000 from Panama. A government that could not telegraph its own province in time to react was in no position to send an army back across the isthmus.
QHow did American newspapers react when they learned what Roosevelt's Navy had done?
Several attacked it. The New York Times called the American support for the Panamanian plot an "act of sordid conquest," and the New York Evening Post labeled the affair a "vulgar and mercenary venture." Both papers were describing a policy their own government had pursued with the Navy. The criticism had no effect on the outcome. Recognition had been given and the treaty signed. The editorials opened a dispute over the episode that continues today.
