ReThink History: Panama: Crossroads of Empires

Episodes

1. Ep 1 — Panama Before Columbus: The Land Bridge That Changed the World

   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.

2. Ep 2 — Balboa and the Pacific, 1513: The Stowaway Who Redrew the World Map

   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.

3. Ep 3 — The Jungle Mule Trail That Bankrolled the Spanish Empire

   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.

4. Ep 4 — Pirates and the Scottish Fiasco: How Panama Broke a Kingdom

   Twice in thirty years, the Isthmus of Panama destroyed those who reached for it.

5. Ep 5 — Independence and Bolívar's Dream: Panama Left Spain Without a Shot

   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.

6. Ep 6 — The Gold Rush Express: Panama's Deadliest Shortcut and the Color Line

   Gold was found in California in 1848, and suddenly the fastest way across America ran through fifty miles of Panamanian jungle.

7. Ep 7 — The French Panama Canal: How the Hero of Suez Buried 22,000 People

   Ferdinand de Lesseps had cut the Suez Canal and become the most celebrated engineer-promoter on Earth.

8. Ep 8 — How the U.S. Manufactured Panama in 1903 — a Treaty No Panamanian Signed

   By 1903 Theodore Roosevelt wanted a canal across Panama — and Colombia, which owned Panama, had just refused to sell him the right.

9. Ep 9 — Conquering the Jungle: How a Doctor Nobody Believed Won the Panama Canal

   The French were destroyed by Panama's jungle.

10. Ep 10 — The Panama Canal Opens: World War One and the Gold vs. Silver Color Line

    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.

11. Ep 11 — The Canal Zone: A Country Cut in Two, and the U-Boats Off Colón

    For half a century, a ten-mile-wide strip of the United States ran straight through the middle of Panama.

12. Ep 12 — Martyrs' Day 1964: The Flag That Doomed the Canal Zone — An Eyewitness

    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.

13. Ep 13 — Torrijos: How a General Talked America Into Giving the Canal Back

    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.

14. Ep 14 — The Rise of Noriega: The CIA's Man Who Became America's Most Wanted

    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.

15. Ep 15 — Operation Just Cause: The 1989 Invasion of Panama and Its Contested Toll

    Just after midnight on December 20, 1989, 27,000 American troops fell on Panama in the largest U.S.

16. Ep 16 — The Turnover: The Day Panama Took Back Its Canal and Proved the World Wrong

    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.

17. Ep 17 — The Mega-Expansion: How Panama Bet $5 Billion on Its Canal — and Won

    By the 2000s the canal Panama had fought a century to reclaim faced obsolescence — the world's giant ships no longer fit.

18. Ep 18 — Panama Today: The Crossroads of Empires, Contested Again

    A century after the canal opened, who is Panama — and can it stay sovereign at the center of everyone else's ambitions? Closing Part Four, 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.

19. Ep 19 — Green Hell Reopens: US Troops Return to Panama's Jungle School

    In 1999 the United States walked away from the finest jungle-warfare school it had ever built — 23,000 acres of Panamanian coast where roughly 9,000 soldiers a year learned to move, survive and fight in terrain no American training area can imitate.

20. Ep 20 — Who Actually Operates the Panama Canal? The Claim vs. the Record

    In December 2024 an incoming American president began saying that China was operating the Panama Canal and that the United States would take it back.

21. Ep 21 — Not a Base: The Memorandum Putting US Troops Back on Panama's Bases

    On 9 April 2025, Panama's Minister of Public Security and the U.S.

22. Ep 22 — The Panama Port Sale That Never Closed: CK Hutchison, BlackRock, Beijing

    For a year Washington said a Chinese-linked company controlled the Panama Canal and demanded it be removed from the ports at either end.

23. Ep 23 — Drugs, Migrants, and the Numbers: Testing the Case for US Troops in Panama

    Washington's return to Panama was justified by two things: drugs and migrants.

24. Ep 24 — Is This the Canal Zone Again? A Finale from Someone Who Lived There

    In 1903 a Frenchman signed away a ten-mile strip of a country fifteen days old.

Explore further

Part of the listening path The United States in the Americas (stop 3 of 5) — next: Global Blueprint: Extraction Goes Global.

Backyard Empire: The U.S. in Latin AmericaTake the Land, Not the PeopleGlobal Blueprint: Extraction Goes GlobalIran & America: A Century and Counting

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