Panama Unsettled by Trump Threat to Seize Canal

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s suggestion on Tuesday that the United States might reclaim the Panama Canal — including by force — unsettled Panamanians, who used to live with the presence of the U.S. military in the canal zone and were invaded by American military forces once before.

Few appeared to be taking Mr. Trump’s threats very seriously, but Panama’s foreign minister, Javier Martínez-Acha, made his country’s position clear at a news conference hours after the American president-elect mused aloud about retaking the canal.

“The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,” Mr. Martínez-Acha said. “Let it be clear: The canal belongs to the Panamanians and it will continue to be that way.”

Experts said that Mr. Trump’s real goal might have been intimidation, perhaps aimed at securing favorable treatment from Panama’s government for American ships that use the passageway. More broadly, they said, he might be trying to send a message across a region that will be critical to his goals of controlling the flow of migrants toward the U.S. border.

“If the U.S. wanted to flout international law and act like Vladimir Putin, the U.S. could invade Panama and recover the canal,” said Benjamin Gedan, director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program in Washington. “No one would see it as a legitimate act, and it would bring not only grievous damage to its image, but instability to the canal.”

In recent weeks, as he prepares to take office, Mr. Trump has talked repeatedly about not just taking over the Panama Canal, control of which the United States ceded to Panama by treaty in the late 1990s, but also buying Greenland from Denmark (though it is not, as it happens, for sale). He returned to those expansionist themes in a rambling speech on Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Florida, and this time refused to rule out using military force to retake the canal.

“It might be that you’ll have to do something,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump’s comments have not sat well with the people of Panama.

Raúl Arias de Para, an ecotourism entrepreneur and a descendant of one of the country’s founding politicians, said talk of American military force stirred memories among his compatriots of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. The military action then, he noted, was aimed at deposing the country’s authoritarian leader, Manuel Noriega.

“That was not an invasion to colonize or take territory,” Mr. Arias de Para said. “It was tragic for those who lost their loved ones, but it liberated us from a formidable dictatorship.”

Of Mr. Trump’s threat now to retake the canal, he said, “It’s a possibility that’s so remote, so absurd.” The United States has the right under the treaty to defend the canal if its operations are threatened, he said, “but that’s not the case now.”

Some experts said Mr. Trump might really be hoping to obtain assurances from Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, that he will even more aggressively work to stop the flow of migrants through the Darién Gap, the jungle stretch hundreds of thousands of migrants have crossed on their way north, fueling a surge at the U.S. border

Mr. Mulino has already pushed hard to deter migrants.

“There is no country in which the United States has found greater collaboration on migration than Panama,” said Jorge Eduardo Ritter, a former foreign affairs minister and Panama’s first canal affairs minister.

On his first day in office, Mr. Mulino approved an arrangement with the United States to curb migration through the Darién region with the help of U.S.-funded flights to repatriate migrants entering Panama illegally. Since then, the number of crossings has dropped drastically, with the lowest figures seen in nearly two years.

If Mr. Trump’s administration carries out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, it will also need countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to agree to receive flights carrying not only their own deported citizens, but also people from other nations, something Panama has not agreed to do.

Experts said it was just as likely that Mr. Trump is angling for a discount for U.S. ships, which make up the largest proportion of vessels transiting the 40-mile passage between oceans. Fees have gone up as the Panama Canal Authority has been grappling with drought and the cost of creating a reservoir to counter it.

“I imagine the president-elect would settle for a U.S. discount at the canal and declare victory,” said Mr. Gedan, of the Wilson Center.

Many experts on the region, he said, view Mr. Trump’s combative remarks as “standard operating procedure for a once-and-future president who uses threats and intimidation, even with U.S. partners and friendly countries.”

After lengthy negotiations, the United States, then under President Jimmy Carter, agreed in the late 1970s to a plan to gradually turn the canal it had built in Panama over to the country where it lay. The exchange was completed in December 1999.

Theories about why Mr. Trump appears focused on the canal were swirling this week. Some noted that ceding control of the canal over to Panama has long been a sore point for Republicans.

Others said Mr. Trump was upset that ports at the ends of the canal are controlled by companies out of Hong Kong. Panama’s president has dismissed those concerns.

“There is absolutely no Chinese interference or participation in anything to do with the Panama Canal,” Mr. Mulino said in a news conference in December.

A small country with more than four million inhabitants and no active military, as per its Constitution, Panama would be in no position to stave off the U.S. military. Protests, however, would probably be huge, and might paralyze the Panama Canal, with disastrous effects on global trade and particularly on the United States, experts agreed.

Panama, said Mr. Ritter, the former foreign minister, can only hope the United States abides by international law. “This is the case of the egg against the stone,” he said.