2025-02-05
24 分钟This is the Guardian.
Today.
What is Trump's obsession with the Panama Canal?
The Panama Canal, a mighty waterway that carries 5% of the world's trade.
And a recent fixation of Donald Trump's anti American demonstrations.
In Panama's capital, the city is being plastered with national flags ahead of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's visit,
here to discuss Donald Trump's threat to take back U.S.
control of the canal.
Trump's claims to the canal might seem spurious, but he's not the first strong man to set his sights on it.
Everyone understood that the second that a canal was dug through Panama connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans,
that this was going to transform international trade.
The only question was, how are they going to do it?
In the 1500s, an English slave trader was the first to try and fail.
Then came the French, inspired by the success they'd had with the Suez Canal.
But the one thing that they hadn't considered is the fact that Panama is not in the same place as the Suez Canal.
This is jungle, it's 40 degrees, there are all kinds of diseases.
It's an incredibly difficult place to work.
And by the end of the time that the French were trying to dig their canal through Panama,
more than 20,000 people had died.
After the French attempt failed, the US saw that it could finally finish this huge imperialist project.