I spent three years in Panama in the mid-80s. You could write a 3,000 page book on Panama and its vast soap opera (I don’t even refer to it as history).
The French-US angle? The French tried to make this simple and just DIG...with no locks. The Americans looked over the whole thing and figured three huge locks....making one of the largest largest man-made lakes in the world....and putting in a hydro-electric plant to boot. The American version worked.
Corruption? Frankly, Panama cannot exist in any form...without corruption...even today. I had to pay an extra $20, on top of the normal $15 inspection fee...to have my car ‘passed’ (it was brand-new).
My German wife upon arriving there....needed a license. I went downtown and chatted with the guy in charge...and he merely winked while asking if my wife knew how to drive, and I said yes (she didn’t)....and passed a $20...ten minutes later, she had her first license....no test required of a person who had never driven in her life.
The dozen or so canal engineers that I came to know over my period there....all American guys in the forties and fifies....were mostly alcoholics who would consume a case of beer between six AM to six PM....we won’t even count what they consumed after the sun went down.
Every single Panamanian political figure had this idea that the canal generated profit...vast profit. The Canal Commission kept the channel fee down between $30k and $60k for most vessels (at that point in time). All of the money that came in....barely paid daily operations. Any updating of anything...came out of the US federal budget (something that Panamanians couldn’t understand). To make any profit at all...you’d have to raise the channel fee by three to four times...which was questionable if freighters would pay that much.
Nothing has changed in five hundred years, to get anything done in this country you have to slip a few bills to the guy or gal waiting on you. Before all you American haters start your crap that the US is the same, I never had to pay a bribe to get anything done in the States. As bad as you think America is it is still the best country in the world.
“The dozen or so canal engineers that I came to know over my period there....all American guys in the forties and fiies....were mostly alcoholics who would consume a case of beer between six AM to six PM....we won’t even count what they consumed after the sun went down.”
Just because you ran around with the wrong group, the rest of us were not.
This speaks a lot about yourself.
You were nothing more than a tourist stationed here as were every other military personnel.