711.192/69: Telegram
President Porras to President Coolidge
[Received July 11.]
Greatly disturbed by the reports sent by the Panaman Commissioners who are negotiating in Washington the new treaty to take the place of the Taft Agreement and earnestly desiring the negotiations to yield satisfactory results, I wish to appeal to Your Excellency’s sense of justice and equity and to ask for your personal intervention so as to prevent a failure of the negotiations. Panama has declared herself willing to agree to all requests of the United States including the transfer of jurisdiction over a large part of the city of Colon which for Panama means the distressing sacrifice of witnessing a further mutilation of her territory in the principal port of the Republic. All that Panama asks is that the new treaty achieving the ends by which it is inspired, shall insure stability for Panama in her economic life by permanently establishing the proposition that the status of the Canal Zone cannot affect the commerce of the Republic.
Panama asks that the policy outlined by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 and afterwards confirmed by his successor and various Secretaries of State be given expression in the new treaty so that she may find therein the guarantee of the security that is most wanting, for if the essential stipulations are not laid down as permanent in the same terms as are used in the Hay–Bunau Varilla Treaty,12 she will ever lie under the threat of commercial, industrial and physical ruin brought on by the erection of a competing commercial colony in the Canal Zone. As long as that menace exists the people of Panama will always live in fear of their economic development being curtailed or crippled.
In 1903 Panama gave the United States every power and privilege needed to insure the construction of the inter-oceanic canal and did so in the hope that in it she would find her economic redemption. The United States has built and operated the Canal with full success and we have declared, for its protection, our will to bind ourselves as allies without restriction both in peace and in war. By the treaty of 1903 Panama ceded and the United States acquired the use, occupation and control of the Canal Zone for the construction, maintenance, operation, sanitation and protection of the Canal. We ask that that strip of land be ever used for those lofty ends and never be made a cause of instability and menace of ruin to the very nation that ceded it. Present difficulties are due to insistence by the American Commissioners [Page 525] in stipulating a fifteen-year period for the only clauses that are vital to Panama, despite the fact that the Taft Agreement endured twenty years and that the joint resolution of Congress, no. 259 of February 6, 1923,13 authorized the abrogation of that agreement which was styled transitory and was to be superseded by a permanent one, and also despite the fact that each and every one of the concessions made by Panama in the draft of the treaty now under consideration are in perpetuity as must also be the concessions asked by Panama for the stability of her economic independence. Equity prescribes that there should be reciprocity and mutual concessions in the terms of the new treaty and I trust that through Your Excellency’s benevolent intervention all the clauses agreed on will be perpetual so that each one of the two parties shall be equally favored by its benefits.
- File translation revised.↩
- Foreign Relations, 1904, p. 543.↩
- Ibid., 1923, vol. ii, p. 677.↩