As he went to shake Trump’s hand, the president mentioned that in his experience there were “a lot of crooks” in Panama. De Dianous died in 2021 and never sought to publicize or draw attention to the moment.

Recovering the Panama Canal, on the other hand, involves stepping into the hornet’s nest of Latin America’s nationalistic politics that are increasingly influenced by China, Russia, and Iran. Successive Democrat administrations have allowed America’s main adversaries to develop a growing intelligence,

In the 1970s, a conservative coalition came together to fight ceding control of the Panama Canal—proving the political potency of the issue.

President-elect Donald Trump speaks about his ambitions for buying Greenland from Denmark and retaking the Panama Canal despite a treaty.

The protests and subsequent violence were not motivated by Panamanian anger over the existence of genuinely contemptible Jim Crow-style laws within the canal zone. Panama then, as

President-elect Donald Trump’s threats over the Panama Canal may be rooted in his decades-long views of the country, forged by his own attempts to do business there. CNN’s Phil Mattingly reports.