Panama fever (43 page)

Soon after, Claude Mallet returned to the Isthmus, having served for two years in Bogotá. It was not good to be back. There was “a great deal of illness” in Panama, and yellow fever in Colón. “I have heard of four cases (two deaths) since I arrived on Thursday,” he wrote to his Panamanian wife, who had remained in England for the health of their children. More than anything, Mallet reported, there was great depression about the chances of the canal treaty going through. “Religion here has taken an extraordinary hold upon the people,” he wrote on June 1. “A few years ago such a scene [a procession of girls carrying an effigy of the virgin] would not have been permitted. The Jesuits are getting in their work and unless the canal is made we shall lapse back to what the place was fifty years ago.”

Panama's senator José Agustín Arango, who also worked as a lawyer for the Panama Railroad, believed that the result of the forthcoming debate in Bogotá was a foregone conclusion and refused to attend the opening of the Senate at the beginning of June 1903. Instead, he believed that the best hope for a canal to bring much-needed prosperity back to his homeland was through secession. By May a small revolutionary group was active, centered on Arango's sons and sons-in-law, all young men educated in the United States. Soon after, Federico Boyd, the son of the founding editor of the
Star and Herald
, and Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero, the railroad's seventy-year-old, frail-looking head physician, were brought on board. The group met secretly at Amador's house, or at the Panama electric light plant.

Petitions were sent from Panama to Bogotá both for and against the treaty. Liberals were opposed to the “selling” of Panama to the United States. Cromwell helped organize pressure in favor. An open letter from Panama's senior Conservatives to the Colombian president Marroquín warned that rejection of the treaty would “give rise to unpatriotic feelings.”

In fact, Marroquín was in a near-impossible situation. In the United States he was seen and portrayed as an all-powerful dictator, but this was far from the case. His power was extremely fluid, varying from issue to issue, and he had made enemies across the political spectrum. It was imperative to his political survival that he did not alienate any of his fragile support.

Indeed, the canal question carried political high explosive. In Colombia, sovereignty was of prime importance, the chief symbol of national permanence and unity in a land of disordered change. In fact, the constitution specifically forbade the transfer to another power of the sovereignty of any part of the country. It was one thing to give a concession to a private company, quite another to hand one to the voracious power to the north, which had already demonstrated its aggression in Cuba and the Philippines. “Not an atom of our sovereignty nor a stone of our territory,” wrote the newspaper
El Correo Naçional
, should be given up, even if it meant “renounc[ing] the honour of a canal across Panama.”

Anti-Marroquín newspapers, of which there were many, attacked the treaty as a way of damaging the president. Herrán had sold out, it was stated; the deal was an example of Yankee imperialism; there was still hope of a European country, Britain or Germany, riding to the rescue to build the canal; Morgan's comments in the U.S. Senate debate about “depraved, priest-ridden people” were printed, causing widespread resentment.

Under the aggressive leadership of Roosevelt, the United States had been throwing its weight around in the region. At Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, ideally situated to guard the Windward Passage into the Caribbean and thence to the Isthmus, a U.S. naval base had been established in February 1903. At a speech in Chicago in April, Roosevelt declared that “our nation has insisted that because of its primacy in strength among the nations of the Western hemisphere it has certain duties and responsibilities which oblige it to take a leading part thereon.” What would become known as the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine emerged as a policy soon after Roosevelt entered the White House. Not only was the United States committed to excluding European powers from the hemisphere, but it was also taking on the role of “international police power” intervening in cases of “chronic wrongdoing” or “incompetence.”

To Colombians, this posture was both frightening and insulting. It is “a warning to our countries,” wrote the Bogotá paper
El Porvenir.
“It is the conviction of his irresistible superiority and vigor that makes the Yankee, from Mr. Roosevelt to the rag-picker, treat the turbulent republics of Latin America with haughtiness and contempt.” The authority to intervene, said the paper, was “derived from nobody knows where … as though the great nation had received from some universal power the mission to put in order those who live in disorder!”

Against this background of distrust and fear, public sentiment on the Hay-Herrán Treaty quickly changed, the U.S. ambassador in Bogotá reported back on April 15, “from approbation to suspicion and from suspicion to decided opposition.” The minister, Arthur Beupré, still believed that Marroquín had the power to force the measure through Congress, but that an open vote would see it rejected.

But this would not be put to the test. Marroquín had no intention of acting so vigorously on the canal question. He saw himself in an unwinnable position. “History will say of me,” he had written the previous year, “that I ruined the Isthmus and all Colombia, by not permitting the opening of the Panama Canal, or that I permitted it to be done, scandalously injuring the rights of my country.” The way out, as he saw it, was to hand over the responsibility for the decision to Congress, a step the constitution demanded anyway.

But the Colombian president was also personally ambivalent about the canal, which, if built, would open up his country as never before. Like U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, he was a novelist. In his 1897 book
Entre Primos
, he used a cultural confrontation between an effete Englishman and an idealized, hardworking Colombian to show the frippery of the outside world and the superiority of the insular Colombian character. During the civil war he had risked ruining his country in order to protect it from the demands of the Liberals— railroads, foreign influence, and capital. In many ways the canal represented the greatest threat of all to everything he held dear—the sheltered, Catholic, genteel age of nineteenth-century Bogotá, untrammeled by technology, modernism, or Protestant capitalism.

Discussions of the treaty continued through the spring. In April, the Colombians again indicated that, even if they gave in on the sovereignty question, an even greater sticking point was the issue of Colombia's right to a proportion of the money to be paid to the New Company. On this issue, though, Cromwell had engineered his great coup. “We pointed out,” the lawyer later wrote, “that Colombia had already pledged herself morally to consent, and that her consent should be imposed on her as being demanded by international good faith.” Even Hay asked Cromwell whether, perhaps, some $ 5 million or so could not be paid over from the $40 million, but Cromwell succeeded in persuading him that this would be tantamount to giving in to blackmail. Cromwell's influence, on behalf of his client, right at the center of the U.S. government, is astonishing.

Then the Colombians hinted at another possible way out of the impasse. If the 1900 extension to the concession, organized by Hutin in the midst of the Colombian civil war, were declared illegal, then they could simply let the original term of the deal with the New Company expire in October 1904, and then sell the lot to the Americans for $25 million. But Cromwell need not have worried. Roosevelt and Hay were appalled by this threat, which confirmed their opinion of the Colombians as shifty and grasping. Hay had strong views on property rights, calling the Colombians “greedy little anthropoids.”

The Americans decided that a firm hand was needed. On June 9, eleven days before the debate in the Colombian Senate was due to start, a serious threat was issued from Hay's office: “If Colombia should now reject the treaty or unduly delay its ratification, the friendly understanding between the two countries would be so seriously compromised that action might be taken by the Congress next winter which every friend of Colombia would regret.” All efforts by Marroquín to reduce the humiliation of the deal were now met by a firm rejoinder: any amendments or other delays would be “tantamount to a rejection of the treaty.”

Behind this browbeating tone was the determination of the president, Theodore Roosevelt. With elections looming in 1904, he was talking up the grandeur and national pride that the construction of the canal would bring to his country. It was, he told an audience in Chicago, the “greatest material feat of the twentieth century— greater than any similar feat in any preceding century.” Of course, it “should be done by no foreign nation, but by ourselves.”

The Panama lobby was also keeping up the pressure. On June 13, Bunau-Varilla, at huge expense, cabled Marroquín. “The only party that can now build the Panama Canal is the United States,” he wrote. “Neither European governments nor private financiers would dare to fight either against the Monroe Doctrine or the American Treasury for building Panama Canal.” Failure to ratify, he warned, would lead to either the “construction of a Nicaragua Canal and absolute loss to Colombia of the incalculable advantages resulting from construction on her territory the great artery of universal commerce, or the construction of the Panama Canal after secession and declaration of independence of the Isthmus of Panama under protection of the United States as has happened with Cuba.”

Cromwell was busy, too. On June 12 he had paid a public visit to the White House, and the next day a story appeared in a New York newspaper, which turned out to have come from Roger Farnham, Cromwell's press agent. “President Roosevelt is determined to have the Panama Canal Route,” the piece read, saying that a combination of “the greed of the Colombian government” and the “frenzy over the alleged relinquishment of sovereignty” made defeat of the measure “probable” in the Colombian Senate. But, the article continued, “the State of Panama will secede if the Colombian congress fails to ratify the canal treaty.” Supposedly, Farnham even told the paper's editors the date of the “revolution”—November 3, when U.S. newspapers would be full of returns from the midterm elections.

Indeed, the treaty never stood a chance in the Colombian Senate. The debate started on June 20, and was dominated by attacks on Mar-roquín that had little to do with the canal. Two weeks later General Rafael Reyes, back in Bogotá after a period of exile and a firm supporter of the treaty, asked Beupré for an additional $5 million up front from the United States and $10 million out of the $40 million for the New Company to break the deadlock.

Hay replied that the U.S. Senate would not approve it. “Any amendment whatever or unnecessary delay in the ratification of the treaty would greatly imperil its consummation,” he told Beupré. A few days later Roosevelt wrote to Hay backing up this firm stand. “Make it as strong as you can… Those contemptible little creatures in Bogota ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future.” In fact, Hay, apart from his improperly close relationship with Cromwell, had his hands tied. The close result of the vote in the Senate on the Hanna minority report meant that any deviation from the strict terms of the Spooner Act could see the treaty fail to make it through the Senate. Thus the intransigence of Morgan and the Nicaragua party doomed the treaty as much as any opposition in Colombia.

The rejection from Bogotá, when it came on August 12, was overwhelming, with 24 voting against, with 3 abstentions. Even Marro-quín's son voted against the measure. In the United States, the vote was seen as an attempt to extort more money out of the United States or the French Company. Patience with Bogotá, never extensive, was now at an end. It was time for a new plan.

oosevelt and Hay now weighed the options open to them. The first was to persevere with Colombia and hope that the treaty might be ratified the following year. The second was to push ahead with the Nicaragua option, as the Spooner Act directed. Or the whole question could be handed over to Congress to decide. The fourth option was somehow to proceed with the Panama route without recourse to Bogotá.