Savvy Navigator of a Turbulent Canal.

• Author: Conaway, Janelle

Two decades ago, the United States and Panama entered into historic agreements related to the operation, management, and defense of the Panama Canal. The treaties--which will result in Panama's assuming full control of the critical waterway at the end of 1999--resolved long-standing, contentious issues and established a new relationship between the two nations.

In a recent interview at the Carter Center in Atlanta, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter recalled the effort to make the treaties a reality. Winning ratification in the U.S. Senate, he says, was "almost a political miracle."

Before it was over, the controversy would pit Ronald Reagan against John Wayne--and cost many politicians their jobs. "Of the senators who voted in favor of the Panama Canal Treaties, there were twenty of them who were up for reelection the following year. Only seven of them came back to the Senate," Carter remembers. The 1980 elections took a similar toll among treaty backers in the Senate--"and one president who supported the Panama Canal Treaties was defeated for reelection," Carter adds, with his broad, trademark smile.

"I devoted a major part of my presidential influence and authority to what was really an unpopular thing to do, but the right thing to do," he says.

Today it may be difficult to remember how high tensions once were over this issue. By 1976, when Carter was elected president, the Panama Canal had become a powerful symbol of injustice throughout Latin America and the Caribbean--a psychological gash that wounded relations with the colossus to the north. As Carter wrote in his book Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, the United States had wielded its power over Panama to rush through the original 1903 treaty that led to the canal's construction across the Central American isthmus.

"No Panamanian had ever seen the treaty, the terms of which were highly favorable to the United States," Carter wrote. Among the terms that Panama resented was U.S. control over a strip of land known as the Canal Zone. The question of sovereignty over the Canal Zone aroused deep passions, which came to a boil in 1964 with massive rioting by Panamanians, a response by U.S. troops, and bloodshed on both sides. In the aftermath, President Lyndon Johnson agreed to renegotiate the treaties related to the Panama Canal. However, Carter wrote, due to intense opposition in the U.S. Congress, Johnson never submitted the renegotiated agreements for ratification.

By the time Carter took office, two other U.S. presidents--Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford--had also been unable to resolve the situation. Control of the canal had turned into a hot-button patriotic issue in the United States, particularly for former California governor Ronald Reagan in...