Panama City:
The Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, entered the conversations on Sunday with the leader of Panama to press the demand of President Donald Trump that the United States resumes the control of the Panama Canal.
Trump has refused to go back in the threats of seizing the vital route and it is not clear what Rubio Diplomatically achieves what he would like, with Panama, firmly rejecting any claim against his sovereignty.
Rubio, at his first meeting abroad as the main diplomat of the United States, passed by an honor guard outside the wrapped walls of President José Raul Mulino in the old quarter of the tropical capital.
Rubio shake hands with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Javier Martínez-Caila, and showed a thumb sign before heading to conversations with Mulino. They did not make immediate comments to the press.
Rubio later in the day he will travel the Panama Canal, the crucial link between Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through which he passes around 40 percent of American container traffic.
Trump and Rubio say that the United States competitor has gained too much power around the channel and could close it in a possible conflict, with catastrophic consequences for the United States.
Mulino, in response to the pressure, ordered an audit of a company based in Hong Kong that controls the ports on both sides of the channel.
Speaking to journalists on Friday, Trump said it was not enough and that Panama “has totally violated” understanding when the United States returned the channel at the end of 1999.
“They have already offered to do many things,” Trump said on Friday from Panama, “but we believe it is appropriate to recover it.”
Protests for sovereignty
The scattered protests exploded in Panama before Rubio’s visit, with an effigy of him in a red, white and blue suit.
Dijenes Sánchez, a professor who participated in the protests, promised to defend Panama’s sovereignty.
“We firmly reject the statements of the United States to make Panama a protectorate and colony,” he said.
The Panama Canal, which Trump has called a modern “wonder of the world, was built by the United States at the expense of thousands of workers of workers, mostly people of African descent from Barbados, Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean. .
The United States maintained control of the channel when it opened in 1914, but began negotiating after mortal disturbances in 1964 by Panamanians enraged by foreign control.
Jimmy Carter sealed the agreement that gave the channel to Panama at the end of 1999, and the late president saw a moral imperative for the United States to respect a smaller but still sovereign country.
Trump has a very different opinion and has returned to the “great stick” approach of the early twentieth century, in which the United States threatened the strength to get his own, especially in Latin America.
In his first week in office, Trump prepared massive tariffs in Colombia to force the ally of the United States to recover citizens deported in military airplanes, after the country’s leftist president complained that they were not being treated in a manner worthy
Just when Rubio began his trip, Trump signed on Saturday in the sanctions of the three main US commercial partners: Canada, Mexico and China.
Rubio, the first Spanish and Catholic Secretary of Devoto, began his Sunday in Panama City attending Mass in a church built four centuries ago in the ancient city.
It will travel to four most Latin American countries: El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, where it is expected to press for cooperation in Trump’s key priority to deport migrants from the United States.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a union feed).
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