WND By David Kupelian March 11, 2025
As Trump boldly takes back control of vital U.S.-built waterway, media decry president's 'expansionist agenda,' 'land grab' obsession and 'new U.S. imperialism'
Democrats in Congress hate it.
"It's bananas. It's insane," U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D.-Conn., told CNN. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D.-Fla., agrees: "It is utterly preposterous to suggest that we are going to send our military into Panama to, quote, 'take back the Panama Canal.'" House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks for virtually all his congressional peers when he insists, "House Democrats believe that we are not sent to Washington to invade Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico or seize the Panama Canal by force!"
But as President Donald Trump stated explicitly during his March 4 speech to Congress, the nation and the world: "My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal – and we've already started doing it. Just today, a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal and lots of other things having to do with the Panama Canal and a couple of other canals."
The Panama Canal, Trump pointed out, "was built at tremendous cost of American blood and treasure. 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal. They died of malaria, they died of snakebites and mosquitoes. Not a nice place to work. They paid them very highly to go there, knowing there was a 25% chance that they would die – the most expensive project also that was ever built in our country's history."
Concluded the 47th president: "It was given away by the Carter administration for $1. But that agreement has been violated very severely. We didn't give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we're taking it back."
'Going to a battlefield'The astonishingly gruesome process of constructing the Panama Canal – commenced by America in 1904 and completed a decade later – was undertaken to fulfill the centuries-old dream of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, thereby saving ships from 21-23 extra days at sea by being able to cross through what would become a 51-mile-long waterway.
However, "the Panamanian isthmus proved to be one of the most difficult – and deadly – spots in the world in which to construct a channel," explains History.com:
Death could strike in the form of an 18-ton boulder or miniscule, malaria-carrying mosquitoes that bred by the millions in festering swamps and puddles. … "The working condition in those days were so horrible it would stagger your imagination," recalled laborer Alfred Dottin. "Death was our constant companion. I shall never forget the train loads of dead men being carted away daily, as if they were just so much lumber."
More:
https://www.wnd.com/2025/03/watch-the-stunning-truth-about-china-and-the-panama-canal/
