Panama is a country whose geopolitical importance outweighs its size because of the volume of trade that passes the Central American isthmus through the canal. For nearly a century, the United States occupied and controlled the Panama Canal Zone and its shipping operations. In 1999, control was passed to Panama’s Canal Authority. This peaceful transfer was a result of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The Weak and the Powerful studies how a weak country negotiated the Cold War and how a strongman navigated between competing power blocs. Omar Torrijos took power in Panama through a 1968 coup d’état and ruled that country until his death in 1981\. He committed his country to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which purported to stand for noninterference and against imperialism. Jonathan C. Brown looks at how Torrijos and the NAM were able to mobilize world opinion of the weak against the powerful to pressure the United States to live up to its democratic and international ideals regarding sovereignty of the canal. The author also demonstrates how world opinion was unable to address the problems of ideologically motivated warfare in neighboring Central American states.
About the Author :
Jonathan C. Brown is professor emeritus in history at the University of Texas at Austin. He has researched and written books on Latin American colonial history, Argentina’s economic expansion of the early nineteenth century, the beginnings of the Mexican oil industry, a brief history of Argentina, and the Cuban Revolution of the 1960s.
Review :
The Weak and the Powerful is a first-rate synthesis by a seasoned historian of an unconventional military dictatorship.
For those new to the topic, Brown’s story of how Torrijos’s friend, film star John Wayne, tried to persuade Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan to support the treaty is worth the cover price. Equally valuable here is Brown’s nuanced treatment of and concerns with Torrijos’s engagement in the Sandinista Revolution and his regret for supporting Fidel Castro's arming of Central American revolutionaries.
Written in an accessible and engaging style, The Weak and the Powerful offers a survey of all aspects of the Panamanian Revolution, which has fared poorly in the extant historiography in comparison to the more radical Peruvian Revolution of 1968–75. It is a most welcome addition to the rather sparse literature on twentieth-century Panama.
A welcome addition to our understanding of the evolution of modern Panama and the seminal role Torrijos played in its modern history as well as that of the Western world. This is a treasure trove of information that deepens our understanding of the man who was easily Latin America’s most enigmatic leader.
An excellent and worthwhile addition to Latin American and Cold War historiography.
Thankfully, the versatile and accomplished historian Jonathan Brown has helped set things straight with his engaging and well-researched new book.
Jonathan Brown has once again turned to challenge stereotypical understandings of Latin America in the world. This time he explores how Panama’s Omar Torrijos engaged the United States in post-Vietnam, post-Nixon times, lobbying Jimmy Carter to claim control of the Panama Canal for his small and weak nation, furthering the Non-Aligned Movement in a world still shaped by Cold War tensions.
Brown has constructed an original account from a fresh perspective that both adds to the history of the Panama Canal treaties and makes broader arguments of far wider relevance and potential interest to readers.
This is an excellent study on the important topic of how weak states negotiate their troubled relationships with more powerful ones—and also on the power of personality in international diplomacy.
