Panama and Latin Policy

Panama Canal as Overriding Hemispheric Issue

For years latin America has been a soporific to the American body politic. Candidates searching for viable issues in U.S. relations with the nations to the south have come up perennially empty-handed. Not since the early 1960s, when the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis stirred wide concern, has there been any substantial interest within the United States in Latin American affairs. “Americans,” James Reston of The New York Times once remarked, “will do anything for Latin America, except read about it.”

That situation may change as the United States moves into the 1976 presidential campaign. The Ford administration is faced with a number of potentially explosive problems in Latin America, any ...