Volume 24, Number 2 · February 17, 1977
The Country with Five Frontiers
By Graham Greene
The American worked in the Canal Zone, but he lived in Panamá, so he was generally regarded as an agent of the CIA, but nobody now seems much afraid of the CIA. When he heard that I was moving around, he asked my friend Chuchu, 'What's the old goat doing here?'—a fair enough question, I often asked it myself, for since the Thirties I had wanted to visit Panamá—perhaps because of a romantic French novel I had read which was set in dangerous, ramshackle, poverty-ridden Colón, perhaps because even then I felt a premonition of Panamá's importance. Panamá's importance is not in fact the importance of the Canal, which becomes less and less with every year—a smaller tonnage passing, a smaller revenue, a channel too shallow and locks too narrow for the great tankers of the Seventies and the aircraft carriers. The Canal is now only important as a symbol of colonialism, a narrow splinter of colonialism cutting the country in two. The situation is watched with sympathy by Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru: Panamá doesn't stand alone.
Feature, 4520 words
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