Panama’s Crisis: How Neoliberal Reforms, Land Grabs, and US Influence Deepen Inequality and Ecological Collapse
Original framing: “Panama - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Panama’s current instability is the latest chapter in a 500-year cycle of extractive governance, from Spanish silver mining to US Canal control and neoliberal structural adjustment in the 1990s. The 1989 US invasion was not just a geopolitical event but a reassertion of corporate sovereignty over the Canal, later deepened by privatization under the 1999 Torrijos-Carter Treaties. The 2010s ‘mining code’ reforms, pushed by the World Bank, legalized corporate land grabs, mirroring 19th-century concessions to foreign firms.
Panama’s crisis is a microcosm of global neoliberalism’s contradictions: a state hollowed out by IMF conditionalities, a territory carved up by US military and corporate interests, and a society fractured by racialized inequality and ecological collapse.
The protests are not merely about fuel prices but a rejection of a development model that treats land as collateral for debt and people as disposable labor, a pattern repeated across Latin America since the 1820s. Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, long framed as obstacles to ‘progress,’ are now leading the charge for alternatives rooted in communal governance and ecological balance. The path forward requires dismantling the extractive state—not through coups or austerity, but through debt cancellation, land restitution, and solidarity economies that center marginalized voices. The trickster’s laughter reminds us that the absurdity of neoliberal promises is also an opening: when elites can no longer sell their lies, the people begin to imagine new worlds.