Edgar Lee
U.S. finance monopoly and the top asset controller in the world BlackRock and Swiss container terminal operator Terminal Investment Limited announced last week (03/04) that they would acquire a 90% stake in two ports of the Panama Canal. The purchase comes from a subsidiary of the Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison.
As part of the planned purchase, the monopolies will also acquire CK Hutchison’s 80% effective and controlling interest in subsidiary and associated companies, which encompasses 43 ports in 23 countries. The value of this deal was assessed to be $22.8 billion.
CK Hutchison’s spokesman, Frank Sixt, said that the transaction is “purely commercial in nature and wholly unrelated to recent political news reports concerning the Panama Ports.”
They await Panamanian government confirmation for this transaction to take place, which they expect to receive on or before April 2.
This agreement comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned the President of Panama last month that the country could face U.S. retaliation if Chinese influence over the Panama Canal isn’t reduced. On December 22, then-President-elect Donald Trump said that the Canal was “given to Panama and the people of Panama, but it has provisions…. If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America” in reference to alleged Chinese influence over the Canal and high fees charged to the U.S. by Panama.
As written earlier on The Worker, this contention over the Panama Canal is not out of interest of preserving the Canal’s “neutrality,” or over “fair” fees, but uses the inter-imperialist contention with Chinese social-imperialism to deepen U.S. domination of Panama. Trump and his administration have made the U.S.’s semi-colonial relationship with Panama in particular and the Third World in general more obvious, demanding that the lackey regime deepen its subservience to US imperialism or face full colonial domination from the superpower. The fact that its ports are being traded among the imperialists as their exploits demonstrates the reality of their oppression and how the Third World is the spoils of the inter-imperialist contradiction.
This domination has also manifested in the U.S.’s use of Panama as a holding grounds for deported migrants. At least 299 undocumented migrants are being held captive at a Panama hotel and a jungle camp, all while being cut off from contact with the outside world and denied lawyer consultation.
Massive demonstrations have taken place in Panama in response to these imperialist maneuvers, with Panamanians marching in the streets and burning U.S. flags.
The lackey and bureaucrat-capitalist regime of Panama, like all bureaucrat-capitalist regimes, strives to be a good servant of its highest bidder—presently U.S. imperialism. As a result, it is helping the U.S. fulfill its desires of domination over the Panama Canal as well as its deportation policy, intensifying the oppression of the Panamanian people and ultimately threatening its semi-colonial domination entirely.
Photo: Panama Canal. By ATP.
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