By JAMES MARSH
The national strike in Panama is nearing its third month in the struggle of militant unions and social movement activist organizations to push back against President José Raúl Mulino’s anti-worker policies. The strike has presented considerable resistance to instituting neoliberal policy changes in Panama, but its participants have faced intense repression from state forces.
While the strike is winding down, it demonstrates the will of the Panamanian working class to fight (https://workersvoiceus.org/2025/05/30/a-wave-of-strikes-and-protests-rocks-panama/) for its interests. It also presents another episode in the long history of the Panamanian working class resisting US imperialism and its collaborators in the Panamanian oligarchy.
Taking a look at the history of class struggle in Panama shows how multinational corporations, U.S. military interests, and Panamanian oligarchs maintained their domination of the country and explains why this alignment of forces exploded into the current strike wave when the Panamanian working class launched a renewed wave of resistance to attacks by US imperialism.
Panama and U.S. imperialism
The Panama Canal Zone, the area stretching for five miles on both sides of the Panama canal (https://workersvoiceus.org/2024/12/27/its-panamas-canal/), was in the early 20th century a U.S. colony.
Popular discontent about this U.S. colony bisecting Panama led, in 1964, to a student movement, which sparked mass protests. Canal Zone police and U.S. military forces sought to repress the protests and on Jan. 9 killed 22 Panamanians, many of them students, during what came to be known as the Martyr’s Day uprising.
Popular discontent in Panama would be co-opted by bonapartist strongman General Omar Torrijos, who took power following a coup in 1968. Torrijos and his party ruled with class-collaborationist policies that made concessions to workers and farmers while keeping the bourgeoisie in power and maintaining strong economic ties to U.S. capitalists, which by co-opting working-class discontent redirected their political efforts away from socialist goals. Torrijos adopted a national developmentalist model for Panama, including by calling to nationalize the Panama canal, following in the footsteps of the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who successfully nationalized the Suez Canal.
One of the national developmentalist policies implemented by Torrijos was an agrarian reform, carried out between 1969 and 1977. United Brands, known as United Fruit Co. before 1970, effectively monopolized banana exports in the country at the time. Torrijos responded to popular pressure by redistributing a portion of the company’s excess land and imposing a minor export tax, though even after this land redistribution, United Brands remained the largest exporter of bananas in the country. United Brands has today been reorganized as Chiquita.
The struggle over sovereignty of the Canal Zone, meanwhile, led to treaty negotiations with the U.S., which were ratified in 1978. With mounting popular pressure in Panama to nationalize the canal leading to diplomatic pressure on the U.S., and the canal no longer as militarily significant in an age of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines too large to traverse the narrow locks, a treaty was ratified by the governments of the respective countries to hand over the canal by 1999.
This treaty came with terms, however. One was a neutrality clause, providing that the Canal Zone would remain neutral so that foreign troops would not be stationed there; at the time, this was aimed at keeping away the USSR. It also included neocolonial provisions that provided the U.S. with the right to intervene militarily in Panama to defend the canal, even after 2000, leaving the looming threat of intervention as a condition of the handover.
Policies like these ultimately channeled working-class discontent to reformist efforts that left U.S. imperialism in place while seeking to prevent mass uprisings of the kind seen on Martyr’s Day.
Following Torrijos’s death, General Manuel Noriega, part of the same party as Torrijos, consolidated power behind the scenes, solidifying his rule by 1983 and maintaining it with a coup carried out in 1984. Noriega collaborated closely with U.S. intelligence agencies, with the DEA, and in the Contra War seeking to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
While Noriega’s heavy-handed military rule had initially been approved of by the U.S. government, by the end of the decade civilian neoliberal parties seemed to be a more appealing and stable partners for U.S. capitalists. Noriega’s growing hesitation in assisting the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinistas also soured his approval by the U.S. government. While Noriega had been a long time U.S. collaborator, the U.S. ruling class felt that their attack dog had gotten off the leash, and in 1989 the U.S. invoked the right to militarily “defend the canal” and invaded Panama to overthrow Noriega. This invasion would be directly paralleled by military action against another U.S. strongman and collaborator turned enemy, Saddam Hussein, in the following year.
This use of treaty provisions granting the right of the U.S. military to intervene at will in Panama to defend their interests demonstrates the neocolonial legacy of colonialism in the Canal Zone.
Civilian neoliberal rule ushered in by the dictatorship’s overthrow, which continued the maintenance of the Panamanian oligarchy, included the 2009 election of President Ricardo Martinelli. Martinelli faced working-class resistance to his policies (https://workersvoiceus.org/2013/02/07/panama-the-popular-and-union-movement-is-getting-ready-for-the-fight/), including protests against the expansion of mining in the Ngäbe-Buglé Indigenous comarca. Mining and extractivism were presented as an alternative to “transitismo,” reliance on canal revenues, and sought to open environmentally devastating strip mines on Indigenous land.
Mobilizations against anti-worker policies put in place on behalf of Panamanian and foreign capitalists intensified in 2019. New attempts at neoliberal privatization and budget cuts for public services drove young women to mobilize against cuts to public education, launching a new wave of popular resistance.
This wave of mobilizations included protests over the First Quantum Minerals’ Cobre Panama mine (https://workersvoiceus.org/2024/04/20/lessons-from-panamas-environmental-struggle/), a Canadian-owned strip mine, in 2023. For two months, protesters barricaded ports and roadways, accompanied by mass marches and public assemblies held at barricades, uniting social and environmental movement organizations with labor unions. This mobilization succeeded in bringing the operation of the mine to a halt.
The oligarchy struck back in the face of this resistance. President José Raúl Mulino, the appointed successor of Martinelli, was elected in 2024; he is seen by many observers as part of an ongoing wave of right-wing leaders taking power—including Donald Trump in the United States, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Javier Milei in Argentina.
This history highlights the ongoing domination of Panama by the U.S. capitalist class, both through corporate and military power and through its Panamanian intermediaries, the collaborating regimes which have kept the Panamanian bourgeoisie in power by using both carrot and stick against the Panamanian working class.
This history also shows that exploitation by foreign and Panamanian capitalists has continuously provoked the Panamanian working class to take action. This action has been co-opted at times by reformists but has won notable victories nonetheless, and is emerging once again in a wave of mass mobilizations that has used workers power to paralyze the country and fight back against imperialist domination.
National strike against Mulino’s policies
Three key elements of President Mulino’s current policies provoked the strikes that were part of the ongoing wave of popular mobilizations. Mulino, backed by parliament, privatized pension services, while future pensions were slashed from 60% of income to 30%, putting most retirees below the poverty line. He also intends to carry out negotiations to reopen the First Quantum Minerals strip mine, the same mine closed in response to the mass uprising of 2023. Further, Mulino made an agreement with Trump to reopen three U.S. military bases and to station U.S. troops in the former Canal Zone, in violation of the neutrality clause of the canal treaties, which ban foreign militaries from stationing troops in the area. This was following statements by Trump that he would seek to take back the Panama Canal.
Protests began erupting across Panama in February of this year. Unions played a key role, and launched the current national strike in April, with teachers’ and construction workers’ unions being joined by Chiquita banana workers. Strikers have faced considerable repression.
Chiquita responded to the strike by firing workers en masse, to which banana workers responded by barricading the roadways. Roadblocks were a common tactic of the 2023 protests, but this time, police repression to clear out the roadblocks has proven more intense. A state of emergency was declared in Bocas del Toro province to give police greater authorization for the use of force, with police attacking protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets. In the face of this repression, the banana workers’ union reached an agreement to dismantle the roadblocks, ending the state of emergency, though the roadblocks for now remain in place.
Construction workers’ unions were also coerced into ending their strike. Police began carrying out arrests of strikers at work sites, forcing many to stay home and intimidating others to return to work. The government also froze the funds of some unions. The leader of the SUNTRACS construction workers’ union was forced into political exile in Bolivia, fleeing the threat of arrest for his role in the strike.
The teachers’ strike was hampered by similar tactics. Teachers faced the threat of mass firings, while the police targeted union leadership for arrest. The majority of teachers’ unions, all except four of the 21 previously participating, negotiated an end to the general strike on July 14. The remaining teachers’ unions still on strike, including the union ASOPROF, are seeking international aid.
While this current strike wave is winding down, the response of the Panamanian government under President Mulino shows the ferocity of repression that the Panamanian ruling class is willing to unleash to maintain their position as collaborators with U.S. neocolonialism and international capital. However, it also demonstrates the willingness of the Panamanian working class to organize and fight back against both the Panamanian oligarchy and U.S. imperialism to resist Mulino’s anti-worker policies even in the face of considerable hardship.
The international struggle of the working class
This national strike places the Panamanian working class at the forefront of the struggle against U.S. imperialism and against the global network of right-wing leaders associated with Trump. The struggle against the capitalist class is international.
The history of U.S. imperialism in Panama shows how the U.S. bourgeoisie has relied on a combination of collaborators, intervention, and corporate power to maintain its strategic interests in accessing the Panama Canal and exploiting the Panamanian working class. The current wave of mobilizations since 2019 shows that the struggle against imperialism in Panama is far from over.
The national strike shows the power of mass action with independent working-class organizations, including labor unions and social movement organizations, in the vanguard of struggle. It further shows the necessity of class change to remove the Panamanian oligarchy from power to finally bring the era of U.S. imperialism in Panama to an end.
In the context of Panama’s history of working-class resistance to and ruling class collaboration with U.S. imperialism, working-class mobilization in Panama, like the current strike wave, has the capacity to win key victories for all workers exploited by U.S. capitalists in the United States and elsewhere. We should take inspiration from the model provided by Panamanian activists and call for solidarity with unions and movement organizations in Panama, and the defense of all targeted activists.
Sources:
A wave of strikes and protests rocks Panama – Workers’ Voice/La Voz
It’s Panama’s canal – Workers’ Voice/La Voz
Lessons from Panama’s environmental struggle – Workers’ Voice/La Voz
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