In The Zone: The End of an American Enclave

By John Borrell

The reflected lights of Panama City dance impishly on the waters of the bay as Lucho Azcarraga and his band play Auld Lang Syne at Fred Cotton's farewell party on the grounds of the Amador Officer's Club. There are more than 250 guests, nearly all of them middle-aged and conspicuously American, wearing colorful shirts and dresses, Hawaiian leis draped around their necks. Azcarraga's pudgy fingers are surprisingly agile on the organ keyboard as he pumps out the Scottish farewell. But then they should be. Although he is over 70, he plays this tune quite often. Most of the guests get to hear it pretty frequently too. "You say goodbye a lot around here these days," says Dick Morgan, who is being promoted to take over Cotton's job as the director of one of the Panama Canal Commission's three divisions. "Sometimes I worry about who is going to be left to come to my retirement."

Since former President Jimmy Carter signed treaties with Panama in 1977 that provide for the canal to be handed over in 1999, Americans have been leaving at a steady clip. In 1979, when the treaties went into effect, there were 2,455 Americans on a payroll that had already been cut sharply by the transfer of schools and other responsibilities to the U.S. Army. Now there are fewer than 1,200 U.S. citizens employed by the commission. This year, and every year until the handover, about 100 more will pack their bags. By the year 2000 only a tiny handful will remain. Most departing Americans will have to clear lumps from their throats at farewell parties. "Hell, you are working for the world on this job, not just the U.S. Government," says Commission Hydrologist Frank Robinson, 59, who will soon retire to Florida after 38 years on the canal. "The canal has been a mission, avocation. Lots of people feel bad about leaving."

Farewells are perhaps hardest of all for people like Cotton, whose ties go back to the beginning, when the canal was still an American dream. His greatgrandparents were railroad folks from New Jersey who came to Panama in 1905, the year after the U.S. under President Theodore Roosevelt began digging. Cotton's grandparents married in Panama, and his mother was born in a construction town.

Cotton himself was born 51 years ago in Colon, at the northern end of the 51-mile-long canal. "Born and raised here, right alongside the canal, and so were my kids," he says. "It is tough to say goodbye when you are fourth generation."

He joined the original Panama Canal Company in 1962 and later served as civil affairs director, a kind of mayor for the whole zone. Anti-Americanism occasionally turned ugly in the years leading up to the signing of the historic agreement. Cotton was a leading opponent of the treaties, earning him the enmity of many Panamanians and the respect of large numbers of his fellow Americans. "It was a period of great trauma," he now says simply. "When people lost their jobs, they lost their way of life. Emotions ran pretty high."

That collegial respect is evident as the breeze runs its fingers through the branches of the pair of giant fig trees that dominate the club's patio. "Fred will be leaving a very big pair of shoes to be filled. They may never be filled," offers Deputy Administrator Fernando Manfredo Jr. as, to loud applause, he hands Cotton a symbolic set of keys to the canal locks. "Your contribution to this engineering wonder of the world is something you can look back on with pride."

Nearly all the Americans who have ever been connected with the Panama Canal have felt a deep sense of identification with what some, unconsciously, still refer to as "our canal." "There has always been great pride involved in operating this canal," says Ronald Seeley, the commission's personnel director. "Americans came out to Panama for life, not just a few years."

Until 1979 employees were offered cradle-to-grave security. "The company was the government," explains George Mercier, the deputy director of personnel. "I've run the hospitals in which people were born and the mortuaries to which they were taken when they died." Employees lived in company housing and bought their groceries from commissaries. The canal operation even had its own ice-cream plant. "It was the biggest company town in the world," recalls Cotton. "Like a separate country within a country," says Robert Emerick, who started work for the company in 1962. "I knew one fellow who only left the zone on his way to the airport. And he was here for 30 years."

All that is changing rapidly as the Americans thin out. The commissaries have gone, and the post office has long since been turned over to Panama. Lest there be any doubt about sovereignty, a red, white and blue Panamanian flag the size of a basketball court flies from the top of Ancon Hill.

"Anyone who hasn't filled in a retirement form please do so immediately." The emcee is joking while Cotton fumbles with the wrapping of another farewell present. "Those that have, please leave now." There seems to be a bit of an edge to the laughter, and at one of the tables someone half whispers to his companions, "Give me my pension, and I'll go tomorrow."

For some, staying on is counting off the days until the pension is due or the moment is otherwise right. "It is not like it used to be," complains Captain Richard Cathaway, a canal pilot a few years short of the retirement age of 62. He recalls with affection the old Tivoli Guest House, with its wide , timber verandas, wicker chairs and a bar where heads might turn at the sound of a conversation in Spanish. The Tivoli, owned by the canal company since construction days and run largely for the benefit of American employees and visitors, was pulled down in 1971. Frank Robinson remembers the monthly dances at a hotel in Colon in his youth. "They were formal affairs. You dressed properly. I went every month," he says. These days many people socialize at home.

The nostalgia runs so deep that complaints are sometimes over mundane matters. "The grass isn't kept cut like it used to be," says the captain. "There's a pile of garden rubbish in the front of my house that hasn't been collected for nearly two weeks. Before, it would have been taken away in a couple of days."

Yet for all the grumbling, those who have stayed on acknowledge that none of the big fears of a decade ago, including the possibility that the canal might have to be closed because of a mass exodus of Americans, have been realized. "Looking back, it has all worked better than any of us thought at the time," says Cotton.

Most Americans wonder about the future of the thin link between oceans that consumed so much of their lives. "They can't even maintain the road to my farm," says Dave Feller, a retiree who has remained in Panama, "so what do you think is going to happen to the canal in 20 years?" Says Cotton, a little more diplomatically: "We'll eventually turn it over to a totally Panamanian work force capable of running the canal. Whether they make a go of it will depend on whether the politicians and the military let them." After serious antigovernment riots in June, those still in Panama worry increasingly about the country's political stability and its effect on the smooth operation of the canal.

The breeze from the north is beginning to play mischievously with the oil lanterns as Cotton at last takes the microphone for his farewell speech. "This is it. What d'ya say?" he asks, uncharacteristical ly at a loss for words. But then he remembers them: "Don't any of you Americans leave here in any doubt about what you did. We are all going to walk out of here with our heads held high."

The applause suggests that the spirit of Roosevelt lives on here, even as time ticks away on one of the U.S.'s most ambitious and successful overseas ventures.