The bestselling author and whistle-blower recounts past US efforts to control the Panama Canal, and assesses the threats of a looming Trump administration: “I would be worried.”
John Perkins was listening to NPR in late December when he heard a report that disturbed him.
President-elect Donald Trump had threatened to retake the Panama Canal, reportedly out of concern about China’s potential influence over the waterway, and because he was upset about Panama charging excessive rates to use the passage.
“It’s pretty bad,” Perkins, a former chief economist for the Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main, said in a recent interview with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
Perkins, 79, said that Trump’s threat is likely a negotiating tactic. (Days after we spoke, the POTUS-elect suggested that he might use military or economic force to achieve such an outcome in Central America.) At the same time, Perkins has seen what happens when Latin American leaders reject US interests. He detailed those experiences in his revealing bestselling 2005 memoir, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
World leaders who Perkins worked with back in the day included then-Panamanian head of state Omar Torrijos, who successfully negotiated with President Jimmy Carter to regain control of the canal from the US in 1977. In 1981, Torrijos died in a plane crash. Perkins and others believe that he was assassinated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1987, a CIA spokesman denied the claim to the Washington Post, saying, “We do not engage in assassinations.” But regardless of what happened back then, Perkins said that current Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino should take Trump’s threats seriously.
“I would be worried if I were him,” he said.
