Ownership of the Panama Canal Company passed on April 23, 1904, from France to the United States, concluding a rivalry between Washington, Paris, and London.
On that occasion in 1904 the property of the French company excavating the canal was sold to the US government for $40 million.
In preparation for this event, a new country was born, Panama. A rebellion began in Colombia on November 3, 1903, and resulted in the creation of Panama, which the United States quickly recognized as a new state on November 6, 1903.
The United States placed Panama under its protection, stressing the inadmissibility of the presence of foreign forces on the territory of this new country.
Thus, the project to build the canal moved from the French, who had established since 1894 a company to build the Panama Canal headed by the French engineer and diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, but the company went bankrupt, so Paris established another company, but the competition ended in favor of the United States.
Panama signed an agreement with the United States to continue building the canal on November 18, 1903, according to which Panama transferred to the United States full jurisdiction over the canal itself and the territory along its route about 16 kilometers wide.
In return, the United States paid Panama $10 million at a time, and also pledged to pay rent for the use of the land it received in the amount of $250,000 annually. This amount then increased several times, reaching in 1998 to $110 million.
The United States immediately began the work of digging the canal, and soon the US War Department received the project from civilians, and the work lasted for more than ten years, and its costs amounted to more than 400 million dollars.
The first ocean liners began passing through the canal on August 15, 1914, but the official opening took place on July 12, 1920, after which the canal entered active service.
This huge project involved nearly 70,000 workers, of whom no less than 5,600 died from various causes, while the expansion and strengthening of the waterway continued until 1999.
The Panama Canal is one of the most important projects for the link between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Attempts to dig the canal began with the Spanish in 1881, then the French, and ended with the hands of the Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Described as an engineering marvel, the Panama Canal consists of an intricate system of gates and dams. They are alternately filled with water, while ships move along the canal with the help of special electric locomotives. Currently, at least 5 to 7% of total world trade depends on this important waterway.
In detail, since 1904 about 240 million cubic meters of soil were extracted during the excavation of the canal, and before that, another 30 million cubic meters of soil were removed during the French construction period.
The total length of the canal is 81.6 km, including 65.2 km on land and 16.4 km at the bottom of the sea bays. The width of the canal ranges from 150-305 meters, and the minimum depth is 12.5 meters.
With the building of the Panama Canal, ships no longer had to pass the Strait of Magellan or circumnavigate Cape Horn, at the tip of South America, and it redirected a number of important sea routes, greatly reducing the distance between ports on the west and east coasts of the United States and Canada, and between the east coast of the United States and the Far East, as well as among Latin American countries.
Panama had repeatedly demanded that the United States revise the 1903 treaty. After many years of negotiations, the "Panama Canal" and "Permanent Neutrality and Administration of the Panama Canal" treaties were signed in 1977, according to which the canal became under the sovereignty of Panama on October 1, 1979, but This order was officially delayed to January 1, 2000.
With the aim of developing the canal and making it suitable for the passage of modern ships, it was decided in 2007 to rebuild this waterway.. The approximate cost of reconstruction was initially estimated at $5.25 billion with completion in 2014.
Many problems faced the development project with a financial dispute that has not been settled yet, but the Panama Canal reopened to navigation on June 26, 2016.
After rebuilding, the carrying capacity of this waterway from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean doubled, from 300 to 600 million tons annually.
Currently, the Panama Canal provides its services to 144 sea routes, connecting 160 countries and about 1,700 ports of the world.
The top ten countries benefiting from the flow of goods are the USA, China, Chile, Peru, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Canada.
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