Democrats in Congress hate it.

“It’s bananas. It’s insane,” U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D.-Conn., told CNN. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D.-Fla., agrees: “It is utterly preposterous to suggest that we are going to send our military into Panama to, quote, ‘take back the Panama Canal.'” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks for virtually all his congressional peers when he insists, “House Democrats believe that we are not sent to Washington to invade Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico or seize the Panama Canal by force!”

But as President Donald Trump stated explicitly during his March 4 speech to Congress, the nation and the world: “My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal – and we’ve already started doing it. Just today, a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal and lots of other things having to do with the Panama Canal and a couple of other canals.”

The Panama Canal, Trump pointed out, “was built at tremendous cost of American blood and treasure. 38,000 workers died building the Panama Canal. They died of malaria, they died of snakebites and mosquitoes. Not a nice place to work. They paid them very highly to go there, knowing there was a 25% chance that they would die – the most expensive project also that was ever built in our country’s history.”

Trump’s inaugural address: ‘China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.’

Concluded the 47th president: “It was given away by the Carter administration for $1. But that agreement has been violated very severely. We didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.”

‘Going to a battlefield’

The astonishingly gruesome process of constructing the Panama Canal – commenced by America in 1904 and completed a decade later – was undertaken to fulfill the centuries-old dream of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, thereby saving ships from 21-23 extra days at sea by being able to cross through what would become a 51-mile-long waterway.

However, “the Panamanian isthmus proved to be one of the most difficult – and deadly – spots in the world in which to construct a channel,” explains History.com:

Death could strike in the form of an 18-ton boulder or miniscule, malaria-carrying mosquitoes that bred by the millions in festering swamps and puddles. … “The working condition in those days were so horrible it would stagger your imagination,” recalled laborer Alfred Dottin. “Death was our constant companion. I shall never forget the train loads of dead men being carted away daily, as if they were just so much lumber.”

The most dangerous work took place as laborers carved a ditch 45 feet deep and at least 300 feet wide through an eight-mile mountainous stretch known as the Culebra Cut.”

Nicknamed “Hell’s Gorge,” the Culebra Cut was a cauldron of noise with roaring locomotives and belching steam shovels where risks of death ranged from drowning to electrocution. Workers blasted away at the mountains with upwards of 60 million pounds of dynamite, which could ignite prematurely in the tropical Panamanian climate. …

Flooding regularly submerged equipment, and the unstable ground could give way at any instant. “The work of months or even years might be blotted out by an avalanche of earth,” lamented a senior U.S. administrator.

Particularly for workers partially deafened as a side effect of drinking quinine to ward off malaria, the inability to hear made deadly railroad accidents a regular occurrence. In an oral history, George Hodges remembered a fellow worker who fell trying to hop on a train and the wheel of another train “cut his body right in two…as if he had been chopped with a machete.”

As one laborer, Antonio Sanchez, explained, working in “the cut” was just like “going to a battlefield.”

Fast-forward six decades. In 1976, Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, campaigning against Gerald Ford, publicly promised – as did Ford – that he would not support transferring the canal from U.S. ownership to Panama, an idea that was then popular with the elites, but not the American people. Yet when he won the presidency, Carter changed his mind and, in 1977, signed the Carter-Torrijos Treaties, transferring total control of the canal to Panama, to take effect on Dec. 31, 1999.

Interestingly, during the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan expressed his firm opposition to turning the canal over to Panama … and then defeated Carter in a historic landslide, with a staggering 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s 49.

“When it comes to the [Panama] Canal,” Reagan said, “we built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and … we are going to keep it!”

China’s plans for world domination

Today, the big issue cited by Trump and other administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is what has long amounted to the de facto control of the Panama Canal by the nation widely regarded as America’s most dangerous geopolitical adversary.

How can that be, many wonder? What happened to the Monroe Doctrine, that revered 200-year-old foreign policy stance established by the fifth U.S. president, James Monroe, holding that any major intervention in the Western Hemisphere – i.e., North, Central or South America – by a foreign power constitutes a potentially hostile act against the U.S.?

U.S.-based China expert Gordon Chang – author of several books about China’s barely disguised plans to dominate the world, including his 2024 bestseller, “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America” – says the Panama Canal has long been a “chokepoint” that Beijing wants to control.

And as Secretary of State Marco Rubio told SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly on Jan. 30: “If the government in China in a conflict tells them to shut down the Panama Canal, they will have to. And in fact, I have zero doubt that they have contingency planning to do so. That is a direct threat.”

Indeed, as WorldNetDaily reported in February, shortly after Rubio expressed to Panama’s leadership President Trump’s concerns over Chinese influence over the canal, Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulina stated that he would not renew a 2017 “memorandum of understanding” by which Panama joined China’s “Belt and Road Initiative.”

“Under that program, China funds the construction and development of infrastructure, such as ports, and then takes control of them for its own profit and empire building,” WND reported, adding: “In the case of the canal, [China] has worked on ports at both ends, creating the possibility that it could shut down the canal if it seemed in the best interests of the Chinese Communist Party. It also has been building bridges over the canal, which would offer the same option.”

Rubio explained to Panamanian officials that “the United States cannot, and will not, allow the Chinese Communist Party to continue with its effective and growing control over the Panama Canal area.” And in Congress, a bill has been introduced directing the U.S. to negotiate the repurchase of the canal from Panama.

Meanwhile, Trump’s March 4 prime-time announcement that “a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal” referred to BlackRock, the huge U.S.-based investment and asset-management firm. BlackRock purchased the critical ports from CK Hutchison Holdings Limited, officially described as a “Hong Kong-based and Cayman Islands-registered multinational conglomerate corporation” formed in 2015 by a merger of Cheung Kong Holdings and its main associate company Hutchison Whampoa.

However, just as with most things concerning Communist China, massive subterfuge and deception are involved. For Hutchinson Whampoa – as a few reality-based media organizations have noted, including this RealClearHistory analysis from January – has been identified as “a front Chinese company that was owned by Chinese military intelligence.” In the report, author Miguel A. Faria succinctly demystifies China’s longtime control of the Panama Canal:

The United States built the Panama Canal early in the 20th century with American sweat, toil and money, only to give it away to a leftwing Panamanian dictator via a dubious treaty. The Panamanians, in turn, ceded the Canal to Hutchison Whampoa, a front Chinese company that was owned by Chinese military intelligence. At about the same time, another Chinese front organization, the Hong Kong-based Hutchinson Port Holdings, obtained a 50-year lease to operate the two strategic ports at either end of the Panama Canal. Thus, in case of hostilities, U.S. shipping routes would be cut off and bottled up in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, encircled by the Chinese and their allies Cuba, Venezuela and Panama. To this day, the Chinese deny that they control the Panama Canal, and the American media seem to believe them. President-elect Donald Trump does not.

Indeed, the American media have rarely if ever sounded the alarm over this serious threat to U.S. security located right in “America’s backyard” (as Central and South America are commonly referred to in the U.S. global security context). Legacy media stories today instead obsess over Trump’s supposed “expansionist agenda,” his “land grab” obsession and his dangerous vision of “a new U.S. imperialism.”

There are a few exceptions, however, including WorldNetDaily, one of the only American media organizations that has sounded the alarm not just recently – but for decades. More than 25 years ago – before the canal was even turned over to the left-wing Panamanian government – WND founder Joseph Farah was passionately making virtually the same arguments Trump has been making during his second term as president.

In “Clinton’s Panama Canal admission,” published Dec. 1, 1999, just weeks before Carter’s “gift” of the canal to Panama would take effect (one of many articles Farah wrote during the late ’90s warning about Chinese control of the vital waterway), he focused on then-President Bill Clinton’s public admission that, indeed, China was running the Panama Canal!

Was it a Freudian slip? Was it a gaffe? Or was it President Clinton finally being honest about something for the first time in his life?

I refer to the statement he made yesterday with regard to the Panama Canal transfer to a group of reporters in the Oval Office before leaving for the West Coast. …

Here it is, folks. Hold on to your hats – especially all of you people who scoffed when I began telling you three years ago that the Communist Chinese were taking over the Panama Canal.

“I think the Chinese will in fact be bending over backwards to make sure that they run it in a competent and able and fair manner,” Clinton said. That’s verbatim. Those are his words, not mine. Clinton, who has until now denied that the Chinese were to take control of the strategic canal, admitted it publicly.

And, as if to underline his admission and seemingly to ensure there could be no misunderstanding of his words, Clinton elaborated. … He compared the operation of the canal to China’s campaign to win admission to the World Trade Organization, which sets the rules for global trade.

“They’ll want to demonstrate to a distant part of the world that they can be a responsible partner,” the president said. “And I would be very surprised if any adverse consequences flowed from the Chinese running the canal.”

Oh, absolutely. Responsible. Partner. Competent. Fair. Those are all words I readily associate in my mind with the totalitarian government in Beijing. Don’t you?

Well, there you have it, folks. Goodbye Panama Canal. The Bamboo Curtain just moved into the Western Hemisphere – officially, that is.

After all, I gave you this history long ago. I told you about the fact that a Chinese government company – a front for the military – Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., was to begin operation of the ports on both ends of the strategic waterway Jan. 1. It has been the Clinton administration and its many apologists in Congress and the press who have laughed, ridiculed the idea. Chinese military shill Alexander Haig suggested I should be jailed for making such accusations.

And now the truth has finally come out through an unusually candid admission by Clinton. He is telling us now what has been obvious to anyone familiar with the transfer of the canal. He is admitting what former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Thomas Moorer stated in our pages some time back.

Clinton says we can rely on the good intentions of the Chinese to maintain access to the canal. Doesn’t that reassure you? The Chinese, who, as we speak, are rounding up tens of thousands of religious dissidents and interning them, threatening to attack Taiwan and working overtime on developing military technology that could only be used to attack the United States, should be trusted on this Panama Canal deal because it’s a chance for them to show how responsible they really are.

This is nuts!

When are the American people going to wake up? Clinton is so embarrassed by this deal on the canal that he is not even going to attend the transfer ceremonies. Why? If he doesn’t have any second thoughts and believes giving away the Panama Canal to a hostile foreign power is still a good idea, why not go wave the flag next month at the ceremony?

… If ever there was a time – an opportunity – to pressure the politicians to reverse what will someday be judged a historic blunder, it is now. If you really have the guts to stop this thing, America, wake up and take action now. You won’t have to risk your life to write a letter to your senators and representatives in Washington or fill out a simple online petition today.

Your kids, however, may someday pay for our mistakes with their blood if you sit silent through this official treachery.

The same day, Dec. 1, 1999, this writer published a detailed news article on WND, headlined “In 2000, it’s China Canal,” which included exclusive comments from former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer, who assured WorldNetDaily that China’s takeover of the canal “would be catastrophic for the U.S.”