Three days before the country's 250th birthday, at the dedication of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, the president told the story of the Panama Canal in three claims: America gave it away for a dollar, China is now trying to take it over, and - as he has said repeatedly since his inaugural address - 38,000 of our people died building it [1][2][3][8]. Each claim has a specific, checkable answer, and the answers live in the treaty texts and the canal's own records.
Start with the dollar. The 1903 Hay-Bunau-Varilla Convention, the treaty that created the Canal Zone, says in Article XIV that the United States "agrees to pay to the Republic of Panama the sum of ten million dollars ($10,000,000) in gold coin," plus a $250,000 annuity [6]. Money moved toward Panama, not from it. The handover agreements - the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, each ratified by the Senate 68 to 32 - transferred the canal on December 31, 1999 as a diplomatic settlement, with continued US payments to Panama and a permanent US right to defend the canal's neutrality [7]. There was no sale, and there was no dollar. Nobody has ever produced the receipt, because it does not exist.
The death toll is the claim with a body count, so precision matters. The Panama Canal Authority's own history states: "According to hospital records, 5,609 lives were lost from disease and accidents during the American construction era" [4]. Of the recorded dead, about 350 were white Americans; roughly 4,500 were West Indian laborers, mostly from Barbados, whose deaths the records were likeliest to undercount [5]. Scholars who push the US-era estimate higher get to about 7,600, with fewer than 1,000 Americans among them [8]. Even adding the entire French era - some 20,000 deaths in the 1880s, before the United States was involved - the combined toll is around 25,000 [4]. The 38,000 figure exceeds every era, every nationality, everything, combined.
Data
| The standing claim - 38,000 of our people | 38,000 workers |
|---|---|
| Both construction eras combined, estimate | 25,000 workers |
| French era 1881-1889, estimate | 20,000 workers |
| US era 1904-1914, recorded | 5,609 workers |
| American deaths, generous upper bound | 1,000 workers |
Then there is China. The canal is operated by the Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous agency written into Title XIV of Panama's constitution, which gives it exclusive charge of administration and operation. The canal's administrator has said it directly: "China has no involvement whatsoever in our operations" [8]. The kernel the claim grew from is real but small: a Hong Kong-based conglomerate, CK Hutchison, held concessions to run two PORTS near the canal's entrances - container terminals, not locks, not transit, not tolls [8][9].
Here is what makes the July 1 version remarkable: even that kernel expired months ago. Panama's courts found the port concessions unconstitutional, and in February the government annulled them outright - operation of both terminals passed on an interim basis to Maersk and MSC, European shipping firms, while the Hong Kong company fights the annulment in arbitration [9]. When the president said China is "trying to take over" the canal, the Chinese-adjacent foothold he was gesturing at had been gone for four months.
The canal is a genuine American epic - of engineering, of medicine, and of several thousand mostly Caribbean workers who paid for it with their lives. Their real number is written in the canal's own records. It does not need inflating, and their story does not become more American by claiming their graves.
