When the treaties entered into force on October 1, 1979, it marked the formal dissolution of the Canal Zone as such: the Republic of Panama immediately assumed jurisdiction over much of the ten-mile-wide territory. US military bases and personnel in Panama came under a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), an accord establishing a legal framework to dictate the rights and privileges of military-affiliated foreign nationals stationed in another country. US personnel began gradually turning over townsites, military bases, and infrastructure in the former Zone, to be completed over the following decades. In accordance with the Panama Canal Act of 1979, the legislation that implemented the treaties, Canal Commission employees were allowed to retire as early as forty-eight with eighteen years of service, or at any age after twenty-three years of service, effectively ensuring that all workers employed at the time the Torrijos-Carter Treaties were signed would be able to start collecting pensions upon the completion of the transition in 1999.
The possibility of early retirement was not enough to placate the Zonians. Even before the ink had dried on the Panama Canal Treaties, negotiation efforts sparked what some in the community have called “the exodus.” A world was ending, and Jimmy Carter was the horseman of their apocalypse. On September 30, 1979, they went to bed under US jurisdiction and awoke under the government of Omar Torrijos, a mestizo general from the hinterlands of Panama.
The vast majority of the community left Panama and resettled elsewhere, predominantly in the southern climes of the US. They were under no legal obligation to depart; Torrijos had extended citizenship to the Zonians in the years leading up to the treaty, and many of them became dual citizens. Nevertheless, as H.B. Twohy, a fourth-generation Zonian, told me, many felt an expectation to “go back home to a place I’ve never lived before.”
There is a general feeling among the Zonians of having been unjustly abandoned by a federal government that had for years administered every facet of their lives, from housing to employment to grocery shopping at subsidized commissaries. There is a prevailing notion, too, that the media has dealt them an unfair hand, particularly in its portrayals of the Canal Zone’s racial segregation. “When the treaty came about, everybody was pissed,” recalled Mike Andrews, a onetime cooling and refrigeration foreman who lived and worked on the Atlantic side of the Zone. Despite his opposition to the transition he decided to remain in Panama, where both his parents are buried. Andrews departed the former Zone in 1991 to run a fishing lodge in Panama’s Darién province and has since retired. We spoke in January of 2024 at a Zonian reunion at the Elks Lodge, a beloved Zonian haunt a short drive from the Administration Building just outside Panama City. The mounted antlers of countless bucks lined the walls.