SPEEDBOATS INTERCEPT a suspicious ship near the entrance to the Panama Canal. Troops board it and bundle the bad guys off. On the Caribbean coast special forces launch an assault on a rebel base. On the outskirts of Panama City, the capital, Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters buzz overhead. From August 3rd to the 13th, Panamanians witnessed a display of military prowess not seen in the country for almost two decades.
We’ve got more troops here in partnership with Panama than we’ve had in a very long time. In the second half of the 20th century hundreds of thousands of troops undertook gruelling jungle-warfare training at Fort Sherman, many of them in advance of being sent to Vietnam. Mr Hegseth was speaking at Fort Sherman, one of three American-Panamanian joint training schools he announced during his previous trip to the country in April 2025.
“I’ve no issue with tabletop exercises but you can’t replicate this,” said Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, dressed in a sweat-soaked olive green t-shirt. The canal, he said, is “a key piece of terrain. “Green Hell” was closed in 1999, along with 13 other American military installations, as a condition of the 1977 Canal Neutrality Treaty, which forbade the existence of foreign military installations. The Panamanian government says the new incarnation of “Jungle School” does not represent a foreign military base. Opposition politicians call its reopening a “camouflaged invasion”.
In August the government launched a new joint command of Panamanian security forces, funded by revenue from the canal, and dedicated to the defence of the waterway and its hydrographic basin. In April it received the first of an order of surveillance drones and interceptor boats from the United States. That is not the position of the United States. The Trump administration believes that China, not drug gangs, poses the most serious threat to the canal. It wants to drive Chinese activity away from all the critical infrastructure it can in Latin America.
Panama’s constitution bars the country from having an army, but since coming to power in 2024 president José Raúl Mulino has beefed up Senafront, the border-control force, and Senan, the naval and air service. Together with port-scanning and cybersecurity equipment, the United States has given technology worth more than $174m to the security forces, according to Mr Mulino. On August 15th Senafront sent over 700 special-forces troops to the country’s southern border in an effort to stop gangsters entering through the heavily forested Darién Gap, which separates the two countries.
Panamax was also an opportunity for the Latin American members of the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition, formerly known as the “Shield of The Americas”, to meet. Mr Hegseth said that Colombia, along with Honduras and Guatemala, had agreed to allow joint American military operations in their territory “to bring the fight to the [designated terrorist organisations] on land.” (The Guatemalan government denies that it has agreed.) With Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, promising an aggressive campaign against criminal groups, Panama is preparing to deal with the spillover. “The canal’s enemy is narcotrafficking, and no one else,” said Mr Mulino. Such “dual-use infrastructure” could be used for “intelligence gathering, cyber vulnerability, or logistical denial during global contingencies”, according to Southcom. Mr Hegseth views Panama as part of “Greater North America” and part of the “immediate security perimeter”.
Last year Panama agreed to buy four Brazilian fighter planes. Last year the Trump administration pushed Panama to remove Chinese operators from the ports at each end of the canal.
