The Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution ended slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States in 1865. There was, however, a fateful exception: slavery or involuntary servitude would remain permissible as punishment for crimes. The Amendment’s “convict clause” extended the supposed legality of forced labor to “any place subject to” the jurisdiction of the United States.
As chain gangs became the manifestation of the criminalization of blackness in the former Confederacy, American “prison imperialism” spread the exploitation of “slaves of the state” through an expanding empire—first to the western territories of North America, then Alaska and Hawaii, and then, in the aftermath of the Spanish American War, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico.
Then came the Panama Canal Zone.
“By establishing slavery and involuntary servitude for punishment of crimes committed any place under US jurisdiction, federal penal policy became used as a tool of white-settler colonialism, imperial expansion, and infrastructure building for global capitalism,” writes historian Benjamin D. Weber in his exploration of how “the American-style chain gang was brought to the Panama Canal.”
Construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama actually began under French auspices in 1881, when the region was still part of Colombia. That effort was unsuccessful. The US bought out what remained of the French project in 1902, but then Colombia rejected the US proposal for a canal. Instead of sweetening the deal, the US assisted local rebels with funding and warships, shepherding the founding of a new state of Panama in 1903. As a Panamanian delegation headed to Washington to negotiate a canal treaty, the former Director General of the French project, who had had himself declared the Plenipotentiary-Minister to the Panamanian rebels, signed his own deal with the US. The US got a roughly ten-mile-wide concession through the heart of the new country. This Canal Zone would be American run until 1979. (The canal was fully turned over to Panama in 1999.)
Construction of the canal and related infrastructure began in 1904 and lasted a decade. The cost was an estimated $15 billion in today’s money. Thousands of lives were lost during the project to workplace disasters and diseases including yellow fever and malaria. Contrary to a recent statement by a US Senator arguing for the “taking back” of the canal, the great majority of these dead were not Americans but migrant laborers from the Caribbean.
Tens of thousands of laborers from Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, St Lucia, Haiti, Martinique, and elsewhere had come for the French project. The US project brought in hundreds of thousands more from the Caribbean, elsewhere in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the US. Racial segregation would be the guiding principle of the labor regime in the Canal Zone. “Gold Roll” white employees got untaxed income, free housing, healthcare, and other luxury benefits. Black workers, both migrants and African Panamanians, would be treated as industrial cannon fodder. And with the blessing of the US Constitution, forced convict labor would be used to build roads.
An “imagined relation between slavery, [B]lackness, and criminality became a linchpin of the prison labor program” in the Canal Zone, as it did in the US, writes Weber. “High visibility and degrading forms of hard physical toil were used to fortify the equation of blackness and criminality.”
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Forced-labor road-building began in 1908, authorized by a US governor who had been a Kentucky plantation owner. While plenty of former Confederates peopled the US imperial project, white officials and engineers from northern US states “were also eager to establish a racialized division of labor” in the Zone. A misdemeanor conviction was enough to be worked to death on road construction.
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Portions of the Pan-American Highway were built by what were essentially slaves of the state. The convict roads were also supposed to open up fertile valleys to white settlement. Deportations of Black people became routine in the Zone.
Weber shows that protests against the “entwined workings of racism and imperialism” in the labor and penal system were there from the beginning. Initially divided by point of origin and language, African Antilleans and African Panamanians would unite to fight for labor rights and against penal state racism. Weber notes that Jamaican-born Pan-African activists Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashwood, the co-founders of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, both experienced living under the American racial order in Panama.
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