About the Panama Canal.

It is good, probably, to blow a butterfly across the Americas and tell, on behalf of smart and working Russo-Americans, stupid and lazy Panamans, how they work poorly, that they cannot quickly, in a couple or three years, dig out a double of the Panama Canal.

But there are a couple of facts that you should know before telling Latin Americans the purely American fables about the fact that "patience and labor will digest everything."

The creation of the channel 100 years ago cost America (far from Panama) giant money. Moreover, the construction alone spent about $ 9 billion on the current money. Currently, the GDP of Panama is only five times greater. It’s about like Russia holding 3-4 Olympics annually in different cities for 8-10 years. In theory, maybe, but it is not easy. Defense, medicine, and education at the same time would go a long way.

At the same time, the expenses of America were not limited to the construction itself (grabbing land, etc.). Before the construction of the Panama Canal, a country like Panama did not actually exist. The country emerged as a result of the battles of a small number of suddenly from somewhere appearing "Panama Fighters for Freedom" (momentally supported by the United States) on the territory of then-Columbia, right next to the place of digging the future canal. Colombia wanted to shrink the “rebels” with its own forces, but Uncle Teddy Roosevelt. The great and terrible (who was so sweetly played in "Night at the Museum" by Robin Williams), immediately sent a pair of cannoners to the shores of Colombia, and "Great Columbia" somehow immediately swallowed, giving the newly created nation of "Panama" an important piece of its territory. A couple of weeks after gaining “independence”, the new “chief of Panama” signed a treaty with the United States on granting them the right to build the canal and indefinitely use it. Furthermore, neither he nor the surrounding canal the territory of Roosevelt and other Americans were virtually not interested.

More than 10,000 Chinese were brought from China to dig the canal, who died like flies from yellow fever so quickly that they simply did not have time to import new batches of labor. In fact, in part they were needed because there were almost no "Panamans" in those regions. For obvious reasons, the former Colombians simply fled the combat zone in the future "Panama", and several hundred "rebels" received their grandmothers for the work carried out to crush the territory, but the cars with land in "free Panama" were absolutely not going to drive). It is necessary to say that medical insurance to the Chinese and compensation to relatives of the dead Teddy Roosevelt for some reason did not provide. By the way, about one-tenth of the work before this was done by the French, who dug in Panama for a long time before, but conducted geological exploration and managed to remove part of the soil.

The current Panamans have: 1) not as much money as the United States had 100 years ago, 2) they have no place to take the crowds of Chinese, ready for a penny, dying from infectious diseases, but to dig the ground for 12 to 14 hours a day.

And the story of the “heroic construction of the Panama Canal” is not the heroism of the “working” Americans. This is the heroism of all the same Chinese, who were almost forcibly, for a penny, brought to hell, where they, virtually in the conditions of a concentration camp, digged and digged Panama (formerly Colombia) land for the needs of the United States.

To set them as an example for modern Panamans, I think, is the top of cynicism.