Marco Rubio Tells Panama’s Leader ‘Immediate Changes’ Are Needed

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to escalate the Trump administration’s confrontation with Panama on Sunday, telling its leader that President Trump had determined that Chinese “influence and control” over the Panama Canal threatens the waterway and demanding “immediate changes,” according to the State Department.

Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, provided a different account of the discussion, saying after the meeting that he did not believe Mr. Rubio had conveyed a threat that Mr. Trump might move to reclaim the American-built shipping route. He said he saw little risk of such an intervention.

But President Trump, speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland about the canal on Sunday, said that “we’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen.”

The State Department’s summary of the meeting in Panama City, Mr. Rubio’s first with a foreign leader since becoming secretary of state, struck a tone that was sometimes aggressive. It said Mr. Rubio had told his host that Mr. Trump had made a “preliminary determination” that China’s government exercised control over the canal.

“Secretary Rubio made clear that this status quo is unacceptable and that absent immediate changes, it would require the United States to take measures necessary to protect its rights under the treaty,” the State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said in the summary. The statement referred to Mr. Trump’s assertion that the Chinese connection to the canal violates a treaty meant to ensure its neutrality.

Ms. Bruce did not specify what those measures might be. Asked last month whether he would rule out putting military force behind his threats to reclaim the canal, which the U.S. controlled for nearly a century, Mr. Trump declined to do so.

Speaking to reporters after meeting with Mr. Rubio, however, Mr. Mulino repeatedly played down the risk that Mr. Trump might seize the canal, by force or otherwise. “There is no question that the canal is operated by Panama and will continue to be so,” he said. “I don’t think there was any discrepancy on that,” he said.

“I did not feel any threat,” Mr. Mulino said.

Mr. Trump has falsely claimed that China “operates” the canal, which was built by the United States in the early 1900s and was operated by Americans for most of the 20th century. Agreements reached under President Jimmy Carter’s administration turned it over in 1999 to Panama, which undertook a massive expansion of the canal so it could accommodate larger ships.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio have focused on the fact that a Hong Kong-based company, CK Hutchison Holdings, operates seaports at both ends of the waterway. They claim that poses a national security threat to the United States, suggesting that the Chinese government could order the company to obstruct shipping. Many experts are skeptical of that claim.

Mr. Mulino said after the Sunday talks that his government would decide what steps to take after receiving the results of an audit of CK Hutchison that it had recently ordered. “We have to wait for that audit to be done to come to our own legal conclusions and act in accordance,” Mr. Mulino said he had told Mr. Rubio. He suggested that this was an area in which there “could be updates.”

Mr. Trump is not the first American president to worry about hostile interference with the canal. During World War II, the Roosevelt administration acted to defend the waterway from Nazi sabotage plans. During the Cold War, presidents fretted about what a 1951 U.S. diplomatic cable called “Communist designs on the Canal.”

Later on Sunday, Mr. Rubio traveled to the canal itself, touring the Miraflores Locks near central Panama City, where vessels move along the 51-mile canal linking the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. He met there with the canal’s administrator and toured an elevated control room, as a huge petroleum gas tanker with a bright orange hull and Korean lettering slowly approached.

Mr. Rubio is touring five Latin American nations on his first trip abroad as Mr. Trump’s top diplomat. He is scheduled to travel on Monday to El Salvador and then to Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

During remarks to employees at the American Embassy in Panama City, Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban migrants, joked that he’d told aides that he wanted to pay his first visit “to a place where they speak Spanish, because I’m bilingual,” proceeding to show off his fluency in the language.

Mr. Rubio acknowledged America’s complicated history with Panama, a former Colombian territory that was founded after President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, eyeing the potential for a shortcut between America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, backed breakaway separatists who declared independence in 1903.

Mr. Rubio noted that the country “was born in many ways here as a result of the interests of the United States,” and said the relationship had had its “ups and downs.” The downs include a 1989 U.S. invasion of the country to arrest the country’s de facto ruler, Gen. Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking and racketeering.

Ahead of the secretary of state’s visit, Panamanian flags covered the streets of Panama City and the former Canal Zone, where they were once prohibited during the era of American control.

Striking a warmer tone than in the stern passages about the canal, Ms. Bruce’s summary said Mr. Rubio had “thanked President Mulino for his support of a joint repatriation program” that had reduced migration through the Darién Gap, the perilous route between Colombia and Panama that has become a gateway for hundreds of thousands of migrants each year.

Mr. Mulino said the two men had discussed expanding a July agreement that he made with the Biden administration aimed at tightening security at the gap, and that he had offered Mr. Rubio the use of an air strip for planes to repatriate migrants.

Mr. Mulino indicated that the United States might use the air strip, in Darién Province, to land planes carrying migrants deported from the United States, who would then be taken to countries like Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. He said he thought that Panama could serve as a point of transfer, stressing that the United States would pay for the process.

Mr. Mulino also said on Sunday that Panama, which in 2017 became the first country in the region to sign on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a far-reaching infrastructure program, would not renew the agreement. He said he hoped the withdrawal would prompt the United States to take a more active role in projects in Panama.

In recent years, Mr. Mulino said, the United States had left “a lot of empty space” for others to fill. After announcing the pullout from the Chinese program, Mr. Mulino said, “I think this visit opens a path toward building a new era in relations.”

Mary Triny Zea contributed reporting from Panama City.