Panama

Panama, officially the Republic of Panama, is the isthmus at Central America's southern end, joining Costa Rica to Colombia between the Caribbean and the Pacific, four million people, half of them in Panama City. Indians lived here before Spain came in the sixteenth century; Panama left Spain in 1821 for Bolívar's Gran Colombia and remained a Colombian province after the union dissolved in 1831. The forty-niners crossed it, the French failed on it, and with an American cruiser offshore Panama quit Colombia in 1903; the United States Army Engineers then cut the canal through in 1904 to 1914 and ran a zone across the republic's middle. Tolls, banks, flags of convenience and tourists made a high-income economy of the transit strip, jungles covering forty percent of the land sheltered wildlife found nowhere else, and the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties gave the canal back, the zone lands first in 1979 and the waterway itself at the end of 1999.