Panama Independence Paves Way for Canal

In the late 1870s, French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal in Egypt, called a conference in Paris to design and raise money for a Central American canal. Deciding on a sea-level canal in Panama, he began to raise money privately, and started work in 1882. But the project was dogged by equipment delays, tropical diseases, financial problems, and poor planning. The canal design turned out to be impossible to build with the technology available at the time. The enterprise went bankrupt in 1888 and was replaced with a holding company to protect the interests of investors. The project, however, had brought Panama a more diverse population, including many Caribbean blacks who came to work on it.