National Government unveils monument in honor and remembrance of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties

The President of the Republic, Laurentino Cortizo Cohen, led the solemn unveiling ceremony of the monument commemorating the Torrijos-Carter Treaties as an act of friendship between the United States and Panama that returned sovereignty to the country, at the end of the American presence and allow the recovery of the Canal, on December 31, 1999.

The statue, baptized “The Conquest of Sovereignty”, was in charge of the painter and sculptor from Veraguas Aristides Ureña Ramos; It measures 13 meters high and was made with the lost wax bronze technique. It represents General Omar Torrijos Herrera and former United States President James Carter, moments before shaking hands after the signing of the historic agreement, on September 7, 1977.

The keynote speaker, the Minister of Canal Affairs, former President of the Republic and former negotiator of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, Aristides Royo, highlighted that the heads of State of this hemisphere, James Carter, of the United States of America, and Omar Torrijos Herrera, from Panama, managed to integrate themselves into a single group of wills that concluded with the delivery of the Canal to Panama and the exercise of full Isthmian sovereignty over our territory.

“The treaties that both leaders signed on September 7, 1977, and that bear their names, put an end to six decades of discord, claims and bloodshed in 1964,” said the former president.

He added that, in his desire to solve the canal problem, the most important decision that General Torrijos made was to turn to international support. Until the first half of the seventies of the twentieth century, relations related to the Canal from which treaties such as the Arias Roosevelt emerged, which eliminated the right to intervention that the Panamanian Constitution of 1904 had granted to the United States , and the Remón Eisenhower Agreement, had remained within a narrow framework of absolute bilaterality.

This foreign support began with meetings with leaders such as Alfonso López Michelsen, from Colombia; Daniel Oduber, from Costa Rica; and Carlos Andrés Pérez, from Venezuela; and in 1973, the UN Security Council met in Panama, outside its headquarters in New York, where Omar Torrijos gave a courageous speech in which he stressed that "we have never been, are not and will never be an associated state, colony or protectorate, nor do we want to add another star to the flag of the United States.”