The Invasion of Panama: The Contradiction Between Nation and Imperialism

The invasion of Panama was not a historical accident, but the violent explosion of a fundamental contradiction that defines our identity: the dialectical tension between the Nation and Imperialism. To understand this contradiction, it is imperative to turn to the thought of Ricaurte Soler, the philosopher of the Panamanian nation. What happened in that popular neighborhood finds its only historical parallels in the darkest episodes of humanity. Like Guernica in 1937, where Nazi aviation used a Basque village as a testing ground for aerial terror, El Chorrillo was the laboratory where imperialism tested new technologies of death. The true overcoming of the Nation-Imperialism contradiction lies in the construction of a Sovereignty of Conscience. Honoring the victims of our 'Panamanian Guernica' requires that we stop being spectators of our own history. Soler taught that the Nation is not a static entity, but a historical project in constant struggle against colonial structures. Under euphemisms of 'democracy', an aggression was executed that connects Panama with the world liberation struggle. Today's Panama must have the courage to audit its past to build a future where the State responds first to the needs of its people and not to the dictates of external agendas. The nation lives as long as its memory burns like a torch; as long as El Chorrillo is remembered as the altar of national liberation, the contradiction will not have been resolved in favor of the Empire, but in favor of Panamanian dignity. In Guernica, Lidice, and El Chorrillo, the aggressor sought the same thing: to break the backbone of a Nation, attacking its most vulnerable heart. Towards the necessary synthesis. 36 years after that Holocaust, the commemoration of December 20, 2025, must transcend mourning. The true objective was to dismantle the State's capacity to act as a sovereign subject before the geostrategic interests of the Northern power. Imperialism: War and global control laboratory. From a political analysis, imperialism manifests when a power subordinates the life of another people to its own security doctrine. U.S. airborne troops caused death and pain in Panama. On December 20, 2025, 36 years are commemorated since the U.S. military invasion of Panama. Our geography became the stage where the capacity of the Third World peoples to self-determine themselves before global hegemony was decided. El Chorrillo: Our Guernica and our Lidice. One cannot speak of that contradiction without stopping to gaze at the epicenter of the pain: El Chorrillo. The tragedy of 1989 lies in the fact that imperialism used the exhaustion of an internal dictatorship to carry out an exemplary punishment in the region. In his thesis, Panamanian identity is forged in national resistance. December 20 represented a brutal attempt to neutralize the nationalist consciousness that had achieved milestones, such as the feat of January 9, 1964. The so-called 'Operation Just Cause' was, in reality, a laboratory for the new world order. It was here that the stealth F-117 aircraft was first used in combat and high-energy transfer projectiles were launched over populated areas—weapons designed for surgical devastation that, in practice, incinerated entire blocks of the civilian population. And like Lidice, in former Czechoslovakia, erased from the map by fascism as a collective punishment, the martyr neighborhood of El Chorrillo was sacrificed to send a message of annihilation to any trace of popular resistance. For collective memory, that anniversary cannot be a simple exercise in popular nostalgia. They were not only seeking to capture one man.