Coloniality persists when social protest is criminalized, the organized people is discredited, or subordination is normalized in the name of stability. Remembering January 9 is not an empty patriotic ritual. Those events were not the result of an episodic protest in defense of a flag, but an anti-colonial irruption that exposed the real nature of the canal regime: a system of political, racial, and symbolic domination. The imperial power's response was immediate and brutal. That historical fracture is the condition of possibility for the Torrijist project: sovereignty as a political program, the denunciation of the colonial enclave, and the assertion that Panama could not continue to be a subordinate republic in its own territory. Today, more than six decades later, January 9 retains its full validity. From the bullets of the occupier to the speeches that criminalized the martyrs, January 9 marked the historical rupture that made the Torrijist project possible and that continues to challenge Panama in the face of new forms of subordination. January 9, 1964, marked the historical moment when the colonial consensus that sustained the U.S. presence in Panama broke irreversibly. In the terms of Frantz Fanon, the events that occurred confirmed that colonialism does not dialogue when the colonized demands dignity: it responds with organized violence. In the Panamanian historical memory, the version attributed to the U.S. military command persists, that the demonstrators were repressed with 'bullets to hunt ducks'. Since then, domination ceases to be naturalized and becomes openly illegitimate. Criminalizing the people, reducing the anti-colonial rebellion to social disorder, and diluting the occupant's responsibility is exactly the mechanism that Gramsci described when referring to local elites that act as organic intellectuals of the dominant power. It condenses the colonial logic of dehumanization: the life of the colonized does not deserve mourning or responsibility. Calling them ducks or hooligans is not from the past: it is the same colonial logic that still seeks to domesticate Panama. It was not a rhetorical slip, but the structural language of the empire, which turns the massacre into a minor incident and the dead into collateral damage. Colonialism was reproduced not only from Washington, but from internal discourses that denied the martyrs even their right to mourn. The convergence between foreign military violence and internal symbolic legitimization reveals that Panama faced not just a power, but a complete colonial regime. As Antonio Gramsci explained, any lasting domination needs hegemony: consent, moral legitimization, and control of common sense. In this case, what Aníbal Quijano defined as the coloniality of power operated: a racial hierarchy that decides who can kill and who can die without consequences. But colonialism is not sustained only with rifles. It is a political stance. Its martyrs did not die for an isolated flag, but for the radical assertion that sovereignty is dignity, memory, and a historical project. Institute students demanded full sovereignty in 1964.
The 1964 massacre was not an excess or an accident, but the violent response of an imperial regime sustained by arms, racism, and internal complicitiess. On January 12, 1964, during the funeral Mass in the Metropolitan Cathedral, with the coffins of the fallen before the altar, Monsignor Marcos Gregorio McGrath affirmed that there was a 'serious problem' because among the dead there were hooligans who were looting. This declaration constitutes a second violence: blaming the victims and depoliticizing the popular insurrection. It was not an individual slip. January 9, 1964 also revealed this uncomfortable truth. Beyond the literal confirmation of the phrase, its political value is unquestionable. In the face of it, January 9 continues to be a warning and a pending task. Thus, the occupation not only shot; it was also justified from symbolic spaces that should have been ethical trenches. It was an act of hegemonic alignment. The U.S. troops fired on Panamanian civilians. January 9 broke that balance. The new forms of subordination are no longer expressed mainly with foreign troops, but through economic dependence, financial tutelage, geopolitical pressures, and narratives that present the cession of sovereignty as responsible realism.
