As Americans go to the polls today in record numbers, the weight of history will be on their shoulders. For the first time in their nation’s 232-year history, one of the campaign frontrunners is a native of the Panama Canal Zone.
The Australian
John McCain was born to officer-class parents in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936. And while his homeland fell to the Panamanian government by mutual agreement in 1979, McCain never forgot his now-non-existent roots.
McCain’s early life was hard, especially the period 1967-73, when he was employed as a prisoner-of-war and had to undergo torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese just to make ends meet.
Could America make history and elect its first Panama Canal Zonian president? Zonians, thought to number some 3000, represent one of America’s smallest minority groups. Until only recently, their ability to contest presidential elections was in doubt.
And although Zonians have excelled in politics, sport and the arts, none has yet been able to crack the seemingly impenetrable barrier that separates Zonians from their fellow Americans. Some call that barrier racism; others call it Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Racial prejudice has its foundation in ignorance: and the sad truth is that even more than a century after the Zone’s foundation, most Americans are unfamiliar with its history or culture; much less the fact that children born in the Zone to US parents have citizenship rights.
Other history-making presidents-elect include Franklin Roosevelt (the first disabled president, 1931), Barack Obama (the first black president, 2008) and Jimmy Carter (the first Malaiseian president, 1976),
