#4. Huele a Quemado
In 1977, the United States was finally deciding what to do with the Panama Canal Zone, a part of Panama that had been under U.S. control since 1903. Panamanian General Omar Torrijos flew up to Washington to meet with President Jimmy Carter to insist that America return control of the canal zone to Panama and withdraw U.S. forces from the country.
The two sides eventually came to an agreement, and Carter put his name behind a treaty that would give the canal and canal zone back in 1999 under the "1999? Ha, that's so far in the future we might as well be agreeing to give it back to them in heaven" theory of international relations. The controversial treaty went to Congress for approval. Little did the U.S. know that, in the event of Congress voting to not let go of the canal, Torrijos and Panama had a backup plan, which reasoned that if Panama couldn't have it, then no one could.
A few months prior to the Torrijos-Carter hoedown, future Panamanian president/coke dealer Manuel Noriega, then only a Panamanian army officer/coke dealer, trained troops and put sleeper agents in villages neighboring the canal zone. If the treaty failed, the agents would have launched attacks on the canal.
According to the plan, cleverly code-named "huele a quemado" (Spanish for "It smells like something is burning"), if Panama didn't get the canal zone back, Torrijos would render the canal "inoperable."
Luckily, for all parties involved, Carter had one of his few victories as president, getting the transfer signed and passed in Congress. By a single vote.
If They'd Gone With Plan B:
If a single vote had gone the other way, a popular radio personality would have delivered what sounded like his ordinary address that night on Panamanian radio. In reality, the address would have contained a coded message to the commandos embedded around the country, who would have launched attacks on the gates and dams that regulate water levels in the canal, as well as the locomotives that pull ships. By the time the sun rose the next morning, millions of dollars in goods would have been stranded on the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the canal, and the U.S. would have been at war with Panama.
As Torrijos mentioned to journalist Graham Greene, while the U.S. would be able to fix the damage in days, you'd need to wait for "three years of rain to fill the canal. During that time it would be guerrilla war waged from the jungle."
Keep in mind that this was two years after the last Americans were airlifted out of Saigon, and the American economy was failing in such strange and inexplicable ways that Carter eventually took to diagnosing the U.S. with the first case of national depression. This would have meant another costly war between the United States and a communist government in one of the densest jungles in the world two years after the U.S. had just gotten out of one that had crippled its will to fight. And as opposed to Vietnam, the U.S. probably would have needed to fight them for the Panama Canal out of economic necessity.
