Once upon a time, there was a country within a country.

If you visited Panama City in the nineteen sixties, you'd find a bustling Latin American community, downtown streets packed with department stores, fruit vendors hawking and banadas and shaved ice, advertisements plastered on billboards and telephone polls, tourist bars playing salsa music late into the night.

In other words, Panama City in the nineteen sixties was a lively, messy, slightly chaotic place.

In western Panama City was a street called Fourth of July Avenue.

It was the first sign you were entering a different part of Panama.

Realistically, it wasn't part of Panama at all.

Crossing Fourth of July Avenue, the noise and chaos of Panama City faded into the background.

On the other side of the street was something completely different, a lush, suburban paradise, handsome single family homes and apartment buildings, manicured lawns, and pristine streets.

It looked like a mid century American town had been dropped into the Panamanian jungle, because that's exactly what it was.

When the United States struck a deal with Panama to build the Panama Canal in nineteen oh three.

It also created something called the Canal Zone.

To build and operate the canal, the United States needed a place for the Canal Company workers to live.

That was the Canal Zone, a ten mile wide strip of land running the full length of the Panama Canal.

For the next seventy five years, the Canal Zone was a slice of America smack in the middle of Panama, a country with a country.

By the early nineteen sixties, there were thirty six thousand Americans living in the Canal Zone, both civilians and military personnel.

Life in the Canal Zone looked a lot like life in any nineteen sixties American town.

The teenage kids of the canal workers attended Balboa High School.

They had Friday night football games, went to sacops, and watched midnight movies at the local theater.

But not to everyone was happy with this country in a country arrangement.

From the very beginning, many Panamanians protested the Canal Zone's existence.

They thought that giving the Americans control of the Panamanian territory was an affront to Panamanian sovereignty.

Panamanians were restricted from entering the Canal Zone unless they worked for the canal company or were hired as maids or nan for the American families.

The canal Zone had its own police force, armed American and quick to hassle anyone who didn't look like they belonged.

By nineteen sixty four, Panamanian resentment of the canal Zone was at an all time high.

Over the world, colonialism was being dismantled, but here in the middle of Panama was a de facto American colony.

What would it take to get the Americans to leave and for Panama to finally be its own country, in charge of its own canal.

The answer, it turned out, was a bunch of teenagers.

Welcome to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast.

I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is how a Panama Canal high school brawl changed history.

We are so back.

She's Danish Schwartz, He's Aaron Burnett, I'm Jason English.

Josh Fisher is on the other side of the glass.

Here.

We're back for another season of very special episodes.

Welcome everybody, glad to be back.

I'm so excited to be back.

I felt like I went up on that I was that's my excitement coming out.

I felt it.

Well, the bar is said, Hi, this season, I'm pleased to report very special episodes is now a two time winner in the Signal Award Podcast category Best Commute Podcast.

Heck yeah, so yeah, it's a lot of pressure.

That's also kind of the best time to listen to a podcast.

I don't want to brag, but like commute podcast is sort of a real category.

Yeah, that is the window.

I mean, you have undivided attention and the people who are sitting there in traffic or on a subway waiting for like any good distraction in there, we are.

You know, it's like the best.

Yeah.

If you've been returned to office recently and not thrilled about it, I feel for you.

But at least you can go back and listen to the archives here.

I know you guys don't do this for the awards.

I do.

So this has meant a lot to me.

I'm right there with you.

I was very stoking.

We got back to back too, not just like we won, but we're holding it down.

Dynasty.

Well, we've got a great whole season planned.

We'll be here every Wednesday through the rest of the year.

We'll be back in January.

We've got some Olympics episodes planned, maybe a Super Bowl episode, maybe something bruin in San Francisco.

So thank you for coming back, and let's get right into it.

Let's do it.

In addition to being a country, Panama is an isthmus, one of those words you learned in junior high and immediately forgot.

If you look at a map of North and South America, Panama is the narrow strip of land connecting the two continents.

On the northern coast of Panama is the Atlantic Ocean.

On the southern coast is the Pacific Ocean.

At Panama's narrowest point, the distance between the two oceans is just thirty miles, a geographic anomaly that wasn't lost on the first Spanish explorers to land on its shores.

Panama has been connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans since the sixteenth century because since the Spanish Empire, goods had to travel from Europe to South America, goods and people.

So Panama was a route.

And that's why Panama.

We have to think about Panama as a five hundred years old route that connected the oceans.

That's Marisa Lasso, a Panamanian Historian Marisa says that the Isthmus of Panama has always been a prized shortcut.

For centuries, people and goods traveled across that narrow passage using a combination of rivers and mule trails.

The Panama Railroad was built in the eighteen fifties to transport eager prospectors on their way to the California gold Rush, but the dream was always to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans directly via a giant canal.

The United States wasn't the first country to attempt it.

The French gave the Panama Canal a shot in the eighteen eighties.

It was a fantastic failure.

More than twenty two thousand workers died during construction, mostly from tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever.

In eight years of digging, they only managed to carve out eleven miles of canal.

Teddy Roosevelt wasn't scared off by the French fiasco.

He really wanted the United States to build and own the Panama Canal.

Owning the canal would give America economic control of a vital new shipping lane, plus a strategic stronghold for the US military in Latin America.

The story of how the US won the right to build the Panama Canal is a saga of its own.

The short version is that Panama wasn't an independent country.

For most of nineteen oh three.

It was still part of Colombia, and Colombia had just emerged from a bloody civil war in which most Panamanians were on the losing side.

Remember Teddy Roosevelt's famous adage, speak softly and carry a big stick.

This is a perfect example.

In nineteen oh three, Teddy Roosevelt softly approached the Colombian Congress with an offer to complete the canal.

When Colombia rejected that offer, Roosevelt switched to his proverbial big stick.

The Panamanians picked up that if they revolted against Colombia, America would help make sure the revolt was a success.

From the American side, knew Panama Canal negotiations would be able to take place with an independent country.

It was the end of a bloody, bloody civil war that left many casualties in Panama, and in that moment of powerlessness, the construction of a Panama Canal was seen as a great hope and aspiration.

On November third, nineteen o three, Panama declared its independence.

Fifteen days later, the new nation signed the hey Buonoveria Treaty, granting the United States full control of the canal zone.

In retrospect, the treaty was a bad deal for Panama.

This treaty was even worse than the one that the Columbia and Congress rejected.

This treaty gave to.

The US control of the Panama Canal zone five miles on each side, as if it were sovereign in eternity.

So what happened to the tens of thousands of Panamanians already living there?

What are the recurrent ideas about the canal zone and the canal Is that the US built the canal on the jungle.

No.

No, it built the canal over a densely populated area filled with towns, people, and fields.

According to my calculation, there were around forty thousand people expel and all the historic counts were dismantled to replace them with brand new towns where only canal employees will leave.

Marisa wrote about this massive displacement of Panamanians in her book Erased the Untold Story of the Panama Canal.

The Panama Canal is widely recognized as one of the greatest engineering achievements of the twentieth century, and deservedly so.

When the gargantuan project was finished in nineteen fourteen, ships from both oceans could cross the fifty one mile route through a series of gravity fed locks filled by two massive man made lakes.

Operation of the canal was eventually handled by the Panama Canal Company.

The Canal Company wasn't a traditional company in the sense that it wasn't a private business.

It was an extension of the US government.

For example, the president of the Canal Company was also the governor of the Canal Zone.

Kind of weird, right, But that's because everyone who lived in the canal Zone worked in some capacity for the Canal Company or the US military.

Basically, the Canal Zone was a government run company town inside another country, perhaps the only one of its kind in the world.

The Canal Company provided everything for its workers, comfortable housing for families, free high quality education for the kids, and American style groceries at the company commissary.

In short, life in the Canal Zone was good.

The canal Zone was a tropical paradise for the Americans that used to live there during the twentieth century.

Most of them worked the civil part, worked for the canal and all the businesses that surrounded it, like maintenance of the canal zone, which was a beautiful area.

I mean, full of trees, very organized, very structured, very orderly.

You would find a speck of garbage in the zone, and everything was taken care for you by the US government.

You also got a very nice salary.

You got paid something called the tropical differential for the sacrifice of living in the tropics.

That's Wendy Tribaldos, a Panamanian historian and writer.

Wendy's written a great book about the history of the tensions between the American residents of the Canal Zone and the rest of Panama.

Her description of the canal Zone as a tropical paradise is echoed by the Americans who lived there in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and.

It was a glorious place to grow up in.

I felt free.

We could go into the jungles and I would.

Travel all over the area.

I thought nothing of it.

I loved fish, I loved hiking, loved swimming, and all these activities we could do outdoors.

That's Jim Jenkins.

His family moved to the Canal Zone in the nineteen forties when he was two years old.

Jim's dad was in the Navy and his mom was a budget analyst for the canal company.

Jim says that life in the Canal Zone was similar in many ways to small town life in the States.

His high school, for example, Balboa High, sounds like it could have been flown in brick by brick from Iowa.

We'd have our sock cops, we have our sporting events during the sock cops with hap sodas, and I'd helped sell the sodas for the student union.

During the football games, we'd be out.

There cheering you.

I wasn't much of an athlete, but I sure did enjoy going.

The fact that a high school in Panama fielded an American football team should be a sign of just how American this place was.

It definitely felt like I was an American because you spoke English, we'd use American customs, and you know, like high school, we played football.

We didn't play soccer.

You think when not soccer, you're in Panama.

No one else has football.

Two high schools, one in the Avanta side one of the Pacific side.

Both played football, but no soccer.

That's Joe Bremmer, president of the Balboa High School class of nineteen sixty four and a classmate of Jim Jenkins.

Joe's mother was Panamanian and he had family in Panama City, which gave Joe a unique perspective on life in the Canal Zone.

Absolutely a different country.

Yeah, I mean, we had our own police force, we had our own traffic laws, some speed limits, etc.

It's definitely a different country.

When my relatives came to visit us in the Coal Zone, they were stopped there and they had to give the address and the person they were visiting.

And sometimes they recall us and say you expect this so and so, and we'd say, sunder Man.

Getting stopped by the Canal Zone police was a regular occurrence for Panamanians, especially young people.

Rimsky Sukra was one of those young Panamanians.

Rumsky attended high school at the prestigious Institute on Nacional or National Institute, located right on the border with the Canal.

Zone crossing the street.

It was like entering a completely different territory.

They had a surveillance system where every Zonian was an informant, so if you dropped even the smallest piece of paper somewhere, it'd be reported.

So there was a lot of resentment.

We felt like even approaching the canal zone or having any relationship with the canal zone was almost like bullying.

It's like they were saying, you're worthless here if you don't have special permission.

The resentment that Rimsky felt wasn't just about him and his friends getting hassled by the canal zone police.

It was a resentment shared by most Panamanians.

Resentment over being treated like a foreigner in your own country, resentment over America's paternalistic attitude toward Panama, and resentment over the US government's refusal to renegotiate the bad treaty that created the canal zone in the first place.

It was very complex relationship between the paname and the US because we understand when they're stood the privilege of having the canal within our territory, but we also felt that we did not get what we deserved, and in terms of sovereignty, it was a big issue for US.

Sovereignty means self rule.

As long as the canal zone existed, Panama was not a sovereign nation.

For Rimsky and his friends, sovereignty was the number one issue.

It was a constant topic of debate in class at the Instituto Nacional.

World Person.

Since nineteen oh three.

When that agreement was signed, the most important Panamanian figures and the people immediately opposed it and we called it the ignominious Agreement.

When would Panama truly achieve independence?

Only when the Americans finally left the Canal Zone.

But for Americans like Jim and Joe, the canal zone was their home too.

Some of their classmates were third generation Zonians, that's the name for Americans born and raised in the Canal Zone.

As Whndy Tarbaldos explains, Zonians were very proud of their place in Panama's history.

They were very proud to be American and also very proud that the United States built a canal.

You must understand that it was a century's long dream and it was only accomplished by the US.

So their grandfathers and their fathers were the ones involved in that construction, and they were very aware of that fact.

But they were also Sonians.

They were also different Americans.

They were overseas Americans, sort of those Americans that lived in US bases throughout the world, but they lived in one particular place, and it was their home, and it was a very important place for them.

To the Zonians, the Canal Zone was a symbol of American ingenuity, a slice of idyllic and orderly American life carved out of the Panamanian jungle.

To Panamanians, the Canal Zone was a colonial outpost, a privileged enclave where they weren't welcome in Panama.

Frustrations with the Canal Zone had been simmering for decades.

But what would it take to change the status quo?

Maybe a communist revolution or a military coup, not exactly.

The future of Panamanian independence would be determined by a fight over a flag.

January two, nineteen sixty four, was a Thursday.

It was the first day of classes after Christmas break for the mostly American students of Balboa High School in the Canal Zone.

There was the usual excitement of seeing friends after a long vacation and the start of a new semester.

But something was different, something was missing.

Actually, the large flagpole in front of the school stood empty.

Usually it flew the American flag like all other public buildings in the canal Zone, but not that morning.

The flag was gone.

Over Christmas break, the governor of the Canal Zone found himself in a no win situation.

In order had come down from the President of the United States to fly both the Panamanian and American flags at all Canal Zone public buildings.

It was meant as a peace gesture to the Panamanian people, who were increasingly frustrated with the US presence in Panama.

Flying both flags was supposed to be a symbol of the enduring partnership between America and Panama that created the Panama Canal.

But the Americans living in the Canal Zone weren't having it.

They picketed outside Governor Robert Fleming's house and protested the presidential order.

The canal Zone was American territory, why should they have to fly a Panamanian flag.

Governor Fleming was in a pickle.

If he defied the president's order to fly both flags, he could lose his job.

But if he flew the Panamanian flag at Canal Zone high schools, the students and parents might lose their minds.

So the governor came up with a temporary fix he thought would buy him time until a permanent solution was found.

Instead of forcing the schools to raise both flags, he told them not to fly any flags at all.

And you must understand the rituals that were behind that flag.

I mean, it was very important for them.

The IROTC group used to put it up and down every single day with high military honors for example, besides having the flag flown inside of their classrooms and things like that.

So for them was also a very important issue that tied them together to their American, faraway country, you know.

So for them not having their flag flown in there was a big show.

Jim Jenkins, a senior at Balboa High, remembers first reading about the governor's decision in an article in Stars and Stripes, the Armed Forces newspaper.

Right after Christmas that the article was published saying that the governor had decided that there would be no flags at the American courts or schools.

So this is where I said, well, where does the governor get off telling us that we can't have our flag.

This was nineteen sixty four, an era of civil rights demonstrations across the US.

Jim read newspapers and watched TV.

He saw how young people were mobilizing and standing up for causes they believed in.

Why couldn't they do the same thing in the Canal Zone.

When I got back to school, I had circulated a petition to the governor to allow us to have our flag back, and the first two days of passing it around it's okay, and then the school ad and then confiscated it, and that kind of ticked us off, because you know, we do have the right to petition.

That weekend, Jim and his friends met at the Balboa Clubhouse, a popular Canal Zone hangout complete with a soda fountain, a lunch counter, and a swimming pool.

Over a round of cherry cokes and cream sodas, Jim and his friends formulated a plan.

So a group of us got together and said, what can we do.

They've taken away our right to petition, And they said, well, I don't know how we came up with the idea.

Of the idea was we'll raise the flag as a demonstration of what we want.

So that's what we did.

Early Tuesday morning, a small crowd of Balboa High School students assembled at the flagpole.

Two Canal Zone police officers were there too, in case things got rowdy, Jim and his friends raised the American flag.

They knew they were breaking the rules and disobeying the governor's orders, but that was kind of the point.

Jim says that he was the ringleader of the operation.

I got the group together to raise the flag.

So what would you call a lot again?

We weren't looking for trouble.

We were looking for a resolution to not having our flag.

After the students went to class, some school officials came out and quietly lowered the flag, hoping the protest had run its course.

Not even close.

Seeing the flagpole empty again, some students ran out and raised a smaller American flag.

This time, about one hundred and fifty Balboa High students gathered around the flagpole and spontaneously recited the Pledge of allegiance.

They ignored the principal's order to return to class.

If the goal of the Balboa High flag protest was to get the governor's attention, it worked.

Worried about a confrontation, Governor Fleming told school officials and Canal Zone police not to break up the protest.

Let the teenagers have their moment.

They could take down the flag later.

After the students went home, but the students never went home.

After the school bell rang at three o'clock, even more students joined the throng at the flagpole.

Some of their parents came to at the Canal Zone commissaries.

There was a rush on American flags.

One store sold one hundred and forty four large verge flags in six hours.

American flags were hung from balconies and waved from car windows.

At sundown that evening, the Zonian students and adults solemnly lowered the American flag outside the high school, as was custom, but the protest wasn't over.

The governor hadn't changed his mind about flying the American flag, so they weren't going anywhere.

About twenty five students kept in all night vigil at the flagpole.

Their parents and supporters brought blankets and warm food.

They were prepared to stay as long as necessary to get the governor to change his mind.

News of the flag protest at Balboa High School spread quickly into neighboring Panama City, but there the motivation for the student protest wasn't understood as a patriotic desire to fly the American flag, but as a colonialist refusal to fly the paname flag.

Jim Jenkins swears that he and his classmates had no issue at the Panamanian flag.

If there were two flagpoles in front of Balboa, Jim says, they could have raised both flags.

What ticked Jim and his classmates off was having no American flag at all.

Well, we were strictly protesting the governor's decision not to allow an American flag at an American school.

You know, if he had said that we're going to put in two flagpoles at the schools.

But until we do, we can't fly the flag, we would have probably accepted that none of this was anti Panama.

It was all pro American school, being proud of the canal, proud of the school, proud of America, and wanting to have our American flag.

But again that's not the message that made it to Panama.

City.

Stations railed against Canal Zone administrators who refused to follow an agreement reached a year earlier between the American and Panamanian presidents.

Both flags were supposed to fly at all public buildings.

Panamanian newspaper editorials called out the callous Zonian students who'd rather skip school than go to class under a Panamanian flag Rumski Suker says that he and his classmates at the Instituto nacion now heard about the flag protests at Balboa High School the next day, Thursday, January ninth.

It was all they could talk about at school.

Unepuela getenia una tradisium.

The Instituto Nacional was a school that had a tradition of teachers really educating us about Panama's internal political situations and especially about the relationship between the US and Panama.

There was a lot of emphasis on that relationship, so I was very involved in student political activities.

This wasn't the first time that flags had been a political flashpoint in Panama.

In nineteen fifty eight, a group of Panamanian college students crossed into the canal zone and planted dozens of small Panamanian flags in the grass.

The message was clear, the canal zone should belong to Panama.

The nineteen fifty eight flag protests started peacefully, but turned ugly when Panamanian National Guard troops clashed with the students.

A year later, anti American riots broke out in Panama City when the US authorities refused to fly the Panamanian flag alongside the American flag in the zone.

The rioters tore down the American flag outside the US embassy and marched toward the canal zone, intent on planting more Panamanian flags, but again they were repelled by armed troops both American and Panamanian.

The clash convinced President Eisenhower that something needed to be done.

It was Eisenhower in nineteen sixty who made the first pact with Panama to fly both flags in parts of the canal zone.

President Kennedy expanded the order in nineteen sixty three, but it still wasn't in place by nineteen sixty four, two months after Kennedy's assassination.

The flag has always been something very important to Panamanians.

For all six years of high school, the idea of going back to the canal Zone and planning the flag was an ever present thought.

As Rimsky remembers it, the decision that day to march on the canal zone was completely spontaneous.

No one at the Instituto Nacional organized it, no one planned it.

One minute Rimsky was sitting in chemistry class.

The next he and his friends were asking the teacher if they could leave.

They weren't the only ones.

Other Instituto Nacional students had already met with the school director to get his blessing for a counter protest.

The plan was simple and direct.

The students of the Instituto Nacional would carry a Panamanian flag into the canal zone and demand it be raised in front of Balboa High School.

I mean, what could go wrong if any of the Panamanian students or school administrators thought this was a wildly inflammatory move.

No one objected.

The director even gave the students these schools historic Panamanian flag kept inside a glass case.

It was a silken flag, saw more delicate than your regular cotton flag, and it also had the Panamanian seal in the middle of it and the words Institute National on top of it.

It had been used that some US protests during the nineteen fifty by the Instituto student so it was in a very delicate state.

But it was also a very important flag for those Stituto students because of.

What it meant.

A little before five pm on January ninth, around two hundred teenagers from the Instituto Nacionale, including our friend Rimsky, crossed fourth of July Avenue and entered the canal zone.

They carried hand painted signs reading Panama is sovereign in the canal Zone and only the Panamanian flag.

Leading the pack was a group of students proudly displaying the school's historic Panamanian flag.

The canal zone police were warned of the approaching students, but told not to engage with them.

The police observed from a distance, ready to intervene if things got out of hand.

The students didn't want to provoke the police either, so they took pains to remain calm and respectful as they marched deeper into the canal zone.

The way they marched towards the sony was so orderly, so calm, so peaceful.

When they came close to Gorga's hospital, they even stopped and kept a moment of silence for the people that were sick in the hospital.

They sent the Panamanian national hymn in front of the Governor's mansion, very quietly, very respectful, very respectful, very much into knowing what they were doing and offering sound arguments on why they were doing it to the people that were involved there.

In a celebratory moment, the Panamanian students walked up the steps of the Canal Zone Administration building and posed for a group photo.

In the black and white picture, they looked like a bunch of kids on a field trip.

Down the hill.

Just a short walk from the administration building was Balboa High School.

The Zonians had no idea the Panamanian students were coming.

It would not be a pleasant surprise.

The flag test at Balboa High School began as an emotional response to the governor's order.

Students like Jim Jenkins just wanted the American flag to fly in front of his school.

He says he had no gripe with Panama, but that's not how the Panamanian students.

Read it to them.

The Balboa High protest was the latest in a long line of insults against their country and their flag, and now the two groups of teenagers were headed towards a historic confrontation.

Looking back more than sixty years later, Jim wishes things could have turned out differently.

If I could go back to the first week in January, I probably would have thought a little bit more about how we handle it.

It would have been great if we could have joined forces come in and say hey, let's fly both flags.

We would not have objected.

We would have had to figure out how to do it.

If I could have figured a way to do it, I would have.

But instead of finding a peaceful resolution, a schoolyard scuffle over a flag was about to trigger an international political incident.

January ninth, nineteen sixty four, was day three of the flag protests at Balboa High School in the Canal Zone.

After school, the crowd around the flagpole swelled to its largest size yet.

There were between four hundred and five hundred Zonians of all ages, adults, teenagers, grade school kids.

They held American flags and sang patriotic songs, giddy with their collective act of civil disobedience.

The whole point of the protest was to convince the Canal Zone governor to let them fly the American flag in front of the high school, but as of Thursday afternoon, the governor wasn't budging.

At six fifteen pm, Governor Fleming broadcast a statement.

The flag agreement is a valid commitment of our government.

We Americans in the Zone have an obligation as citizens to support that commitment, regardless of our personal beliefs.

A hope that we Americans will conduct ourselves with reason and in an emotional situation, successfully avoid emotionalism.

Governor Fleming had no idea how emotional the situation was about to get.

To the Zonian's great surprise, they weren't the only ones protesting that day.

Marching down the hill from the Canal Administration building came a large group of Panamanian high school students carrying their protest signs.

On a normal day, the Panamanian students would have been stopped immediately by Canal Zone police the second they stepped onto Zonian soil.

But today, in hopes of avoiding a conflict, they were allowed to enter.

And now the uniformed students from the Instituto Nacional were within sight of their destination, Balboa High School.

The mood around the flagpole shifted dramatically.

The Zonians booed and shouted at the Panamanian students, and the Panamanian students hollered back, each in their own language, neither side truly understanding each other, each assuming the worst intentions.

That's when the Canal Zone police finally stepped in.

It was incredibly tense, and not only what you describe, but also add to that mixture that the Panamanias did not speak English and the Sonia spoke little or no Spanish, so the communications between the police commander Gaddis Wall and the Instituto students were done by an interpreter, and when you interpret things kind of get lost in the mixture.

Finally, the captain of the police decided to allow a small delegation of Instituto student close to where the American flag was flying in the staff of Balboa High School.

So that meant escorting those students in the middle of a very aggressive, very tense crowd of adults and also high school kids to get to the flag.

As the rest of the Panamanian students stood back.

Five or six senior boys from the Instituto Nacion now approached the circle of Zonians around the flag pole.

They must have been terrified, but they wore stern looks of defiance as they gripped their school's historic Panamanian flag.

Jim Jenkins was part of the delegate of Balboa High students and administrators who met with the Panamanians.

They wanted to raise their flag.

Obviously, with only one flagpole, that wasn't going to happen, and I explained it to them that that wouldn't happen, but they were more than welcome to stand on the steps with their flag, sing their national anthem.

We had no objection to them stating their case that the country was cannibal.

The situation was volatile.

The Zonians roared with disapproval as the Panamanians approached the base of the flagpole.

The delegates from the Instituto Nacionale later said that they were booed, pushed, and insulted as they tried to make their way through the crowd.

As Jim said, the hastily negotiated agreement was that the Panamanian students would hold up their flag, sing Panama's national anthem and go home.

At least that's how the Americans understood, whether due to poor translation or not.

The Panamanians decided to make a historic statement, like the college students did back in fifty eight.

They wanted to raise the Panamanian flag alongside the American one.

A heated discussion ensued between Captain Wall and the Panamanian students.

Tensions ratched it even higher.

The crowd of Zonians squeezed in tightly around the Panamanian delegation and began to sing the American national anthem.

Exactly what happened next is a matter of great contention.

Fearing an outbreak of violence, Captain Wall abruptly pulled off the ceremony and ordered the Panamanian delegation to leave, but they weren't having it.

Instead, the Panamanian students tried to push forward poured the flagpole.

That's when Captain Wall ordered his Canal Zone policemen batons in hand, to quote escort the Panamanian student delegation back to their classmates.

The police formed a line and with shouts of go go, they began to slowly push the Panamanian students backward.

According to some reports, the police were joined by Balboa students and Zonian adults in the crowd, who punched and shoved the Panamanian teens.

I don't understand what was going on because as far as I could tell, there were no canals On students involved in that pushing and shoving.

I know I wasn't.

No one knows exactly what happened next.

Every eyewitness has a different story.

But in the chaos of the moment, as the Panamanian students were pushed backward through a row of bushes.

Two of them fell to the ground, and as they fell, the school's historic Panamanian flag was torn.

It's one of the biggest history mysteries that you can think of, because you have the Panamanians saying that the Americans ripped it up, and then you have the Americans saying that the Panamanians fell as they were led away by the police from that area where tensions had been rising.

And if you see the pictures, you can see the policemen that were putting the Panamanian Institute students backwards, pulling them backwards with their batons, and they were not hitting them, but just pulling them back.

And the students were moving backwards where the flag in front, and then you had the very hostile crowd also in the middle of the way.

However it happened, the Panamanian students were stunned.

They had promised the director of the Instituto that they wouldn't even let the fragile school flag touch the ground, and now it was nearly ripped and half again.

Jim Jenkins swears that it was never the intention of him or his Balboa classmates to desecrate the Panamanian flag.

I have no idea.

I actually have no idea.

I'm sorry that anything like that happened because I respect the flag too much.

I respect our flag, I respect their flag.

The Panamanian students were enraged.

They had tried to take a stand for Panamanian sovereignty and they were attacked by the Zonians and their police.

It wasn't enough to deny them the right to protest, but the Zonians had literally trampled on the Panamanian flag, the symbol of everything the students held sacred.

Rimsky secret was right there.

He wasn't part of the student delegation, but he remembers the explosion of emotions as word spread about what happened at the flagpole.

They said, they tore our flag, They tore our flag.

We were all angry, we were crying, and we stampeded towards Panama City from different places.

The group I was in, the one very close to those carrying the flag, was planning to go to the Instituto Nacional to tell the rector and the teachers what had happened and to inform the media.

News of the incident spread like wildfire.

By the time Rimsky and his classmates made it back to the Instituto Nacional.

There were already Panamanians in the streets.

Panamanian radio stations reported the confrontation at Balboa High School, but the story got uglier and more violent with every retelling.

Historian Wendy Trabaldos says that the media absolutely threw gasoline on the fire.

Yes, they had a huge role, especially the radio.

At the time, the media people in Panama grossly exaggerated what was happening, which contributed to the on risks that happened during that time, especially during the ninth and the tenth of January, when things were really very intense in such a way that the US Army intervened.

Triggered by the torn flag and stoked by the media, there was an unprecedented explosion of outrage in Panama City directed at the Americans and the Canal Zone.

For three days, Panama City was engulfed in violence and chaos.

Cars with Canal Zone plates were flipped over and burned.

The pan am Building was vandalized.

Protesters hurled rocks and molotov cocktails.

Rooftop snipers took aim with hunting rifles.

The US Army and Canal Zone police fired back with tear gas and live ammunition.

Tragically, at least twenty one Panamanians and four Americans died in the fighting.

The first Panamanian casualty was a student named Ascanio a Rosamena.

He was a true leader in a youngster kind of way.

He was a great dancer, and he was captain of the football team, and he was a volunteer for the Red Cross.

And he was actually there helping his former Instituto friends during the riots that the bullet got to him.

So yes, he was a case of a true martyrdom for the country.

In Panama.

January ninth is observed every year as the Day of the Martyrs.

That's how Ascanio and the other Panamanians who died in the nineteen sixty four riots are remembered as martyrs for Panamanian sovereignty.

That's the craziest part of this whole, wild and tragic story.

When Jim Jenkins and his friends met in the Balboa Clubhouse and planned their patriotic flag protest, they never set out to change Panamanian history, but that's exactly what happened.

Because they didn't know that a few miles away, another group of impulsive teenagers was going to grab their own flag and march into history.

I'm looking at the cover of Life magazine from that week.

It's a photograph taken of Fourth of July Avenue during the riots.

It shows three young Panamanian men climbing a canal zone streetlight.

Below them is a car in flames.

The man at the top of the street light uses his belt to attach a large Panamanian flag for Rimsky Sukra.

That image brings back visceral memories, memories of three days of chaos that galvanized Panama like no other moment in its short history.

Every time someone climbed a fence with a flag, there was a cheer.

Every time they climbed a pole, there was a cheer.

The Panamanian people united like never before.

In the wake of the flag riots, the President of Panama briefly severed diplomatic relations with the United States, a bold move for a small Latin American country, but a line had been crossed, and Panama refused to go back to the status quo.

For decades.

The US had ignored calls to renegotiate the Canal Treaty with Panama.

The presidential order to fly both flags at Canal Zone buildings was supposed to smooth things over, but it backfired spectacularly.

The riots were a wake up call.

It came to this point this had to happen, sadly, where people lost lives, both Panamanian lives and also American lives, and you also had all the physical destruction that accompanied the riots, that this had to happen for the US to react and think, Okay, we might need to do something in Panama and try to not be the colonial power that we are.

The US government did come to the negotiating table and through a long and arduous process, the Canal Zone Treaty of nineteen oh three was replaced with a historic new agreement.

In nineteen seventy nine, the US dissolved the Canal Zone, returning the contentious strip of land to Panama, and on New Year's Eve in nineteen ninety nine, full control of the Panama Canal was finally handed over to Panama.

Historian Maurice Alasso was ten years old when the Canal Zone was finally opened to all Panamanians.

She and her family went for a picnic to a hilltop park that Panamanians hadn't been able to access for seventy five years.

I remember remiately the happiness around me, my family, happiness, everybody so happy that finally we.

Could anchor in the Canal Zone.

So this was a moment where people could go to places, parks, to swim in certain beaches that you could not go before.

Every Panaminian family will have a different story of how they entered the canal Zone in nineteen seventy nine, how they fellow we're going back to this important piece of our land.

As Jim Jenkins said before, he wished things had gone differently in January nineteen sixty four.

He wished there were two flagpoles outside the high school.

He wished that his Balboa classmate and the Panamanian kids could have kept cooler heads and come to an agreement.

When the Balboa High flag protest blew up into an international incident, Jim's name was all over the press.

The situation became unbearable for him in the Canal Zone, a seventeen year old kid being blamed for a political firestorm.

Jim left the Canal Zone and went to live with a relative in Ohio.

He didn't get to graduate with the rest of the Balboa High class of nineteen sixty four.

Jim later joined the military and has two master's degrees.

Rumski Suker is now doctor Suker, a physician with a successful practice in Panama City.

He's in his late seventies, but when he talks about politics, he still sounds like the teenage firebrand who marched into the canal zone with a hand painted sign and a crazy plan.

Today Panama is a sovereign nation.

The Canal Zone is no longer a country within a country, just a parklike neighborhood in Panama City.

Under Panama's management, the Panama Canal has been humming along now for twenty five years.

Our historian Wendy Trabaldo's it never ceases to amaze her that one of the most monumental geopolitical events in Panama's history was set in motion by teenagers being teenagers.

And you must understand teenagers, they are very much into.

Fighting for causes.

And that's true yesterday and true today.

They really believed in each other causes.

Even if you do not agree with their position, whether Sonian position or with a Panemanian position, you can understand why they were thinking, they were thinking and why they were behaving the way they were behaving.

Yeah, you can see that teenagerism in both sides in different ways.

But yes, you can see a typical teenage behavior.

I guess into two separate mind frames, two separate nationalities, to separate educational systems and way of looking at things.

But yes, still teenagers.

How about that episode guys and I wanted to ask you, do you have a favorite world flag?

Ooh, that's a good question.

Flags.

Were you a flag kid?

I was not a flag kid, but some kids love flags.

No, but I had a neighbor who was who you could show him a flag and he could tell you even like the hardest ones.

And he's the reason why I have my favorite flag, which was the flag of Gibraltar.

It has this castle on it and then it sits above this field of red, and then it has this golden key kind of dangling from the gates of the castle, which looks like it's almost like a zipper that you could unzip the castle.

It's one of the wildest flags there is.

I think I like the fun fact that Jamaica is the only flag without red, white, or blue, and then like Jamaica's flag is just green, yellow, and black.

Yes, so that's like a fun flag.

Fact, yes, that is I did not know that one.

The Isle of Man flag, Oh yes, looks to me like three legs, yeah, like bent nye right, that's like yea yeah.

I'm also from Chicago, and I feel like in terms of a city with a flag, Chicago has a really good one that just makes a lot of appearances like maybe it is like I'm biased because I'm from Chicago, but it is the only city with a flag that personally I that is true.

The same.

So, in the past, we've done very special characters.

Everyone's always welcome to pick a very special character, but you can also pick a very special moment.

This year, we're amending the rules who does a Zarin improvement for year three?

So does anyone have either a very special character or a very special moment from this one?

Well, I would say for me, the very special moment obviously is that moment of peak conflict and Drama's when the Panamanian high schoolers are marching to the Canal Zone with their silken Panamanian flag, their eyes all filled with ardor and like pride.

I really love that.

But then there's obviously the question of was their flag torn up and I've watched nineteen sixties like civil rights footage, so I have to believe that there's a high likelihood that the Americans did see that flag and rip it up.

So that was my favorite.

That was kind of my instinct too, that people get heated.

I was going to say, if you asked about very special characters, I was going to say that original Panamanian flag.

It sounds beautiful.

Yeah, it doesn't it.

I could put this in either category special character or a special moment.

If we're going special character, I want to add historian Marisa Lasso, who I like.

How we do this often here where we'll have an expert historian and then they become part of the story.

They kind of crawl into the script and we get more of them in the third act.

And so her talking about being ten and being able to go into the canal zone for the first time, that was a very nice scene.

Also, I'd never heard the term Zonians for people in the canal Zone.

I love that it sounds like a sci fi name of off world people.

It's like something from like Alien Earth.

Yeah, it does.

Zonians.

Now, if you are new to this show, what we do here at the end, we have an in house casting director Zarin, and we like to say these episodes often like this should be a movie, and Zaren takes it one step further and says, who should be in that movie?

Did you cast any of the key roles in this one?

I did.

And starting with the historic figure of Teddy Roosevelt who gives us the Panama Canal, I thought Andy Cirkis but with false teeth.

Whoo, that's interesting because Andy Serkis is sort of like a small guy, and I feel like people always think of Teddy Roosevelt as a big guy, but I'm like he can rise to the challengel totally.

Thank you, thank you for seeing it.

And then for Jim Jenkins, the American who's on the side of the Zonians Alex Lothor, who if you don't know him, he's the principled rebel kid from the Andor the series.

He's the one who gives all the speeches about fascism.

I thought he had just the right earnest energy because I did believe Jim Jenkins, like you know, meant well when he was telling the story and recounting events.

And then for Rimsky Sukra that I thought, uh, there's this kid, Justice Smith.

He's a Latin kid from Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, and I think he'd be perfect.

He also has that same kind of like earnestness.

So there you go.

Actual casting directors take notes.

Zaren' stune the work for you.

Yes, it's right there.

Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.

This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Sarah Burnett, and Jason English.

Today's episode was written by Dave Rus.

Our senior producer is Josh Fisher.

Editing and sam design by Chris Childs.

Additional editing by Mary Doo, Mixing and mastering by Chris Childs.

Original music by Elise McCoy.

Research and fact checking by Dave Rus and Austin Thompson.

Show logo by Lucy Kintonia special thanks to our voice actors Chris Childs and Josh Fisher.

I am your executive producer.

We'll see you back here next Wednesday.

If you'd like to email the show could reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com.

Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.