Panama

Before European contact, the isthmus that is now Panama was inhabited by indigenous peoples whose communities formed part of the Intermediate Area between the great Mesoamerican and Andean civilisations. Groups ancestral to the present-day Ngabe, Bugle, Kuna, and Embera lived in chiefdoms organised around fishing, agriculture, and long-distance trade, working in gold and producing distinctive polychrome ceramics. Archaeological sites such as Sitio Conte, in what is now Cocle province, attest to socially stratified societies with elaborate burial traditions reaching back well over a thousand years before Spanish arrival.

European contact began in 1501 with the voyage of Rodrigo de Bastidas, followed in 1502 by Christopher Columbus during his fourth voyage. In 1510 the Spanish founded Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien, the first permanent European settlement on the American mainland, and in 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the isthmus and reached the Pacific Ocean. Panama City was founded in 1519 by Pedro Arias Davila and quickly became a key node of the Spanish empire, serving as the staging point for the conquest of Peru and as a transit route for Andean silver bound for Spain. Administered successively under the Audiencia of Panama, the Viceroyalty of Peru, and after 1739 the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the territory suffered repeated pirate raids, including Henry Morgan's sack of the old city in 1671.

Panama declared independence from Spain on 28 November 1821 and joined Simon Bolivar's Gran Colombia. When that union dissolved in 1831, the isthmus remained attached to the Republic of New Granada and its successor states, eventually becoming a department of Colombia. The mid-nineteenth century brought the Panama Railroad, completed in 1855 in connection with the California gold rush, and in the 1880s a French effort under Ferdinand de Lesseps to dig an interoceanic canal, which collapsed amid disease and financial failure. After the Thousand Days' War weakened Bogota's grip, Panama proclaimed separation from Colombia on 3 November 1903, with decisive backing from the United States, which then secured rights to build and operate the Panama Canal. The canal opened in 1914 and the surrounding Canal Zone remained under United States jurisdiction for most of the century.

Twentieth-century Panamanian politics oscillated between civilian governments and military influence. A 1968 coup brought General Omar Torrijos to power, and his negotiations with President Jimmy Carter produced the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977, which provided for the gradual transfer of the canal to Panamanian control. After Torrijos died in a 1981 plane crash, effective power passed to General Manuel Noriega, whose authoritarian rule ended with the United States invasion of December 1989, known as Operation Just Cause. Civilian democratic government was restored under Guillermo Endara, and on 31 December 1999 full sovereignty over the canal passed to Panama under the terms of the treaties.

Since 2000, Panama has consolidated electoral democracy, with peaceful alternations of power among competing parties and presidents including Mireya Moscoso, Martin Torrijos, Ricardo Martinelli, Juan Carlos Varela, Laurentino Cortizo, and Jose Raul Mulino. A major expansion of the canal was inaugurated in 2016, reinforcing the country's role in global maritime trade. Panama today is a unitary presidential republic, governed under the 1972 constitution as substantially reformed, with a directly elected president, a unicameral National Assembly, and an independent judiciary.