Walking Away from a Deadly Mess:
The U.S. Legacy in Panama
by John Lindsay- Poland
[Panama; mines; chemical weapons; polution]

With great fanfare the United States handed over the symbolic keys of Fort Sherman to Panamanian President Ernesto Pérez Balladares on June 30. The Army used Sherman for more than 80 years to train U.S. troops in jungle survival and combat, and "the United States and its allies have a debt of gratitude to those men and women who made such efforts in the name of freedom and democracy," U.S. Ambassador Simon Ferro told assembled dignitaries.1

Pérez Balladares gloated upon receiving the base, which with 23,900 acres makes up almost a third of the land on U.S. military bases being transferred to Panama under the terms of the 1977 Canal Treaties. "Sherman's potential is immense for tourism and eco- tourism, and its use will be of great benefit to the country," the president said. "Having so much land of all kinds to use, Panama is in an unbeatable position to take the leap into definitive modernity." He made reference to the United States' obligation to finish cleaning up explosives from the base's artillery range, then accepted the keys.

Five days later, a 17year- old Panamanian boy named Kelvin Pérez Sánchez went to work as he had for the past five months, planting trees on a deforested former military base outside the Canal area, called Rio Hato. Rio Hato had been a U.S. air base during World War II, was occupied by Panama's National Guard in the 1970s, and was subjected to bombing by U.S. Stealth attack jets during the 1989 invasion of Panama.

As Pérez hammered a stake into the ground, an explosion threw him and several co- workers into the air. Rushed to the provincial hospital, he lost his right eye and suffered severe burns on his neck, face, hands, and thorax. The youth was not the first Panamanian to be hurt in accidents involving explosives left behind by the military. The Foreign Ministry claims that explosives from U.S. ranges have killed 21 Panamanians and injured many others who went onto ranges seeking recyclable metal or to plant crops.2

The outgoing government of Pérez Balladares says it will sue the United States for further cleanup. Ambassador Ferro, repeating the United States position of the last four years, says munitions cannot be removed from the ranges using existing technology without destroying the forest.

Attention to the problem of removing conventional explosives from ranges in Panama has diverted attention from an even more sensitive issue, on which U.S. authorities have been especially secretive: the history of chemical weapons tests in Panama, and chemical munitions abandoned on lands over which Panama will now be sovereign. In this small isthmian nation, the United States had an active chemical weapons program from 1930 until at least 1969, with tests of poison gases including mustard gas, phosgene, sarin, VX agent, and Agent Orange. From 1930 to 1946, the program focused on Canal defense. From 1943 until 1969, the program aimed to test chemical munitions under tropical conditions.

Today, Panama is experiencing rapid urban growth, focused on the Canal area, where half of Panama's entire population now lives and works. The growth is accompanied by major road projects, housing starts, and projects to reforest denuded lands. The turnover of properties pursuant to the Canal Treaties is accelerating these transitions. Many Panamanians worry that unaware construction workers, farmers, or children will stumble across abandoned chemical munitions and be burned, as has happened in France, Vietnam, and China.

Two agreements govern U.S. obligations to clean up chemical weapons in Panama: the Canal Treaties and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), ratified by the United States in 1997 and by Panama last year. The Canal Treaties require the United States to remove threats to human health and safety "insofar as may be practicable" from military installations in the Canal area.

The CWC requires participant nations to declare chemical munitions they have abandoned in other countries, and to destroy those weapons once the country where they were abandoned ratifies the Convention. For all its rhetoric about Iraq's chemical weapons program and Saddam Hussein's defiance of the international community, by not declaring the chemical weapons that it has abandoned in Panama, the United States is violating the CWC. What's worse, the United States is flouting international law by telling private land- owners, Congress, and even the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that it is implementing the CWC bilaterally with Panama, when it is doing no such thing, according to Panamanian officials. And the CWC is, after all, the single existing legal instrument for abolishing chemical weapons on the planet.

A Long History

Chemical weapons were a component of U.S. Canal defense tactics from the Canal's early years. The first chemical defense plans were drawn up in 1923 and would be updated every year through at least 1946. "As unusually favorable conditions exist in Panama for the employment of chemical agents in defense of the Canal, maximum use of chemical and anti- gas equipment is anticipated," according to the doctrine. The plan involved bombing prospective invaders with mustard gas on inland trails and coastal beaches.

In the 1940s, the United States, Great Britain, and Canada collaborated closely on testing and development of chemical weapons. Anticipating possible defensive or offensive use of chemical weapons against the Japanese, the Allies wanted to understand how chemical weapons could be used during further invasions of the Japanese- occupied Pacific islands.

The first chemical weapons test using live agents known to be carried out in Panama occurred before the United States' entry into World War II. Jack Cadenhead had enlisted in the Army in South Carolina in 1940 to escape an oppressive job in the local cotton mill. Sent to the Canal Zone, he and other infantrymen were taken to a long narrow building on Fort Clayton one day in July 1941. The officers running the experiment asked for ten volunteers.

"They said they wanted some men who didn't smoke," Cadenhead remembered. He raised his hand. "It's hot, close to a hundred degrees in Panama, with no air conditioning, especially in those chambers. They would drop stuff in a container, and it would fog up."

The operators had gas masks on, Cadenhead said, but "they didn't tell us a thing, they just run us through there pretty fast." The building was long, so long that the men were forced to breathe in the mustard as they ran. The men quickly developed problems breathing, and were rushed on stretchers to nearby Gorgas Hospital. "The guy with me, Bill Hansard, almost choked to death when we got to Gorgas," Cadenhead remembered. The doctor attending them said, "It's that damn mustard gas!"

Mustard gas permanently affected Cadenhead's speech, blisters would come up on his feet as big as a half- dollar, and the end of his penis turned white. "I thought I had leprosy for awhile," Cadenhead said. More than fifty years later, he still has problems breathing.

"We were all just kids, we didn't know what was going on. After I got older and wiser, I felt we were used as guinea pigs."3

The largest and best documented project to test chemical weapons in Panama occurred on San José Island, in the Pacific not far from Panama City. More than 130 tests were conducted there from 1944 to late 1947, when Panama rejected an agreement to keep U.S. military bases outside the Canal area.4 Many of the tests were "drop tests" involving aircraft that dropped chemical munitions into target areas, while others required troops to fire chemical mortars into the test areas. The chemical agents tested included: mustard gas, phosgene, cyanogen chloride, and hydrogen cyanide.5

Many of the tests on San José Island used rabbits or goats to observe how lethal various methods of attack or how effective gas masks were. "They brought goats from Ecuador," said José Alsola, a Peruvian who worked on San José in 1946. "They put those gases on them. The skin fell off the animals, they died, and they ended up cooked. The animal was red, red! Like it was cooked, burnt."6

But several of the San José Project tests involved human subjects. One of the San José tests, carried out in August 1944, sought "to determine if any difference existed in the sensitivity of Puerto Rican and Continental U.S. Troops to H gas [mustard]." The men, who were "unfamiliar with the use of chemical agents," were "given a stiff course in gas discipline and the significance of H [mustard] lesions to casualty production." The tests involved applying liquid mustard to the under- surface of the forearms of each subject, then observed for three days. A summary of the test produced by Defense Secretary William Cohen in April 1998 implied that some men were hospitalized after they "sustain[ed] severe body burns or eye lesions." Men with less severe burns were simply returned to their barracks and expected to meet company formations.7

The Chemical Corps returned to Panama in 1952, when it conducted tests on mustard gas mines and containers until 1956. Between 1958 and 1962, the Chemical Corps carried out several tests involving small amounts of live chemical agents such as mustard and sarin, which were probably kept in glass vials in laboratories.8

With the escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, the U.S. Army Tropic Test Center (TTC) was established in Panama to test military equipment under tropical conditions, eventually growing to a staff of several hundred. In 1964 the TTC began four tests "to determine the effects of environment on the storage" of warheads containing nerve agent. Three of the tests were for VX agent weapons, the same chemical weapon that UNSCOM has scoured Iraq to uncover, including two- gallon M- 23 mines, 115- millimeter rockets, and 155- millimeter shells. The fourth test concerned sarin rockets. The weapons were to be stored for approximately two years, "outdoors on pallets under ventilated cover." Test plans for the VX mines showed that the Army was to detonate them in Panama after being stored there.9

The M- 23 mine holds 10.5 pounds of VX agent; since ten milligrams of VX agent constitutes a lethal dose, each of these VX mines theoretically had enough nerve agent for nearly half a million lethal doses. Shipping records show that the United States sent three tons of VX nerve agent in 1964 for testing in Panama—more than three times what was needed for tests shown in the Tropic Test Center documents.

The records also show a shipment to Panama on January 29, 1969, of "Chemical Agent Identification Sets" or CAIS kits, that were designed to train soldiers in the detection of chemical agents. According to munitions disposal expert Rick Stauber, "the kits contained ‘live' chemical agent and were disposed of at the training site location after use."10

"Since the movement information does not contain the amount of CAIS kits delivered to Panama, one does not know how many may be buried at the training areas used by U.S. troops," Stauber continued. The information also raises serious questions about how other chemical agents shipped to Panama were disposed of.

More Chemicals

Pamela Jones, whose husband worked for the Army in Panama from 1970 to 1974, earlier this year won recognition from the Veterans Administration for his exposure there to Agent Orange, which resulted in severe acne and eventually in his death from non- Hodgkins lymphoma in 1996. Jones obtained testimony by Charles Bartlett, who directed the Pentagon's Agent Orange litigation project in the early 1980s, that several hundred drums of Agent Orange were shipped to Panama in the late 1960s. Bartlett testified that after tests were conducted, many drums were left behind "extensively under the control of Fort Clayton ... and were never shipped out of Panama. And available for use by anybody that needed it." The Army's Directorate of Environment and Housing then sprayed the herbicide for years to choke back plants, according to a document Jones obtained.

"My husband told me that they used to spray, and the plants would die," Jones said. "He would ride his dirt bike up in the jungle, and he would end up oily, and Agent Orange is very heavy and oily."11

Another veteran, who has also contracted an Agent Orange- associated disease, saw Agent Orange being sprayed over the jungle in Fort Sherman in Panama in 1969 or 1970. "It was applied by helicopter and I watched the jungle disappear over a matter of days," said the vet, who declined be to identified because he fears it might jeopardize his case for medical benefits. An engineer, he subsequently found high levels of Agent Orange in water samples from Panama's coastal coral reefs.12

As late as 1971, a Panamanian doctor named Erimsky Sucre was on his way home from a medical visit to a small community by the banks of the Panama Canal, when he and his assistants felt strange. Driving their jeep on a remote road with the windows open to the humid tropical air, they passed the Empire firing range run by the U.S. military and began to have trouble breathing.

It was "a sensation of lack of oxygen," Sucre said, almost like carbon monoxide poisoning. He stopped the jeep, unable to drive, and encountered a U.S. soldier with his gas mask on. The soldier, a Puerto Rican, took off his mask and told the group not to drink water. As their asphyxia passed, Sucre felt "a burning on my face" which lasted another hour. He knew it wasn't tear gas, he said, because he had experienced tear gas in street protests.13

Disposal of Chemical Munitions

Less information is available on the disposal of chemical munitions used in Panama than on tests themselves. As one San José Project participant commented, "We didn't worry too much about things like that at that time."14

All chemical munitions, like conventional munitions, include a certain number of duds—munitions that are fired or dropped but do not detonate. On impact areas, these unexploded ordnance (UXO) are typically what cause accidents to people who unsuspectingly pick up, step on, or play with them. According to one explosives expert, the rule of thumb in the community of explosives disposal professionals is a ten percent dud rate.15

On San José Island, thousands of chemical mortars and bombs were fired or dropped into target areas. If all tests on San José averaged the same number of munitions as for the 18 tests for which we have obtained records, with a dud rate of ten percent, that would leave more than three thousand chemical UXO on San José Island.

The military's evacuation of the San José Project in early 1948 was carried out with haste.16 The San José post diary records three barge shipments which dumped chemical munitions at sea in 1947 and early 1948.17 But chemical munitions which the military still hoped to use were moved into the Canal Zone. Two of the project's officers wrote:

The materiel owned by San José was stored wherever space could be found. Some of it was placed in the basements of barracks, more in an abandoned motor pool, and a toxic yard was established at the mouth of the Chagres River on the Fort Sherman Reservation.18    

They did not elaborate on this alarming declaration. The toxic materials at Fort Sherman were stored there for "rehabilitation," according to a later account, which may have meant leaks from munitions in need of repair.19 The San José Project shipped usable munitions to its new home on St. Thomas of the Virgin Islands in April 1948.

Based on National Archives documents, bomb expert Rick Stauber asserts that the United States established a chemical burial site in the 1930s at France Field, an airport that was transferred to Panama in 1979. The documents Stauber found indicated that 30- pound bombs that leaked mustard were involved. According to Stauber, the same documents stated that a storage magazine at France Field had been contaminated by leakage of mustard agent.20 Panamanian officials said that U.S. military officials acknowledged the France Field burial site, but decided when the area was transferred that removing the munitions was not worth their effort.21

Another area of concern is Chiva Chiva, a former munitions storage site that Army documents show was a disposal area for chemical munitions in the 1950s. The area was transferred to Panama in 1979, and is now overgrown with vegetation.

Long- Term Dangers

Health hazards of chemical munitions can be long- lasting, as demonstrated by continuing burns of Chinese people by chemical munitions that were abandoned by the Japanese army in China during World War II. As one study of chemical munitions abandoned in China notes, abandoned chemical weapons (ACW):

...pose much greater hazards to civilians than military stockpiles of chemical weapons, such as those stored in depots in the United States and Russia. Military stockpiles are stored in special bunkers under lock and key, so that barring a catastrophe, ordinary citizens face no immediate threat. Since the location of many ACW is not known and civilians lack an understanding of their hazards, they risk being accidentally exposed to these weapons.22

A chemical agent that has been sprayed or exploded does dissipate, but an agent that is stored or abandoned in canisters or drums can survive for decades, including underwater. According to Col. Edmund W. Libby, the U.S. Army's Project Manager for Non- Stockpile Chemical Materiel:  

Our experience indicates that chemical warfare agents which remain in storage containers or munitions, or which are otherwise retained in bulk quantities, can retain essentially all of their toxic agent properties for many years. Even unexploded munitions recovered from the World War One era are often found to contain chemical warfare materiel that has been but little degraded in its toxic effects by the passage of time.23

On San José Island, hazards from unexploded chemical rounds still remained three decades after the Army dropped its mustard bombs. The island's owner in the 1970s, the inventor Earl Tupper, discovered this himself. "An [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] team was contacted by Mr. Tupper's son in 1974 with [a] report that one of the their workmen had been burned and requested assistance," the Pentagon wrote in 1979.

Just the Facts, Sam

Because the military bases have been under U.S. control for more than 90 years, most Panamanians have little or no idea of their history of use. A responsible transfer of these lands must include the transfer by the United States to Panama of all historical documents related to activities that have had impacts on Canal area lands. According to Panamanian officials and records, since January 1997 the Government of Panama has repeatedly and formally requested documents from the United States on chemical weapons tests in Panama.24

But Foreign Ministry officials say that the only documents on chemical weapons programs that the United States has given Panama were the four nerve agent test plans cited above.25 Most of what Panama knows about the history of chemical weapons tests has come from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and a whistleblower bomb expert named Rick Stauber.

Pentagon officials and publications refer to many records of weapons tests (over 100 conducted by the Tropic Test Center) and the Panama section of a 1993 document that lists suspected chemical munitions burial sites overseas. But despite congressional inquiries, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and insistence by the government of Panama, the Pentagon has steadfastly refused to disclose these documents.

The Army General Counsel's Office justified denying the 1993 annex on "suspected overseas burial sites" by stating that "the requested material contains information concerning weapons systems and information of a foreign government, and the information could assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction."26 In other words, the Army concedes that the chemical agents abandoned in Panama remain a potential public health threat.

The Army went even further when it refused to disclose reports on the 1964- 1968 nerve agent tests in Panama. Citing Panama's ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Army asserted that release of the reports could "alter relations between the U.S. and Panama with regards to implementation of the CWC" and are therefore purportedly exempt under FOIA law. In a formal letter, the Panamanian Foreign Ministry emphatically denied that disclosure would interfere with bilateral relations, and added, "on the contrary, disclosure of these documents would serve as a basis for constructive mutual discussions of how best to implement our countries' respective obligations under the CWC."

Panama, for its part, could do more to locate chemical weapons dumps on its territory. Panama was invited by the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague, to request a technical inspection of suspected sites, but has so far neglected to do so.

Hopefully there will not be more experiences like that of Kelvin Pérez Sánchez before those who with power take effective action.

Endnotes:

John Lindsay- Poland coordinates Latin America and Caribbean programs of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. 995 Market St., #1414, San Francisco, CA 94103.  Tel: (415) 495- 6334.  Further information is also available at www.nonviolence.org/for/panama.

1._El Universal, July 1, 1999.

2._El Panamá América, July 7, 1999; Crítica, July 7, 1999.

3._Letter from Jack Cadenhead, Nov. 1997; interview with Jack Cadenhead by author, May 24, 1998.

4._Capt. Jay S. Stockhardt, "San José Project," Armed Forces Chemical Journal, Jan. 1948.

5._San José Project files in National Archives, Washington, D.C.

6._Herasto Reyes, "La siembra de la contaminación," La Prensa, July 29, 1997.

7._"San José Project Report No. 24 Summary," in letter from Secretary of Defense William Cohen to U.S. Representative José Serrano, Apr. 7, 1998.

8._"Chemical Corps Tropical Test Team, Fort Clayton, Canal Zone," Dugway Proving Ground,  Jan. 25, 1956; Dugway Proving Ground, "Environmental Test Branch Test Plan 36," Sept. 25, 1958; U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, Dugway Proving Ground, "Environmental Field Test: Food Testing and Screening Kit, Chemical Agents, ABC- M3," Dec. 1962.

9._Dugway Proving Ground Test Plan 704, "Surveillance Test (Environmental) of Mine, Gas Persistent, VX, 2- Gallon, ABC- M23"; Dugway Proving Ground Test Plan 719, "Surveillance Test (Environmental) of Projectile, Gas Persistent, VX, 155- mm, M121A1"; Dugway Proving Ground Test Plan 723, "Surveillance Test (Environmental) of Rocket, Gas Persistent, VX, 155- mm, M- 55"; and "Change to Surveillance (Environmental) Plan for Rocket, Gas Nonpersistent, GB, 115- mm, M- 55." Obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

10._William R. Brankowitz, "Chemical Weapons Movement History Compilation (U)," 1987.

11._Interview of Pamela Jones with author, July 1999; testimony by Charles Bartlett, in hearing at San Antonio Veterans Administration office, Nov. 3, 1997.

12._Communication with author, June 1999.

13._Interview with author, Aug. 1998.

14._Interviews with Eugene Reid by author, Sept. 16, 1997 and June 7, 1998.

15._Interview with Rick Stauber by the author, June 26, 1998.  Col. Edmund W. Libby, U.S. Army Project Manager for Non- Stockpile Chemical Materiel, says that "bulk high- explosive and  chemical- loaded artillery rounds" have a dud rate "of between 5 to 10 percent."  Communication from Col. Libby to author, July 23, 1998.

16._Capt. Jay S. Stockhardt and 1st Lt. Stephen D. Noyes, "The San José Project Moves," Armed Forces Chemical Journal, Jan. 1949, p. 53.

17._San José Project files, National Archives.

18._Stockhardt and Noyes, op. cit., n. 16.

19._Army Chemical and Biological Defense Command, "Survey and Analysis Report," Draft version, Apr. 1993.

20._Letter from Rick Stauber to author, July 18, 1998.

21._Press release, Autoridad de la Región Interoceánica, May 3, 1998.

22._Hongmei Deng and Peter O'Meara Evans, "Social and Environmental Aspects of Abandoned Chemical Weapons in China," The Nonproliferation Review, Spring- Summer 1997, p. 102.

23._Communication from Col. Edmund W. Libby to author, July 20, 1998.