The difficult negotiations now in process between the United States and Panama over a new Panama Canal treaty are almost certain to ignore the rights of one people: the descendants of the blacks who dug the canal in the first place. “We are just hoping,” said a black who lives in the U.S. Canal Zone, “that whatever happens between the two countries, our position doesn’t become worse.” It probably will.

Although Americans look on the Panama Canal as one of their great engineering achievements, it was dug mainly by foreign workers, mostly blacks from the West Indies. Few of these blacks left when the job was finished in 1914. They stayed on to help run the canal or to work in Panama. Their children did the same. As a result, Panama’s two main ports, Panama City and Colón, have urban ghettos of English-speaking blacks in the slums near the U.S. Canal Zone, and the Canal Zone itself has embarrassing communities of virtually segregated blacks.

They are a people without power. Although many are America-oriented, they are not American. Although they are now citizens of Panama, they are a distant cultural minority. Their descendants will probably be assimilated, some day into the racially mixed Panamanian culture, but that does not help the present generations.

There are two black problems in Panama, both created by the canal. The first lies within Panama itself, a tiny country of only 1.5 million population whose main natural resource is geography. It is the narrowest stretch of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which is why the canal was built there. Perhaps 100,000 blacks of West Indian descent live within Panama.

The second problem lies within the American colonial enclave called the U.S. Canal Zone. The zone exists because Panama, in the treaty of 1903 now under review, granted the United States a strip of land 10 miles wide and 50 miles long, so that it could construct and then operate the Panama Canal. The zone now has a population of 41,000. Almost 25,000 are U.S. servicemen and their dependents living on thirteen military installations. The civilian population of the zone, there because of the canal, comprises 10,500 Americans, almost all white, and 5,500 Panamanians, almost all black. They give the zone its special segregated atmosphere.

During construction days, the U.S. Government hired 45,000 foreign contract laborers. A caste system developed, hidden somewhat by a euphemism. The U.S. Government paid Americans in gold coin, others - mostly West Indian blacks - in silver. The pay windows were marked gold and silver. Before long, everything else was marked that way, too. There were gold and silver toilets and gold and silver counters at the post office and gold and silver housing and, later, gold and silver schools. The terminology was not abolished until 1947.

The racial contrast between gold and silver was made starker by the racial make-up of the Americans. The Canal Zone has long had a tradition that almost all its American civilians have been white, living in small communities with the air of stirless Mississippi towns in August. Even today, with all the pressures on U.S. Government agencies to hire minorities, the U.S. Panama Canal has only seventy-eight blacks among its American employees. American officials have been free to pursue their own prejudices in this largely ignored U.S. colony.

In the last twenty years, there has been an American attempt of a sort to deal with the segregation and discrimination in the zone - partly by abolishing restrictions but mostly by cultural eviction. There has been an open policy of pushing the West Indians out of the zone and into Panama. An all-American zone would end both the American embarrassment and the American responsibility.

As a result of this policy, Panama has large black populations in Panama City and Colón, the terminal ports of the canal. Colón, the Caribbean port of 70,000, is heavily black. It is, in fact, a town of black squalor. The wooden houses with their rusted roofs are rotting and peeling. Some of the apartments are single rooms, disordered and crowded. The alleys between the tenements smell of urine and rancid garbage. Panama City, the Pacific port with a population of 450,000, is less black, but black slums, almost as squalid as those in Colón, crowd the border of the Canal Zone.

A visitor, however, must be careful with these impressions. Not all the squalor is a spillover from the canal. It is difficult to tell how many West Indian blacks and their descendants now live in Panama. A 1950 census reported that Panama and the Canal Zone had 25,000 residents born in the West Indies. There was no figure for those of West Indian descent. At a guess, it was three or four times the number of native West Indians, a total that is surely much greater now.

It is also difficult to tell how many blacks in the slums of Colón and Panama City work for the Panama Canal or are descended from those who once did work there. The United States accepts no responsibility for the living conditions of blacks outside the Canal Zone, whether or not they work for the canal, so there are no studies, reports or statistics about them. Moreover, Panama has had a long history of black immigration, mostly slaves brought by the Spanish colonials. Many Panamanians have some black ancestors. In the 19th century, when Panama was a part of Colombia, it was known as that country's black province. Every black face in Panama does not represent a descendant of a West Indian who dug the canal.

Language, is surer evidence. The old blacks spoke Spanish; the West Indian immigrants did not. Walking the streets of Colón, a visitor soon discovers that English is the predominant language there. That is not true of Panama City.

Sometimes the languages mix, with the children favoring Spanish, and their parents English. In the black area of Panama City one afternoon, I overheard a father send his son into a toy store to find out the price of a model car. The boy came out and announced, "Cuarenta y cinco." "Forty-five," the father said, "that’s too much out of me." “Porqué, papa?" "Because I can't spend that much." The evidence of language shows clearly that the black slums of Colón and Panama City are at least a partial legacy of the American construction of the canal.

The blacks have an odd position within Panama. For years, the government of Panama was ambivalent about their citizenship. They were deprived of Panamanian citizenship from 1941 to 1946. Now, they do have full citizenship, but the white-skinned, Spanish-descended upper class of Panama society still looks down upon them. At the same time, other Panamanians resent them because their language and experience give them access to jobs in the Canal Zone, the best-paying in Panama. But Panama is not a closed society. The blacks may be drawn into Panama eventually through intermarriage and Spanish.

The blacks inside the U.S. Canal Zone have much better living conditions than those outside. Unlike those others, they can make the United States responsible for their welfare and they can see to it that inequities are obvious. That may be one reason why the U.S. Government wants them out.

Of course, the United States does not state that as a matter of official policy it is kicking the blacks out of the zone. It says that the blacks must leave only because the United States must care for its own citizens first. Its primary responsibility, so the argument goes, is to house American citizens who have been recruited to work on the canal. Since there is not enough housing even for them, the United States has decided to stop housing Panamanians within the zone except in those rare cases where a Panamanian must live near his job. According to a disingenuous official statement of the Canal Zone Government, ‘‘If there were surplus housing in those [American] communities it could and would be assigned to eligible non-U.S. citizen employees. Eligibility is not in any way based on race and color.” But there is no recent evidence that the Canal Zone Government has even tried to plan, budget or request funds for “surplus housing” for the foreign blacks. The blacks are simply not wanted.

The United States is accomplishing its cultural eviction by attrition. All workers on the canal, whether American or Panamanian, must leave the zone when they retire. In the case of Americans, their homes are filled by other Americans. In the case of Panamanians, their homes are filled by no one. When a new Panamanian is hired, he is not assigned housing in the zone. As a result, only one tenth of the Panamanians who work on the canal now live in the zone, While the attrition is going on, U.S. officials allow the Panamanians to live in their homes in the old “silver” communities. They are now called “Latin American” communities; they are really black communities.

The segregation is not absolute. A few Panamanians - doctors and policemen, for example - live in the American communities. But they tend to be Latin Panamanians rather than those of West Indian descent. In any case, the segregation comes close to being total. The American civilian communities in the Canal Zone, which are almost all white, are as separate from the Latin American communities, which are almost all black, as white and black towns are separated in South Africa.

Schooling in the Canal Zone is much the same. In 1955, the U.S. Government abolished the segregated gold and silver school system. A new segregated school system took its place, divided into English-speaking American schools and Spanish-speaking Latin American schools. “The name was changed,” Roy A. Watson, a black Panamanian, wrote the House subcommittee on the Panama Canal two years ago, “but the debasing intent and practice remained.”

American officials argue that the Latin schools are needed to help the blacks, who are Panamanian citizens, assimilate into Panamanian life. “It was concluded,” the Canal Zone Government has said in an official statement, “that in the interests of all concerned, the Panamanian students in the Canal Zone should be oriented culturally, socially and economically toward their own country.” The phrase, “it was concluded,” is significant. The black, English-speaking parents did not decide that it was better for their children to attend Spanish-speaking schools. This was “concluded” for them by the U.S. Government.

There is a good deal of validity in the American argument, but the United States is not consistent about it. The Canal Zone admits a few Panamanians from outside the zone to its English-speaking high school. They are usually the children of wealthy or politically well-placed Panamanians who are Latin and lighter skinned. The United States has not concluded that it would be better for them to remain in their own culture. The American schools are far from lily-white. Since they admit the children of American servicemen from the military installations in the zone, there are a good number of American blacks in the classrooms. But for the children of the black Panamanians who work on the canal, the schools are as segregated as they were in the old gold and silver days.

Since the Canal Zone is run as sovereign American territory and the canal is an American company, Americans get the best paying jobs in the zone. Nonetheless, 11,000 of the 15,000 workers on the canal are Panamanian, mostly blacks. Black advancement, however, is often blocked by a rule that the most important jobs must be filled by American citizens, because the jobs are “security positions.” U.S. officials say there are 1,700 such positions. A Panamanian can become a policeman in the zone, for example, but he can never advance to sergeant. That is a security position. The situation was once far worse. In 1962, no Panamanian held a job in the zone as a postal clerk, fireman or towing locomotive operator. Only three held jobs in the police force.

Many blacks in the zone insist that the United States, in hiring professional and clerical staff, favors lighter-skinned Latin Panamanians. “You look there in the administrative building,” said a black, “and you see a general Latin favoritism.” This may be true in the administrative building. But blacks, because of their English and their historical place in the zone, still have the vast majority of Panamanian jobs on the canal, and other Panamanians call them “the privileged ones.”

Because of resentment over relative pay scales and some racial antagonism, many blacks are uncertain about their place in Panama. “We are sort of a peculiar breed,” Philip Henry, a black canal worker, told Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. treaty negotiator, at a public hearing last November, “because even though we carry the title of Panamanians, many of us might be reared in the Canal Zone, educated in the Canal Zone, educated in the United States, and we’ve worked for the Panama Canal company for all our lives.” A black police officer said in a recent interview, “Most of our kids have grown up in American democracy. They don’t know what Panama is like.”

Some black Panamanians have suggested that the problem might be eased if the United States relaxed immigration requirements for Panama Canal workers and their dependents. At the moment, in fact, the only major difference between the U.S. Canal Zone and most other American colonial territories is the refusal of the United States to grant any kind of American nationality or citizenship to the people who live in the zone. But relaxation of the immigration laws for canal workers does not seem probable. Congress has never shown any interest in the idea. The officials of the Canal Zone, the whites who think they know the blacks best, refuse to support any such proposal. The blacks themselves feel the idea is too remote to fuss about.

Most blacks who work on the canal seem resigned to their Panamanian citizenship. Even those who live in the zone, when they discuss their future under a new treaty, are less concerned with possible Panamanian sovereignty over the zone than with their jobs. One resident of the zone, who once lived outside the zone, said, “We are accustomed to Panama justice - no matter what we think of it. We can live with it. Our greatest fear is the security of our jobs, our salaries and our fringe benefits.” They fear, in fact, that if the United States returns sovereignty to Panama, they will lose many of their jobs to lighter-skinned, Latin Panamanians.

In the long rum, assimilation will probably solve the problem within Panama. But for the United States, the blacks are still an embarrassment. In a letter to Rep. Robert L. Leggett (D., Calif.), the chairman of the House subcommittee on the Panama Canal, Rupert A. Phillips, secretary of the Congress of Latin American (i.e., black) Civic Councils in the zone, asked, “Has the United States forgotten the people whose brawn, willingness to work, and brain made this engineering feat a reality? Or have we been chosen as the sacrificial lamb?” The answer would probably not reflect much credit on the United States.

Stanley Meisler is a correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, now stationed in Mexico.