THE ZONE
‘…What was it? Did a meteor fall down?
Was it a visit by citizens of the vast space?
So or otherwise in our little country appeared
the greatest miracle of miracles – the ZONE.’ [2]
This part of the opening sequence of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, in a surprising and intriguing way, is arguably applicable to the context of Panama. With the Panama Canal Zone, the Colon Free Zone or the numerous ’Zonas Francas’, the territory of the Panamanian isthmus has seen a disproportionately high, and thus intriguing number of Zones appearing in its most recent history.
The Panama Canal Zone, or simply Canal Zone, was an unincorporated organised territory of the United States of America, which between 1903 and 1979 divided the Republic of Panama in two, largely following the navigational line of the Panama Canal with an offset of 8 kilometres on both sides. Established with the signing[3] of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty[4] which simultaneously made legal provisions for the construction of the Panama Canal, the Canal Zone was granted to the US ‘in perpetuity.’[5] This territorial and legal entity produced a multitude of contested and idiosyncratic conditions, unfolding issues of sovereignty, military control, race, cultural and local identity as well as giving rise to the unique Zonian[6] community. Officially dissolved through the Torrijos-Carter Treaties in 1979, it has remained present and operational in parts and enclaves until 1997, significantly shaping the isthmian territory up to this day.
Since the establishment of the Colon Free Zone in 1948, and especially in the last decade, the Panamanian isthmus has witnessed the appearance of a wide variety of Free Trade Zones. Those Zones exhibit various characteristics, but at their core, contain some forms of incentives provided by the government of Panama that aim to stimulate and attract the conduct of commercial business activity through either taxation, customs or labour regulation.
While an etymological inquiry traces the Zone to the Latin ‘zōna’ and eventually the Greek ‘ζώνη’ for ‘girdle’[7] its general meaning can be defined as a ‘definite region or area of the earth, or of any place or space, distinguished from adjacent regions by some special quality or condition’.[8] Thus the two essential aspects that define a Zone lie in its operation and demarcation.
Its operation can be understood as an alteration to the code, or to borrow from Keller Easterling, the ‘spatial software’,[9] which defines the modi operandi of a territory. Thus the Zone then becomes a software in itself, the employment of which usually follows a purpose-specific doctrine, be it consolidation of control or accumulation of resources; or both. The idiosyncratic spatial conditions produced by the operation of the Zone are thus territorialised by its demarcations, which also establish the Zone as an autonomous entity through the practice of othering.
To illustrate this, it helps to take a look at things on the ground. In the Canal Zone, the operations were defined through a set of spatial software components, ie. the Canal Treaty itself, the Canal Zone Laws, its legal status as an unincorporated organised territory of the US, the direct executive command by the military through the Panama Canal Company[10] and the Gold/Silver roll system,[11] to name a few. Demarcated within the territory by under provisions of the Canal Treaty, this set of code alterations produced a landscape within which one would find, extraconstitutional interpretations of US law, issuance of citizenship outside formally US soil,[12] overseas extension of the 5th US Court of Appeals,[13] wide-ranging military infrastructure and reservations, sanitation zones, infrastructure adhering to US building codes, a legal absence of political representation of its population, a state-run economic system with allocation of goods and housing, codified racially segregated towns, as well as housing and facilities among many others. As for the Zonas Francas, the operations and demarcations are established through a series of laws for specific FTZs, all referring to an executive order describing the Free Zone regime, which generate landscapes of warehouses, duty free stores, international asset storage vaults for precious metals and valuables, repackaging facilities, call centres, factories, data centres, educational facilities, housing and many more.
Thus, the Zone in its operation and demarcation produces a whole new territorial and spatial logic, which can be read, problematised and operationalised to become generative of novelty if one is to engage with its material-agential becomings.