By Bruce Bagley
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- From 1899 to 1902 Colombia was convulsed by a bloody civil war, known as the War of a Thousand Days, between rebels of the Liberal Party and the government, led by the Conservative Party. Some 100,000 Colombians lost their lives. This conflict severely undermined the country's central power and ruptured Bogota's control over its distant and increasingly discontented province of Panama.

The accompanying crisis on the isthmus led to Panama's secession from Colombia, then to recognition by the United States of an independent Panama in 1903, and subsequently to the U.S. construction of the Panama Canal.

Colombians held President Theodore Roosevelt and the United States responsible for the secession of Panama and bitterly resented for decades afterward the intervention of the "Colossus of the North" in their country's affairs. Over time, however, realism gradually forced Colombians to accept American hegemony in the region, and to reconcile themselves to the loss of Panama.

In 1921, after years of friction, controversy and delay, the U.S. Senate ratified the Thompson-Urrutia Treaty between Colombia and the United States, which formally brought an end to one of the most painful and volatile episodes in relations between the two countries.

NARRATIVE   • Strategic: A century's journey in Panama   • History: Troubled passageway   • Operations: Transfer heavy on symbolism, light on change   • Politics: Canal return a mixed blessing?   • Interview: Historian David McCullough   • Security: Colombia boils

A potential powder keg

By the late 1990s, the old wounds caused by Colombia's loss of Panama have healed and are unlikely to affect in any significant way Washington's transfer of the canal to Panama on December 31, 1999. Newer problems besetting Panama-Colombia relations, however, are sources of considerable concern to Panamanian and U.S. authorities on the eve of this historic event.

Among the most important of these is the increasing activity of Colombian guerrillas, paramilitary groups and drug traffickers on both sides of Panama's 165-mile (266-kilometer) border with Colombia, an inhospitable, densely forested region ideal for smuggling arms and drugs.

Panama's worries start with the fact the country has no armed forces capable of protecting its territorial integrity, much less the canal itself, from incursions or even attacks originating across the border in Colombia.

Members of the country's largest guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), are growing in strength and in number

Between 1996 and 1998 multiple armed confrontations took place between Panamanian National Guardsmen and rebels of the Northwestern Bloc of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). In 1998 the control exercised by the FARC in the Uraba region of Colombia adjacent to Panama virtually collapsed in the face of an offensive by some 1,800 right-wing paramilitary forces led by Carlos Castano.

The FARC guerrillas were forced to seek refuge across the border in Panama's Darien region. But FARC's Frente 57 continues to operate all along the border, mostly engaged in logistics. In June 1999 the guerrillas briefly took over the border settlement of Sapzurro.

Castano and his paramilitaries have declared they will attack any civilians or Panamanian National Guardsmen they suspect of "collaboration" with the FARC. As of mid-1999, an estimated 7,000 Colombian peasants had fled into Panama to escape guerrilla and paramilitary violence.

Panamanians ill-equipped for conflict

In September 1999 Panama's government announced it would deploy 1,500 more troops from its modest National Guard to reinforce the 1,500 already stationed in the border area. It is evident, however, the Panamanians have neither the training nor the equipment to effectively meet the Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary offensives taking place on Panamanian soil or to curb the flow of drugs and arms transiting the region.

The Colombians have stationed approximately 1,500 to 2,000 men (one naval brigade and three army battalions) on their side of the border, but they also have been unable to significantly curb the escalating violence. Since 1996, several massacres of Colombian peasants residing in Panama have been attributed to Colombian paramilitary forces intent on stamping out FARC influence in the Darien area.

The spillover into Panama of the conflicts convulsing Colombia have heightened tensions in relations between the two countries. Both Panamanian and U.S. authorities have prodded Bogota to undertake greater efforts to safeguard Panamanian territorial integrity, and the canal, from potential threats emanating from Colombia.

In 1998, Washington gave Colombia $289 million in foreign aid to improve its military and police capabilities to confront guerrilla violence and drug trafficking. Discussions are under way to increase U.S. aid to Colombia to more than $1 billion in the next fiscal year.

Even with substantially increased U.S. aid over the next several years, however, there is little reason to hope the intensifying violent conflicts and spiraling trafficking in drugs and arms on the Panama-Colombia border will likely abate soon.

Hence, the United States will continue to face significant security concerns regarding Panama and the canal for the foreseeable future, and without a military presence in the country. No members of the U.S. armed forces will remain in Panama after the December 31 transfer of the canal.

Bruce Bagley, a professor in the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, is an authority on U.S.-Latin American relations, with an emphasis on drug trafficking and security issues. The author of more than 40 publications, Bagley has taught at several institutions both in the U.S. and in Latin America, including Johns Hopkins University, the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, National University and the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia, and the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico.