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Territory in south Central America, ruled since 1903 by the República de Panama

Panama (Spanish: Panamá), officially the Republic of Panama (Spanish: República de Panamá), is a country in Central America, bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The capital and largest city is Panama City, whose metropolitan area is home to nearly half the country's 4 million people.

Geographical type: Territory

Latitude: 9° N — Longitude: 80° W

Area: 74,177 km²

ISO 3166-2 code: PA

Measures of Freedom

Human Freedom Index [PDF], The Human Freedom Index 2023: A Global Measurement of Personal, Civil, and Economic Freedom
2021: 7.57, Rank: 53, Personal freedom: 7.62, Economic freedom: 7.51
Level of Economic Freedom, Economic Freedom of the World
2014: 7.47, Rank: 37
Panama | Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2024
2016: Status: Free, Aggregate Score: 83, Political Rights: 2, Civil Liberties: 2
Panama continued to struggle with corruption and insecurity in 2015. However, authorities opened a series of corruption investigations against former president Ricardo Martinelli and his associates, leading to the arrest of numerous former government officials. While perceived insecurity remains high, the homicide rate declined by more than 20 percent during the first nine months of the year, compared to the same time period in 2014.

Articles

The Secret State, by Carl Oglesby, 19 Dec 1991
Details various events from the dismantling of the Office of Strategic Services after World War II to the 1991 death of Danny Casolaro, which Oglesby said are reason to be worried about "a secret and invisible state within the public state"
1970s and 1980s: The Noriega Connection
The CIA was exposed time and again throughout these decades in big-time international dope trafficking ... The rash of drug cases around former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega—once a darling of the CIA until he dared oppose U.S. policy in Nicaragua—provides a glimpse into the true heart of the contemporary CIA. Noriega received as much as $10 million a month from the Medellin Cartel (whose profits were $3 million a day) plus $200,000 a year from the CIA for the use of Panamanian runways in transhipment of cocaine to the north.

The introductory paragraph uses material from the Wikipedia article "Panama" as of 22 Sep 2018, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.