American military personnel are back. Actually, this isn't the first Panama has seen of the US Armed Forces since the end of 1999 --- there have been the embassy's Marine Corps guards, US special operations people and DynCorp mercenaries taking their breaks from Plan Colombia here, and the crews of American warships that pass through from time to time. The US Coast Guard has been within our territory on anti-drug missions and Evergreen Air of Alaska has been doing Plan Colombia support work out of Tocumen. A former US Navy SEAL is President Moscoso's security advisor. What was supposed to be a ten-day jungle warfare seminar for Panamanian cops, given by American soldiers at the former Fort Sherman, seems to have lasted longer. US military helicopters rushed emergency supplies to Darien residents displaced by a paramilitary attack on this country.

Officially, and not counting any of the above, the American forces are back for Nuevos Horizontes, a series of maneuvers for US Army National Guard and Reserve combat engineering units. They will learn how to build roads, bridges, buildings, landing sites and water wells under tropical conditions in remote areas, and the impoverished Ngobe-Bugle Comarca will get needed roads, bridges, schools, clinics, helicopter pads and clean water sources.

Many, maybe most, Panamanians are unaware of the US presence mentioned in the first paragraph of this column. Nuevos Horizontes is widely known, and appears to enjoy the support of a large majority of Panamanian citizens.

Yet the other day about 300 people marched up Avenida Peru and down Via España to protest against Nuevos Horizontes. The rally was called by the National Movement in Defense of Sovereignty (MONADESO), an umbrella group headed by Father Conrado Sanjur that brings together most of Panama's leftist and nationalist groups.

Most of those in attendance were members of the militant SUNTRACS construction workers' union. Set aside the leadership's leftist ideology and this outfit's presence would still be expected. What if the US Army Corps of Engineers wanted to train Panama's National Police in construction skills, and brought them into some cash-strapped US school district to build a new schoolhouse? Would you expect the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers --- a fairly conservative organization, as far as labor unions go --- to accept foreign soldiers rather than IBEW members installing the wiring? For SUNTRACS, Nuevos Horizontes is an economic as well as a political issue.

The student left was also there. It's vacation time, which thinned their ranks, and they were splintered into three main marching sections, the Revolutionary Student Front (FER-29), Thought and Transformative Action (PAT) and the University Popular Bloc (BPU).

From out of the ranks, somebody grabbed a microphone and dredged up a moldy oldie. "¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!" It's the old Chilean chant, the battle cry of a movement that took a smashing defeat with General Pinochet's coup.

I have this friend in the States who was active with Rabble --- the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL). The English version of the Chilean chant is "The people united will never be defeated," and in that form, too, it gets abused as it did at the protest against the American military engineers. As in during the Gulf War of 1991, when only about 15 percent of the US public was opposed to the war, this slogan's use at anti-war rallies. Rabble, being a voluntary association of free-thinking and committed activists, responded to such foolishness during protests against Daddy Bush's war by chanting "A slogan exhausted should never be repeated."

Ah, but it seems that the best thinkers at this protest march expressed themselves not by chanting hallucinatory slogans, but in writing.

In a little flyer entitled "Gringo Army out of Panama --- No to war in Iraq," MONADESO made "the camel's nose under the tent" argument. "Under the inoffensive name of 'Operation New Horizons'," the group argued, the US Army "attempts to carry out supposedly humanitarian aid in Chiriqui and Bocas del Toro (and now to the displaced in the Darien), but its real objective is to interpose itself on our territory for military objectives." MONADESO opposed a US war against Iraq and insisted that the security problem in the Darien "must be resolved by our own country and not by the army of a foreign nation."

The Unified Popular Movement (MPU) --- students who wave the Invincible Red Banner of Marxism-Leninism with the BPU apparently outgrow the campus organization at some point --- made much more pointed argument in its leaflet entitled "Colombian paramilitaries and Yankee troops out of Panama!" The MPU protested the assassination of four Kuna caciques and blasted the Moscoso administration's handling of the crisis, accusing National Police Chief Barés of "keeping Darien province militarized, but only to harrass the civilian population, as he is incapable, or unwilling, to confront the constant attacks by the Colombian paramilitaries." The MPU further asserted that "Everybody knows that the paramilitaries are groups armed by the Colombian Army, with American assistance."

Such arguments would find many more receptive ears if the Moscoso administration deepens Panama's participation in Colombia's civil war. A low turnout to protest an American military project that most Panamanians support should not lead anyone to believe that the United States can't alienate many of its friends in this country. Panama's historic determination to stay out of Colombia's nonstop madness is a factor that Washinton policy makers would be unwise to ignore.