Philippe Bunau-Varilla

Philippe Bunau-Varilla was a French engineer who represented Panama in the treaty that gave the United States its canal, and had been in the country for a total of about two weeks in his life. Born in Paris in 1859, he trained at the École Polytechnique and went to Panama at twenty-six as an engineer on Ferdinand de Lesseps' French canal company, becoming its chief engineer within a year when yellow fever killed everyone senior to him. The company collapsed in 1889 in the largest financial scandal of the century, having lost some 800 million francs and around 22,000 lives. Bunau-Varilla spent the following decade lobbying to sell what remained of it. He held shares in the successor company, and his interest was that the United States should build at Panama rather than at Nicaragua, where a rival route was favoured in Congress. He is said to have posted every senator a Nicaraguan stamp showing a smoking volcano days before the vote. When Colombia's senate rejected the canal treaty in 1903, he helped organise the Panamanian secession, arranged its financing, and had himself appointed the new republic's minister to Washington within days of a revolution he had funded. He signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty on 18 November 1903 before the Panamanian delegation arrived, granting the United States a zone in perpetuity on terms more generous than Colombia had refused. Panamanians have resented it ever since, and it took until 1999 to undo. He lost a leg at Verdun and died in 1940.

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