on territory split of from Colombia;
the U.S., which had conspired in the se-
cession plot, began building the canal
the following year and for decades largely
controlled the government. Things began
to change in 1968, when the left-leaning
general Omar Torrijos seized power and
began pressing for Panama to gradually
assume control of the canal. Twenty-
one years later, though, the U.S. mili-
tary invaded to oust Tor-
rijos’s truculent successor,
Manuel Noriega, and install
a more pliant regime. In 1999,
the canal was finally handed
back, and since then the U.S.
military bases that occupied
the Canal Zone have been
turned into malls, hotels,
and housing developments.
But the U.S. dollar remains
Panama’s oicial currency,
and baseball is the national sport. In
many countries, American Ambassa-
dors exert extraordinary influence—act-
ing as interpreters of U.S. policy, resolv-
ing disputes, and, less publicly, leading
intelligence teams. In Panama, they tend
to be seen as agents of empire.
Cherie said that she and Feeley wanted
to supplant the old model of U.S. diplo-
macy, which she described as “male, pale,
and Yale.” Contemporary culture, she
said, demanded “someone who can go
out there on the street, talk in your lan-
guage, dance with old ladies, drink wine.”
After they arrived, in February, 2016, Fee-
ley began showing up at street festivals
and amateur boxing matches; he ofered
weekly English classes in El Chorrillo,
an impoverished neighborhood that U.S.
forces had bombed heavily in the fight
against Noriega. With his public-afairs
team, he developed videos to be shared
on social media—intending, he said, to
portray “Americans, even Ambassadors,
as average people who like to drink, dance,
party, help others.”
Miroslava Herrera, the Afro-Pana-
manian singer of the well-known band
Afrodisíaco, befriended Feeley. “He
brought a diferent style,” she said. “One
time, he trusted me to take him to a
late-night folk event in a tough neigh-
borhood. People were surprised but wel-
coming, and afterward he came to most
of my band’s shows.” Herrera attended
Feeley’s jazz-themed party, and recalled,
“He had a Who’s Who of Panama there,
all sharing a meal. And he made sure
that the artist of the evening sang
‘Strange Fruit’ ”—Billie Holiday’s anti-
lynching lament.
Foreign-afairs hawks sometimes de-
scribe this kind of historical reckoning
as “apologizing for America.” But Fee-
ley’s most controversial episodes in Pan-
ama came, instead, from asserting U.S.
power too zealously. He told me, “I
wanted to shatter the image
of the U.S. Ambassador in
Panama as proconsul—even
while implementing poli-
cies that struck many as
proconsul-ish.” Early in his
posting, the U.S. Treasury
Department accused a Pan-
amanian business tycoon
named Abdul Waked of
laundering money for drug
traickers. Economic sanc-
tions were directed at his assets, which
included a string of duty-free shops, a
department-store chain, and La Estrella
de Panamá, the newspaper. Thousands
of jobs were put at risk. Feeley, who de-
scribed Waked as “one of the world’s
most significant money launderers and
criminal conspirators,” publicly supported
the sanctions.
In the end, the case against Waked
stalled. (A nephew, Nidal, confessed to
a minor charge of bank fraud.) Feeley,
who had promised to save jobs where
he could, worked quietly to spare La
Estrella, helping to arrange a deal in
which Waked gave 50.1 per cent of his
ownership share to a nonprofit. But
several of Waked’s other businesses
were auctioned of, and hundreds of
employees lost their jobs. Mariela Sagel,
a prominent columnist with La Estrella,
wrote to me, “Feeley’s lightning pas-
sage through Panama was as devastat-
ing to the self-esteem of Panamanians
as it was for the Waked businesses. After
less than two years on the job he quit,
claiming that he was not in agreement
with Trump’s policies. If those were his
reasons, why didn’t he resign when that
demented man won the Presidency?”
Panamanians had their own experi-
ence with divisive populists. The coun-
try’s previous President, Ricardo Marti-
nelli, was accused of spying on influential
citizens and embezzling forty-five mil-
lion dollars from a school-lunch pro-
gram. (Martinelli denies these activities.)In 2015, he fled to Miami and asked the
U.S. government for asylum, while Pan-
ama worked to extradite him. As Mar-
tinelli secured a mansion in Coral Ga-
bles and moved around with apparent
freedom, many Panamanians began to
suspect that the United States was pro-
tecting him. In May, 2017, I mentioned
these suspicions to Feeley, but he assured
me that the U.S. was pursuing the case.
A few weeks later, Martinelli was ar-
rested on a Justice Department warrant.
“I pushed hard to have him arrested,”
Feeley told me. “It sent a signal that im-
punity for grand-scale kleptocracy would
not be tolerated and could be overcome
by state-to-state judicial coöperation.”
But, where Feeley saw coöperation, some
in Panama saw another example of Amer-
ican overreach. An article in La Estrella
said that critics of Feeley’s work on the
case “could not remember an outsider’s
interference of such magnitude.”A
t a poker table in his library, Feeley
spoke about the ways in which the
Trump Administration’s policies were
harming U.S. diplomacy. Between for-
eign posts, Feeley had held positions of
increasing responsibility in the State
Department, working as a deputy to
Colin Powell and eventually becoming
the second-ranking diplomat for West-
ern Hemisphere Afairs. Co-workers
jokingly referred to him as “the mayor.”
He built teams, fostered a crew of loy-
alists (known as Feeley’s Mafia), and
strove to be directly involved with pol-
icy implementation. “He was a superior
bureaucrat—and I say that with love,”
the U.S. diplomat in Latin America told
me. “If you asked him his opinion he’d
give it, and if you didn’t he’d give it. And
that’s a really valuable thing in an or-
ganization like ours.” The diplomat
added, “He was the one guy we all
thought would be Assistant Secretary.”
Now the State Department was in
tumult. As Secretary of State, Rex Til-
lerson had endorsed a thirty-one-per-
cent budget cut and a hiring freeze on
diplomats; in August, half a year into his
term, seventy-one ambassadorships were
unfilled, along with scores of other se-
nior posts. Feeley was especially con-
cerned about the frayed U.S. relationship
with Mexico. When I spoke to him early
in Trump’s term, the customary chan-
nels of communication had been replaced