When Marco Rubio arrived Saturday in Panama for his first international trip as secretary of state, he was greeted by flags—Panamanian ones. They littered the highways and roads on his route from the airport to downtown Panama City. They were displayed on buildings and streets in Casco Viejo, the historic “old town” where Rubio on February 2 met with President José Raúl Mulino. And they were visible everywhere in such suburbs as Albrook and Clayton, a former neighborhood and fort, respectively, in the previously U.S.-administered Panama Canal Zone.

American corporate media covering the visit viewed the ubiquity of the banners as representative of Panamanian resolve in response to President Donald Trump’s inaugural address threats that the United States might be taking back the canal. The MSNBC foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell reported that “flags [are] being arrayed all across the streets in Panama. It’s not a big holiday here, it’s in defiance of the U.S. and Marco Rubio’s incoming visit.” Jorge Quijano, a former Panama Canal Authority administrator, told Mitchell visible with pride, “Everybody is wearing a flag, I’m wearing a flag.” Perhaps in light of Panama’s lack of a standing military, one might call it a policy of “bandera” (Spanish for “flag”) deterrence.

Yet given the importance of the canal to Panama—it earns the country about $5 billion a year and is the largest contributor to its primarily service sector economy—the reaction to Rubio’s visit was surprisingly muted, with only a couple hundred demonstrators outside the presidential palace. In the days leading up to the visit, there were a few minor protests in the streets; a small demonstration of less than 100 people blocked the U.S. Embassy on Christmas Eve (a day on which the embassy was actually closed because of an executive order by the former President Joe Biden). In January, a small crowd of Panamanians protested outside the residence of the U.S. ambassador and burned an American flag, though, ironically there was no senior diplomat there to witness it—the former Ambassador Mari Carmen Aponte, an appointee of the previous administration, had already departed the country.

Not that the Panamanians don’t know how to protest. Beginning in mid-October 2023, Panamanian activists led by a militant leftist labor union brought much of the country to a standstill for more than a month, blocking roads and daily filling the capital with thousands of demonstrators against a copper-mining contract with a Canadian firm. (They got their wish: in late November 2023, the country’s supreme court declared unconstitutional earlier bipartisan legislation that had granted the Canadian firm’s copper mine a 20-year concession.)