With the advance of the waters of Gatun Lake, as thousands of villagers were dispossessed of their land and homes and were moved to new sites on higher ground, very few of them felt that they were given fair compensation and bitterly resented the arbitrary fashion in which their new locations were decided for them. “The Americans took awful advantage of the poor people, because they had no one to speak for them,” one woman would remark sadly, more than sixty years later, remembering the home her family had been forced to abandon.
