PANAMA - República de Panamá

Panama (, Spanish: Panamá), officially the Republic of Panama (Spanish: República de Panamá), is a transcontinental country in Central America and South America, bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The capital and largest city is Panama City, whose metropolitan area is home to nearly half the country's 4 million people. Panama was inhabited by indigenous tribes before Spanish colonists arrived in the 16th century. It broke away from Spain in 1821 and joined the Republic of Gran Colombia, a union of Nueva Granada, Ecuador, and Venezuela. After Gran Colombia dissolved in 1831, Panama and Nueva Granada eventually became the Republic of Colombia. With the backing of the United States, Panama seceded from Colombia in 1903, allowing the construction of the Panama Canal to be completed by the US Army Corps of Engineers between 1904 and 1914. The 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties led to the transfer of the Canal from the United States to Panama on December 31, 1999.

Before Europeans arrived Panama was widely settled by Chibchan, Chocoan, and Cueva peoples. The largest group were the Cueva (whose specific language affiliation is poorly documented). When Panama was colonized, the indigenous peoples fled into the forest and nearby islands. Scholars believe that infectious disease was the primary cause of the population decline of American natives. The indigenous peoples had no acquired immunity to diseases which had been chronic in Eurasian populations for centuries.  

Panama was formerly a department of Colombia and used overprints of Colombian stamps from 1878 until it gained independence in 1903. However, from 1903 to 1905 sets of stamps with overprints were still used and it was only in 1906 that the first printed stamps by the Panamanian postal administration were produced with República de Panamá. In 1904, Panama was one of the few countries to issue a stamp for the Avis de réception service. Panama issued a number of telegraph stamps between 1917 and 1935, most of which were postage or revenue stamps overprinted for telegraphic useColombia also issued telegraph stamps for use in Panama before independence but they are not known in used form. Postage stamps and postal history of the Canal Zone is a subject that covers the postal system, postage stamps used and mail sent to and from the Panama Canal Zone from 1904 up until October 1978, after the United States relinquished its authority of the Zone in compliance with the treaty it reached with Panama.

The Canal Zone was a strip of territory 50 miles (80 km) long and 10 miles (16 km) wide across the Isthmus of Panama, and was ceded to the United States for the purpose of constructing and operating the canal which connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Upon the establishment of the Canal Zone in 1903, seventeen Post Offices had also been established and were operated by the U.S. Government.  The Canal Zone and its post offices, with the main distributing office in Cristobal, operated as an independent government agency under the direct authority of the President of the United States. In the towns where there were railroad stations, the station agents of the Panama Railroad functioned as postmasters. Along with ships and freight, domestic mail and mail from around the world moved through the canal. The Canal Zone Post Office began operating and issued its first postage stamps on June 24, 1904. Initially these were the current stamps of Panama or (less often) the U.S., overprinted with 'CANAL ZONE' in various styles. Philatelists have identified over 100 varieties, some of them quite rare (and counterfeited). The Republic of Panama was formally part of Colombia, and after it broke away from Colombia, with assistance from the United States, it established itself as a separate nation where it immediately became necessary to establish its own post offices and issue its own postage stamps. The Canal Zone Post Office was inaugurated on June 25, 1904. 

The first Panama stamps consisted of existing Colombian stamps, which were overprinted with Panama. These in turn were used for Canal Zone postage and were again, overprinted with CANAL ZONE with a red bar at top blocking out the name Colombia. Many varieties of the overprinting of PANAMA and CANAL ZONE exist, including doubled overprinting, These stamps consisted of existing U.S. regular issues of 1902–1903 and were overprinted in 1904 with CANAL ZONE and PANAMA in vertical fashion, for use as Canal Zone postage. On August 15, 1939 the Canal Zone Post Office issued a series of 16 stamps commemorating the 25th anniversary of the canal's completion, depicting "before" and "after" views of various points along the canal. Thereafter stamps appeared at an average rate of about two per year, with a commemorative set in some years and no stamps in others. The inscriptions were changed to just "CANAL ZONE" in the 1960s.