The Intersection of Panama and Huawei Involves Several Key Points

Panama and Huawei represent a complex geopolitical flashpoint, balancing Huawei’s deep corporate presence in the country with U.S. efforts to limit Chinese technological influence in the region.

• Regional Headquarters: Huawei has maintained a significant corporate presence in the country since 2011, establishing its Latin American regional headquarters in Panama City and a distribution center in the Colón Free Zone.

• U.S. Infrastructure Replacement: In mid-2025, the U.S. Embassy and Panama’s Ministry of Public Security initiated an $8 million project to replace Huawei telecommunications equipment at 13 sites across Panama with “trusted American technology”.

• Sovereignty Friction: Following the U.S. announcement, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino publicly urged the U.S. to refrain from unilateral announcements and stated that Panama should not be dragged into geopolitical conflicts between the U.S. and China.

• Corporate Investments: Despite telecommunications security concerns, Huawei continues to operate in the country, providing jobs, cloud infrastructure, and educational tech initiatives like the “Seeds for the Future” program.

On the eve of Canada Day July 1st, we should have a look into Canada’s Nortel an offshoot of Bell Telephone, and China’s Huawei as it proves to be an interesting story. This story came out a few years back but it seems to be a similar story repeated world wide.

Did Huawei Bring Down Nortel? Corporate Espionage, Theft, and the Parallel Rise and Fall of Two Telecom Giants

As Canada decides on whether to allow Huawei a role in the coming 5G wireless networks (which will be a hard no), one part of the story is vexing Nortel’s many fans. Was Chinese spying central to the fall of Canada’s Nortel?  Jonathan Calof was on a tour of Huawei Technologies’ Shenzhen, China campus not long ago when he unexpectedly came across some familiar faces. On a wall of fame for stars of the Chinese company were several former employees of Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications giant that suffered a spectacular collapse a decade ago. “These are (now) Huawei employees associated with great technological accomplishments … and I recognized so many of them,” said Calof, a University of Ottawa business professor who was visiting the site with MBA students. “At one level you’re proud to be a Canadian, at the same time you’re upset to be a Canadian.” The ex-Nortel engineers’ place of honour in Shenzhen underscores how the two companies’ fortunes unfurled for years in striking parallel, and yet with starkly different outcomes.

They produced similar equipment, competed for the same contracts and tried to negotiate joint ventures. As one grew into a Goliath, the other crumbled to pieces. In Nortel’s waning days, Huawei reportedly backed a bid to keep it alive, only to ultimately walk away. And then snap up many of the bankrupt firm’s most-skilled staff. For at least 10 years, it was revealed in 2012, the company was invaded by hackers based in China who stole hundreds of sensitive internal documents from under the noses of its top executives. Before that, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) warned Nortel of Beijing-led human spies in its midst. Later reports suggested that actual listening devices had been planted in Nortel’s Ottawa research and development complex, now Canada’s National Defence headquarters.

And never previously reported are allegations by former Nortel security personnel that a customer tied to Huawei returned a piece of equipment that had been pulled apart and “reverse engineered” to divine its secrets. Huawei strenuously denies that it played any part in the hacking or other alleged espionage, or that it benefited from such industrial spying. But on social media, and among some cyber-security experts and ex-Nortel staff, suspicions live on that Nortel died at least in part because its intellectual property was plundered, as an upstart Chinese rival soared past it in the telecom industry. Such views will not be disabused by a new indictment that U.S. prosecutors filed. It accuses Huawei of using various methods to steal other companies’ intellectual property for decades. “What people need to hear is that economic espionage caused Nortel’s failure,” insists Brian Shields, the security advisor who uncovered the massive hack. “So others better beware lest they succumb to the same fate.”

This is Part 1 of a continuing story. Stay tuned as we prepare Part 2 for publication.