Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino said on social media on Thursday that he would speak to his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump at 3:30pm on Friday afternoon, amid an increasingly tense standoff over the Panama Canal.

"If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without

Panama’s President Raúl Mulino criticized as an “intolerable” falsehood the US State Department’s claim that the Central American nation had agreed to no longer charge fees for US government ships passing through the Panama Canal.