At home, however, they had their own concerns. At the end of the previous year there had been an armed uprising against the state president; a district judge and two others were killed during violence in Panama City's sprawling and volatile suburbs. On April 17, a month before the conference opened in Paris, there was another attempted revolution led by soldiers of the Colombian garrison. “Tragic scenes,” wrote the New York Tribune's local correspondent, “fighting in the streets and many persons killed.” Although the conspirators surrendered, martial law came into force. “Business has been paralysed,” reported the British consul Hugh Mallet, “and trade diverted from the Isthmus by constant apprehensions of danger to life and property.” Disorder continued even as the delegates in Paris were debating the future of Panama. On May 24 there were violent scenes, including gunfire, in the provincial assembly building. Two weeks later, General Rafael Aizpuru, who had been state president on Wyse and Reclus's first visit to the Isthmus, led a revolt of his supporters among the racially mixed lower classes in Colón, while Benjamin Ruiz, another radical, tried unsuccessfully to seize power in Panama City.None of this political turmoil seems to have registered with the delegates at the Paris conference who met in the afternoon of May 15 in the sumptuous surroundings of the headquarters of the Société de Géographie on Rue Saint Germain, in Paris's Latin Quarter.
