Many Panamanians accuse the United States of ignoring the dangers and President George W. Bush will face protests over the controversy during a visit starting on Sunday night.

Washington controlled the inter-oceanic waterway and a five-mile strip either side of the canal for almost all of the 20th century, and used some of the land for firing ranges.

It gave control of the canal to Panama at the end of 1999, but handover treaties only obliged it to clear up unexploded munitions as far as was "practicable."

Around 30,000 acres were cleaned but 8,000 acres are still scattered with live mortars, grenades, bombs, rockets and Agent Orange residue. Outside the canal zone, seven mustard gas bombs weighing between 500 pounds and 1,000 pounds were abandoned on Panama's uninhabited Pacific island of San Jose.

Officially, 21 people have been killed in the firing ranges over the years, although some believe the true figure is more than double that.

Sabino Rivera was the most recent victim, killed in July 2004 near his home in the village of Escobal, three hours from the capital.

"He had nine children, and was gathering bananas in the firing range - he had no work. He exploded when he stood on a mortar. He never came home," his mother Blasina said this week, cradling her grandchildren in a breeze block shack.

The village is surrounded by bomb-infested rain forest ranges that poor locals still enter to hunt and farm.

"The Americans must come and take away these bombs," said Sabino's sister Carmen. "If the don't, more people will die."

Five people in Escobal have been killed by exploding munitions in the last 20 years, two of them children who found a grenade in a dump as they played near their homes in 1993.

A local shopkeeper winces at the memory. "There were chunks of flesh hanging from the mango trees. It was horrible."

MINIMAL SECURITY

The restricted areas have minimal security beyond a few faded warning signs, and those near Escobal run alongside a national park renowned among bird-watchers.

The United States says the jungle is too dense to cut a path through for bomb disposal experts, and warn that trying it would erode the topsoil and silt up the canal.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared the issue closed when he visited Panama last year, and U.S. officials say Panama simply needs to keep people away from the former ranges.

John Lindsay-Poland, an author who wrote "Emperors in the Jungle" about the U.S. military in Panama, says many areas are easy to clean and that even zones of heavy vegetation could be made safe if Washington spent the time and money to do it.

He said the U.S. government should set a better example, especially in cleaning up the mustard gas bombs.

"When the U.S. has gone to war over weapons of mass destruction being in other country's hands, to abandon WMD in a country they used as a military training ground for nearly a century is irresponsible and hypocritical," he told Reuters.

The United States tested mustard gas, phosgene and other chemical weapons on San Jose island between 1943 and 1948. No one has died as a cause of those weapons.

The weapons cleanup controversy is not on the formal agenda for Bush's visit, but Panamanian Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro insisted last month that it was not over.

"We do not consider it a closed case in the same way we did not consider the canal question closed for 74 years," he said.

President Martin Torrijos is the son of Omar Torrijos, a populist military dictator still revered by many here for negotiating the 1977 treaty that bound Washington to handing over control of the Canal to Panama in 1999.

Bush will be met in Panama by street protests against the war in Iraq and his free trade proposals for the Americas, as well as demonstrators demanding a munitions clean up.

Panamanians like Vaneza Lozano, who lost her father to a mortar that exploded in 1985, say the United States doesn't care about the problem.

"I want the United States to come and clean up. We are still in danger and so are our children. They leave us to die like animals," she said. "We are not animals. We are human beings."