Coastal villages face land grab

In the Miami Herald Section of La Prensa today it was published how coastal villages face land grab and how squatters are being asked to pack up and move on. Below the story as published in la Prensa.


Panama’s thriving real estate industry threatens long-term residents of coveted coastal regions.

Inhabitants of two beachfront villages allege that they were forcefully evicted by police.

maydée romero/la prensa

On Oct. 10, a court returned a land title to a Colón resident whose property was gifted to a developer by the Office of Land Registry at the Ministry of Economy and Finance

A wave of evictions has hit coastal communities across the country, picking up and scattering, in some cases, entire villages to make way for the flood of real estate and tourism developments.

The voices of distress rise up from both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, where inhabitants and even some local authorities claim that developers are ignoring the possessory rights of long-established residents, according to attorney Guillermo Márquez Amado.

In the middle of the controversy is the National Program for Land Administration that is looking to carry out a widespread campaign to assign land titles.

Some of the displaced communities are getting organized to protest the initiative, which they say has backed them into a corner, with their lands being ceded to powerful companies on one side, and the cost of obtaining a land entitlement far from their reach on the other.

Donatilo Jiménez still wonders how the Office of Land Registry at the Ministry of Economy and Finance thought it could grant land in Cocuye, in the Santa Isabel region of the Colón province, that had belonged to his family for three generations to a developer.

Thanks to Jiménez’s perseverance, however, he was able to fight the government’s decision and reclaim his land as of Oct. 10 in a court ruling supported by the land administration program’s consultative council.

Though Jiménez was pleased by the outcome, he remains concerned about his ancestral land, which is coveted by several developers of tourism projects.

“We’re not opposed to [the projects], but if they think they claim not to know that we have a right to the land, we’re going to defend it,” he added.

“What happened to Donatilo can happen to any of us,” said Alfredo Reid, a resident of Santa Isabel.

While the Santa Isabel community is breathing a little easier for the moment, several indigenous communities in the archipelago of Bocas del Toro are on tenterhooks about their lands, after some 17 policemen allegedly showed up in the village of Cayo de Agua and tore down the homes of nearly 100 families, said Félix Sánchez, a resident of the area.

Six days later, the same savagery occurred in the coastal town of Playa El Toro and La Garita, in the Pedasí area of the Los Santos province. That day, a group of fishermen were preparing for their morning activities when heavy machinery arrived to demolish their houses, reported to Amada Caballero.

According to Caballero, the order was given by the land’s supposed owner, ignoring the fact that the land has been occupied by the current residents for more than 40 years.

Rebeca Díaz may not have been one of those evicted from their beachfront property in nearby Pocrí, but three years ago the land administration program assessed their 133 square meter lot for a fee of $165, before informing her that she would then owe $400 per square meter, a sum required to obtain a so-called “administrative title.”

César Carrasquilla, chairman of the program’s advisory council confirmed that his office has received several reports similar to Díaz’ case.

La Prensa’s attempts to contact Vice Minister of Economy and Finances Gisela Alvarez de Porras, and the land program’s technical coordinator, Rolando Armuelles, were unsuccessful.

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