Though the problem appears only subtly in the background of
the photo shown above, a simmering land dispute became much more acute on
August 11 and 12, when the Cocle beach community of Santa Clara celebrated
it local saint's day. Part of the celebration was a religious procession to
a little chapel dedicated to the virgin Saint Clara, located in the corner
of a park that has been a park since the 1930s.
However, a Mr. Fonseca has bought the residuary land rights
of the development company that built most of Santa Clara, beginning in the
1930s, and now he claims to own all the street and the park. A few days before
the community's celebration, his employees erected a barbed wire fence that
cordoned off the chapel from the rest of the park. The wooden posts can be
seen in the background, and the barbed wire strands running in back of the
chapel in one part run under its roof. Also in the background, a small shack
is visible. Fonseca has divided the park into tiny lots and begun selling
them, and the shanty behind the chapel is one result.
The park's middle class neighbors claim that Fonseca's attempt
to take a park that has been identified and used by the public as as such
for more than 60 years is illegal, and they do not like the idea living near
a shantytown, which they accuse Fonseca of trying to create. Elsewhere in
Santa Clara, people complain of Fonseca's attempt to declare the traditional
public access road to the beach his private property.
The dispute, which the barbed wire fence has given an unusual
religious aspect in Santa Clara, mirrors many similar land controversies around
the country. For example, the developers of Coronado have from time to time
tried to exclude non-residents from gaining access to the beach through their
community, arguing that the roads there are private property. A Panamanian
constitutional provision declaring the beaches public property and various
laws that many lawyers interpret to mean that there can be no private roads
in this country are asserted to counter Coronado's claim, and during the previous
administration the development company was ordered to raise its gate and desist
from its security guards' practice of excluding non-residents. However, many
beachfront developments still do exclude non-residents, and other communities
prohibit or limit the use of beach access roads by buses.
It also turns out that many of the country's schools and parks
were informally donated for public use by landowners years ago without titles
being issued, and in many cases descendants of the donors, or people who have
bought companies that donated such lands, now claim to own public parks or
the lands upon which schools stand. In the present difficult economy a number
of people, sometimes urged on by lawyers, have attempted to fence off parks
or school yards, with the hope of forcing the Ministry of Education or local
government to pay them to abandon their land claims.
