Jackson, Land invasions from the land use planning perspective

Look at how two of the politicians in Mireya Moscoso’s ruling coalition are running for re-election:

Antolín Arenas, the MOLIRENA representante for the La Chorrera corregimiento of Puerto Caimito, organized an invasion of 93 hectares of privately owned land by some 350 people. He charged them $100 apiece, assigned them lots on land that was not his, and as part of the deal required them to change their voter registrations to Puerto Caimito. The police were called in, the squatters were forcibly removed, and Arenas at the time this column was written had not returned the money.

If we had a normal country in which the people who are supposed to enforce the law do their jobs, Arenas would be in jail for fraud and criminal trespass. Unfortunately, Attorney General José Antonio Sossa is pro-corruption so that hasn’t happened in this case. However, Electoral Prosecutor Gerardo Solís, who is independent of Sossa, is pursuing Arenas over what look like pretty flagrant election law violations. Solís is, as one may have expected, being accused by Arenas of conducting a partisan witchhunt.

Meanwhile, not all migrations are to, nor are all land invasions within, the metro area. Within days after a government-brokered agreement between the Embera and Wounaan community in which the Darien villages of Arimae and Embera Puru are located and several colono families that had grabbed land that was collectively deeded to the indigenous inhabitants during the Torrijos government, legislator Haydée Milanés de Lay, a renegade Solidaridad deputy who will probably run for re- election on the Arnulfista ticket, incited another invasion of the indigenous community’s land. She denies that it’s a land invasion and asserts that all the Embera and Wounaan living in Darien communities outside the comarca must move into the comarca, because all the rest of the province belongs to the blacks and the cholos from the Interior. By her logic, it’s not an invasion for people to take what’s already theirs.

The legislator has received plenty of support in the mainstream and alternative media by people who argue indigenous land rights are bogus because property rights should not be determined on the basis of race. Ironically, this position was advocated on Debate Abierto by attorney, journalist and Partido Popular activist Milton Henríquez, who’s Jewish, and in La Carta de Panama, which is run by Juan Manuel Handal, who’s of Palestinian descent. I have not heard Henríquez dispute Israel’s land claims, which are based upon race and an interpretation of the Bible, nor have I heard Handal dispute the Palestinians’ land claims, which are based upon race and a history of possession. Nor do I see or hear any politicians inciting or journalists advocating invasions of lands owned by prominent Arab-Panamanians, nor of the real estate of prominent Jewish families because they're Jewish, nor of lands held since the days of Pedrarias the Cruel by members of the old Creole aristocracy who got their titles because they were Spanish.

In any case, the issues of race, class, partisanship, legality and social justice ought to be side issues in any proper debate about land invasions. Land invasions happen because there are urban residents without the means to find a legal place to live, and farmers without an arable plot of land to farm. They are tolerated by the economic elite and manipulated by politicians and building materials vendors for reasons of crass personal interest. They will continue so long as no realistic alternatives are offered to the sorts of people who participate in them.

But let us understand first and foremost that notwithstanding all of the other issues, land invasions are the worst possible land use policy.

What if the ultra-sleazy Antolín Arenas got away with his Puerto Caimito land grab?

Then La Chorrera would be faced with an immediate sanitation problem. This community already can’t properly pick up and dispose of its garbage. Its sewer system is already grossly inadequate. Even if the $100 per person that Arenas was charging the squatters was entirely dedicated to solving the sanitation problems, it wouldn't come close to meeting the costs of needed services and infrastructures.

The Ministry of Education is faced with new demands on the public schools with every new residential neighborhood. The National Police are similarly confronted with new responsibilities, both in legal developments and even more so in the shanty towns created when there are land invasions by the poor. New squatter communities almost always mean that the Ministry of Public Works will eventually be called upon to install proper streets. When an urban land invasion is not suppressed, there generally ensues a battle between the electric company and the new residents over illegal power line connections.

Yes, the metropolitan area of Panama and Colon provinces faces a serious housing deficit for those with little or no means. Given the continuing rural to urban migration it’s a national rather than a local or regional problem. It needs to be resolved by way of the well planned construction of more low-cost public and private housing, and by an orderly urban homesteading program. To the extent that Panama can get its economy back on track and reduce unemployment, the government will have to pay less attention to subsidized solutions to the housing problems of the poor, but in any case it ought to be more diligent about urban planning issues.

And what about Darien land invasions? What do those mean from a land use perspective?

What they mean is the permanent destruction of forests and streams upon which the indigenous way of life depends. However, indigenous people are not the only ones who depend on the resources that the legislator would destroy in her bid for reelection. Clean water supplies, the nation's fisheries, supplies of wood for many purposes and the tourism industry all depend on the conservation of our remaining forests.

All those Santeños are in the Darien in search of farms because they or their ancestors have slashed, burned, worn out and overgrazed the lands from whence they come to the point that their old farms are no longer very useful for agricultural purposes. They seek to cut down the forests and eke out a living for just a few years, until the fate of Los Santos is imposed upon the Darien as well. Once gone, the forests and the way of life based upon their existence will be gone for many generations. In the case of most of the individuals involved in rural land invasions, there’s nothing malicious about it, but that doesn’t make their rural land invasions any less destructive.

So even if we ignore the ugly racist demagoguery inherent in Haydée Milanés de Lay's call for ethnic cleansing in her province and just look at the issue in terms of national land use and agricultural policies, what she proposes to do is still wrong. While in other parts of the country the debate is about how best to reforest lands that have long been degraded, we shouldn’t even consider the destruction of such forests that remain.

Panama’s agricultural land use policy should not be the clearance of more forests with marginally fertile red clay soil for a few years of crops and a few more years of cattle grazing. It should be the restoration of already cleared land by way of composting, agroforestry, smarter rotation of farm plots among various uses and greater public investment in irrigation systems that less wealthy farmers can afford to use. There needs to be orderly and equitable agrarian reform that gives landless farmers a realistic opportunity to turn unproductive land into viable farms. None of this is so facile a solution as bullying those perceived to be weaker and taking their land, but it’s the way that this country needs to go.

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Weisbrot, Argentina and the IMF again
White, What news is old?
Jackson, Land invasions

opinion

Land invasions