Proposed Law 132 advances in the National Assembly

Amended beach and island land law before the National Assembly

by Eric Jackson, partly from other media

Some of the protesters are mollified, others are not and another group of concerned citizens and non-citizens is warily unsure, but when this story was written an amended version of proposed Law 132 was before the plenary of the National Assembly headed for likely approval. Earlier, however, in the Finance Committee sections that would have allowed concessionaires to summarily bulldoze people's homes they encountered on lands granted to them as tourist concessions were stricken, and an amendment provided that rights of possession existing at the time the law was passed would be respected.

So what will the latter point mean to someone who grew up on a farm next door in a family who held undeniable squatters's rights to that land, and as a young adult, nine years ago, carved his farm out of an adjacent piece of property, when 12 years from now the government grants a resort development concession that includes this farm to a foreign billionaire? Do those nine years of adverse possession now count for anything?

And what does it mean to an Ngobe community that has for longer than anybody's living memory been collectively using a beach that's just outside the comarca limits for recreation and to launch their cayucos?

To the foreigners who have flocked into the Bocas islands and bought rights of possession from people who legitimately had these to sell, assurances have been given. But all it would take to negate these promises that their land tenure won't be lost is a court decision that because these people are foreigners, because their properties are on islands, or because they are not farmers working the land, their rights of possession are legally illusory. And in any case, the Torrijos administration had promised these people that they would be able to get full title to their lands and to the extent that Law 132 is the government's solution to the Bocas land tenure mess, that pledge has been broken.

This gets us to a basic problem between Panama's government and citizens, a profound lack of trust.

Indigenous opposition

Why, for example, are Ngobe groups taking the most unusual --- for them --- step of buying ads in the daily newspapers to denounce Law 132? The answer to that is not found solely in the text and possible interpretations of the proposal. It's also rooted in a long history.

When the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca was created during the Pérez Balladares administration, it boundaries were specifically drawn to exclude indigenous beach communities with possibilities for tourism development. The law creating the comarca also withheld control over and any direct benefit from mineral and hydroelectric resources within the comarca. All of these issues have since been bones of contention, with the national government seeking to sell assets which indigenous people claim to foreign corporate investors.

To many people in the comarca, Law 132 looks a lot like the ill-fated Cerro Colorado copper mining project, which would have injected caustic chemicals into veins of ore on a mountain in the comarca, polluting the streams and groundwaters upon which nearby Ngobe communities depend. In this case, the fear is not only the expulsion of people who had lived on and collectively used certain beaches for many decades, but also of huge resorts cutting mangroves, pouring sewage and golf course fertilizers into the sea, and thus destroying local fisheries upon which people who live outside the resort concessions have historically fed themselves. As one of the newspaper ads, taken out in the name of “the folks of the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca and the citizens of Bocas del Toro” put it, “the environment must be respected and must not be destroyed by big businesses under any pretext.”

The problem of trust between indigenous people and the government is long-standing, and has become more acute during the previous two administrations. Both Ernesto Pérez Balladares and Mireya Moscoso, for example, differed from their predecessor Guillermo Endara in taking seats in the Central American Parliament. Toro is the son of a Nicaraguan immigrant, and to indigenous eyes the Central American paradigm is one of tiny white elites ruling over largely indigenous populations through combinations of demagoguery and the iron fist. Both the Pérez Balladares and Moscoso administrations put high priority on economic integration with the Central American banana republics, reversing the polarity of Panama's usual cultural and economic self-definition as a South American country. It's not that there are no issues between the governments of our South American neighbors and the indigenous peoples in those countries, but as a matter of symbolism --- combined with specific issues like mining and hydroelectric concessions --- the turn toward Central America of the past decade has carried ominous connotations in the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca.

All this matters a great deal on the national scene, when one considers that Panama tends to be divided into political tribes, the largest being the Torrijistas and the Arnulfistas, which command less than majority support are implacable in their hatreds of the others. There are not a whole lot of swing voters in Panama, and the biggest single concentration of them is found in the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca. That unaligned voting trend for the most part explains Martin Torrijos's coalition between his PRD and the Partido Popular (former Christian Democrats), the latter who count a small base within the comarca as a part of their small sliver of the Panamanian electorate.

Environmentalist objections

The Ngobe-Bugle Comarca is the most poverty-stricken region of Panama. But joining people from that neighborhood in protesting proposed Law 132 is the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON), the environmentalist group with the most substantial base of support among wealthier Panamanians. Líder Sucre, ANCON's aristocratic US-educated director, was among those who testified against Law 132 as it then stood as the assembly's Finance Committee was about to pass it on to the legislature as a whole. Sucre and ANCON were not opposing the entire concept of Law 132 or, like the people from Bocas and the comarca demanded in their add, asking that the whole matter be dropped. He did, however, say that it needed some major modifications.

More militant environmentalists who don't have ANCON's establishment ties have tended to be more categorical in their opposition to proposed Law 132. In arguments circulated on the Internet, for example, Ariel Rodríguez asserts that what really matters is that the entire concept of tourism development concessions is an attempt by wealthy interests to usurp the public beaches, the enjoyment of which is one of the reasons why Panamanians become environmentalists in the first place. He also frowns upon large resort developments as environmental disasters in general. Thus Rodríguez, who played important roles in the defeat of Mireya Moscoso's proposed road through the Volcan Baru National Park and civic resistance to the construction of a housing development in a wooded area of the former Fort Clayton through which the colonial Las Cruces Trail runs, is advocating the defeat rather than the modification of the proposal. He thinks that as far as the assembly goes Law 132 is a done deal, but is pushing for a court challenge based on the constitutional provision that beaches are public property after it passes.

Who's behind Law 132?

Various lawyers have claimed, or been alluded two in press releases from the legislature, a hand in drafting Law 132. Some of the attorneys claiming authorship seem to be mere self-promoters who are puffing up their own role way beyond any justification, while those corporate lawyers who are rumored to have actually written the original draft are not stepping forward to claim credit.

Those promoting the amendments have been more open about it: a coalition of beachfront property owners, particularly in Bocas del Toro and Colon provinces; environmental activists; lawyers of a libertarian bent who look at the proposal as an attack on private property rights; indigenous groups; and the PRD legislators who represent communities that have seen large influxes of foreign retirees and fear that the bad publicity about Law 132 will kill this boom.

The most commonly heard rumor is that a group of wealthy Panamanians who have Canadian junior partners fronting from them and want to displace long-established fishing communities to build an upscale resort in the Perlas Archipelago are the main force behind the proposal's drafting. But on his Noriegaville website, Okke Ornstein alleges that the real impetus comes from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, whose yacht has been in Bocas a lot lately, sometimes with President Torrijos aboard. The aim of Law 132, Ornstein reports, is to bring Cancun-style mega-resorts to Bocas.

Stepping back and looking at things in the larger context, what's clearly going on is a continuation and intensification of a relatively rich versus relatively poor struggle for control of Panama's most scenic beaches. This confrontation was inherent in the drawing of the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca's boundaries during Toro's administration and the widespread falsification of public maps and assertion of private claims to control access to the beach at Santa Clara during Mireya's time. It has been the underlying subject matter of frequent arguments about whether Coronado can block public access to the beach in front of that development. It's the gist of a series of local arguments, which have sometimes ended violently, about whether the Colombian proprietor of the Hotel Contadorahas exclusive dibs over all tourism activity on Contadora Island. It underlies the bans on buses using the access roads to many a public beach.

It's an argument that won't go away anytime soon, regardless of what the National Assembly does with proposed Law 132.

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