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Long struggle over access to Costa Abajo beach ends --- maybe
by Eric Jackson, from other media

For at least a decade, access to one of the beaches along Colon's Costa Abajo had been blocked by Colombian businesswoman María M. Reyes de Porras, despite provisions in this country's laws and constitution that the beaches are public property and access to them cannot be blocked.

The woman is not the only offender --- in nearly 100 cases around the country, Catastro has been challenging the private appropriation of beaches. But along Colon's Costa Abajo, there are racial and nationalistic overtones to the struggle. Piña, back in the 60s the preferred beach for Cristobal High School kids, has for decades been the sort of place where low-flying planes would drop bundles into the sea, people would go out in cayucos to fetch them, and the drug cartels' shipments would make their way by various means to points north. A fair number of illegal Colombian immigrants have over the years taken up residence on the Costa Abajo. Once in the mid-90s, a bundle of cocaine was found and sold by local teenagers, bringing Colombian hit men to town and forcing several whole families to flee. In more recent years, lots of beach property along much of the Costa Abajo, whose population is predominantly black, has been bought and fenced off, mainly by white foreigners.

Mrs. Porras says she wants to make a hotel, and nobody has credibly called her the sort of gangster that's the stereotype of Colombians here. She did, however, flout the law for many years and in addition to illegal hedges and fences, she used vicious dogs to uphold her appropriation of public property. Hers was a public exercise of lawlessness that many Panamanians associate with Colombia.

On April 16, it was alleged, one of those dogs bit a local child. That brought local, provincial and national government officials out a few days later to make a point --- sort of. Catastro head Benjamín Colomarco (since promoted to become Minister of Public Works), Colon governor Olgalina de Quijada and José Mercedes Coronado were among the bigwigs who showed up in front of Mrs. Porras's house. They took measurements, left a note telling her to report to the Catastro office, and used a government backhoe to clear away her hedge and fence, creating a path to the beach which jubilant neighbors used. Reporters and photographers from La Prensa and the television stations were brought in to record the event.

The violation of beachfront access was not the only problem with Mrs. Porras's hedge and fence line --- it was also built upon the public right-of-way along the road.

Mrs. Porras was not available to authorities, but she did tell La Prensa that she would be taking legal action against the government officials for violating her "private property."

What's at stake here may have profound effects for the beachfront real estate boom, most of whose buyers are foreigners.

In Panama the beaches are public property up to a margin 22 meters inland from the high-tide mark from the days when the tides are highest. (On the Pacific side, where there is a wide variation in tides, that's farther inland than most people would guess. On the Alantic side there's much less variation in the tides and thus it's a lot easier to measure with some degree of accuracy the extent of the public beach. Property owners may block access across their land to the beach only if there is a public access within one kilometer.

However, many is the real estate hustler who tells the foreign buyer that the land being sold will be held in fee simple --- a Common Law concept that does not exist as such under Panama's Civil Code legal system --- down to the waterline. The Panama News has been told of an American in Bocas del Toro chasing local residents off the public beach in front of his property with an assault rifle, and has encountered hotels owned by both Panamanians and foreigners who used guards, sometimes armed, sometimes using dogs, to keep the public off adjacent beaches. Coronado has for years fought an off-and-on battle with authorities by installing a guardhouse which purports to restrict access to the beach there to residents and their guests, and Catastro has demolished several walls erected on the beach by property owners there.

The government is warning that it is prepared to act in Bocas del Toro as it has toward the Coronado beach grabbers and Mrs. Porras. Last year when the Torrijos administration's beach and island tourism concession law was debated, it was presumed by many critics that the intention was to legalize the private appropriation of public beaches and whole islands, particularly by foreign investors. However, the law's proponents denied that this was so, and maybe the media event at Mrs. Porras's fence was intended as a public demonstration that it wasn't and isn't.

In any case, it ought to be taken as a warning to anyone shopping for beachfront real estate in Panama. If a seller says that the property to be transferred includes the beach, the buyer should immediately walk away from the negotiation.

Panama Canal expansion update

Also in this section:
Truth about policing that people don't want to hear?
Piña beach wall toppled
Drug plane strafed, banana co-op security guards busted
Tico presidential inauguration will be a big international event
Panama News Briefs