news

Also in this section:

Tourist visa changes may be short-lived
City has second thoughts on getting rid of the Avenida Central Peatonal

Urban planning in Panama, such as it has been and may become

Emancipated high school girls expelled

The strange tale of Captain Sherman

Flowing in the streets of the capital
Panama News Briefs

Whirlwind lobbying campaign taps community sentiment

Tourist visa reduction may be short-lived

by Eric Jackson

 For a National Assembly given to the most odious demagoguery and absolutely cognizant of where the lucrative public corruption opportunities lie, it was a natural thing to slip into an emergency crime bill. Nobody knows how many Colombians we have here in Panama, but the figure is in the hundreds of thousands and a lot of people here fear or loathe them. A few hundred Colombian women come here every year with six-month visas to practice prostitution, but other hookers come here on tourist visas, or as supposed university students. When a Colombian is involved in a gangland hit as perpetrator or victim, the tabloids point that out in the most unsubtle ways. When a rich Colombian plays the part of scofflaw and grabs a public beach, all Colombians are tarred with that reputation. When Panamanians hear mention of an "immigration problem," they sometimes think about Chinese but almost always think about Colombians. The Panamanian business community and political elite are afraid of the influence of Colombians, but in many cases dependent on their money. The Panamanian people fear a "Colombianization" that has something to do with "settling of accounts" by hit men becoming a part of the way we do business here.

So how to get tough on the supposed Colombian menace, but not really? In this case the deputies lowered the length of stays on tourist visas for all foreigners from 90 days (with a possibility of extension) to 30 days (with a possibility of extension).

Without the unspoken Colombian subscript the proposal did not sound so utterly absurd. If one wants to consider overstaying or otherwise abusing a tourist visa as a crime in itself, as it in most cases is, that's by no means an unheard-of offense. There are lots of people of many nationalities illegally working and living here on tourist visas. But the Colombian hoods with the big money who hobnob with Panamanian politicians come here under the guise of being legitimate business owners and can afford any number of other sorts of visas, and a lot of the Colombian hoods who maintain a lower profile slip in and out of this country without going through immigration controls so as to make the visa issue of no consequence to them.

Still, even when shorn of the coded anti-Colombian demagoguery, what the National Assembly did was incredibly short-sighted.

Foreigners who come down here to retire inject a lot of money into the Panamanian economy, but they are usually not so foolish as to buy real estate without having seen it. (Yes, there are just enough dolts of that description to make the fraud industry lucrative, but usually only in the short term.) Typically those retirees thinking about the move while having no historic ties here will take an extended vacation in Panama while looking around for a place that they can afford and where they'd like to live.

Then there are the "snowbirds," people from Canada and the northern parts of the USA who like to come down here for the cold months, without actually establishing residency in Panama. Some of these are of the yachtie subculture. There are an awful lot of these in Coronado, which has played to Canadians for many years.

Now that part of the real estate industry that plays to foreign retirees was already concerned about a string of canceled Panama City high rise luxury condo projects that may be the harbinger of a deflation in the capital's wild speculative market. To the serious developers the caution signals about the overblown hype had a good side, although they too stand to lose when some of the people coming down here aiming to get rich quick on real estate speculation are disabused of those illusion but then stick around to look for a place to live. A more rational market that bears some relationship to supply and demand, after all, tends to be more appealing to those who supply things made of brick and mortar than does a house of cards. Still, a market's panicky retreat is not what they want to see.

The loss of the snowbirds, and reduced time for people to shop for a retirement home in Panama, are very different matters. To developers like Valle Escondido's Sam Taliaferro and Prima Panama's Paul McBride, the reduction in tourist visa time was a call to action.

On the Panama Investor Blog McBride posted an article entitled "Paradise Lost," arguing that the visa changes, along with the long talked-about phase-out of the property tax break for new construction "was having a negative impact on foreign direct investment into Panama." A online survey was taken that elicited the responses of more than 800 people, many of them not "investors" in any more sense than retirees who own or want to own homes. Hardly anybody was happy with the visa changes. It was an impressive protest that was heard throughout the land, particularly among foreign retirees and within the real estate industry.

The survey in hand, McBride and Taliaferro went visiting to business groups and government leaders, enlisting the former to increase the pressure on the latter. First Vice President, Foreign Minister and potential presidential candidate Samuel Lewis Navarro promised to "champion" the cause. Supermarket baron and past likely future presidential candidate Ricardo Martinelli threw in his support. Legislators vowed to correct the problem, although that will have to wait until the National Assembly goes back into regular session in September.

(At this point one of the few foreigners in Panama who praised the visa law changes, because he said it would help him harass his business rivals, published on his website a diatribe about how he would like to punch one of those legislators, Pedro Miguel González (PRD-Veraguas) over a 1992 drive-by shooting about which the latter was tried for and acquitted of the killing of US Army Sergeant O. Zak Hernandez. That vitriolic screed appeared to have mobilized few converts to the cause of shortened tourist visas.)

At the end of three days of lobbying McBride reported that a legislative source had informed him that a proposal would be drafted to bring the visas back to 90 days (without any details on whether they would be extendable as before, which is a big snowbird issue) and that there would likely be yet another delay in the phase-out of the 20-year new construction property tax exemption.

The changes won't go down without an argument. Tourism Minister Rubén Blades, who has been criticized for not having been part of the discussion when the legislature shortened the tourist visas, grumbled that "the real estate sector is not tourism.... The issue of those coming to Panama in search of a second home, temporary or permanent, must be defined and resolved by the Ministry of Government and Justice, using a different criterion than the one applied to the traveler tourist."

In the end, the positions of Blades and the developers may be reconciled, with a "residential tourist" visa for those who would winter here and another type of visa for the shorter term visitor. We won't know much about what changes will be made until the National Assembly goes back into regular session.

Tourist visa changes may be short-lived
City has second thoughts on getting rid of the Avenida Central Peatonal

Urban planning in Panama, such as it has been and may become

Emancipated high school girls expelled

The strange tale of Captain Sherman

Flowing in the streets of the capital
Panama News Briefs