Surfers target of Santa Catalina land grab

Surfing beach land grab

Ricardo "Ponky" Icaza was the pioneer of surfing at Santa Catalina on the Pacific side of Veraguas in the 1970s, and at that time he and other early surf enthusiasts Jimbo H. Espino, Kiki O'Brien (of "Kiki Boards") and Kenny Myers bought a 200-meter deep strip of land between the beach on one side and the president of a cattle ranching cooperative on the other. It worked well --- the surfers built their houses and fenced off the cattle behind them, keeping the cattle away from the beach's hazards. Later Admiralty Services Inc, a company owned by one José Crespo, bought an adjacent parcel of property from the cooperative president's daughter and successor in interest, and began to claim the surfers' cottages and the land upon which they were built, claiming that he had bought them from the daughter. The surfers presented their papers from Catastro, but Crespo prevailed upon the local corregidor and the National Police to oust the Myers, and while the dispute was in court --- a judge having ruled in favor of Myers --- a gang of thugs appeared and demolished Myers's cottage, as shown above. So what's the big picture? Crespo is well connected with the PRD and seeks to oust the surfers in order to sell the land to foreign resort developers. This sort of land grab has been one of the hallmarks of the Torrijos administration's beach and island land tenure policy. This time we see the burden falling upon some surfers who are not poor but much more frequently working to dispossess farmers and fishing villages, some of the latter which have existed since ancient times. In this and many other cases, the occupants of the land who are being ousted own their land by squatters' rights if nothing else, and at the time that the beach and island property law was being debated it was promised (and inserted into the law) that squatters' rights would be respected. But not so in practice.

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