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Call it what you will: urban renewal, social cleansing, gentrification, theft...

According to Panamanian law, if a rental property is condemned, the owner can't legally collect rent, but the residents can't legally accrue time toward ownership by adverse possession (squatters' rights).

Then there are properties that have been in the hands of poor families --- some of which were not always poor --- for generations, but the paperwork isn't good or there are taxes or utility bills owing and there is no money to hire lawyers to defend the property.

Some slums are partly occupied by transients --- who may be drug addicts or mentally deranged --- and partly occupied by long-term residents who have actual or arguable ownership interests.

How long someone has lived in a building, or in a neighborhood, counts for very little in the patchwork of housing policies that has grown up over the years. At times there have been broad-brushed moral standards applied, until those have become inconvenient. For example, when she was Housing Minister, Balbina Herrera adopted a policy that families were to be favored --- but actually not. It was a matter of families possibly being able to get housing assistance, while single men, no matter their circumstances, were made ineligible. That "pro-family" pretense went up in the flames of the Curundu slum fires. People who had valid claims to own their homes were not allowed to return, or even retrieve any belongings from the ruins. Balbina sent in the bulldozers even before all the bodies were found, so that the family of an incinerated little girl didn't even get the opportunity to find the remains, and arson investigators did not get the opportunity to do a proper investigation. Such was the start of the now ongoing Curundu renovation project. People who were displaced will have an opportunity to move back in --- if they can afford it, which very few of them can. But the value of the place they owned? In most cases there was no compensation for that.

Those are the slums where not many people really like to live. The Casco Viejo is something else again. The lots there are worth something. People will bribe judges or other public officials, forge documents, bring lawsuits that ought to be laughed out of court but are not because the residents can't afford a proper defense, assert claims of long-dead relatives who may or may not have had some relationship to the property generations ago, or otherwise manipulate the system to get their hands on valuable Casco Viejo lots. And now the Martinelli administration has a policy of clearing out all slums in the neighborhood and oh so generously allowing those residents who can afford to start paying high rents to someone else to move back in.

The people of Casa 7-49 on Avenida A were reviled by some as junkies. A few of them probably were, but others were working people, in many cases walking street vendors, who had lived with their families there for many years. There was no living owner of record and hadn't been for a long time. But prices went up, with the lot upon which the run-down building stood rising to at least half a million dollars.

Someone strange to the property made a claim, prevailed in court, and the people of Casa 7-49 were thrown out onto the street. Whether or not somebody who knows something about the situation sympathizes with those left homeless is usually directly related to his or her social class.

This urban land struggle was not something that came suddenly out of the blue. Litigation over the property began shortly after the 1989 US invasion, and an eviction order was issued in 1998. But until recently, governments found that the relative equities of the situation made such an order repugnant to enforce.

"Poor people aren't allowed to own a lot worth $500,000 in Panama City," a neighbor said. "It doesn't matter what the law says." Another neighbor described the evicted residents as criminals who terrorize everyone else in the area.

But don't chalk it all up to Panama's vicious class divisions. Can't you read all those "For Sale" signs in the Casco Viejo, in English? The usual fate of a property that changes hands in Pamama City's "urban renewal" is not that it becomes the home of someone who asserted a claim. Of course not. It gets put on the market, and in the Casco Viejo there's a preference to sell to foreigners.

To many of the locals, it thus looks like a case not only of social cleansing, but of ethnic cleansing. And some day, it may be quite dangerous to be an American who happens to be in the way of somebody who sees it that way. Nobody has experienced such a thing in recent decades, but this country has seen anti-American riots before.