Twisted Fantasy to Twisted Reality

Hello from the Caribbean.

The thoughts page never really got off the ground this year like I hoped it would, but now I have an excuse. I'm on the USS Iwo Jima for the next few months during a humanitarian mission to Central America/Caribbean. When I'm off the ship, I'm working long days in the field. Once I'm back on, I'm writing about them and catching up on more mundane desk job responsibilities. This leaves me very little time to write as I'd like.

But every once in a while, a story comes along that practically writes itself. This is what happened when I read about the gruesome killings of five Americans in an expat community in Western Panama.

For me, the story gave me a feeling of déjà vu that never happened. Sometimes, the déjà vu is the result of your imagination, not an actual event, although cognitive psychologists might say those two lines blur anyway. Maybe a dream you had or a story you invented, but not an actual, real life event.

The AP has good coverage of the story. For those who read Spanish, here is coverage from Prensa, Panama’s leading daily. Basically, the American couple posed as Dutch citizens (just one of many aliases for one of them) and killed five people, all Americans in Bocas, to take over their property.

The story evokes imagery of swashbuckling expats living outside the laws and norms of the United States in a land where anything goes. It’s difficult to imagine this same story happening at a retirement community in Tucson.
Panama is full of retired Americans. Encouraged by cheaper beachside real estate than what is available in the states and a friendly governmental policy towards ‘retired tourists’, thousands of retired Americans call Panama casa. Panama is attractive to US expats for another reason. It had significant US influence for the better part of a century, uses the dollar as its currency, has affordable health care, and is home to Panama City, which could be mistaken for Miami if it weren’t for the old town that smacks of decaying Spanish colonialism (though more than one expat told me on a recent trip there that they stay as far away from Panama City as possible). The internet is crawling with English-language news on Panama, tips for retirees, etc.

Bocas del Toro (Bocas) is arguably the mecca of Panama’s expat life. An archipelago on the Atlantic side near the Costa Rican border, Bocas del Toro is part of Bocas del Toro province, and most of the islands in the area are uninhabited. It is a veritable ‘tropical paradise’ with beaches on par with anything the US has to offer.

When I visited in November, I arrived at the tiny airport in a plane full of older compatriots. I was met with more English signs than Spanish ones, and saw lavish homes dotting the coast – a sure sign of foreign capital in an otherwise poor part of the country. As I rode my bike around town, I saw license plates from North Carolina, Texas, and California. I picked up a copy of the Bocas Breeze, the monthly, English-language newspaper geared towards American expats. I spent one night in an American-owned bar watching football while two older gentlemen made grand plans for real estate investments throughout the country as their much younger female Panamanian counterparts fawned over them. Every now and then I’d be called upon to fix up some of the broken love phrases in Spanish-English being thrown around, work that earned me a few beers throughout the night.

Given the potential volatility of making large land investments in foreign countries, especially when one doesn’t know the language or culture of the place, I left the bar feeling that the two men might be investing in something unexpected, something more dangerous than what they were hoping for.

So I wrote a story in my head, that if these two guys followed through on their drunken ramblings, that something bad was going to happen. Maybe it was paranoia. Maybe I just didn’t have what they were having. For whatever reason, I created this fictional story in my head and hoped it wouldn’t come true.

My heartfelt sympathies go out to the families of those who lost loved ones as a result of a deceptive ex-pat con artist, absolutely the exception and not the norm. I am saddened too, that the story I created for myself about the two guys at the bar has taken a twisted turn from fantasy to reality.