In the last few months there has been much written about foreign fugitives who have sometimes lived here for many years without detection. We have had an Englishman John Darwin who faked his own death at sea in a canoe while his wife Anne collected thousands of pounds in life insurance and moved here.
The only reason he got caught was because he was stupid enough to pose for a picture for a real estate company.
In the last couple of weeks The Panama Star reported the case of David Matusiewicz and his mother abducting his three children and living happily in Cerro Azul in a $175,000 property. He also forged his ex-wife’s name to obtain a home equity loan; he even had the audacity to sell an optometry business.
All this netted him in excess of a million dollars. Another fugitive Russel Ruble has just been returned to America by the FBI to stand trial for a theft of over $320,000 from his relatives.
So why do they choose Panama? I know the North Americans treat Panama as their playground where they can do things here they could never do in their home countries. Some of them maybe were ex-military and remembered the good old times and wanted to revisit with some nostalgia.
But, I do not understand why Europeans choose to come here. When during my rare visit to England, I have told locals in pubs that I live in Panama, the educated ones might know that is where the canal is. Others do not even know what part of the world we are in.
Most of the criminals who are up to no good in the U.K. tend to go to ‘Costa del Sol’ (nicknamed ‘Costa del Crime’) in the south of Spain. Mainly due to the climate and cheaper way of life but probably more importantly only a two hour flight from their homeland, unlike Panama which is eleven hours flying time--not including the wait at the airports.
Now we live in an electronic global age where anybody can sit at a keyboard and find out information about anywhere in the world. Is it possible that all the promotion from the tourist sector is actually partly responsible for the influx of criminality? Cruise ships now come here, and the tourist industry is thriving generating over $2.2 billion.
Are we sure we can control this new thriving business?
Dare I say that immigration is not doing their job. When I applied for my cedula I had a barrage of paperwork to fill out and I quite clearly remember one of those documents was a crime report stating that I did not have a criminal record from my homeland.
Why were these individuals not flagged when this document was completed?
Panama is a country with an abundance of laws. The main problem is these laws are never implemented. It could be the lack of resources or is it that the government does not have the will or skill to enforce the laws of the land?
Alternatively were all of these aforementioned individuals here illegally by overstaying their tourist visas? I somehow doubt it.
Unless someone in authority gets a grip on the crime wave, which includes trafficking narcotics and gang wars which now envelop this beautiful country, it is going to turn into another ‘Costa del Crime’.
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