The bag is getting heavier in Bocas. Ashburn Dixon and Rigoberto Serrano are no longer the only names listed in it. (ENGLISH)

OP ED: “JB”

Bocas del Toro has never lacked stories of land. What it has lacked, for a very long time, is a history that remains within a single farm, a single notary’s office and a single court in silence. The file that now rests in the Prosecutor’s Office – and the one that Anticorruption and the Attorney General’s Office no longer pretend not to see – does not stay within a single farm.

Just ask Dario Van Horne.

Van Horne is not a developer with a press release. He is a man who woke up on the wrong side of an acquisitive prescription and who, since then, has tried to explain how a piece of land changed hands on a piece of paper that does not match the land. His case is useful for only one reason. Pull him out and the same names that have been appearing for years appear: the representative of the township, Ashburn Stanley Dixon, and the lawyer who appears every time a prescription has to be delivered, Rigoberto Serrano.

That couple is no longer a rumor told about a beer on Isla Colon. In June, La Estrella de Panamá reported a complaint from Bastimentos that describes forged documents, corruption of public servants and influence peddling around farm 2748, thirty hectares first registered in 1931 in the name of Samuel Joseph. The complaint, according to reports, says that Ashburn Dixon accepted that the processes were fraudulent and that the botched work had been done by Serrano, and that the statute of limitations had been earned by paying the experts and the court. The name of a circuit judge, “Guadalupe,” appears in that same narrative. ANATI, according to the same report, prepared its own report and a legal action of its own.

That was the old map. Dixon on the political side. Serrano on the legal side. A judge where a judge was needed. Experts where an expert was needed. National land, or land whose owners were dead or absent, transferred to another island and then offered for sale, as so many other times in the past.

Van Horne’s file says the map was incomplete.

The new name is the one that should worry those who believed that the circle stopped at the door of the courthouse.

José Manuel Sánchez, the highly controversial municipal engineer, is no longer a man who limits himself to sealing what others bring him. The complainants have put their names in the same conversation as Dixon and Serrano, and I have seen the paperwork that supports that location. I have the certification. It is dated 2002, from the period in which Sánchez held a position in the Cadastre. It was not done in 2002. It was made twenty years later and it was dated backwards, and there is proof of that. A certification is not an ornament. In a statute of limitations process it is the memory of the State. Move the date, and move possession. Move possession, and move the earth.

I have reviewed the document. It does not read as an office error. It reads as a date that was chosen. That same falsified inspection was later used by Ashburn Dixon and Rigoberto Serrano as if the State had blessed the work.

Sánchez does not come to this story with a clean desk. In August, La Verdad Panama reported that the specialized prosecutor’s office of Bocas had asked a judge for six years in prison, plus two years of disqualification from holding public office, against José Manuel Sánchez Saldaña. The charge in that file is against the environment and territorial planning: the construction permit 02-25-2023, issued on February 27, 2023, for a tourism project on Isla Solarte promoted by Alfred Gernot Ramrath and AGRSS Asset Management, later linked in the paperwork to Coral Bays. He is the same character who last month was escorted out of Solarte handcuffed by INTERPOL. Who, it is alleged, obtained those permits by paying Sánchez and Dixon. Solarte falls under Bastimentos, and Ashburn Dixon charges for his “approval.” That approval approved the residence, the bungalows, a structure for boats, the mangrove and the sea. That case is a separate case. It matters here because it puts the same official, already under a prison request from the Prosecutor’s Office, within the machinery that says yes or no to what is built on these islands.

The land record is uglier than a bad permit.

According to several witnesses who are now talking to investigators, Sanchez trained and prepared one of the two experts used in these prescriptions: Everista Pineda, who in turn has been criminally charged. The same witnesses describe Pineda as Sanchez‘s right-hand man, the man who comes forward when the engineer doesn’t want his own name on the errand, and the man through whom, they say, the bribes have moved. Pineda ‘s name also appears on more than one acquisitive prescription linked to Serrano.

That is the circuit. The lawyer presents. The expert measures what he is told to measure. The engineer certifies a past that the file needs. The judge signs. Dixon, where a local representative is useful, sets the policy and, according to the version of the complainants, the market.

Call it land theft if you want. Call it forgery of documents. Call it embezzlement when public authority is rented. Those who file these complaints say that they are all three, and that the three are not separate pastimes. They are a single operation. Ordinarily he has had two faces: Serrano and Dixon. Sánchez is the new face that comes out of the file as an active participant, not as a spectator with a stamp.

And paper no longer moves in one direction.

The national director of ANATI, according to people familiar with the filing, has filed his own complaint with the offices of the Attorney General’s Office. That is not a local official clearing his throat. It is the land authority putting his name on the same conduct that the complainants have been describing: armed prescriptions on documents that do not survive contact with the file.

The director of the Public Registry has gone further, and in writing. The Registry has reproached the judge for her role in this and has refused to comply with her court order, on the grounds that the fraud is evident. A title does not exist because a judge says it exists. It exists when the Registry registers it. The Registry looked at this one and said no.

Then there is the MIVI. The ministry has officially declared that the plan used for the illegal prescription was never presented to it. The stamps and approvals that appear on that plan were falsified. There was no presentation. There was no review. A stamp that was not theirs.

Put it next to Sánchez‘s certification. An inspection and a Cadastre document, falsified and dated backwards, and then given to Dixon and Serrano as cover. Different offices. The same method. ANATI’s own complaint. A Registry that does not obey the order. A Ministry of Housing whose seal was loaned. A paper from the municipal engineer written twenty years after the year he intends.

Sloppy work, ladies and gentlemen. A fraud orchestra only sustains itself if each section is in tune. It left the score on the music stand.

Anti-corruption is on top. The Attorney General’s Office is on top of it. The Prosecutor’s Office has already begun to make calls. More than one person, according to people close to the investigations, has already been contacted. More than one, with the same information, has already begun to talk. This is how these files stop being a pile of overlapping planes and become a case. Someone decides that the penalty attached to loyalty is longer than the penalty attached to memory.

So the question is no longer whether Dixon and Serrano know each other’s work. The complaint reported in June already left that in the record, in the very admission attributed to Dixon. The question is not even whether there was a female judge available when a female judge was needed. The Registry has already answered that, in writing. The question is now narrower, and worse for those who are still calculating.

Will Pineda turn against Sánchez to save himself?

Pineda is denounced. Sanchez is the man witnesses call their boss, and the man whose cadastre certification, falsified and dated backwards, is now in the hands of real investigators, outside of Bocas. An expert who prepared the measurements, and an engineer who prepared the expert, do not have the same exposure once the Prosecutor’s Office begins to ask who wrote the date. One of the two is useful. The other is expensive.

After that, the question gets bigger. Who is left carrying the bag?

Not Van Horne. He is already a victim, but the tide has turned and, apparently, he has the wind in his favor. Van Horne is rumored to have the financial backing of other victims and the help of Panama’s most feared law firm.

Nor do the dead owners whose farms became inventory. The bag is for the living: the representative, the lawyer, the engineer, the expert, and whoever from a toga treated a prescription as a product. Dixon and Serrano have been the names in front. Sánchez has already been placed inside the circle, not next to it. Pineda is the one who has to decide if he was a professional, an employee or a front man.

The question that remains for the press is simpler. When does La Prensa come in? Or does La Estrella, which already left Dixon, Serrano and the farm in the minutes in June, return with the follow-up now that ANATI, the Public Registry and the MIVI have spoken?

People are starting to sing, and it already sounds like “three little birds, outside my door step”. “Signing sweet songs of melodies pure and True”. Who is going to be carrying the bag is no longer a rhetorical question. This is going to get ugly when this panga fills with water and there is, perhaps, only one life jacket on board.

Mucho más está por venir.

Hasta la próxima.

JB Bryson