THEY DIDN’T JUST STEAL THE BEACH………THEY STOLE THE ENTIRE ISLAND!!!! BOCAS POLITICAL THUGS

Editorial OP-ED- “JB” Bryson

This week I got on the phone with a retired teacher and former leader of the Bocas del Toro boatmen’s union, a gentleman named Dario Van Horne.
He is not a spokesman. He is not a lawyer reading a script. He is a man whose family has held five hectares of Caribbean beachfront in Bocas del Toro since before there was a Republic of Panama — and who says that beach now sits under someone else’s title because a survey that belonged to Cayo Mono Island, in Tierra Oscura, Bahía Chiriquí, was walked across the water and dropped onto Isla Bastimentos, for the benefit of elected official Ashburn Stanley Dixon and his accomplices.
Read that again.
Same paper. Different island. The whole property now blanketed and titled in the name of a company belonging to Representative Ashburn Stanley Dixon.
Van Horne walked me through what he has in the file, not what he wishes he had: old inspections. A titling process that started in 1995. Another running from 2021 to today. Both dates sit ahead of the prescription El Faro de Bastimentos later used to claim the land. He also says the same parcel had already been prescribed once before — years ago — in Bocas del Drago on Isla Colón by the same crooked lawyer, Rigoberto Serrano, who holds three posts at once inside local government. Same property. Different zip code. That is not adverse possession. That is a moving target with a rubber stamp.
The names he put on the table are not new to anyone who has been paying attention in Bocas: the dishonorable Ashburn Dixon; Rigoberto Serrano, former legal adviser to the mayor of Isla Colón and traffic judge recently removed by the mayor over another land scandal — land Serrano himself had taken when he was representative of Isla Colón, and who is now legal adviser to the municipal council; a cooperative and venal judge, Guadalupe del Carmen González, willing to treat a relocated survey as if the land had grown legs; and the company that ended up with the paper — El Faro de Bastimentos. Political office plus a court file plus a survey that does not match the water. That is how a family beach becomes a “clean” title without anyone sleeping on it for even one of the fifteen years the law requires to prescribe a title.
I have spent enough years in this province watching acquisitive prescription used the way you use a crowbar. On paper it is a lawful way to clean up old possession. In the hands of someone like Rigoberto Serrano and Judge Guadalupe del Carmen González it is another way to pad a salary: prescribing titles, moving them, and leaving Serrano and Dixon a chance to sell them to foreigners. In practice, in Bocas, too often it has been a fast lane for people who already know the clerk who later becomes the judge, the surveyor, and the bench. Van Horne is not describing a neighbor who farmed a boundary for a generation. He is describing a map that jumped islands so a title could land on ground his family never left — ground the representative then lists for sale online for millions of dollars.
He showed me the evidence before the call even started. I am going to go through it. Surveys. Inspections. The 1995 file. The 2021 file. The Bocas del Drago prescription and the judge’s orders to the Public Registry to record her ruling. Overlay the coordinates on the cadastre and see whether Tierra Oscura and Cayo Mono are still in Bahía Chiriquí, or whether somebody renamed the Caribbean. Only Rigoberto Serrano, Ashburn Dixon, and maybe Donald J. Trump have the stones to rechristen islands and put them wherever it suits them.
That is today’s glosa.
Early this week or next I publish the long piece: every document, the timeline, the offices that signed, and what it means that a titled island can be “prescribed” onto another island while the family that was there first is told they are now the squatters. According to Mr. Van Horne there are several other titleholders hit by the artwork of Ashburn Dixon and Rigoberto Serrano. Believe me: we are going to the bottom of this acquisitive-prescription case, and several others.
If you hold land in the archipelago — titled, ROP, or “the registry says the neighbor is the Caribbean Sea” — you already know why this case matters.
Stay tuned. I intend to ride this wave all the way to the beach and name everyone involved. There is a lot more coming on the political and judicial mafia running loose in Bocas.