| Crime in Boquete, Panama |
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| Written by Ezra Paskus | |
| Friday, October 05 2007 | |
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When I lived in Arizona,
we had this group of people called "Snow Birds". Retirees that would go north
to escape the surface of the sun heat of the summer months. Inevitably, they
would come back for the winter and find that their homes had been ransacked,
valuables taken, or in some cases to find that someone had been living in their
home while they were away. When I first moved to Boquete, I noticed something I had not been exposed to while living in the laid back farming and ranching areas of eastern Washington: bars on the windows. I asked my new neighbor what this was all about. He told me things used to be worse and the bars had been a necessity. I asked why no one had removed them if things had gotten better. He replied, "No one wants to be the first", as if there was some group of organized bandits that were sitting around playing cards until the someone's bars were taken off. Now it seems as if those bandits are tired of playing poker. My stereo was stolen out of my car as it sat in front of my house, directly under a street light. An expat friend had his house broken into via a smashed second story window. Another friend had part of his tin roof peeled back so thieves could enter. But I recently found some articles about crime in Boquete that made me pause... One popular website here published a story of a few expats driving home to find a small fire in the road, apparently designed to make a driver stop and be robbed. Another story ran in Panama America that a Molotov cocktail was thrown over a fence and struck the rear quarter panel of an expat couple's vehicle in their garage. So what does this have to do with Snow Birds and Arizona? Well, first, let's set aside the Molotov cocktail incident because I don't see how anyone gains by setting someone's car on fire and I don't think that was a random act of violence; just a speculation. In the town in Arizona, there was a very large disparity of income. Local wages were far lower than the amount of cash brought in by tourists and retirees. In Boquete, it is similar, but also a lot of the locals have never seen the kind of consumables brought in by foreigners before the last five years or so. They see the nice cars and nicer houses, big screen TVs and other such things. It becomes a dream to have those things and at first it seems quite attainable, but over time it gets further and further out of reach. $12 a day won't buy you a Lexus SUV or a BMW. The petty theft appears to be a symptom of a larger problem. You can put funds into police, and request a bigger police presence, put bars on the windows and doors, alarms on your houses and cars, but you're just treating the symptoms, not the disease. To quote Matt Landau, Boquete will be Cancun-ized and the only safe place will be behind the walls of your gated community. What can you do? I don't have all of the answers nor am I an economist that understands the detail workings of a community's economy. But, how about starting at home, paying your maid or gardener a decent wage that will inspire loyalty and privacy because, lets face it, most robberies are inside jobs or come from personal information. |
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