Atlantic
Conquest

The road being opened through the mountains of Veraguas was planned in the mid 1970s, during the regime of General Omar Torrijos.

 The commander of a country occupied by United States military bases and cut in two by a canal that was not theirs, Torrijos thought these mountains would feed the national riches. These were not the times of climate change or environmental apocalypse. Deforestation was not a suicidal decision, but one of hope: the expansion of the agricultural frontier could be the engine of development.

Torrijos tried several times but without luck. Torrijos founded Romero City, on the banks of the Belén River, where hundreds of Salvadoran farmers had arrived to escape from their civil war. He hoped they would work the land. The city prospered. At the end of the armed conflict in El Salvador, they returned to their country and left a ghost town.  Torrijos also founded a work camp in Coclesito where urban youth came to carry out social works.

Torrijos, fascinated, constantly visited these lands and there he encountered his own death, in 1981, when the small plane in which he traveled crashed against a crag near North Coclé. 

The project was left in limbo.

In the mid 1980s, discussions around indigenous autonomy of the territory intensified. In Panama there are seven native groups. Two of them, the Ngäbe and Buglé, with close to 350,000 people, eight percent of the Panamanian population, inhabit these lands. According to the archaeologist Richard Cook they have been there for more than 10,000 years. Panama’s Administration agreed to their claims on the land, and in the case of the Ngäbe and Buglé, decided their reservation lands ended at the Calovébora River. Along it river valley, Torrijos had planned the road. They recognized Ngäbe and Buglé land in Bocas del Toro, but not in Veraguas. They were left the extremely rugged infertile lands susceptible to flooding. In this way, a great many of the native communities were excluded from the Ngäbe Buglé Reservation.

To get to the house of Paulino González Sianca, you must take a one hour boat from Calovébora.  From the water, you can see everything: there are small beaches, like little coves between rock walls that open to the sea. There are broad open beaches. There are beaches with waves to surf and inlets of water so crystal clear that you can see the coral and fish. There are immense arches of stone and submarine caves.

An hour later, you arrive at the mouth of the Estero Salado River. The sway of the waves peters out and the quiet of the river absorbs everything. The forest canopy creates an arch over the water. You arrive at a place where the river is so low that it can no longer be navigated by boat. The property is still 650 feet away, through the water, then up and over a small hill. There are two elevated wood houses where González lives with his children and grandchildren. Children are running around, baskets filled with the day’s harvest.

The man, 80 years old, considers himself victim of  fraud, but  he has a hard time explaining it all. He was born near here and has lived his whole life in the countryside. He never went to school, and cannot read or write. He says he met Van Rijswijk in the middle of 2008. The Dutchman had arrived in a helicopter and offered him a hundred thousand dollars for all of the beach on his land. González had possession rights and had lived there for forty years.

Van Rijswijk told him that if he accepted, he would need to take care of the entire process at once. They would fly him to Panama City in a helicopter, where he would sign the papers and take care of the payment. Paulino did not know much about the capital. He had only been there once, at a hospital, on the edge of death. This was 30 years ago. However, after speaking with his family, he decided to sell. To them, the beach had no value. They are not fishermen and the sand does not produce food, except for the coconuts. The fertile land that they work daily is upriver; they did not sell that.

The next day, the helicopter arrived looking for him. Paulino went with his grandson. There was a problem during lift off, and the helicopter fell back to the earth. It almost killed them. Instead they travelled by land to Santiago city, and from there to Panama city. They were put up in a hotel in the downtown. They went to the offices of Van Rijswijk and signed the contract. Since he did not know how to read or write, Paulino signed with his thumbprint. His grandson, who could read, was the sworn witness.

The contract included an arbitration clause against Paulino which stated that if he did not follow through with the deal, he would owe Van Rijswijk a million dollars.

They returned to Santiago with a check for u$s 20 thousand dollars as a down payment. They went to the bank. José Gilberto Guardia Pinzón, the Dutchman’s representative, cashed it for them. He gave them half and kept the other half. After using  the $10,000 that they received to buy equipment for the farm, clothing, and tools, they returned to Calovébora.  Van Rijswijk was supposed to arrive soon after to pay them the rest.  He never did. However, on September 22, 2008, the Department of Rural Catastro titled the lands in the name of one of his companies, Veraguas Eco Turismo, SA. Today, these lands are for sale for millions of dollars.

Despite the fact that the Dutch businessman said he was friends with Paulino, he received bad news weeks ago, by the end of November: Paulino went to court against him.

This fraudulent business scheme was used multiple times to trick the community. Mrs. Margarita Pineda Rodriguez suffered the same fate as Paulino. Van Rijswijk came to her house and told her that he was ready to invest in the community, that he would create a reserve to protect turtles. He offered her what seemed like a fortune: $125,000 for 44.5 acres of beach. Dídimo, her son, who had studied in Santiago, told her it was a good opportunity, one that would allow them to re-invest in the farm they had inherited from his grandfather. It would be land without beachfront, but workable land. They talked amongst themselves, and eventually decided to sell.  The Dutchman answered that if they wanted to make the deal, they had to travel immediately to the city. Margarita had no shoes. They didn’t give her time to change her clothes. Neither of them knew the city.

“In the city we will buy you shoes, which ever you want”, and thus they traveled.  A hotel, dinner, an office, an elegant blonde man that spoke another language. They signed. They received their down payment and returned to Calovébora. Van Rijswijk never returned with his indebted payment. Their land no longer belongs to them and none of they money they were given is left. In one way, though, Van Rijswijk’s team fulfilled their promises: after signing the contract, they bought her shoes.

The most grave case, however, is that of Florentino González. He had lived for more than five years on the beach, at the mouth of the Estero Salado River. Hearing rumors about the presence of developers in the area, he decided to put the land in his name. To his surprise, upon arriving at ANATI, he learned that his land had already been titled by Max Van Rijswijk. Twenty nine and a half acres with two immense white sand beaches.

Florentino got a lawyer and filed for a restraining order. The law was on their side. The lawyer took a surveyor to the area and they realized that the title was obviously fraudulent: the photos that accompanied the documents presented by the Dutchman did not correspond with the place, and the limits of the lot were not real. ANATI had apparently given Van Rijswijk title to the sea bed, something explicitly prohibited in Panamanian law. Florentino reported him to the legal system. Weeks later, Van Rijswijk arrived at the beach with four bodyguards while Gonzalez was away. González is sure it was they who knocked down the walls of his house, and as if that wasn’t enough, left him a memento: six gunshot holes in the laundry sink.

Florentino’s lawyer accused Van Rijswijk of the crime, and a representative of the justice system came to the community. The Dutchman presented himself and denied the accusation.  The Defense called the boatmen and the owner of the hotel where they stayed to the stand as witnesses. Van Rijswijk denied that he was there.  The case is still under investigation.

“Every parcel of land was selected for its pristine nature, the proximity of navigable rivers, for their protected ports, and for the quality of its beach fronts and views.   Caribbean Riviera has already acquired the titles of the majority of the properties in its portfolio. The job of converting lands with“Possession Rights” to “Titled” land is a process excessively complex, that requires significant capital, legal support, logistical capacity and a factor of luck”.  

Says the Caribbean Riviera sale´s portfolio.

Based on the findings, what Caribbean Riviera refer to as“luck”,  others would call criminal.

Between 2006 and 2016, Max Van Rijswijk registered 16 publicly held companies and 17 foundations in Panama. Carolina Carrizo was the resident agent of seventeen of them. Carrizo was on the Board of Directors of the Ocean Oasis Foundation from its creation, January 9, 2008 until December 29, 2015, when she resigned as the Resident Agent and as a Director.

This foundation, over which presides Van Rijswijk, appears in the Panama Papers, the voluminous documents obtained by the German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The information in the Panama Papers is related to a request by the Ocean Oasis Foundation for the adjudication of land. The request was made August 20, 2006 to the Agrarian Reform department of the province of Colón.

According to Public Records and the national archives, Van Rijswijk managed to grab 289 acres across five farms in the Miguel de La Borda community of Donoso district between 2008 and 2013. How much did he payfor these lands?  A little more than $700. In this case, he used his lawyers or front men to gain possession rights, then transferred them in a form of a donation to the Ocean Oasis Foundation, property of Max Van Rijswijk. The same one that was found in Panama Papers.

In 2008, he managed to acquire 1,400 acres of land across seven farms under the guise of of seven separate foundations  He acquired them for only $3,834. He carried out these transfers in spite of an order by the first Anticorruption Prosecutor of the Attorney General’s Office of Panama to confiscate real estate that was subject to investigation for fraudulent titles that affected, and still affect, dozens of families between Calovébora River and Belén River, in north Veraguas.

They also tried to open an investment fund named Panama Land Fund,under the public limited company name Crownland. The idea was to generate shares to quote on the stock exchange, using the land as backing. The National Securities Commission prohibited the promotion of this fund in order to protect the security of the investors.

Contacting his lawyers is an impossible mission.  Their firms’ offices remain unoccupied, like those of lawyer Nelly Perez Arosemena, in the Pancanal of Allbrook Building. Another legal representative of his, Maria Gabriela Reyna Lopez, just got out of prison after having been detained for money laundering. Eugenia Espinoza Arias works today in the city government.  She declined to be interviewed when contacted about the case. All of them, in recent times, have resigned from representing the companies.

As if that were not enough, Max Van Rijswijk is in dispute with old partners: he has a committal order for trial in court 14 and an impediment to leave the country. In spite of everything, Van Rijswijk vindicates himself as an honest businessman. "The people who have land that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars they can read and write, they all who came to my office with a reliable person, we did not buy land from people who did not know they were selling. We paid well at the time and fulfilled all the agreements”, Van Rijswijk defends himself.