Colón’s plan for urban renewal ousts locals to make room for tourism

By Sophia Paffenroth and Eamonn Ryan

COLÓN, Panama — Four paint-chipped walls converge into a single square of light, interrupted only by a line of clothing and the silhouettes of two children playing with a hula hoop and a laundry basket in a nearly empty living room.

These are the grandchildren of Rosamaria Brenés Del Delgado, a resident of the Altos de Los Lagos housing project in Colón, Panama. Delgado’s two-bedroom apartment has very little to suggest she shelters four adults and 10 children on the ground floor of this five-story building.

The kitchen walls and ceiling are spotted with black mold. At least a dozen plastic soda bottles are clustered together on the floor, kept to collect the apartment’s only water from a broken pipe outside. At the front door, a red Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt acts as a doormat where children wipe their feet to scamper in and out. It also staunches some of the wet during the rainy season.

“Every time it rains,” Delgado says through an interpreter, “it brings flooding, because of the door…water comes in under the door. We went to a government administration building for support, but they told us it was not their business.”

Delgado was forced to move to Altos de Los Lagos in 2019, following her stay in Mindi, a transitional housing camp, after her home was condemned as part of an urban revitalization project. Before relocating, Delgado lived in Casa Wilcox, the oldest public building in the medium-sized city of Colón. She used to be able to walk around Colón’s Avenida Central and talk to friends, engage with the community and find occasional work.

Now, she lives in barracks-style housing without running water as part of a 180-building development built on top of a landfill and surrounded by walls of barbed wire – a 20-minute drive from the city. As she leans against the outer wall of her apartment, hand resting on her granddaughter’s shoulder, she says the government has failed her and the thousands of other families who have been displaced.

“In Colón, if we didn’t have money or food to put on the table, we traveled to a friend or a neighbor,” Delgado says. “But here, it’s a little more complicated.”

Altos de Los Lagos is the latest phase of a three-decade-long urban renewal project that has moved residents out of strategically located but blighted neighborhoods in the heart of Colón and onto what was previously barren land, away from the bustle of city life. In the first phase of the Altos development, launched in 2014 under President Juan Carlos Varela Rodríguez, 11,000 families were relocated. By 2023, the government will have moved 20,000 families all together.

But while residents were promised new, cleaner and more dignified living spaces than the crumbling and often gang-ridden apartment buildings they were leaving behind, the reality has been starkly different. Tight living quarters have forced once-disparate gangs to neighbor one another, driving up gun violence. Police substations and checkpoints outnumber supermarkets as an attempt to stem simmering violence. Residents pick their way along trash-strewn streets, alert to conflict that could erupt at any time. 

Despite the desperation expressed by the inhabitants of Altos de Los Lagos, the government continues what residents call a “mass exodus” as part of its plan to obliterate the downtown cityscape and construct higher-end living units and commercial buildings in place of the mostly crumbling structures there now. It’s all in the hopes of revitalizing Colón as a tourist destination and commercial center that will eventually rival Panama City. Some changes are already visible, from the new and massive duty-free mall steps from Colón’s impressive ports, to the newly renovated government buildings within walking distance of each other downtown. 

But there’s a lot of work to do — and still a lot of people to displace — before the full vision of this new Colón is realized. And as far as local economists and legislators are concerned, the end result will be worth it.  

“Despite moving people out of the city, [which] might have caused some economic hurdles throughout the process like affecting a lot of local businesses who’ve depended on the income from these people, they’re opening these doors to be open for commercial purposes,” says Yashira Lee, regional executive director of MIVIOT, the Ministry of Housing, through an interpreter. “So I guess, it’s ‘suffer a little’ to ‘not suffer so much’ later this year.”

The forgotten “Tacita de Oro”

Once known as “La Tacita de Oro,” or “the little gold cup,” Colón, situated on the Caribbean coast and at the entrance of the Panama Canal, was a crown jewel on the Caribbean Sea with a rich culture and a lively atmosphere that has often been compared to New Orleans. 

“We are not ceasing to be the ‘tacita de oro,’ but we have to accept and see a reality that there are things that have deteriorated,” says Javier Lynch, the district representative of the Barrio Norte neighborhood in the Colón province, in an interview in Spanish.

Defined by just 16 streets and 14 avenues, the city is the second largest in Panama. Its ports generate $2.7 billion annually – the second-largest contributor to the overall GDP of the country, with 17.4% of Panama’s output coming from the province. 

Founded by the United States in 1850 during the creation of the Panama Canal Railway, the city of Colón became prosperous in the early 20th century when it was one of the top trans-shipment harbors in the world. In 1948, the city also began prospering from the addition of its “free-trade zone” – an area right outside the ports where goods are not subject to customs duties. Marked by a four-lane road and high metal gates, Colón’s zone remains the largest in the Western Hemisphere. 

While those are the city’s economic highlights, there have been significant setbacks, too. Colón suffered three devastating fires in 1885, 1911 and 1940 that left much of the infrastructure in ruin. The largest and most destructive, in 1940, made 10,000 families homeless. 

The city stayed afloat because of its booming transportation and tourism industry. But the switch to container freights in 1956 was another blow as it eliminated most of the need for manual sorting of shipments, which greatly reduced the number of jobs available.

Then in 1977, the Panama Canal Treaties were signed, signifying the transfer of control of the canal from the Americans. This was heralded as a triumph for Panamanians, but by 1979, it meant that a large portion of the American population had vacated the area, leaving those Colón locals whose economy depended almost entirely on American presence — landscapers, maids, tailors — unemployed.

The ‘80s brought about the dictatorship of Manuel Noriega, whose conflicts with America led him to impose economic sanctions that made unemployment much worse. At the same time, says Joseph Berger, a local tour guide, Pablo Escobar was running his cocaine trade from Colombia through Panama, which meant gangs had taken hold in Colón, a scourge that continued into the ‘90s.

Poverty, government neglect and humidity all contributed to a downtown building-scape that was in such disrepair, many residents relocated and squatters moved in. Movies such as “Quantum of Solace” and “The Suicide Squad” later chose Colón as their real-life sets because of the skeletal buildings that populate the city.

Apocalyptic dilapidation and despair permeated throughout. 

But in the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s, the local government decided to reframe the narrative and began a series of reconstruction projects both to get people out of poor living conditions and restore the city to its prior commercial success. First came Río Alejandro, La Feria and Providencia, all housing projects that moved people out of the city.

The campaign has continued since, resulting in huge swaths of nearly empty streetscapes and squares, where weeds grow in hollowed-out window sills, doorless entryways disintegrate at the touch and heaps of garbage rot on street corners outside. 

Rafa Gordon, 52, a gang leader-turned-family man and professional tour guide, is standing at the edge of 5th of November Park — named for when Panama separated from Colombia — pointing to a flagless pole and gesturing toward weeds, graffiti, a broken water fountain and an abandoned amphitheater as indications of the neglect the city has endured for decades as gangs and poverty prevailed. 

He grew up in this area and commanded much of it until 1998 as leader of the drug-running Los Mortales, or the Mortals Gang, until he was caught and served five years in jail. Now a husband and father of 10, he serves the people who come off cruise ships, taking them to Panama City on the Pacific, or to the Guna Yala islands on the Caribbean coast. He sees their wealth, as well as the lucrative cargo on hundreds of ships that line up for the canal. But on this hot May day, clad in a bright blue tour guide shirt and black cap, he looks around at squalor and hopelessness and wonders aloud where it’s all going: “All that money isn’t put back into Colón,” he says. “It’s put into Panama City.” 

“Bahamas on steroids”

On a different day, but at the edge of the same park, Rep. Lynch gestures out the window of his newly renovated office known as Municipal Palace on the corner of Calle Sexta and Avenida Amador Guerrero, talking about why it is necessary to displace thousands of families and raze many of the buildings he can see from his second-floor office. 

“I hope within the next five, 10 years that all these buildings will be knocked down and replaced with commercial buildings,” he says. “I want to reduce the stigma. A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, you should visit Panama, but don’t go to Colón,’ that type of thing.”

The stigma is born from Colón’s reputation as unsafe for tourists — a particularly detrimental reality for a place whose income relies so heavily on tourism. Renovating the downtown will create many — and much more lucrative — jobs, but it will also involve the displacement of thousands more people, and the distancing of them from their jobs. 

According to Alicia Jímenez, president of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce, which oversees chambers across the country, the poverty and disrepair stem not from a lack of jobs or lack of access to jobs, but from a lack of people wanting to work. She says that when the U.S. left in the ‘70s, Colón residents didn’t try hard enough to adapt. 

“When I was in the Ministry of Housing,” says Jímenez, who was a cabinet member from 1999 to 2004, “I felt that really the attitude of people was the problem.” 

Jímenez, who oversaw one of the first relocation phases of Colón residents, claims she gave 120 of Colón’s homeless and poor families the “opportunity to have what a person needs to change” when she moved them from the inner city to duplex houses within La Feria, an early iteration of the relocation sites, also about 20 minutes away from the city center. When she returned after three months, Jímenez says “they destroyed and sold everything” – from toilets to sinks. Worse, she says, they “stayed without jobs but they didn’t try to change.”

Colón’s unemployment rate is currently documented as 12.6 percent, but Michael Chen, president of the Colón’s Chamber of Commerce, says “it’s probably a lot closer to 30 percent.” Local leaders hope that’s about to change.

As it stands, phase two aims to oust anyone who is not able to pay the high rents that would accompany new buildings planned for Colón center. According to Ministry of Housing Director Yashira Lee, the national government has mandated that the relocation process be finished by 2024. That means in fewer than two years, the landscape of Colón will change drastically as the government works in tandem with the private business sector to reconstruct the city into a commercial-tourism mecca that, like the capital city, will be a haven for middle-to-upper class Panamanians and expats looking to take advantage of what the country has to offer. 

Chen goes as far as to say that “the best possible scenario [for Colón] would be a Bahamas on steroids.” 

In fact, he vows that between Colón’s free zone and its premiere port area, the city can surpass other tourism hubs. To accomplish that, he hopes to make the entire area a duty-free tax haven to encourage more cruise ships and business relocations. And by November, the city’s leaders hope to bring as many as 8,000 tourists a month via cruise ships through Colón 2000 – a vast duty-free shopping center on the city’s eastern edge that will include a massive, sleek glass and cement mall under construction now just off the home port, Puerto de Cruceros. 

“We want to show them our beaches and our coastline,” says Chen, who, at 35, is the youngest president the chamber has ever had. “We want to show them our culture.” 

However, lost amid the grand plans are the current residents of Colón. Even Chen admits this. “What they forgot,” he says, “is to invest in our biggest asset, which is our people… They forgot about our people.”

This is not a revelation to the people themselves. Almost all the government-subsidized housing projects are situated at least a 20-minute drive from the city limits. Many of the displaced don’t have cars and say they can’t afford the trip back to Colón to work. There are currently no federally or locally funded social programs in Altos de Los Lagos.

Rufo Bonista Cordoba, a 46-year-old resident of Altos de Los Lagos, says that when he was a kid, when he was involved in gangs, the government worked with churches to provide recreation, sports and activities that created community resilience. 

“If you found your enemy there, you could fix what happened,” he says through an interpreter. “But the government isn’t doing anything like that anymore. They’re not working with the churches, they’re not working with the kids.” 

Raúl Del Espada, a Panama Canal worker also residing in Altos de Los Lagos, says something more is needed than the mere relocation of masses of people to remote areas with no community infrastructure. “The situation with the gangs is going to get worse. Nobody is doing anything to stop that,” Espada says through an interpreter. “The intention was good to build [Altos de Los Lagos]. And for a couple of people, it was better. But for a lot of people, there’s no culture.”

Rep. Lynch recognizes this and says he is hopeful social services and better housing can be accomplished. “The purpose of moving people out of the city was to get them out of the bad conditions that they were living in and give them … a dignified quality of life.” But “what really needs to be done here is the investment of education, sports, health and the economy – those types of things.”

No one knows this better than Rosamaria Brenés Del Delgado, who can’t afford the bus fare it costs to travel to the city for work and so also can’t take advantage of social services available there. Though she copes enough to take care of her 10 grandchildren – she believes her husband succumbed to the stress after they moved to Altos in 2019 and stopped receiving free food supplies shortly after. 

“This place killed him,” she says, her neat, cropped hair and collared purple Polo shirt in stark contrast to the cream stucco wall of her apartment building and the peeling, dilapidated front door to her right. 

Across the cement courtyard from Delgado, Elba Gonzalez, a young mother of three children, has found a way to give her living space some color and make a supplemental income by offering beauty work out of her living room. Gonzalez moved to Altos de Los Lagos in 2017. On the outside wall of her ground-floor, coral-colored apartment, she has painted “Elba Nails” and the six services she offers. 

But it’s little consolation when she reflects on the circumstances that brought her here. The beautician’s nails are a wash of blue and pink, butterflies and rhinestones, as she gesticulates her thoughts. “The local government lied to us because they told us that this would be paradise… they would be taking us to a paradise,” she says in an interview in Spanish. “And the government never, never, never provided any maintenance; any help.”