Cocktails In Boquete

Today is my birthday and I'll be heading out for much needed martinis tonight. I'm pretty far along with getting over the delayed impact of having the bar, a year of my life and most of my possessions stolen by the bitch of Boquete. Did the depression and impotent rage thing and have pretty much settled into the cold realm of slow revenge. I'm not sure how that's going to happen, but of necessity it will be simmering on the back burner. It will likely take years.

In the meantime I'll post one last story, related to me a couple of weeks ago, furthering the concept that Lolita is simply a piece of crap. The story needs some background for context as it concerns not me, but my former employees.

First off, my employees were great. Each one was different, each came from different places, each had different abilities and were at different levels of training as far as the bar was concerned.

Sandy brought the most to the table and could conceivably bartend with minimal supervision and help from her husband (who in the past had worked as a bartender in the capital). Her husband has a barbershop in Boquete that he runs with his brother and was- at least as of a couple of weeks ago- putting together a beauty salon for Sandy. She was my first employee and had the most practice behind the bar. She comes from Santiago, a conservative Catholic town about 160 kilometers east of David.

Maria comes from Costa Rica and is the most worldly of the crew. She's also the most vulnerable as a foreigner and has the youngest baby (all the girls have babies). She was just taking a few night shifts to get some practice mixing cocktails, as during the day most people prefer wine or beer. She has an easy smile and loves to go dancing, and was eager to learn about mixology.

Yaris is a Boquetena, the most easygoing of the group and arguably the easiest on the eyes. She was the last to be hired, worked the day shift exclusively and kept the place spic and span. She was also the first victim of the pig.

Part of my deal to open the bar was that the employees would be picked up on Lolita's payroll. My first inkling that something was wrong with the deal was her refusal to do so once I actually had employees. I badgered her for about two weeks about it but the bottom line was that she just flat out lied and never had any intention of putting anyone on her payroll. She especially detested female employees, and of those she especially detested locals- meaning Boquetenas.

Without getting into the details of why this was so, in addition this she was not happy with the amount of money the employees earned: i.e., too much. She then started meddling by calling Claudete in Costa Rica and telling her that she thought the girls were prostitutes and I was having sex with them. Not that Clau was buying any of this, but after some hours of back and forth Clau felt that were I to let one of the girls go, at least for the moment, Lolita would back off and I could approach her again about putting the remaining two on the payroll.

According to Clau, Lolita wanted Yaris gone- again, not getting into details that would further sidetrack our story. After Yaris was gone she then became the focus of the 'prostitution' whispering campaign, which I was unaware of. From her perch in her own bar Lolita began to spread this gossip among her employees, friends and customers- as well as my remaining employees. Yaris became known as a 'puta.'

So that's the setup: Lolita trying to get into the heads of my employees and ex-girlfriend when she couldn't get into mine, and leaving everyone high and dry once the dust settled. The bar is shut down, she put three women out of work, lied to and stole from Claudete. She also corrupted the local and national police, perjured herself to the alcalde and pulled strings of an unknown nature in David, possibly in the judiciary. Then she goes for the gutter.

A week or so after she had the bar padlocked and me thrown out, Lolita went to Sandy's husband's barbershop to try and get her to come and work for her to reopen the bar. Sandy wasn't there but her husband put Lolita off. She then asked for Maria's phone number and went to hunt her down. Maria told her 'no' when she asked, but then Lolita pulled some rank shit. She said that if Maria didn't come work for her she would report her to immigration.

So Lolita reopened the bar with Maria but had to shut it down after two days for lack of customers. They reportedly served not a single drink. Lolita ultimately didn't pay Maria a penny for her efforts.

Lolita then visited Sandy again to try and force her to come and work for her. Threats were used, angry words were exchanged and then Sandy's husband threw Lolita out of his shop. He told her that she may scare some people in town but she didn’t scare him. Bravo.

Shortly afterwards, Yaris decided to pay Sandy and her husband a visit. She had heard some buzz around town concerning the bar and her, and wanted to know the real reason why she was let go. Sandy knew all (more than I did) and she told her.

What Lolita didn't know was that Yaris is the daughter of an old friend of hers. Yaris ran home and told her dad, and dad paid a loud and unfriendly visit to Lolita.

Unless something really interesting happens I don't expect to be posting more here, at least until I can get the comments system to work again so that other people can leave their own stories of dealing with Lolita. I mean this to be a public service.

Ultimately, I highly recommend anyone searching in Boquete, Panama for Lolita, aka Lola, aka Maria Dolores Guerra Romero- to not do business with her, especially where real estate or in any kind of ongoing partnership is concerned. Not only is she quite comfortable with taking assets from a gringo, she is also capable of tying up large real estate projects.

She has connections in the provincial government in David as well as the capital, owns a respectable portion of the local and national police force and is low enough to take food from a baby's mouth by firing, spreading rumors about or blackmailing its mother.

Posted by petefredbob at 01:37 AM | Permalink

The cruelest and most low thing that Lolita did was to befriend and then betray my then (now ex) girlfriend. As a gringo I'm culturally fair game. By way of explanation (for those inured to the facts on the ground) I remind you that we are seen as cultural imperialists running roughshod over the rest of the world.

In other words, as a white, male-American (my use here of the self-descriptor 'American' is considered by many to be culturally insensitive) I'm party by default to many persistent ills that seem to plague Latin America, and reparations may be extracted by any means available. To put that in plaintext English: I'm a gringo so it's locally seen as OK if Lolita steals from me. Not so with Claudete, and here is where she made her mistake.

A well-off Latina, adopted as a child along with her sister out of poverty and cared for like blood family, stole from a hard-working Latina of more humble means and background. I'm not sure that Lolita's 'father,' a former mayor of Boquete, is aware of or would be surprised at what she did, but I'm sure her estranged sister (by all accounts a respected professional living in Panama City) would find it par for the course.

Over the year that I physically built up the bar and improved the apartment upstairs to make it fit for living, finances for me and Clau were, to put it mildly, up and down. Everything we had was invested. We didn't even have a car during this time as we sold the one we had for capital (as well as a few thousand dollars worth of professional camera equipment and other items). The final bill for simply rewiring the building to make it safe and usable ran close to three thousand dollars.

['Funny' aside: Our original "electrician," Georgie or Jorge, was a long-time employee of Lolita's who touched me for an advance one day and never came back to finish the job. He was later found copulating with a dog on Lolita's finca, which is apparently what you need to do to get fired. As long as he was her dog he was fine, but as she's proudly known as an animal lover herself- don't cut in on her turf.]

May of last year found Clau back in Costa Rica to try and sell the above-mentioned car and she wound up finding decent work at a call center in San Jose. It was finally sold after an excruciating three months, and as our finances had by that point dwindled to nothing we decided it would be best for her to stay there and work while I went on putting things together in Panama. Things stayed like that, with her occasionally coming down for the occasional weekend, until the week the bar opened.

When we first moved in Lolita spent many a supper hour at our table. Clau had me research the Atkins/ South Beach diet and its variations and then proceeded to cook for and feed Lolita. I would of course occasionally find her stuffing her face afterwards in her cantina, so it's no surprise that the diet didn't do all that much for her. After, whenever Clau would come down to visit she would cook for her then as well. I also would occasionally whip up some chow, a cake or something special like Chicken Parmesan and bring some over for Lolita and her girls.

Clau would also do little favors like send medicine from Costa Rica that wasn't available in Panama and bring little gifts when she visited. They chatted frequently on MSN about the usual, female problems, men, family, whatever. Lolita told Clau a number of times that I was the only gringo she liked and trusted. You get the idea. As a matter of fact, as Lolita was setting us up on that final day, she was chatting with Clau on the internet telling her that everything was fine.

Clau was scheduled to go for an operation to cut out a fatty growth the doctors had found and she was terrified of going under the knife. Lolita knew it. She also knew that I didn't want to upset Clau by telling her of Lolita's increasingly bizarre behavior- including Lolita chasing behind me and a dinner companion in her car and forcing us off the road. I still had hope that our lawyer could talk to her lawyer and sort things out by injecting some calm into the situation.

(BTW: She drives a maroon Prado with blacked-out windows and bad tires.)

That was not to be, and, after sleeping that night with a large kitchen knife beside the bed, in the morning I had to tell Clau what had happened. Gratefully, she immediately got that Lolita had been playing her and responded calmly. She contacted Lolita to try to see what could be salvaged, which turned out to be nothing. Lolita continued to play a double game, and kept adding to the 'bill' that she said we/Claudete owed.

As Clau had just taken time off from her job to come down and open the bar she would have had to come down just for a weekend to try and settle the 'bill.' But as Lolita had been offered that money already by my partners- and refused, and as the lease was set to expire on April first, and as Lolita had denied that she had any business with me or the partners, and as I wasn't allowed within 500 yards of the place because of false assault charges, this was just a ruse to take another chunk of money. Disgusting.

So Claudete has lost her clothes, her furniture, music and scads of personal stuff that couldn't be of interest to the fat one, not to mention her money, time and effort (Clau was shoveling gravel with me on the evening before we opened to add more parking) because of some stupid, envious bitch that thought I was paying my bartenders too much money. If for no other reason I will hound this pig to her dying day.

Next week I'll post links to the photos that I took and the directions to her property that she wanted me to sell for her. Thank God I was too busy with the bar to have done more than I did, but I was working on it and was in contact with a local agency in Boquete.

Posted by petefredbob at 05:05 PM | Permalink

Sad to say but I'm back in the States after having to give up on getting the rest of my stuff back. I'm lucky to have friends that gave to the cause with cash and places to stay while I figure out my next move. Friends in Panama and Costa Rica were extremely helpful, and if it hadn't been for certain people in Panama helping out (you know who you are but will remain anonymous here) I would have literally lost everything but the clothes on my back.

I thank everyone not only for their faith in me, but for sticking with me when things got rough. I'll remember the kindnesses and endeavor to return them when I can, as well as whatever cash I can muster up over time. This gives me a reason to set out again and find another adventure, though the direction isn't yet clear. Will I learn from my mistakes? Who knows?

When I was a kid a group of us used to climb up to the top of a thin tree and swing it back and forth until it bent enough to fall toward another tree where we would all try and switch over before the decreasing ballast allowed the original tree whip back. Of course we pushed it- taller trees, more kids, more risk, more danger, more adrenaline, more broken branches and thuds from the ground. The payoff was to look back and say wow, look what we just did. Somehow nobody died.

Cocktails in Boquete was kind of like that. The looks I get from my friends back home remind me that I lost thirty pounds getting there, endured sickness, hundreds of bug bites, corrupt officials, simply dangerous and armed people, lack of sleep and an astounding lack of professionalism in virtually all the professions.

The bar was a success in all but endurance, and yes, that of course would be the most important part of any business. And though it sucks, and hurts, to have not made it pay off, I can still look back at it and say wow.

That doesn't mean I will let up on the fat one- that's just a public service. I'm just going to have to figure out how to balance my revenge (in as healthy a manner as is possible with such a thing) with my need to move forward into something new and pay my bills. If nothing else I hope to continue to entertain here as I sort through my options.

Thanks again for the support.

Posted by petefredbob at 01:13 PM | Permalink

Photo of Maria Dolores Guerra Romero (Lolita aka Lola) Cedula # 4-138-645 and her two adopted daughters sitting in my bar, Cocktails In Boquete.

I can't say I wasn't warned. Repeatedly. But sometimes one's choices are limited and experience is a harsh mistress. Two years of running legitimate businesses in Costa Rica taught me well that if you don't have the backing of the right people, officially in or out of the government -in all iterations- it means near certain failure. Egos need to be stroked, respect has to be paid and cash has to find its way to where it needs to go.

When my girlfriend and I first came to Boquete in January of 2007 we tried that route, and after renting and moving into a place we sought a meeting with the mayor, or alcalde. This was the guy that had the final veto over whether or not we would be granted a patente, or operating permit, or so we were told by our landlord. After three weeks of arranging meetings and sitting and waiting we were told there was a problem.

We forced our landlord to accompany us to the next meeting when he was told that unless major structural changes were made to the building we would not be allowed to open. It was clear that our landlord had been aware of this at an earlier time.

This experience pointed to a typical play made by a certain type of folk: hook the gringo into a lease, let him make a substantial investment, then in order not to lose what he'd already spent, force him into making improvements to the property itself thereby increasing its value to the property owner. Of course that's just the beginning.

Now that the game was out in the open we were able to break the lease without having spent anything except for the lost rent and time. We needed a new place, and having annoyed the mayor's office, a new idea. That's when we met Lolita, a person that not only despised the mayor but our current landlord as well. She was a local institution with many friends on the police force and offered to rent us a better place at the same price (a poke in the eye to our landlord) and further allow us to operate our business under her own patente (a poke in the eye to the mayor).

Here's where the decision gets made. Having identified the warring parties and a portion of the local political structure one needs to choose sides- and take the consequences. I found Lolita's rustic wild-west attitude amusing (she has a habit of wandering around waving a long barrel revolver) and my girlfriend hit it off with her immediately (there are different brands of crazy). I was to be given free reign to do whatever I wanted to do, the only required improvement was that as my building was a free standing structure there needed to be a physical connection between it and the building next door (which housed Lolita's mini super and cantina). This would provide the legal fig leaf for the patente.

Thus begins the story as we, or- here is the important part- my girlfriend signed the lease on April first. This signature became the basis of Lolita's ultimate legal maneuver to have me thrown out on my ass. She denied knowing who I was, never mind having had done business with me (even as a local cop- who I had lent power tools to and knew quite well- stood there in front of my bar locking me out). She claimed that the legal leaseholder had abandoned the place and moved back to Costa Rica with her husband, though said leaseholder had cooked Lolita dinner about a week and a half before. For good measure she threw in a denuncia against me for assault, though I only found out about that the following day.

More next week.

Posted by petefredbob at 09:20 AM | Permalink