(Photo opposite: Corregidor’s office) The one part of society that I’ve always tried to steer clear of no matter where I was living is the legal system. When I lived in the U.S., I never had any run-ins with the police or courts and in Panama I have always kept myself far from any problems. So with that as a backdrop I was not at all optimistic about going to court, but there was no avoiding the problem. The problem started when my neighbor – who owned the duplex on the other side of the wall from my duplex – decided he was going to completely remodel his home. I wasn’t against his wanting to remodel his duplex, but he didn’t tell me and the construction turned out to be extremely loud – so loud that we couldn’t be in the duplex while the construction was taking place. The banging on the connecting wall at 7:00am was loud and disturbing; our duplex shook as if we were in an earthquake The neighbor wasn’t willing to talk to us about the noise: he didn’t talk to us before he started construction and he wouldn’t talk to us after he started construction: we tried to call him, but he refused to talk. Not only was there lot’s of noise, but someone decided to cut our phone lines as a way of trying to intimidate us. And then the construction went on week after week. I had no choice; we had to take him to court.

After we filed our complaint against our neighbor at the Corregidor a hearing was scheduled. The hearing was going to be in front of the Corregidor – the equivalent of a District Justice in the U.S. The hearing was scheduled to begin at 1:30pm on a Tuesday; we jumped into the car at 1:15pm and quickly drove to the Corregidor’s office. The Corregidor’s office was in an old-style U.S. Canal Zone house; to enter the office you needed to walk up a flight of concrete steps that led to the living quarters of the old wooden house. We sat down in what would have been the living room of the house. The courtroom was located in what would have been the front bedroom, and the Corregidor’s secretaries sat behind desks in what would have been the kitchen. The wooden floor of the office was rotting; you could see through the floor to the level below. There was a T.V. on in the office and the rabbit ear antenna of the T.V spread out in opposite directions. On the T.V. a Mexican soap opera faded in and out of focus, a lone police sergeant sat behind a little elementary school desk and watched the soap opera as he looked at his watch and whispered into his cell phone. This was the scene as we waited for the hearing to begin.

My neighbor was not in the waiting room when we arrived to the Corregidor’s office. We talked with the secretaries and then waited for about twenty minutes. The neighbor didn’t come. After a while we thought he wasn’t going to show and that the whole episode would end without any resolution. And then just as we were leaving I saw the neighbor’s car pull up through one of the glass slat windows. He parked his car in front of mine so that the front of my car and the front of his car were facing one another. He was tall, bald, Afro-Antillean and dressed in brown pants and a rust colored shirt. He had money: his cloths, car and house reflected wealth

He walked into the waiting room of the Corregidor and said something to the cop. The tension in the room increased; the neighbor and I walked back and forth and paced around each other like animals about to fight. He came close – I moved back and then I walked to where he was and he moved away: the police sergeant kept a close eye on us. My wife became tense and started talking very quickly with the secretaries. And then we were called into the Corregidor’s office.

I hadn’t seen the Corregidor at this point and had no idea what he or she might look like. When I walked in I was very surprised: the Corregidor was very young, clean-cut with a baby face and wearing a pair of very tasteful transparent designer eyeglasses. His courtroom had been a bedroom which made the atmosphere personal and surreal. The Corregidor sat behind a large desk that had been placed on a raised platform that was three feet from floor level. In front of the platform and desk was a wooden railing that acted as a kind of barrier between the Corregidor and us.

The Corregidorasked for my neighbor’s ID and my wife’s ID. He could see they were Latin. He then turned to me and asked who I was, was I Panamanian? I said no - I was from the U.S. My wife told the Corregidor that I was her husband. He said ok and that I could stay, but I couldn’t yell or make noise. He then asked everyone to sit down. There were some small chairs at the back of the room where we sat. I sat next to the window and had a view of the traffic passing by outside.

The Corregidor turned to my wife and asked her to explain her complaint. She shot into the whole episode: the neighbor had literally run us out of our house with his construction noise; he never even told us that he was going to bang on the wall separating our duplexes; that when she called him he said he didn’t care and kept on banging; that after she complained the phone lines were cut. That the noise continued and the cops were unwilling to do anything. All of this was said with an intense anger that shot through the room like a bullet; her Spanish was very precise and sharp. The Corregidor wrote everything down as she spoke. He needed time because my wife spoke in a rapid fire cadence.

Then the Corregidor turned to our neighbor and asked him to explain his position. The neighbor pulled out a piece of paper from an appointment book and opened it up. And then he began to read from the paper. The paper contained an explanation of the seven sins. He was turning to God as a way of explaining all the noise: he was putting God front and center in our stupid duplex fight. When he got to the last sin which was pride he pointed to my wife and said she was guilty of this sin. Would the doors of hell now open up and would my wife and I be sucked down a fiery red hole: it was a classic Latin mind-fuck. Use God to defeat your opponent, especially if she was a woman. The neighbor must have thought that we had no education. Of course, slamming on someone’s wall with out telling them is also very prideful, but we didn’t get into that.

He went on to say that my wife had overreacted and that we were not being cooperative with his plans to remodel his duplex. He was very emotional and loud when he spoke. He had no explanation as to why our phone lines were cut. And then he changed tone and started to say things like your “closest neighbor is your best amigo”. He was trying to say that we should be friends because we lived next to each other which I had no problem with: if he felt this way why hadn’t he talked to us before he started construction? He then pointed at me and said “El Senor (me) had given him a sign with my hand.” He pointed at his middle finger and tried to flip every one in the room the ”bird” without really knowing what it meant.

The Corregidor listened a little and then asked our neighbor if he had a construction permit to do the work: he didn’t. Did he know that he needed one: no, he thought that if the construction was on the inside of his house then he didn’t need a construction permit. The Corregidor said he needed that permit to do what he was doing. He also needed a permit of tolerance from the ministry of housing. That permit certified that we had been notified of the construction.

The Corregidor invoked the law in a very fair way: he told us that if any of us started a conflict with one another then there would be a $600 fine. With that the hearing ended. And we quickly walked out of the courtroom, as we did so our neighbor yelled to us that he wanted to talk to us about the pipe that connected the two duplexes.

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