Cotito: Chronicle of a Forgotten Crime - Paperback

by David M. Fishlow (Editor), Carlos H. Cuestas Gomez (Author)

On July 7, 1941, war was raging in Europe and the U.S. was demanding that Panama ruthlessly ferret out "German" saboteurs. The presidency of Arnulfo Arias was on the brink of collapse. On the morning of July 7, the Policía Nacional of Panama opened fire in cold blood on Swiss-Germans who had founded an enigmatic community on a farm in the highland wilderness of western Panama. These obstinate but unarmed settlers were followers of the U.S. cult-figure Father Divine. The victims of the shooting: 10 dead on the spot; two who bled to death on the 18-hour trek by horse, truck and train to the hospital; and eight gravely injured. Only an old man and two children escaped injury. Whether Pres. Arnulfo Arias personally ordered the massacre is unknown, but he praised the killers after the fact, and the judicial cover-up dragged on for 12 years with no result. Forty years later, in the 1984 election of a puppet president, the Noriega dictatorship tried to exploit the incident, conducting two gruesome exhumations of a common grave, and publishing a weird book accusing Arias, who was again running for president, of a "Holocaust" against Jewish settlers who had never existed, hoodwinking even CNN in the U.S., which broadcast the hoax as truth. This new and expanded translation of the classic work by an eminent Panamanian jurist includes substantial new material to help the English-language reader understand this bizarre episode in the history of the province of Chiriquí.

Author Biography

Carlos H. Cuestas Gómez is a jurist and historian. Now an appellate judge in the Superior Tribunal for the 3rd District, he is a former Secretary General of the Supreme Court. He has written numerous books on the history of Panama, legal doctrine and historical novels based in Chiriquí. David M. Fishlow is a retired publicist for non-profit organizations and public officials. He has a farm in Chiriquí and has uncovered significant new material now appended to his translation of Dr. Cuestas's 1993 Spanish version of Cotito.