Cotito: Chronicle of a Forgotten Crime

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 Policia 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 Chiriqui.