Sylvain's Panama Adventure

Nothing is more frustrating than having to deal with the Panamanian Government’s complex and inefficient bureaucracy. Anyone who’s been through the immigration process will attest to that. I guess if you make it through the whole thing, they know you REALLY want to live here…

I just had another brush with this incredible inefficiency while trying to register a trailer. I had this really nice trailer custom-made for my company, so I had to figure out how to get it registered.

First thing was to get it insured and while this has nothing to with the government, I hit the first road-block: the insurance company required a serial number, something the custom-manufacturer didn’t provide, but he made one up for me on request. I was also surprised by the cost of the insurance, which was about four times what I expected and nearly as much as for my car! Apparently that is because it is a commercial trailer…

Once I had the insurance I had to go to my local municipal office (Palacio Municipal de Chame) to get it registered. As usual they needed photocopies of all my documents including my passport and government ID (cedula). I always carry a copy of my passport, cedula and insurance, but I was missing copies of the trailer’s description. As usual, while they require a copy of everything they do not have a photocopier (in this day of $200 copiers, that is inexcusable, a scanner would be even better and save tons of paper). So I had to go out to the nearest photocopy center and come back. Then I needed to go out to the cashier to pay my $15 registration fee, and also go to the Banco Nacional to deposit $10 in the treasury account and obtain a deposit voucher.

I then had to go get a “revisado”, this ridiculous and useless yearly inspection process where they take pictures of your vehicle but never inspect anything, as evidenced by the thousands of completely unsafe vehicles on Panama’s roads. What they failed to tell me though is that because my trailer wasn’t yet in the system, I had to get something called a “pre-revisado”, where they create your record in the registration system and enter the vehicle’s description including weight, dimensions, serial numbers, etc.  The problem is that only a few places are authorized to do the “pre-revisado”, so after some seemingly endless arguing with the clueless girl at the San-Jose revisado center I finally figured out the problem and had to go all the way to La Chorrera with my trailer. The pre-revisado cost $15 and showed me how easy it would be to get a stolen vehicle properly registered in this country, the process being entirely handled by some gofer in a second-rate garage.

Once armed with the pre-revisado, I had to go to the Palacio Municipal de La Chorrera with all my docs and went through another photocopy dance because I had already given away my passport/cedula copy! It was doubly frustrating here because the woman actually had a nice photocopier right on her desk, but when I pointed it out she sternly informed me that it was strictly for internal use and not for public use! After returning with a photocopy they could finally print the official registration certificate (Registro Unico) which includes a hologram and a government seal. They also assigned me a plate number, but I had to go back to my municipal office in Chame in order to retrieve the actual plate.

Something that should have taken a few minutes ended up taking several days…