Panama's Bureau of Unparalleled Bureaucracy has been working overtime of late. I have a vision of how it operates. Major government functionaries seek out, via a set of confusing questionnaires, the most inept yet creative minor functionaries throughout the country, lock them in a room, provide them with an unlimited supply of marijuana, and refuse to free them until they've come up with new diabolical plan guaranteed to confuse the maximum number of people--particularly those with a less than perfect command of the Spanish language.
While perusing one or more of the many forums (fora?) circulating among the expat population, I came across, a couple of months ago, information indicating that a new law has been enacted requiring owners of motor vehicles to obtain a motor vehicle identification card, a piece of plastic designed to offer proof that one is in compliance with a variety of regulations relating to car ownership and, presumably, to obviate the necessity of emptying the glove box or console of papers relating to vehicle registration, insurance, etc., every time one encounters a traffic stop/check manned by the transitos (traffic police). On the face of it, this sounds like a worthy endeavor as traffic stops invariably result in interminable delays as drivers shuffle through the paperwork, transitos shuffle through the paperwork, and the two struggle with coming to some form of agreement about what the paperwork means. The Bureau of Unparalleled Bureaucracy, however, saw it as an opportunity to produce some of its finest work.
According to the forums, the government had developed a website on which, by entering one's license plate number, one could determine the date on which one's motor vehicle identification card could be retrieved from a specified transito office. Miraculously, this worked. I discovered, back in December or so, that my card would be ready and waiting in February 2010. As this is the month in which the license plate on our principal vehicle is renewed, I figured, somewhat correctly, that the card is linked to license plate renewal. Everything gets hazy after that. (All the information on the forums was confusing and contradictory because, and this will be a surprise to many of you, people cannot write. Information is useful only if it's clear, and people cannot write. I sought clarity via responding with questions, but came away even more confused because people cannot write.)
As if this weren't bad enough, the Bureau of Unparalleled Bureaucracy simultaneously decreed that henceforth one's national identification number must be the same on all governmental documents. This sounds reasonable except that the national i.d. number is tied to the passport number, and, when a passport is renewed, as ours recently were, the number changes. So now the numbers on our cedulas, driver's licenses, vehicle registration, insurance, etc., are different from the numbers on our passports. As best as I could ascertain from the gibberish on the forums, the process by which this is accomplished begins with license plate renewal, after which one sets about getting all the numbers to match before visiting the transito office to claim the ready-and-waiting vehicle identification card. This involves several steps, the order of which remains unclear.
It appears that one first must pay a visit to the Immigration Office, the most hellish place in all of Panama, to get a new cedula (national identification card) with a new number that matches the new passport. I cannot overemphasize what a daunting task this is. The Immigration Office, located in the heart of jam-packed David, provides no parking, has no air-conditioning, offers a tiny waiting room into which are packed dozens of sweaty people vying for attention, and is staffed entirely by non-English speakers. Waiting times of hours or even days are not uncommon unless one goes to the expense of arriving armed with a lawyer or, at the very least, a Spanish-speaking facilitator who is somehow entitled to jump the lines. Once receiving the attention of a sure-to-be surly Immigration bureaucrat, there's bound to be a delay or delays in receiving the actual card bearing the new number, requiring a return trip or trips to David, paid lawyer or facilitator at hand, to once again navigate the bureaucratic quagmire. The next step--again, apparently--is to drive through more traffic congestion to the David City Hall, second floor, to change the motor vehicle registration documents to reflect the new number. It goes without saying that there will be a line of 30 or more persons and that the employee servicing the line that I'm in will close down and go to lunch or on break just as I reach the front. In any case, some paperwork eventually will be accomplished, after which a fee will be assessed. But the fee cannot be paid at City Hall. It can only be paid at Banco Nacional, a few blocks down the 100+ degrees street, after which one returns to City Hall, receipt in hand, to stand in line all over again.
On the other hand, one forum participant reports that she received her vehicle identification card merely by producing her old passport to prove that she is who she purports to be. Either she was very lucky (my guess, all things considered) or the matching numbers requirement is tied to renewal of one's driver's license rather than the renewal of the license plate. This seems unlikely as the card became available at the time the license plate was due to be renewed. I don't know when my driver's license expires. And I don't want to know right now as that presents a whole nother bureaucratic nightmare.
In any event, the license tag had to be renewed, and I know from experience that the first step in that bureaucratic process is to obtain a revisado. The revisado is loosely analogous to a car inspection except that they don't inspect anything. They just check that the vehicle is insured, take a photograph of the car, charge $15, and produce a piece of paper entitling one to pick up the new license tag. A nifty way to pad the federal coffers. There's no place is Boquete that offers revisado services, of course, so I set off for David on Thursday, got the revisado without a hitch, and drove the 25 miles back to Boquete to pick up my new license plate and pay another fee at City Hall. Alas, they had no plates. I was told to return in Marzo (March).
I'm optimistically looking at it as a reprieve as, without the license plate paperwork, I can't take whatever the steps may be toward getting the vehicle identification card. Then I read this morning on a forum that I should have been given a permiso temporal de circulacion (temporary permit to drive around aimlessly) to display in my window to avoid being fined for having an expired tag.
Back to Boquete City Hall Monday morning.
[The photo is of Novey, the offspring of Maisie, one of Steve and Michelle's howler monkeys, fathered by a monkey in the wild.]
