History of Pavones
By Justice Mendez
When the first Costa Rican families ventured to homestead the remote, unoccupied area of Pavones in the sixties, the Boruca Indians had already departed the region for the Talamanca Mountains or elsewhere to establish their reserves, leaving behind only their gold-strewn graves, which early homesteaders eventually looted. Only twenty to thirty Costa Rican families occupied the vast region surrounding Pavones when American Daniel Fowlie, who principally bought and developed the region of Pavones, arrived there in 1974. A two-hour-minimum boat ride from Golfito (through Golfito Bay, down the La Trocha, and across the Rio Coto) separated Pavones’s raw land from civilization.
In the early sixties, San Diegan body surfer Kenny Easton, who grew up diving and surfing La Jolla with Fowlie during the dawn of California surfing, became the first surfing foreigner to find Pavones and first person to ride its now legendary waves. He moved to Costa Rica to
harvest copra and then found Pavones while harvesting the coconuts on Golfo Dulce’s eastern shorelines and selling them in Golfito. Pavones appeared totally uninhabited to him, and virtually no one lived there who might have seen him. The few families who occupied Pavones in the sixties and seventies preferred the place for its fertile, self-sustaining, and unclaimed land, which neighbors twenty fresh-water rivers and is conducive to practices of raising cattle and pigs and growing fruit trees, rice, and beans. Though land conflicts inevitably arose among early settlers of this open frontier, squatters were few, so existence was halcyon—like the morning glass on undiscovered waves. The stories Kenny told Fowlie (fishing out at sea) about Pavones’s perfect waves left Fowlie with the lingering dream of following Easton’s treasure map to paradise.
Dan with ofer 3,000 pounds of big lobster
When Fowlie followed Kenny’s map ten years later in 1974, hoping to move to Pavones if it lived up to Easton’s stories, Fowlie immediately inquired in the Golfito cantinas about the beach property, and that very night Fowlie found Claudio Lobo (who owned the 250 acres Fowlie later called Rancho Del Mar) drinking beer in a Golfito saloon. That same night,
Fowlie got provisional bill of sale from Cullo for the property, and within a few days, Fowlie had seen the property and bought the whole parcel and rudimentary sawmill for
Town of Golfito 1976
$30,000. One by one, the other beach owners approached Fowlie to sell pieces of their land. From 1974 to 1982, Fowlie purchased every beachfront ranch and beach concession from Rio Manzanillo to Punta Banco. Only four of the original twenty owners refused to sell, including Dan’s friend Herman Vargas (a gentlemanly Costa Rican who wanted to keep his homesteaded land to raise cattle but who since died). These purchases gave Fowlie over fifteen miles of beach-concession land and over eighty percent of Pavones, land which Fowlie legally owns today with legitimate title because he bought the land from its original Costa Rican homesteaders.
Rancho Del Mar, Fowlie's first property
By the summer of 1974, Dan had moved his family into huts he constructed on the beach and had begun employing almost every local to build essentially every public amenity found in Pavones today
Exparimental cocoa project
(including the roads, schools, new sawmill, and new cantina). They also planted more
Argonomist John Hall
than 200,000 trees—over 60,000 of which trees squatters have since destroyed. Fowlie hired several agronomists, including Costa Rican residents Dr. Bull Hunter and John Hall, to develop nurseries, teach locals how to farm, and develop experimental balsa and cocoa trees by hybridizing varieties from all over the world. Knee boarder Tom O’Neil (of the O’Neil wetsuits family) also worked for Fowlie for a time and planted thousands of palm trees from Rancho Del Mar south to Rio Claro and north to Rio Manzanillo.
In 1976, Fowlie rebuilt the makeshift cantina, previously owned by a local tico named Alvaro. Alvaro had bought a little land from Juan Mendoza, gotten a beer license, and put
First schoolhouse in Pavones, built by Dan
up little a shack. Fowlie bought the whole setup from Alvaro for $1,000 and immediately built the present-day cantina, which became a gathering place for all the local families and home of regular luaus and dances
for the local adults and children. Fowlie later hired Francisco (or Chico) Gomez as the cantinero, but when Fowlie was afterward imprisoned, Gomez became one of the richest men in Pavones by selling Fowlie’s cantina to gringo Sam Claiborne. Fowlie personally informed Claiborne by phone from prison that the cantina was not for sale, but Claiborne continues to profit off both Fowlie’s land and cantina, while Fowlie unwinds the cantina’s illegal sale in courts.
Cantina after rebuilt by Fowlie in 1976
Absolutely no police presence existed in Pavones in the days before Fowlie or
A squatter's shack being burned down by locals when Dan was imprisoned
during Fowlie’s time in Pavones from 1974-1985, and the gradual influx of squatters made Pavones’s west even wilder. Many people carried guns and machetes for protection. When Dan left Costa Rica on occasion, he’d often return to find that squatters had built shacks on his property and cut down spreads of trees in order plant more familiar crops, a practice which left the locals who had labored planting the trees heartbroken over the loss of their work. Without help from the law, locals just gathered a posse on horseback to go rattle their machetes at the squatters. Since squatters usually hid away from their shacks out of fear of landowners, locals simply burned down the shacks or pulled them down with tractors. Only on a few occasions did Fowlie elicit help from The Rural Guard to perform a desalojo (or eviction). Yet, law breakers were rarely jailed for more than a few days in Golfito because the municipality had so little budget for incarceration. The detention facility in Golfito was so crude, in fact, that suspects regularly escaped. Even Fowlie’s ex wife, whom the Golfito police detained after a bar skirmish, managed to sneak out of jail and meet Fowlie on the road before he could pay off the guards, who never pursued the matter further.
Typical living quarters, built by Fowlie on Rancho Del Mar
When the surf was flat in Pavones, you’d find Fowlie working with the locals on one of their many planting or building projects. When the swell rose, he enjoyed the company of no more than ten surfers in the water, a group composed of his son and son’s friends, of locals they taught how to surf, or of aspiring surfers (like Buttons, Pat Curran, and Rory Russell, all of whom Fowlie knew from his surfing and shaping days in California and Hawaii in the forties and fifties). Fowlie also invited early surf cinematographers Spyder Wills and Greg Weaver to document the waves at Pavones between 1976 and 1982. They created hundreds of recordings during their extended visits, some of which footage the surf documentary Chasing the Lotus features and more of which footage Love Machine Films’ forthcoming documentary about Pavones’s history plans to display.
A German could have actually become the king of Pavones before Fowlie did, but fortune fated otherwise. German surfer and sailor Winford Zeegen (the second surfing visitor to Pavones) arrived there in 1973—one year before Fowlie and ten years after Kenny Easton. Zeegen purportedly fled from problems in Germany to Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast and then traveled as far away from the Atlantic as possible, ending up in the remotest South Pacific portion of Costa Rica: Pavones. In exchange for $200 dollars, Winford got a handwritten note from a local landowner at Rio Claro, Marcella Mendoza, that gave Winford permission to erect a shack on a little piece of property for not more than a year. Winford had found his temporary sanctuary. Fowlie, however, bought
the entire ranch from Marcella and then declined Winford’s request to keep his shack there because Winford had failed to complete a paid sailing mission for Dan. Dan had hired Winford to replace a sailboat’s engine in San Diego, but Winford had sailed the boat only as far as Mexico and returned the sailboat in worse condition. While Fowlie was still in Costa Rica, Winford claimed to own the property and then illegally sold it to Steve Love—though the handwritten note from Marcella had long since expired and all the land had been legally purchased by Fowlie. Love tried to obtain the concession for the municipality, but Fowlie (possessing Winford’s original note from Marcella) presented the note to the municipality, which denied Love’s concession request, so Love just walked away from the property. Later when Fowlie was institutionalized, Zeegen sold the same piece of land again to Alex (owner of the Pavones surf shop). Alex successfully obtained the concession from the municipality, which failed to grant Fowlie his legal right to defend his beach leases, though he has always paid taxes for them. Fowlie plans on reclaiming all the land he bought from Marcella and from every other original landowner, including the parcel sold illegally by Winford. Sadly, in the early nineties, Winford was found dead by his boat on an island in Panama; he had been badly beaten and his boat looted.
Winford Zeegen
In 1987, the tides of fortune then turned against Fowlie when he was convicted for marijuana-conspiracy charges in US federal courts, was then incarcerated in Mexico at the request of the US, later extradited to federal prison on Terminal Island, California, in
1990, and then released in 2004 after serving eighteen years of a thirty-year sentence. The case against Fowlie began in 1985 when local authorities recovered less than an once of marijuana in a raid of Fowlie’s 214-acre ranch, Rancho Del Rio, on the
Rancho Del Rio
boarder of Orange County and Riverside County in California. Fowlie did not live on the property at the time of raid; he generally lived in Pavones and was visiting Mexico when he heard that his ranch had been raided. Since many friends and workers of Fowlie occupied the seven houses on the ranch during the raid, it’s likelier that the small amount of marijuana belonged to them. Yet amazingly, this single ounce found in California was the only hard evidence or marijuana brought against Fowlie. Contrary to sensationalist depictions of Fowlie, nothing ever suggested that he ran drug operations in Pavones or elsewhere. The other pieces of “evidence” leveled against Fowlie were the purchased testimonies of informants (paid by the prosecution with reduced jail sentences) and the testimony of an officer who claimed that twenty boxes were found on the California ranch with marijuana residue in them. However, the prosecution could never produce the boxes or lab results confirming that the residue was cannabis, and Fowlie attested that he used the boxes to collect grapes on his vineyard. Later assertions that Fowlie possessed tons of marijuana were simply induced from the alleged capacity of these empty, elusive boxes. In light of all these facts, in 1986 Judge McBride threw Fowlie’s case out of California courts “in the interest of justice”—leaving Fowlie free and clear from all charges.
Dan's Vineyard at Rancho Del Rio in Orange County, CA
Yet nothing but injustice was then served against Fowlie when the local authorities found a federal prosecutor to bring the discarded dry-conspiracy case to a federal judge, who allowed the illegal search in court. The federal court managed to convict Fowlie with just the single once of pot, alleged boxes, and paid testimonies. The authorities then seized and manned Fowlie’s property for three years—living in Fowlie’s house, auctioning or looting all of his antiques, and shooting up all of Gus Fowlie’s Volkswagens, cars which Dan’s son planed to restore into off-road racecars. Not only did Fowlie lose his ranch, worth an estimated 22.5 million today; he also lost nearly all of his Pavones land to illegal squatting during his imprisonment, land which Fowlie has been forced to win back through slow and costly legal processes. As if Fowlie has not endured enough, uninformed Costa Rican and American newspapers continue to vilify him with their prejudicial (i.e., adverse and unwarranted) depictions of him as a former drug lord in Pavones and California.
The story worsens. After waiting eighteen years to return to Pavones, Fowlie’s dream of living there again was shattered. In June 2005, Costa Rica’s Director General of Immigration Marco Badilla exiled Fowlie from Costa Rica for purposes of public safety on the basis of reports that Fowlie’s brief return to Pavones after his release from prison caused public fear and disorder in the region. However, the source and legitimacy of these reports of disturbances remain completely dubious. All extant evidence proves that Dan’s visit was “muy tranquillo,” as the local police commented in official reports during Dan’s return. Fowlie, convinced that land thieves would harm his efforts to reacquire his land by planting contraband on him, hired an unarmed Costa Rican drug-enforcement agent to accompany him at all times during his visit, and this agent also testifies to Dan’s good behavior. The only discernable allegation of violence in circulation contends that Fowlie threatened one of Chico Gomez’s “children”—not the best fabrication because the “child” in question was Bierno, who stood 6’3 and weighed about 225 pounds in his thirties. Though many know Fowlie for his bravado, the video tape and eyewitness accounts of the encounter—in which Gomez’s son appears to stop his car to invite Dan to his father’s house for a meeting—all suggest the opposite of these baseless rumors of violence. During this visit, only the people who had acquired parts of Danny Land illegally (most of them gringos) were unhappy to see Fowlie in Pavones; most of the original families, who had become family to Fowlie in former years, embraced him. Why, then, do newspapers and government officials continue to trust untrustworthy rumors of violence, which were most likely disseminated by the very land thieves interested in keeping out of Pavones Fowlie and his legal right to the land they acquired illegally? In reality, an exile meant to prevent fear and disorder in the region has succeeded merely to protect Pavones land thieves from fearing the disruption of their thievery by Fowlie’s return.
While Fowlie was in jail, squatting in Pavones increased like rain in Costa Rican winters. The first surge of squatting came in 1988 from Costa Rican farmers trained and armed by Cuban communists. Well-organized communist squatters had inundated the southern zone of Costa Rica after the United Fruit Company (the main exporter of bananas in Costa Rica) abandoned their vast properties in southern Costa Rica when the unions raised export tariffs. The fruit company’s abandonment of the South gave all squatters every right to squat the land and later claim title to it. Under Costa Rican law, squatters can claim possession rights to land (commonly known as squatters’ rights) after occupying land uncontested for three years, and squatters can homestead property and claim escritura (or national title rights) after occupying land uncontested for ten years. From the South, a handful of communist opportunists organized and armed a group of farmers, and together they succeeded to take over the entire Langostino beach area (just northeast of Pavones) by force. During this violent period in the early nineties, many shootouts and scenes of brutality occurred as the well-armed group drove out all but the original landowners (the only ones who were armed and tough enough to resist the invasion). All other new opportunists in the region—including other Costa Rican squatters (armed with just machetes) and the many gringo surfers who came for land in the early nineties—were forced to relinquish their land battles. The victors reigned in Pavones for several years until they lost their legal quest for the land in 1993 when Fowlie won the case against IDA, who supported the campesinos in tying to claim title. As a result of this legal defeat, the handful of communist organizers of the invasion departed the area, but many squatters remained and many more came. None of them realized, however, that all squatting and homestead rights are void in the case that the land’s owner is rendered unable to defend his or her land due to institutionalization or exile.
In the nineties, the squatting struggle gradually left the fields and entered the courts, but spurts of squatting violence continued to occur. In one widely publicized case, 72-year-old US-citizen Max Dalton got into a shootout in 1997 with squatters on a piece of property that Dalton occupied, an incident which resulted in the death of Dalton and purported shooter, Alvaro Aguilar. Fowlie actually owned the land that Dalton occupied, having purchased the property from its original land holder, Alejandro Gomez Concepcion. But during Fowlie’s absence from Costa Rica, Dalton bought the property from Owen Handy despite Fowlie’s warnings about Handy’s bogus power of attorney for Alan Nelson, Fowlie’s former attorney who ludicrously claimed to inherit Fowlie’s property. After occupying the property, Dalton was harassed by every side of the land conflict. Original homesteaders resented Dalton for taking Fowlie’s land and for fencing off the path through which Dan had always allowed locals to herd cattle. Eyewitness accounts of Dalton’s killing purport that Gerardo Mora, a professional land thief in the area, armed a group of squatters, including the person who shot Dalton as Dalton came out armed to defend the property. As rumor has it, Mora then shot Alvaro to make things appear like Dalton and Alvaro shot each other. However, no shells or other evidence was ever collected. Currently, Max Dalton’s family occupies the property and contends for it in court, while Fowlie intends to reclaim the land with his better-than-fools-gold title.
As civilization developed in Pavones in the nineties, so did law and order. The people vying for Danny Land laid down their guns and machetes for the new weapons of lawyers and payments to corrupt municipality officials. For an envelope under the table, the notorious Golfito municipality would give away Fowlie’s beach leases (which are required for all property within the first two-hundred meters of ocean shore) without ever fulfilling the legal burden to notify the lease holder and provide him an opportunity to defend the leases in court. Many squatters were also issued national titles based on squatting and homestead laws while Fowlie was unable to contest the squatters. Fowlie later won several major land cases in court, thereby reacquiring about a thousand acres of the five thousand he owns and some of the biggest properties taken from him. The courts rejected all titles created within Fowlie’s titles due to the caveat that Fowlie was unable to defend his legal rights to the land while institutionalized. Costa Rica no longer grants national titles for Fowlie’s land, but Fowlie must still legally unwind long chains of illegal sales of many of his properties. Many of Dan’s loyal former employees have also assisted Fowlie by squatting his land and refusing to sell to the many willing buyers. These loyal locals plan on handing Fowlie back his land when he returns, and Fowlie plans on rewarding them each with a nice house or property.