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## What Panama Represented
In the years between 2002 and 2007, Panama came to represent something specific in the Darwins’ imagination: the place where the scheme could be cashed out, where the couple could reinvent themselves, where the money that had been accumulated through fraud could be converted into a life that had no connection to the debt and the concealment and the performance in Seaton Carew.
Panama in the early twenty-first century had genuine appeal for British investors and retirees. Its dollarized economy, relatively accessible property market, and tropical climate made it a destination for people looking for a lower cost of living with modern infrastructure. There was a community of British and other European expatriates. Property prices were, by UK standards, low. The climate was dramatically different from northeast England.
The Darwins’ specific choices—the El Dorado apartment in Panama City, the Escobal estate near the Panama Canal—reflected a particular vision of what their Panamanian life was going to look like. The Escobal property, a rural estate with land, suggested either agricultural ambitions or eco-tourism or simply the desire to own something substantial in a country where their money would go further than it had in England.
John Darwin later dismissed some of the media characterizations of their plans as exaggerated. He said in subsequent interviews that reports about a canoe-rental operation or elaborate eco-tourism plans were inventions—that the property was land they had bought, not a business they had constructed. The media, during the week the story broke, had a great deal of airtime to fill and not all of it was filled with precision.