Back in the noughties the property now co-owned by the Levers belonged to a US citizen. This man was then close to our niece and as a result my wife was a guest in that house on several occasions.
Its owner consistently expressed to her a strong desire to acquire the next door property, which would ultimately become our main home in Guatemala.
Back in the days when the village was a set of fields filled with cane, the two plots had been part of the original 'home farm'. But subsequent to divisions via inheritance, they were registered with separate escrituras.
Our friend the US citizen did eventually acquire the larger of the two, and partially unified them, physically if not legally. He did this using a loan firm in the capital and at some point in 2012, for his own reasons, decided to surrender the newly-acquired plot rather than continue paying the interest.
Around the same time he reportedly persuaded Australian miner come antro-preneur Jason Lever to pay off (in installments) the mortgage he had on the main house.
What follows is largely speculation, but seems like a reasonable deduction, given what was to follow.
When Lever moved in there was no dividing wall between the two plots. He made use of the full space. He may well have had an expectation that he would be able to acquire both pairs of deeds down the line for a relatively small additional outlay.
We were informed that the owner of the loan firm in Antigua had started toying with the idea of having a country retreat. This may have put a bit of a key scratch down the side of Lever's long-term plan.
The prestamista reportedly showed the property to his wife who informed him that not only did she need him to build a wall, she needed a 2m corridor down the side of the house so that her servants could enter the garden without passing through her living space.
Lever obliged by agreeing to sell him the extra portion allowing for the construction of a perimeter wall which would not belong to him.
This was pretty much the situation when we showed up, following a tip off from the above-mentioned US citizen.
The prestamista and his wife had meanwhile reportedly become disillusioned with the provinces and the larger of the two properties with the wall had been put on the market.
Following our purchase in 2013, Lever had a conversation with my wife in which he pleaded temporary poverty as an excuse for not raising his own perimeter wall.
Our concern was that the escrituras that he would take control of in 2015 after the loan was paid of, contained a number of errors with regard to the physical dimensions of the property, and that Lever or any subsequent proprietor might later be inclined to take advantage of this. And we were led to conclude that there was something more akin to obstruction already going on here.
Our mistake early on was perhaps to assume that Lever's reluctance to build the wall, open a water account, lay down his own drains, register for IUSI and so on reflected either laziness or opportunism and nothing more systematic.
The trigger for a greater appreciation of the threat was the realisation that we had accidentally paid the Claro bill of one of his business accounts that had been registered to our address.
When we moved in, Lever's home was signposted #5 and this identification was reflected in the underlying paperwork shared with us by the prestamista and his staff.
Yet shortly after Lever concluded his nuptials, this numeral was painted over and the couple started advertising the address as #3, exactly the same as ours.
And so it was that pretty much every single delivery that they requested came and knocked on our door first. Why would anyone knowingly put themselves at such an inconvenience?
Back in the days when Guatemala had a working postal service this was significantly inconveniencing me as well.
Even now, for professional reasons, I receive confidential deliveries via courier and for the past five years I have had to pick these up in an office in town as I cannot trust anyone to negotiate the on-going confusion over signposting.
And we still see the Levers' own couriers standing outside scratching their heads on a regular basis.
When I ran into him outside one morning and asked why he had made the change, he proposed a plan which from the tone of his voice sounded pre-approved. 'You can be A and I can be B'.
I wrote a polite yet firm letter to Lever back in October 2016 asking him to explain the imposture and rejecting his proposed solution: I might need to make use of those kind of subdivisions of my own property in the future and he needed to use the number specified by his deeds (though I later learned that these do not mention the specific address in the village as ours do, nor do they specify the location of the property beyond referring to the registration.)
Later on he came up to me once more in the street outside and announced, again almost as a fait accompli, that he had registered for IUSI using another variant of #3 (-1) and that that was therefore how it was going to stay.
This is really not much of a solution at all and many of the inconveniences remain, particularly with regard to the delivery of confidential information.
It was in this same conversation he made the strange boast that he had a 'free water' deal with the Muni, a comment which was ultimately to lead to a rapid deterioration in the essentially amicable relationship we had thus far retained in spite of the series of (what seemed) minor encroachments.
Even so, it is clear to us that some of his accounts (EEGSA and Campero for example) remained registered to #3 and his name consistently turns up attacked to 3-G in official paperwork.
Again, why would anyone voluntarily place themselves in such a pickle?
All of the above needs to be borne in mind when, in later posts, I will address the 'plot' against us. The latter unfortunately, is not precisely wild speculation. We have it on audio file, so to speak, from the horse's mouth.
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