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Published May 11, 2024 • 3 minute read
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PANAMA CITY (AP) — Panama is on the verge of a dramatic change to its immigration policy that could reverberate from the dense Darien jungle to the U.S. border.
President-elect Jose Raul Mulino says he will shut down a migration route used by more than 500,000 people last year. Until now, Panama has helped speedily bus the migrants across its territory so they can continue their journey north.
Whether Mulino is able to reduce migration through a sparsely populated region with little government presence remains to be seen, experts say.
“Panama and our Darien are not a transit route. It is our border,” Mulino said after his victory with 34% of the vote in Sunday’s election was formalized Thursday evening.
As he had suggested during his campaign, the 64-year-old lawyer and former security minister said he would try to end “the Darien odyssey that does not have a reason to exist.”
The migrant route through the narrow isthmus grew exponentially in popularity in recent years with the help of organized crime in Colombia, making it an affordable, if dangerous, land route for hundreds of thousands.
It remains a risky route, however. Reports of sexual assaults have continued to rise, some migrants are killed by bandits in robberies and others drown trying to cross rushing rivers.
Even so, some 147,000 migrants have already entered Panama through Darien this year.
In a local radio interview Thursday, Mulino said the idea of shutting down the migration flow is more philosophical than a physical obstacle.
“Because when we start to deport people here in an immediate deportation plan the interest for sneaking through Panama will decrease,” he said. By the time the fourth plane loaded with migrants takes off, “I assure you they are going to say that going through Panama is not attractive because they are deporting you.”
It’s also unlikely that much could be accomplished without a lot of cooperation and coordination with Colombia and other countries, he said.
Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said that “without considering the risk of returning migrants to dangerous situations, in mathematical terms I don’t know how they hope to massively deport” migrants.
“A daily plane, which would be extremely expensive, would only repatriate around 10% of the flow (about 1,000 to 1,200 per day). The United States only manages to do about 130 flights monthly in the entire world,” Isacson said.
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