By: Staff Writer
July 23, 2024
Panama’s government has begun to take concrete steps to deal with the migrant crisis through the infamously treacherous Darien Gap and some of it involves deportation and another involves implementing barbed wire.
Panama’s government expects to start deportation flights for migrants who crossed the country’s dangerous Darien jungle in two to three months, the country’s chief of migration Roger Mojica said Friday.
The flights will be paid by the United States under a recent agreement that the two countries closed earlier this month.
“We are establishing the needs, equipment and requirements that Panama has to face in order to start the program, and we are in conversations with the United States,” Mojica said during a conference call. “We estimate we should be able to start the process in two to three months.”
Meanwhile, Panama is also implementing barbed wire along the Darien Gap. Videos of the barbed-wire barriers appeared as early as June 27 in WhatsApp groups for people planning to migrate to the U.S., causing users to ask who was behind the move and if they could still get across the jungle. Since then, the Ministry of Public Security of the Republic of Panama has claimed responsibility for the new installations.
“The patrol at the national border service has begun to block the majority of border passages,” Panama’s minister of public security, Frank Abrego, said at a June 28 news conference during a visit to the Darien Gap.
Abrego said that one passage will remain open and that migrants there must present a passport or another form of identification to Panamanian migration authorities. All this, he said, is an effort to manage the flow of people coming in and to prevent organized crime from entering Panamanian cities.
The president of Panama, Jose Raul Mulino, said the ongoing migrant crisis in the Western Hemisphere is a “United States problem,” adding deportation flights that are partly funded by the U.S. are only voluntary.
“This is a United States problem that we are managing,” Mulino said Thursday. “People don’t want to live here in Panama. They want to go to the United States.”
Panama is a key crossing area for migrants moving north as many move through the Darien Gap, a massive jungle crossing Panama and Colombia that serves as a pathway through Central America and toward the U.S.