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Panama City – Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino announced Thursday that U.S.-funded repatriation flights would take migrants who had arrived in Panama through the Darién jungle to the border country of Colombia, from where the crossers entered.
«They will fly to Colombia (repatriation flights). Everyone enters through Colombia, not through Venezuela. We do not have a border with Venezuela, but with Colombia, and this issue is being resolved, ”Mulino said at his weekly press conference.
On July 1, Panama and the United States signed an agreement to repatriate migrants who traveled through Darien on Panama-funded flights. The agreement means the United States will provide $6 million worth of support, which will not be “delivered directly” to the Panamanian government but will be used to finance the implementation of the program.
This week, Gen. Laura Richardson, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, also visited Panama and held meetings with various authorities, including the Panamanian president.
“I spoke about the issue and told General Richardson that we are waiting for the MOU (memorandum of understanding/agreement between the two parties on the repatriation of migrants),” Mulino noted on Thursday.
«The ball is in their court. “We have done everything we could, but nothing has happened on the American side, which has attached so much importance and pressure to the signing of this memorandum of understanding,” the president said.
He added that the agreement “has been signed, there is a path forward, and I understand the complexity of the current situation with the U.S. administration and its campaign, but the problem is there, the border is in Panama, not Texas.”
The agreement is aimed at reducing the flow of migrants through the dangerous Darien jungle, which has seen more than 216,000 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, cross so far this year and more than 520,000 for all of 2023, an unprecedented number, according to official Panamanian data.
For its part, the Central American country has gradually installed, since July 3, about 4.7 kilometers of “perimeter barriers” (barbed wire) in the Darien region to “channel” the flow of people, where there are at least five unauthorized passages or paths for migrants to pass through “humanitarian corridors.”
According to Panamanian authorities, as Mulino recalled on Thursday, last July the flow of migrants decreased compared to the previous month.
However, Panama’s president has previously said the number of migrants passing through the Darien River could increase depending on how the situation in Venezuela develops after the July 28 elections, as most of the migrants come from that Caribbean country.
Darien is a 266-kilometer stretch of jungle that forms the natural border between Panama and Colombia. Migrants pass through these places on their way to North America, often facing dangers such as sudden flooding of rivers, attacks by wild animals or armed groups who charge them tolls or rob them, sometimes becoming victims of sexual abuse. JS
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