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Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino announced that next Tuesday (August 20) flights funded by the United States will begin to pick up migrants who have crossed the Darien jungle on the border between Panama and Colombia.
“The return of migrants will start on August 20,” said Mulino in an interview with Univision Noticias, which aired last night and was sent to the media this Saturday by the President of Panama from the Dominican Republic, where Panamanians attended the inauguration of Luis Abinader.
He added: “I sincerely regret it because I know why many of them fled. “The political crisis in Venezuela is hanging them.”
Murino also reiterated that the migrants’ repatriation flights were funded by the United States and that “Panama does not bear any costs because it is their problem and the border is in Darien, not Texas.”
“The bulk of (the migrants) are Venezuelan. It’s a sad situation because they are human beings. (There are) broken families, children of five or six years old, whose parents died during the journey and now we have them in shelters in Panama and we don’t know who they are (or) what their names are,” Mulino said.
He also said that in the flow of migrants from Darien, Panamanian authorities who record migration data have found people “linked to narco-terrorism (and) international terrorism.”
Last Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said after a telephone conference with Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino that the United States is “ready” to begin an agreement with Panama in August to repatriate migrants who have passed through the Darien jungle by flight, according to a statement from the Panamanian presidency.
Repatriation Immigration Agreement
Panama and the United States signed an agreement on July 1 to repatriate migrants who cross the Darien River, a migration route that reaches North America daily via state-sponsored flights.
The agreement involves US support worth $6 million.
According to the latest information provided by Mulino on August 8, the return flights for the migrants who crossed the Darien jungle to Panama will go to the border country of Colombia, where these passers-by entered the country.
The goal is to reduce 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 data from Panama.
Since July 3 last year, Panama has gradually set up a “perimeter barrier” (barbed wire) of about 4.7 kilometers in the Darien area to “guide” migrants through a “humanitarian corridor” where there are at least five unauthorized passes or trails. According to the authorities, the migration flow decreased in July compared to the previous month.
Moulino has repeatedly insisted that the number of migrants passing through the Darien River could increase, depending on how the situation develops in Venezuela after the July 28 elections, as most of the migrants come from that Caribbean country.
Panama is also providing aid and food to migrants at a shelter in Darien so they can continue on buses paid for by the migrants to Costa Rica.
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