Q24N (EFE) — Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino expressed his concern last week about the rising number of migrants arriving in the country from the north in their irregular transit southward, after being prevented from entering the United States.
“I am concerned that the number of people coming from north to south is increasing,” Mulino said during his weekly press conference on Thursday, in which he specified that to date, Panamanian authorities have counted 11,810 people in this reverse flow.
The majority of these travelers detected by Panamanian authorities are Venezuelan nationals, followed by Colombians, Peruvians, and Ecuadorians, among others, including non-continental migrants such as Nepalis, Cameroonians, and Iranians, the Panamanian president commented.
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Mulino recalled that his administration, whose five-year term began on July 1, 2024, “closed” the roads in the Darien jungle used by “more than a million” irregular migrants on their journey north in recent years, amid an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the region.
In fact, on May 14, the Panamanian government closed the main immigration station at the exit of the jungle border with Colombia, given the drastic drop in the flow of irregular travelers northward.
The so-called reverse migration flow from north to south has become almost the only one existing in countries like Panama, where before Donald Trump became president of the United States, hundreds of migrants crossed the Darien jungle daily on their way to the United States, with a record number of more than 500,000 in 2023.
On their return, instead of crossing the jungle, migrants now take boats from ports in the Panamanian Caribbean to a town on the border with Colombia, from where they continue their journey to South America.
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