Panama’s President-Elect Reiterates Promise to Deport U.S.-Bound Migrants Crossing Darien Gap

President-Elect of Panama José Raúl Mulino reiterated on Thursday his plans to deport U.S-bound migrants who cross Panama through the dangerous Darien Gap jungle trail.

Mulino made the assertion as part of his speech given after the National Scrutiny board officially proclaimed him president of Panama for the 2024-2029 term.

“I will make an effort, that I have already started to talk about, to end the odyssey of the Darien, which has no reason to exist, and I reiterate that Panama and our Darien is not a transit route,” Mulino said:

No sir, that is our border, and the concept of closure [of the Darien gap] that I have outlined also implies a philosophical concept that is related to closing the border on the grounds that we will initiate with international help a process of repatriation with full respect for the human rights of all the people who are there.

Mulino warned “those over there [in South American nations] and those who would like to come” that “whoever arrives here will be sent back to their country of origin.”

Mulino, a 64-year-old conservative lawyer and former security minister, was elected president of Panama in Sunday’s 2024 general elections as a candidate for “Save Panama,” a coalition composed of the conservative Realizing Goals Party and the centrist Alliance Party. Mulino obtained 34.23 percent of the votes, giving him ten percent more votes than his closest rival, Ricardo Lombana of the Another Way Movement (MOCA) Green Party.

Mulino was a “last-minute” candidate in 2024’s presidential race, joining as a stand-in replacement candidate for former President Ricardo Martinelli (2009-2014), who was banned from running after local courts sentenced him to ten years in prison on money laundering charges in 2023.

Since February, Martinelli has remained inside the Nicaraguan embassy in Panama City, where he sought asylum after the Supreme Court of Panama denied his appeal requests. Local authorities have not granted Martinelli a safe passage out of Panama.

Mulino will take office on July 1, succeeding current outgoing center-left President Laurentino Cortizo.

During his presidential campaign, Mulino vowed to close the Darien Gap, a dangerous jungle trail that Panama shares with neighboring Colombia. In recent years, the Darien Gap has been crossed by hundreds of thousands of migrants from South American nations and other regions to reach the United States.

According to Panamanian government statistics, roughly 520,000 migrants were documented to have crossed the Darien Gap in 2023, a record-breaking number that doubles that of 2022.

The majority of the migrants who crossed the Darien Gap in 2023, according to the Panamanian government, were Venezuelan nationals, followed by nationals from Ecuador, Haiti, and China. 

Panama’s Migration Service informed on April 18 that 125,311 migrants crossed through the Darien Gap between January and April 17.

In April, Mulino stated that he would “close” the Darien Gap and deport migrants in accordance with human rights provisions if elected president. He has not publicly disclosed the specific details of his plan to close the Darien Gap.

The Office of the Mayor of the Colombian town of Necoclí, which borders Panama, expressed “deep concern” over Mulino’s April statements on the Darien, claiming that “measures such as the one contemplated by the new government of Panama could further exacerbate the migratory flow” toward the shared Colombian-Panamanian border territory.

“Just two months ago we experienced a critical situation with a damming of approximately 1,000 migrants, which generated chaos in our municipality due to our limited capacities to attend to such a volume of population,” the mayor’s office said in a statement.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.