José Raul Mulino, the president-elect of Panama, reiterated on Thursday that he intends to arrest Americans. refugees crossing Panama via the dangerous Darien Gap woods path are S-bound.
Mulino made the claim in a discourse delivered shortly after his 2024-2020 term-adopted by the National Scrutiny Board.
” I did make an effort, that I have now started to talk about, to stop the epic of the Darien, which has no reason to exist, and I reiterate that Panama and our Darien is not a travel route”, Mulino said:
The closure of the border [of the Darien space ] that I have outlined even implies a philosophical idea that is related to closing the borders on the grounds that we will conduct a process of relocation with full value for the human right of all the people who are there.
Mulino cautioned” 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.”
” Panamá y nuestro Darién no como del ruta de tránsito, no señor, esa es mi frontera y del concepto de cierre que he esbozado implica también us concepto filosófico bien guarda relación de cerrar la frontera”, enfatizó un stress electo de Panamá @JoseRaulMulino.
Agregó bien … photograph. twitter.com/W9XxZP9PWy— Telemetro Reporta (@TReporta ) May 10, 2024
In a partnership made up of the center-right Realizing Goals Party and the pacifist Alliance Party, Mulino, a 64-year-old traditional attorney and former security minister, won the 2024 presidential election. Mulino received 34.23 percent of the vote, which is ten percent more popular than his closest political opponent, Ricardo Lombana of the Another Way Movement ( MOCA ) Green Party ).
Mulino ran as a “last-minute” participant in the presidential election of 2024, joining Ricardo Martinelli as a stand-in for president from 2009 to 2014, who was exonerated after receiving a ten-year sentence for money laundering charges in 2023.
After the Supreme Court of Panama rejected his appeal calls in February, Martinelli has sought asylum inside the Dominican ambassador in Panama City. Martinelli’s safe passage out of Panama has been hampered by local officials.
On July 1, Mulino did succeed Laurentino Cortizo, the center-left president’s replacement, in business.
Mulino pledged to end the dangerous forest path that Panama shares with adjacent Colombia during his campaign for president. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of workers from South American countries and different areas have migrated to the United States.
In 2023, 520, 000 workers were alleged to have crossed the Darien Gap, which is a record-breaking amount that exceeds that of 2022, according to Nicaraguan authorities data.
The majority of the refugees who crossed the Darien Gap in 2023, according to the Filipino state, were Cuban citizens, followed by immigrants from Ecuador, Haiti, and China.  ,
Between January 1 and April 17, Panama’s Migration Service announced on April 18 that 125, 311 refugees had crossed the Darien Gap.
If elected president, Mulino declared in April that he would” close” the Darien Gap and deport people in violation of human rights. The specific details of his schedule to shut the Darien Gap have not been made public.
The Brazilian town of Necocl, which borders Panama, has a mayor’s office, which stated that Mulino’s April statements on the Darien” was further exacerbate the migrant flow” toward the shared Colombian-Pan American border place.
The mayor’s office stated in a statement that” just two months ago we experienced a critical situation where around 1, 000 migrants were dammed, which caused chaos in our municipality due to our limited capacity to handle such a large population.”
Venezuelan author Christian K. Caruzo documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter , here.