Panama's next leader will try to shut down migration routes

PANAMA CITY, May 11 (AP): Panama is on the verge of a dramatic change to its immigration policy that could reverberate from the dense Darien jungle to the U.S. border.

President-elect José Raúl Mulino says he will shut down a migration route used by more than 500,000 people last year. Until now, Panama has helped speedily bus the migrants across its territory so they can continue their journey north.

Whether Mulino is able to reduce migration through a sparsely populated region with little government presence remains to be seen, experts say.

"Panama and our Darien are not a transit route. It is our border," Mulino said after his victory with 34% of the vote in Sunday's election was formalized Thursday evening.

As he had suggested during his campaign, the 64-year-old lawyer and former security minister said he would try to end "the Darien odyssey that does not have a reason to exist."

The migrant route through the narrow isthmus grew exponentially in popularity in recent years with the help of organized crime in Colombia, making it an affordable, if dangerous, land route for hundreds of thousands.

It grew as countries like Mexico, under pressure from the U.S. government, imposed visa restrictions on various nationalities including Venezuelans and just this week Peruvians in an attempt to stop migrants flying into the country just to continue on to the U.S. border.

But masses of people took the challenge and set out on foot through the jungle-clad Colombian-Panamanian border. A crossing that initially could take a week or more eventually was whittled down to two or three days as the path became more established and entrepreneurial locals established a range of support services.

It remains a risky route, however. Reports of sexual assaults have continued to rise, some migrants are killed by bandits in robberies and others drown trying to cross rushing rivers.

Even so, some 147,000 migrants have already entered Panama through Darien this year. Previous attempts to close routes around the world have simply shifted traffic to riskier paths.

"People migrate for many reasons and frequently don't have safe, orderly and legal ways to do it," said Giuseppe Loprete, chief of mission in Panama for the U.N.'s International Organization for Immigration. "When the legal routes are not accessible, migrants run the risk of turning to criminal networks, traffickers and dangerous routes, tricked by disinformation."