The current took them first. Ten migrants who tried to cross a swollen river in Panama’s Darien Gap were swept away, and their bodies were later spotted near the Indigenous community of Carreto, the National Border Service said in a statement on Wednesday.
The nationalities of the dead have not been identified. A prosecutor’s office is looking into the details. An agency official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not cleared to discuss the case, said the drownings are believed to have happened on July 16. The area is so remote that the information only now came out. The Guardian reported that the group was probably heading for the United States.
Rain is the detail that matters. It is the wet season in Panama, and the rivers that cut through the jungle run harder and faster than usual. Authorities said this was one of the largest drowning tolls they can remember.
A crowded, deadly route
The numbers explain why the border service keeps count. More than 500,000 migrants crossed the Darien in 2023, a record, and double the figure for 2022 according to the Guardian. Panama’s border police recorded 84 deaths last year. This year, more than 212,000 people have entered Panama through the jungle, and at least 29 had died before these ten were announced. More than half of the people making the trek come from Venezuela.
Other dangers sit alongside the water. The Guardian listed armed bandits who commit sexual assault, tropical infections, venomous snakes and steep ravines. In February, five Afghan migrants drowned and one went missing off the coast as they tried to reach Panama by boat from Colombia.
Barbed wire and politics
The deaths followed closely on a change in policy. Days earlier, Panama had strung barbed wire across some popular trails, around three miles of it, to funnel migrants to a single reception point. President José Raúl Mulino, who took office on 1 July, had promised to stop migration through the jungle with help from the U.S. government. On 16 July he told reporters that Panama could not force migrants onto planes home and that repatriation would be voluntary.
Whether the ten chose the rainy season because of his tough talk is not known. Blaine Bookey of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies said the deaths show that making the route harder does not stop people using it. “These tragic deaths underscore that draconian policies are not a deterrent,” she said. “When people are fleeing for their lives they’re willing to take risks of an uncertain death rather than stay trapped in a burning house where death is certain.”
The border service blamed “transnational organized crime through local collaborators in Caribbean coastal communities” that “insist on using unauthorized paths putting the lives of these people at serious risk.” Barriers at one spot often push people toward riskier and more remote routes, NBC News noted, a pattern also seen along the U.S. southwest border.
Sources
- 10 migrants drown in rushing river crossing Darien Gap in Panama
- Ten people drown in Darién Gap while trying to cross swollen river
