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On migrants, help is on the way, from an unexpected source: Panama

By Monica Showalter

The U.S. learns a lot about who its friends are and aren't, with Joe Biden's open-borders migrant crisis.

Now we learn that Panama, which has just elected Jose Raul Mulino, a center-right president, has plans to shut down the Darien Gap, which serves as a dangerous superhighway for all the migrant traffic making its way into the states from South America. Mulino actually ran for office on a vow to shut down the Darien Gap to migrant travel, saying they weren't a transit country for everyone else. He takes office in July.

If he succeeds -- and leftist analysts say it can't be done -- a critical stopgap in the pan-global migrant trade will come to a halt, meaning, South America won't shipping migrants from countries all over the world with South America as their launching point.

Mexico will become the main problem, which raises the spotlight, and U.S. leverage, on Mexico.

Some half a million migrants have already traversed the Darien Gap's treacherous jungle swamp-and-mountain region filled with crocodiles, leopards, drug dealers, powerful rivers, snakes, poisonous frogs, thorns, toxic plants, slippery rocks, and dead bodies, where no roads have ever been carved out.

Panama is a small country, so a half a million unvetted migrants, including much of Venezuela's criminal class, tramping through and leaving a lot of garbage and social problems on the fragile ecosystem, where native peoples are known to be angry about the human traffic waves, was obviously an issue for many voters.

The press said it wasn't, because the government bused migrants through the country to Costa Rica once they crossed the Gap, but there are definitely indicators that it was.

According to El Pais of Spain, it wasn't a publicly discussed issue very much.

Here's a Google translate:

The humanitarian emergency represented by the massive flow of migrants through the inhospitable Darién jungle that marks the Colombian-Panamanian border is not perceived in Panama City, nor has it been one of the important topics in the electoral debate of the Central American country, which attends this Sunday to the polls. And yet, the discourse against immigration has found a way to sneak into the presidential race, in the mouth, among others, of the poll favorite, former Security Minister José Raúl Mulino, who replaced the disqualified former president Ricardo Martinelli. “We are going to close Darién and we are going to repatriate all these people accordingly,” he said in statements reported by the Efe agency. Mulino, considered a champion of the heavy hand, assured that he would ask for support from the countries in the region involved in the migratory flow, such as Colombia and the United States, understanding that “Panama is not a transit country” and that many migrants are victims. of trafficking.

The chart of crossings seen on Foreign Policy's website is startling and tells a lot about the kinds of problems Panama (and other transit countries north of Panama) have been enduring.

So the reality is, the voters said 'no.' The backstory to how Mulino got elected, as described in Foreign Policy, is useful, too. He was the security minister of former president Ricardo Martinelli, a conservative who got knocked out of the race by his political enemies on a money-laundering charge. He was the frontrunner, very popular because voters remembered his previous term (they don't allow sucessive terms in Panama), and Mulino, a strong loyalist to Martinelli, was put in his place at the last minute, winning by surprise.

So obviously if it wasn't the open border that was driving this, it was the banana-republic maneuvers of the Panamanian left, which knocked out a president who brought prosperity to the country through lawfare, and voters could see it and sent a message.

Sound like any countries you know?

The bottom line for us is that Panama is proving to be a friend of the U.S. with this move. In placing Panama First on the migrant surge, they also proved to be a friend of the U.S. as well.

That's quite the opposite of what the socialist countries in the region are doing.

Nicaragua, for one, run by communist "little dictator" Daniel Ortega, has chosen to throw accelerator fuel onto the migrant crisis by faciliating flights from all over the world into Nicaragua as a money-making venture for itself, and sending them up north.

Venezuela has emptied its prisons of criminals, not political prisoners, perhaps to make more room for political prisoners, but in the main, to stick it to gringo.

Cuba has directed both socialist hellholes in their efforts to take down the U.S. with their poor man's weapon, illegal migration, which they learned to use as a tool to Get Gringo back in 1980.

Mexico has used the opportunity to attempt to extort the U.S. into dropping sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela, hand over a $20 billion "development" payment, and handing out amnesty to 10 million illegals. Mexico's aims may be dishonest and dishonorable, and certainly not the activity of a good neighbor, but its government knows a fool when it sees one.

The same harm that came to Panama from Biden's open border, also comes to these countries(including the U.S.), yet the governments of nearly all of these countries on the migrant superhighways let that harm happen to themselves, just to Get Uncle Sam. Obviously, Panama is different. The voters there chose Panama first, to save itself and its land from destruction.

Panama just threw the spanner into that Get Gringo-fest, and its actions to shut down that human trafficking highway of death and horrors is not only a means of standing for itself first, but a service to humanity. Sound like any countries you know?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/on_migrants_help_is_on_the_way_from_an_unexpected_source_panama.html