Panamanian Foreign Minister Erika Mouynes reported this past Tuesday, that tens of thousands of migrants—including many Haitians, but other countries’ citizens as well—are already moving up through Central America and Mexico towards the United States, with around 30,000 more already waiting on the Colombian border to enter Panama on their way north.
“This is the beginning of something.… What we can say now is, that by the numbers we see, [immigration] is going to increase,” she warned.
What she described happening in the Americas, is what has been seen in the Mediterranean, in Central Asia, in Africa, as the old imperial order dies. This horror, of tens of millions of families forced to move all over the world from country to country, risking their lives solely to find some place where they might live a human life, can only be stopped with the kind of global paradigm- shift which the Schiller Institute has put on the table.
“Something must be done; not doing anything is not an option,” Foreign Minister Mouynes stated. What is needed is “a shared solution for this migratory wave, which involves migrants of African, Caribbean, Cuban, Haitian, and other nationalities,” who have often already traveled long distances through various South American nations, by the time they arrive at Panama’s southern border.
“When we receive them on the Panamanian side [of the border], they are malnourished. The children are in terrible condition, so even getting them up to a healthy state takes time.”
More people crossed through the dangerous jungles of Panama’s Darien Gap in the month of August than in all of 2019 — nearly 27,000, her government estimates. There would have been many more, but Panama tries to enforce a quota system, so that they are able to provide those who make it through the Darien Gap some food and medical attention.
Mouynes spoke from Washington, D.C., where she had come for two days of meetings with State Department and National Security Council officials, and as many Members of Congress as possible, to wake up the U.S. capital to the urgency of coordinating policy for handling these waves of migrants with the other countries of the Americas.
She specifically added that the international community must help Haiti “face the humanitarian and political crisis which it is going through,” but in her remarks to the press, at least, she only spoke of “coordinating” so as to humanely “manage” these waves of people moving through, while actually stopping such inhumane conditions requires a total change in global policy.
