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At least 39 people were killed early Wednesday when a bus carrying 66 migrants from Panama’s Darién Gap fell off a cliff, local authorities said. The crash highlighted the dangers of the increasingly common journey through Central America towards the United States.
The bus was transporting the migrants to a shelter in Chiriquí, a province in western Panama that borders Costa Rica, around 4:40 a.m. when the driver missed the entrance to the shelter, turned around and lost control of the vehicle, Samira Gozaine said. Panama’s Migration Director. It collided with another bus and crashed off a cliff.
All of the passengers were migrants who had paid for private bus service to reach the shelter on their way north, Gozaine told the Washington Post. Some of the dead were children, she said.
Several other passengers are hospitalized with serious injuries. “We envision that everyone on this bus has some type of injury,” Gozaine said.
A hospital treated 10 children, between the ages of 4 and 11, who were injured in the accident, medical director a local news station. Three were in critical condition as of early afternoon.
The bus was driven by two Panamanians who were properly licensed, Gozaine said. At least one of the drivers was killed.
The authorities have not identified the nationalities of the migrants, but Cuba’s foreign minister confirmed on twitter that Cuban nationals were among the passengers. As Panamanian officials continue to investigate the crash, limited cellular service in the area has made communications difficult.
This is the first fatal accident involving migrants for at least a year, Gozaine said, despite a record number of migrants having crossed the Darién River on their way to the United States. The 66-mile stretch of dense jungle and swamp on the Colombia-Panama border, the only gap in the 19,000-mile Pan American Highway from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina, serves as a barrier between South and Central America.
According to the Panamanian government, nearly 250,000 people crossed the Darién in 2022, almost double the number of the previous year. More than 150,000 of them were Venezuelans, twice as many as in the previous year.
The next largest groups were Ecuadorians, Haitians, and Cubans. About 16 percent were children and young people, according to the International Organization for Migration.
At least 36 people died in the Darién Gap last year, according to data collected by the IOM Missing Migrants Project. But many deaths in the jungle are never reported and remains are never recovered, the agency said, making it difficult to know exactly how many people died on the journey.
At a meeting on Tuesday, Colombian and Panamanian officials agreed to step up joint military operations in the Darién jungle to combat irregular migration, drug trafficking and illegal mining.
According to Juan Pino, Panama’s security minister, about 37,000 migrants have entered the country so far this year.
The Panamanian government requires migrants to take these buses to continue their journey to Costa Rica after crossing the Darién Gap and staying overnight in a refugee camp on the Panamanian side, said Juan Pappier, deputy associate director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch, who traveled to the area last year.
“If you force people to take these buses, you are responsible for everything that happens on them,” Pappier said. He argued that the fatal crash exposed the “reckless and lax migration policies of the Panamanian authorities, who simply want the migrants to go away.”
On his visit, Pappier noted that buses began to fill up around 3 p.m. and then waited until dark before departing. Pappier asked a driver why, he recalled, and the driver replied, “Because we don’t want migrants to escape.”
Migrants spend long hours on these buses, which don’t even make toilet stops, Pappier said. They are often so narrow that migrants have to stand in the aisle. A bus crashed last year, injuring several passengers, some of whom Pappier interviewed. None of them were taken to a hospital for medical treatment, the migrants told Pappier. They were simply picked up by another bus to continue on their way.
The crash, he added, “unfortunately came as pretty unsurprising. It was a matter of time.”
Gozaine told local reporters earlier Wednesday that bus drivers often prefer to transport migrants at night or early in the morning to avoid traffic.
“Usually, after such a difficult journey through the jungle, they really want to get there quickly,” she said. “They want to get to a shelter quickly where they can be cared for and fed and continue on their way.”
Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo lamented the crash early Wednesday.
“It is with great sadness that I receive the news of the traffic accident in Gualaca, Chiriquí,” he tweeted. “This news is unfortunate for Panama and the region. The national government extends its condolences to the families of those killed in this accident and reiterates its commitment to continue providing humanitarian assistance and decent conditions to address irregular migration.”