More than 5,000 children crossed the inhospitable Panamanian Darién jungle in 2022, twice the number of children in the same period last year, UNICEF warned on Friday (17).
“We are in the middle of the rainy season right now and our teams in the field are seeing a massive increase in children risking their lives walking through the jungle in the worst weather conditions,” warned UNICEF Director Jean Gough Americas, Latin America and the caribbean
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“More and more boys and girls are being forced to flee their homes as the only viable option for survival,” Gough added in a statement.
According to Unicef, from January 1 to May 31, more than 5,000 children crossed the Darién, double the number for the same period in 2021. Also, 2,000 children crossed the forest in May 2022, four times more than in May 2021.
Unicef also emphasized this Almost 170 children were unaccompanied or separated from their families. Some didn’t even have ID cards or birth certificates.
“What we’re seeing is that there’s a significant increase” of minors in the jungle, even though “there are a lot of risks,” Laurent Duvillier, UNICEF’s regional communications director, told AFP.
“The children arrive in very precarious conditions and need medical attention due to dehydration, skin infections, trauma from what they have seen such as sexual harassment, blackmail or people who have died along the way,” he added.
El Tapón del Darién, 5,000 km2 of rainforest on the PanamaColombia border, has become a corridor for irregular migrants trying to cross Central America from South America to the United States.
There are no roads on this road and migrants have to face raging rivers, wild animals and criminal gangs. According to official figures, more than 133,000 people, mostly Haitians and Cubans, crossed there in 2021. Almost a quarter of them were children.
In 2022, more than 32,000 people have already crossed the border, twice as many as in 2021. Now it is mostly Venezuelans.
According to Unicef, the situation caused the centers set up by the Panamanian government for these migrants to be overcrowded.