LAJAS BLANCAS, Panama – Duperat Laurette fled Haiti after the great earthquake of his country in 2010, first traveled to the Dominican Republic, then to Chile and five years later to Panama, all with the dream of reaching the United States and locating a task of assisting 14 abandoned brothers in Haiti.
The coronavirus stopped her.
Panama, the narrow bottleneck between the American and South American comalignants, is a transit point for virtually all migrants from South America to the United States by land and closed its borders on March 16 to prevent the spread of COVID-19.nearly 2,000 migrants from Haiti and a handful of African and Asian countries stranded in jungle camps along Panama’s northern and southern borders.
They are among the thousands, if any, of migrants stranded in countries around the world due to the closure of the borders connected to the virus.
Thousands of transit personnel across Asia were stranded outside New Zealand’s gates when the country closed its borders; other Asian employees were stranded at Moscow airports; migrants were also abandoned in makeshift situations in the Sahara desert after being evicted without caution from detention centres in Algeria and Libya.
Migrants in Panama say they know that the United States has in fact suspended its asylum procedure at the southern border, but they still need to keep going there, hoping they can enter in some way.
Laurette, 45, and her husband arrived at the Panamanian border with Colombia seven months ago and did go further.There are no opportunities to paint in the jungle, and she and her husband have exhausted their money.
While at another camp, Laurette was taken to the hospital so doctors said, a fibroid that caused her pains in her abdomen and caused her to lose weight.
“They took me to the hospital for surgery, but they never did,” he says.”They said there was no room for the operation, the hospital is full of COVID-19 cases.”
However, the couple rejected Panama’s offers of loose flights to the country, many migrants left their home countries years ago and cannot believe they return worse than before.
“I’m still sick. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Laurette said at his local Kreyol.
Tensions are emerging here in Lajas Blancas, where some two hundred migrants are waiting, and near Peitas, where some of the nearly 1,100 migrants were charged last month by police to set fire to tents containing medical supplies in the camp.imprisoned in the incident and can be deported.
Jean Bernadeau raised a young woman and pointed out the marks left by mosquito bites on her legs.”We know there’s a serious illness there,” he said. We can’t stay here forever.”
“The challenge here is that we have a lot of children, pregnant women,” said Bernadeau, another Haitian who came from Chile, who had lived there for five years and had $4,000 stored to continue his journey, but that money was over.now.” Here we live as prisoners in a prison.”
Migrant trafficking through Darien’s dense and harmful jungle has been intense for more than a decade.This is the first time the government has interrupted him for a fitness emergency abroad.
In 2015 and 2016, a massive influx of Cuban migrants attempted to succeed on the U.S. border before a U.S. policy that favored them ended, forcing Central American countries to send migrants in parts of their route.
Panama experienced a wave of migrants in early 2019 that led to agreements with neighboring Costa Rica to allow its loose passage. Most of the stranded in Panama fled Haiti after the earthquake that left the country in ruins. Many have been running in Brazil and Chile for years, saving cash to continue north.
In Lajas Blancas, migrants live in a grassy box under canvases on tight wooden platforms between a dirt road and the brown waters of a river; a row of portable baths is on the other side of the road and the jungle surrounds them.his food on a wood fire. Border police guard the front of the camp.
Jean Edoly, a 30-year-old Haitian, is there with his wife and two children, 2-year-olds, born in Chile.”They don’t feed us well. They feed us like dogs,” he says.
The Panamanian government says it is offering humanitarian aid to migrants. Together with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he has built a new camp with larger shelters on the outskirts of Metet, where he hopes to be able to move 400 migrants soon., especially families with young children.
“The Panamanian government is asking you to remain calm.We’ve been doing it for six months. What’s left isn’t much.The Gentile is noticeable at the end of the tunnel,” said Public Security Minister Juan Pino on a recent scale in the region.
Panama reported more than 92,000 contagions and 2,000 COVID-19 deaths.In recent weeks, contagion has stabilized and deaths have declined.The government recently announced a plan that will allow greater economic activity to reopen and restrictions to be lifted from September 7.
In Lajas Blancas, migrants did wear masks or practice social estbankment, but Pino said there were no more than 10 infections between them.
Panama submitted flights back to Haiti in early August with the International Organization for Migration, but most migrants were not interested, Pino said.
Edoly downplayed this as “impossible.”
“We have a destiny. We have a dream to achieve,” he said, reciting a list of countries through which migrants traveled.”We need to give our young people a better life.”
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