PANAMA CITY, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- Four migrants died and seven others were missing after their boat overturned off Panama's northeast coast due to bad weather, Panamanian authorities said Wednesday.
The other 14 are safe, according to a local media report reposted by the Central American country's national border service called Senafront.
The migrants were presumably being transported by criminal groups, it said.
The boat had set off from Colombia and capsized near the community of Carreto in the Guna Yala indigenous province of Panama.
Search patrols have been dispatched in coordination with the Public Ministry and immigration authorities to recover the bodies, rescue the survivors and pursue the traffickers, Senafront said.
Each year, thousands of migrants try to enter Panama through the Darien Gap, the only overland route connecting Central and South America, on their way north in search of work.
Stretching over 60 miles (some 96.6 km) through forest and swamp, the Darien Gap is widely regarded as one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world. The "Darien is not a route, but a jungle," Senafront said.
Senafront said it recently reinforced patrols and other measures to stop the increasing arrival of migrant boats to combat migrant trafficking by transnational criminal organizations.
In 2023 alone, 520,085 migrants made their way from Colombia to Panama through the Darien border region, more than the 500,144 migrants who passed through that same route from 2009 to 2022, data from Panama's National Migration Service showed. ■
