Panama launches a plan to free itself from gangs with more than a thousand police officers

The president of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, launched a plan to “free” the country from the gangs – with which most homicides are linked – that puts more than a thousand policemen patrol the streets checking “house by house or farm by farm” of the main dangerous areas.

“This plan aims to free Panama from the gangs. Starting today we will go house by house, farm by farm or wherever the gang members hide to put them where they should be: prison,” Mulino said in an event at the headquarters of the National Police, according to a statement from the Panamanian Presidency.

The ‘Panama 3.0’ plan will put about 1,032 police officers in the main “conflict points” such as the province of Colón (Caribbean and one of the most dangerous in the country), West Panama (adjacent to the capital), San Miguelito (peripheral district with high rates of insecurity), the Canal area and other popular areas near the city.

“All this has a single purpose: that every working Panamanian feels that peace and security return. The challenge is great, it was many years of lack of leadership giving free rein to organized crime throughout the country. But from today, we begin the path to change this reality and turn Panama, again, into the safest country in the region,” Mulino remarked.

According to the statistics of the Prosecutor’s Office, 19% of the 556 homicides recorded in the country in 2023 occurred in Colón and 18% in San Miguelito, which were positioned as the second and third most violent area in the country, only surpassed by Panama, which registered 38%.

The police units will have “vehicle patrols, mobile checkpoints and police checkpoints,” placed in those areas to “block the mobility corridors of groups that operate outside the law to perpetrate high-impact crimes,” according to official information.

“Now many more policemen will be seen on the streets, with the order to protect and defend honest Panamanians. I’m on the side of the honest Panamanian who suffers a robbery on the street or who is assaulted in his house,” Mulino said.

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The Panamanian president also stressed that his “commitment is to the good citizen and I will be by his side” and “for that, he announced the creation of new groups of vigilant neighbors, vigilant entrepreneurs and the implementation of the new program of vigilant schools, which will provide integral security to students, faculty and parents.”

Mulino had already referred to that plan during his weekly press conference on Thursday by pointing out that “the issue of security” is linked to drug trafficking, a statement that he has already made before by recognizing, even, the leakage of this type of crime in the State.

“This issue of security has a relationship of two aspects, one media, and another the cause that generates it, depending on the enormous amount of drugs that is seized in this country, by the tons, the aftermath of deaths and bills is great,” said the president.

Since the end of August, a night curfew has been applied in the two ‘hottest’ areas of the country – where the new plan is now being developed – to “clean” them of the gangs, as Mulino said at the time.

In Panama there are about 150 gangs, although their way of acting and their aesthetics is very different from the Central American gangs, which are much bigger, violent and identifiable by their tattoos.

Authorities maintain that 70% of the murders in the country are linked to organized crime, including gangs, which deal with hiding the drug that arrives from South America and moving it to go out to North America and Europe, as well as retailing in the local market, according to official information.

Until August 2024, there were 406 homicides, an increase compared to the same period last year when 362 were recorded, according to figures from the Panamanian Prosecutor’s Office.