The number of US-bound children who crossed the dangerous Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia exploded by a record sevenfold in the past year, authorities said.
According to UNICEF, between January and February 2023 about 9,700 minors crossed the Darien Gap; in the same period of the previous year, some 1,400 were documented.
"Our teams on the ground have never seen such numbers of children crossing the Panamanian jungle alone or with their parents," Panama-based Garry Conille, UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said in a statement.
"This figure is the highest that has been recorded in a period of two months since these records were kept," he said.
Laurent Duviller, a UNICEF adviser, told AFP the rise in migrant children is due to multiple reasons, including increased inequality, unemployment in host countries, and the lack of schooling after the pandemic.
In addition, in two months at least 200 children crossed the jungle alone, a number five times higher than the same period in 2022, when fewer than 40 crossed it.
"We are concerned about this group because unaccompanied children are at high risk of falling into networks of traffickers and criminals," Duviller said.
In addition, "these children are very vulnerable to forms of violence, exploitation, child labor and various types of abuse because they do not have any supervision," he added.
No roads connect Panama and Colombia, so migrants cross the swampy Darien Gap on foot. It has become a corridor for irregular migration traveling from South America through Central America to the United States.
On their journey, migrants face wild animals, mighty rivers, and criminal groups.
In January and February 2023, nearly 50,000 people crossed the Panamanian jungle, and almost a fifth of them were children.
In 2022, about 250,000 people made the jungle crossing. Of these, 16 percent were children.
The migrants were mainly from Venezuela, Ecuador and Haiti, although some also came from Asian and African countries.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, "many children" are moving between various countries "under extreme conditions," Conille said.
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© Agence France-Presse
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