Migrants are looking for new routes on their return trip to South America

Many migrants They are guided by the “voice to voice” and social networks to find new routes to continue their way to return to South America, after seeing their dream of reaching USA After the new immigration restrictions of the president Donald Trump.

In Panama the Tiktok And mouth has taken them to the coastal area of ​​Palenque, a fishing village in the Caribbean province of Colón, after running the voice that from there departed three ships managed by the Panamanian authorities with 180 migrants to the border with Colombia.

Dozens of them arrived at the scene only a few hours after the three large wooden boats sail and covered to cover long distances.

This new journey was apparently designed to avoid the danger of smaller boat trips, after last week he shipwrecked a boat in which 21 people with migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were traveling, dying an 8 -year -old Venezuelan girl.

However, after the exit of the three larger ships, it is now the boats with outboard engines and with extra fuel provisions that have taken over for the transport of migrants, where they travel with “Much risk”they say, about 30 people.

Social networks and migration

Like other migrants consulted by EFE, the Venezuelan Oscarli Pineda said she learned of this new route through the “voice to voice” and the comments for the social networks of others who had used it.

«Normally one finds out by Tiktok, for the social networks», Pineda explained on this migrant route, and pointed out that “A friend who was there in Tapachula had already passed and told us, then.”

Pineda arrived in Panama after starting in Tapachula, Mexico, his return trip, not getting into the United States after waiting months. Unlike when the Central American country entered for the first time, crossing the dangerous jungle of the Darién border with Colombia, now opts for the Caribbean Sea for the reverse journey.

The South American added that now it happens as before in the Darién jungle when “A group was doing the way, until they were more and more and more, so also of return: a group comes out and comes and sees how things are and explaining to those who come behind, and running the voice between the immigrants themselves.”

Even so, Pineda acknowledges that this new route is an option with a “very expensive” cost for migrantsbut he says that “It is the only method we have not to enter the jungle.”

However, he accepts that both the sea and the jungle “are dangerous routes”, but that “preferable” is the first “because we are going boat and we are not walking, we are not running out.”

“That is, there are so many things that we can avoid in the sea (although) it is certainly a risk, but the truth is too expensive and only they will know why they charge that”said Pineda, who has been in Panama for a week.

His trip there, he details, was fast: Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, but in Panama, he said, “it has cost us”, although not as much as other migrants, to which the “migra returned to Costa Rica.”

Economic opportunity

Meanwhile, in Palenque, the arrival of migrants is also seen as an economic opportunity.

“We are seeing the flow of migrants that is going back to their destination that is to Venezuela, here people have benefited a lot with this and working orderly,” He told Efe Ameth Mesa, mayor of Santa Isabel, a district to which Palenque belongs, and that he added that “it is the first time something like this happens in this area.”

Mesa indicated that Santa Isabel is a tourist district, so he hopes that with the arrival of Venezuelan migrants, he will capture international attention, because they have “quite potential on beaches, good people and tourism.”

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said Thursday that more than 2,000 people in mobility have entered Panama this month by the border with Costa Rica in a growing inverse migratory flow to the south, while still falling the number of these who insist on going to the United States.