<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The START team (Spanish Technical Aid Response Team, for its acronym in English) sent by the Spanish Cooperation to the indigenous community of Bajo Chiquito, in the Panamanian province of Darién, began its sixth and last rotation this Wednesday, which will end a sixty-day mission to provide health support on one of the most dangerous migratory routes in Latin America.</strong></h4> Since arriving in Panama at the end of September, the team has provided medical and humanitarian assistance to both the migrant population and the local community, relying on the work of 57 volunteers (34 women and 23 men), including health and logistics personnel, according to a press release from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). The START mission deployed by AECID, in which professionals from different Autonomous Communities of Spain have participated, has operated with six rotations of fifteen days each, which, overlapping each other to facilitate the changeover, have included the presence of emergency medical personnel, midwives, pediatricians, epidemiologists and logisticians. Last Thursday, the START team in Panama received a visit from the director of AECID, Antón Leis. Thirteen volunteers are participating in this last rotation, scheduled until November 17, thus closing the medical intervention that has offered assistance to both the local Emberá population and the migrant population of 662 people on average who arrive daily in Bajo Chiquito in transit, predominantly from Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. The mission has been carried out in permanent coordination with the Ministry of Health of Panama (MINSA) and with the Darién Health Board, in which all the institutions and organizations that provide health services in the area are represented. Since the beginning of the mission, more than 2,100 people have been treated in Bajo Chiquito. Among those treated, 50% are minors, and approximately 20% are in situations of added vulnerability, with a high percentage of pregnant women and unaccompanied minors. The most frequent pathologies treated include acute gastroenteritis, respiratory infections and complications derived from the inhospitable terrain and adverse weather conditions. The medical team has also treated one in four inhabitants of Bajo Chiquito and more and more people from other towns, mainly pregnant women, have travelled to be treated. <h5><strong>The Darien Gap</strong></h5> More than 250,000 Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Haitian and Colombian migrants and refugees have crossed the so-called Darien Gap, one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world, so far in 2024, to try to reach the United States. Since 2020, the number of migrants crossing the Darien Gap has skyrocketed from 8,000 to almost 500,000 in 2023, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which has specified that the migrants are mainly citizens of Venezuela (almost 60%), followed by Haiti, Ecuador and, more recently, China. On July 1, King Felipe VI expressed his concern about the humanitarian crisis in Darien to the President of Panama, José Raúl Mulino, on the occasion of his inauguration. Since its launch in 2018, the START Team (known as the “red vests”) has carried out humanitarian missions in Mozambique (after the passage of Cyclone Idai in 2019), Bata (Equatorial Guinea, after the explosion of a gunpowder depot that devastated part of the city in 2021), Haiti (after the earthquake in August 2021), Turkey (after the earthquakes in 2023), apart from Darien. The START project, whose health team belongs to the public health system, has the capacity to be deployed, within a maximum of 72 hours, to any corner of the world where a humanitarian emergency occurs. Spain is, together with Italy and France, one of the three EU countries to have a team of this nature.
