The former Minister of Security, Rodolfo Aguilera, analyzed this Friday morning the issue of insecurity in the country and the alert issued by the United States embassy in Panama, regarding the crime wave.
He stated that this government must resume the resocialization work that it had before, not only in the streets but also in prisons.
“I think that the great problem of Panamanian security and justice is that we have a bottleneck, 70 thousand crimes are reported a year, 350 thousand in a presidential period, we have 30 thousand police officers to deal with these problems, but we only have about 300 prosecutors, then it is a kind of tsunami of crimes that falls to the prosecution, and the prosecutors try to process it with a kitchen funnel and that is a physically impossible task, that translates into exorbitant numbers of acquittals and resolutions of not guilty ” , argument.
According to Aguilera, another latent problem is the penitentiary system, which has as one of its objectives to rehabilitate and reintegrate individuals, “not to prevent them from committing crimes because they have already committed crimes, but to prevent them from reoffending. There is no type of rehabilitation and reintegration programs, 60% relapse in the first year after leaving, according to data from the PRD government plan and 85% relapse in total, counting those who relapse after the first year after leaving and subsequently”.
The former minister continued: “I see that the problem of insecurity is not only the victimization of Panamanians, the terror in which we live, but also the damage it does to foreign direct investment.”
In Aguilera’s opinion, there are three phenomena that have occurred in this government and that have done very serious damage to foreign direct investment. “The first has been the elimination of the ‘friendly country’ visa, which was a simple and easy-to-manage visa that, during its lifetime, managed to attract nearly 21,000 foreigners from friendly countries where crime rates are very low. We are talking about 21 thousand foreigners who came to the country; The second is that the homicide rate shot up from 9 to 10% at the time I was in the ministry to 13%, which is where it is today and continues to rise, 544 homicides in the last 12 months without counting October and November; The third event that has hurt foreign direct investment and will continue to hurt it, is the warning from the United States department and the American embassy, because Americans represent the largest number of residential tourists in our country. This is a terrible damage because it is profitable tourism for the country, ”he said.
He stressed that Panama has distinguished itself greatly by North American and European residential tourism.
