By Wendy Anders

As undocumented immigrants from various regions continue to permeate Panama and Costa Rica, and present a growing concern from economic, health and social angles, the countries are scurrying to put into place official information-sharing and other essential mechanisms for tackling the pressing problem.

This week, foreign ministry representatives from Costa Rica and Panama held a technical meeting to develop some new, and also to strengthen existing binational agreements on illegal immigration, security, and indigenous migrant workers, reported Costa Rica’s Foreign Ministry in a press statement.

Christian Guillermet, general director of foreign policy, headed the Costa Rican delegation, and German Edilma, general deputy director of foreign policy, was Panama’s representative at the technical meeting.

Guillermet qualified as “urgent” the need for the countries to strengthen their information-sharing as well as to define coordinated and comprehensive national and bilateral actions to work “in solidarity” on the issue of undocumented immigration.

Proposals discussed included exchanging intelligence and coordinating preventive operations. The delegations began to define specific actions to be taken towards these ends such as creating migratory alert systems at airports and borders in order to combat and prevent organized crime and human trafficking, strengthening anti-drug operations, enhancing search and rescue operations, and monitoring and preventing illegal fishing.

The delegations agreed to work towards concluding negotiations on the “Agreement between the Republic of Panama and the Republic of Costa Rica to Implement Migration Alerts and Security Information Exchange Mechanisms,” which will be signed soon, stated the Foreign Ministry.

The delegations also reviewed the progress on the binational Bugle Ngöbe temporary migrant program. Members of this indigenous group migrate temporarily each year from Panama into Costa Rica’s southern highlands to harvest coffee. The countries have a joint program to allow for registering births, deaths, and marriages that occur during their seasonal migration, and for providing health coverage and other types of governmental assistance during their time in Costa Rica.

Finally, the two countries aim to sign in December a framework for cross-border control systems to facilitate binational trade, stated Costa Rica’s Foreign Ministry.