Blinken’s Panama visit will include corruption talks

US Secretary of State Antony  Blinken will be in Panama on April 19 and 20, to participate in the Ministerial Conference on Migration and Protection and high on the agenda will be corruption.

Blinken will be “co-host the meeting of foreign ministers from 20 countries to discuss collaboration on safe, orderly, and humane migration throughout our hemisphere.”

With him, Blinken will be the Secretary of National Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas. the undersecretary of the Department of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Brian A. Nichols; and a high-level team of regional experts.

Blinken will meet with President  Cortizo, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Erika Mouynes, He also has on his agenda meetings with representatives of multilateral development banks, international financial institutions, and international organizations.

Round table
Also on his agenda is a round table with regional civil society leaders focused on transparency and anti-corruption efforts, a growing challenge for democracy and economic stability in the hemisphere,” says a State Department press release.

Blinken is one of the people closest to the US president, Joe Biden. He has been his attorney for over 20 years. He was Deputy Secretary of State of the United States from 2015 to 2017 and between 2013 and 2015 he served as Deputy National Security Advisor under  Barack Obama. In 2021, in the middle of a tour of Ecuador and Colombia, he claimed that his country had focused too much on tackling the symptoms of organized crime, such as homicides and drug trafficking, and too little on the root causes. He promised that they would correct “that imbalance.”

He also highlighted a greater effort by the Biden administration to fight corruption in the region giving as an example the refusal of visas to officials involved in bribery.