Panama President Mulino will Visit Ecuador to Discuss Trade Along with Investment and Security.

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino will visit Ecuador next Friday, September 4, to discuss issues related to investment, trade, and security with his counterpart, Daniel Noboa pictured below, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Roberto Kury announced.  A diplomatic source confirmed to news media on Tuesday that Mulino’s meeting with Noboa will take place in the coastal city of Guayaquil (southwest), but did not provide further details about the agenda.  Kury recalled on Radio Centro Digital that Ecuador and Panama have a “historical relationship” and stressed that with President Mulino “there is an excellent relationship.” 

The foreign minister noted that the Central American country is a financial, logistics and trade hub where many companies establish themselves to “distribute or enter Latin America”.  He indicated that the topics Ecuador and Panama are discussing include trade, investment, and security cooperation, especially in the fight against transnational organized crime with their stong police force as pictured below.  On October 24, Javier Martínez-Acha and Gabriela Sommerfeld, then foreign ministers of Panama and Ecuador respectively, agreed in Quito on the “urgent need” to fight transnational organized crime together and to work to make this fight a cross-cutting theme of the multilateral agenda. 

“We are brothers in history and united by many purposes. In democracy, for example, and in the fight against international organized crime, which, in my opinion, is the greatest threat facing our democracies. And together we must coordinate in the region to defeat this scourge,” Martínez-Acha asserted at the time.  Martínez-Acha arrived in Quito to attend the Second Meeting of Political Consultations, and signed two cooperation agreements with Sommerfeld related to the care and exchange of information to promote safe, orderly and regular migration, and another related to the strengthening of diplomatic academies. 

For his part, Sommerfeld noted that the meeting with Martínez-Acha allowed them to set the work agenda “for the future in trade, multilateral, and migration matters” and the “opening of new paths to integrate and strengthen” both economies.  On that last point, both indicated that the foreign ministries will promote technical approaches to advance negotiations for an Economic Complementation Agreement , focused on creating synergies and productive linkages between the economies of the two countries, to promote a balanced economic and trade exchange.  Kury commented that Mulino’s visit will be the second by a president to Ecuador in less than a month, after the Argentine leader, Javier Milei, visited the Andean country on August 6.  “I emphasize the great position that Ecuador is achieving in the world with the visits of all these presidents, foreign ministers and delegations from other countries,” noted the head of Ecuadorian diplomacy.