The Cortizo PRD administration (1 July 2019 – 1 July 2024)
Laurentino “Nito” Cortizo Cohen of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) took office on 1 July 2019 after winning the presidential election with 33.27% of the vote in a fragmented field, succeeding Juan Carlos Varela of the Panameñista Party. His term ran through 1 July 2024 (the constitutional five-year maximum for a single Panamanian presidency). Cortizo was a career PRD politician of the party’s centrist wing: he had served as a member of the National Assembly for Colón Province from 1994 to 2004, as President of the National Assembly in 2000–2001, and as Minister of Agricultural Development under President Martín Torrijos, resigning from that ministry in 2006 over his objections to the US–Panama Free Trade Agreement negotiations. Before entering electoral politics he had spent the early 1980s in Washington, first as a technical advisor to the secretary-general of the Organization of American States and then as Panama’s alternate ambassador to the OAS. His running mate and vice president was José Gabriel Carrizo [1].
In June 2022, midway through his term, Cortizo was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a serious blood condition. The diagnosis did not interrupt his tenure, but it overlapped with the most demanding stretch of his presidency and became a recurring factor in the late-Cortizo political schedule [1].
The Cortizo term was dominated by three external shocks that together defined the administration’s public record: the 2020 COVID-19 recession and the fiscal expansion that followed it; the 2023 drought that forced the Panama Canal Authority to restrict canal transits; and the 2023–2024 surge in irregular migration through the Darién Gap. The second and third of these are covered in detail below. Cortizo also signed, on 31 March 2022, the decree establishing 20 December (the anniversary of the 1989 U.S. invasion) as an annual National Day of Mourning for the invasion’s victims, a long-standing demand of the Panamanian human-rights movement (covered in The US Invasion of Panama: December 1989) [1].
The Cobre Panamá mining controversy (2022–2025)
The defining domestic political crisis of the Cortizo term was the Cobre Panamá copper mine (Panama’s largest single mining operation). Cobre Panamá is operated by Minera Panamá S.A. (MPSA), a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company First Quantum Minerals, which had acquired the project through its 2013 takeover of Inmet Mining. In January 2022 the Cortizo government opened negotiations with First Quantum on a revised concession contract; the subsidiary offered roughly US$375 million a year in tax and royalty revenue. The negotiations broke down in December 2022, when the government announced plans to order the suspension of operations, and ore processing was briefly halted in February 2023 (after the Panamá Maritime Authority halted concentrate loading at the Punta Rincón port) before resuming on 8 March 2023 [3].
In October 2023 the National Assembly approved a revised contract as Bill 1100, and Cortizo signed it into Law 406. The signing triggered the largest mass protests in Panama in a generation, and under that pressure the Assembly passed a separate metallic-mining moratorium (Bill 1110) on 3 November 2023. On 16 November 2023 MPSA made a $567 million tax-and-royalty payment covering December 2021 to October 2023 (described at the time as the largest fiscal payment ever made in Panama) but a small-boat blockade at Punta Rincón cut supplies to the mine’s power plant and forced production to halt on 23 November 2023. The political crisis culminated on 28 November 2023, when the Plenary Session of the Supreme Court of Justice unanimously declared Law 406 unconstitutional; Cortizo responded by announcing that the Cobre Panamá mine would be closed [3].
The mine was then placed under a preservation-and-safe-management regime, which the government formally approved in May 2025 (a plan that permits the export of the mine’s stored copper concentrate and the restart of its power plant but does not resume full mining). The closure, the loss of the mine’s fiscal contribution, and the unresolved question of whether large-scale metallic mining will ever resume in Panama have materially altered the country’s fiscal position and its environmental politics [3].
The 2023–2024 drought and the canal’s transit restrictions
The second shock was a severe drought that drove the canal’s freshwater reservoirs to historically low levels and forced the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) to restrict traffic. The canal’s dependence on freshwater is structural: each ship transit consumes roughly 52 million US gallons (about 200 million litres) drawn from Gatún Lake, the artificial reservoir that the Chagres River feeds. The 2015–2016 fiscal year had already been one of the driest periods on record, and 2019 was the fifth-driest year in seventy years, but the 2023 drought (compounded by El Niño conditions) pushed the system past its earlier limits [4].
In normal conditions 36 ships can transit the canal each day; in early December 2023 that figure was cut to 22 ships per day because of low water levels in Gatún Lake, and in January 2024 it was raised only to 24. The restrictions produced a visible shipping backlog at both entrances to the canal and a fall in toll revenue at exactly the moment the Cortizo government’s fiscal position was already under strain from the Cobre Panamá closure. In response, the Canal Authority announced a plan to build a new reservoir on the Indio River (a project estimated at roughly $1.6 billion, intended to augment the canal’s dry-season water supply and also to serve more than half of Panama’s population with drinking water). The drought and the reservoir plan together pushed long-term climate and water-management questions to the centre of Panamanian infrastructure politics [4].
The Darién migration surge
The third shock was the surge in irregular migration through the Darién Gap, the roadless jungle on the border with Colombia that is the only overland route between South and Central America. The Darién Gap is the one missing segment of the Pan-American Highway: efforts to bridge it were repeatedly abandoned on environmental grounds and on foot-and-mouth-disease concerns, and the area remains home to Emberá-Wounaan and Guna communities. Since the late 2010s, however, the Gap has become one of the heaviest migration corridors in the world, used principally by Haitian and Venezuelan migrants travelling north toward the Mexico–United States border [2].
The crossings rose by an order of magnitude across the Cortizo term: roughly 24,000 in 2019, 250,000 in 2022, and more than 520,000 in 2023, more than double the previous year’s figure and a more than twentyfold increase over the 2019 baseline. The surge imposed direct costs on the Panamanian state (reception, transit, health, and security along the Darién route) and it converted the Darién from an environmental and indigenous-rights question into a frontline migration-management question. Panama’s cooperation with the United States on managing the flow, and the Mulino administration’s subsequent security policy on the crossing, became defining features of the bilateral relationship and of domestic politics in the 2024–2026 period [2].
The 2024 election and the Mulino Realizing Goals administration
The 2024 Panamanian presidential election was held on 5 May 2024 with five candidates in the field, none of whom reached the 50% threshold required for an outright win. The leading candidates were José Raúl Mulino of Realizing Goals (the Martinelli-allied vehicle), Ricardo Lombana of the Otro Camino movement, Martín Torrijos of the PRD, Rómulo Roux of the Panameñista Party, and José Gabriel Carrizo of the ruling party’s coalition partner. Mulino won the election with 34.2% of the vote (a clear plurality in a fragmented field) and was inaugurated on 1 July 2024 for a five-year term that runs through 30 June 2029. Mulino, a lawyer born in David, Chiriquí in June 1959, had served as Minister of Public Security from 2010 to 2014 under Martinelli. He ran without a vice president; his intended running mate had been disqualified along with Martinelli himself, who was constitutionally barred from the ballot while under criminal conviction [5].
The Mulino administration inherited the Cortizo government’s public-debt overhang, the residual Darién migration crisis, the post-Cobre Panamá fiscal hole, and the continuing Panama Canal water-management question. Mulino’s own policy agenda (a blend of Martinelli-era law-and-order and business-friendly positioning, together with a personal commitment to closing the Darién crossing) has been complicated by the U.S. foreign-policy environment under the second Trump administration, which has been more confrontational toward Panama on the canal question than its predecessor. In December 2024, after the U.S. President-elect publicly criticised U.S. ships paying canal tolls to Panama, Mulino responded that “Panama moved toward a relationship of respect, restored trust, joint work, and friendship, and the canal remained Panamanian”, a formulation that reaffirmed the 1977 Neutrality Treaty framework without escalating the dispute [5].
What is verifiable in the documented record as of 30 June 2026
The figures above are restricted to facts documented in current public-record sources. The forward-looking political questions (the 2029 presidential election, the long-term resolution of the Cobre Panamá mine, and the Mulino–Martinelli relationship) are explicitly out of scope here; for any forward-looking forecast, or for figures more recent than those cited above, defer to current news sources rather than this page.
The chain of presidencies is documented: Ricardo Martinelli of Cambio Democrático (2009–2014), Juan Carlos Varela of the Panameñista Party (2014–2019), Laurentino Cortizo of the PRD (2019–2024), and José Raúl Mulino of Realizing Goals (from 1 July 2024). Mulino’s party, Realizing Goals (Realizando Metas), is a vehicle built from the Cambio Democrático network that Martinelli constructed in 1998; the 2024 election was the first presidential victory for that network since Martinelli’s own 2009 win. The 2023 New Business conviction of Martinelli (more than 10 years’ imprisonment) and the 2 February 2024 Supreme Court affirmation of that conviction remain the controlling legal record of the Martinelli era [6] [5].
Where to take this next
The 2019-2026 period is the most recent political record and the most volatile. For the Martinelli-era events that produced the corruption cases, see The Martinelli Presidency and Aftermath. For the canal-treaties framework that remains the controlling legal foundation for the canal’s operation, see The Canal Transfer Era (1990–1999). For the broader twentieth-century context of the National Guard and the PRD, see The Torrijos Era (1968–1981). For the 1989 invasion that set the stage for the post-Cold War Panamanian state, see The US Invasion of Panama: December 1989.
Last reviewed: