Residents report dengue and past floods amid missing services
For decades, mountains of waste have blighted poor neighbourhoods on the edge of Panama City, and the problems are spreading. Life in San Miguelito, a densely populated district less than 6 miles from the capital’s skyline, has long been dictated by rubbish: residents plan routes to shops around mountains of rotting waste — some visible from space — and during the rainy season, black bin bags and rusty fridges obstruct the roads. Children learn early to keep away from the river, the rubbish and the rats, yet mosquito-borne illness continues to affect the community.
For Yamileth, who lives with her family on one of the steep, narrow streets that thread the hillside neighbourhood, the waste is a constant backdrop to daily life. Mornings bring stench and flies; evenings bring rats scuttling and stray dogs tearing open bags for food among rubbish heaps known locally as patacones — also the name of a staple side dish made from green plantains. “Since forever, we’ve had trash everywhere, flies, odours bothering us all day long,” she said, her daughter peeking around the porch door. “No one wants to live like that. Dengue is very common here. One of our neighbours died from it. We’re really worried about our children getting sick because of the trash. We live in the city, but we feel abandoned.”
San Miguelito is home to some of the capital’s poorest communities, many living in informal settlements, scraping a living by selling goods on the pavement and lacking basic services such as waste collection and running water. Just beyond rise the tower blocks of one of Latin America’s wealthiest metropolises, flush with international banks and luxury developments. Panama is one of the most unequal nations on Earth.
Decades of growth without adequate infrastructure for collection, transport and final disposal have entrenched an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to rubbish. The wealthy pay private companies to remove their waste and buy apartments facing away from the rivers, while poorer communities, many living alongside polluted waterways, are forced to dump refuse where the next rainfall will sweep it away.
Waste travels through the city’s waterways. Along the Juan Díaz River, which passes through San Miguelito, debris drifts between green banks. Farther downstream, beaches and mangroves are covered in discarded footballs, fridges, toys and thousands of plastic water bottles before the rest flows into the Bay of Panama and the Pacific Ocean. Plastic waste also litters the beach at Costa del Este in Panama City.
Rodolfo Rodríguez, a representative of the Parque Lefevre community board, pointed to the mangrove-fringed coastline of Panamá Viejo, where plastic items litter the shoreline, mangrove branches flutter beneath their plastic shrouds, and black vultures move among the trees and trash. “This is an area of very high ecological significance,” he said. “There are lots of birds and amphibians here.” The mangroves act as storm buffers and provide nurseries for fish and birds, and about 2 million migratory shorebirds flock to the city’s wetlands each year. “But fish and marine populations are declining, and the creatures here consume all this plastic,” he said.
Panama’s waste crisis is increasingly colliding with the country’s ambitions to position itself as a tourist destination and high-income city. Last December, the government announced an urgent intervention in San Miguelito, with President José Raúl Mulino warning the district was “experiencing a sanitation crisis that could lead to a health crisis.” “We are trying to bring it under control,” environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro said. “If you don’t find a way to adequately collect and dispose of waste, you can’t have a healthy city. We have wasted decades without addressing pollution in our rivers.”
The government has pledged funding, but environmental organisations carry much of the implementation. Adrián Benedetti, executive director of the environmental group Ancon, said conditions have reached a “critical level.” “There is no recycling programme and inconsistent garbage collection, especially in areas higher up the watershed that generate a lot of the river trash,” he said. “There’s an element of neglect by city officials, to the point where public health and the environment are at risk.”
The Siete Cuencas project — a partnership between local group Marea Verde and the Ocean Cleanup — is installing floating barriers on each of the city’s seven rivers, with the aim of preventing 800,000kg of waste from reaching the Pacific each year. Three interceptors have been deployed so far, the latest on the Matías Hernández River in May.
James Patterson, the Ocean Cleanup’s Panama project manager, said the organisation shifted its focus to the world’s most polluting rivers after a 2021 study in Science Advances found that about 1,000 rivers account for 80% of the plastic emitted by rivers into the ocean each year. “If we clean up all the legacy trash in the oceans but continue to pollute, we’re just replacing old trash with new trash,” Patterson said. “We’re trying to turn off that tap into the oceans.”
In a deprived riverside community in Puente del Rey, the barriers have already triggered change. Liska said she used to dread heavy rain, when the plastic-choked Abajo River would burst its banks and push filthy water into homes. “Every time it rained, it flooded,” she said. “I had to help neighbours escape their houses with a canoe. It’s very sad.” She recalled rescuing a mother and her baby during one flood and trying in vain to save nappies and bottles. Since the barrier was installed last year, there have been no floods.
Liska said the river had served for decades as a dumping ground for local people and others who travelled there to discard refuse. “My grandmother is 94, and used to tell stories about how they used the river for everything, washing clothes, bathing,” she said. “Now, it’s so polluted. The people here no longer have a relationship with the river. Let’s pray that it will again be a reality that we can experience.”
Patterson said the barriers address only part of the problem. “This is a Band-Aid,” he said. “There is much more that needs to be done within government, community and education to really create a complete solution.”
Mirei Endara de Heras, president and co-founder of Marea Verde and a former environment minister, linked the crisis to Panama’s inequality and a failure to value its urban environment. “We’re working on SDGs (sustainable development goals) and these global goals and yet we’re living amid all this trash,” she said. “A survey found rubbish was one of the top three things capital citizens are ashamed of. But it has become normalised. Accepted as a fact. But why should we accept it as part of the scenery?”
Education is another front. At La Casa de Wanda, a Marea Verde centre above the Juan Díaz River, about 14,000 visitors — mostly schoolchildren — have passed through in two years for interactive tours and creative programmes about plastic pollution, recycling and the circular economy. Many children are “completely shocked,” De Heras said, and go home demanding their parents recycle and refusing plastic water bottles. Just beyond the river barriers, an island of rubbish collects each day, a visual reminder of the scale of the challenge.
At Santa Librada school in San Miguelito, an in-school recycling programme and a green football league are beginning to create ripples in the wider community, teachers said. “There’s definitely a change,” said Ràmses Córdoba, an English teacher at the school. “We don’t have a recycling culture in Panama. But we see kids bringing in cardboard and plastic, and each year interest is growing.”
Opposite the school, what for decades was a large illegal dumping ground next to the river, with mountains of waste visible on satellite images, has been transformed into a park with sunshine-yellow benches. It is part of efforts by San Miguelito’s mayor, Irma Hernández, to clean up the neighbourhood, alongside establishing new rubbish collection routes and schedules. “The mindset change is that if it’s beautiful, it’s not a place for your trash,” Córdoba said.
Minutes later, a man with a backpack stopped beside a small pile of rubbish, opened his bag and emptied it. Asked why he dumped there despite the new collection schedule, he shrugged. After decades of patchy or nonexistent collection, trust is tenuous.