José Raúl Mulino
José Raúl Mulino has been president of Panama since July 2024, the lawyer who had been Martinelli's running mate and became the candidate when Martinelli was barred by his conviction, winning the election of May 2024 with thirty-four per cent in a field of eight on the promise to close the Darién gap and to be the president Martinelli would have been. His first year became the year of the Canal: on 20 January 2025 the new American president said in his inaugural address that the United States would be taking it back, that China was operating it and that Panama had broken the treaty. Mulino, who had told the president-elect in December that the Canal was and would remain Panama's, spent the year answering. There was the audit of the Hong Kong company that ran two of the ports, the withdrawal from China's belt and road initiative in February after the secretary of state's visit, and the memorandum of April 2025 that gave the American military access to Panamanian bases for training, which brought the students and the unions into the streets. There was the sale of the ports to an American consortium, blocked by Peking and then by the courts. The Darién crossings fell from half a million in 2023 to a few hundred a month by mid-2025 after he closed the trails, put up barbed wire and accepted American deportation flights, which was the other thing Washington wanted. He was born in Panama City in 1959, studied law at the Santa María la Antigua University and at Tulane. He was deputy foreign minister under Endara in the early 1990s. He was Martinelli's security minister from 2010 to 2014, in which office he ran the police, the border service and the wiretaps' apparatus. He was jailed for six months in 2015 over a police radar contract before the case was dismissed. The presidency has also been the social security reform of March 2025 that raised contributions and kept the retirement age, against a general strike of the teachers and the banana workers that lasted two months and that he broke with arrests and the dismissal of the Chiquita plantation's workforce. There was the Cobre Panamá mine, closed by the supreme court in 2023 after the largest protests in a generation, whose reopening he has said the country cannot afford to refuse, and a majority in the assembly that he does not have. He has said that Panama is nobody's colony. He has given the Americans most of what they asked for, which the country has noticed both halves of.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Panamanian
- Roles: president, politician
