Panama Sends Incarcerated Women to Clean Streets as Trash Crisis Deepens

In San Miguelito, garbage has become a daily geography—piled along sidewalks, wedged into gutters, drifting toward rivers and sea. Now Panamá is testing an unusual response: incarcerated women sweeping the streets for a day’s freedom, and a day less behind bars.

Seventy Blue Shirts Step Outside For A Few Hours

Before sunrise at the Centro Penitenciario Femenino de Panamá, a line forms with the kind of nervous excitement that rarely exists in prison routine. Only seventy women out of nearly seven hundred trade the usual white T-shirt for a blue one. They are handed a broom and a dustpan, and for some, it is the first time in years they will leave the facility—even if only for a few hours, supervised, and to do work most people avert their eyes from.

The incentive is stark and practical: a sentence reduction that subtracts one day of confinement for every two days worked. As the bus rolls toward the first cleanup point in San Miguelito, they sing, joke, and—quietly—begin imagining what comes after release. In that small space between prison gates and city streets, the country’s waste crisis ceases to be a policy debate. It becomes something intimate: time, breath, motion, the simple ability to be outside.

San Miguelito, on the capital’s periphery, is a hard place to stage any civic experiment. It is both densely populated and structurally neglected, a district marked by poverty, high crime, and a long accumulation of broken services. For years, mountains of trash have piled up along main roads and footpaths, turning public space into a health hazard. The smell is not the worst part. It is the message it sends: that some neighborhoods are expected to live inside other people’s leftovers.

“Nos hemos encontrado con demasiada basura. Estamos aquí para apoyar y para que podamos ver un lugar más limpio y mejor. Le pido a la comunidad de San Miguelito que, por favor, tengamos conciencia; es necesario que mantengamos más limpio el lugar donde vivimos para gozar de buena salud,” said Otis Puertas, one of the incarcerated women, describing both the volume of waste and the hope of leaving the streets cleaner than they found them, she told EFE.

A Plan Born From Collapse And A Broken Contract

The operation is new and born of a rupture. Officials say the cleanup push in San Miguelito began on January nineteen, deploying dump trucks, backhoes, and compactors—heavy machinery for a problem that had become too large for ordinary collection. Alongside the seventy incarcerated women, twenty-five incarcerated men joined the effort, according to official information. The timing matters: the plan intensified after the company holding the trash-collection concession for twenty-five years left, triggering an urgent scramble to keep refuse from swallowing public space.

In a single day of cleaning, authorities collected 300 tons of waste in a district of roughly 280,000 people, squeezed into 50 square kilometers. The numbers read like a headline, but on the ground, they translate into a brutal visual: garbage that has been sitting for months, broken open by rain, animals, and feet.

“Encontramos un distrito a punto de colapsar, inmerso en desechos acumulados durante meses,” said Ovil Moreno, administrator of the Autoridad de Aseo, describing a neighborhood pushed to the edge by a service that failed for too long, he told EFE.

That collapse is not contained to San Miguelito. Panamá, with about 4.2 million people, generates 4,372 tons of waste every day. Officials say 57.8% is collected, while the rest—around 2,500 tons—ends up in rivers, the sea, or other environments. It is a national leak, not just a municipal failure: a steady outflow of plastic, organic refuse, and debris into ecosystems that cannot digest it.

Open Dumps, Indigenous Neighbors, And A Politicized Mess

What is collected often ends up at one of the country’s 60 open-air dumps, including Cerro Patacón, the largest landfill serving the capital. Beneath that dump lives an Indigenous community, exposed to the slow violence of modern waste: liquids that seep downward, smoke and toxic fumes from fires that have repeatedly scorched the area in recent years, and the long-term health consequences that tend to arrive quietly, then stay.

Moreno says the government is beginning a plan to eliminate open-air dumps because poorly managed waste travels—into waterways, then into the ocean, where it becomes both a contamination and a national embarrassment. “Estamos empezando un plan para eliminar esos vertederos a cielo abierto, que tienen una muy mala disposición, porque esos desperdicios van a los mares y contaminan,” he said, speaking from San Miguelito as excavators lifted garbage into trailers that filled and returned again, he told EFE.

The deeper problem is that Panamá—one of the region’s highest generators of waste per person—has limited recycling capacity. The Ministry of Environment estimates that less than 10% of waste is reused, citing weak infrastructure, limited separation, and limited environmental awareness. In practice, that means the system is designed for disposal, not recovery. It treats garbage as something to hide rather than manage.

And then there is politics. The waste-collection system—partly handled by private companies, with recycling fully private—has produced what politicians, social leaders, and environmentalists describe as a politicized crisis. San Miguelito illustrates that friction: the national government stepped in to take control of collection after the concessionaire’s departure, even though the district’s municipal government already had its own plan to confront the emergency. Who holds authority over trash is never only about sanitation. It is about budgets, contracts, and the power to decide whose streets matter.

Even Rubén Blades, the Panamanian singer-songwriter, echoed the conflict on his personal blog, writing that he now sees the tangle formed by poor or nonexistent garbage collection in San Miguelito. How the issue has been “politicized,” a euphemism, he suggested, for who gets to profit from the business of waste, according to EFE.

Meanwhile, the women in blue continue sweeping through glass, spilled bags, and crows circling small heaps that repeat on every corner. Their labor offers the city a temporary clean surface. But their presence also raises a more complex question: if a district can reach the point of collapse before the state responds, what exactly is being punished—and who has been living, for years, inside the sentence?

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