Panama's collapsed churches prove José Raúl Mulino is not ready

By Daniel Okafor · Reporting from New York · October 11, 2026

Two powerful earthquakes damaged central provinces and historic sites, revealing that Panama's infrastructure cannot withstand the Ring of Fire despite calls for calm from the government.

President José Raúl Mulino is wrong to prioritize public calm over a hard look at his country's ruins. He told the public on social media that the disaster "should not be used to cause alarm or disorder." But the alarm is already ringing in the rubble of the central provinces. When a national heritage site collapses and government offices crack, the disorder is not in the streets. It is in the building codes. Panama is a nation built on a fault line that the government treats as a theoretical risk rather than a physical certainty.

The ground broke first

The disaster began Friday morning. A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck near the southern tip of the country, according to CBS News. The epicenter sat about 7 miles southwest of Pitaloza Arriba. Hours later, a second magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck west of Río Grande.

The tremors reached far beyond the epicenters. Buildings in the capital shook more than 100 miles away. The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially warned of tsunami waves hitting the coast. The threat eventually passed, but the panic did not.

In Herrera province, Rosendo Domínguez told the Associated Press that the quake knocked things over in his kitchen. He said everyone was outside and scared. Seismologists at the University of Panama recorded more than 45 aftershocks. The panic in Panama City echoes the 2015 Illapel earthquake.

A heritage of collapse

The damage concentrated in the provinces of Veraguas, Herrera, and Los Santos. In the city of Penonomé, the cathedral in the main square suffered cracks and a partial collapse. The governor's office building and the Dos Continentes hotel also sustained damage. In Los Santos province, the Church of San Atanasio collapsed entirely. The state declared that church a National Historic Heritage Site in 1938.

The collapse of the Church of San Atanasio reflects the same structural failure seen during the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake. Historic masonry cannot survive shallow seismic waves without modern reinforcement. In Veraguas province, large fissures appeared on roadways. Former president Ricardo Martinelli saw his house in the town of Sona collapse, according to SBS News.

The 2026 Venezuela earthquakes share the same mechanism as this disaster. In both cases, a doublet of high-magnitude earthquakes struck a Latin American region in the same season. In Venezuela, the doublet killed more than 6,500 people. Panama escaped that death toll, but the physical evidence of fragility is the same.

What is the cost of a false calm?

The government will argue that the lack of fatalities proves the system worked. They will point to the Panama Canal Authority, which said operations continued normally. They will note that Tocumen International Airport reopened Friday afternoon. That airport served more than 20 million passengers in 2025.

But the facts of the damage suggest a different verdict. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated economic losses between 1% and 10% of Panama’s gross domestic product, The Guardian said. In Penonomé, a cashier named Juana Alveo said the experience was like nothing she had ever seen. Her daughter was trapped in school.

President Mulino admitted the truth in a moment of candor. He said, "Nobody was ready, and no one is ever ready for this type of disaster." This admission contradicts his social media pleas for calm. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella offered aid. Panama needs the help because its own structures failed.

The history of the region predicts more. An earthquake in Colombia in August killed at least 289 people. In 1991, a quake centered in Costa Rica killed 23 people in Panama's Bocas del Toro region. Panama sits on an arc of volcanoes and fault lines called the Ring of Fire. The interaction of the Cocos, Nazca, and Caribbean tectonic plates does not care about government calls for calm.

The government's failure is not in the response, but in the preparation. Document D2 shows the quake injured at least 27 people. These are not random accidents. They are the result of a policy that ignores seismic retrofitting for the sake of the present.

Panama now faces a slow recovery. Utility repair crews will likely struggle to reach isolated communities in Herrera and Los Santos. The collapse of the San Atanasio church must force the government to accelerate structural reinforcement of colonial buildings over the next six months. In Panama City, a commercial slowdown will likely last two to four weeks as engineers audit the skyscrapers that residents were forced to evacuate. The ruins in the central provinces are a warning. If the government continues to treat the Ring of Fire as a ghost, the next doublet will not be so merciful.

Panama's collapsed churches prove José Raúl Mulino is not ready

The ground broke first

A heritage of collapse

What is the cost of a false calm?

Sources