Is Panama Safe for Gay Men? Crime Data and Our Honest Take

“Is Panama safe for gay men?” sounds like a question with a data-backed answer. It isn’t, and the reason why is itself the most important thing we found while researching this. Panama’s government does not track anti-LGBTQ+ violence as its own category — not quietly, not incompletely, but explicitly and by its own admission. So before we get to what we do know, we want to be upfront about what nobody actually measures.

Panama’s General Crime Picture

Start with the baseline, because it applies to every resident and visitor regardless of who they are. Panama’s national homicide rate was about 14.6 per 100,000 residents in 2025, essentially flat from roughly 12.9 in 2024 — moderate by Central American standards, and well below Honduras, El Salvador, or Venezuela. The U.S. State Department rates Panama a Level 2 travel advisory (“Exercise Increased Caution”), the same tier as much of Western Europe for different reasons — it’s not a high-alarm rating. Violence is heavily concentrated geographically: over 60% of 2025’s homicides occurred in Panamá province, with another 20% in Colón, and both are driven substantially by transnational drug trafficking rather than street crime against residents or tourists.

Ordinary opportunistic crime — pickpocketing, residential break-ins, the occasional express kidnapping where someone is held for a few hours and forced to empty an ATM — is real and documented, and it applies to everyone. None of that is what makes this question hard to answer for gay men specifically. The hard part is the last row in that table.

The Data Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s the finding that shaped how we wrote this whole article. The U.S. State Department’s human rights reports on Panama for 2022 and 2023 both stated plainly that the Panamanian government provided no estimate of the number of violence cases reported against LGBTQI+ individuals — not a low number, not an estimate with caveats, no number at all. Then, in the 2024 report (released August 2025 under a revised reporting framework), the State Department removed violence against LGBTQ+ individuals as an evaluated category entirely, along with gender-based violence and several other categories present in prior years.

This isn’t an oversight we’re inferring — Panama’s LGBTQ+ organizations have said the same thing directly, in a formal United Nations submission. In September 2025, AHMNP (Asociación Hombres y Mujeres Nuevos de Panamá) and several allied organizations submitted recommendations to the UN’s Universal Periodic Review of Panama, explicitly citing a “lack of official data” resulting in what they called “institutional invisibility,” and formally requesting that Panama’s Penal Code be reformed to recognize bias motivated by sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression as an aggravating factor in sentencing — a classification that does not currently exist in Panamanian law.

What Panama’s Own LGBTQ+ Organization Is Tracking Instead

AHMNP is Panama’s oldest and only formally recognized LGBTQ+ association, founded in 1996. In the absence of government tracking, its own count is the closest thing to real data that exists. According to AHMNP’s president, Ricardo Beteta, the organization’s internal count found five gay men and two transgender people killed in Panama in 2024, with several of those cases connected to initial contact made through a dating app — reporting that appeared in La Prensa, one of Panama’s major newspapers, in November 2025. Beteta has also stated publicly that these killings are frequently misreported in the press as ordinary robberies or personal disputes rather than being investigated or recorded as bias-motivated crimes, because Panamanian law has no hate crime classification to record them under in the first place.

We want to be precise about what these numbers do and don’t tell you. Seven documented cases in a single year is a real, serious pattern for a country of roughly 4.4 million people — and simultaneously, it’s a small enough absolute number, from a single non-governmental source with no independent verification body cross-checking it, that we can’t responsibly convert it into a rate or compare it directly to countries with formal hate-crime tracking systems, like Mexico or Colombia, without manufacturing a false sense of precision. What we can tell you honestly: multiple independent sources — AHMNP, Panamanian press, and international reporting — describe the same underlying pattern of violence that goes uninvestigated as what it is.

The Legal Backdrop That Shapes All of This

We covered Panama’s legal status for gay people in more depth in Is Panama Gay Friendly? The Honest Answer, but the safety-relevant pieces are worth restating here, and one of them surprised us with how current it still is. As of a Thomson Reuters Foundation report published in late January 2026, Panama’s National Police disciplinary code still formally lists homosexuality as a “grave offense” grounds for dismissal — a rule that predates decriminalization and has never been repealed, even though the State Department notes no confirmed instances of it actually being enforced. The same report documents gay and bisexual Panamanian men still being functionally excluded from blood donation, LGBTQ+ people still lacking any legal protection from discrimination in education, healthcare, or employment, and the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against same-sex marriage still standing.

Visitors vs. Residents: Two Different Risk Pictures

Worth separating two different things this data actually points to. General Panama crime — the pickpocketing, the occasional express kidnapping, the residential break-ins — isn’t targeted at gay men specifically, and the baseline advisory (Level 2, moderate for the region) applies the same way it would to any traveler or resident. That’s the risk picture for a short visit doing ordinary tourist things.

The pattern AHMNP is describing is different and more targeted: violence connected to being identified as gay, frequently — per their reporting — beginning through contact made on a dating app. That’s a risk that scales with how long you’re there and how you’re meeting people, not one that shows up walking around Casco Viejo in daylight. We wrote a full breakdown of what we actually do to manage that specific risk — meeting in public first, never discussing money, being deliberate about what a dating app’s distance feature can reveal — in Grindr, Scruff, and Meeting Guys in Panama City, and we’d point anyone asking this safety question there next.

Our Honest Take

Firsthand: in twelve days in Panama City in April 2026, walking as a visibly together gay couple through restaurants, the Metro, hardware stores, and attorney offices, we experienced zero friction. That’s a real data point, and it’s consistent with what we’ve heard from other gay expats already living there. It is not the same thing as this data gap not mattering. Both things are true at once: day-to-day life in Panama City has been, in our direct experience and by most accounts we trust, easy and low-friction for an out gay couple — and there is a real, documented, currently untracked pattern of targeted violence that a small number of gay men in Panama have died from, disproportionately connected to how they met someone.

We’re moving anyway, with our eyes open about both halves of that. If you’re weighing a longer stay or a move, and any of this touches on health planning as well as physical safety, we’d also point you to our PrEP in Panama guide — a different kind of safety question, but one that comes up in the same conversation for a lot of readers.