Panama's Friendly Nations list
Not a bloc. A list of states named one by one in a Panamanian executive decree and revised by decree, which is why it is the first group here that is not a treaty. It cuts straight across every bloc in the model: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay are on it while Bolivia and Venezuela, their fellow Mercosur full members, are not; Chile, Ecuador and Peru are on it while Colombia, Guyana and Suriname, their fellow associates, are not; Costa Rica and Mexico are on it and no other Central American state is. Membership of this list is all the group asserts. What it gets you is a Panamanian permit and nothing anywhere else. **The decree names fifty-one states and this group holds all fifty-one.** Denmark and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region were missing for a while - not from the decree, which names the Reino de Dinamarca and the Región Administrativa Especial de Hong Kong de la República Popular China in article 2, but from our own country catalogue, so a Danish or Hong Kong reader was shown nothing. That was our gap rather than Panama's and it is closed.
Where it actually bites
Membership is one thing and what a destination does with it is another. These are the countries covered here that treat these nationalities differently, and on which question.
Panama- Residency through investment · Países Amigos: Property Instead of the Ordinary Investor Thresholds
- Residency through work · Países Amigos: a Named List of Nationalities With Their Own Route to Residence
- issuesDecreto Ejecutivo 16 de 2026, art. 2, first part of the list - Gaceta Oficial 30601-B
Gaceta Oficial Digital de la República de Panamá
About this source
Panama's official gazette. An instrument takes effect on publication here and carries its gazette number as part of its identity, which is how the Friendly Nations list, the migration decree-law and every decree amending them are identified.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes acts as enacted and never republishes the amended text, so it cannot be cited for consolidated law - and on Panama that bites hard: Decreto Ejecutivo 26 de 2009 alone substituted fifty-six articles of the 2008 regulation, and an article number inside an amending decree is an instruction to amend rather than the article of the resulting regulation. Worse, some issues are page images with no text layer: Gaceta 29335 of 2021 extracts only its contents page, which is why the current Friendly Nations property threshold cannot be stated. Anything quoted from a gazette must be checked for recognition damage first and declared as ocr where it is a reading of a picture.
We re-read it every 30 days. More about this source
- issuesDecreto Ejecutivo 16 de 2026, art. 2, continuation after the page break
Gaceta Oficial Digital de la República de Panamá
About this source
Panama's official gazette. An instrument takes effect on publication here and carries its gazette number as part of its identity, which is how the Friendly Nations list, the migration decree-law and every decree amending them are identified.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes acts as enacted and never republishes the amended text, so it cannot be cited for consolidated law - and on Panama that bites hard: Decreto Ejecutivo 26 de 2009 alone substituted fifty-six articles of the 2008 regulation, and an article number inside an amending decree is an instruction to amend rather than the article of the resulting regulation. Worse, some issues are page images with no text layer: Gaceta 29335 of 2021 extracts only its contents page, which is why the current Friendly Nations property threshold cannot be stated. Anything quoted from a gazette must be checked for recognition damage first and declared as ocr where it is a reading of a picture.
We re-read it every 30 days. More about this source