https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/09/darien-gap-route-migrants-panama/679156/
Seventy Miles in Hell
The
Darién Gap was once considered impassable. Now hundreds of thousands of
migrants are risking treacherous terrain, violence, hunger, and disease
to travel through the jungle to the United States.
By Caitlin DickersonPhotographs by Lynsey Addario
August 6, 2024
They gathered in the predawn dark.
Bleary-eyed children squirmed. Adults lugging babies and backpacks stood
at attention as someone working under the command of Colombia’s most
powerful drug cartel, the Gulf Clan, shouted instructions into a
megaphone, temporarily drowning out the cacophony of the jungle’s birds
and insects: Make sure everyone has enough to eat and drink, especially
the children. Blue or green fabric tied to trees means keep walking. Red
means you’re going the wrong way and should turn around.
Next
came prayers for the group’s safety and survival: “Lord, take care of
every step that we take.” When the sun peeked above the horizon, they
were off.
More
than 600 people were in the crowd that plunged into the jungle that
morning, beginning a roughly 70-mile journey from northern Colombia into
southern Panama. That made it a slow day by local standards. They came
from Haiti, Ethiopia, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela, headed north across the only strip
of land that connects South America to Central America.
The Darién Gap was thought for centuries to be all but impassable.
Explorers and would-be colonizers who entered tended to die of hunger
or thirst, be attacked by animals, drown in fast-rising rivers, or
simply get lost and never emerge. Those dangers remain, but in recent
years the jungle has become a superhighway for people hoping to reach
the United States. According to the United Nations,
more than 800,000 may cross the Darién Gap this year—a more than 50
percent increase over last year’s previously unimaginable number.
Children under 5 are the fastest-growing group.
The U.S. has spent years trying to discourage this migration, pressuring its Latin American neighbors to close off established routes
and deny visas to foreigners trying to fly into countries close to the
U.S. border. Instead of stopping migrants from coming, this approach has
simply rerouted them through the jungle, and shifted the management of
their passage onto criminal organizations, which have eagerly taken
advantage. The Gulf Clan, which now calls itself Ejército Gaitanista de
Colombia, effectively controls this part of northern Colombia. It has long moved drugs and weapons through the Darién Gap; now it moves people too.
Everyone
who works in the Darién Gap must be approved by the cartel and hand
over a portion of their earnings. They have built stairs into hillsides
and outfitted cliffs with ladders and camps with Wi‑Fi. They advertise
it all on TikTok and YouTube, and anyone can book a journey online.
There are many paths through. The most grueling route is the
cheapest—right now, about $300 a person to cross the jungle on foot.
Taking a boat up the coast can cost more than $1,000.
I
went to the Darién Gap in December with the photographer Lynsey Addario
because I wanted to see for myself what people were willing to risk to
get to the United States. Before making the journey, I spoke with a
handful of journalists who had done so before. They had dealt with
typhoid, rashes, emergency evacuations, and mysterious illnesses that
lingered for months. One was tied up in the forest and robbed at
gunpoint. They said that we could take measures to make the journey
safer but that ultimately, survival required luck.
Each year, Panamanian authorities remove dozens of bodies from the jungle. Far more are swallowed up by nature. These deaths are the result not only of extreme conditions, but also of the flawed logic embraced by the U.S.
and other wealthy nations: that by making migration harder, we can
limit the number of people who attempt it. This hasn’t happened—not in
the Mediterranean, or the Rio Grande, or the Darién Gap. Instead, more
people come every year. What I saw in the jungle confirmed the pattern
that has played out elsewhere: The harder migration is, the more cartels
and other dangerous groups will profit, and the more migrants will die.
The night before we
set out, a Venezuelan father named Bergkan Rhuly Ale Vidal paced around
a camp at the jungle’s mouth, packing and repacking his family’s bags.
He and his partner, Orlimar, had their children with them: 2-year-old
Isaac and 8-year-old Camila. Even in the dark the air was sweltering,
and Bergkan’s mind was spinning with worry. What if one of the children
fell and hurt themselves, or came down with a fever? What if one was
bitten by a snake? In trying to salvage his family’s future, had he
gravely miscalculated?
The
first day, the path was studded with boulders and trip-wired with
vines. It weaved across a river so many times that I quickly gave up on
dumping out my rubber boots, because they would only fill again minutes
later. Bergkan’s family’s tennis shoes were already ripped and
disintegrating. The hills were slick with mud and so steep that we were
often not so much walking as climbing on our hands and knees, holding on
to mangled roots.
We passed stands selling bottles of water and Gatorade, two for $5. Porters, known as mochileros,
circled the family, hawking their services. “We carry backpacks, we
carry children!” they chanted. They charge roughly $100 a day, and also
barter with migrants for items in their backpacks. Orlimar tried trading
a pair of old headphones for new boots, but was rejected. A couple of
times, she and Bergkan lost patience with the porters and yelled, “We
have no money!”
Midmorning,
we reached the route’s toughest hill. After half an hour of climbing,
Bergkan crashed to the ground, his chest heaving. Orlimar threw down her
belongings. “What do you have in that bag?” he asked her.
“Shoes—sandals,” Orlimar said in a voice so soft, she was barely audible.
Bergkan
told her to dump any weight she could. She began pulling out clean
clothes. “Someone else will be able to use them,” he said. But the other
families nearby were also unloading supplies. The people who had the
strength to keep hiking charged past us, staring straight ahead, as if
exhaustion were an illness that they might catch just by looking at it.
Crossing
the jungle can take three days or 10, depending on the weather, the
weight of your bags, and pure chance. A minor injury can be catastrophic
for even the fittest people. Smugglers often downplay how many days the
journey will take—Bergkan had been told to plan for two. A few hours
into the trip, he began to realize that they were nowhere near as deep
into the jungle as they needed to be, which meant they might not have
enough food to get them out.
Bergkan
and Orlimar had planned for a different life. They’d met as teenagers
and gone to college together, Orlimar studying nursing and Bergkan
engineering. But Venezuela’s economy imploded in 2014, the result of
corruption and mismanagement. Then an authoritarian crackdown by the
leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, led to punishing American sanctions.
The future they had been working toward ceased to exist. In the past
decade, at least 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled.
Bergkan
and Orlimar spent five years taking any job they could get, first in
Venezuela and then in Peru, while they watched their friends and
classmates leave, one after another, for the United States. Then
Orlimar’s cousin Elimar, who was like a sister to her, came to them with
an offer: Her boyfriend, who was living in Dallas, would pay for
Bergkan’s family to take the cheapest route across the jungle, if Elimar
and her two children—who were 6 and 8—could go with them. “No one in
Venezuela can lend you money, much less that amount,” Bergkan told me.
“It was our moment.” They planned to stay in the U.S. only until
Venezuela’s economy recovered and they could return home.
We
trudged uphill for hours. Isaac teetered on Bergkan’s shoulders.
Gripping his son’s feet, Bergkan adopted a strategy of sprinting up a
stretch of hill for about 30 seconds, then collapsing again. His limbs
shook and his face turned an ominous shade of purple. “The weight you
carry is in your mind,” he said at one point, giving himself a pep talk.
Camila stopped cold a couple of times, holding up the long line of
people behind her, and yelled, “Mommy, I can’t!”
Around
1 p.m., Isaac fell asleep, his limp body rocking back and forth. “It
feels like his weight has tripled,” Bergkan told Orlimar. They sat down
on a hillside to regroup. Elimar tried coaxing her nephew awake with
lollipops, but he was unresponsive. Other parents stopped to ask if he
was okay. Bergkan pulled a packet of electrolyte powder out of his bag.
He mixed it with water, then shook Isaac awake and told all four
children to down it. “We’re going to get you out of here,” Bergkan said,
more to himself than to anyone else.
Eventually,
a porter explained that we were moving too slowly to make it to Panama
that day; we would have to sleep at a camp for stragglers. When we
arrived, we saw wooden platforms for tents, bucket showers and toilets,
and a couple of outdoor kitchens with Colombians serving plates of
chicken and rice—all for a price. People around us began purchasing
Wi‑Fi for $2 an hour so they could ask relatives to send them more
money; transfers carried a 20 percent fee. Elimar began circulating
through the camp, asking other Venezuelans for a loan to help her
contact her boyfriend. Bergkan, Orlimar, and their children sat down and
rubbed their aching limbs. They had no one to call.
In the three trips
I took to the Darién Gap over the course of five months, I saw new
bridges and paved roads appear deeper in the jungle, Wi‑Fi hotspots
extend their reach, and landmarks that were previously known only by
word of mouth appear on Google Maps. Looking down at a thrashing river, I
held on to ropes that made it safer—slightly—to creep across sheer rock
faces behind parents with crying babies strapped to their chests.
Guides
and porters follow the migrants in the jungle with their iPhones
rolling, asking, “Do you feel good?” and “Have we treated you well?”
They film incessantly during the first day of walking, when people are
still able to conjure a smile. (Even I ended up in one of their videos.)
They post the videos on social media, selling trips across the jungle
as if they were joyful nature walks. The profit motives of the cartel
have become yet another factor fueling migration.
The
UN has tried to counteract these messages by stationing migration
officials at bus stations and other checkpoints along the way to the
Darién Gap; they warn people of the dangers ahead and try to persuade
them to reconsider. Those efforts have been largely ineffective. “People
come with tunnel vision, like, ‘I must get to the United States,’ ”
Cristian Camilo Moreno García, a UN migration official based in northern
Colombia, told me. “Turning back is not an option.”
On
the second morning of our journey, about 150 people filed out of the
camp and waited for the sun to rise before they started walking. Bergkan
and his family ate nothing; they needed to conserve the few cans of
tuna and packages of cookies they had left. The children were still in
their pajamas, some of their only remaining clean clothes. Two women
stood at the end of the line collecting final payments and then handing
each person a wristband, the kind you might get at a music festival, to
show that they had paid. “Please take out your money so that we can move
you along faster!” one yelled.
We
walked along a narrow ridge with steep cliffs dropping off on either
side, all of us trudging much slower than the day before. After about an
hour and a half, Elimar’s son, Luciano, crumpled to the ground. The
adults gathered around him. “Take off his sweater—he’s suffocating!” one
yelled. Without a word, one of the porters Lynsey and I had hired
hoisted the child onto his shoulders, apparently unable to watch Luciano
struggle any longer. He dashed up the slope and out of sight. Elimar
looked defeated but also relieved to have one fewer child to worry
about, at least until we made it to the next stopping point.
Word
spread down the line that we were approaching the border with Panama.
The porters, who had boisterously peddled their services for two days,
started to go quiet. Profiting from migration is illegal in Panama, and
can carry a sentence of more than 12 years in prison. Panama’s border
patrol, known as SENAFRONT, has been enforcing those laws aggressively
against people who sell migrants bottles of water, carry their
backpacks, or serve as guides. The porter who had picked up Luciano
revealed the scar on his chest from a bullet wound that he said he’d
sustained on a previous trek, when officers had sprayed bullets into
Colombia. He said that we should be prepared to run. (When I asked Jorge
Gobea, the head of the agency, if his officers ever shot across the
border at Colombian guides, he told me, “If someone armed fights Panama
authorities, we use force.”)
The
border was marked by a Panamanian flag and piles of trash. Some people
posed for pictures and celebrated half-heartedly, unsure if they were
nearing the end of the journey or still at the beginning. Orlimar made
the sign of the cross, then sat down with her head between her knees.
Elimar was the first to notice the Panamanian border guards approaching
and warned us: “Get down! Get down!”
Lynsey and I wished the family well and, along with the Colombian porters, sprinted back down the mountain.
After leaving Bergkan and
his family at the border, we doubled back to take the second primary
land route through the Darién Gap. This one was said to be slightly
easier, and cost more as a result. We had secured permission this time
from the Panamanian government to follow it all the way through to the
end.
After
a day of hiking, we slept at another camp, where we fell in with a
large group led by a Venezuelan mother of three named María Fernanda
Vargas Ramírez, who had been living with her family in Chile. The
original members had met on social media and picked up more travelers on
their way to the jungle, until the group included 21 people, all but
one of them Venezuelan. People crossing the Darién Gap tend to develop
family-like bonds with other migrants they meet along the way. They look
out for one another’s kids and count off when they pause to rest,
making sure no one gets lost. But this group was especially close. Its
members shared food and water freely and said they planned to stay
together all the way to the United States.
As
we neared the Panamanian border a second time, a Colombian guide who
was preparing to turn back asked a few of us to look out for a woman
named Cataña, whom he’d recently led down the same path but who had
never come out of the jungle. He took out his phone and showed us
pictures of her sitting on a bus and in what looked like a transit
station. She appeared pensive, unsure what to think about the voyage
ahead. “She was very slow, so the others in the group left her behind,”
the guide said.
“I can’t imagine this group doing something like that,” I replied.
“We’ll see,” he said. People lose patience quickly when they’re running out of food.
This
route was newer and hadn’t yet been trampled by hundreds of thousands
of people. The foliage closed in from all sides, making the path hard to
discern. We stepped over jaguar tracks and passed a Bothrops, the
deadliest viper in South America, coiled around a branch near our
ankles. In a ravine, we saw what looked like the scene of a person’s bad
fall: a tennis shoe, a skull, and the bones of a leg with a bandage
wrapped around the knee like a tourniquet.
Once
we entered Panama, we faced new threats: robbery and sexual assault.
Most of these attacks happen at the hands of Indigenous Panamanians. For
years their villages were routinely ransacked by narco traffickers and
paramilitary groups. Some Indigenous Panamanians took up arms in
self-defense, or got involved in trafficking themselves. The government
did little to protect them then and does little to stop them now.
The
porters we had paid to continue on with us told us to stay close
together because bandits were thought to be intimidated by large groups.
Later, we learned that was false—they were in fact targeting large
groups, perhaps because it was more efficient than robbing a handful of
people at a time. Our anxiety grew when we passed a couple of abandoned
backpacks. We pushed through thicker and thicker brush until I realized
there was no longer any sign of a path. One porter accused another of
leading us astray. They started arguing, until a third hissed, “No
yelling!” We turned around, but a bottleneck formed in front of a fallen
tree trunk. One of the porters shouted for us to hurry: “Grab the kids
and go!”
At
midday, we reached a camp known as La Bonga, the only place in the
jungle where the Panamanian government was allowing people to sell food
and water to migrants. Lynsey and I met up with a dozen border-patrol
officers who had been assigned to tail us, as a condition of our making
the trip. We trudged through mud and rivers for another six hours before
stopping for the night. It rained on and off; the adults, sharing a
handful of tents, would have to sleep in shifts.
One
of the women, a Venezuelan named Adrianny Parra Peña, climbed into an
airless tent, her face smeared with dirt. She and her husband had been
helping María Fernanda by essentially taking custody of her 9-year-old
twin boys, carrying them across rivers and lifting them up steep
inclines. Adrianny told me that she’d wanted her own children but that
this was the third time in six years that she and her husband had tried
resettling, first in Peru, then Chile, and now, she hoped, the United
States. “We are tired of all this migrating,” she told me. “This is no
way to live.”
The next morning, we
faced the route’s hardest obstacles, a series of rock faces. Ropes had
been strung across some of them, but it was impossible to know which
were secure enough to hold on to. “Oh my God, I can’t watch,” María
Fernanda said when her 7-year-old daughter crossed the rock. She covered
her eyes and shouted, “Hold on tight, my princess!”
When
it was an 8-year-old girl named Katherine’s turn, she slipped and fell
into the rocky river about 15 feet below. Her mother, who had been right
behind her, stood frozen while one of the porters jumped into the water
after her. Katherine emerged crying but uninjured. We started hiking
again almost immediately—no one wanted to contemplate the near miss any
longer than they had to.
The
next day was the group’s fourth in the jungle and the 15th since
leaving Chile. We came upon a fallen tree trunk covered in wet moss that
we would have to cross like a balance beam above a racing river. I
stopped short, certain that there was no way I would make it across
without slipping. Then I noticed a little girl we’d never seen before
standing alone, wide-eyed, seemingly unsure of what to do. One of the
teenage boys in our group reached over, wrapped an arm around her belly,
and carried her across. He placed her down unceremoniously on the other
side and kept walking. I held my breath and stepped onto the log.
We
started seeing abandoned tents and wondered if they meant that we were
reaching the jungle’s edge, or if the people who’d left them had simply
been too weak to carry even the most basic supplies. And for the first
time, we saw people sitting by themselves on rocks and tree stumps,
staring aimlessly into the distance, apparently deserted by their
traveling companions. We crossed a river behind a family with three
girls, two of whom were disabled. The eldest looked to be at least 10
but was swaddled like a baby in a sheet against her father’s chest, her
long limbs flopping out. Her father slipped and face-planted, dunking
them underwater. When they resurfaced, the girl was coughing and
screaming. The father shook himself off, tightened the sheet, and kept
going. Just off the path lay a decomposing corpse, tucked under a
blanket.
The
dozen Panamanian officers assigned to tail us started asking us to
share the last of our food—until we ran out. They were exhausted and
kept wanting to take breaks. The platoon’s medic chugged a bottle of
saline solution. We’d given it to him, along with antivenom that
required dilution, to hold on to as a precaution against snakebites. But
the officer had a more urgent problem: diarrhea from drinking the river
water.
Around
midday, we reached a place called Tres Bocas, where three rivers
combine—and where bodies tend to wash ashore toward the end of the rainy
season. Many members of María Fernanda’s group had fallen far behind,
along with half of the border-patrol officers. One officer warned us
that we were still at least 13 miles from the jungle’s edge but that,
because of the terrain, it would feel twice as long. We couldn’t wait
for the others to catch up.
For
four hours, we alternated between speed-walking and running, far
exceeding what I would have thought physically possible. We finally
emerged from the canopy onto a rocky beach where hundreds of migrants
were waiting. Many said they hadn’t eaten in days.
We
all climbed into motorized canoes driven by Indigenous people who
charged $25 a person. Two hours later, as the sun set, we arrived in
Bajo Chiquito, a community of about 200 people that—despite having no
running water, electricity, or hospital—the Panamanian government had
deemed an official reception point for people who make it out of the
Darién Gap, and a key landmark amid the “controlled flow” of migration that it claims to have achieved.
The density of the
jungle makes it difficult to contend at any one moment with the
humanitarian catastrophe it contains, and the many policy failures that
led people there. But all of that is on display in Bajo Chiquito, where
the feeble systems for processing migrants are stretched dangerously
thin.
Shaking
from exhaustion, we climbed up a set of stairs that leads into the
village. From sunrise to sunset, the entrance is packed with migrants
waiting to be processed by government officials. Up to 4,000 people a day arrive here. Some have to be carried up the steps; others collapse when they reach the top.
Despite Panama having the highest per capita income in Latin America,
its Indigenous people live in almost universally crushing poverty.
Panamanian politicians are quick to decry how migration has changed the
Indigenous way of life, but it has been a windfall for communities like
Bajo Chiquito. While I was there, music blared as the migrants who had
money bought food, Wi-Fi, toiletries, clean clothes, and tents.
Residents walked around holding wads of American dollars, the de facto
currency of the Darién Gap.
Most
of the migrants I met in the processing line told me they’d been robbed
by bandits at a checkpoint within a day’s walk of the community. The
women said they’d been groped; some said they’d been digitally
penetrated under the guise of a search for hidden cash. Panamanian
border officers standing nearby showed no interest in investigating.
Indigenous leaders say they have asked the government for help addressing crime against migrants, but the situation seems to be getting worse. In February, Doctors Without Borders published a report on sexual violence
against migrants in the Darién Gap, showing a frequency more typical of
war zones. Soon after, the government kicked the organization out of
the area.
On the sides of houses in Bajo Chiquito, I saw MISSING
flyers displaying the photograph of a 9-year-old Vietnamese boy with
plump cheeks. Panamanian authorities had told me that children who
become separated from their family in the jungle are pulled aside until
the adults arrive. But within minutes of interviewing people in the
processing line, I met a 5-year-old Ecuadorian girl who’d arrived with a
group of strangers she’d met in the jungle. When it was their turn to
be questioned, no one in the group admitted that they weren’t related to
the girl. They had no documents for her, but the migration officers
waved them through.
A
long line of the sick and injured snaked around Bajo Chiquito’s sole
medical clinic, which was opened to respond to the influx of migrants.
In the open-air waiting room—a few dozen plastic chairs on a concrete
slab—people vomited, nursed rashes and bloody wounds, and carried babies
who’d had diarrhea for days. Doctors handed out a couple of pills for
fevers or squirts of rash cream in plastic baggies, and called for the
next patient.
Two
women carried in a friend who had nearly drowned; she was mumbling and
couldn’t lift her head. A nurse led them to a gurney and connected the
woman to an IV while her three children watched in horror. The nurse
returned a short while later and, though the woman was still incoherent,
told the family that they would have to leave soon—the facility closed
at 5 p.m. A couple of men who had just come out of their own
appointments carried her to a tent as she moaned.
The
next morning, migrants lined up again for canoes that would take them
to a larger camp near the highway, from which they would depart for
Costa Rica. Unaware that all of them would get a spot, they started
shouting at one another in different languages about who had been first
in line. “This happens every day,” an officer told me. I spotted the
woman from the clinic asleep on a bench, her skin a greenish-gray color.
Her youngest child, an 8-year-old boy, held her head in his lap,
stroking her hair and swatting away flies. Her two older children were
walking up and down the village, looking lost and debating what to do.
Suddenly,
Lynsey and I heard screaming. We ran inside a pink house that was
renting rooms to migrants and found a large family from China whom we
had met at the clinic the day before. They’d had fevers for days and
were sent away with ibuprofen. That morning the 70-year-old grandfather,
Yenian Shao, had not woken up. His wife and daughter lay over his body,
wailing and chanting.
Border-patrol
officers called for a local investigator, who arrived an hour later.
Using a translation app on his phone, Yenian’s son tried asking if his
father’s body could be cremated or sent back to China, but he couldn’t
understand the response. The authorities packed up Yenian’s body and
lowered it down the side of a hill into a canoe. Yenian’s wife got in
next, straddling her husband’s body bag, followed by the rest of their
family. Residents were sweeping the streets of trash. Just across the
river, the first new migrants of the day were arriving.
In April, we returned
to Panama to visit a sleepy fishing village near the Colombian border
called Puerto Obaldía. Its once brightly colored homes have weathered
over the years. There are few ways to make money here. Migration used to
be one of them.
For
years, migrants had arrived in Puerto Obaldía on boats from Colombia.
Locals sold them food, allowed them to camp, and charged them to arrange
the next leg of their journey—either on charter flights to Panama City
from a tiny airstrip, or in fishing boats up the coast, to another
village with a paved road that connects to a highway out of the country.
This lasted until 2015, when migration through the Darién Gap reached roughly 30,000 people for the first time in history, and the U.S. leaned on Panama to crack down. The border patrol began arresting residents and charging them with smuggling.
When
we went, the town was in the middle of a mayoral election, plastered
with posters of smiling candidates. They were all campaigning on a
platform of bringing the migrants back, though none seemed to know how
to do so. The candidates I interviewed, and other residents,
acknowledged that at times the town had been overwhelmed. At one point
in 2015, there were 1,500 migrants camped in this community of only
about 600. But they insisted that the arrangement was better than the
one that exists now—for them and for the migrants.
The boat rides never stopped; cartels simply took them over, labeling them a “VIP” option and charging upwards of $1,000 a person.
Now the boats leave just after sunset, even when the seas are
dangerously rough, and sometimes they capsize. At least five people have
drowned this year, including an Afghan child.
“It’s
the government’s fault that so many have died,” Alonsita Lonchy Ibarra
Parra, one of the candidates, told me. Another, Luis Alberto Mendoza
Peñata, said that the community had appealed to the authorities, asking
why migrants can rest and refuel in Bajo Chiquito but not in their
community. “We write letters. They don’t respond,” he told me. “If
immigration is illegal in Panama, why is it allowed there, but not
here?”
But the United States is pushing Panama and other Latin American countries to crack down more on migration, not less. Recently Panama agreed to accept $6 million from the U.S. for deportation flights.
The U.S. has also been urging Panama to construct detention centers,
like those that exist along the U.S.-Mexico border. Panama’s newly
elected president campaigned on the promise to seal the Darién Gap
completely. But an effort to do just that, announced by the U.S.,
Panama, and Colombia last year, had no discernible effect—more than half a million people made it through, the largest number to date. In June, the Panamanians installed a razor-wire fence
across the border at the same spot where we had crossed. When I asked
one of our Colombian guides what the cartel was going to do next, he
replied, “Make another route.” Before the week’s end, someone had cut a
hole in the fence, and migrants were streaming through.
Beyond the Darién Gap, migrants and their smugglers continue to find ways around the roadblocks set before them. Recently, hundreds of thousands of migrants have flown into Nicaragua, for example, which has bucked U.S. pressure to restrict visas.
Mari
Carmen Aponte, the U.S. ambassador to Panama, and other State
Department officials I interviewed said the American government was
trying to balance deterrence with programs to keep migrants safe. They
pointed to offices that the United States is opening throughout Latin
America to interview people seeking refugee status. The U.S. hopes to
approve as many as 50,000 this year to fly directly into the country,
far more than in the past.
Key
to these screenings, the officials told me, will be distinguishing
between true refugees and economic migrants. But most people migrate for
overlapping reasons, rather than just one. Many of the migrants I met
in the Darién Gap knew which types of cases prevail in American
immigration courts and which do not. They were prepared to emphasize
whichever aspect of their story would be most likely to get their
children to safety.
And
too often, deterrence and protection are not complementary strategies,
but opposing ones. When I told Aponte about my reporting in Puerto
Obaldía, where Panama’s crackdown seemed only to hand migrants over to
the cartel and force more of them into the jungle, she said she hadn’t
thought about the situation in such stark terms before. She acknowledged
that she was trying to make choices “between two extremes—none of which
works.”
On
that same trip to Puerto Obaldía, I learned that in January of this
year, Panama had made what seemed like a concession to the locals,
allowing them to open a small camp about a four-hour hike from the town.
A group of officers agreed to accompany Lynsey and me there. On the
way, a representative from the border patrol’s communications department
had to stop several times to vomit from overexertion. After we arrived,
the officers recovered while drinking cold Gatorade and eating a hot
lunch of chicken and rice.
Nelly
Ramírez, a 58-year-old woman from Venezuela, sat slumped on a bench. On
her second day walking through the jungle with her daughter and four
grandchildren, she had slipped on some leaves and broken her leg, and it
was still oozing with pus. Other migrants had carried her to the camp
while her family continued on. A woman working there had given her food
and a hammock. She had no money and was panicking about what to do next.
But if the camp hadn’t existed, she figured she would have died in the
jungle alone.
Two
days later, some of the same officers returned to the camp just after
sunrise. They were not on their way to investigate people robbing and
assaulting migrants in the jungle, or those who captain deadly boat
rides for exorbitant fees. Instead, they declared that the people
running the camp had been aiding and abetting human trafficking by
selling food and Wi-Fi. They burned the camp down.
María Fernanda’s group of
21 splintered before even making it out of the jungle, when some
members were caught sneaking food they’d hidden after everyone said
they’d run out. After passing through Central America, those who could
afford it took express buses to Mexico City. The rest slept in shelters
and on the streets. One of the poorest families was kidnapped in
southern Mexico. They sent desperate messages to the group, begging for
money. Most said they had nothing to spare.
Orlimar
and her cousin Elimar are no longer speaking. They had a falling-out at
a bus station in Honduras, when Elimar grew tired of waiting for
Bergkan to scrounge together enough money to continue. She purchased
tickets for herself and her own kids, and told Orlimar they were leaving
just as they were called to board.
Bergkan had blown up, he said, accusing Elimar of taking advantage of him. “I told her, ‘You used me like a coyote! Like a mochilero to help you with the kids.’ ”
In
Mexico City, Elimar applied for an interview with American immigration
officials using U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s app CBP One, which
was created to streamline arrivals at the border. But she lost patience
after a month and found someone to shuttle her and the kids across the
border illegally. They turned themselves over to immigration authorities
and were given a court date in 2029. That long a wait is not
unheard-of. They now live in an apartment complex on the outskirts of
Dallas, where her children are enrolled in public school. Elimar cleans
offices and her boyfriend works as a cook at a chain restaurant.
Once Bergkan’s family made it to southern Mexico, they rode in a series of vans called combis,
which are the cheapest way to travel on the country’s dangerous rural
highways. They say they lost count of the times that narcos, police
officers, and Mexican immigration officials boarded the vans and
demanded bribes. They made Central Americans and Caribbeans pay more
than the Venezuelans—everyone knew they were the poorest. The last group
of armed men kept their request modest: “100 pesos per person,” they
said, about $6. “It’s not that much.” Sixteen days after the family left
Bajo Chiquito, they arrived in Mexico City.
Bergkan
is now working odd jobs; he has bound textbooks in a factory and done
construction in a cemetery. The family is living in a two-bedroom
basement apartment with more than a dozen other Venezuelans. They have
also applied to enter the United States through CBP One and are waiting
for their number to be called. They could try hopping the dangerous
train known as la bestia to the border, where they could cross illegally. But for now, Bergkan can’t stomach a single additional risk.
When someone dies in
the jungle, their remains are usually eaten by animals or swept away by
a river, or they disintegrate in the hot, wet terrain. But sometimes a
body is retrieved. Panamanian authorities have offered conflicting
accounts of the number of bodies recovered from the jungle—ranging from
30 to 70 a year. But these appear to be significant undercounts. In one
remote community called El Real, Luis Antonio Moreno, a local doctor,
told me that a mass grave dug in 2021 had quickly filled with hundreds
of migrant bodies—double if not triple the reported numbers.
Moreno
has operated El Real’s run-down hospital for 18 years. Its morgue is
one of several in the area where bodies are taken after they are removed
from the jungle. Moreno said he has processed the remains of people
“from every country and every age.” Some arrive with their
identification documents still protected in plastic baggies they had
been carrying with them. Others are just bones. He teared up recalling
two cases from last year: One was a father and son who drowned together;
their bodies were still hugging when they were delivered to him. The
other was a father and son who had both been shot in the head.
The
morgue is next to the hospital kitchen. Moreno said the stench was
often intolerable, even before the day this spring when he discovered
that the air conditioner had gone out and the bodies inside were
decomposing. In March 2023, the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC), which has a program to help families track down loved ones who
have gone missing while migrating, built a mausoleum in the local cemetery with space for hundreds of bodies, and it’s quickly filling.
At
a recent burial ceremony, municipal workers wearing hazmat suits placed
12 white body bags into graves. Ten of the bags were labeled desconocido,
or “unknown.” One bore the name of a man from Venezuela whose family
had confirmed his identity. Just before the last body bag, which was
also the smallest, went into the mausoleum, an ICRC worker opened it and
placed a dog tag on the wrist of the 8-month-old Haitian girl inside.
After leaving Panama, I
sent a message to the phone number I saw on the flyer for the missing
9-year-old boy in Bajo Chiquito. The number led me to Bé Thị Lê, the
mother of the boy, whose name was Khánh.
A
single mother, Bé had worked in school administration in Vietnam, but
lost her job at the beginning of the pandemic. She started watching
videos that smugglers posted on YouTube of the trip through the Darién
Gap; the journey seemed doable. Several relatives who had already
migrated to the United States sent her money to join them. Bé and Khánh
traveled for nearly a month to get to the jungle, flying first to
Taiwan, then France, then Brazil, and then taking buses and cars through
Peru and Ecuador to reach northern Colombia.
Bé
sent me photographs and videos she’d taken of her son throughout the
journey, posing on boats and at transit stations. In one video, Khánh
sat on a hotel-room bed, using the Duolingo app to work on his English.
He was practicing the phrase Yes, coffee with milk please, nailing all but the final word. The app prompted him to repeat it again and again: please, please, please.
In
the jungle, they moved slowly and quickly ran out of food. On the fifth
day, they walked into a river identical to dozens they’d already
crossed. Neither knew how to swim, so they linked arms with an
Ecuadorian man named Juan. The rain that had been pounding all day
started to come down harder, and the water suddenly changed from clear
to brown, signaling a flash flood. “The water was only up to my knees,
but two steps later, it was up to my neck,” Bé told me. All three were
knocked off their feet. Bé grabbed onto a boulder. Juan tried to do the
same, but his backpack filled with water and pulled him under. Khánh
slipped out of his grip. Juan and Bé scrambled to a patch of beach and
looked out in the direction where the current had taken Khánh. He was
gone.
Bé
said she felt all the energy drain from her body as she sat on the
beach, speechless and unmovable. Some of the other migrants in their
group told her they had heard Khánh call out “Mommy” as he was pulled
away. They offered her their condolences and kept walking. Juan
eventually persuaded her to continue on so that they could report what
had happened and get help trying to find Khánh. A day and a half later,
they climbed up the stairs to Bajo Chiquito.
Border-patrol
officers used a translation app to take down Bé’s account. They advised
her to continue on to the larger camp near the highway to make another
report. She did so, then asked her brother, who lives in Boston, to fly
down and help her. Together, they returned to Bajo Chiquito and posted
the signs that I later found. She said that officials there gave no
indication that they planned to look for Khánh, and told her that she
didn’t have permission to do so herself. At her brother’s urging, Bé
turned herself over to American immigration authorities to request
asylum, and then traveled to Boston, where she has been working in a
nail salon. “My son has always been with me, since he was born until
now. I have no husband, so there are times when I am not quite there,”
she told me. “Not so conscious, not quite there. I’m physically still
here, but emotionally not, because I miss him.”
Without
a body to mourn, she’s become obsessed with the idea that Khánh may
have been pulled out of the river or washed ashore. She thinks he may
have been kidnapped by someone in the jungle, or perhaps he’s being
taken care of but was injured or can’t remember her phone number. She
thinks he might still be waiting for her to come get him. After I wrote
to her, she sent me pleading messages almost every day for weeks.
“Please help me find my son.”
When
I contacted a representative at the ICRC about Khánh, the organization
added him to the list of missing migrants it is trying to find. Months
later, there has been no news. Bé continues to write to me. “What do you
believe about my son?” she asked recently. “I’m always waiting for news
of my baby.”
This article appears in the September 2024 print edition with the headline “Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap.”
About the Author
Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer at
The Atlantic. She received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
