darien gap atlantic
Author: Unknown
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Seventy Miles in Hell

Story by Caitlin Dickerson

• 3mo • 29 min read

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Photographs by Lynsey Addario

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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.

[Caitlin Dickerson: There’s no such thing as a border czar]

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?

Bergkan Rhuly Ale Vidal and his partner, Orlimar, set out to traverse the Darién Gap with their children, Isaac, 2, and Camila, 8. They traveled with Orlimar’s cousin Elimar and her two children. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

Illustration by La Tigre

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.

Migrants discarded clothing and gear to lighten their packs. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

Bergkan and his children ascend a mountainous stretch of trail near the Colombian border with Panama. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

Migrants gather at the starting point of a trail through the Darién Gap. The dense stretch of jungle typically takes three to 10 days to traverse. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

Susej, 7, comforts her mother, María Fernanda Vargas Ramírez, the informal leader of a group of 21 migrants crossing the Darién Gap. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.”

Left : A migrant carries his 4-year-old son up a hill. Right : A blanket conceals human remains left along the trail. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

A Colombian guide helps Susej traverse a slippery rock wall. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

Left : Migrants arrive in Bajo Chiquito, an official Panamanian reception point for those who make it out of the Darién Gap. Right : Migrants camp overnight in Bajo Chiquito, which has no running water or electricity. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

Panamanian soldiers transport the body of a Chinese migrant, Yenian Shao, who died after arriving in the village with a fever. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

A group of Indigenous Panamanians ventures across rough seas. Before a 2015 crackdown, many migrants traveled up the coast of Panama by boat to circumvent the Darién Gap; today, however, the cartels that control the overseas routes charge high prices for passage, driving many to opt for the cheaper—and more dangerous—paths through the jungle. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

“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.

Soldiers from Panamanian border control visit a makeshift camp along a route through the Darién Gap, one of several improvised way stations where migrants can rest and purchase food and supplies. A few days later, officers would return to the camp and destroy it. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

Left : A woman who arrived in Bajo Chiquito severely dehydrated and barely able to walk recuperates in the village’s sole medical clinic. Right : Moaning and incoherent, the woman was carried to a nearby tent when the clinic closed for the night. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.

The Church of Santa Cruz y la Soledad, in Mexico City, has become a resting place for migrants on the journey north, at times housing more than 1,000 people a night. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic with support from National Geographic Society)

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.”

Darién Gap

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Darién Gap (UK: /ˈdɛəriən, ˈdær-/,[1][2] US: /ˌdɛəriˈɛn, ˌdɑːr-, dɑːrˈjɛn/,[1][3][4] Spanish: Tapón del Darién [taˈpon del daˈɾjen],  'Darién plug')[5] is a geographic region that connects the American continents, stretching across southern Panama's Darién Province and the northern portion of Colombia's Chocó Department. Consisting of a large watershed, dense rainforest, and mountains, it is known for its remoteness, difficult terrain, and extreme environment,[6] with a reputation as one of the most inhospitable regions in the world.[7] Nevertheless, as the only land bridge between North and South America, the Darién Gap has historically served as a major route for both humans and wildlife.

Colombia–Panama border

Pan-American Highway between Yaviza, Panama, and Turbo, Colombia

Embera girl

The geography of the Darién Gap is highly diverse. The Colombian side is dominated primarily by the river delta of the Atrato River, which creates a flat marshland at least 80 km (50 mi) wide. The Tanela River, which flows toward Atrato, was Hispanicized to Darién by 16th Century European conquistadors. The Serranía del Baudó mountain range extends along Colombia's Pacific coast and into Panama. The Panamanian side, in stark contrast, is a mountainous rainforest, with terrain reaching from 60 m (197 ft) in the valley floors to 1,845 m (6,053 ft) at the tallest peak, Cerro Tacarcuna, in the Serranía del Darién.

The Darién Gap is inhabited mostly by the indigenous Embera-Wounaan and Guna peoples; in 1995, it had a reported population of 8,000 among five tribes.[8] The only sizable settlement in the region is La Palma, the capital of Darién Province, with roughly 4,200 residents; other population centers include Yaviza and El Real, both on the Panamanian side.

Owing to its isolation and harsh geography, the Darién Gap is largely undeveloped, with most economic activity consisting of small-scale farming, cattle ranching, and lumber.[7] Criminal enterprises such as human and drug trafficking are widespread.[9] There is no road, not even a primitive one, across the Darién: Colombia and Panama are the only countries in the Americas that share a land border but lack even a rudimentary link. The "Gap" interrupts the Pan-American Highway, which breaks at Yaviza, Panama and resumes at Turbo, Colombia roughly 106 km (66 mi) away. Infrastructure development has long been constrained by logistical challenges, financial costs, and environmental concerns; attempts failed in the 1970s and 1990s.[10] As of 2024, there is no active plan to build a road through the Gap, although there is discussion of reestablishing a ferry service and building a rail link.

Consequently, travel within and across Darién Gap is often conducted with small boats or traditional watercraft such as pirogues. Otherwise, hiking is the only remaining option, and it is strenuous and dangerous. Aside from natural threats such as deadly wildlife, tropical diseases, and frequent heavy rains and flash floods, law enforcement and medical support are nonexistent, resulting in rampant violent crime, and causing otherwise minor injuries to ultimately become fatal.[11]

Despite its perilous conditions, since the 2010s, the Darién Gap has become one of the heaviest migration routes in the world, with hundreds of thousands of migrants, primarily Haitians and Venezuelans, traversing north to the Mexico–United States border.[12][13] In 2022, there were 250,000 crossings, compared to only 24,000 in 2019.[14] In 2023, more than 520,000 passed through the gap, more than doubling the previous year's number of crossings.[9]

Pan-American Highway

[edit]

Main article: Pan-American Highway

The Pan-American Highway is a system of roads measuring about 30,000 km (19,000 mi)[15] in length that runs north–south through the entirety of North, Central and South America, with the sole exception of a 106 km (66 mi) stretch of marshland and mountains between Panama and Colombia known as the Darién Gap. On the South American side, the Highway terminates at Turbo, Colombia, near 8°6′N 76°40′W. On the Panamanian side, the road terminus, for many years in Chepo, Panama Province, is since 2010[citation needed] in the town of Yaviza at 8°9′N 77°41′W.

Many people, including local indigenous populations, groups and governments are opposed to completing the Darién portion of the highway.[10] Reasons for opposition include protecting the rainforest, containing the spread of tropical diseases, protecting the livelihood of indigenous peoples in the area, preventing drug trafficking[16] and its associated violence, and preventing foot-and-mouth disease from entering North America. The extension of the highway as far as Yaviza resulted in severe deforestation alongside the highway route within a decade.[17]

Efforts were made for decades to fill this sole gap in the Pan-American Highway. Planning began in 1971 with the help of American funding, but was halted in 1974 after concerns were raised by environmentalists.[10] US support was further blocked by the US Department of Agriculture in 1978, from its desire to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease.[10] Another effort to build the road began in 1992, but, by 1994 a United Nations agency reported that the road, and the subsequent development, would cause extensive environmental damage. Cited reasons include evidence that the Darién Gap has prevented the spread of diseased cattle into Central and North America, which have not seen foot-and-mouth disease since 1954, and, since at least the 1970s, this has been a substantial factor in preventing a road link through the Darién Gap.[18][19] The Embera-Wounaan and Guna are among five tribes, comprising 8,000 people, who have expressed concern that the road would bring about the potential erosion of their cultures by destroying their food sources.[10]

An alternative to the Darién Gap highway would be a river ferry service between Turbo or Necoclí, Colombia and one of several sites along Panama's Caribbean coast.[10] Ferry services such as Crucero Express and Ferry Xpress operated to link the gap, but closed because the service was not profitable. As of 2023, nothing has come of this idea.[20]

Another idea is to use a combination of bridges and tunnels to avoid the environmentally sensitive regions.[21]

History

[edit]

Pre-Columbian history

[edit]

pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas:

Arctic

Northwest

Aridoamerica

Mesoamerica

Isthmo-Colombian

Caribbean

Amazon

Andes

Archaeological knowledge of this area has received relatively little attention compared to its neighbors to the north and south, although in the early 20th century, scholars such as Max Uhle, William Henry Holmes, C. V. Hartman and George Grant MacCurdy undertook studies of archaeological sites and collections that were augmented by further research by Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, John Alden Mason, Doris Zemurray Stone, William Duncan Strong, Gordon Willey and others. There are a large number of sites with impressive platform mounds, plazas, paved roads, stone sculpture and artifacts made from jade, gold and ceramic materials.[citation needed]

The Guna people lived in what is now Northern Colombia and the Darién Province of Panama at the time of the Spanish conquest, and they subsequently began to move westward due to a conflict with the Spanish and other indigenous groups. Centuries before the conquest, the Gunas arrived in South America as part of a Chibchan migration that moved east from Central America. At the time of the Spanish invasion, they were living in the region of Uraba, near the borders of what are now Antioquia and Caldas. The Guna themselves attribute their several migrations to conflicts with other chiefdoms, and their migration to nearby islands in particular to escape malarial mosquito populations on the mainland.[22]

European settlement

[edit]

Isthmus of Darién in America, The Bay of Panama, The Gulph of Vallona or St. Michael, with its Islands and Countries Adjacent". In A letter giving a description of the Isthmus of Darien, Edinburgh: 1699

Vasco Núñez de Balboa's travel route to the South Sea, 1513

Vasco Núñez de Balboa and Alonso de Ojeda explored the coast of Colombia in 1500 and 1501. They spent the most time in the Gulf of Urabá, where they made contact with the Gunas. The regional border was initially created in 1508 after royal decree to separate the colonial governorships of Castilla de Oro and Nueva Andalucía, using the River Atrato as the boundary between the two governorships.[23][24]

Balboa heard of the "South Sea" from locals while sailing along the Caribbean coast. On 25 September 1513, he saw the Pacific.[25]

In 1519, the town of Panamá was founded near a small indigenous settlement on the Pacific coast. After the Spaniards entered what is now Peru, it developed into an important transshipment port as well as an administrative center.[citation needed]

In 1671, the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan crossed the Isthmus of Panama from the Caribbean side and destroyed the city; the town was subsequently relocated a few kilometers to the west on a small peninsula. The ruins of the old town, Panamá Viejo, are preserved and were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.[26]

Silver and gold from the viceroyalty of Peru was taken across the isthmus by Spanish Silver Train to Porto Bello, where Spanish treasure fleets shipped them to Seville and Cádiz from 1707. Lionel Wafer spent four years between 1680 and 1684 among the Gunas.

In 1698, the Kingdom of Scotland tried to establish a settlement in a project known as the Darién scheme, intending to tame, occupy and administer the non-traversable land of the Darién Gap, and use it as a gateway to trade between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans,[27] as was later achieved successfully by the Panama Railroad and then the Panama Canal. The first expedition of five ships (Saint Andrew, Caledonia, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour) set sail from Leith on 14 July 1698, with around 1,200 people on board.[28] Their orders were "to proceed to the Bay of Darién, and make the Isle called the Golden Island ... some few leagues to the leeward of the mouth of the great River of Darién ... and there make a settlement on the mainland".[29] After calling at Madeira and the West Indies, the fleet made landfall off the coast of Darién on 2 November. The settlers christened their new home "New Caledonia".[30]

The aim was for the colony to have an overland route that connected the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Since its inception, it has been said that the undertaking was beset by poor planning and provisioning, divided leadership, a poor choice of trade goods, devastating epidemics of disease, reported attempts by the East India Company to frustrate it, and a failure to anticipate the Spanish Empire's military response. It was finally abandoned in March 1700 after a siege and harbor blockade by Spanish forces.[31]

As the Company of Scotland was backed by approximately 20% of all the money circulating in Scotland, its failure left the Scottish Lowlands in substantial financial ruin; in fact, English financial incentives are thought to have been a factor in persuading those in power to support the 1707 union with England.[31] According to this argument, the Scottish establishment of landed aristocracy and mercantile elites considered that their best chance of being part of a major power would be to share the benefits of England's international trade and the growth of the English overseas possessions, so its future would have to lie in unity with England. Furthermore, Scotland's nobles were almost bankrupted by the Darién fiasco.[31]

Panamanian independence

[edit]

Main article: History of Panama

Most of Panama was part of Colombia until it declared its independence in 1903, with encouragement and support from the United States. The geography of Darién, through which no troops could pass, made its Departamento of Panamá harder to defend and control.

The current border is regulated by the Victoria-Velez Treaty [es], signed in Bogotá on 20 August 1924 by the Foreign Ministers of Panama, Nicolás Victoria [es], and Colombia, Jorge Vélez.[32] This treaty is officially registered in the Register No. 814 of the Treaty League of Nations, on 17 August 1925; said border was based on the same Colombian law of 9 June 1855.[33]

Natural resources

[edit]

A Ceiba tree makes Darien Gap crosser Gustavo Ross look tiny in comparison. Ceibas were considered sacred trees by ancient Mayan cultures. Ceiba tree in the Darién Gap

Two major national parks exist in the Darién Gap: Darién National Park in Panama and Los Katíos National Park in Colombia. The Darién Gap forests had extensive cedrela and mahogany cover until many of these trees were removed by loggers.[34]

Darién National Park in Panama, the largest national park in Central America, covers roughly 5,790 km2 (2,240 sq mi) of land, and was established in 1980. The property includes a stretch of the Pacific Coast and almost the entire border with neighbouring Colombia.[34]

Copa Airlines Flight 201

[edit]

Main article: Copa Airlines Flight 201

On 6 June 1992, Copa Airlines Flight 201, a Boeing 737 jet airplane covering a flight between Panama City and Cali, Colombia, crashed in the Darién Gap, killing all 47 people on board.[35]

Adventure travelers

[edit]

To travel between the continents through the Darién Gap has long been a challenge for adventure travelers.

The Gap can be transited by off-road vehicles attempting intercontinental journeys. The first post-colonial expedition to the Darién was the Marsh Darién Expedition in 1924–25, supported by several major sponsors, including the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History and the government of Panama.[36]

The first vehicular crossing of the Gap was made by three Brazilians in two Ford Model T cars. They left Rio de Janeiro in 1928 and arrived in the United States in 1938. The expedition intended to bring attention for the Panamerican highway, after an International Conference in Chile, in 1923. The participants were Leonidas Borges de Oliveira, a lieutenant from Brazilian army, Francisco Lopez da Cruz from Brazilian air force, and Mário Fava, a young mechanic. They took what appears to be the last photo of Augusto Sandino, who received them in Nicaragua, and were received by Henry Ford and Franklin Roosevelt in the United States. [citation needed]

Another crossing was completed by the Land Rover La Cucaracha Cariñosa (The Affectionate Cockroach) and a Jeep of the Trans-Darién Expedition of 1959–60.[37] They left Chepo, Panama, on 2 February 1960 and reached Quibdó, Colombia, on 17 June 1960, averaging 201 m (220 yd) per hour over 136 days.

Prudhoe Bay, United States, to Quellón, Chile, and Ushuaia, Argentina, with official and unofficial routes shown in Mexico and Central and South America.

In December 1960, on a motorcycle trip from Alaska to Argentina, adventurer Danny Liska attempted to transit the Darién Gap from Panama to Colombia.[38] In Panama City, Liska decided to fly his motorcycle ahead to Medellin, and proceed across the Gap by boat and on foot.[39] He was later forced to abandon it in Punta Arenas when he was not able to clear it at a customs office, and was once again afoot.[40]

In 1961, a team of three 1961 Chevrolet Corvairs and several support vehicles departed from Panama. After 109 days, they reached the Colombia Border with two Corvairs, the third having been abandoned in the jungle.[41][42]

A pair of Range Rovers was used on the British Trans-Americas Expedition in 1972 led by John Blashford-Snell, which is claimed to be the first vehicle-based expedition to traverse both American continents north to south through the Darién Gap. The Expedition crossed the Atrato Swamp in Colombia with the cars on special inflatable rafts that were carried in the backs of the vehicles. However, they received substantial support from the British Army.

The first fully overland wheeled crossing (others used boats for some sections) of the Gap was that of British cyclist Ian Hibell, who rode from Cape Horn to Alaska between 1971 and 1973. Hibell took the "direct" overland south-to-north route, including an overland crossing of the Atrato Swamp in Colombia.[43]

BMW R80G/S motorcycle) was the first motor vehicle to fully navigate the Pan-American Highway by land.

Ed Culberson was the first one to follow the entire Pan-American highway including the Darién Gap proposed route on a motorcycle, a BMW R80G/S.[44]

In the 1990s, the gap was briefly joined by ferry service, provided by Crucero Express, until it ceased operations in 1997.

A number of notable crossings have been made on foot. Sebastian Snow crossed the Gap with Wade Davis in 1975 as part of his unbroken walk from Tierra del Fuego to Costa Rica. The trip is documented in his 1976 book The Rucksack Man and in Wade Davis's 1996 book One River. In 1981, George Meegan crossed the gap on a similar journey. He too started in Tierra del Fuego and eventually ended in Alaska. His 1988 biography, The Longest Walk, describes the trip and includes a 25-page chapter on his foray through the Gap.

First Mexican by-foot crossers take a rest by the "Lost Corvair" abandoned in 1961 by a failed caravan from Chicago.

In 1979, evangelist Arthur Blessitt traversed the gap while carrying a 3.7-meter (12 ft) wooden cross, a trek confirmed by Guinness World Records as part of "the longest round-the-world pilgrimage" for Christ.[45][46][47]

Most crossings of the Darién Gap region have been from Panama to Colombia. In July 1961, three college students — Carl Adler, James Wirth, and Joseph Bellina — crossed from the Bay of San Miguel to Puerto Obaldia on the Gulf of Parita (near Colombia) and ultimately to Mulatupu in the San Blas Islands. The trip across the Darién was by banana boat, piragua and foot via the Tuira river (La Palma and El Real de Santa Maria), Río Chucunaque (Yaviza), Rio Tuquesa (Chaua's (General Choco Chief) Trading Post—Choco Indian village) and Serranía del Darién.[48]

In 1985, Project Raleigh, which evolved from Project Drake in 1984 and in 1989 became Raleigh International, sponsored an expedition which also crossed the Darién coast to coast.[49]

Between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, Encounter Overland, a British adventure travel company, organized two- to three-week trekking trips through the Darién Gap from Panama to Colombia or vice versa. These trips used a combination of whatever transport was available: jeeps, bus, boats, and walking, with travelers carrying their own supplies.

Complete overland crossings of the Darién rainforest on foot and riverboat (i.e., from the last road in Panama to the first road in Colombia) became more dangerous in the 1990s because of the Colombian conflict. The Colombian portion of the Darién rainforest in the Katios Park region eventually fell under control of armed groups. Furthermore, combatants from Colombia even entered Panama, occupied some Panamanian jungle villages and kidnapped or killed inhabitants and travelers.[50]

Migrants traveling northward

[edit]

Venezuelan migrants being processed in Ecuador in preparation to make the long journey north to New York City, including crossing the Darién Gap

While the Darién Gap has been considered to be essentially impassable, the 21st century has seen thousands of migrants, primarily Haitian during the 2010s and Venezuelan during the 2020s, cross the Darién Gap to reach the United States. By 2021, the number was more than 130,000,[13] and 2023 is on pace for 500,000 migrants for the now more organized 2 ½ day trek, which used to take a week.[51] Of the 334,000 migrants that made the trek over the first eight months of 2023, 60% were Venezuelan, motivating the Biden administration to provide foreign assistance to help Panama deport migrants.[52]

The hike, which involves crossing rivers which flood frequently, is unpleasant, demanding, and dangerous, with rape and robbery common, and there are numerous fatalities.[12]

By 2013, the coastal route on the east side of the Darién Isthmus became relatively safe, by taking a motorboat across the Gulf of Uraba from Turbo to Capurganá and then hopping the coast to Sapzurro and hiking from there to La Miel, Panama. All inland routes through the Darién remain highly dangerous.[53] In June 2017, CBS journalist Adam Yamaguchi filmed smugglers leading refugees on a nine-day journey from Colombia to Panama through the Darién.[54]

Migrants from Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and China[55] have been known to cross the Darién Gap as a method of migrating to the United States. This route may entail flying to Ecuador (taking advantage of that nation's liberal visa policy) and attempting to cross the gap on foot.[56] The journalist Jason Motlagh was interviewed by Sacha Pfeiffer on NPR's nationally syndicated radio show On Point in 2016 concerning his work following migrants through the Darién Gap.[57] Journalists Nadja Drost and Bruno Federico were interviewed by Nick Schifrin about their work following migrants through the Darién Gap in mid-2019 and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic a year later, as part of a series on migration to the United States for PBS NewsHour.[58][59][60]

In 2023, people fleeing China travelled to Ecuador, then to Necoclí in Colombia, with the intention of crossing the Darién Gap on foot.[61][55] The number of Chinese people crossing the Darién Gap increased with each passing month in 2023.[62]

In August 2024, journalist Caitlin Dickerson reported on immigration through the Darién Gap for The Atlantic.[50]

The route in the 21st century

[edit]

Several video teams have traveled with migrants and thus the conditions of the route have become better known. It is possible, although arduous, dangerous, and seriously rainy, to hike from Colombia to Panama.

By boat

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At various times scheduled boats, including sailboats, have sailed between the Colombian ports of Cartagena, Turbo, Necoclî and Capurganá and the Panamanian ports of El Porvenir and Colón. Chartering a small boat is also an option. Sea conditions make it a sometimes hazardous trip, and schedules can change frequently. Any of these options are more expensive than flying.[citation needed]

By land

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It is possible to cross the Gap on foot, but the conditions are very difficult and often underestimated. It is one of the rainiest and most dangerous places on the planet, a lawless, unpoliced region, with many drug smugglers and sometimes political rebels. Records are not kept, but it is known that many migrants die on this trip.[63]

The hiking trail ascends abruptly over a mountain; the four-day hike is a challenge even for a person in good physical shape. Most migrants are in mediocre physical shape or worse, and without equipment for hiking and camping. Women who are carrying babies or pregnant make the attempt.[64] Three migrant women bore babies in the Darién between 2013 and 2021, with no medical help or supplies available.[citation needed]

The Darién Gap is one of the rainiest places on the planet. The rainfall produces flash floods that can carry sleepers to their deaths. Several rivers with neither bridges nor boats must be crossed. No services of any kind are available; food, a tent and water purification materials sufficient for a hike of several days must be carried. Bodies of migrants are often found, but the numbers are grossly underreported by authorities in Panama.[50] There is no medical help and no way to evacuate someone ill, injured, or simply exhausted. A broken leg is usually fatal. There are many insects, snakes, and carnivorous animals. Many migrants are robbed or raped. There is no police presence and no cell phone service.[50]

In Capurganá, Colombia, and Yaviza, Panama, many young men offer, for a fee, to serve as guides and to provide "protection". There is no easy way to determine if those who offer these services are knowledgeable and trustworthy, or criminals looking for victims.[citation needed]

Armed conflict

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FARC insurgents in 1998

The Darién Gap was subject to the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which led an insurgency against the Colombian government.[65] FARC rebels were present on both the Colombian and Panamanian sides of the border.[66]

Other non-political victims include three New Tribes missionaries, who died after disappearing from the Panamanian side in 1993.[67]

In 2003, Robert Young Pelton, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure magazine, and two traveling companions, Mark Wedeven and Megan Smaker, were detained for a week by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a far-right paramilitary organization, in a highly publicized incident.[68][69]

In May 2013, Swedish backpacker Jan Philip Braunisch disappeared in the area after leaving the Colombian town of Riosucio to attempt crossing on foot to Panama via the Cuenca Cacarica. The FARC admitted to killing him, having mistaken him for a foreign spy.[70]