The Green Hell: Migration Through the Darién Gap

I'd only been in the tiny Emberra village of Baho Jigito a couple of days, and I had already seen the lifeless body of a little girl, as though the migrants carried her into town. The river I was sleeping around him, with this group of migrants resting here in the shade, had swept sleeping children to their deaths earlier this year. An upstream of me, there were at least three people's remains here. It was shin deep, but crossing upstream where it's above head height and rages down out

of the mountains in steep ravines. Was the migrants I walked back to town with told me the stuff of nightmares. The voice you just heard was a migrant from Cameroon who called himself James. That's not his real name, and astute listeners will have noticed that it is my real name, but for the protection of James and his family, it's a name be using when I met James. We're in a migrant reception center called Las Blancas, to the north

of the Darien Gap. To get there, one has to take a dugout canoe called a piragua from Bajo Jaquito. The voyage takes five hours, and for that five hours, migrants are packed fifteen to a boat wearing bright orange life jackets. They share the boat with nembra piraguero who sit at the back driving the boat with a two stroke motor, and a guide who sits on the front, using a pole when necessary to push the boat through

shallow sections. The Umbra people are indigenous to the area that's commonly known as the Daliang Gap, or at least to this part of it and the tiny Embrea village of Bajo Jaquito. It's a first settlement migrants encounter is they emerge from the perilous crossing of the jungle that divides Central America from South America and thousands of people

from a better future. There's a morale patch that the Panamanian Border Patrol and military were on their uniforms There reflects a slogan in a government messaging campaign darien asuna Jungla. It says. The campaign was launched in August, and it translates to the darinessn't a route or maybe a roads a better translation, it's a jungle. Obviously it's actually both, but this is like no route. Most of us will

be familiar with. The dark and foreboding jungle I saw in Bahajigito is one of the most impenetrable on Earth, and the crossing of it is among the most dangerous land migration routes. In the nineteen seventies, the British Army sent its most experienced explorers to find a way through the gap. Their commander called the gap a god forsaken place. Today migrants have their own names for it, Dete or

sometimes the Green Hell. Here's a group from Cameroon explaining why they didn't see a future there and they decided to take this dangerous route.

killing the citizens of our country. There's a lot of hardship, a lot of that. Eye for one, I've lost everybody, a lot of my family, my mom, my dad, my two brothers, and I'm the only one left so things and there is no job. I've completed school, but there's nothing for me to do. So that's why it decided to.

are at all. They must im giant boulders, cross perilous ravines, and traverse sheer cliff faces, all of this with barely any water than what they can carry, little to no food, inadequate clothing, a terrible footwear, and no medical attention. They must walk past dead bodies and past people who might

soon become dead bodies as they beg for help. They carry their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other across mountains and rivers, and in bau Jiquito they take what, for many of them will be the final steps of this part of their journey. It's a journey that few of us can imagine, and they were lucky to be able to avoid. My own migration to the US sixteen years ago was much simpler and safer, But for migrants like James, the journey's worth it because what they're leaving

behind is worse. Here's James describing the situation in the state of Cameroon.

And that's why you won't see me right about the people who tried to hire mercenaries to intimidate voters in twenty twenty, or the Burmese rebels who if I did their revolution with co op produced tea or a surfing team in the Gaza strip, And on reflection, you probably

won't hear about that last one anywhere. Now. The media cycle has a way of coming around to these stories eventually, sure, but I not really want to go back to what it is who didn't give a shit about people before and only care about their stories now because they get more traffic. But there's one story I've never given up on. That's the story of a daddy en gap and the people who risk their lives crossing it for a shot at the American dream. And at this point I do

want to ignolize. I'm incredibly grateful to the people I work with for trusting me when I asked them to pay for me to disappear in a dugout canoe into the jungle and come back two weeks later with a story. The daddy and looms in the stories of migrants I meet in the US border as a sort of heart of darkness on what is a very difficult and dangerous journey. It's worse than the freight trains they hop on in Mexico, worse in the crowded worse even than the months of

waiting for an asylum appointment. I firly believe that you can't really understand and write about things you haven't seen, smelt, and heard. So for years I've been asking theeed it is to send me to the tiny and but our community on the banks of the river, so that I could share the final steps of this horrific journey with the people who see little option but to risk their

lives for a better future for their children. Because the US refuses to create more legal pathways, people instead take a sudden pathway straight up and down the mountains to the Darian rainforest. The journey will take them past the corpse into people who never left. The terrain is too fierce for anyone to carry their remains out, so they must simply rut there as a reminder to migrants, so

they must keep going. It's a sort of deterrent through death that has been the unofficial and official US border policy for decades. To turn or not. Once you're in the Darien, there's no turning back, and the lack of escape routes has made the gap popular among criminals who commit untold numbers of sexual assaults, murders, and armed robberies

every year in the jungle. Despite this, more than half a million migrants made the perilous journey last year, and it's many, if not more, will do so this year. Do you understand the Daddy and you have to first understand US immigration policy, which is something I talk about a lot on this podcast. I want to include here a clip from Amos, a migrant from North Africa who met my friends and helped them build shelters in u Cumba last year, explaining his journey to the United States.

they will arrest you. And yeah, Jai, when you are not Muslim, when you really like something like a Christian or something else, theres Yes, it was. It was so so, so so difficult living in Iran, but it's a it's a wonderful country, but not government.

if I said I didn't prefer it that way. But I do always feel obliged to use the platform I have here to give people a chance to share their stories, their voices, and their struggles. So he's their message.

take a year or more. One napoly man I met in Bajajuquito had spent thirty months just to get that far, and among his group, his journey had been the fastest. As long as these journeys are, that darien often stems out as the hardest part to understand. Why I want to take you back to that shady spot by the river just a few minutes south of Bajo Juquito. So what I'm doing right now, as you can hear from my footsteps, is I'm doing what it told me not

to do. I'm walking along the migrant trail. Lots of like vines and creepers, and oh fucking hell, that's me el eating shit. There's little bits of tape marking a trail. I think they just come down the river here. Some local guys are pushing out wheelbarrows on the trail to dump trash. The's trash everywhere, to fucking mess the little wood arrows that they've carved just outside town to direct

people into town. And if I heard, I can see migrants making what's probably hopefully their final crossing of the river here. One thing I noticed was that as soon as I got out of sight in near shot of the town, the jungle seems a lot more intimidating. Somebody spends a lot of time in the mountains, and I grew up playing in the woods. I'm comfortable outdoors, and I frequently camp and hike for days on my own.

I like it better that way, and I might see more comfortable forty feet under the seed free diving, or three hours from the nearest road. Then I'm in a busy city sometimes, but in the jungle. After all the stories I'd heard that week. I was afraid. I get scary. I don't know why. I mean, everything's new to me. I'm, you know, relatively comfortable in the outdoors. But fucking there's new animals, there's new plants. I don't know what's poisonous. I don't know what's going to kill me. I don't

know who's going to try and hurt me. Got another fucking RF Jesus wept. I'm jumping out my skin. Everything Now it's funny. I'm in a place that's beautiful, you know, like these better paradise plants are just just growing here, gorgeousness. Horses belong to people of the Mbah community. I suppose having snacks, you know, eating jungle horse food. And here

here I am at the river. It's wide here, it's sort of shallow, and it's been dammed up a little bit with rubbish, just like flocks and and jets some kind of stuff.

surface possible. There are no trail crews in the Darien, and as a result, every step has the potential to results in a sprained ankle or another injury, which might sound trivial but can be faithal in such a remote

and challenging place. Trail is all rocks, like maybe rocks the size of a fift like that way now, and then there are sort of in this area we only have the lower canopy, so we have ferns, we have reeds, bamboo plants growing really tall and straight, that's what they use for the poles that the pit our words, and then sort of low grassy kind of plants. And then where the migrants walk is just this muddy trail that every time it raine just turns into like ankle to

knee deep mud. And I could see them making pretty slow progress along the trail towards me. At the end of the day, as I took a pedagua back to Madagan Tea, where I would be staying the night, I reflected again on this an incredible tenacity it took for people with little outdoor experience and terrible equipment to pass through the jungle. You know, I'm a fit person. I run ultramarathons. It used to be exercised for a living. And it's fucking hard. It's wet. Everything's wet all the time.

If you're wet from the rain, then you're wet. If you're wet from the sweat and you're wet. If you cross rivers, you get wet. You just can't stay dry. And everyone's feet are just fucked when they get into town, Like the size of the blisters I've seen, and like one lady had a cramp today where like it just locked up a whole that she like, I grabbed her. She was falling down and I was able to hold her up. But people are really pushing themselves physically as

well as psychologically. That river crossing south of Bachigiso was as far south as I was going to be able to get without being forced to be adjacted from Panama, and my request to take a boat or walk further

south was denied by the Panamanian Ministry of Security. So the only part of the migrants journey I would share with them, with the last kilometer or so of their walk even then, I wasn't really supposed to be leaving town at all, So several times over the days I spent in Bajajigito, I would look over my shoulder, hop down the river bank, jump across the stream, and likely jog out of town. Once on the trail, I'd started to walk slowly and try and waive a groups outcoming migrants.

I didn't want to scare them. I offered to carry their bags and let any help I could, supporting them as they walked towards their first meal and clean drink of water. In up to a week. Just getting to barje Gito was a journey in itself for me. I took two flights, a five hour drive which was evenally split between paved roads, roads that aspired to pavement, and dirt roads. At the end of our road journey, the Pan American Highway, the links Alaska to Argentina, seems to

give up on fighting the jungle and Peter's out. Asphalt turned to worse asphalt, which turned to dirt, which turned to mud, which led us to a river. A driver, however, was prepared for this. The drive here was mad, like that road was fucked. We're in this tiny old guard. The driver took off his shoes and socks to conduct the more technical section of the drive, which I thought was quite amusing. And yeah, really steep, lots of holes, lots of potholes, you know, just really rutted out kind

of dirt road. And then we got here and thopped some guys, negotiated a price and told him where we wanted to go, and they said, yeah, sure, buy some water, you know, snow water on the way about three hours and so we bought some water right there, and yeah, here we are on the boat now, as you can hear, I recorded this on a piragua. It's a kind of dugout canoe with the hole made out of a single tree and a tooth stroke motor bolted on the back.

It's the only way to travel here other than on your feet, and it's the only way the Embarra can get the produced cigaret to market. The skill of the piragueros, the people who drive the piraguas, is incredible. They navigate parts of the river so shallow that they have to pull up the two stroke motor. And I noticed all the motors have propellers that are covered in chips and bashes,

from smacking into the rocks at the bottom. In the bow of the boat, I sat on top of my giant rucksack, marveling at the birds, insects, and foliage of the jungle, and occasionally I jumped up to make fairly useless contributions with the boat's bamboo pole under the close supervision of Marcellino, a driver and are soon to be host for mostly just laughed at me as I leaned my whole way into the pole, which notably slipped, and I tried to avoid falling face first into the chocolate

brown water. On the way to bout Jiquito, we passed several small limber our villages. Little children waved at us from the banks or from the shallows of the river where they washed and played. Adults looked on I doubtless why there one nurse's ex vict three white dude was going the wrong way on the river for a migrant, but they smiled and waved back anyway. After an overnight flight, a five hour drive, and three hours in a dugout canoe, we rounded a corner in the river. Abou Jiquito came

into view. Over the last few years, it's three oriented itself from a tiny indigenous village to an unofficial reception center for migrants. On my hopelessly outdated topo map, the area has nothing but contours and green shading, no roads, no trails, no markets of human existence at all, and

perhaps that's how the state sees this place. The Daddy Inn is as real to most Panamanians a Sesame street or Jurassic Park, But for the Enber this has been their home since long before Panama and Columbia and even maps existed. A few dozen houses in the village, mostly built on stilts to avoid the seasonal floods, now offer up their rooms as hostels for the migrants. Some of them have enclosed at bottom floor using plywood or cinder blocks.

Others have strung hammocks from their support posts. For four or five bugs, migrants can get their first good night's sleep since they left Neck or Clee in Columbia as much as a week before. Along the main street, which is really just to raise concrete footpath about a meter across, you can buy a meal any of half a dozen places for five bucks. You can get an hour of Wi Fi for a dollar, or charge your phone for at the same price. Cold drinks for a dollar as well.

Are one of the many front rooms that have turned into small kiosks. And that's where the migrants I have been sitting down with that the river went. When they're rived into town, I let them be for a while I went off to interview more migrants. About a thousand

of them arrive in this village every day. Each year since a pandemic has seen record numbers arrive, and the little village on the side of a hill, surrounded by palm trees and full of smiling children in their traditional brightly colored paluomers chasing chickens and dogs, has welcomed every single one of them. About a thousand of them arrive in this town every day. To get here, they also take a boat from neck o'clee across the Golf of

the Dabbienne. They crossed on small motor boats to Kapolgana or Candel. Those are both towns on the western side of the Gulf of the Darienne. From there they begin their walk. Even though they're now north of the gulf, they're still in Colombia, and on the Colombian side of the border. They're guided by guides to whom they pay several hundred dollars and in return receive protection and a

wristband that ensures they can walk without being robbed. Nobody I spoke to had made it this far without paying a guide. The area is largely under the control of the Golf Cartel, several members of which were sanctioned by the USA. While I was in the jungle, the marcos I spoke to you didn't really have much bad to say about this part of their experience, but universally acknowledged that the next part was where they really confronted their

fears and nightmares about the Daddy. N Here's one Venezuelan migrant sharing his experience.

the incredibly steep mountain path. They climb and descend those mountains and cross rivers, often without eating or drinking for days at a time. On the trail, they passed by the bodies of their fellow travelers as a constant reminder of the risk they're taking. If you ask people in Panama City, they'll tell you the day and is closed now.

New President hose Raoul Molino was elected on a promise to shut down the gap, end the humanitarian crisis, and deport more migrants for the US funding, and that funding has certainly arrived, with more than six million already spent since he took office in July. Since then, Panama has deported more than eleven hundred people to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, and India. Each of these has been funded by US taxpayers. Obviously the jungle isn't closed, and it can't really be closed.

But in an interview before he was elected, Molino said that the border of the United States, instead of being in Texas, has moved to Panama, and that is something he can do with US support. I spoke to us in venezuel and ladies help and carry their bags. It's a steep hill, and they were saying that no one has seen any barriers. I don't know anythink about any barriers or any fences in a Darien and that like

they hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not. I'm standing in front of one hundred people who just got off a boat from the Darienn Hubris. Aside, the rhetoric of closing the Daddi, m signals are turn not just in Panamanian politics, but in the way the world sees and handles migration. The US has always sought to externalize its borders, from US train border patrol officers and Dominican Republic along the border is Haiti to DHS agents deploying

to Iraq and Afghanistan. As migration has become more politicized, the US has sought to move its enforcement away from prying eyes and from compassion, and instead brought more trauma to a place that is already so high. I've spent much of the last decade of my life watching the state try to bring the mountains and desert close to where I live under its control. I've stood with kumia I people as the government dynamited their graveyards. I found

border walk contractors lost deep in the mountains. I've driven the impossibly steep concrete roads that they built, worried about my truck turning end on end. I've seen billions of dollars thrown at these mountains, and I've seen people with twenty dollars angle grinders or ladders made of old palettes defeat the wall in moments. Trying to close borders doesn't work at home, and it won't work in the Daddy

and Gap either. Just building the roads to get the construction equipment into the gap is a gargantuan task, and any attempt to create a barrier across the sixty kilometer wide wilderness area will simply push migrants onto other more dangerous routes, into places where you can't build, and the place is where nobody can rescue you. If you fall down or break your leg, that doesn't mean there's nothing

the US can do. I saw first hand the impact of Americans spending here as migrants had a reception center called Lajas Blancas, had their families torn apart, and men, women and children cried as their parents and partners were taken away for a flight back to Colombia, Cuba, or Venezuela that my taxes helped to pay for. I consider that children with toys and stickers and something to eat

as their dads were loaded into a flatbed truck. A government didn't send money to feed these children, but it seemed to have the funds to fund their parents' deportation. By deporting people from Panama, the US effectively deprives them of much of the due process they should, in theory, have the right to in the United States, and the US can easily deport them back to places like Cuba and Venezuela, which it considers to be dictatorial regimes. The

US does not and cannot stop migration. People have always moved, and people will always want a better future for their children. What it can do is to make it as painful and dangerous as possible. But the rais of word barriers in the Daddy and Gap, which I've seen person on social media didn't exist for the hundreds of migrants I spoke to. No one I asked had even seen them, but what they had seen was far worse.

She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus ride she'd taken to get there went boring because she enjoyed looking out the window, and the whole journey was well, I'll let her say.

was crying. I was like, God, I don't know my family and my family they don't know where I am right now.

people leaving India and then Haiti. It grew as conditions in Venezuela became more unsustainable and people found themselves too poor to stay home and too poor to travel north by any other means, and so they chose a deadly jungle over a future in a country where their votes don't matter. Last year, as many is half a million

people across the jungle. This year we might see more Magaret's arriving about Jigito, spend the day in the village before taking off in a piaguoa of their own up to Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier. They register with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym Cena Front, and they call their families to say they survived. Then they dry out their blistered feet, enjoy the cooking of several of the families who have turned their homes

into sort of ersad's restaurants. They sleep on the floors of the houses or underneath them, bardge their phones for a dollar a time. Certainly, migration has changed this town, and I want to talk about that more in tomorrow's episode. But despite more than a million people passing through this route, you don't find antimigrant sentiment here right now, despite the gap being a deadly deterrent, numbers are expected to reach a requid again this year, maybe seven hundred thousand people

will walk the gap. But despite these numbers, which may seem high for a small country, I didn't really find much anti migroan sentiment in Panama as a whole. There's plenty of it in the US, though, and as the United States winds down its war and terror. It needs a new nebulous enemy to justify its military spending and to keep the security into veillance companies donating too politicians

in their millions. In part, it is found that by simply opening a floodgate of weapons and funding, they can spew forth genocide and death in Palestine and keep some of its income streams. But it needs a more long term solution. There are only so many Palestinian babies that can bomb, and we'll run out of Palestinians long before we run out of bombs. The USA is new enemy when it must seek out all over the world. It's a migrant. It's a woman I met carrying her child

across the mountains. The little Venezuelan girl throwing bottle caps into a cinder block with me to pass the time as she asked me questions about America. It's a twenty one year old man who's remains my friends found at

the border on a hot day this September. The US will stop at nothing and fining and destroying the migrant, and just as it did in the War on Terror, it will find fast friends in states desperate to avail themselves to the seemingly unlimited flow of resources the US dedicates to keeping its conflicts out of the sights and the minds of its citizens. The USA's open hostility to migrants isn't something that's I'm known here. Everyone I met

knew about it. Several of them had watched with horror as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump argued not about how to treat migrants but about who could turn more of them away. In a recent presidential debate. Every migrant I met had questions about CBP, one, about US asylum policy, and about how they could get to the US before a second Trump administration. Despite this, they all clung to

their versions of the American dream. They wanted to work and be paid a fair wage, to send their kids to school and maybe to college, to feel safe in their homes, and to be able to speak a dress as they wish without varing consequences. All of those things are imperiling this country too, and they know that, but they still feel their dreams are worth the journey. For Noemi, the little girl who took the daddy and in Astride, the American dream was pretty simple. She wanted two things.

To see Minnie Mouse and to see her aunt.