All media. It's me James, and before we listen to this episode today, I just did want to make you a way that I conducted these interviews in French and Spanish, mostly Spanish, and then transcribed and translated them. So what you're hearing is a translated interview that's being edited for brevity and content. I hope you enjoyed the episode.
LVY awesome. Yeah, the journey is dangerous, but what can we do. We can't stay in a country where the economy is getting worse and worse. With a salary of three dollars a month, you can't survive. Like my friend said, if you have a job in other countries, maybe you
can invest some money. But where are you going to get the money to invest If before you had a salary that fed you paid for your car, your house and your children to enjoy it all with, and now you can't even afford to put gas in the car. So it's true. Yeah, the darien is dangerous, but nothing is impossible. We walk hand in hand with God and with the faith that we will get there. But that doesn't mean it isn't difficult. But I'll say it again,
it's not impossible. You suffer, you cry, you go hungry cold, but thank God we made it through.
Bored around the Tuquesa River, the jungle rumbles quiet as you pass by on your boat. Insects, frogs, and birds all combined to make a sort of deep throbbing that emanates from the darkness between the trees. It seems it wants to be calling you in and warning you to
stay away. I've been in the jungle before, in the Rwanda Congo borderlands and in Venezuela, but I've never really felt the sense of foreboding I did as we rode down the river, protected only by our hollow log, looking into the triple canopy forest, and knowing that if I walk long enough in the shadows, I'd be confronted with the remains of people I might have interviewed if it hadn't been for a rolled ankle, a slippery rock, or
a desperate sip of water. To understand what drives people to enter the jungle with their children and their dreams, I think we also have to understand what drives them to leave wherever they're living. And that's what I want to talk about today, the story of migrants crossing the
Daddy and gap is an American one. It's impossible to disentangle the people making this dangerous journey from the history of support for dictatorship sanctions, an imperial plunder that ties the United States to its American brothers and sisters in the South. Sometimes I play a game with myself at the border where I try and meet people from all the countries named in Washington bullets in a single day. Since Biden bungled the Afghanistan withdraw, it's become a lot easier,
but Tibet can be hard. For two hundred years, since President Monroe gave the State of the Union address in December eighteen twenty three, the US has seen the Western hemisphere is its sphere of influence. What is opposed old fashioned colonialism. It has used less avert methods of control,
as well as overt military across the hemisphere. For much of the last century, it supported and installed dictators who would prevent what it saw as a threat of state socialism in its sphere of influence, and allowed them to create economic and political climates that were unsurvivable for the
majority and extremely profitable for US based corporations. The direct result of this policy has been economic insecurity, political instability, and state violence across South and Central America, resulting in people making the very natural humor decision to flee to somewhere safer. As in so many other empires, they've made the choice to lead a destabilized colonial periphery and seek safety instability in the metropol For more than a century, money and good to be able to travel seamlessly up
and down the continent, but people have not. The bananaread for breakfast this morning made the journey in a few days, but people take months, if not years, pay thousands of dollars, climb mountains ford rivers, and risk their lives on trains and buses that cost a lot more than the flights I took to Panama, but offered considerably less comfort and safety. As climate change has have a greater impacts, more and more people are forced to leave their homes so their
livelihoods become less sustainable. The Guna, the indigenous people at the Panamanian coast, in an area called Guna Yala, are having to withdraw from some of their islands because of sea level rise. Right now, agriculture across the world is increasingly threatened by extreme weather and rising temperatures, and our oceans are less they're able to sustain life than they
once were due to pollution and overfishing. Forced to leave their homes as people have been for millennia by weather patterns changing, people head to places that have want to caused much of the issue and tried to insulate themselves from its consequences. Their American dreams are modest to overcome the crippling low paid. They received a home to bring their children up in a place where they have a good chance of surviving their twenties, to work and get
paid enough to get by. They want to be able to protest and not get shot, and to look forward to the future not feared. These aren't guaranteed in the USA, and as many of you listening will know, it can be high for us to make ends meet here as well. But despite what you see on social and legacy media, things are unlikely to become as bad here as they
are in Venezuela, Cameroon or Iran anytime soon. I've lived in Venezuela, specifically in the formerly jab eastern neighborhood of La Pastora in Caracas, and I've seen how hard it is for my friends who still live there. Even for people with no other disadvantages, making rent and feeding your
family can be a challenge. That's part of why Venezuelan people make up the majority of the folks I met men daddian so much so that I'd slipped back into using Venezuelan slang in Spanish, and after a few days of seeing the same people engaging in the kind of friendly mockery and banter that I remember well from Caracas, mostly the super form of asking them why they crossed a Daddian gap in Man United shirts or worse yet,
in a Chelsea shit. It's important to steal moments of humor in these difficult times, to laugh a little among all the suffering, and that's something people in Venezuela have done very well for a very long time. But despite their humor, I could tell the journey had a serious impact on the people I spoke to.
You have to go through a lot, a lot of jungle, a lot of hills. There are people, there are dead people on the road, so it's something you cannot really explain. It's complicated because everything can be explained in a fashion, but it's not the same as living it. It's insanity. Three four days with that food and nothing. One thing is to live it. Explaining it, talking about it, that's different. It's hard to put into words.
This interview is when I conducted with one group of Venezuelan migrants with my voice recorder in the chest pocket of my shirt and whatever bags it let me carry in my hands. We walked along the last part of the trail, discussing what they'd seen. For a while, we joked a little. One guy had crossed it a man United ship. I talked to him about the team and the universal dislike non Manu fans have for Menu fans. Then after a while they opened up more about their experiences.
They had, they said, seen their bodies, and they couldn't stop thinking about what happened if they had for them, and they wanted to know how when or if the dead people's family would ever find out.
The family waits for that person to come out to hear that they made it, because if not, who's going to let you know? There's no signal and nobody's going to grab the body, and you're not going to carry them out. The person stays there and eventually years and years go by and the family won't know where they are or how they died. Those are the sort of things that one doesn't expect to see, and it makes
you just want to hurry past. Not that you wouldn't want to get the documentation from the body and deliver it and tell them how this person had passed away, But how dare you just go grabbing a dead body?
Nethuinan elections were held on the twenty eighth of July this year. Venezuelan pressions have a six year term and the incumbent, the Colasma Duro, has been in office since twenty thirty. I let the Venezuelan people and that introduce themselves and explain the result of the election. Now there's a bit of background noise here, but that's because we're walking on the trails and it's hard to avoid.
I am coming from Venezuela, migrating through the jungle for a better future for me and my children. I'll tell you it's hard, but it's not impossible. No, that was electoral fraud. And I tell you what, one day, you just have to leave.
Maduro was opposed by A Juardo Gonzalez, an opposite candidate who represented a wide coalition in creating groups on the left and right. While Maduro might have support among Western socialists and even communists, the actual Venezuelan Communist Parties youth organization formed part of the Popular Democratic Front that opposed him. Despite Paul Watchers tallying a massive victory for the opposition, Moduro controls the National Lecture Council and proclaimed himself the victor.
People protested, and Maduro responded with bullets. Gonzales fled to the Dutch and then the Spanish embassy, and later claimed asylum in Spain, where his family lived. But for regular working class Venezuelan's there's no option to hop on a flight to safety. Instead, they have to be in the long walk north, as many Venezuelans in respect you told me. In addition to the electoral fraud, Venezuela is undergoing an economic collapse, at least in the Chavis. He said, most
people could eat. When I lived in La Pastora, I was able to access medical care from Cuban doctors. Now they say things have become a Survivaldo.
So you're Venezuela. When Venezuela, well, I would say that Venezuela, you know, yeah, you can live but not on a minimum wage.
I would say that, for example, working independently in an independent business, maybe you can live good. But working and surviving for a minimum wage now, the truth is that it doesn't work, and that's serious. Things are still bad with the new elections and the new government. Everything is ugly.
Yeah.
The streets of Caracas are full of protests. Every day. People went out to protest. Sometimes they shoot people. The government mistreats people. But if you can live with it, and you can live with it it's ugly. Well, that is why we left there for a better future, and we will keep moving onward onward.
This group were young men traveling in advance with their families, hoping to earn some money, save it up, and send it home. They knew what they were getting into when they got to the USA, that migrants were often underpaid and might struggle to make ends meet, but they still thought it was better than staying home and watching your children's future disappear.
If you don't have papers, you don't have a work permit, you have to work for it. They want to pay you, not for what you demand or anything.
I met lots of Venezuela families with children who had different illnesses or disabilities, things they couldn't obtain or afford treatment for in Venezuela. They were traveling to the US in the hopes of a better future for their kids, or any future at all. I met young men who left their children behind but carried the children of strangers,
even those with whom they didn't share a language. Christian, who he heard from earlier, showed me how he'd carried someone else's child on his shoulders until he fell and hurt his knee.
We all help.
I put little children up here on my shoulders to carry them, but it isn't easy.
In the jungle, they'd formed chains using their arms to cross rivers and carried little children on those who couldn't swim. In Barji Guito, I saw a group of men from Angola receiving hugs from Venezuela and women they'd helped in the jungle. Without the help of the Angolans, they said their children wouldn't have made it. One slip or a loss of grip, they told me, would be fatal, and the remains of those who had done just that served
as a grisly reminder. Later, little boys, maybe eight or ten years old gleefully recounted seeing a dead body on which the head had quote exploded while their parents winked in recollection. I wanted to understand a bit more of what they were fleeing. That made it worth going through all this.
Venezuela.
Well, I left Venezuela because I worked in fishing. But right now in Venezuela, despite the fact that it is a country rich and oil, there's not enough gasoline for the fishermen to go fishing. And since I did not have the ability to even buy basic things such as food, the situation was, well, it was a little complicated. I had to immigrate. I had nothing else to do. They didn't rob me, well, they were going to rob me because I didn't have anything to steal. We passed by
and the group that was behind us got robbed. They raped women in that group.
Almost every Venezuelan micro and I speG to share a similar story. One said he didn't stare security cameras, but nobody could afford them now, as it had to choose between rent and groceries or medical procedures that they needed but couldn't afford. Overwhelmingly they said the same thing. No aifuturo, there's no future. One group said to me that they couldn't wait for their country to become like Cuba, as
decades of embargos took their toll on the population. But others reminded me in them that least of Cubans seem to have doctors. Venezuela has an eighty percent poverty right now, and though it sits on one of the largest oil reserves of any country on Earth, it's been plagued by planting oil prices in the years of hyperinflation, which got so bad at one point the shots stopped putting price tags on things and relied on staff to give up
to the minute prices. Today, alongside a regime that lacks legitimacy, a state that readily uses horrific violence against its people, an election that was essentially ignored, Venezuelan's must also deal with shortages of basic goods, poverty, and malnutrition. Unlike Cubans who have a relatively good polittal lobby in the USA, Venezuelan's coming to the USA do not benefit from special laws.
Cubans under the Cuban Adjustment Act have a part of the citizenship and permanence once they set foot on US soil. Venezuelans do not. They're covered by something called a temporary protected status, but this does not afford them much in the way of stability, protection, or a secure future. His Ereka Pinhidro of Alotolado and Incredible organization does valuable work with migrant legal aid advocacy and humanitarian relief, explaining just how temporary a TPS is.
So temporary protected status is it's basically a form of protecting individuals who are already in the United States when their countries have experienced a natural disaster, if they are in war, there's some kind of situation going on that makes it difficult for them to return, and so temporary protected status was first created in nineteen ninety and the first individuals who receive the status were from El Salvador, and since then, I think there's been a few dozen
countries that have been designated. But basically the way it works is they designate a country and so if you were in the United States before that designation date, you can apply for temporary protected status within a designated time period and you get a work permit. It's valid for six, twelve or eighteen months and then two months before it expires, the Secretary of the Department of holand Security has to
say whether or not they're going to reauthorize GPS. So there's like eight hundred and sixty thousand people in the US who have temporary protected status and it's not a path to citizenship. So basically people are just in limbo sometimes for decades, you know, they just have to reapply for this permit every eighteen months. So I have quite a few salvador and friends who've been in the United
States since the nineties. They have kids, some of them current kids, or a US citizen, and they can't become permanent residents or have a path the citizenship unless they leave the country and either come back with another type of parole or you know, apply through a consulate, which many of them are just not willing to take that risk.
Well, makes things even more complicated for the Venezuelans is that many of them are traveling without document. It costs three hundred bucks to get a passport, they told me, and the weight's considerable. This makes their journeys even harder as every country the enter has to approve them to without a passport. Getting a visa, they said would be nearly impossible, and just trying that result in the government
coming after them. Such things, they said, are reserved for the wealthier citizens, people like Gonzales, who's asylum claim and stays at the Dutch and Spanish embassies, and his right to join his family in exile are all luxuries that most of his country people can't expect. Instead, most Venezuelans must ride buses through Columbia, then walk north through the jungle, then ride buses stir away on trains, or walk again
all the way to the border. They all lamented the Dadian crossing and so they wouldn't advise it without other options. They all made it anyway, community.
See, because because unfortunately we don't have much in our country. You don't have another option. When you're dying of hunger and you don't have a future, you can't even study. So yeah, it's worth it.
The economic situation is dire in Venezuela. Many families can't make end me, their currency is almost worth us, and the majority government seems to have successfully installed itself for the foreseeable future. This will mean a continuation of embargos and sanctions, which will harm the people more than the regime. Sadly, though, economic hardships is not a criteria which won't be grounded asylum in the usah Erica.
Again, so severe economic deprivation can be persecution if it's linked to one of the other protege grounds, so race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership, but in a particular social group. So for example, if someone participated in anti Maduro political activity and then we're blocked from getting a job or just denied economic opportunities to the point where they're starving, the economic deprivation could count as persecution, but it's a very
difficult case to make in the United States. In Mexico, you can get protection based on generalized conditions in your country, and so you know, Venezuelans betweeing economic collapse or even Central Americans fleeing extreme violence have a much easier time dating protection in Mexico than they would in the United States because of that kind of extra category of protection
in Mexico. The issue with Mexico is just the very limited capacity of this islum system overall, and the very dangerous conditions in which people are forced to wait while their cases are judicated.
Going forward from the Dadian, they'll face an enormously difficult journey. The US does have a program for Cubans, Venezuelan and Haitians and Nicaraguans, then in theory allows them to apply, be pre approved and fly straight to the USA, but it's so delayed and it's just not an option for people who barely have enough money for food, let learn a plane ticket there.
This HMV program is for Cumanations, nick Garaguans, Venezuelans who have not crossed into Panama or Mexico in the past few years. You do not qualify who've done that or have not been inter died at sea. If they're Haitian or Cuban, you have to have a sponsor in the United States who have some kind of legal status. You have to be able to pay for the flight, you have to have a passport, and you have to be able to wait forever long it takes for your application
to be approved. And the Department of Homeland Security just announced that they are not renewing parole for people who are already in the United States. So people from those four countries who were in the US head up to two years of humanitarian parole, which is not being renewed, so they either would need to apply for something else or go back to their country, or just I guess, stay in the it stints undocumented until their codavy.
I heard the same story hundreds of times that week, sometimes off mike and sometimes on mike, sometimes holding my voice recorder and notebook, sometimes just sitting on the ground or walking on the trail or enjoying a bottle of cold water in Bahjigito. Crippling poverty and bad governance in their country made it difficult to see a future there. They wanted better for their children, so they bought them across the mountains and risked their lives in the jungle
to give them a chance. And I prepared a lot for this trip, and I tried to search for everything I my experience on the internet. But one thing I really didn't expect to learn in the jungle is just how much it's possible for parents to love their kids. I watched exhausted mothers hoist their babies onto their shoulders to keep walking, and somehow come up with a story that made the whole thing an adventure, not a tragedy. Then did the same thing again the next day, without
sleeping or eating. I watch fathers carefully lay out their sleeping map so that children could rest where they tried to do the same on the dirt or hardwood floors every day as their savings grew low and they out looked more bleak, I watched parents try to smile for
their kids. The sacrifices I saw them make, starving for days to give their kids something to eat, or spending their last remaining dollar on clean clothes for their kids while they walked barefoot and couldn't afford shoes really brought home for me the desire these families had for a better future and the sacrifices they were willing to make for one Another. Week later, it's still hard for me to accept that I'm home safely and they're still in as much danger, if not more.
Our walk lasted five days. Thank god I was always strong enough and able to get back up when I fell, because if I fell and my children had to see me fall and not get up, imagine how bad that would be. My children want more in the future, but they despaired in the jungle. They said, tell me, Mommy, when are we going to get there? Mommy? What could I say to them? My dear, we have to have patience because we have to make the crossing. We have to move forward. If not, we can't get out of here.
Even among such difficult times, the Venezuelans always greeted me with a laugh and a smile, especially after a few days of running into each other. When I use venezuhealen slang or my accents slowly reverted to the Spanish, and I learned in Karrakas only two decades ago, they'd laugh at me, as they noted at that time Karrakas had attracted plenty of migrants, to recern, some of them, like me, didn't stay, but we came. We wanted to see a revolution in
the flesh, and they welcomed us. For a while in Caracas, I lived in a social center in La Pastora. I didn't pay rent, but there was a small, empty room and no one seemed to mind. Every day I talked to strangers, big friends, and try and learn something new. The situation there was an ideal. For one thing, we didn't really have showers, and also I got robbed at gunpoint. So for most of my time in the country, I
stayed with the Chilean family i'd met. They welcomed me a more or left total stranger into their homes and lives. In the evenings, we spent hours talking and they'd tell me stories about how they'd suffered under Pinochet, the hopes they'd had for their country, and how they'd had to flee to Caracas like tens of thousands of their fellow Chileans. They introduced me to Victor Harr and Jody Pan. I introduced them to chumber Wamba, and we shared an affection
for George Orwell. The song you heard after the adverts was not in fact chamber Wamba, but Chilean left his folk musician in Victor Haa. He's playing Eldrecho de vi videnpaz the right to live in Peace in English, and it's one of his most famous songs. It confronts the US War in Vietnam. After how I was tortured and murdered by the Pinochet regime, it became an anthem of
protest in the country. Haah and his friend Pabu and the Ruda were both symbols of the cultural power of the Chilean people and the brutality of the Pinochet regime who broke the hands He used to play his guitar before they killed him. Harah and the Rudah both moved in the same revolutionary artistic circles as my Chilean host in Venezuela. At night, they tell me stories about the
time they spent together. We'd have to speak loudly as a man who had adopted me as a sort of surrogate grandson of permanent hearing damage from the torture he'd endured under the same regime. Luckily, he'd been able to flee with his wife to Venezuela, where they were welcomed. They never returned to Chile and happily lived out the rest of their lives listening to their Victor Haarra records in Caracas and living the ideals that had seen them persecuted.
Their kindness to me, a nineteen year old stranger with terrible Spanish and nowhere to sleep at night, reflected the kindness they'd received, and I've tried to reflect it in turn ever since. Oh no, oh, I never once heard any children crying and last blankets or bar chiquito, well, not until the deportations took their parents away on my
last day there. Most of the time, the kids entertained themselves one day in Last Blancas, where migrants can wait and spend weeks or months they don't have the funds to move forward with their journey. I left my picture while she made a call and bumped into some little children playing a game where they throw water bottle caps into half a breeze block from various distances, each of
them counting how many they could land. I sat down next to them, put my recorder on the ground and asked nicely if I could join them like a tiny pit boss. One of the kids bought me a pile of bottle tops, and I chatted with them as we threw a bottle cap to the broken piece of concrete. What was it like in America?
They asked.
They's had a lot of questions about Africa, having probably met African kids in the casita just across the way. Do they have big buildings in Africa? Does it rain there? How long does it take to get there in a bus? Then they tested by venezuela and legitimacy by drawing me in a ripper in my notebook, and I asked him if I knew what it was, what I passed a test? They asked me how to say some things in English, and they showed me the toys they bought with them,
which were very few. One of them had a small plastic cow of which he was very proud one. After a while, they asked what I was doing, and I showed them how I record interviews, at which point they began recording themselves in each other, wildly stabbing at the buttons on my recorder, which I will admit scared the crap out of me, but I didn't have the heart to take it off them. They stroked the fluffy wim protector I use on my microphone. It told me it
was like a tiny teddy bear. Eventually I was able to trade my recorder for several small wooden animals that brought with me as gifts, which seemed to be a deal. The left all of us feelings that we come out ahead. They seemed n't bothered by the suffering around them. But Las Blancas is no place for children. They should be in school, learning the English phrases they kept repeating to me every time I saw them. But for a chance to use their English, they first had to endure month
more danger and deprivation. I guess Son. Some slightly hold A children made the journey alone or almost alone. They were accompanied by a spaniel called Channel. I saw a future while as people are carried with them through the day and gap. But to my analysis, is the first spaniel that has made the treacherous Crossingezuela.
Luela.
Like everyone else, they had terrible memories from the jung.
The truth is you have to fight a lot to be able to get out of there, because not everyone gets out of that jungle, and it's even more difficult with small children. There are times when one goes without food and it's very stressful because all around us all we saw was the jungle, and we never saw the way out. But it is complicated. The truth is that it is very hard the jungle. Well, I would really recommend that people never go there. All our feet are hurting,
we can't walk properly. Our whole body is hurt. We went days without eating.
They were traveling. They said to join their parents, and because in Venezuela they told me they were always hungry. They saw people sleeping on the streets and worried that would be their only option. One day they didn't leave.
I want to see mom. I haven't seen her in three years, and I want to have my American dream too.
I want to see my dad, my aunt and my uncle. I haven't seen them for three years either.
Despite the hard yet they didn't blame their parents for leaving.
We know that we made it because of them. They're the ones who sent us money for the things we need. We were able to get a few things, not everything we needed, but it's all thanks to them.
The end of their interview, as I always do, I asked them if there's anything else that they wanted to share.
I don't know. For our parents, we love them a lot and hope we can see them soon.
Like many of the Venezuelan's I spoke to, their American dreams were pretty modest for most of them, though they'll be unachievable in the current immigration system. They'll end up stuck in Mexico, in Mexico City perhaps for further south, but in Tijuana or Juaro's waiting across the border of They're lucky, but if they cried across between ports of entry,
we'll get caught traveling without red string. In Mexico, they were being deported or relocated back to southern Mexico, Hesatica explaining that process.
The Mexican National Guard has been detaining people who are trying to cross the US medical border, and they had been sending them south to Mexico City and Chiapas to Tapachula. Now there's been this huge effort to stop people from waiting, not only at the US Mexico border, but even in Mexco City. So we're seeing Mexican Immigration and National Guard doing sweeps of migrant camps, of apartment buildings, doesn't matter
if the person has a CVP one appointment. Sometimes they'll just send them souths to either Chiapa's an increasing lead to Basco. So Vie at Mossa, which is where people are arriving in Tabasco, has one shelter and I think the capacity is around two hundred and fifty three hundred people, and earlier this year they were sending twenty thousand migrants a month there and then they posted the military ships so that people can't leave, and it's very dangerous there.
It's a drug tracking area, so it's you know, not only are people sleeping in the streets, but they're sleeping on the streets of some of the most dangerous cities and massacre win very few services there to help them even get their next meal.
This, of course, didn't happen without the inmfluence of the United States. In many ways, Joe Biden has done exactly what Donald Trump promised to do. Not only has he built more wall, he's also forced Mexico to pay for a significant amount of the US's immigration enforcement. But when people are sent back to the south of Mexico, they'll just make their way north again, only this time with fewer resources and even greater risk. They're all proud of
where they're from. About half the groups I saw had Venezuela flags and the cats or backpacks, but they're also very aware of the betrayal they get as Venezuelan's in the US media, and many of them made the very valid point if American is afraid of Venezuela gangs, they ought to consider how much more afraid people are in a country where they actually exist.
Yahvencelanma parazon is and female.
I'm thirteen. Please don't believe that because one person from Venezuela does crime, that all Venezuelans do crime.
But at least they get it betrayed in the US media. Many African migrants don't even get that. Of course, it doesn't mean they don't know about the USA his powers in her anglophant Cameronian group again talking about their impressions of America where they'd like to live when they arrive here.
You know, America is a very beautiful country, and America has human rights, take care about the citizens. In fact, they care about humanity. See, I don't want to have a friend that I'm gonna stay with for the meantime.
Then it gets that's great. Yeah, that helps a lot. Do you know which city your friend lives in?
She's in Maryland, Maryland? Okay, yeah, So if I'm asks, if you don't mind me asking, of course, what do Americans? How do they treat or how do they say immigrants?
Oh, my friend, it's changing a lot. African migrants in particular will struggle with a lack of resources. The absence of solidarity structures an obvious anti blackness along the journey. Along with this, people they meet along the way simply lack context of their journeys and why they're leaving what they're fleeing. Language barriers may exclude many of them from using CBP one which is only offered English, Spanish and
Haitian Creole. Less than fifteen percent of asylum cases are conducted in English, but the app ignores huge swass of the world outside the Western Hemisphere. And by Jiquito, I used French to speak to minor student's speak English and began to notice the complete absence of signage. And I think other than Spanish and sometimes English and Creole, this
is likely an issue throughout their long journeys. Here's one migrant from Angola, and I should probably know at this point that Angolan people tend to speak Portuguese, that's a national language. But French, with the language I shared with some of them, as I don't speak Portuguese, pretty complete.
It was too much, very complicated. Like me, I did a week in Brazil, at Brazil and for par Peru to nicol Klee. Then here I did. We did four days, four days walking. There are many mountains, many risks, there are many animals along the route. You have to follow the path for four days and there's no food. But we are glad to arrive today. This is the first group. There's the second, third, fourth, fifth group. They're still on the road. I'm very proud of the fact that we
made it despite the suffering. But God was with us. That is what is important.
There are numerous instances of French speaking migrants trying to approach the border near me in scis Cedra and being turned away for not having an appointment on that that's not available in a language they can understand. These language barriers might stop the migrants getting information, but they don't stop them helping one another. His powers group describing the isolation they felt, but also the kindness they experienced. Do you think people on the trip treat African people differently?
Yes, they're not living communicated. They are just by themselves. They don't associate. They look at all differently. Yeah, client personally art I had some more support.
Yeah, yeah, I saw.
I saw how kind the person was.
Because of their obvious foreignness and perceived an ability to communicate. African migrants are often targeted for crime in Mexico. Since leaving Panama, I've heard from migrants who are raped, kidnapped, ransomed, and I even heard about one who was killed Because of their difficulties accessing this CVP one app Many face longer weights in Mexico, which may in turn leave them open to extortion or see them decide to cross the
border between ports of entry. I've met hundreds of migrants, mainly Mauritanians and Geneians, who have made this difficult choice. Since Biden's Asylent Bank came into force. Due to the distance, African migrants also face a longer, more expensive, and more dangerous journey. His premier from Zimbabwe, describing her journey, has to get about the situation.
For me, it was tough. I just ran away to South Africa and South Africa was not safe. Solophobia and they almost kill me and my boyfriend and even my my big father was abusive, too much agressive because of the politics. I'm opposition party, so it was now even in South Africa, I was not safe at all. It was those people, they were like following me and my daughter. So I spent three months on the road coming here. I leave South Africa, I think fourth of July till
now I'm in Panama. I'm still working using basses.
Jesus, how did you get away from Africa to America? Did you fly or take a boat?
The thing is I f from Juannspek to Brazil. Then I seek asylum in Brazil. Then I wanted to stay in Brazil, so people said no, ye in Brazil, you can't because of language. Yeah, yeah, Portuguese. So I start also using depots root like you list take this pass from point A to point BA. So we take a bus from Brazil to Bolivia, then from Bolivia to Peru, Peru to Equad to Colombia. Then you start working with using Darren Cape too. I'm here in Panama.
African migrants will end up in different shelters, a little more remote, will have less connectivity, again, making their asylum process harder. Unlike migrants from the Western Hemisphere, they might struggle to find solidarity networks even inside the USA without a significant diaspora. Many of the migrants I met the jungle have struggled to find sponsors. That's the people I spoke to here, including Primerose and her daughter, still looking for someone to give them a helping hand as they
start their new life. We spoke a lot over the WEEKO is there, and we've spoken most days since. It's heartbreaking for me to see her daughter going for months with our education or even a safe place to sleep. I've seen photos of them sleeping on the street They've ridden crowded busses north, and I've heard their frustrated attempts to comply with the arcane and complicated restrictions on their
right to come here and ask for help. And it's been really hard since I got home to reconcile this with a national discussion that seems to see migration as a number that we have to decrease a migrants to something other than people who want to come here for all the same reasons. I live happily and peaceably as our neighbors. Now that they've come this far, maggants from
outside the Western Hemisphere have to keep going. They can't even file their claims on CBP one until they make it to Tapatula, which is hundreds of dollars and thousands of kilometers from Panama. They likely don't have the funds to go back home even if they want to, and they are far more likely to be robbed or kidnapped along the way. However, their story is often aren't told. Reporting on the board is still largely focused on Spanish
speaking migrants, with some space for Chinese or Haitians. The migrants from Africa rarely get much care or attention in the media. In part this has helped them before the demonization the Venezuelan migrants are all too aware of, but in part it also leads to a lack of concern for their needs. I went to end today was Gabriel from Equatorial Guinea sharing his message for Americans.
Ah Aca know as Yeah, A lot of people get this confused. Africa is not a country. A lot of them think when they see you and you're black person, they say, are you African? And it's like, there are lots of countries in Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, you got, Guinea, you got the more Atanian people. There are loads of countries. I wish people would know.
How do I say this?
I wish they'd take us into a count because really they don't consider us when they say Africa is a country. They don't care about us the way we care about them. And this is the way of seeing things which doesn't consider us as human, not the same as them. You understand, they see us as Africans or animals, something like that.
It could happen.
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