December 26, 2025 • 41 mins
In the first of five episodes, James describes his journey to the Darién gap in Southern Panama, and the journeys that thousands of migrants take each week on one of the most dangerous land migration routes on earth.
Original Air Date: 10.28.24
Sources:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DAaDkSwh1Jk/?igsh=bmgyanBteW10czd5
https://www.themanual.com/outdoors/darien-gap-feature/
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/apr/18/panama-darien-gap-jose-raul-mulino
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/10/27/the-darien-gap-a-deadly-extension-of-the-us-border
https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/supporting_resources/jmhs.pdf
https://www.strausscenter.org/publications/asylum-processing-at-the-u-s-mexico-border-august-2024/
https://www.msf.org/lack-action-sees-sharp-rise-sexual-violence-people-transiting-darien-gap-panama
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The media.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
The most difficult part of the journey is when you
are treking and you meet dead bodies on the road.
It makes you weep, it makes you cry, but there's
only one focus in the forest ahead. You have to
(00:33):
keep going. You'll see mother's children. They are crying just
to have a sip of water. It is not easy.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting beside the
Tuquesa River on a warm afternoon in late September, making
faces at a two months old baby as we both
marveled at the cloud yellow butterflies. Anywhere else on earth,
it could be in a dyllic summer day, But in
these final steps, as a journey across a daddy and gap,
it's hard to open up your mind to experience joy.
(01:16):
I'd only been in the tiny Ember village of Bahujiguito
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,
and up to stream of me there were at least
three people's remains here. It was shin deep, but crossing
(01:38):
up stream 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 would have noticed that it is my real name,
but for the protection of James and his family, it's
(01:59):
a name be using when I met James. We're in
a migrant reception center called Las Blancas, to the north
of the Daliang 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
(02:19):
life jackets. They share the boat with nembra piraguero, who
sits at the back driving the boat with a tooth
stroke motor, and a guide who sits on the front,
using a pole when necessary to push the boat through
shallow sections. The Umbrada people are indigenous to the area.
That's commonly known as the Daliang Gap, or at least
to this part of it, and a tiny Emberda village
of Bajo Jiquito. It's a first settlement migrants encounter as
(02:42):
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 wear 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
(03:05):
translates to the Darien isn'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 Bahajiguito 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
(03:28):
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, lut del Mote
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.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
We are coming from Cameroon. IM My name is Flowers.
There's a lot of crisis in our country. That's a
civil war going on in Cameroon right now because of
our president. President Pombia has been in power over forty
two years. So I was the anglophone. We started revolting
for him to step down because he doesn't develop the
Southern American sorry, the English section of Cameroon anglerphone. Yeah,
(04:12):
the anglophone sections a revolts that he was set in
the military and it's killing the citizens of our country.
There's a lot of harshship, a lot of that. Eye
for one, I've lost everybody. I lost for my family,
my mom, my dad, my two brothers, and I'm the
only one left.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
So things.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
No, there's no job of completed school, but there's nothing
for me to do. So that's why it decided to migrate.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
To get to baho Jiqito from Columbia. It's James and
other migrants did. There's no road you can take. You
can't even take a boat or a train. Instead, you
have to walk the Dairying Gap, an area of rainforested mountains,
so it's one of the most dangerous migration routes in
the world. For anywhere between two and fifteen days, migrant
(04:55):
trek through waste time, mud, and rivers deeper than they
are at all. They must climb 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
(05:18):
soon become dead bodies as they beg for help. They
carry their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other. Across
mountains and rivers and abou jiqito. 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
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
The situation in Cameroon is, how can I put it,
very very, very very difficult, especially in the Anglophone part
of the country. Yeah, because for about five to six
years there's a world the ongoing war in the Anglophone crisis.
(06:18):
We also have been there has been fighting, There has
been shooting, killings. I myself speaking to you, Yeah, I've
been targeted. My cousin was shot and with his husband
(06:41):
were shot together. Both of them were nursis and they
were shot by the army that were there to protect
the people. So the situation back at home, it's very
very tense. Yeah, the very times when you see most
(07:03):
of Camaronians traveling taking the rigs part from Columbia brazy
right up to where I am. It is not because
they like it. It's because of the situation back at
home and most of it, and most of the time
it is the anglophone population that is suffering.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Most of them.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
They choose this part because they will not have a
direct visard to American Yeah, it's very hard to get
one yes, it's very, very difficult, so they have to
use the hard way.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Which is the only way. The truth is dead bodies,
terrible stories and families celebrating the end of their work.
It's nothing out of the ordinary. And bahu Jikito, the
Enbarra town, with the population of just five hundred and ninety,
it's a place I've been trying to come to for
almost as long as I've been writing about migration. There
are a few stories in my time as a journalist
(07:52):
that I've been pitching for close to a decade. Most
of the time I give up if there are no
bites after a few months, 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 whof 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.
(08:15):
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 the
Daddy and Gap and the people who risk their lives
crossing it for a shot at the American dream. And
(08:35):
at this point I do want to tegnlolize. 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
(08:56):
the freight trains they hop on in Mexico, worse in
the crowded worse even than the months of waiting for
an asylum appointment. I've only 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 get it Is to
send me to the tiny ember Our community on the
banks of the river, so that I could share the
(09:18):
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 of the
people who never left. The terrain is too fierce for
(09:40):
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 to commit untold numbers
(10:01):
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 if many, if
not more, will do so this year. Do you understand that, 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
(10:22):
migrant from North Africa who met my friends and helped
them build shelters in a cumber last year, explaining his
journey to the United States.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
So another route right now, which is a difficult route,
is through Brazil because Brazil has a I don't know
if you guys know, and I think they do that
for Americans too. Yeah, so Brazil has sort of I
don't know the word, but the equivalent to them is
if you impose of his own Brazil Brazilians were imposed
(10:53):
of his own news.
Speaker 6 (10:54):
They do that to Americans.
Speaker 7 (10:55):
Too, So.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
You know where I'm from. They don't have a visa
to uh as far as for Brazilians, so we don't.
So a lot of Africans can go to Brazil and
from Brazil take the the.
Speaker 6 (11:09):
Route all the way.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
That game was Jim couldn't fly here directly that he
was able to get a little bit closer to the
US by flying to Columbia. I'll let him explain how
he pulled that off.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
For me to have a pass to Colombia, it was
not easy. So we had we had to There was
a female female on that twenty World Cup that was
that was taking place in Colombia, so we had to
go to Columbia as football fans. That's why they had
(11:43):
They had to give us our Biza.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
That is all right.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
From Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Where we are today. Most are Continental America. We'll have
to travel to Brazil, just like Amos. Here's one a cap.
I'll let the speaks introduce himselves.
Speaker 6 (12:05):
My name is so I m I'm from Idan.
Speaker 8 (12:09):
My name is mohade for Omraan, my name is Ali,
and I'm from Iran.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
They told me why they left a run, but I'm
sure manygi could wear that went out of yourself, so
we won't included here. How did you come from Iran?
To hear you got for Turkey?
Speaker 6 (12:24):
It was so difficult, And we.
Speaker 8 (12:29):
Came from Iran, Tehran to Dubai, after that South all
of Brazil and after that believe Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and
Nikoklei and jungle Panama. Here Panama. And it was so
difficult for us because we are young. We just leave
(12:51):
our family, my sister, my mother, father. It was so emotional, yeah,
and it was so hard for us. But because of
the freedom, because we can't speak in our country.
Speaker 6 (13:02):
You know, if you speaking in your in the street,
something like it. They will arrest you.
Speaker 8 (13:09):
Yeah, in jail when you are not Muslim, when you
really like something like a Christian or something else.
Speaker 6 (13:17):
They arrassed.
Speaker 8 (13:18):
Yes, it was. It was so so, so, so difficult
living in Iran. But it's a wonderful country. But not government.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
When I talk to migrants, I always want to offer
them the chance to share their stories in ways that
they want to share them. And I asked them what
they would want to say if they could talk directly
to Americans. It's a question I ask a lot, because
in all the coverage of migration I've seen in this country,
I rarely see migrants' voices. I'm very familiar with being
the only journalist in a place, and i'd be lying.
(13:49):
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.
Speaker 9 (13:59):
So he's their message, We love you, hope too you
love is that's hard question?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Yeah? Yeah, I think that's very good.
Speaker 9 (14:10):
It will be our next home, and we should be
proud of that, We should be worth for that, we
should be be a real American for the concert.
Speaker 7 (14:22):
Yeah, they know women are very bad situations, have a
bad situation in Itra. Yeah, for all people, that is saying,
but for women is very, very, very hard. I think
American people know about Massa Amini. Yeah, and they really
(14:47):
they chill us, really they chill women for simple things.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time
about how Jiqito and the last Blancast migrant reception center
that migrants traveled to after they arrive in Bajo Chiquito.
People left horrific things behind them and saw horrific things
on their journey, but they all remained hopeful for a
better future in America. These journeys, in some cases, could
(15:21):
take a year or more. When napoally Man I met
in Bajo Juquito, I 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 stands out as the hardest part. Do understand
why I want to take you back to that shady
spot by the river just a few minutes south of
(15:42):
Bajo Juquito. So what I'm doing right now and you
can hear from my foot depths 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 nearly eating shit. There's little bits
of tape marking a trail. I think they just come
(16:04):
down the river here. Some local guys are pushing out
wheelbarrows on the trail to dump trash. There'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 heeard, I can see migrants making what's probably hopefully
their final crossing of the river here. One thing I
(16:26):
noticed was that as soon as I got out of
sight in nearshot of the town, the jungle seems a
lot more intimidating. I'm 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
sea free diving, or three hours from the nearest road.
(16:47):
Then I am 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
(17:08):
new plants. I don't know what's poisonous. I don't know
what's going to kill me, and know who's going to
try and hurt me. Got another fucking horse, 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
(17:30):
paradise plants are just just growing here, gorgeousness. Horses belong
to people of the bah community. I suppose having snacks,
you know, eating jungle horse food. And here here, I'm
at the river. It's wide here, it's sort of shallow,
and it's been dammed up a little bit with rubbish,
(17:52):
just like flop some and jets some kind of stuff.
And then this is where people cross because of that
little dam. But it's still got some four to it,
like you wouldn't want to fall and crack your head
or you know, a lot of these folks can't swim
without the fear it's hard going. Because you've only hiked
on trails, you perhaps don't realize how much work goes
(18:12):
into making that 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 fist that way now,
(18:33):
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 they pit I was,
and then sort of low grassy kind of plants. And
then where the migrants walk is just this muddy trail
that every time it rains just turns into like ankle
(18:54):
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 Madragante, where I would be staying the night, I
reflected again on this and the 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.
(19:15):
I run ultramarathons. I used to be exercised for a living.
And it's fucking hard. It's wet. Everything's wet all the time.
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
(19:37):
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 like hold
her up. But people are really pushing themselves physically as
well as psychologically. That river crossing south of Bachigiso was
(19:58):
as far south as I was going to be to
get without being forcibly adjaced 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 was
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 Bahajigito,
(20:21):
I would look over my shoulder, hop down the river bank,
jump across the stream, and lightly jog out of town.
Once on the trail, I'd started to walk slowly and
try and waive a groups of 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
(20:42):
in up to a week. Just getting to baj Gito
(21:04):
was a journey in itself for me. I took two flights,
a five hour drive which was efnally 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,
(21:25):
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 little guard. The driver took off
his shoes and socks to conduct the more technical section
of the drive, which I thought was quite amasing. Yeah,
(21:45):
really steep, lots of holes, lots of potholes, you know,
just really rutted out kind of dirt road. And then
we got here and took to 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
(22:08):
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 toothstroke 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
(22:30):
who drive the piraguas, is incredible. They navigate parts of
the river so shallow that they have to pull up
the toothstroke 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,
(22:51):
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 homstly 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 bat Jiquito, we passed several small lember our villages.
(23:14):
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 worthy. One nurse's excrect tree
white dude was doing 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 and ba Jigito came into view. Over the
(23:38):
last few years, it reorientated 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. That Daddy Inn is as real to
(23:59):
most Panamanians a Sesame street or Jurassic Park. But for
the mber 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
(24:20):
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.
(24:42):
You can get an hour of Wi Fi for a dollar,
or charge your phone for 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 at
the river went. When they're arrived into town, I let
them be for a while I went off to interview
more migrants. About a thousand of them arrive in this
(25:02):
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 pallumers 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
(25:23):
o'clee across the Golf of the Dabienne. They crossed on
small motor boats to Capolgana or Kandel. 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 Dolf, 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
(25:44):
receive protection and a wrist band 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 Uncle 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
(26:07):
where they really confronted their fears and nightmares about the Daddy.
N Here's one Venezuelan migrant sharing his experience.
Speaker 6 (26:15):
A Gandhi.
Speaker 10 (26:17):
That's nothing compared to what comes from the border to hear. Yes,
the road is better, and I say that the dangerous
less too, and they have everything you need there. You
come prepared, you have you come with water, and there
are also many ravines where you can drink water. Well,
there are springs that come from the mountain, but from
the border on it's pretty ugly.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
It's a stretch from the Colombian Panamanian border at a
place that they call Las Bandabas, which means to Flags
to Bajo Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There they
can't drink from the river because a human waste and
human remains that constantly fill it like the water deadly.
They must walk on unmaintained trails. It often turns in
(26:58):
deep mud. They only have the supplies they carry, which
often run out, or they jettison to stave weight on
the incredibly steep mountain path. They climb and descend those
mountains across 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
(27:18):
the risk they're taking. If you ask people in Panama City,
they'll tell you that Dalian 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
(27:39):
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,
(28:02):
has moved to Panama, and that is something he can
do with US support. I spoke to some in venezuel
And ladies help and carry their bag because it's a
steep hill, and they were saying that no one has
seen any barriers. I don't know anything about any barriers
or any fences in a Darien and that like they
hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not standing in
front of one hundred people who just got off a
(28:23):
boat from the Darienn Hubris Aside, the rhetoric of closing
the daim signals are turned 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.
(28:48):
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 hard. 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 Kumiai people as the government dynamited their graveyards.
(29:11):
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
(29:33):
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 or simply push migrants onto other
more dangerous routes, into places where you can't build and
the places where nobody can rescue you. If you fall
down or break your leg. That doesn't mean there's nothing
(29:56):
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 console
the children with toys and stickers and something to eat
(30:18):
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
(30:39):
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 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 so
(31:00):
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.
Speaker 11 (31:10):
Aimulcholi, there are many rivers that you're forced into all
the time. You're putting your life and everything else on
the line there. I was worried that the indigenous people
would come out and do something to us. In the nights.
I was worried that any of the children, god forbid,
would have an accident. The same for me. It's horrible
to think about it now.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
This mother hood cross with a five, six and sixteen
year old child, the baby of six months. They'd all
made it in one piece, but the journey clearly had
its impact on the children.
Speaker 11 (31:44):
There are many people who are left out there without
food and do not have anything to give to their children.
We had food until last night. Nothing left now, and
we had to each one had to just eat a
little bit because we had nothing else to give them.
You can't find anything there. It's in the middle of nowhere.
People died right now, along with those who came with us.
(32:04):
Yesterday how many died yesterday?
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Three?
Speaker 11 (32:07):
I think three died yesterday. One drowned in the river. Yeah,
it's really tough this. No, no, nobody should do this.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Nobody.
Speaker 11 (32:18):
We do this out of pure physical necessity to look
for a better future for our kids. We can't stay
in our country, We couldn't stay any longer.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
There here are a couple of the kids I spoke to,
or in some cases, the kids who took my regorda
and conducted interviews with each other.
Speaker 11 (32:35):
The mountains. I was so tired and I couldn't climb anymore,
And when I fell in the river, I was really scared.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Apparently the whole thing was like an adventure. She'd seen
Peppa Pig happy, which at once made me giggle and
also one reflection, It's one of the saddest things I've
ever had to record. I'm sure her mum told her
that to make it easier for her to pass through
a terrible place. They're really sure to be at home
washing Pepper Pig and playing with her friends. No walking
(33:06):
past three dead bodies which are currently decomposing on the trail.
She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus ride
she'd taken to get there. One boring because she enjoyed
looking out the window, and the whole journey was well,
I'll let her say ees Mohamma not buying her Mum
gave us a different account.
Speaker 6 (33:25):
Rahmo.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
I didn't want to cry because I didn't want her
to see me crying. But sometimes I would explode because
it's hard for your child to ask you for water,
to ask you for food, and you don't have any
to be in a place where you walk. You walk
from five in the morning, it's five in the afternoon.
You're walking. You don't know what to do, going through
more than one hundred rivers and asking God not to
(33:49):
rain and not wanting it to get worse. It rained,
and the girl got a fever. She got a fever.
But well, God is good that we pray a lot.
I say that we don't know God so much in
the church from the process and the process that we
are in, and we don't know we can be so
strong until we go through that storm and we see
(34:10):
that He protects us. He knows that He was always
there watching over us, taking care of us at all times.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Parents being amazed at their children and drawing shrink from
them and their faith was a common message I heard
from migrants. He's a migrant from Zimbabwe telling me how
her daughter inspired her to keep going when she felt
like she couldn't walk anymore.
Speaker 12 (34:31):
My daughter, she was strong, she was strong, but she
was crying also, but she had what wounds all over
the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like,
I want to just put myself in the water, then
I can.
Speaker 6 (34:44):
Just go both.
Speaker 12 (34:44):
The gain was tough, really really tough. The mountain, the stones,
the river. It's not easy at all. It's not very
I don't even recommended someone to say you use daddy
and give no. And even by I did know about it. Yeah,
I was regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God,
(35:07):
I don't know my family and my family they don't
know where I am right now.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
But like so many other migrants, when the government of
the world abandoned her, she found strength in the strangers
along the road who wouldn't abandon her.
Speaker 12 (35:20):
We didn't even eat anything, were just asking people, can
I have a piece of biscuit?
Speaker 6 (35:25):
They just help us.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
That's nice. The other migrants helped.
Speaker 6 (35:28):
You, Yeah, the others.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Yeah, do you think that they treat African people differently.
Speaker 12 (35:35):
Very nice, especially these Spanish people, they are very nice.
I don't want to lie because if you need help,
you for call them for your look. The other ones
they might run away, but the other ones they just
found for health. They even give us tablets on the road,
give us energy drinks, give my daughter a sweets for energe.
(35:57):
They push us like, let's go, guys, let's call, let's go.
You make it injury, and we really make it.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
The journey over the mountains to Banama has become more
and more popular in recent years as other routes have
become more dangerous or closed themselves off to migrants entirely.
It's a route the Embira tell me that started with
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
(36:51):
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 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 piagua of their own up to
Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier. They
(37:13):
register with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym Sena 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, ardge their phones for a
dollar a time. Certainly, migration has changed this town, and
(37:37):
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
Arequid again this year, maybe seven hundred thousand people will
walk the gap. But despite these numbers, which may seem
(37:58):
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 valance companies donating to politicians in
their millions. In part. It is found that by simply
(38:20):
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 balm,
and we'll run out of Palestinians long before we run
out of bombs. The USA is new enemy when it
(38:40):
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 whose remains my friends found in a border on
a hot day this September. The US will stop at
(39:01):
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
(39:29):
that's unknown 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,
(39:53):
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, maybe to college, to
feel safe in their homes, and to be able to
speak in 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
(40:17):
daddy and in Astride, the American dream was pretty simple.
She wanted two things. To see Minnie Mouse and to
see her aunt. Why am I mine with seven or
thousand euros, a studio.
Speaker 6 (40:33):
Not ye Ammia, as you dear Amia.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You could
now find sources for it Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
The media.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
The most difficult part of the journey is when you
are treking and you meet dead bodies on the road.
It makes you weep, it makes you cry, but there's
only one focus in the forest ahead. You have to
(00:33):
keep going. You'll see mother's children. They are crying just
to have a sip of water. It is not easy.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting beside the
Tuquesa River on a warm afternoon in late September, making
faces at a two months old baby as we both
marveled at the cloud yellow butterflies. Anywhere else on earth,
it could be in a dyllic summer day, But in
these final steps, as a journey across a daddy and gap,
it's hard to open up your mind to experience joy.
(01:16):
I'd only been in the tiny Ember village of Bahujiguito
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,
and up to stream of me there were at least
three people's remains here. It was shin deep, but crossing
(01:38):
up stream 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 would have noticed that it is my real name,
but for the protection of James and his family, it's
(01:59):
a name be using when I met James. We're in
a migrant reception center called Las Blancas, to the north
of the Daliang 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
(02:19):
life jackets. They share the boat with nembra piraguero, who
sits at the back driving the boat with a tooth
stroke motor, and a guide who sits on the front,
using a pole when necessary to push the boat through
shallow sections. The Umbrada people are indigenous to the area.
That's commonly known as the Daliang Gap, or at least
to this part of it, and a tiny Emberda village
of Bajo Jiquito. It's a first settlement migrants encounter as
(02:42):
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 wear 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
(03:05):
translates to the Darien isn'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 Bahajiguito 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
(03:28):
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, lut del Mote
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.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
We are coming from Cameroon. IM My name is Flowers.
There's a lot of crisis in our country. That's a
civil war going on in Cameroon right now because of
our president. President Pombia has been in power over forty
two years. So I was the anglophone. We started revolting
for him to step down because he doesn't develop the
Southern American sorry, the English section of Cameroon anglerphone. Yeah,
(04:12):
the anglophone sections a revolts that he was set in
the military and it's killing the citizens of our country.
There's a lot of harshship, a lot of that. Eye
for one, I've lost everybody. I lost for my family,
my mom, my dad, my two brothers, and I'm the
only one left.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
So things.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
No, there's no job of completed school, but there's nothing
for me to do. So that's why it decided to migrate.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
To get to baho Jiqito from Columbia. It's James and
other migrants did. There's no road you can take. You
can't even take a boat or a train. Instead, you
have to walk the Dairying Gap, an area of rainforested mountains,
so it's one of the most dangerous migration routes in
the world. For anywhere between two and fifteen days, migrant
(04:55):
trek through waste time, mud, and rivers deeper than they
are at all. They must climb 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
(05:18):
soon become dead bodies as they beg for help. They
carry their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other. Across
mountains and rivers and abou jiqito. 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
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
The situation in Cameroon is, how can I put it,
very very, very very difficult, especially in the Anglophone part
of the country. Yeah, because for about five to six
years there's a world the ongoing war in the Anglophone crisis.
(06:18):
We also have been there has been fighting, There has
been shooting, killings. I myself speaking to you, Yeah, I've
been targeted. My cousin was shot and with his husband
(06:41):
were shot together. Both of them were nursis and they
were shot by the army that were there to protect
the people. So the situation back at home, it's very
very tense. Yeah, the very times when you see most
(07:03):
of Camaronians traveling taking the rigs part from Columbia brazy
right up to where I am. It is not because
they like it. It's because of the situation back at
home and most of it, and most of the time
it is the anglophone population that is suffering.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Most of them.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
They choose this part because they will not have a
direct visard to American Yeah, it's very hard to get
one yes, it's very, very difficult, so they have to
use the hard way.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Which is the only way. The truth is dead bodies,
terrible stories and families celebrating the end of their work.
It's nothing out of the ordinary. And bahu Jikito, the
Enbarra town, with the population of just five hundred and ninety,
it's a place I've been trying to come to for
almost as long as I've been writing about migration. There
are a few stories in my time as a journalist
(07:52):
that I've been pitching for close to a decade. Most
of the time I give up if there are no
bites after a few months, 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 whof 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.
(08:15):
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 the
Daddy and Gap and the people who risk their lives
crossing it for a shot at the American dream. And
(08:35):
at this point I do want to tegnlolize. 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
(08:56):
the freight trains they hop on in Mexico, worse in
the crowded worse even than the months of waiting for
an asylum appointment. I've only 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 get it Is to
send me to the tiny ember Our community on the
banks of the river, so that I could share the
(09:18):
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 of the
people who never left. The terrain is too fierce for
(09:40):
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 to commit untold numbers
(10:01):
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 if many, if
not more, will do so this year. Do you understand that, 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
(10:22):
migrant from North Africa who met my friends and helped
them build shelters in a cumber last year, explaining his
journey to the United States.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
So another route right now, which is a difficult route,
is through Brazil because Brazil has a I don't know
if you guys know, and I think they do that
for Americans too. Yeah, so Brazil has sort of I
don't know the word, but the equivalent to them is
if you impose of his own Brazil Brazilians were imposed
(10:53):
of his own news.
Speaker 6 (10:54):
They do that to Americans.
Speaker 7 (10:55):
Too, So.
Speaker 5 (10:58):
You know where I'm from. They don't have a visa
to uh as far as for Brazilians, so we don't.
So a lot of Africans can go to Brazil and
from Brazil take the the.
Speaker 6 (11:09):
Route all the way.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
That game was Jim couldn't fly here directly that he
was able to get a little bit closer to the
US by flying to Columbia. I'll let him explain how
he pulled that off.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
For me to have a pass to Colombia, it was
not easy. So we had we had to There was
a female female on that twenty World Cup that was
that was taking place in Colombia, so we had to
go to Columbia as football fans. That's why they had
(11:43):
They had to give us our Biza.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
That is all right.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
From Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Where we are today. Most are Continental America. We'll have
to travel to Brazil, just like Amos. Here's one a cap.
I'll let the speaks introduce himselves.
Speaker 6 (12:05):
My name is so I m I'm from Idan.
Speaker 8 (12:09):
My name is mohade for Omraan, my name is Ali,
and I'm from Iran.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
They told me why they left a run, but I'm
sure manygi could wear that went out of yourself, so
we won't included here. How did you come from Iran?
To hear you got for Turkey?
Speaker 6 (12:24):
It was so difficult, And we.
Speaker 8 (12:29):
Came from Iran, Tehran to Dubai, after that South all
of Brazil and after that believe Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and
Nikoklei and jungle Panama. Here Panama. And it was so
difficult for us because we are young. We just leave
(12:51):
our family, my sister, my mother, father. It was so emotional, yeah,
and it was so hard for us. But because of
the freedom, because we can't speak in our country.
Speaker 6 (13:02):
You know, if you speaking in your in the street,
something like it. They will arrest you.
Speaker 8 (13:09):
Yeah, in jail when you are not Muslim, when you
really like something like a Christian or something else.
Speaker 6 (13:17):
They arrassed.
Speaker 8 (13:18):
Yes, it was. It was so so, so, so difficult
living in Iran. But it's a wonderful country. But not government.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
When I talk to migrants, I always want to offer
them the chance to share their stories in ways that
they want to share them. And I asked them what
they would want to say if they could talk directly
to Americans. It's a question I ask a lot, because
in all the coverage of migration I've seen in this country,
I rarely see migrants' voices. I'm very familiar with being
the only journalist in a place, and i'd be lying.
(13:49):
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.
Speaker 9 (13:59):
So he's their message, We love you, hope too you
love is that's hard question?
Speaker 3 (14:06):
Yeah? Yeah, I think that's very good.
Speaker 9 (14:10):
It will be our next home, and we should be
proud of that, We should be worth for that, we
should be be a real American for the concert.
Speaker 7 (14:22):
Yeah, they know women are very bad situations, have a
bad situation in Itra. Yeah, for all people, that is saying,
but for women is very, very, very hard. I think
American people know about Massa Amini. Yeah, and they really
(14:47):
they chill us, really they chill women for simple things.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time
about how Jiqito and the last Blancast migrant reception center
that migrants traveled to after they arrive in Bajo Chiquito.
People left horrific things behind them and saw horrific things
on their journey, but they all remained hopeful for a
better future in America. These journeys, in some cases, could
(15:21):
take a year or more. When napoally Man I met
in Bajo Juquito, I 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 stands out as the hardest part. Do understand
why I want to take you back to that shady
spot by the river just a few minutes south of
(15:42):
Bajo Juquito. So what I'm doing right now and you
can hear from my foot depths 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 nearly eating shit. There's little bits
of tape marking a trail. I think they just come
(16:04):
down the river here. Some local guys are pushing out
wheelbarrows on the trail to dump trash. There'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 heeard, I can see migrants making what's probably hopefully
their final crossing of the river here. One thing I
(16:26):
noticed was that as soon as I got out of
sight in nearshot of the town, the jungle seems a
lot more intimidating. I'm 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
sea free diving, or three hours from the nearest road.
(16:47):
Then I am 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
(17:08):
new plants. I don't know what's poisonous. I don't know
what's going to kill me, and know who's going to
try and hurt me. Got another fucking horse, 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
(17:30):
paradise plants are just just growing here, gorgeousness. Horses belong
to people of the bah community. I suppose having snacks,
you know, eating jungle horse food. And here here, I'm
at the river. It's wide here, it's sort of shallow,
and it's been dammed up a little bit with rubbish,
(17:52):
just like flop some and jets some kind of stuff.
And then this is where people cross because of that
little dam. But it's still got some four to it,
like you wouldn't want to fall and crack your head
or you know, a lot of these folks can't swim
without the fear it's hard going. Because you've only hiked
on trails, you perhaps don't realize how much work goes
(18:12):
into making that 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 fist that way now,
(18:33):
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 they pit I was,
and then sort of low grassy kind of plants. And
then where the migrants walk is just this muddy trail
that every time it rains just turns into like ankle
(18:54):
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 Madragante, where I would be staying the night, I
reflected again on this and the 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.
(19:15):
I run ultramarathons. I used to be exercised for a living.
And it's fucking hard. It's wet. Everything's wet all the time.
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
(19:37):
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 like hold
her up. But people are really pushing themselves physically as
well as psychologically. That river crossing south of Bachigiso was
(19:58):
as far south as I was going to be to
get without being forcibly adjaced 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 was
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 Bahajigito,
(20:21):
I would look over my shoulder, hop down the river bank,
jump across the stream, and lightly jog out of town.
Once on the trail, I'd started to walk slowly and
try and waive a groups of 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
(20:42):
in up to a week. Just getting to baj Gito
(21:04):
was a journey in itself for me. I took two flights,
a five hour drive which was efnally 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,
(21:25):
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 little guard. The driver took off
his shoes and socks to conduct the more technical section
of the drive, which I thought was quite amasing. Yeah,
(21:45):
really steep, lots of holes, lots of potholes, you know,
just really rutted out kind of dirt road. And then
we got here and took to 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
(22:08):
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 toothstroke 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
(22:30):
who drive the piraguas, is incredible. They navigate parts of
the river so shallow that they have to pull up
the toothstroke 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,
(22:51):
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 homstly 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 bat Jiquito, we passed several small lember our villages.
(23:14):
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 worthy. One nurse's excrect tree
white dude was doing 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 and ba Jigito came into view. Over the
(23:38):
last few years, it reorientated 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. That Daddy Inn is as real to
(23:59):
most Panamanians a Sesame street or Jurassic Park. But for
the mber 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
(24:20):
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.
(24:42):
You can get an hour of Wi Fi for a dollar,
or charge your phone for 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 at
the river went. When they're arrived into town, I let
them be for a while I went off to interview
more migrants. About a thousand of them arrive in this
(25:02):
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 pallumers 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
(25:23):
o'clee across the Golf of the Dabienne. They crossed on
small motor boats to Capolgana or Kandel. 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 Dolf, 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
(25:44):
receive protection and a wrist band 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 Uncle 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
(26:07):
where they really confronted their fears and nightmares about the Daddy.
N Here's one Venezuelan migrant sharing his experience.
Speaker 6 (26:15):
A Gandhi.
Speaker 10 (26:17):
That's nothing compared to what comes from the border to hear. Yes,
the road is better, and I say that the dangerous
less too, and they have everything you need there. You
come prepared, you have you come with water, and there
are also many ravines where you can drink water. Well,
there are springs that come from the mountain, but from
the border on it's pretty ugly.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
It's a stretch from the Colombian Panamanian border at a
place that they call Las Bandabas, which means to Flags
to Bajo Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There they
can't drink from the river because a human waste and
human remains that constantly fill it like the water deadly.
They must walk on unmaintained trails. It often turns in
(26:58):
deep mud. They only have the supplies they carry, which
often run out, or they jettison to stave weight on
the incredibly steep mountain path. They climb and descend those
mountains across 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
(27:18):
the risk they're taking. If you ask people in Panama City,
they'll tell you that Dalian 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
(27:39):
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,
(28:02):
has moved to Panama, and that is something he can
do with US support. I spoke to some in venezuel
And ladies help and carry their bag because it's a
steep hill, and they were saying that no one has
seen any barriers. I don't know anything about any barriers
or any fences in a Darien and that like they
hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not standing in
front of one hundred people who just got off a
(28:23):
boat from the Darienn Hubris Aside, the rhetoric of closing
the daim signals are turned 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.
(28:48):
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 hard. 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 Kumiai people as the government dynamited their graveyards.
(29:11):
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
(29:33):
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 or simply push migrants onto other
more dangerous routes, into places where you can't build and
the places where nobody can rescue you. If you fall
down or break your leg. That doesn't mean there's nothing
(29:56):
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 console
the children with toys and stickers and something to eat
(30:18):
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
(30:39):
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 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 so
(31:00):
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.
Speaker 11 (31:10):
Aimulcholi, there are many rivers that you're forced into all
the time. You're putting your life and everything else on
the line there. I was worried that the indigenous people
would come out and do something to us. In the nights.
I was worried that any of the children, god forbid,
would have an accident. The same for me. It's horrible
to think about it now.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
This mother hood cross with a five, six and sixteen
year old child, the baby of six months. They'd all
made it in one piece, but the journey clearly had
its impact on the children.
Speaker 11 (31:44):
There are many people who are left out there without
food and do not have anything to give to their children.
We had food until last night. Nothing left now, and
we had to each one had to just eat a
little bit because we had nothing else to give them.
You can't find anything there. It's in the middle of nowhere.
People died right now, along with those who came with us.
(32:04):
Yesterday how many died yesterday?
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Three?
Speaker 11 (32:07):
I think three died yesterday. One drowned in the river. Yeah,
it's really tough this. No, no, nobody should do this.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Nobody.
Speaker 11 (32:18):
We do this out of pure physical necessity to look
for a better future for our kids. We can't stay
in our country, We couldn't stay any longer.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
There here are a couple of the kids I spoke to,
or in some cases, the kids who took my regorda
and conducted interviews with each other.
Speaker 11 (32:35):
The mountains. I was so tired and I couldn't climb anymore,
And when I fell in the river, I was really scared.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
Apparently the whole thing was like an adventure. She'd seen
Peppa Pig happy, which at once made me giggle and
also one reflection, It's one of the saddest things I've
ever had to record. I'm sure her mum told her
that to make it easier for her to pass through
a terrible place. They're really sure to be at home
washing Pepper Pig and playing with her friends. No walking
(33:06):
past three dead bodies which are currently decomposing on the trail.
She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus ride
she'd taken to get there. One boring because she enjoyed
looking out the window, and the whole journey was well,
I'll let her say ees Mohamma not buying her Mum
gave us a different account.
Speaker 6 (33:25):
Rahmo.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
I didn't want to cry because I didn't want her
to see me crying. But sometimes I would explode because
it's hard for your child to ask you for water,
to ask you for food, and you don't have any
to be in a place where you walk. You walk
from five in the morning, it's five in the afternoon.
You're walking. You don't know what to do, going through
more than one hundred rivers and asking God not to
(33:49):
rain and not wanting it to get worse. It rained,
and the girl got a fever. She got a fever.
But well, God is good that we pray a lot.
I say that we don't know God so much in
the church from the process and the process that we
are in, and we don't know we can be so
strong until we go through that storm and we see
(34:10):
that He protects us. He knows that He was always
there watching over us, taking care of us at all times.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Parents being amazed at their children and drawing shrink from
them and their faith was a common message I heard
from migrants. He's a migrant from Zimbabwe telling me how
her daughter inspired her to keep going when she felt
like she couldn't walk anymore.
Speaker 12 (34:31):
My daughter, she was strong, she was strong, but she
was crying also, but she had what wounds all over
the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like,
I want to just put myself in the water, then
I can.
Speaker 6 (34:44):
Just go both.
Speaker 12 (34:44):
The gain was tough, really really tough. The mountain, the stones,
the river. It's not easy at all. It's not very
I don't even recommended someone to say you use daddy
and give no. And even by I did know about it. Yeah,
I was regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God,
(35:07):
I don't know my family and my family they don't
know where I am right now.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
But like so many other migrants, when the government of
the world abandoned her, she found strength in the strangers
along the road who wouldn't abandon her.
Speaker 12 (35:20):
We didn't even eat anything, were just asking people, can
I have a piece of biscuit?
Speaker 6 (35:25):
They just help us.
Speaker 3 (35:26):
That's nice. The other migrants helped.
Speaker 6 (35:28):
You, Yeah, the others.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Yeah, do you think that they treat African people differently.
Speaker 12 (35:35):
Very nice, especially these Spanish people, they are very nice.
I don't want to lie because if you need help,
you for call them for your look. The other ones
they might run away, but the other ones they just
found for health. They even give us tablets on the road,
give us energy drinks, give my daughter a sweets for energe.
(35:57):
They push us like, let's go, guys, let's call, let's go.
You make it injury, and we really make it.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
The journey over the mountains to Banama has become more
and more popular in recent years as other routes have
become more dangerous or closed themselves off to migrants entirely.
It's a route the Embira tell me that started with
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
(36:51):
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 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 piagua of their own up to
Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier. They
(37:13):
register with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym Sena 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, ardge their phones for a
dollar a time. Certainly, migration has changed this town, and
(37:37):
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
Arequid again this year, maybe seven hundred thousand people will
walk the gap. But despite these numbers, which may seem
(37:58):
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 valance companies donating to politicians in
their millions. In part. It is found that by simply
(38:20):
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 balm,
and we'll run out of Palestinians long before we run
out of bombs. The USA is new enemy when it
(38:40):
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 whose remains my friends found in a border on
a hot day this September. The US will stop at
(39:01):
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
(39:29):
that's unknown 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,
(39:53):
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, maybe to college, to
feel safe in their homes, and to be able to
speak in 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
(40:17):
daddy and in Astride, the American dream was pretty simple.
She wanted two things. To see Minnie Mouse and to
see her aunt. Why am I mine with seven or
thousand euros, a studio.
Speaker 6 (40:33):
Not ye Ammia, as you dear Amia.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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