October 28, 2024 • 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.
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 1 (00:53):
A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting beside the
Tuquesa River on a warm afternoon in late September, making
bill 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 the daddy and Gap,
it's hard to open up your mind to experience joy.
(01:16):
I'd only been in the tiny Emberra village of Baho
Jigito a couple of days, and I had already seen
the lifeless body of a little girl, as though the
migrants carried her into town. The river I was sleeping
around him, with this group of migrants resting here in
the shade, had swept sleeping children to their deaths earlier
this year. An upstream of me, there were at least
three people's remains here. It was shin deep, but crossing
(01:38):
upstream where it's above head height and rages down out
of the mountains in steep ravines. Was the migrants I
walked back to town with told me the stuff of nightmares.
The voice you just heard was a migrant from Cameroon
who called himself James. That's not his real name, and
astute listeners will have noticed that it is my real name,
but for the protection of James and his family, it's
(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 Darien Gap. To get there, one has to
take a dugout canoe called a piragua from Bajo Jaquito.
The voyage takes five hours, and for that five hours,
migrants are packed fifteen to a boat wearing bright orange
(02:19):
life jackets. They share the boat with nembra piraguero who
sit at the back driving the boat with a two
stroke motor, and a guide who sits on the front,
using a pole when necessary to push the boat through
shallow sections. The Umbra people are indigenous to the area
that's commonly known as the Daliang Gap, or at least
to this part of it and the tiny Embrea village
of Bajo Jaquito. It's a first settlement migrants encounter is
(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 were on their uniforms There
reflects a slogan in a government messaging campaign darien asuna Jungla.
It says. The campaign was launched in August, and it
(03:05):
translates to the darinessn't a route or maybe a roads
a better translation, it's a jungle. Obviously it's actually both,
but this is like no route. Most of us will
be familiar with. The dark and foreboding jungle I saw
in Bahajigito is one of the most impenetrable on Earth,
and the crossing of it is among the most dangerous
land migration routes. In the nineteen seventies, the British Army
(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, Dete or
sometimes the Green Hell. Here's a group from Cameroon explaining
why they didn't see a future there and they decided
to take this dangerous route.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
We are coming from Cameroon. I'm my name is Flowers.
There's a lot of crisis in our country. The civil
war going on in Cameroon right now because of our president.
President Pombia has been in part 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, the anglophone sections
(04:13):
revolt ins that you was selling the military and it's
killing the citizens of our country. There's a lot of hardship,
a lot of that. Eye for one, I've lost everybody,
a lot of my family, my mom, my dad, my
two brothers, and I'm the only one left so things
and there is no job. I've completed school, but there's
nothing for me to do. So that's why it decided to.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Mygrae to get to Baho Jikito 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 Darying 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,
(04:55):
migrants trek through waste time mud rivers deeper than they
are at all. They must im giant boulders, cross perilous ravines,
and traverse sheer cliff faces, all of this with barely
any water than what they can carry, little to no food,
inadequate clothing, a terrible footwear, and no medical attention. They
(05:15):
must walk past dead bodies and past people who might
soon become dead bodies as they beg for help. They
carry their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other across
mountains and rivers, and in bau Jiquito they take what,
for many of them will be the final steps of
this part of their journey. It's a journey that few
of us can imagine, and they were lucky to be
(05:37):
able to avoid. My own migration to the US sixteen
years ago was much simpler and safer, But for migrants
like James, the journey's worth it because what they're leaving
behind is worse. Here's James describing the situation in the
state of Cameroon.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
The situation in Cameroon is.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
How can I pity, 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 ongoing war
in the anglophone.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Crisis we are.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
So they have been there has been fighting, has been shooting, killings.
I myself speaking to you, Yeah, I've been targeted. My
cousin was shot and with his husband were shot together.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Both of them.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
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, very very tense.
When you see most of Camaronians traveling taking the Rigspath
(07:06):
from Columbia Brazy right up to where I am.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
It is not because they like it. It's because of
the situation back at.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Home and most of it, and most of the time
it is the anglophone population that is suffering.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Most of them. They choose this part because they will
not have a direct result to America.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
It's very hard to get one way.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yes, it's very very difficult. So they have to use
the hard way, which is the only way.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
The truth is dead bodies, terrible stories, and families celebrating
the end of their work. It's nothing out of the ordinary.
And Babu 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 that I've been pitching for
close to a decade. Most of the time I give
(07:56):
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 who if I did
their revolution with co op produced tea or a surfing
team in the Gaza strip, And on reflection, you probably
won't hear about that last one anywhere. Now. The media
cycle has a way of coming around to these stories eventually, sure,
(08:19):
but I not really want to go back to what
it is who didn't give a shit about people before
and only care about their stories now because they get
more traffic. But there's one story I've never given up on.
That's the story of a daddy en gap and the
people who risk their lives crossing it for a shot
at the American dream. And at this point I do
want to ignolize. I'm incredibly grateful to the people I
work with for trusting me when I asked them to
(08:41):
pay for me to disappear in a dugout canoe into
the jungle and come back two weeks later with a story.
The daddy and looms in the stories of migrants I
meet in the US border as a sort of heart
of darkness on what is a very difficult and dangerous journey.
It's worse than the freight trains they hop on in Mexico,
worse in the crowded worse even than the months of
(09:02):
waiting for an asylum appointment. I firly believe that you
can't really understand and write about things you haven't seen, smelt,
and heard. So for years I've been asking theeed it
is to send me to the tiny and but our
community on the banks of the river, so that I
could share the final steps of this horrific journey with
the people who see little option but to risk their
(09:22):
lives for a better future for their children. Because the
US refuses to create more legal pathways, people instead take
a sudden pathway straight up and down the mountains to
the Darian rainforest. The journey will take them past the
corpse into people who never left. The terrain is too
fierce for anyone to carry their remains out, so they
must simply rut there as a reminder to migrants, so
(09:45):
they must keep going. It's a sort of deterrent through
death that has been the unofficial and official US border
policy for decades. To turn or not. Once you're in
the Darien, there's no turning back, and the lack of
escape routes has made the gap popular among criminals who
commit untold numbers of sexual assaults, murders, and armed robberies
every year in the jungle. Despite this, more than half
(10:07):
a million migrants made the perilous journey last year, and
it's many, if not more, will do so this year.
Do you understand the Daddy and you have to first
understand US immigration policy, which is something I talk about
a lot on this podcast. I want to include here
a clip from Amos, a migrant from North Africa who
met my friends and helped them build shelters in u
Cumba last year, explaining his journey to the United States.
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. They do that to Americans too, So.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You know where I'm from.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
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
route all the way.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
That game was James 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 visa is all right.
From Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Where we are today.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Most continental America. We'll have to travel to Brazil, just
like Amos. Here's one ac Can. I'll let the speakers
introduce himselves.
Speaker 6 (12:05):
My name is Tom, I m I'm from Idan.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
My name is mohade for.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
Omran, my name is Ali, and I'm from Idan.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
They told me why they left Irun. But I'm sure
many di could wear that went out of yourself, so
we weren't included here. How did you come from Iran
to hear you got for Turkey?
Speaker 7 (12:24):
It was so difficult, and we came from Iran, Tehran
to Dubai. After that, saub all of Brazil and after
that Believe Peru, Ejuador, Colombia and Nkokley and Jungle Panama
Here Panama. And it was so difficult for us because
(12:47):
we are young. We just leave 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. You know, if
you speaking in your in the street, something like it
they will arrest you. And yeah, Jai, when you are
(13:11):
not Muslim, when you really like something like a Christian
or something else, theres Yes, it was. It was so so,
so so difficult living in Iran, but it's a it's
a wonderful country, but not government.
Speaker 1 (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 asked 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):
if I said I didn't prefer it that way. But
I do always feel obliged to use the platform I
have here to give people a chance to share their stories,
their voices, and their struggles. So he's their message.
Speaker 7 (14:01):
We love you, hope too, you love this?
Speaker 6 (14:03):
Yeah, that's hard question.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's very good.
Speaker 7 (14:10):
It will be our next home, and we should be
proud of that. We should be bored for that, we
should be real, real American for the concert.
Speaker 6 (14:22):
Yeah, they know women are very bad situations, have a
bad situation in Iran.
Speaker 8 (14:29):
Yeah, for all people, that is.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
Saying, but for women is very, very, very hard. I
think American people know about masa Amini. Yeah, and they
really they chill us, really, they chill women for simple things.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time
about how Jiqito and the last blankat 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, can
(15:21):
take a year or more. One napoly man I met
in Bajajuquito had spent thirty months just to get that far,
and among his group, his journey had been the fastest.
As long as these journeys are, that darien often stems
out as the hardest part to understand. Why I want
to take you back to that shady spot by the
river just a few minutes south of Bajo Juquito. So
(15:45):
what I'm doing right now, as you can hear from
my footsteps, is I'm doing what it told me not
to do. I'm walking along the migrant trail. Lots of
like vines and creepers, and oh fucking hell, that's me
el eating shit. There's little bits of tape marking a trail.
I think they just come down the river here. Some
(16:07):
local guys are pushing out wheelbarrows on the trail to
dump trash. The's trash everywhere, to fucking mess the little
wood arrows that they've carved just outside town to direct
people into town. And if I heard, I can see
migrants making what's probably hopefully their final crossing of the
river here. One thing I noticed was that as soon
(16:28):
as I got out of sight in near shot of
the town, the jungle seems a lot more intimidating. Somebody
spends a lot of time in the mountains, and I
grew up playing in the woods. I'm comfortable outdoors, and
I frequently camp and hike for days on my own.
I like it better that way, and I might see
more comfortable forty feet under the seed free diving, or
three hours from the nearest road. Then I'm in a
(16:48):
busy city sometimes, but in the jungle. After all the
stories I'd heard that week. I was afraid. I get scary.
I don't know why. I mean, everything's new to me. I'm,
you know, relatively comfortable in the outdoors. But fucking there's
new animals, there's new plants. I don't know what's poisonous.
(17:10):
I don't know what's going to kill me. I don't
know who's going to try and hurt me. Got another
fucking RF Jesus wept. I'm jumping out my skin. Everything
Now it's funny. I'm in a place that's beautiful, you know,
like these better paradise plants are just just growing here, gorgeousness.
(17:34):
Horses belong to people of the Mbah community. I suppose
having snacks, you know, eating jungle horse food. And here
here I am at the river. It's wide here, it's
sort of shallow, and it's been dammed up a little
bit with rubbish, just like flocks and and jets some
kind of stuff.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
And then.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
This is where people cross because of that little dam.
But it's still got some to it, like you wouldn't
want to fall and crack your head or you know,
a lot of these folks can't swim even without the fear.
It's hard going. If you've only hiked on trails, you
probably don't realize how much work goes into making that
surface possible. There are no trail crews in the Darien,
and as a result, every step has the potential to
(18:19):
results in a sprained ankle or another injury, which might
sound trivial but can be faithal in such a remote
and challenging place. Trail is all rocks, like maybe rocks
the size of a fift like that way now, and
then there are sort of in this area we only
have the lower canopy, so we have ferns, we have reeds,
(18:40):
bamboo plants growing really tall and straight, that's what they
use for the poles that the pit our words, and
then sort of low grassy kind of plants. And then
where the migrants walk is just this muddy trail that
every time it raine just turns into like ankle to
knee deep mud. And I could see them making pretty
slow progress along the trail towards me. At the end
(19:01):
of the day, as I took a pedagua back to
Madagan Tea, where I would be staying the night, I
reflected again on this an incredible tenacity it took for
people with little outdoor experience and terrible equipment to pass
through the jungle. You know, I'm a fit person. I
run ultramarathons. It used to be exercised for a living.
And it's fucking hard. It's wet. Everything's wet all the time.
(19:23):
If you're wet from the rain, then you're wet. If
you're wet from the sweat and you're wet. If you
cross rivers, you get wet. You just can't stay dry.
And everyone's feet are just fucked when they get into town,
Like the size of the blisters I've seen, and like
one lady had a cramp today where like it just
(19:44):
locked up a whole that she like, I grabbed her.
She was falling down and I was able to hold
her up. But people are really pushing themselves physically as
well as psychologically. That river crossing south of Bachigiso was
as far south as I was going to be able
to get without being forced to be adjacted from Panama,
and my request to take a boat or walk further
(20:05):
south was denied by the Panamanian Ministry of Security. So
the only part of the migrants journey I would share
with them, with the last kilometer or so of their
walk even then, I wasn't really supposed to be leaving
town at all, So several times over the days I
spent in Bajajigito, I would look over my shoulder, hop
down the river bank, jump across the stream, and likely
(20:26):
jog out of town. Once on the trail, I'd started
to walk slowly and try and waive a groups outcoming migrants.
I didn't want to scare them. I offered to carry
their bags and let any help I could, supporting them
as they walked towards their first meal and clean drink
of water. In up to a week. Just getting to
(21:03):
barje Gito was a journey in itself for me. I
took two flights, a five hour drive which was evenally
split between paved roads, roads that aspired to pavement, and
dirt roads. At the end of our road journey, the
Pan American Highway, the links Alaska to Argentina, seems to
give up on fighting the jungle and Peter's out. Asphalt
(21:24):
turned to worse asphalt, which turned to dirt, which turned
to mud, which led us to a river. A driver, however,
was prepared for this. The drive here was mad, like
that road was fucked. We're in this tiny old guard.
The driver took off his shoes and socks to conduct
the more technical section of the drive, which I thought
was quite amusing. And yeah, really steep, lots of holes,
(21:47):
lots of potholes, you know, just really rutted out kind
of dirt road. And then we got here and thopped
some guys, negotiated a price and told him where we
wanted to go, and they said, yeah, sure, buy some water,
you know, snow water on the way about three hours
and so we bought some water right there, and yeah,
(22:07):
here we are on the boat now, as you can hear,
I recorded this on a piragua. It's a kind of
dugout canoe with the hole made out of a single
tree and a tooth stroke motor bolted on the back.
It's the only way to travel here other than on
your feet, and it's the only way the Embarra can
get the produced cigaret to market. The skill of the piragueros,
(22:30):
the people who drive the piraguas, is incredible. They navigate
parts of the river so shallow that they have to
pull up the two stroke motor. And I noticed all
the motors have propellers that are covered in chips and bashes,
from smacking into the rocks at the bottom. In the
bow of the boat, I sat on top of my
giant rucksack, marveling at the birds, insects, and foliage of
(22:50):
the jungle, and occasionally I jumped up to make fairly
useless contributions with the boat's bamboo pole under the close
supervision of Marcellino, a driver and are soon to be
host for mostly just laughed at me as I leaned
my whole way into the pole, which notably slipped, and
I tried to avoid falling face first into the chocolate
brown water. On the way to bout Jiquito, we passed
(23:12):
several small limber our villages. Little children waved at us
from the banks or from the shallows of the river
where they washed and played. Adults looked on I doubtless
why there one nurse's ex vict three white dude was
going the wrong way on the river for a migrant,
but they smiled and waved back anyway. After an overnight flight,
a five hour drive, and three hours in a dugout canoe,
(23:33):
we rounded a corner in the river. Abou Jiquito came
into view. Over the last few years, it's three oriented
itself from a tiny indigenous village to an unofficial reception
center for migrants. On my hopelessly outdated topo map, the
area has nothing but contours and green shading, no roads,
no trails, no markets of human existence at all, and
(23:55):
perhaps that's how the state sees this place. The Daddy
Inn is as real to most Panamanians a Sesame street
or Jurassic Park, But for the Enber this has been
their home since long before Panama and Columbia and even
maps existed. A few dozen houses in the village, mostly
built on stilts to avoid the seasonal floods, now offer
up their rooms as hostels for the migrants. Some of
(24:18):
them have enclosed at bottom floor using plywood or cinder blocks.
Others have strung hammocks from their support posts. For four
or five bugs, migrants can get their first good night's
sleep since they left Neck or Clee in Columbia as
much as a week before. Along the main street, which
is really just to raise concrete footpath about a meter across,
you can buy a meal any of half a dozen
(24:40):
places for five bucks. You can get an hour of
Wi Fi for a dollar, or charge your phone for
at the same price. Cold drinks for a dollar as well.
Are one of the many front rooms that have turned
into small kiosks. And that's where the migrants I have
been sitting down with that the river went. When they're
rived into town, I let them be for a while
I went off to interview more migrants. About a thousand
(25:01):
of them arrive in this village every day. Each year
since a pandemic has seen record numbers arrive, and the
little village on the side of a hill, surrounded by
palm trees and full of smiling children in their traditional
brightly colored paluomers chasing chickens and dogs, has welcomed every
single one of them. About a thousand of them arrive
in this town every day. To get here, they also
(25:22):
take a boat from neck o'clee across the Golf of
the Dabbienne. They crossed on small motor boats to Kapolgana
or Candel. Those are both towns on the western side
of the Gulf of the Darienne. From there they begin
their walk. Even though they're now north of the gulf,
they're still in Colombia, and on the Colombian side of
the border. They're guided by guides to whom they pay
several hundred dollars and in return receive protection and a
(25:45):
wristband that ensures they can walk without being robbed. Nobody
I spoke to had made it this far without paying
a guide. The area is largely under the control of
the Golf Cartel, several members of which were sanctioned by
the USA. While I was in the jungle, the marcos
I spoke to you didn't really have much bad to
say about this part of their experience, but universally acknowledged
(26:06):
that the next part was where they really confronted their
fears and nightmares about the Daddy. N Here's one Venezuelan
migrant sharing his experience.
Speaker 9 (26:14):
Yeah, 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 1 (26:36):
It's a stretch from the Colombian Panamanian border at a
place that they call Las Bandavas, which means the flags
to Bajo Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There, they
can't drink from the river because it's 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 and cross rivers, often without eating or drinking for
days at a time. On the trail, they passed by
the bodies of their fellow travelers as a constant reminder
of the risk they're taking. If you ask people in
(27:21):
Panama City, they'll tell you the day and is closed now.
New President hose Raoul Molino was elected on a promise
to shut down the gap, end the humanitarian crisis, and
deport more migrants for the US funding, and that funding
has certainly arrived, with more than six million already spent
since he took office in July. Since then, Panama has
(27:42):
deported more than eleven hundred people to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia,
and India. Each of these has been funded by US taxpayers.
Obviously the jungle isn't closed, and it can't really be closed.
But in an interview before he was elected, Molino said
that the border of the United States, instead of being
in Texas, has moved to Panama, and that is something
(28:05):
he can do with US support. I spoke to us
in venezuel and ladies help and carry their bags. It's
a steep hill, and they were saying that no one
has seen any barriers. I don't know anythink about any
barriers or any fences in a Darien and that like
they hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not. I'm
standing in front of one hundred people who just got
off a boat from the Darienn Hubris. Aside, the rhetoric
(28:28):
of closing the Daddi, m signals are turn not just
in Panamanian politics, but in the way the world sees
and handles migration. The US has always sought to externalize
its borders, from US train border patrol officers and Dominican
Republic along the border is Haiti to DHS agents deploying
to Iraq and Afghanistan. As migration has become more politicized,
(28:50):
the US has sought to move its enforcement away from
prying eyes and from compassion, and instead brought more trauma
to a place that is already so high. I've spent
much of the last decade of my life watching the
state try to bring the mountains and desert close to
where I live under its control. I've stood with kumia
I people as the government dynamited their graveyards. I found
(29:12):
border walk contractors lost deep in the mountains. I've driven
the impossibly steep concrete roads that they built, worried about
my truck turning end on end. I've seen billions of
dollars thrown at these mountains, and I've seen people with
twenty dollars angle grinders or ladders made of old palettes
defeat the wall in moments. Trying to close borders doesn't
work at home, and it won't work in the Daddy
(29:33):
and Gap either. Just building the roads to get the
construction equipment into the gap is a gargantuan task, and
any attempt to create a barrier across the sixty kilometer
wide wilderness area will simply push migrants onto other more
dangerous routes, into places where you can't build, and the
place is where nobody can rescue you. If you fall
down or break your leg, that doesn't mean there's nothing
(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 consider
that 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 to make it as painful
and dangerous as possible. But the rais of word barriers
in the Daddy and Gap, which I've seen person on
(30:59):
social media didn't exist for the hundreds of migrants I
spoke to. No one I asked had even seen them,
but what they had seen was far worse.
Speaker 10 (31:10):
Aimucholi, 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.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Now, 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 10 (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. Yesterday.
(32:05):
How many died yesterday?
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Three?
Speaker 10 (32:07):
I think three died yesterday. One drowned in the river. Yeah,
it's really tough this. No, no, nobody should do this. Nobody.
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 1 (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 10 (32:34):
On the mountains. I was so tired and I couldn't
climb anymore, and when I fell in the river, I
was really scared.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Apparently the whole thing was like an adventure she'd seen
Pepper Pig having, 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, But really she ought to be at home,
washing Peppa Pig and playing with her friends. No walking
past three dead bodies which are currently decomposing on the trail.
(33:10):
She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus ride
she'd taken to get there went boring because she enjoyed
looking out the window, and the whole journey was well,
I'll let her say.
Speaker 8 (33:18):
It else, Mohammed, I'm not buying.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Her.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Mum gave us a different account.
Speaker 11 (33:25):
Rah, 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
(33:47):
more than one hundred rivers and asking God not to
rain and not wanting it to get worse. It rained,
and the girl got a fever.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
She got a fever.
Speaker 11 (33:56):
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
that He protects us. He knows that He was always
there watching over us, taking care of us at all times.
Speaker 1 (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 8 (34:31):
My daughter she was strong, she was strong, but she
was crying also, but she had what wound all over
the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like,
I want to just put myself in the water. Then again,
just go both. The gain was tough, really really tough.
The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not easy at all.
(34:52):
It's not very I don't even recommended someone to say
you use daddy and give no. And even myself I
did know about it. Yeah, I was regretting myself. I
was crying. I was like, God, I don't know my
family and my family they don't know where I am
right now.
Speaker 1 (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 8 (35:20):
We didn't even eat anything. We just asked and people,
can I have a piece of biscuit?
Speaker 7 (35:25):
They just help us.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
That's nice.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
The other migrants helped you.
Speaker 5 (35:28):
Yeah, the others.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Yeah, do you think that they treat African people differently?
Speaker 8 (35:35):
Very nice, especially these Spanish people, they are very nice.
I don't want to like 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
come 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.
Speaker 7 (35:59):
You make it, and we really make it.
Speaker 1 (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 Embra 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 is half a million
people across the jungle. This year we might see more
Magaret's arriving about Jigito, spend the day in the village
before taking off in a piaguoa of their own up
to Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier.
(37:13):
They register with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym
Cena Front, and they call their families to say they survived.
Then they dry out their blistered feet, enjoy the cooking
of several of the families who have turned their homes
into sort of ersad's restaurants. They sleep on the floors
of the houses or underneath them, bardge their phones for
a dollar a time. Certainly, migration has changed this town,
(37:37):
and I want to talk about that more in tomorrow's episode.
But despite more than a million people passing through this route,
you don't find antimigrant sentiment here right now, despite the
gap being a deadly deterrent, numbers are expected to reach
a requid again this year, maybe seven hundred thousand people
will walk the gap. But despite these numbers, which may
(37:58):
seem high for a small country, I didn't really find
much anti migroan sentiment in Panama as a whole. There's
plenty of it in the US, though, and as the
United States winds down its war and terror. It needs
a new nebulous enemy to justify its military spending and
to keep the security into veillance companies donating too politicians
in their millions. In part, it is found that by
(38:20):
simply opening a floodgate of weapons and funding, they can
spew forth genocide and death in Palestine and keep some
of its income streams. But it needs a more long
term solution. There are only so many Palestinian babies that
can bomb, and we'll run out of Palestinians long before
we run out of bombs. The USA is new enemy
(38:40):
when it must seek out all over the world. It's
a migrant. It's a woman I met carrying her child
across the mountains. The little Venezuelan girl throwing bottle caps
into a cinder block with me to pass the time
as she asked me questions about America. It's a twenty
one year old man who's remains my friends found at
the border on a hot day this September. The US
(39:00):
will stop at nothing and fining and destroying the migrant,
and just as it did in the War on Terror,
it will find fast friends in states desperate to avail
themselves to the seemingly unlimited flow of resources the US
dedicates to keeping its conflicts out of the sights and
the minds of its citizens. The USA's open hostility to
(39:28):
migrants isn't something that's I'm known here. Everyone I met
knew about it. Several of them had watched with horror
as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump argued not about how
to treat migrants but about who could turn more of
them away. In a recent presidential debate. Every migrant I
met had questions about CBP, one, about US asylum policy,
and about how they could get to the US before
(39:50):
a second Trump administration. Despite this, they all clung to
their versions of the American dream. They wanted to work
and be paid a fair wage, to send their kids
to school and maybe to college, to feel safe in
their homes, and to be able to speak a dress
as they wish without varing consequences. All of those things
are imperiling this country too, and they know that, but
(40:11):
they still feel their dreams are worth the journey. For Noemi,
the little girl who took the daddy and in Astride,
the American dream was pretty simple. She wanted two things.
To see Minnie Mouse and to see her aunt.
Speaker 7 (40:25):
Why am I Mini.
Speaker 4 (40:28):
Get dear with a seven or thousand eros? A study air.
Speaker 10 (40:33):
Not yell an.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
Ammia as to Dear Ami Dea.
Speaker 11 (40:47):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
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You can 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 1 (00:53):
A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting beside the
Tuquesa River on a warm afternoon in late September, making
bill 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 the daddy and Gap,
it's hard to open up your mind to experience joy.
(01:16):
I'd only been in the tiny Emberra village of Baho
Jigito a couple of days, and I had already seen
the lifeless body of a little girl, as though the
migrants carried her into town. The river I was sleeping
around him, with this group of migrants resting here in
the shade, had swept sleeping children to their deaths earlier
this year. An upstream of me, there were at least
three people's remains here. It was shin deep, but crossing
(01:38):
upstream where it's above head height and rages down out
of the mountains in steep ravines. Was the migrants I
walked back to town with told me the stuff of nightmares.
The voice you just heard was a migrant from Cameroon
who called himself James. That's not his real name, and
astute listeners will have noticed that it is my real name,
but for the protection of James and his family, it's
(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 Darien Gap. To get there, one has to
take a dugout canoe called a piragua from Bajo Jaquito.
The voyage takes five hours, and for that five hours,
migrants are packed fifteen to a boat wearing bright orange
(02:19):
life jackets. They share the boat with nembra piraguero who
sit at the back driving the boat with a two
stroke motor, and a guide who sits on the front,
using a pole when necessary to push the boat through
shallow sections. The Umbra people are indigenous to the area
that's commonly known as the Daliang Gap, or at least
to this part of it and the tiny Embrea village
of Bajo Jaquito. It's a first settlement migrants encounter is
(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 were on their uniforms There
reflects a slogan in a government messaging campaign darien asuna Jungla.
It says. The campaign was launched in August, and it
(03:05):
translates to the darinessn't a route or maybe a roads
a better translation, it's a jungle. Obviously it's actually both,
but this is like no route. Most of us will
be familiar with. The dark and foreboding jungle I saw
in Bahajigito is one of the most impenetrable on Earth,
and the crossing of it is among the most dangerous
land migration routes. In the nineteen seventies, the British Army
(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, Dete or
sometimes the Green Hell. Here's a group from Cameroon explaining
why they didn't see a future there and they decided
to take this dangerous route.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
We are coming from Cameroon. I'm my name is Flowers.
There's a lot of crisis in our country. The civil
war going on in Cameroon right now because of our president.
President Pombia has been in part 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, the anglophone sections
(04:13):
revolt ins that you was selling the military and it's
killing the citizens of our country. There's a lot of hardship,
a lot of that. Eye for one, I've lost everybody,
a lot of my family, my mom, my dad, my
two brothers, and I'm the only one left so things
and there is no job. I've completed school, but there's
nothing for me to do. So that's why it decided to.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Mygrae to get to Baho Jikito 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 Darying 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,
(04:55):
migrants trek through waste time mud rivers deeper than they
are at all. They must im giant boulders, cross perilous ravines,
and traverse sheer cliff faces, all of this with barely
any water than what they can carry, little to no food,
inadequate clothing, a terrible footwear, and no medical attention. They
(05:15):
must walk past dead bodies and past people who might
soon become dead bodies as they beg for help. They
carry their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other across
mountains and rivers, and in bau Jiquito they take what,
for many of them will be the final steps of
this part of their journey. It's a journey that few
of us can imagine, and they were lucky to be
(05:37):
able to avoid. My own migration to the US sixteen
years ago was much simpler and safer, But for migrants
like James, the journey's worth it because what they're leaving
behind is worse. Here's James describing the situation in the
state of Cameroon.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
The situation in Cameroon is.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
How can I pity, 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 ongoing war
in the anglophone.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Crisis we are.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
So they have been there has been fighting, has been shooting, killings.
I myself speaking to you, Yeah, I've been targeted. My
cousin was shot and with his husband were shot together.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Both of them.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
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, very very tense.
When you see most of Camaronians traveling taking the Rigspath
(07:06):
from Columbia Brazy right up to where I am.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
It is not because they like it. It's because of
the situation back at.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Home and most of it, and most of the time
it is the anglophone population that is suffering.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Most of them. They choose this part because they will
not have a direct result to America.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
It's very hard to get one way.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Yes, it's very very difficult. So they have to use
the hard way, which is the only way.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
The truth is dead bodies, terrible stories, and families celebrating
the end of their work. It's nothing out of the ordinary.
And Babu 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 that I've been pitching for
close to a decade. Most of the time I give
(07:56):
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 who if I did
their revolution with co op produced tea or a surfing
team in the Gaza strip, And on reflection, you probably
won't hear about that last one anywhere. Now. The media
cycle has a way of coming around to these stories eventually, sure,
(08:19):
but I not really want to go back to what
it is who didn't give a shit about people before
and only care about their stories now because they get
more traffic. But there's one story I've never given up on.
That's the story of a daddy en gap and the
people who risk their lives crossing it for a shot
at the American dream. And at this point I do
want to ignolize. I'm incredibly grateful to the people I
work with for trusting me when I asked them to
(08:41):
pay for me to disappear in a dugout canoe into
the jungle and come back two weeks later with a story.
The daddy and looms in the stories of migrants I
meet in the US border as a sort of heart
of darkness on what is a very difficult and dangerous journey.
It's worse than the freight trains they hop on in Mexico,
worse in the crowded worse even than the months of
(09:02):
waiting for an asylum appointment. I firly believe that you
can't really understand and write about things you haven't seen, smelt,
and heard. So for years I've been asking theeed it
is to send me to the tiny and but our
community on the banks of the river, so that I
could share the final steps of this horrific journey with
the people who see little option but to risk their
(09:22):
lives for a better future for their children. Because the
US refuses to create more legal pathways, people instead take
a sudden pathway straight up and down the mountains to
the Darian rainforest. The journey will take them past the
corpse into people who never left. The terrain is too
fierce for anyone to carry their remains out, so they
must simply rut there as a reminder to migrants, so
(09:45):
they must keep going. It's a sort of deterrent through
death that has been the unofficial and official US border
policy for decades. To turn or not. Once you're in
the Darien, there's no turning back, and the lack of
escape routes has made the gap popular among criminals who
commit untold numbers of sexual assaults, murders, and armed robberies
every year in the jungle. Despite this, more than half
(10:07):
a million migrants made the perilous journey last year, and
it's many, if not more, will do so this year.
Do you understand the Daddy and you have to first
understand US immigration policy, which is something I talk about
a lot on this podcast. I want to include here
a clip from Amos, a migrant from North Africa who
met my friends and helped them build shelters in u
Cumba last year, explaining his journey to the United States.
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. They do that to Americans too, So.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You know where I'm from.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
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
route all the way.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
That game was James 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 visa is all right.
From Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Where we are today.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Most continental America. We'll have to travel to Brazil, just
like Amos. Here's one ac Can. I'll let the speakers
introduce himselves.
Speaker 6 (12:05):
My name is Tom, I m I'm from Idan.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
My name is mohade for.
Speaker 7 (12:11):
Omran, my name is Ali, and I'm from Idan.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
They told me why they left Irun. But I'm sure
many di could wear that went out of yourself, so
we weren't included here. How did you come from Iran
to hear you got for Turkey?
Speaker 7 (12:24):
It was so difficult, and we came from Iran, Tehran
to Dubai. After that, saub all of Brazil and after
that Believe Peru, Ejuador, Colombia and Nkokley and Jungle Panama
Here Panama. And it was so difficult for us because
(12:47):
we are young. We just leave 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. You know, if
you speaking in your in the street, something like it
they will arrest you. And yeah, Jai, when you are
(13:11):
not Muslim, when you really like something like a Christian
or something else, theres Yes, it was. It was so so,
so so difficult living in Iran, but it's a it's
a wonderful country, but not government.
Speaker 1 (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 asked 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):
if I said I didn't prefer it that way. But
I do always feel obliged to use the platform I
have here to give people a chance to share their stories,
their voices, and their struggles. So he's their message.
Speaker 7 (14:01):
We love you, hope too, you love this?
Speaker 6 (14:03):
Yeah, that's hard question.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's very good.
Speaker 7 (14:10):
It will be our next home, and we should be
proud of that. We should be bored for that, we
should be real, real American for the concert.
Speaker 6 (14:22):
Yeah, they know women are very bad situations, have a
bad situation in Iran.
Speaker 8 (14:29):
Yeah, for all people, that is.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
Saying, but for women is very, very, very hard. I
think American people know about masa Amini. Yeah, and they
really they chill us, really, they chill women for simple things.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time
about how Jiqito and the last blankat 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, can
(15:21):
take a year or more. One napoly man I met
in Bajajuquito had spent thirty months just to get that far,
and among his group, his journey had been the fastest.
As long as these journeys are, that darien often stems
out as the hardest part to understand. Why I want
to take you back to that shady spot by the
river just a few minutes south of Bajo Juquito. So
(15:45):
what I'm doing right now, as you can hear from
my footsteps, is I'm doing what it told me not
to do. I'm walking along the migrant trail. Lots of
like vines and creepers, and oh fucking hell, that's me
el eating shit. There's little bits of tape marking a trail.
I think they just come down the river here. Some
(16:07):
local guys are pushing out wheelbarrows on the trail to
dump trash. The's trash everywhere, to fucking mess the little
wood arrows that they've carved just outside town to direct
people into town. And if I heard, I can see
migrants making what's probably hopefully their final crossing of the
river here. One thing I noticed was that as soon
(16:28):
as I got out of sight in near shot of
the town, the jungle seems a lot more intimidating. Somebody
spends a lot of time in the mountains, and I
grew up playing in the woods. I'm comfortable outdoors, and
I frequently camp and hike for days on my own.
I like it better that way, and I might see
more comfortable forty feet under the seed free diving, or
three hours from the nearest road. Then I'm in a
(16:48):
busy city sometimes, but in the jungle. After all the
stories I'd heard that week. I was afraid. I get scary.
I don't know why. I mean, everything's new to me. I'm,
you know, relatively comfortable in the outdoors. But fucking there's
new animals, there's new plants. I don't know what's poisonous.
(17:10):
I don't know what's going to kill me. I don't
know who's going to try and hurt me. Got another
fucking RF Jesus wept. I'm jumping out my skin. Everything
Now it's funny. I'm in a place that's beautiful, you know,
like these better paradise plants are just just growing here, gorgeousness.
(17:34):
Horses belong to people of the Mbah community. I suppose
having snacks, you know, eating jungle horse food. And here
here I am at the river. It's wide here, it's
sort of shallow, and it's been dammed up a little
bit with rubbish, just like flocks and and jets some
kind of stuff.
Speaker 7 (17:55):
And then.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
This is where people cross because of that little dam.
But it's still got some to it, like you wouldn't
want to fall and crack your head or you know,
a lot of these folks can't swim even without the fear.
It's hard going. If you've only hiked on trails, you
probably don't realize how much work goes into making that
surface possible. There are no trail crews in the Darien,
and as a result, every step has the potential to
(18:19):
results in a sprained ankle or another injury, which might
sound trivial but can be faithal in such a remote
and challenging place. Trail is all rocks, like maybe rocks
the size of a fift like that way now, and
then there are sort of in this area we only
have the lower canopy, so we have ferns, we have reeds,
(18:40):
bamboo plants growing really tall and straight, that's what they
use for the poles that the pit our words, and
then sort of low grassy kind of plants. And then
where the migrants walk is just this muddy trail that
every time it raine just turns into like ankle to
knee deep mud. And I could see them making pretty
slow progress along the trail towards me. At the end
(19:01):
of the day, as I took a pedagua back to
Madagan Tea, where I would be staying the night, I
reflected again on this an incredible tenacity it took for
people with little outdoor experience and terrible equipment to pass
through the jungle. You know, I'm a fit person. I
run ultramarathons. It used to be exercised for a living.
And it's fucking hard. It's wet. Everything's wet all the time.
(19:23):
If you're wet from the rain, then you're wet. If
you're wet from the sweat and you're wet. If you
cross rivers, you get wet. You just can't stay dry.
And everyone's feet are just fucked when they get into town,
Like the size of the blisters I've seen, and like
one lady had a cramp today where like it just
(19:44):
locked up a whole that she like, I grabbed her.
She was falling down and I was able to hold
her up. But people are really pushing themselves physically as
well as psychologically. That river crossing south of Bachigiso was
as far south as I was going to be able
to get without being forced to be adjacted from Panama,
and my request to take a boat or walk further
(20:05):
south was denied by the Panamanian Ministry of Security. So
the only part of the migrants journey I would share
with them, with the last kilometer or so of their
walk even then, I wasn't really supposed to be leaving
town at all, So several times over the days I
spent in Bajajigito, I would look over my shoulder, hop
down the river bank, jump across the stream, and likely
(20:26):
jog out of town. Once on the trail, I'd started
to walk slowly and try and waive a groups outcoming migrants.
I didn't want to scare them. I offered to carry
their bags and let any help I could, supporting them
as they walked towards their first meal and clean drink
of water. In up to a week. Just getting to
(21:03):
barje Gito was a journey in itself for me. I
took two flights, a five hour drive which was evenally
split between paved roads, roads that aspired to pavement, and
dirt roads. At the end of our road journey, the
Pan American Highway, the links Alaska to Argentina, seems to
give up on fighting the jungle and Peter's out. Asphalt
(21:24):
turned to worse asphalt, which turned to dirt, which turned
to mud, which led us to a river. A driver, however,
was prepared for this. The drive here was mad, like
that road was fucked. We're in this tiny old guard.
The driver took off his shoes and socks to conduct
the more technical section of the drive, which I thought
was quite amusing. And yeah, really steep, lots of holes,
(21:47):
lots of potholes, you know, just really rutted out kind
of dirt road. And then we got here and thopped
some guys, negotiated a price and told him where we
wanted to go, and they said, yeah, sure, buy some water,
you know, snow water on the way about three hours
and so we bought some water right there, and yeah,
(22:07):
here we are on the boat now, as you can hear,
I recorded this on a piragua. It's a kind of
dugout canoe with the hole made out of a single
tree and a tooth stroke motor bolted on the back.
It's the only way to travel here other than on
your feet, and it's the only way the Embarra can
get the produced cigaret to market. The skill of the piragueros,
(22:30):
the people who drive the piraguas, is incredible. They navigate
parts of the river so shallow that they have to
pull up the two stroke motor. And I noticed all
the motors have propellers that are covered in chips and bashes,
from smacking into the rocks at the bottom. In the
bow of the boat, I sat on top of my
giant rucksack, marveling at the birds, insects, and foliage of
(22:50):
the jungle, and occasionally I jumped up to make fairly
useless contributions with the boat's bamboo pole under the close
supervision of Marcellino, a driver and are soon to be
host for mostly just laughed at me as I leaned
my whole way into the pole, which notably slipped, and
I tried to avoid falling face first into the chocolate
brown water. On the way to bout Jiquito, we passed
(23:12):
several small limber our villages. Little children waved at us
from the banks or from the shallows of the river
where they washed and played. Adults looked on I doubtless
why there one nurse's ex vict three white dude was
going the wrong way on the river for a migrant,
but they smiled and waved back anyway. After an overnight flight,
a five hour drive, and three hours in a dugout canoe,
(23:33):
we rounded a corner in the river. Abou Jiquito came
into view. Over the last few years, it's three oriented
itself from a tiny indigenous village to an unofficial reception
center for migrants. On my hopelessly outdated topo map, the
area has nothing but contours and green shading, no roads,
no trails, no markets of human existence at all, and
(23:55):
perhaps that's how the state sees this place. The Daddy
Inn is as real to most Panamanians a Sesame street
or Jurassic Park, But for the Enber this has been
their home since long before Panama and Columbia and even
maps existed. A few dozen houses in the village, mostly
built on stilts to avoid the seasonal floods, now offer
up their rooms as hostels for the migrants. Some of
(24:18):
them have enclosed at bottom floor using plywood or cinder blocks.
Others have strung hammocks from their support posts. For four
or five bugs, migrants can get their first good night's
sleep since they left Neck or Clee in Columbia as
much as a week before. Along the main street, which
is really just to raise concrete footpath about a meter across,
you can buy a meal any of half a dozen
(24:40):
places for five bucks. You can get an hour of
Wi Fi for a dollar, or charge your phone for
at the same price. Cold drinks for a dollar as well.
Are one of the many front rooms that have turned
into small kiosks. And that's where the migrants I have
been sitting down with that the river went. When they're
rived into town, I let them be for a while
I went off to interview more migrants. About a thousand
(25:01):
of them arrive in this village every day. Each year
since a pandemic has seen record numbers arrive, and the
little village on the side of a hill, surrounded by
palm trees and full of smiling children in their traditional
brightly colored paluomers chasing chickens and dogs, has welcomed every
single one of them. About a thousand of them arrive
in this town every day. To get here, they also
(25:22):
take a boat from neck o'clee across the Golf of
the Dabbienne. They crossed on small motor boats to Kapolgana
or Candel. Those are both towns on the western side
of the Gulf of the Darienne. From there they begin
their walk. Even though they're now north of the gulf,
they're still in Colombia, and on the Colombian side of
the border. They're guided by guides to whom they pay
several hundred dollars and in return receive protection and a
(25:45):
wristband that ensures they can walk without being robbed. Nobody
I spoke to had made it this far without paying
a guide. The area is largely under the control of
the Golf Cartel, several members of which were sanctioned by
the USA. While I was in the jungle, the marcos
I spoke to you didn't really have much bad to
say about this part of their experience, but universally acknowledged
(26:06):
that the next part was where they really confronted their
fears and nightmares about the Daddy. N Here's one Venezuelan
migrant sharing his experience.
Speaker 9 (26:14):
Yeah, 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 1 (26:36):
It's a stretch from the Colombian Panamanian border at a
place that they call Las Bandavas, which means the flags
to Bajo Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There, they
can't drink from the river because it's 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 and cross rivers, often without eating or drinking for
days at a time. On the trail, they passed by
the bodies of their fellow travelers as a constant reminder
of the risk they're taking. If you ask people in
(27:21):
Panama City, they'll tell you the day and is closed now.
New President hose Raoul Molino was elected on a promise
to shut down the gap, end the humanitarian crisis, and
deport more migrants for the US funding, and that funding
has certainly arrived, with more than six million already spent
since he took office in July. Since then, Panama has
(27:42):
deported more than eleven hundred people to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia,
and India. Each of these has been funded by US taxpayers.
Obviously the jungle isn't closed, and it can't really be closed.
But in an interview before he was elected, Molino said
that the border of the United States, instead of being
in Texas, has moved to Panama, and that is something
(28:05):
he can do with US support. I spoke to us
in venezuel and ladies help and carry their bags. It's
a steep hill, and they were saying that no one
has seen any barriers. I don't know anythink about any
barriers or any fences in a Darien and that like
they hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not. I'm
standing in front of one hundred people who just got
off a boat from the Darienn Hubris. Aside, the rhetoric
(28:28):
of closing the Daddi, m signals are turn not just
in Panamanian politics, but in the way the world sees
and handles migration. The US has always sought to externalize
its borders, from US train border patrol officers and Dominican
Republic along the border is Haiti to DHS agents deploying
to Iraq and Afghanistan. As migration has become more politicized,
(28:50):
the US has sought to move its enforcement away from
prying eyes and from compassion, and instead brought more trauma
to a place that is already so high. I've spent
much of the last decade of my life watching the
state try to bring the mountains and desert close to
where I live under its control. I've stood with kumia
I people as the government dynamited their graveyards. I found
(29:12):
border walk contractors lost deep in the mountains. I've driven
the impossibly steep concrete roads that they built, worried about
my truck turning end on end. I've seen billions of
dollars thrown at these mountains, and I've seen people with
twenty dollars angle grinders or ladders made of old palettes
defeat the wall in moments. Trying to close borders doesn't
work at home, and it won't work in the Daddy
(29:33):
and Gap either. Just building the roads to get the
construction equipment into the gap is a gargantuan task, and
any attempt to create a barrier across the sixty kilometer
wide wilderness area will simply push migrants onto other more
dangerous routes, into places where you can't build, and the
place is where nobody can rescue you. If you fall
down or break your leg, that doesn't mean there's nothing
(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 consider
that 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 to make it as painful
and dangerous as possible. But the rais of word barriers
in the Daddy and Gap, which I've seen person on
(30:59):
social media didn't exist for the hundreds of migrants I
spoke to. No one I asked had even seen them,
but what they had seen was far worse.
Speaker 10 (31:10):
Aimucholi, 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.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Now, 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 10 (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. Yesterday.
(32:05):
How many died yesterday?
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Three?
Speaker 10 (32:07):
I think three died yesterday. One drowned in the river. Yeah,
it's really tough this. No, no, nobody should do this. Nobody.
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 1 (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 10 (32:34):
On the mountains. I was so tired and I couldn't
climb anymore, and when I fell in the river, I
was really scared.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Apparently the whole thing was like an adventure she'd seen
Pepper Pig having, 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, But really she ought to be at home,
washing Peppa Pig and playing with her friends. No walking
past three dead bodies which are currently decomposing on the trail.
(33:10):
She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus ride
she'd taken to get there went boring because she enjoyed
looking out the window, and the whole journey was well,
I'll let her say.
Speaker 8 (33:18):
It else, Mohammed, I'm not buying.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Her.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
Mum gave us a different account.
Speaker 11 (33:25):
Rah, 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
(33:47):
more than one hundred rivers and asking God not to
rain and not wanting it to get worse. It rained,
and the girl got a fever.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
She got a fever.
Speaker 11 (33:56):
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
that He protects us. He knows that He was always
there watching over us, taking care of us at all times.
Speaker 1 (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 8 (34:31):
My daughter she was strong, she was strong, but she
was crying also, but she had what wound all over
the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like,
I want to just put myself in the water. Then again,
just go both. The gain was tough, really really tough.
The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not easy at all.
(34:52):
It's not very I don't even recommended someone to say
you use daddy and give no. And even myself I
did know about it. Yeah, I was regretting myself. I
was crying. I was like, God, I don't know my
family and my family they don't know where I am
right now.
Speaker 1 (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 8 (35:20):
We didn't even eat anything. We just asked and people,
can I have a piece of biscuit?
Speaker 7 (35:25):
They just help us.
Speaker 4 (35:26):
That's nice.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
The other migrants helped you.
Speaker 5 (35:28):
Yeah, the others.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
Yeah, do you think that they treat African people differently?
Speaker 8 (35:35):
Very nice, especially these Spanish people, they are very nice.
I don't want to like 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
come 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.
Speaker 7 (35:59):
You make it, and we really make it.
Speaker 1 (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 Embra 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 is half a million
people across the jungle. This year we might see more
Magaret's arriving about Jigito, spend the day in the village
before taking off in a piaguoa of their own up
to Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier.
(37:13):
They register with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym
Cena Front, and they call their families to say they survived.
Then they dry out their blistered feet, enjoy the cooking
of several of the families who have turned their homes
into sort of ersad's restaurants. They sleep on the floors
of the houses or underneath them, bardge their phones for
a dollar a time. Certainly, migration has changed this town,
(37:37):
and I want to talk about that more in tomorrow's episode.
But despite more than a million people passing through this route,
you don't find antimigrant sentiment here right now, despite the
gap being a deadly deterrent, numbers are expected to reach
a requid again this year, maybe seven hundred thousand people
will walk the gap. But despite these numbers, which may
(37:58):
seem high for a small country, I didn't really find
much anti migroan sentiment in Panama as a whole. There's
plenty of it in the US, though, and as the
United States winds down its war and terror. It needs
a new nebulous enemy to justify its military spending and
to keep the security into veillance companies donating too politicians
in their millions. In part, it is found that by
(38:20):
simply opening a floodgate of weapons and funding, they can
spew forth genocide and death in Palestine and keep some
of its income streams. But it needs a more long
term solution. There are only so many Palestinian babies that
can bomb, and we'll run out of Palestinians long before
we run out of bombs. The USA is new enemy
(38:40):
when it must seek out all over the world. It's
a migrant. It's a woman I met carrying her child
across the mountains. The little Venezuelan girl throwing bottle caps
into a cinder block with me to pass the time
as she asked me questions about America. It's a twenty
one year old man who's remains my friends found at
the border on a hot day this September. The US
(39:00):
will stop at nothing and fining and destroying the migrant,
and just as it did in the War on Terror,
it will find fast friends in states desperate to avail
themselves to the seemingly unlimited flow of resources the US
dedicates to keeping its conflicts out of the sights and
the minds of its citizens. The USA's open hostility to
(39:28):
migrants isn't something that's I'm known here. Everyone I met
knew about it. Several of them had watched with horror
as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump argued not about how
to treat migrants but about who could turn more of
them away. In a recent presidential debate. Every migrant I
met had questions about CBP, one, about US asylum policy,
and about how they could get to the US before
(39:50):
a second Trump administration. Despite this, they all clung to
their versions of the American dream. They wanted to work
and be paid a fair wage, to send their kids
to school and maybe to college, to feel safe in
their homes, and to be able to speak a dress
as they wish without varing consequences. All of those things
are imperiling this country too, and they know that, but
(40:11):
they still feel their dreams are worth the journey. For Noemi,
the little girl who took the daddy and in Astride,
the American dream was pretty simple. She wanted two things.
To see Minnie Mouse and to see her aunt.
Speaker 7 (40:25):
Why am I Mini.
Speaker 4 (40:28):
Get dear with a seven or thousand eros? A study air.
Speaker 10 (40:33):
Not yell an.
Speaker 4 (40:34):
Ammia as to Dear Ami Dea.
Speaker 11 (40:47):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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