The Darién Gap

“Lots of snakes, big jungle. Very dangerous.”

That was Marina’s summary, offered matter-of-factly during one of our shifts at a welcome centre for asylum seekers on the U.S.–Mexico border. She was speaking of the Darién Gap - a stretch of dense, humid jungle spanning roughly 66-miles between Colombia and Panama. In recent years, the Darién Gap has exploded into international news as one of the most treacherous migrant routes - earning a reputation built on one word: deadly.

According to the UN, more than 300,000 people made the crossing in 2024, up from a quarter of a million two years earlier. Most are Venezuelan, fleeing economic precarity and political repression, but they are joined by Colombians, Ecuadorians, Haitians, and an increasing number of Chinese. Of those crossing, 51% are men, 28% are women, and 21% are children and adolescents.

Regardless of their provenance, asylum seekers passing through the Darién do so having been propelled from their homes by desperate circumstances and the promise of a better life in the US. Yet realising that promise comes with a great cost.

The cost of passage

Physically, the Darién exacts a brutal toll: steep ravines, dense vegetation, and relentless heat  (often surpassing 35°C). The jungle floor - strewn with the decaying remains of those who didn’t make it - offers a brutal reminder that in this place, forwards is the only option. Hesitation or retreat can be fatal.

The terrain is thick with treacherous mud and poisonous wildlife, all of which can spring into motion with the sudden arrival of heavy rain. In this environment, an hour’s downpour can transform shallow streams into deadly torrents. Timing, therefore, is everything. Some make the crossing in four days; for those battling ailments or bad weather, it can take weeks.

Yet survival depends on more than outlasting nature. Though often described as lawless, the Darién is in fact tightly controlled by smugglers, gangs, and former paramilitary groups. They decide who crosses, how, and at what price. Migrants pay thousands of dollars for so-called “safe passage”. Though operating under the guise of guides, these groups are known to rob, rape, exploit, and brutalise those under their control. For women, passage carries something brutally close to a guarantee of sexual violence.

One gang leader, filmed by CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh, warned migrants from a hillside: “Take care of your children! A friend or anyone could take your child or sell his organs.” Though trust is scarce here, the threat is real. In a legal vacuum where FARC remnants and cartels jostle for control, the jungle becomes a marketplace of desperation - where vulnerability is a currency, and violence is the price of passage.

Meeting Carmen

At the welcome centre where I spent most of my fieldwork, the Darién was never far away. As people came and went, taking the support and resources offered by the centre, they bore the mark of the jungle. It scarred their bodies, punctured their narratives, and haunted their thoughts.

Though I never travelled there myself (an understandable product of my university’s limited risk appetite), I came to know the Darién through the experiences of my research participants.

Among them was a woman I call Carmen. I first heard her story at the centre, though only later, after listening to many others and piecing together the wider picture, was I able to narrate it with the detail I do now.

Carmen had fled Venezuela with her two infants, seeking the safety and security made impossible by her country’s dictatorial governance. Like many, Carmen saw the jungle not as a choice, but as a necessary evil in the pursuit of a better life; a sort of tax paid, or a sacrifice made to escape precarious conditions.

Carrying the emotional and physical weight of her children, both still in pre-walking years, Carmen set out on foot. Her group, a cohort of local strangers bound by shared circumstance, faced the jungle at its most unforgiving: torrential, unrelenting rain swelled the region’s serpentine river network into a labyrinth of churning, waist-deep hazards.

At one swollen crossing, Carmen reached a makeshift rope spanning the river’s breadth, a vestige of those who had crossed before her. Using stray items of clothing, Carmen fashioned a harness to secure one child to her front, the other to her back. She stepped into the current, gripping the rope as a belay, inching her way across.

Mid-way the upstream current accelerated, crashing into her side. The water swelled upwards around her body as she sunk deeper into the shifting riverbed. Planting her feet, she braced herself against the flow. Arms held with awkward tension, she grasped onto her two children whilst praying for the resilience of her makeshift harness.

It held. The current relented. She moved forward.

On the far bank, relief came in the weight of both children still strapped to her. A single sharp wail soon rose from the child behind her, whose cheek rested on her shoulder - held high and dry by the position on Carmen’s back.

Yet beneath this set of tears lay a critical absence.

The child on Carmen’s front lay still in painful silence. Held by soaked fabric and a mother’s determination, the infant had remained in place. But in the process, the baby had been submerged by the current for a period too long for young lungs to bear. 

This death was not the casualty of a river, but of the circumstances that force mothers like Carmen into the jungle in the first place. A casualty of a world where the price of safety is fatally unequal.

Despite their sympathies, Carmen’s group shifted uneasily. Stillness, even in grief, is not tolerated in a landscape that punishes hesitation. The mud, patterned with abandoned flip-flops, wellies, and jackets, tells the story of what people will shed in order to keep moving.

Weeks later, seated in the welcome centre with her surviving child, Carmen was nearly 3,000 miles from that river. Yet the determination to keep moving - to outrun trauma, to reach something better - still carried her forward.

Policy by Design

In April this year, Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino declared the “migration crisis” in the Darién over, pointing to a sharp fall in crossings. Between January and April, just under 3,000 people entered the jungle, compared with more than 126,000 during the same period in 2024. Officially, this is cast as a triumph - proof that deportation flights, penalties for illegal entry, and the closure of jungle trails is “working.” But migration rarely disappears; it shifts.

Before the Darién became infamous, many asylum seekers flew to Mexico and continued north on foot. The U.S.’s pandemic-era Title 42 policy ended that, condoning mass expulsions while pressing Mexico to tighten visa rules for South Americans. For those without the right passport, flights became impossible.

Unable to fly, they walked - beginning in Colombia and then into the Darién, “the world’s biggest hole in the fence”.

The jungle was never an accident of geography. It was an outcome of policy. As anthropologist Jason De León has shown in his account of “Prevention Through Deterrence” in Arizona, border regimes rely on hostile landscapes to do their work. Migrants are not stopped so much as displaced - into deserts, mountains, rivers, jungles. Danger itself becomes a tool of governance.

Today’s apparent success in Panama is another iteration of the same story. But we must remember that as one route shuts, another opens - longer, riskier, and more violent. After all, migration is not a crisis of movement but of management. And as America’s long-distance dominance over the hemisphere continues, little is likely to change.

Uneven steps

A final thought. Perhaps it is my Instagram algorithm, but I often see videos of Europeans and Americans trekking across the world's deserts or climbing its mountains, armed with little more than a GoPro and a water bottle. Increasingly, these journeys are not for charity or awareness, but for personal conquest or clout - a strange community of adventurers documenting their mileage for likes and applause.

And the applause is loud. They are celebrated for bravery and endurance. Yet Carmen - and thousands like her - endure journeys far longer, far harsher, and with infinitely higher stakes. There is no sponsorship, no admiration, often not even sympathy. Whilst I can confirm that the welcome centre's greetings and congratulations are heartfelt, the material offering amounts to a couple of breakfast bars, some new socks and a tampon after what is an exceptional journey. And the real fun begins: integrating into a country that is increasingly inhospitable and indifferent towards asylum seekers.

For some this jungle is a stage for adventure; for others, it is the unforgiving theatre of survival. The difference is dictated not by courage, but by citizenship.

To conclude, it is worth remembering that those our governments dismiss as problematic, extractive or illegitimate may have endured feats we would otherwise celebrate, losses we can barely imagine, and still fight only for a better, safer life.

Materials:

Council on Foreign Relations (2022) Crossing the Darien Gap: Migrants Risk Death on the Journey to the U.S. Available at: https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-risk-death-journey-us (Accessed: 30/05/2023).

De León, J. (2015) Land of Open Graves. Oakland: University of California Press.

IOM (2022) Number of Migrants Who Embarked on the Dangerous Darien Gap Route Nearly Doubled in 2022. Available at: https://www.iom.int/news/number-migrants-who-embarked-dangerous-darien-gap-route-nearly-doubled-2022

Shute, J. (2022) 'The ‘Road of Death’: A Treacherous, Jungle Trafficking Route Lined with Rotting Corpses'. The Telegraph, 17 October. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people/darien-gap-migration/ 

Spagat, E. (2022) 'For Many Asylum-Seekers, Flying to Mexico is Ticket to US', AP News, 10 February, Available at: https://apnews.com/article/immigration-arizona-united-states-mexico-colombia-fb4f913f2c43c48c0f4ecade8b2c1913

'The Trek: A Migrant Trail to America' (2023) The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper. CNN. 17 April, 20:00. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOWthjWmS2s

UNICEF (2021) 2021 Records Highest Ever Number of Migrant Children Crossing the Darien Jungle Towards the US – UNICEF. Available at: https://www.unicef.org/lac/en/press-releases/2021-records-highest-ever-number-migrant-children-crossing-darien-towards-us.

'What Migrants Face as they Journey through the Deadly Darien Gap' (2020) PBS News Hour, PBS. 12 August, 18:30. Available at: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-migrants-face-as-they-journey-through-the-deadly-darien-gap

Cover picture: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/09/darien-gap-route-migrants-panama/679156/