A Reporter’s Journey through the Darién Gap: A Q&A with Author Belén Fernández

"As a microcosm embodying the chasmic and fortified gap between haves and have-nots, the Darién Gap is as good an expanded U.S. border as any."

A Haitian woman carrying a toddler is helped by a fellow migrant as they cross through the Darién Gap in Colombia in 2021. (Photo by Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images)

What has been happening on the Darién Gap, one of the deadliest border crossings in the Western Hemisphere? Luckily, we have author Belén Fernández here to give us an in-depth rundown. Fernández has the unique ability to capture the absurdity, terror, and sorrow of a situation—often in the same sentence—and add a biting layer of sociopolitical and economic analysis on top of that. She accomplishes this in her new book, The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, and she does it here with her answers in this interview.

Here, she discusses the Gap as an extension of the U.S. border, her own travel in it in 2024, the people she met—including the smugglers—and the testimonies she heard from people about the Darién Gap when she was locked up in an immigration prison in Mexico. Fernández is a prolific author, and her other work includes Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up inside Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center and Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World. She also writes a regular column for Al Jazeera.

Can you tell us what the Darién Gap is, who is crossing through it, and if you would consider it part of the U.S. border? If so, in what way?

The Darién Gap is the 106-kilometer stretch of territory straddling Colombia and Panama that constitutes the only roadless interlude in the Pan-American Highway linking Alaska to the tip of Argentina. It encompasses a deadly jungle through which hundreds of thousands of international refuge seekers have been forced to pass in recent years in the pursuit of eventual safety and economic stability in the United States, still some 5,000 kilometers to the north. The trajectory can take from days to weeks, and entails formidable mountains, rivers, armed assailants, and hostile wildlife. Although the Darién Gap is considerably less trafficked these days on account of Donald Trump’s decision to effectively shut down the U.S. border itself and do away with the right to asylum, no fewer than 520,000 people survived the crossing in 2023 alone. An untold number of refuge seekers have perished in the jungle, and it is next to impossible to speak to survivors of the journey without receiving a rundown of all the cadavers they encountered en route, from dead mothers lying next to their dead newborns to bloated corpses floating in the river.

As I discuss in my book, the Darién Gap has in fact functioned as an extension of the U.S. border; after all, it is entirely thanks to U.S. policy and the criminalization of migration for the have-nots of the global capitalist order that so many humans have been obligated to risk their lives in the hopes of a better life, enduring an odyssey that is not only physically punishing but also psychologically torturous. Rape and digital penetration, for instance, have been par for the Darién course.

Only the privileged of the earth can cross borders at will—in his own book Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border around the World, the Border Chronicle’s cofounder Todd Miller highlights the “enormous chasm between those who have freedom of movement and those who do not.” As a microcosm embodying the chasmic and fortified gap between haves and have-nots, then, the Darién Gap is as good an expanded U.S. border as any.

(Map created by Milenioscuro via Wikimedia Commons)

One of the things I see in the Darién Gap is a brutal example of the prevention-through-deterrence strategy we see on the U.S.-Mexico border, the forcing of people into hostile terrain when they cross borders. What were some of the things you witnessed? And can you describe your experience in the Gap? And who were some of the people you met in your journey?

In the case of both the U.S.-Mexico border and the Darién Gap, the point has never been to entirely halt undocumented migration, without which the U.S. economy would naturally be up a creek. Rather, the aim has simply been to render the trajectory so absolutely hellish that the folks who eventually do make it to the land of the free are not tempted to expect too much in the way of basic rights.

Obviously, “prevention through deterrence” will never deter people who have nothing to lose—and whose lives are often at risk in their home countries, whether for political, societal, or economic reasons.

As for what I myself witnessed in the Darién Gap when I entered in 2024, I should emphasize that I did not fully complete the jungle crossing from Colombia to Panama; I entered via the Colombian village of Capurganá and later exited from the same side. There were various motivations for this choice of route—among them that I had not acquired press permission to enter the territory and, more importantly, that I suffer from a serious lack of balls and really, really, really did not want to be raped. Not long after my Darién Gap incursion, the New York Times would report that sexual violence against migrants on the Panamanian side of the Gap had reached a “level rarely seen outside war,” although the Times of course did not care to point out that this was in fact a war—and one in which the U.S. happened to be the chief belligerent, as imperial policy played out on vulnerable human bodies in the jungle. Armed as I was with a United States passport that automatically confers privilege, I was able to choose not to put myself in a situation in which I would forfeit control over the boundaries of my own body.

I entered the Darién Gap as a “migrant” rather than a journalist, which put me in a bit of a fix with the “guides” running the show in Capurganá, who operated under the auspices of the Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s dominant drug-trafficking organization that had quickly gotten in on the migrant-smuggling business as well. As part of the initial extortion process, I was asked for my national identifying document along with a payment of $280; since it was more than slightly sketchy for a U.S. citizen to be migrating to their own homeland via the Darién Gap, I claimed to have lost my ID and went on to plead Palestinian-ness, pointing to the Palestine soccer shirt I was wearing as proof. I entered as part of a group of more than 20 people, primarily Venezuelans, one of them an infant whose mother was visibly on the verge of fainting before we even set out. After scaling an imposing hill under the scorching sun, we set about slipping down muddy descents and navigating creeks, being scolded all the while for our slow pace by our guide, “Kelly,” a 28-year-old Afro-Colombian woman with two children who was studying to be a nurse; in the meantime, the trafficking gig was helping pay the bills. Indeed, while the U.S. establishment is forever bleating about the evils of human-smuggling outfits—who are relentlessly assigned the blame for whatever plight migrants might endure—it’s not the Kellys of the world who are the problem. Without America’s simultaneous criminalization of migration and drugs and demand for the very same things, organized crime would be definitively screwed.

Author Belén Fernández in the Darién Gap. Notice her Palestinian soccer jersey. (Photo courtesy of the author)

Given the brevity of my Darién Gap experience, my book relies primarily on stories told to me by refuge seekers I have befriended and interacted with over recent years—the first occasion being when I was temporarily imprisoned in a migrant jail in Chiapas, Mexico, in 2021 for overstaying my allotted time in the country. It was in this jail that I first came into contact with survivors of the Darién Gap, most of them Cuban women who recounted both the horrors of their week in the jungle and the incredible solidarity that had been on display therein—as when some of their countrymen had rescued a group of other migrants from near-certain demise in a ravine.

In February 2023, I met a group of seven young Colombian and Venezuelan men when they exited the jungle in Bajo Chiquito, an indigenous Panamanian village on the edge of the Darién Gap, and would spend the next month and a half doing my best to assist them financially and logistically—all the while having a neurotic breakdown on their behalf—as they navigated the continuing horrors of Central America and then Mexico. I have spent time with families and individuals from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Haiti, and Yemen, to name but a few of the people who have seen no other choice but to pick up and risk their very existence by traversing the Darién Gap—and to be criminalized for doing so.

And what did you discover about U.S. economic, military, and drug policy? Did it have anything to do about why people were migrating in the first place? And what do you think would be a way forward?

To be sure, U.S. foreign policy has for decades been a driving force behind migration to the United States—from the good old days of backing right-wing dictators, death squads, mass slaughter, and general terror in Latin America to more recent maneuvers like sweeping sanctions on Venezuela, which constitute a form of warfare in their own right. As of 2020 alone, coercive economic measures against the South American nation—whose greatest crime has been to defy imperial domination—had caused upwards of 100,000 deaths. This is to say nothing of the less lethal but still highly irritating effects of sanctions like shortages of water, electricity, and cooking gas, which do much to complicate daily life.

Of course, when speaking with individual migrants, they’re not generally going to give you a macro-level analysis of the reasons for their migration; for example, a Haitian person might cite high levels of violence and a dearth of economic opportunities but probably won’t delve into Washington’s lengthy history of fueling the violent panorama, cozying up to torture-happy dictators, backing coups, or agitating to block a raise in the minimum wage for Haitian assembly-zone workers beyond 31 U.S. cents per hour—as the Barack Obama administration charmingly did. A Yemeni will probably tell you that things are, you know, pretty bad in Yemen, without delving into the past two-plus decades of covert U.S. war on the country and massacres of Yemeni schoolchildren with U.S.-made bombs. Climate refugees probably aren’t going to sit down and analyze the role of the United States in their plight or cite Oxford University professor Neta Crawford’s book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, which exposes the U.S. Defense Department as the single-largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet.

And yet imperial fuckery is a consistent backdrop to what is often traumatic migration—while the U.S. wrests the role of victim from the refuge seekers themselves, hollering on about migrant invasions and so forth.

As for a way forward, it’s clearly not the current one. The Trumpian wet dream of shutting down the Darién Gap has been at least partially realized, with the number of arrivals from Colombia to Panama via the Gap plummeting since January. But a significant number of international refuge seekers stuck in Mexico have been forced to undertake the reverse journey south through the Darién region and environs, which by many accounts is even more perilous and extortion-ridden than the way up. From any non-sociopathic standpoint, the way forward would necessarily involve the abolition of militarized borders along with acute inequality and the punitive hierarchy of value assigned to human life. But that would be a deadly blow to capitalism—and so, for the moment, the Darién Gaps of the world remain alive and kicking.

Belén Fernández.