Crossing the hell of Darién

To calm his anxieties — “I get very paranoid about this place” — Keyber grabs a flashlight, rummages through his backpack, and pulls out a book, Little Bogged Down Angels, by Andrés Caicedo, a Colombian writer who took his own life at the age of 25. It was in the late 1970s, a time when young people wanted to die early and leave a pretty corpse. Keyber is 17 and likes to browse second-hand bookstores, play the guitar, and upload funny stories to Instagram. In the middle of this dark jungle, full of dangers, he clings to life like a madman, so young, so crazy about music and literature.

He reads Caicedo and for a few moments his life is cleared of fear and worry. He focuses on the pages with a dim light due to the lack of batteries, careful not to wake his mother and his 10-year-old sister, who sleep next to him in the tent. The three of them embarked together on crossing the Darién jungle, one of the busiest border crossings in the world. Keyber wanted to bring more books, but his mother took them away to pack cans of tuna, bottles of water, energy bars, and mosquito repellent instead.

He says he has the mentality of “a machine; damn, a cyborg,” leaving sentimentality or negative thoughts aside. He hasn’t cried, he hasn’t laughed. In his eyes, nothingness, an empty look. He has come across people sitting on rocks, talking to others, and his blood boils. “This isn’t a vacation, damn it.” Romantic as he is in other circumstances, he is not immune to the grandeur of nature: “I wanted to relax for a while because the jungle is beautiful, but it deceives you with its beauty. You sit there contemplating it and it kills you.”

Over the last five years, more than a million people have risked their lives in this stretch of the planet between Colombia and Panama. They plan to reach, above all, the United States, where they believe the American dream awaits them.

The trees along the route have colored ribbons tied around their trunks. Blue: the correct path. Red: danger of drowning due to river flooding. Black: threat of imminent death.

Many of them learned about this route from others who have done it before, a cousin of a cousin of a cousin, but also from messages that the mafias that control part of the journey spread on TikTok, like an invitation to a cruise. There are several ways to get there. The main one, now, is the port of Necoclí, a Colombian city bathed by the Caribbean Sea. The migrants have previously called a phone from which a voice gives them instructions. The first, to spend the night in a hostel where they will be picked up the following morning. At dawn, they are taken by boat to Panama, and you could say that is where the danger begins.

At a checkpoint, knives and guns are confiscated, even scissors capable of severing an artery. If they are good-looking, if they fit the profile, they record a video of them that is uploaded to social media as an advertisment: “This route is safe. Come! Call…” Spoiler: it is not safe. Then it’s time to pay $350 per person, with a discount for children. The business at this point is controlled by the Gulf Clan, a paramilitary group at war with the Colombian army and several other guerrilla groups that have not yet been dissolved. In any case, the migrant business belongs to the organization. Since the route was opened, it is estimated that the Gulf Clan has made more than $1 billion. They put bracelets on the migrants that will later be used to identify them as having paid and, why not say it, give them a false sense of protection. From now on, the goddess of fortune.

The Darién Gap covers a strip of land almost 160 kilometers (100 miles) long that was never conquered by Europeans. The first Spanish explorers settled there at the beginning of the 15th century. After travelling around the world, they saw gold even in the rocks. After a decade, the few who had not died of disease or got lost in the undergrowth were expelled by Indigenous tribes. The same fate befell the Scots who tried to set up camp here two centuries later — their ruddy skin attracted mosquitoes like a light bulb.

Today it remains a natural barrier for anyone who wants to travel by road from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, as the Darién divides the Pan-American Highway in two. There is no way around it. The Darién became an important crossing point for migrants four years ago. The journey then took up to 10 days, but the most popular routes now allow someone in top physical condition to cross in two or three days. The elderly and those with children can take up to a week, on 10-hour daily walks. At first, the majority of those who crossed it were Antilleans. Now, Venezuelans cross it en masse, although Colombians, Ecuadorians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Congolese, Pakistanis, and Afghans also do so, among many other nationalities who land in nearby countries where they are not required to have a visa. People from Asia and Africa may disembark on a strange planet, but they are somewhat saved from absolute incomprehension by Google Translate.

Jonathan Franco has set out alone into Darién. He paid the criminal gangs and still had a few hundred dollars hidden in his clothes. His greatest fear was that he would be robbed along the way, as he has read that happens to many people. His money had to last long enough to get to Mexico, as he had planned, to apply for asylum and travel to Chicago, where a niece awaits him. But he has met people with problems and he, as someone who does not know how to say no, whose heart softens at the plight of others, has provided loans at zero interest. So there he is, this morning, in a small town in the middle of the route, waiting for a woman to receive an international money transfer from her husband in Venezuela. There are no signs of impatience or distrust in him; Franco sunbathes, serene, as if evil did not exist in this world.

Seen up close, he looks like a crossfit competitor. He is 30, with muscular arms, toned abs, and gladiator calves. With his backpack on his back, he could have crossed the Darién in just a few days, but again, the good Samaritan, the man to the rescue. He has dedicated himself to carrying strangers’ children and crossing rivers with them on his shoulders, climbing mountains, leaving one ahead and going back for another who was left behind, before the surprised gaze of the parents, who no longer had the strength and would have been stranded if it weren’t for him. A man who watched a lot of movies in the 1980s looked him up and down and said: “You’re Rambo.” That’s how everyone here knows him. “You’re so strong, Rambo,” a five-year-old girl he’s carrying on his shoulders tells him a moment later. It is estimated that there are 36.5 million child migrants in the world due to conflict, violence, or other crises, according to UNICEF. The United Nations Children’s Fund, which accompanied EL PAÍS on part of this trip, says that this is the highest number since the Second World War.

Rambo has come alone, but he is not alone in life. In fact, he has plenty of company: five children from two different wives. His plan is to raise enough money for his second wife to cross the jungle in a few months and join him, wherever she is. The truth is, it hasn’t been hard for him to walk through the mud, or feel the rain falling on his forehead, or face the current of the rivers. He was a motorcycle taxi driver and fruit seller in Machiques, a town almost on the border between Venezuela and Colombia, and he also helped his father on a farm in the countryside. When he had time, he went to the gym. For him it hasn’t meant too much physical effort, but even so he thinks that this adventure is very dangerous: “A lot of kids come, a lot of old people. I don’t wish it on anyone to cross like that. Not even if they are fat. I saw many crying and in a lot of anguish, without food. I’m not going to send my children through here, forget it.”

The passage of migrants has changed the lives of the Emberas, the Indigenous communities settled on the banks of the river. They did not live in isolation; their young people have smartphones and spend the day hooked on TikTok or listening to reggaeton on the plasma screens in the bars. But they were not accustomed to 200,000 people passing through their lands every year, a flow that has disrupted the daily life of a jungle region far removed until recently from the urgency of capitalism, where 90% of the inhabitants live in poverty. In Bajo Chiquito, immigrants are forced to sleep after passing through a Panamanian immigration authorities checkpoint. They arrive at a safe place tired, dirty, hungry. Suddenly, before their eyes, a tiny Las Vegas.

Twenty-four hours a day there are neon-lit shops, hot dog stands, rotisserie chickens turning on spits, internet points, phone charging stations, hostels with Caribbean hammocks. Vultures lurk on the rooftops with their large black wings. Those without money rest in tents, set up on a basketball court. In a corner, Carmen Velázquez, a 54-year-old Venezuelan woman who met a pastor from a church in Texas on Facebook, cries. She is heading there to meet her. One day, anxious about her documents getting wet, she gave them to a boy she had just met. In the package, she kept her nursing card, a job she wants to carry on doing in “the United States.”

No trace of the young man, no trace of her passport, or her photographs. At an internet point, more tears: a teenager traveling alone talks to his mother via video call, after several days without contact. “Oh, mommy, it’s so hard.” Children everywhere, running, hooked on their cell phones, fighting with sticks — also mothers with cracked nipples breastfeeding their babies. Of the 286,210 migrants who crossed the Darién between January and October of this year, 61,154 were minors. One in five. In Lajas Blancas, the last town travelers encounter in the hardest phase of the journey, UNICEF has an office for managing cases of unaccompanied minors or children who become separated from their parents during the journey, something that happens more often than one imagines.

There is a kindergarten, where the youngest children go, and a space for “cooler” teenagers, as its managers explain. They also offer assistance in menstrual health and feminine hygiene. And cases of sexual violence, which abound, are addressed. A common criticism of NGOs is that they only focus on helping migrants, which means that they forget about the locals. However, UNICEF has installed water treatment plants in all the surrounding communities and has provided technicians to train the Emberas themselves in their use. This is no small matter: they used to live around the river, which was often polluted, causing many health problems.

There is also room for almost medieval scenes along the way: an Embera boy lies face up, with a leg clamped in a trap. The border guards caught him selling drinks to migrants at extortionate prices, which is forbidden, and punished him in this way, in full view of everyone. They have also confiscated a white horse from the boy. Before nightfall, they will let the animal go and he will speed off along the riverbanks, without his owner being able to control it. The guards will laugh out loud.

Before the sun comes up, the Indigenous guard wakes up the migrants and urges them to line up on a beach. No one, without exception, can stay another day in the town, thus preventing pockets of foreigners from becoming stranded. On the beach, they form a long line that is controlled by the Indigenous Migration Security. “I want to leave now,” complains a boy named Luis — we will learn his story in a few moments. They are distributed onto boats with Yamaha motors that, in one hour and 20 minutes, will transport them downriver to Lajas Blancas. The ticket costs $25 per person.

— ”I’ve got $10,” says a Venezuelan with one foot on the boat.

— “$25, kid, $25,” the boatman replies jokingly.

The would-be passenger laughs too, but the boatman means it. The boy is taken out of the line and placed next to some bushes, with others whose pockets are empty. Then a psychological game begins. The last boatmen, in order to save some money, lower the price to $20. Then to $15. Some are genuinely broke. Others have read in travel guides that if you hold on, it will be cheaper. There is also something known as “humanitarian quotas.” The negotiations last half an hour. In the end, the boatmen get tired and refuse to lower the price any further: “To the trail!” That is, to the jungle, to a stretch that, if all goes well, takes seven hours. They will reach the next point on the route when it is night, exhausted. It was not a day of humanitarian quotas.

A few rays of light filter through the foliage and illuminate Luis, Luis, and Luis, like a lamp. There are two things that people don’t usually know about the jungle: 1. It always feels like nighttime as the vegetation barely lets the light through. 2. Silence doesn’t exist. Twenty-four hours a day, at full volume, a symphony of frogs, howler monkeys, verbally incontinent macaws, and wild dogs plays. Mosquitoes move in flocks, buzzing until they identify meat. The Luises are in a clearing, sitting on prehistoric stones. The heat and humidity have bitten the skin of their hands, of their exposed legs. The first Luis and the second Luis are brothers. They are 11 years apart, but they are almost identical, one would even think them twins. The third Luis is the son of the first Luis, who also has a father and a grandfather named Luis. They come from the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil, one of the most dangerous cities on Earth.

Luis Mera, the eldest at 30, is making the journey for the first time. In his city, a gang shot him in the knee. He shows the scar left by the bullet in case anyone has any doubts. On his first trip he reached the Mexico-U.S. border and there he turned himself in to the immigration authorities — that is the plan of almost all Ecuadorians and Venezuelans, the two nationalities that make up the vast majority of people who travel through Darién. They took his passport and summoned him to a court to study his request for asylum. Luis lived in Roosevelt, on Long Island in New York, and worked installing windows on tall buildings; he has videos and photos that he shows with pride. He saved up money to go back for one of his five children, all of whom he had with different mothers. But, absent-minded as he is, a bit careless, he did not show up at his court hearing, so he was deported. “Immigration,” he says, “plays with your psychology.” He is going to turn himself in again, with his son, and let what may happen. “This is now in God’s hands.”

The route is littered with corpses that migrants find along the way, like mountaineers in the Himalayas who come across the frozen bodies of those who tried before. According to the Missing Migrants Project run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a United Nations agency, between 2015 and 2024, 536 deaths of migrants have been reported in this jungle, 172 of them so far this year.

Manuel Contreras, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, plump and hirsute, was crossing a banana plantation a few days ago when he found the corpse of a man who, given his degree of decomposition, must have died a week earlier. He covered his nose and mouth with his hands — “the dead smell like death; there is no other way to explain it” — and crossed that stretch as quickly as he could. Later, he climbed the mountain of La Llorona, one of the most dangerous passes on the Darién route.

Migrants climb and descend steep terrain on ropes, where a fall can be fatal. In fact, they call it that because of the cries and tears shed by those who face it. “For another reason, too,” explains Contreras. “You hear children crying as you climb La Llorona. I turned back thinking: ‘Fuck, there’s a lost kid.’ It’s a lie, it’s hallucinations, it’s like a siren’s song. It’s the jungle luring you to kill you.” Luckily, he escaped the spell in time and continued on his way. Someone he met later, the following morning, broke his neck at midday before his eyes, after falling off a cliff. A sharp blow to the base of his head left his lifeless body lying on some rocks: another death that will not be recorded anywhere, another missing person swallowed up by the earth, with no grave or anything to remember them by.

Now that he thinks about it, Contreras doesn’t even remember his name. In less than a day, he had seen a corpse and walked for a while with another person who was about to become one. The worst, however, was yet to come. He says he would like to undergo a lobotomy to remove this memory but science, today, has its limits. When he thought he had seen everything, that the trip could not hold any more surprises, he came across the lifeless body of a girl, who he estimates was five years old at the time of her death. The pragmatist in him encouraged him to continue, as if he had seen nothing, but the idealist stopped for a few moments, enough to paralyze him.

“I carried the corpse and put it behind some bushes so that it would not be in the middle of the path and people wouldn’t come across the little girl so suddenly. Digging a grave would have made me lose a lot of energy and a lot of time. I covered her up so that she would not get cold,” says Contreras, about to get on a bus bound for Costa Rica, after having crossed the dangerous traffic jam.

— “By the way,” he says before leaving. “Have you come across the ghost?”

He is referring to the wandering Haitian that many migrants claim to have met along the way — at least half of the more than 100 people interviewed for this story attest to having seen him. He is an elderly man, protected from the rain by a plastic bag, holding a child in his arms. They say they met him in the opposite direction to the route, going up La Llorona where others go down, retracing their steps, looking for another child who was lost while crossing the river and was carried away by the current.

The story is obviously not true, but it is a reflection of an atavistic fear, that of children left alone, without their parents, lost in the middle of the jungle. As happened to Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in a forest at the mercy of a cannibal witch who lives in a gingerbread house; or to Little Red Riding Hood, tricked by a wolf who wants her for a snack. There are many cases. A child who, inadvertently, wanders into the jungle and never comes out again. Another traveling with grandparents who, halfway across the border, can no longer bear it and leave the life of their grandchild in the hands of strangers. Relatives who get fed up with other people’s children and abandon them in the middle of the journey. Or, simply, those whose family has strapped a backpack on their back, put a few hundred dollars in their pocket, and launched themselves into the Darién, like someone throwing a bottle into the sea. This happens every day. “Alone,” these children respond when asked who they are traveling with.

In the villages there are specific spaces for unaccompanied minors. In Lajas Blancas, on a Tuesday, a couple from the Democratic Republic of the Congo wait for the return of an eight-month-old baby. The parents do not explain how they lost him, nor do the immigration officials. In the morning, they took the whole family to the Prosecutor’s Office in the nearest town, Metetí, where the father and mother filled out a mountain of paperwork and took a paternity test, which came back positive. Before the sun went down, they returned the baby and the couple sat under a tree while the mother breastfed him.

When the Europeans fled, ravaged by mosquitoes, terrified by the sounds of the jungle and blinded by malaria, Esmeralda Dumosa’s ancestors remained impassive in the place where they had lived for hundreds of years, and planned to spend as many more. Dumosa, a queen from another time, sits majestically in a chair in front of her house. At 53, she is the necora (mayor) of Bajo Chiquito, the boss, the one who rules here. Her husband, a taciturn gentleman attached to her, acts as her secretary. He carries a notebook in his hand and several pens in a shirt pocket. The couple has a problem, as do all the Indigenous inhabitants of Bajo Chiquito. The authorities have forbidden them from going upriver in search of migrants, those who help make the journey easier and who earn a good pinch. That transport has been suspended until further notice. Because something terrible has just happened: a few days ago, Senafront (the National Border Service of Panama) shot down two thieves who, according to their version of events, opened fire first.

They were “local bandits and thieves” from this town and its surroundings, the authorities said. Dumosa wrinkles her face and claims to have identified a plot to blame her people for robbery and rape, and that is why she is so upset. The Emberas are not criminals, she explains. At most there are a couple of black sheep who do not pay attention to their ancestors and dedicate themselves to pillage. But the necora, now that she thinks about it, realizes that there is a bigger problem. It is then that she lights up like a match, opens her arms indignantly, and identifies with the stroke of a pen the generators of chaos and problems: “Men, I do not trust them.”

Endri Paz, 41, appears in the shadows, dressed all in black, with a T-shirt from the Special Olympics that are being held in Florida. He has eaten nothing but “pure water” all day. He was walking with a woman who fainted in the middle of the jungle, where she was left unconscious. Her boyfriend remains at her side, as a sentinel. The night, quarrelsome, has fallen upon them. They are somewhere near Bajo Chiquito, but where? Endri does not know exactly. They must be rescued, saved, they cannot remain there at the mercy of death, implores Endri, who does not know them at all, only from a short while of traveling together, but now he is the master of their destinies. The woman’s husband, the secretary, sighs: he has no other choice.

He gathers a couple more Emberas and they go down to the river, where they climb into some canoes. With the sound of the motor, the boat enters the darkness. The Milky Way with its golden trail crossing the sky. “I think it was here, here,” says Endri. The secretary, who now has to be named (Rubén Guainora), takes the lead. The darkness does not allow him to see anything beyond half a meter. Guainora, however, picks out his way without hesitation. At the forks in the path, he asks Endri: “This way?” “Yes, this way,” he answers. “No, no, it can’t be.” The secretary prefers to follow his instinct. He goes one mile further, five on normal terrain, with a flashlight. His boots fill with mud. The branches of the trees and the tips of the plants sting like insects. All around, an enormous explosion of life that wants to annihilate you.

A moan is heard further ahead. Guainora quickens his pace and comes across the following scene: an unconscious woman inside a tent and, next to her, a distressed boyfriend. They have been without water or food for hours, disoriented. Her name is Kimberly Rodríguez, a 33-year-old Venezuelan. His name is Juan Pablo, from Medellín, who bears a strong resemblance to the singer Nanpa Básico, because he is skinny, small, light as a feather. They met just a month ago on Facebook and convinced each other to try to get to the United States. Juan Pablo has tried to carry her, but he doesn’t have the strength; she knows it and is afraid of falling when she hangs on his back. Juan Pablo is a “kid” from Medellín who had to flee because he “snitched on an open-air operation in commune 13.” Translation: he ratted out some drug dealers. Kimberly comes to after they wet her lips with water. Guainora, who is no more than five feet tall, tells her “get on,” and she clings to his back. The Embera walks back with the same ease with which he had arrived. “What a tough road,” says Juan Pablo. “Dude, we didn’t make it.”

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