Speaker 1: Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: It's me James, and before we listen to this episode today,
Speaker 3: I just did want to make you aware that I
Speaker 3: conducted these interviews in French and Spanish, mostly Spanish, and
Speaker 3: then transcribed and translated them. So what you're hearing is
Speaker 3: a translated interview that's been edited for brevity and content.
Speaker 3: I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker 4: The most difficult part of the Jinney is wing. We
Speaker 4: are tricking and your meet dead bodies on It makes
Speaker 4: you rep it makes you cry, But there's only one
Speaker 4: for coss in the forest ahead. You'll have to keep going.
Speaker 4: You'll see modest children. They're crying just to have a
Speaker 4: sip of water. It is not easy.
Speaker 3: A few weeks ago I found myself sitting beside the
Speaker 3: Tuquesa River on a warm afternoon in late September, making
Speaker 3: silly faces at a two minths old baby as we
Speaker 3: both marveled at the cloud yellow butterflies. Anywhere else on
Speaker 3: earth it could be in a dyllic summer day, but
Speaker 3: in these final steps of the journey across the daddy
Speaker 3: and gap, it's hard to open up your mind to
Speaker 3: experience joy. I'd only been in the tiny Emberra village
Speaker 3: of a couple of days, and I had already seen
Speaker 3: the lifeless body of a girl as the migrants carried
Speaker 3: her into town. The river I was sleeping around him
Speaker 3: with this group of migrants resting here in the shade
Speaker 3: had swept sleeping children to their deaths earlier this year,
Speaker 3: and up to stream of me there were at least
Speaker 3: three people's remains here. It was shin deep, but crossing
Speaker 3: upstream where it's above head height and raides down out
Speaker 3: of the mountains in steep ravines. Was the migrants I
Speaker 3: walked back to town with told me the stuff of nightmares.
Speaker 3: The voice you just heard was a migrant from Cameroon
Speaker 3: who called himself James. That's not his real name, and
Speaker 3: astute listeners would have noticed that it is my real name,
Speaker 3: but for the protection of James and his family, it's
Speaker 3: a name we'll be using when I met James. We're
Speaker 3: in a migrant reception center called Las Blancas, to the
Speaker 3: north of the Daien Gap. To get there, one has
Speaker 3: to take a dugout canoe called a piragua from Bajo Jiquito.
Speaker 3: The voyage takes five hours, and for that five hours,
Speaker 3: migrants are packed fifteen to a boat wearing bright orange
Speaker 3: life jackets. Here the boat with Embra Praguero, who sits
Speaker 3: at the back driving the boat with a tooth stroke motor,
Speaker 3: and a guide who sits on the front, using a
Speaker 3: pole when necessary to push the boat through shallow sections.
Speaker 3: The Umbraa people are indigenous to the area that's commonly
Speaker 3: known as a Darian Gap, or at least to this
Speaker 3: part of it, and a tiny Embrea village of Bajo Juquito.
Speaker 3: It's a first settlement migrants encounter is they emerge from
Speaker 3: the perilous crossing of the jungle that divides Central America
Speaker 3: from South America and thousands of people from a better future.
Speaker 3: There's a morale patch that the Panamanian Border Patrol and
Speaker 3: military wear on their uniforms. The reflects a slogan in
Speaker 3: a government messaging campaign, da Jungla. It says. The campaign
Speaker 3: was launched in August, and it translates to the Darien
Speaker 3: isn't a route or maybe a road to a better translation,
Speaker 3: it's a jungle. Obviously it's actually both. But this is
Speaker 3: like no route. Most of us will be familiar with.
Speaker 3: The dark and foreboding jungle I saw in Bahajiguito is
Speaker 3: one of the most impenetrable on Earth, and the crossing
Speaker 3: of it is among the most dangerous land migration routes.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen seventies, the British Army said it most
Speaker 3: experienced explorers to find a way through the gap. Their
Speaker 3: commander called the gap a gold for saken place. Today,
Speaker 3: migrants have their own names for it, Route del Morte
Speaker 3: or sometimes the Green Hell. Here's a group from Cameroon
Speaker 3: explaining why they didn't see a future there and they
Speaker 3: decided to take this dangerous route.
Speaker 5: We are coming from Cameroon and my name is Powers.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of crisis in our country. There's a
Speaker 5: civil war going on in Cameroon right now because of
Speaker 5: our president. President Pombia has been in power over forty
Speaker 5: two years, so I was the anglophone. We started revolting
Speaker 5: for him to step down because it doesn't develop the
Speaker 5: Southern American sorry, the English section of Cameroon. Yeah, the
Speaker 5: anglophone section a revolt insid he was set in the military,
Speaker 5: and what's killing the citizens of our country. There's a
Speaker 5: lot of hardship, a lot of that. I for one,
Speaker 5: I've lost every body. I lost one of my family,
Speaker 5: my mom, my dad, my two brothers, and I'm the
Speaker 5: only one left.
Speaker 6: So things a moan.
Speaker 5: There's no job. I've completed school, but there's nothing for
Speaker 5: me to do, so that's right.
Speaker 6: We decided to migrate.
Speaker 3: To get to Baho Jiquito from Columbia, as James and
Speaker 3: other migrants did. There's no road you can take. You
Speaker 3: can't even take a boat or a train. Instead, you
Speaker 3: have to walk the Darrying Gap, an area of rainforested
Speaker 3: mountains that it is one of the most dangerous migration
Speaker 3: routes in the world, for anywhere between two and fifteen days.
Speaker 3: Migrants trek through waste timeh mud, and rivers deeper than
Speaker 3: they are tall. They must climb giant boulders, cross perilous ravines,
Speaker 3: and traverse sheer cliff faces. All of this with barely
Speaker 3: any water than what they can carry, little to no food,
Speaker 3: inadequate clothing, a terrible footwear, and no medical attention. They
Speaker 3: must walk past dead bodies and past people who might
Speaker 3: soon become dead bodies, as they beg for help, carry
Speaker 3: their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other. Across mountains
Speaker 3: and rivers and about Jiqito. They take what, for many
Speaker 3: of them will be the final steps of this part
Speaker 3: of their journey. It's a journey that few of us
Speaker 3: can imagine, and they were lucky to be able to avoid.
Speaker 3: My own migration to the US sixteen years ago was
Speaker 3: much simpler and safer. But for migrants like James, the
Speaker 3: journey's worth it because what they're leaving behind is worse.
Speaker 3: His James describing the situation in the stative Cameroon. The
Speaker 3: situation in Cameroon is, how can I put it, very
Speaker 3: very very very difficult, especially in the anglophone part of
Speaker 3: the country. Yeah, because for about five to six years
Speaker 3: there's a wall, the ongoing war in the anglophone crisis
Speaker 3: we are sort have been.
Speaker 4: There has been fighting the shooting Killing's I myself speaking
Speaker 4: to you. Yeah, I've been targeted. My cousin was shot
Speaker 4: and with his husband, he was shot together. Both of
Speaker 4: them were Nessis and they were shot by the army
Speaker 4: that were there to protect the people. So the situation
Speaker 4: back at home, it's very very tense. Yeah, it's very
Speaker 4: very tense. When you see most of Camaronians traveling taking
Speaker 4: the Ric's part from Columbia Brazy right up to where
Speaker 4: I am. It is not because they like it. It's
Speaker 4: because of the situation back at home and most of it,
Speaker 4: and most of the time it is the anglophone population
Speaker 4: that is of most of them. They choose this part
Speaker 4: because they'll not have a direct result to American.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very hard to get one right.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's very very difficult, so they have to use
Speaker 4: the hard.
Speaker 3: Way, which is the only way. The truth is that
Speaker 3: dead bodies, terrible stories and families celebrating the end of
Speaker 3: their walk is nothing out of the ordinary. And Bahajiqito,
Speaker 3: the Enbarra town with the population of just five hundred
Speaker 3: and ninety, is a place I've been trying to come
Speaker 3: to for almost as long as I've been writing about migration.
Speaker 3: There are a few stories in my time as a
Speaker 3: journalist that I've been pitching for close to a decade.
Speaker 3: Most of the time, I give up if there are
Speaker 3: no bites after a few months, and that's why you
Speaker 3: won't see me write about the people who try to
Speaker 3: hire mercenaries to intimidate voters in twenty twenty, or the
Speaker 3: Burmese rebels who if I did their revolution with co
Speaker 3: op produced tea or a surfing team in the Gaza strip,
Speaker 3: And on reflection, you probably won't hear about that last
Speaker 3: one anywhere now. The media cycle has a way of
Speaker 3: coming around to these stories eventually, sure, but I not
Speaker 3: really want to go back to what it is who
Speaker 3: didn't give a sh about people before and only care
Speaker 3: about their stories now because they get more traffic. But
Speaker 3: there's one story I've never given up on. That's the
Speaker 3: story of the daddy En Gap and the people who
Speaker 3: risk their lives crossing it for a shot at the
Speaker 3: American dream. And at this point I do want to agnolige.
Speaker 3: I'm incredibly grateful to the people I work with for
Speaker 3: trusting me when I ask them to pay for me
Speaker 3: to disappear in a dugout canoe into the jungle and
Speaker 3: come back two weeks later with a story. The Daddy
Speaker 3: and looms in the stories of migrants I meet in
Speaker 3: the US border as a sort of heart of darkness
Speaker 3: on what is a very difficult and dangerous journey. It's
Speaker 3: worse than the freight trains they hop on in Mexico,
Speaker 3: worse than the crowded buses, worse even than the months
Speaker 3: of waiting for an asylum appointment. I've only believe that
Speaker 3: you can't really understand and write about things you haven't seen, smelt,
Speaker 3: and heard. So for years I've been asking, yet it
Speaker 3: is to send me to the tiny, en but our
Speaker 3: community on the banks of the river, so that I
Speaker 3: could share the final steps of this horrific journey with
Speaker 3: the people who see little option but to risk their
Speaker 3: lives for a better future for their children. Because the
Speaker 3: US refuses to create more legal pathways, people instead take
Speaker 3: the sudden pathway straight up and down the mountains of
Speaker 3: the Darian rainforest. The journey will take them past the
Speaker 3: corpse of the people who never left. The terrain is
Speaker 3: too fierce for anyone to carry their remains out, so
Speaker 3: they must simply run there. As a reminder to migrants,
Speaker 3: so they must keep going. It's a sort of deterrent
Speaker 3: through death that has been the unofficial and official US
Speaker 3: border policy for decades to turn or not. Once you're
Speaker 3: in the Darien, there's no turning back, and the lack
Speaker 3: of escape routes has made the gap popular among criminals,
Speaker 3: who commit untold numbers of sexual assaults, murders, and armed
Speaker 3: robberies every year in the jungle. Despite this, more than
Speaker 3: half a million migrants made the perilous journey last year
Speaker 3: and if many, if not more, will do so this year.
Speaker 3: To understand the Dadian you have to first understand US
Speaker 3: immigration policy, which is something I talk about a lot
Speaker 3: on this podcast. I want to include here a clip
Speaker 3: amos Am I going from North Africa, who met my
Speaker 3: friends and helped them build shelters in the Cumba last year,
Speaker 3: explaining his journey to the United States.
Speaker 7: So another route right now, which is a difficult route,
Speaker 7: is through Brazil because Brazil has a I don't know
Speaker 7: if you guys know, and I think they do that
Speaker 7: for Americans too. Yeah, So Brazil has sort of I
Speaker 7: don't know the word, but the equivalent to them is
Speaker 7: if you impose a visa on Brazil. Brazilians were imposed
Speaker 7: his own news. They do that to Americans too, so
Speaker 7: so you know where I'm from. They don't have a
Speaker 7: visa to as far as for Brazilians, so we don't.
Speaker 7: So a lot of Africans can go to Brazil and
Speaker 7: from Brazil take the route.
Speaker 3: All the way was Jims couldn't fly here directly, that
Speaker 3: he was able to get a little bit closer to
Speaker 3: the US by flying to Columbia. I'll let him explain
Speaker 3: how he pulled that off.
Speaker 4: For me to have a pass to Colombia, it was
Speaker 4: not easy, so we had we had to. There was
Speaker 4: a female female on that twenty World Cup that was
Speaker 4: that was taking place in Colombia, so we had to
Speaker 4: go to Columbia as football fans.
Speaker 3: That's why they had.
Speaker 4: They had to give us our bizare yes all right?
Speaker 4: From Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to.
Speaker 3: Where we are today, both from the Continental America, we'll
Speaker 3: have to travel to Brazil, just like amos. Here's one
Speaker 3: a cap. I'll let the speakers introduce themselves.
Speaker 8: My name is tom May, I'm from Ida.
Speaker 6: My name is Mohade from Iran.
Speaker 9: My name is Ali and I'm from ira.
Speaker 3: They told me why they left around but I'm sure Manydicul,
Speaker 3: we that went out of yourself, so we weren't included here.
Speaker 3: How did you come from Iran? Here you got for
Speaker 3: a Turkey.
Speaker 9: It was so difficult, and we came from Iran Tehran
Speaker 9: to Dubai, after that South Aul of Brazil and after
Speaker 9: that Believe Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Ecokley and jungle Panama
Speaker 9: here Panama, And it was so difficult for us because
Speaker 9: we're young. We just leave our family, my sister, my
Speaker 9: mother and father. It was so emotional and it was
Speaker 9: so hard for us. But because of the freedom, because
Speaker 9: we can't speak in our country. You know, if you
Speaker 9: speak in your in the street something like it, they
Speaker 9: will arrest you to and yeah, in the Jaid when
Speaker 9: you are not Muslim, when you will be like something
Speaker 9: like Christian or something else, they will arrest you. Yes,
Speaker 9: it was It was so so, so so the because
Speaker 9: living in Iran. But it's a wonderful country, but not government.
Speaker 3: When I talk to migrants, I always want to offer
Speaker 3: them the chance to share their stories in ways that
Speaker 3: they want to share them. And I asked them what
Speaker 3: they would want to say if they could talk directly
Speaker 3: to Americans. It's a question I ask a lot, because
Speaker 3: in all the coverage of migration I've seen in this country,
Speaker 3: I rarely see migrants' voices. I'm very familiar with being
Speaker 3: the only journalist in a place, and I'd be lying
Speaker 3: if I said I didn't prefer it that way. But
Speaker 3: I do always feel obliged to use the platform I
Speaker 3: have here to give people a chance to share their stories,
Speaker 3: their voices, and their struggles. So here's their message to you.
Speaker 3: We love you.
Speaker 9: Hope too, you love is it's hard to share.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think that's very good.
Speaker 9: It will be our next home and we should be
Speaker 9: proud of that. We should be vote for that, We
Speaker 9: should be be a real American for the country.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they know Romans are very bad situations, have a
Speaker 8: bad situation in Iran. Yeah, for all people, that is saying,
Speaker 8: But for women is very, very, very hard. I think
Speaker 8: American people know about Massa Amini. Yeah, and they really
Speaker 8: they chill us, really, they chill women for simple things.
Speaker 3: I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time
Speaker 3: in Bajo Jiquito and the last Blancast migrant reception center,
Speaker 3: that migrants travel to after they arrive in Baja Chiquito.
Speaker 3: People left horrific things behind them and saw horrific things
Speaker 3: on their journey, but they all remained hopeful for a
Speaker 3: better future in America. These journeys, in some cases can
Speaker 3: take a year or more. When the poorly man I
Speaker 3: met in Bajo Gito, I'd spent thirty months just to
Speaker 3: get that far, and among his group, his journey had
Speaker 3: been the fastest. As long as these journeys are, that
Speaker 3: darien often stems out. There's the hardest part to understand why.
Speaker 3: I want to take you back to that shady spot
Speaker 3: by the river just a few minutes south of Bajoji Keepo.
Speaker 3: So what I'm doing right now, you can hear from
Speaker 3: my footsteps, is I'm doing what it taught me not
Speaker 3: to do. I'm walking along the migrant trail. There's lots
Speaker 3: of like vines and creepers. Oh fucking hell, that's me
Speaker 3: nely eating shit. There's little bits of tape marking the trail.
Speaker 3: I think they just come down the river here and
Speaker 3: some local guys are pushing out wheelbarrows on the trail
Speaker 3: to dump trash. There's trash everywhere to fucking mess. The
Speaker 3: little wood arrows that they've carved just outside town to
Speaker 3: direct people into town, and if I heard, I can
Speaker 3: see migrants making what probably hopefully their final crossing of
Speaker 3: the river here. One thing I noticed was that as
Speaker 3: soon as I got out of sight in near shot
Speaker 3: of the town, the jungle seemed a lot more intimidating.
Speaker 3: I'm somebod who spends a lot of time in the mountains,
Speaker 3: and I grew up playing in the woods. I'm comfortable outdoors,
Speaker 3: and I frequently camp and hike for days on my own.
Speaker 3: I like it better that way, and I might see
Speaker 3: more comfortable forty feet under the sea free diving, or
Speaker 3: three hours from the nearest road. Then I'm in a
Speaker 3: busy city sometimes, But in the jungle, after all the
Speaker 3: stories I'd heard that week, I was afraid. I keept scary.
Speaker 3: I don't know why. I mean, everything's new to me. I'm,
Speaker 3: you know, relatively comfortable in the outdoors. But fucking there's
Speaker 3: new animals, there's new plants. I don't know what's poisonous.
Speaker 3: I don't know what's going to kill me. I don't
Speaker 3: know who's going to try and hurt me. Got another
Speaker 3: fucking horse, Jesus wept. I'm jumping out my skin everything.
Speaker 3: Now it's funny. I'm in a place that's beautiful, you know,
Speaker 3: like these better paradise plants are just just growing here.
Speaker 3: It's gorgeousness. Horses belong to people of the black community.
Speaker 3: I suppose it's having snacks, you know, eating jungle horse food.
Speaker 3: And here here I am at the river. It's wide.
Speaker 3: Here it's sort of shallow, and it's been dammed up
Speaker 3: a little bit with rubbish. It's like flocks and jets
Speaker 3: some kind of stuff. And then this is where people
Speaker 3: cross because of that little dam. But it's still got
Speaker 3: some force to it, like you wouldn't want to fall
Speaker 3: and crack your head or you know, a lot of
Speaker 3: these folks can't swim even without the fear. It's hard going.
Speaker 3: If you've only hiked on trails, you probably don't realize
Speaker 3: how much work goes into making that surface possible. There
Speaker 3: are no trail crews in the dry it and as
Speaker 3: a result, every step has the potential to results in
Speaker 3: a sprained ankle or another injury, which might sound trivial
Speaker 3: but can be faithal in such a remote and challenging place.
Speaker 3: Trail is all rocks, like maybe rocks the size of
Speaker 3: a fist. By that way nows and then there are
Speaker 3: sort of in this area we only have the lower canopy,
Speaker 3: so we have ferns, we have reeds, bamboo plants growing
Speaker 3: really tall and straight. That's what they use for the poles,
Speaker 3: so the pitag was and then sort of low grassy
Speaker 3: kind of plants. And then where the migrants walk is
Speaker 3: just this muddy trail that every time it rains just
Speaker 3: turns into like ankle to knee deep mud. And I
Speaker 3: could see them making pretty slow progress along the trail
Speaker 3: towards me. At the end of the day, as I
Speaker 3: took a piaguard back to Madagante, where I would be
Speaker 3: staying the night, I reflected again on this and the
Speaker 3: incredible tenacity it took for people with little outdoor experience
Speaker 3: and terrible equipment to path through the jungle. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm a fit person. I run ultra marathons, I used
Speaker 3: to be exercised for a living. And it's fucking hard wet.
Speaker 3: Everything's wet all the time. If you're wet from the rain,
Speaker 3: then you're wet. If you're wet from the sweat and
Speaker 3: you're wet. If you cross rivers, you get wet. You
Speaker 3: just can't stay dry. And everyone's feet are just fucked
Speaker 3: when they get into town, like the size of the
Speaker 3: blisters I've seen. Like one lady had a cramp today
Speaker 3: where like it just locked up a whole she like
Speaker 3: I grabbed her or she was falling down and I
Speaker 3: was able to hold her up. But people are really
Speaker 3: pushing themselves physically as well as psychologically. That river crossing
Speaker 3: south of Bajiqito was as far south as I was
Speaker 3: going to be able to get without being forced to
Speaker 3: be adjacted from Panama, and my request to take a
Speaker 3: boat or walk further south was denied by the Panamanian
Speaker 3: Ministry of Security. So the only part of the migrants
Speaker 3: journey I would share with them was the last kilometer
Speaker 3: or so of their walk. Even then I wasn't really
Speaker 3: supposed to be leaving town at all, So several times
Speaker 3: of the days I spent in Bahajikito, log over my shoulder,
Speaker 3: hop down the river bank, jump across the stream, and
Speaker 3: lightly jog out of town. Once on the trail, I
Speaker 3: started to walk slowly and try and waive a groups
Speaker 3: of outcoming migrants. I didn't want to scare them. I
Speaker 3: offered to carry their bags and gant any help I could,
Speaker 3: supporting them as they walked towards their first meal and
Speaker 3: clean drink of water in up to a week. Just
Speaker 3: getting to bahji Ghita was a journey in itself for me.
Speaker 3: I took two flights, a five hour drive, which was
Speaker 3: equally split between paved roads, roads that aspired to pavement,
Speaker 3: and dirt roads. At the end of our road journey,
Speaker 3: the Pan American Highway, the links Alaska to Argentina, seems
Speaker 3: to give up on fighting the jungle and peters out.
Speaker 3: Asphalt turned to worse asphalt, which turned to dirt, which
Speaker 3: turned to mud, which led us to a river. A driver, however,
Speaker 3: was prepared for this. The drive here was mad, like
Speaker 3: that road was fucked. We're in this tiny little car.
Speaker 3: The driver took off his shoes and socks to conduct
Speaker 3: the more technical section of the drive, which I thought
Speaker 3: was quite amusing. And yeah, really steep, lots of holes,
Speaker 3: lots of potholes, you know, just really rutted out a
Speaker 3: kind of dirt road. And then we got here and
Speaker 3: talked to some guys, negotiated a price, and told them
Speaker 3: where we wanted to go, and they said, yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: buy some water. You know, snow water on the way
Speaker 3: about three hours and so we bought some water right there,
Speaker 3: and yeah, here we are on the boat now, as
Speaker 3: you can hear, I recorded this on a piragua. It's
Speaker 3: a kind of dugout canoe with the hole made out
Speaker 3: of a single tree and a toothtroke motor bolted on
Speaker 3: the back. It's the only way to travel here other
Speaker 3: than on your feet, and it's the only way the
Speaker 3: embarra can get the produced cigaret to market. The skill
Speaker 3: of the piragueros, the people who drive the piraguas, is incredible.
Speaker 3: They navigate parts of the river so shallow that they
Speaker 3: have to pull up the two stroke motor. And I
Speaker 3: noticed all the motors have propellers that are covered in
Speaker 3: chips and bashes from smacking into the rocks at the bottom.
Speaker 3: In the bow of the boat, I sat on top
Speaker 3: of my giant rucksack, marveling at the birds, insects and
Speaker 3: foliage of the jungle, and occasionally I jumped up to
Speaker 3: make fairly useless contributions with the boat's bamboo pole. Under
Speaker 3: the close supervision of Marcellino, our driver, and are soon
Speaker 3: to be host. Homoti just laughed at me as I
Speaker 3: leaned my whole way into the pole, which notably slipped,
Speaker 3: and I tried to avoid falling face first into the
Speaker 3: chocolate brown water. On the way to Baajiquito, we passed
Speaker 3: several small limber villages. Little children waved at us from
Speaker 3: the banks or from the shallows of the river where
Speaker 3: they washed and played. Adults slipped on. I doubtless why
Speaker 3: there's one nurse six tree. White dude was going the
Speaker 3: wrong way on the river for a migrant, but they
Speaker 3: smiled and waved back anyway. After an overnight flight, a
Speaker 3: five hour drive, and three hours in a dugout canoe,
Speaker 3: we rounded a corner in the river. Ba Jigito came
Speaker 3: into view. Over the last few years, it three oriented
Speaker 3: itself from a tiny indigenous village to an unofficial reception
Speaker 3: center for migrants. On my hopelessly outdated topo map, the
Speaker 3: area has nothing but contours and green shading, no roads,
Speaker 3: no trails, no markets of human existence at all, and
Speaker 3: perhaps that's how the state sees this place. The Daddy
Speaker 3: n is as real to most Panamanians a Sesame street
Speaker 3: or Jurassic Park. But for the mb this has been
Speaker 3: their home since long before Panama and Columbia and even
Speaker 3: maps existed. A few dozen houses in the village, mostly
Speaker 3: built on stilts to avoid the seasonal floods, now offer
Speaker 3: up their rooms as hostels to the migrants. Some of
Speaker 3: them have enclosed their bottom floor using plywood or cinder blow.
Speaker 3: Others have strung hammocks from their support posts. For four
Speaker 3: or five bugs, migrants can get their first good night's
Speaker 3: sleep since they left neck or Clee in Columbia as
Speaker 3: much as a week before. Along the main street, which
Speaker 3: is really just to raise concrete footpath about a meter across,
Speaker 3: you can buy a meal any of half a dozen
Speaker 3: places for five bucks. You can get an hour of
Speaker 3: Wi Fi for a dollar, or charge your phone for
Speaker 3: at the same price. Cold drinks for a dollar as well.
Speaker 3: Are one of the many front rooms that have turned
Speaker 3: into small kiosks. And that's where the migrants I have
Speaker 3: been sitting down with at the river went when they
Speaker 3: arrived into town. I let them be for a while
Speaker 3: I went off to interview more migrants. About a thousand
Speaker 3: of them arrive in this village every day each year
Speaker 3: since a pandemic has seen record numbers arrived, and the
Speaker 3: little village on the side of a hill, surrounded by
Speaker 3: palm trees and full of smiling children in their traditional
Speaker 3: brightly colored pollumers chasing chickens and dogs, has welcomed every
Speaker 3: single one of them. About a thousand of them arrive
Speaker 3: in this town every day. Here they also take a
Speaker 3: boat from neck o'kley across the Golf of the Dabienne.
Speaker 3: They crossed on small motor boats to Capolgana or Kandel.
Speaker 3: Those are both towns on the western side of the
Speaker 3: Gulf of the Darienne. From there they begin their walk.
Speaker 3: Even though they're now north of the gulf, they're still
Speaker 3: in Colombia and on the Colombian side of the border.
Speaker 3: They're guided by guides, to whom they pay several hundred
Speaker 3: dollars and in return received protection and a wristband that
Speaker 3: ensures they can walk without being robbed. Nobody I spoke
Speaker 3: to had made it this far without paying a guide.
Speaker 3: The area is largely under the control of the Golf Cartel,
Speaker 3: several members of which were sanctioned by the USA. While
Speaker 3: I was in the jungle. The marcus I spoke to
Speaker 3: didn't really have much bad to say about this part
Speaker 3: of their experience, but universally acknowledged that the next part
Speaker 3: was where they really confronted their fears and nightmares about
Speaker 3: the Daddy. Inne he is one Venezuelan migrant sharing his experience.
Speaker 10: That's nothing compared to what comes from the border to hear, Yes,
Speaker 10: the road is better, and I say that the dane
Speaker 10: is less too, and they have everything you need there.
Speaker 10: You come prepared, you have, you come with water, and
Speaker 10: there are also many ravines where you can drink water. Well,
Speaker 10: there are springs that come from the mountain, but from
Speaker 10: the border on it's pretty ugly.
Speaker 3: It's a stretch from the Colombian Panamanian border at a
Speaker 3: place that they call Laspandabas which means to flags to
Speaker 3: Bajo Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There they can't
Speaker 3: drink from the river because a human waste and human
Speaker 3: remains that constantly fill it like the water deadly. They
Speaker 3: must walk on unmaintained trails. It often turns in deep mud.
Speaker 3: They only have the supplies they carry, which often run out,
Speaker 3: or they jettison to stave weight On the incredibly steep
Speaker 3: mountain path they climb and descend those mountains across rivers,
Speaker 3: often without eating or drinking for days at a time.
Speaker 3: On the trail, they pass by the bodies of their fellow travelers.
Speaker 3: It's a constant reminder of the risk they're taking. If
Speaker 3: you ask people in Panamas, they'll tell you that Darian
Speaker 3: is closed. Now, your president, nose Raoul Molino was elected
Speaker 3: on a promise to shut down the gap and this
Speaker 3: humanitarian crisis and deport more migrants with the US funding,
Speaker 3: and that funding has certainly arrived, with more than six
Speaker 3: million already spent since he took office in July. Since then,
Speaker 3: Panama has deported more than eleven hundred people to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia,
Speaker 3: and India. Each of these has been funded by US taxpayers. Obviously,
Speaker 3: the jungle isn't closed, and it can't really be closed,
Speaker 3: but in an interview before he was elected, Molino said
Speaker 3: that the border of the United States, instead of being
Speaker 3: in Texas, has moved to Panama, and that is something
Speaker 3: he can do with US support. I spoke to some
Speaker 3: venezuel And ladies to help them carry their bag because
Speaker 3: it's a steep hill, and they were saying that no
Speaker 3: one has seen any barriers. I don't know anything about
Speaker 3: any barriers or any fences in a Darian and that
Speaker 3: like they hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not
Speaker 3: a standing in front of one hundred people who just
Speaker 3: got off a boat from the day enn Hubris Aside,
Speaker 3: the rhetoric of closing the Dati m signals are turn
Speaker 3: not just in Panamanian politics, but in the way the
Speaker 3: world sees and handles migration. The US has always sought
Speaker 3: to externalize its borders, from US train border patrol officers
Speaker 3: and Dominican Republic along the border is Haiti to DHS
Speaker 3: agents deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. As migration has become
Speaker 3: more politicized, the US has sought to move its enforcement
Speaker 3: away from prying eyes and from compassion, and instead brought
Speaker 3: more trauma to a place that is already so hard.
Speaker 3: I've spent much of the last decade of my life
Speaker 3: watching the state try to bring the mountains and desert
Speaker 3: close to where I live under its control. I've stood
Speaker 3: with Kumia people as the government dynamited their graveyards. I
Speaker 3: found border wal contractors lost deep in the mountains. I've
Speaker 3: driven the impossibly steep concrete roads that they built, worried
Speaker 3: about my truck turning end on end. I've seen billions
Speaker 3: of dollars thrown at these mountains, and I've seen people
Speaker 3: with twenty dollars angle grinders or ladders made of old
Speaker 3: palettes defeat the wall in moments. Trying to close borders
Speaker 3: doesn't work at home, and it won't work in the
Speaker 3: Daddy and Gap either. Just building the roads to get
Speaker 3: the construction equipment into the gap is a gargantuan task
Speaker 3: in any attempt to create a barrier across sixty kilometer
Speaker 3: wide wilderness area, or simply push migrants onto other more
Speaker 3: dangerous routes into places where you can't build and the
Speaker 3: places where nobody can rescue you if you fall down
Speaker 3: or break your leg. That doesn't mean there's nothing the
Speaker 3: US can do. I saw first hand the impact of
Speaker 3: Americans spending here as migrants had a reception center carded
Speaker 3: Lajas Blancas, had their families torn apart, and men, women
Speaker 3: and children cried as their parents and partners were taken
Speaker 3: away for a flight back to Columbia, Cuba, or Venezuela
Speaker 3: that my taxes helped to pay for. I console, the
Speaker 3: children with toys and stickers and something to eat as
Speaker 3: their dads were loaded into a flatbed truck. A government
Speaker 3: didn't send money to feed these children, but it seemed
Speaker 3: to have the funds to fund their parents' deportation. By
Speaker 3: deporting people from Panama, the US effectively deprives them of
Speaker 3: much of the due process they should, in theory, have
Speaker 3: the right to in the United States, and the US
Speaker 3: can easily deport them back to places like Cuba and Venezuela,
Speaker 3: which it considers to be dictatorial regimes. The US does
Speaker 3: not and cannot stop migration. People have always moved, and
Speaker 3: people will always want a better future for their children.
Speaker 3: What it can do is make it as painful and
Speaker 3: dangerous as possible. But the rais of word barriers in
Speaker 3: the daddy a gap which I've seen person on social media,
Speaker 3: didn't exist for the hundreds of migrants I spoke to.
Speaker 3: No one I asked had even seen them, but what
Speaker 3: they had seen was far worse.
Speaker 11: There are many rivers that you're forced into all the time,
Speaker 11: you're putting your life and everything else on the line there.
Speaker 11: I was worried that the indigenous people would come out
Speaker 11: and do something to us in the nights. I was
Speaker 11: worried that any of the children, God forbid, would have
Speaker 11: an accident. The same for me. It's horrible to think
Speaker 11: about it now.
Speaker 3: This mother hood cruss with a five, six, and sixteen
Speaker 3: year old child, the baby of six months. They'd all
Speaker 3: made it in one piece, but the journey clearly had
Speaker 3: its impact on the children.
Speaker 11: There are many people who are left out there without
Speaker 11: food and do not have anything to give to their children.
Speaker 11: We had food until last night. Nothing left now, and
Speaker 11: we had to each one had to just eat a
Speaker 11: little bit because we had nothing else to give them.
Speaker 11: You can't find anything there. It's in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 11: People died right now along with those who came with
Speaker 11: us yesterday. How many died yesterday? Three? I think three
Speaker 11: died yesterday. One drowned in the river. Yeah, it's really tough.
Speaker 1: This.
Speaker 11: No, no, nobody should do this. Nobody. We do this
Speaker 11: out of pure physical necessity to look for a better
Speaker 11: future for our kids. We can't stay in our country,
Speaker 11: We couldn't stay any longer there.
Speaker 3: Here are a couple of the kids I spoke to,
Speaker 3: or in some cases, the kids who took my recorder
Speaker 3: and conducted interviews with each other.
Speaker 11: The mountains, I was so tired and I couldn't climb anymore,
Speaker 11: and when I fell on the river, I was really scared.
Speaker 3: Apparently the whole thing was like an adventure she'd seen
Speaker 3: Pepper Pig having, which at once made me giggle and
Speaker 3: also one reflection, it's one of the saddest things I've
Speaker 3: ever had to record, I'm sure. Her mum told her
Speaker 3: that to make it easier for her to pass through
Speaker 3: a terrible place, but really sure to be at home
Speaker 3: washing Peppa Pig and playing with her friends, not walking
Speaker 3: past three dead bodies which are currently decomposing on the trail.
Speaker 3: She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus ride
Speaker 3: she'd taken to get there one boring because she enjoyed
Speaker 3: looking out the window, and the whole journey was well,
Speaker 3: I'll let her say it em.
Speaker 1: Her mum gave us a different account sah, I didn't
Speaker 1: want to cry because I didn't want her to see
Speaker 1: me crying. But sometimes I would explode because it's hard
Speaker 1: for your child to ask you for water, to ask
Speaker 1: you for food, and you don't have any to be
Speaker 1: in a place where you walk you walk from five
Speaker 1: in the morning, it's five in the afternoon. You're walking,
Speaker 1: you don't know what to do, going through more than
Speaker 1: one hundred rivers and asking God not to rain and
Speaker 1: not wanting it to get worse. It rained, and the
Speaker 1: girl got a fever. She got a fever. But well,
Speaker 1: God is good that we pray a lot. I say
Speaker 1: that we don't know God so much in the church
Speaker 1: from the process and the process that we are in,
Speaker 1: and we don't know we can be so strong until
Speaker 1: we go through that storm and we see that He
Speaker 1: protext us. He knows that He was always there watching
Speaker 1: over us, taking care of us at all times.
Speaker 3: Parents being amazed at their children and drawing shrink from
Speaker 3: them and their faith. It was a common message I
Speaker 3: heard from migrants. He's a migrant from Zimbabwe telling me
Speaker 3: how her daughter inspired her to keep going, but she
Speaker 3: felt like she couldn't walk anymore.
Speaker 12: My daughter, she was strong, she was strong, but she
Speaker 12: was crying also, but she has got wounds all over
Speaker 12: the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like,
Speaker 12: I want to just put myself in the water, then
Speaker 12: I can just go both. The gene was tough, really
Speaker 12: really tough. The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not
Speaker 12: easy at all. It's not very I don't even recommended
Speaker 12: someone to say you used that and gave no And
Speaker 12: even myself I did know about it. I was regretting myself.
Speaker 9: I was crying.
Speaker 12: I was like, God, I don't know my family and
Speaker 12: my family they don't know where I am right now.
Speaker 3: But like so many other migrants, when the government of
Speaker 3: the world abandoned her, she found strength in the strangers
Speaker 3: along the road who wouldn't abandon her.
Speaker 12: We didn't even eat any thing, were just asking people,
Speaker 12: can I have a piece of biscuit? They just help us.
Speaker 3: That's nice. The other migrants helped you.
Speaker 12: Yeah, the others.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Do you think that they treat African people differently?
Speaker 12: Very nice? The especially these Spanish people, they are very nice.
Speaker 12: I don't want to lie because if you need help,
Speaker 12: you call them for your Look. The other ones they
Speaker 12: might run away, but the other ones, they just come
Speaker 12: for help. They even give us tablets on the road,
Speaker 12: give us energy, drinks, give my daughter a sweets for energy.
Speaker 12: They push us like let's go, guys, let's call let's go.
Speaker 12: You make it, and we really make it.
Speaker 3: The journey over the mountains to Banama has become more
Speaker 3: and more popular in recent years as other routes have
Speaker 3: become more dangerous or closed themselves off to migrants entirely.
Speaker 3: It's a route the Embira tell me that started with
Speaker 3: people leaving India and then Haiti. It grew as conditions
Speaker 3: in Venezuela became more unsustainable and people found themselves too
Speaker 3: poor to stay home and too poor to travel north
Speaker 3: by any other means, and so they chose a deadly
Speaker 3: jungle over a future in a country where their votes
Speaker 3: don't matter. Last year, as many as half a million
Speaker 3: people cross the jungle. This year we might see more
Speaker 3: migrants arriving about Jiguito spend the day in the village
Speaker 3: before taking off in a piagua of their own up
Speaker 3: to Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 3: They registered with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym
Speaker 3: Cena Front, and they call their families to say they survived.
Speaker 3: Then they try at their blistered feet, enjoy the cooking
Speaker 3: of several of the families who have turned their homes
Speaker 3: into sort of ersad's restaurants. They sleep on the floors
Speaker 3: of the houses or underneath them charge their phones for
Speaker 3: a dollar a time. Certainly migration has changed its town,
Speaker 3: and I want to talk about that more in tomorrow's episode.
Speaker 3: But despite more than a million people passing through this route,
Speaker 3: you don't find anti migrant sentiment here. Right now, despite
Speaker 3: the gap being a deadly de terrent, numbers are expected
Speaker 3: to reach to Equil again this year, maybe seven hundred
Speaker 3: thousand people will walk the gap. But despite these numbers,
Speaker 3: which may seem high for a small country, I didn't
Speaker 3: really find much anti migroant sentiment in Panama as a whole.
Speaker 3: There's plenty of it in the US, though, and as
Speaker 3: the United States winds down its war and terror, it
Speaker 3: needs a new nebulous enemy to justify its military spending
Speaker 3: and to keep the security in surveillance companies donate into
Speaker 3: politicians in their millions. In part it is found that
Speaker 3: by simply opening a floggate of weapons and funding, they
Speaker 3: can spew forth genocide and death in Palestine and keep
Speaker 3: some of its income streams. But it needs a more
Speaker 3: long term solution. There are only so many Palestinian babies
Speaker 3: that can balm, and we'll run out of Palestinians long
Speaker 3: before we run out of bombs. The USA is new
Speaker 3: enemy when it must seek out all over the world.
Speaker 3: It's a migrant. It's a woman I met carrying her
Speaker 3: child across the mountains. The little Venezuelan girl throwing bottle
Speaker 3: caps into a cinder block with me to pass the
Speaker 3: time as she asked me questions about America. It's a
Speaker 3: twenty one year old man whose remains my friends found
Speaker 3: in the border on a hot day this September. The
Speaker 3: US will stop at nothing and fining and destroying the migrant,
Speaker 3: and just as it did in the War on Terror,
Speaker 3: it will find fast friends in states desperate to avail
Speaker 3: themselves the seemingly unlimited flow of resources the US dedicates
Speaker 3: to keeping its conflicts out of the sights and the
Speaker 3: mines of its citizens. The USA's open hostility to migrants
Speaker 3: isn't something that's unknown here. Everyone I met knew about it.
Speaker 3: Several of them had watched with horror as Kamala Harris
Speaker 3: and Donald Trump argued not about how to treat migrants
Speaker 3: but about who could turn more of them away in
Speaker 3: a recent presidential debate. Every migrant I met had questioned
Speaker 3: about CBP, one about US asylum policy, and about how
Speaker 3: they could get to the US before a second Trump administration.
Speaker 3: Despite this, they all clung to their versions of the
Speaker 3: American dream. They wanted to work and be paid a
Speaker 3: fair wage, to send their kids to school and maybe
Speaker 3: to college, to feel safe in their homes, and to
Speaker 3: be able to speak and dress as they wished without
Speaker 3: fearing consequences. All of those things are in periling this
Speaker 3: country too, and they know that, but they still feel
Speaker 3: their dreams are worth the journey. For Noami, the little
Speaker 3: girl who took the daddy and in her stride, the American
Speaker 3: dream was pretty simple. She wanted two things. To see
Speaker 3: Minnie Mouse and to see her around. Why am I
Speaker 3: gros estudia anymore? As to deer a deer? Every day
Speaker 3: for the past two years, the population of Bajo Chikito
Speaker 3: has more than tripled. At six in the morning, piraka
Speaker 3: has come from other Embra villages along the river, dozens
Speaker 3: of them, all filled with orange life jackets. Migrants form
Speaker 3: a line so long that it stretches from the beach
Speaker 3: north of town all the way through the village and
Speaker 3: at the other side, and in groups of fifteen, they
Speaker 3: hand over their twenty five dollars each and get onto
Speaker 3: the piraguas. Each one puts on their bright orange life jacket,
Speaker 3: sits with their legs around the person in front, and
Speaker 3: they take off at the first official migrant reception center
Speaker 3: in last blankets. As the last boat leaves, those who
Speaker 3: can't afford the trip begin a walk which could take
Speaker 3: eight hours. I couldn't walk with them, but I handed
Speaker 3: to group my water filter in one of those overbright
Speaker 3: energy bars that are basically trail mix in a rectangular format,
Speaker 3: and wish them the best of luck as they force
Speaker 3: their tired legs and sore feet to walk again. The
Speaker 3: population of Barjaquito dropped back to five hundred or so
Speaker 3: indigenous people who live here, and the usual background noise
Speaker 3: of chattering dozens of languages gave way to crowing chickens
Speaker 3: and barking dogs. By the next morning, as migrants came
Speaker 3: walking in from the south, it would grow again to
Speaker 3: fifteen hundred. For the last ten years or so, fewer
Speaker 3: than two thousand people crossed in a year, but numbers
Speaker 3: have been steadily increasing, and now the resident of Bajo
Speaker 3: Jiquito see the numbers that they saw in a year.
Speaker 3: In a single weekend while you listen to this series,
Speaker 3: thousands of people will take their lives into their hands
Speaker 3: as they leap into mudcolored rivers, ascend towering mountains in
Speaker 3: the pouring rain, and desperately fight the urge to drink
Speaker 3: from a river polluted with human waste to decaying corpses.
Speaker 3: All of those who survive will walk out of that jungle,
Speaker 3: up the river bank, along a muddy path, and into
Speaker 3: Bajo Chiquito, where they'll buy themselves a cold drink and
Speaker 3: enjoy the hospitality of the locals for a night before
Speaker 3: leaving to head north. At first, the locals told me
Speaker 3: didn't charge people at all. They were shocked to see
Speaker 3: the migrants and wanted to help them, But as numbers grew,
Speaker 3: they had to start asking for money as they couldn't
Speaker 3: afford to feed and house all the migrants arriving. Over time,
Speaker 3: they said, the costs rose, and now a bed costs
Speaker 3: about five dollars for a night, and a meal's about
Speaker 3: the same. As they pointed out, that's less than half
Speaker 3: what I paid in Meta Tea, the nearest town a metait.
Speaker 3: He doesn't have to haul its supplies up the river
Speaker 3: in a canoe using seven dollars per gallon fuel in Bahjigito.
Speaker 3: I sat down with oder man whose front room I
Speaker 3: just had luncheon. I wanted to get a sent to
Speaker 3: the change he'd seen over his lifetime in his community
Speaker 3: and how he felt about it.
Speaker 13: We saw how they arrived injured, sick, with vomiting diarrhea.
Speaker 13: Then there was no healthcare here. What did we do?
Speaker 13: We had to speak for the government. It wasn't easy.
Speaker 13: It was not easy. We told him that we needed
Speaker 13: a doctor, and finally, now, thank god, we have doctors here.
Speaker 3: The community, which has long been socially and economically marginalized
Speaker 3: and acutely underprovided with government services, had built a house
Speaker 3: themselves for the doctors and another house for migration officials.
Speaker 3: It was the only way to help migrants access services,
Speaker 3: which in turn allowed them to move on with their
Speaker 3: journeys quicker, he said. However, like almost every other ember
Speaker 3: our person I spoke with, he felt that the government
Speaker 3: should be doing more here. Even after all these years
Speaker 3: serving as the first Panamanian village, many thousands of people
Speaker 3: enter every year, they still don't have electricity or a
Speaker 3: road that's successible year round, both of which would make
Speaker 3: their lives and the transit of the migrants much safer.
Speaker 3: But that doesn't mean the state's totally absent here. It
Speaker 3: used to be possible for migrants to take a paragua
Speaker 3: from come Galina little further south up river and avoid
Speaker 3: some of the most dangerous river crossings. Bonio told me
Speaker 3: that authorities in the Cormarca, which is like a state
Speaker 3: in the USA, have prohibited this. I wanted to see
Speaker 3: more of what was going on further south and what
Speaker 3: made it so dangerous, but I wasn't permitted to join
Speaker 3: a center front patrol going out that way despite my request.
Speaker 3: I asked Bonnio what made things more dangerous than that
Speaker 3: part of the river. First, he explained that the wide
Speaker 3: and low lying beaches often seemed like good points for
Speaker 3: migrants to sleep, but that any rain in the mountains above,
Speaker 3: which result in a rapid increase for the water level,
Speaker 3: turning those beaches into rapids in minutes, he told me,
Speaker 3: looking down at the table. But not so long ago,
Speaker 3: a storm had washed away sleeping migrants, drowning them in
Speaker 3: their sleep and washing their remains towards his village. But
Speaker 3: terrible as it is, that isn't the only risk.
Speaker 9: What they say.
Speaker 13: You know very well that there's not a single country
Speaker 13: that does not have criminals. In every country, there are criminals. Yeah,
Speaker 13: so what happens at that point in the river, as
Speaker 13: I was saying, at that point, and clearly it is
Speaker 13: not everyone, but there are some certain young men who
Speaker 13: engage in robbery and even rape. So that's why in
Speaker 13: this community, in this village, in coordination with the community
Speaker 13: and the leaders, we will The leader spoke to the
Speaker 13: national government to ask for a chance to transport people
Speaker 13: from came Gaya so that nothing would happen to them.
Speaker 13: The government talked and talked, and for a while it
Speaker 13: was possible and it was safe, and nobody died and
Speaker 13: nobody robbed. It was all going well. But what happened.
Speaker 13: We have a leader at Casika. I don't know if
Speaker 13: you've heard about it, but the regional leader he put
Speaker 13: a barrier, he stopped it.
Speaker 12: No.
Speaker 13: Look, to be honest, these people with their degrees in
Speaker 13: this classic person, they're not humanitarians.
Speaker 3: Despite the struggles and the relative absence of the government
Speaker 3: of rule, he felt that the migration had been a
Speaker 3: positive for his community. He'd learned a lot from the migrants.
Speaker 3: He said, and enjoyed learning about their cuisines. In particular,
Speaker 3: there's a common narrative in media that mentions Boito that
Speaker 3: this village has been somehow stripped of its culture or
Speaker 3: ruined by migration, but the locals don't seem to agree
Speaker 3: with this. I also speke to is leader. She's the
Speaker 3: first woman in the whole con marker to hold such
Speaker 3: a position.
Speaker 1: I'm chief of the community police and leader of the community.
Speaker 3: She explained to me that Balji Guito was just one
Speaker 3: of several communities along the river, each with its own leader.
Speaker 3: Those leaders meet in the council, an answer to the
Speaker 3: Comarca Mara anti di yact in over here. She also
Speaker 3: explained that as the first woman in the position, she'd
Speaker 3: made sure to advance the cause of women in her community.
Speaker 1: So I've had my administration, which has been seven months
Speaker 1: asnoko or leader, I have put some women to work.
Speaker 1: They were waiting for the migrants.
Speaker 3: There After that, I asked her to explain to listeners
Speaker 3: what exactly a migrant encounters when they first set foot
Speaker 3: in her village and the various steps that they might
Speaker 3: go through before leaving the next morning.
Speaker 1: Is there is a check in at first verification of
Speaker 1: whether they have a crime in their country. From there
Speaker 1: they got immigration, their documents are checked and then they
Speaker 1: are free to choose where they're going to wait and
Speaker 1: rest for the next part of their journey. On behalf
Speaker 1: of UNISEF we have free toilets from the community. We
Speaker 1: also have a free place where they can camp or rest.
Speaker 1: That's theirs now. If they want better things better rest,
Speaker 1: they can find accommodation available in almost every house here.
Speaker 1: The next day we prepare everything at together with the
Speaker 1: Center front security.
Speaker 14: We go to the.
Speaker 1: Beach there and at the beach we also coordinate with
Speaker 1: a coordinator from each village. I also want to make
Speaker 1: it clear as well that the boat driver must have
Speaker 1: their idea and be of legal age.
Speaker 3: From there, the migrants pay twenty five dollars ahead and
Speaker 3: take the five hour boat trip north to Lahasblancas, which
Speaker 3: is the UN and government run camp and the first
Speaker 3: official migrant welcome center outside the dai N. Having boat
Speaker 3: drivers who are of age is important. Can't swim trust
Speaker 3: their lives to these boat drivers in high water. Once
Speaker 3: they're at last Blankers, they're close to the Pan American
Speaker 3: Highway and the beginning of the rest of their journey north.
Speaker 3: They don't have to walk any further unless they run
Speaker 3: out of money for buses. I asked what happened when
Speaker 3: someone couldn't afford the right to last blankers?
Speaker 15: Yes, then.
Speaker 1: What does the community do? The community takes responsibility presending them,
Speaker 1: not the state, the state migration center front. They don't
Speaker 1: pay for the fuel or the transport of these people.
Speaker 3: Specifically, she told me the community sends three free boats
Speaker 3: to day. Most of these are filled of women and children,
Speaker 3: and in my time there, it seemed that these people
Speaker 3: paid whatever they could those leftover, usually men would have
Speaker 3: to make the walk on their blistered feet and tired
Speaker 3: legs and risk further sickness, robbery, and heat exhaustion. I
Speaker 3: also wanted to ask a leader about the problems with
Speaker 3: theft and sexual assault that the migrants encountered on their
Speaker 3: walk into Bajo Jiquito, and she was pretty forthright this
Speaker 3: was an issue for the state, not for her community
Speaker 3: to fix.
Speaker 1: Then where is Senafron. Aren't Centafrat supposed to be on
Speaker 1: all the banks of the river, Yes, so where are
Speaker 1: those staffs?
Speaker 3: Despite being able to prevent the Embira from using their
Speaker 3: boats on their river to transport migrants. The government at
Speaker 3: any level above the village isn't really present in Bahjigitofront,
Speaker 3: Panama's combined Border Patrol and military received migrants and register
Speaker 3: them there, but all the services provided to the migrants
Speaker 3: come either from the Emperor or from non governmental organizations.
Speaker 3: This pattern of the state failing to provide basic services,
Speaker 3: when Neil told me, is one that goes back a
Speaker 3: long time before the migrants began arriving here.
Speaker 13: So now, before the migrants began arriving here, we had
Speaker 13: a town, a town that the government is supposed to
Speaker 13: give what it has to give us as Panamanians, but
Speaker 13: it doesn't. It was a town without anything. All we
Speaker 13: did was sell our products and sell stuff here for us.
Speaker 13: We grow rice, corn plantains, everything. Well, it was a lot,
Speaker 13: but products that we grow are not enough to get by.
Speaker 3: Even today in late twenty twenty four, the village doesn't
Speaker 3: have mains electricity, nor does it have a connection to
Speaker 3: telephone networks or a road that it can take year
Speaker 3: round to connect it to the rest of the country.
Speaker 3: And a few clean water taps in the town come
Speaker 3: from UNICEF, not Panama City. Doctors here come from European NGOs,
Speaker 3: and even the policing of the community is largely done
Speaker 3: by the community, by a group called the Zara. And
Speaker 3: never to better understand there but our communities, both with
Speaker 3: and without migrants. I wanted to visit another Embero village
Speaker 3: and after the break, we'll hear about that ring, all right.
Speaker 3: So I'm just in my hammock now kind of the
Speaker 3: end of the day. We were staying in another in
Speaker 3: village today just probably, I mean, but it's a kilometer
Speaker 3: two kilometers away, you know, probably a decent walk, but
Speaker 3: it was pretty fast in the Agua. Just it's a
Speaker 3: little more peaceful here. And a boat driver passed us
Speaker 3: to stay his house. We said we would. You can
Speaker 3: probably hear like, I don't know how much of this
Speaker 3: is getting picked up. It's a nice little village, you know.
Speaker 3: The fucking way to the dogs have stopped. I guess
Speaker 3: when I wasn't in, I took a boat every evening
Speaker 3: to Maraganti. Maraganti is only a couple of kilometers away
Speaker 3: on a different branch of the river, but the walk
Speaker 3: might take hours through a thick jungle. A Perraguero had
Speaker 3: invited us to stay with his family and to see
Speaker 3: another Inmbara village. I'm always down to sleep outside, so
Speaker 3: I gladly accepted his invitation and slung my hammock across
Speaker 3: his front porch after a long discussion on whether the
Speaker 3: dynamic cordage I was using would actually hold my weight,
Speaker 3: and on my part of probably ill advised free solo
Speaker 3: onto the roof of his house to find a good
Speaker 3: anchor point for my hammock. In my time in Maraganti,
Speaker 3: I found myself growing fonder and fond of his little community.
Speaker 3: Everyone's doors were open and the village's children enjoyed unsupervised
Speaker 3: playtime everywhere. There was never not a pick up game
Speaker 3: going on at the concrete football and basketball court, and
Speaker 3: despite the fact that they were on average several feet
Speaker 3: short than me and playing on concrete without shoes, local
Speaker 3: kids humiliated me at a wide variety of sports with
Speaker 3: no electricity of them generators, one Wi Fi connection in
Speaker 3: the whole village as far as I can tell, and
Speaker 3: a few hours to myself. In the evening, I happily
Speaker 3: settled into a routine of washing in a river along
Speaker 3: with everyone else in the hour before sunset, walking around
Speaker 3: town chatting with the inhabitants, who seemed surprised but happy
Speaker 3: to see a gangly British man ambling around their neighborhood
Speaker 3: and petting their dogs. Once it got dark, I'd spend
Speaker 3: my evening sitting in my hammer, because the grandchildren of
Speaker 3: our host asked me how to say various things in English.
Speaker 3: I played with the little toys I always bring along
Speaker 3: in case I run into children on my work trips.
Speaker 3: Being in Maragantine made me think a lot about my
Speaker 3: own life and the US in general. I certainly have
Speaker 3: a lot more possessions here, but my neighbors don't let
Speaker 3: their kids run around in the streets, and cars would
Speaker 3: hit them if they did. People in my community, if
Speaker 3: the next door Wrapp is anything to go by, spend
Speaker 3: seeing mely countless hours bitching about the unhoused in other
Speaker 3: people's children. But here everyone had a roof over their heads,
Speaker 3: and other people's children ran in and out my host's
Speaker 3: kitchen without anyone batting an eyelid. Aside from laughing at
Speaker 3: my paleness when I was washing in the river, nobody
Speaker 3: here seemed that concerned that I was different. They let
Speaker 3: me hold their babies while they cooked. They didn't overcharge
Speaker 3: me for the It was a water of snacks that
Speaker 3: I brought from their front room convenience stores. What seemed
Speaker 3: that bothered about sharing their meals and their homes with me.
Speaker 3: At night, we sat on tiny plastic chairs and talked
Speaker 3: about our shared interest in woodwork and what they wanted
Speaker 3: for their children. We talked about their boats and the river,
Speaker 3: and about how terrible things must be for migrants to
Speaker 3: risk their lives and abandon their homes making the journey
Speaker 3: across these mountains that the Embrara and their Kuna neighbors
Speaker 3: call home. Ever since I left their village, I've been
Speaker 3: thinking a lot about the part of The Dawn of
Speaker 3: Everything in which Grab and Wengrove detail how many indigenous
Speaker 3: people were adopted into colonial society but chose to return
Speaker 3: to their communities. How by settlers in indigenous communities often
Speaker 3: chose to remain among the indigenous communities. I don't wish
Speaker 3: to romanticize the very real struggles the Mbra have with
Speaker 3: their economic marginalization and lack of access to basic services
Speaker 3: compared to other Panamanians, But I just want to reflect
Speaker 3: on the fact that there was something really special about
Speaker 3: the little river community, where dogs and chickens and ducks
Speaker 3: woke me up in the morning, little children welcome me
Speaker 3: back evening. They told me what they did at school,
Speaker 3: or just a little ball back and forth, and seemed
Speaker 3: entirely comfortable chatting to an adult from across the world.
Speaker 3: The people a Baho Jiqito have shown that same hospitality
Speaker 3: to migrants and indeed to me, and so I wanted
Speaker 3: to ask the village leader how migration had changed her community.
Speaker 3: Like everyone else I spoke to, she insisted that they
Speaker 3: had held on to important parts of their culture, which
Speaker 3: he illustrated by giving me a history lesson.
Speaker 1: Well, the town of Bajo Chikito was founded in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five. At first there were three families, the Vaparizo,
Speaker 1: the Rosales, the Chagos. They came here for education reasons.
Speaker 1: Before everyone lived on their own, the education came and
Speaker 1: that is why we grew this town.
Speaker 3: It was the education, she said, that had changed town,
Speaker 3: not the migrants. They have night school now for adults
Speaker 3: and a school for all the children with seven teachers.
Speaker 3: The children speak Emberbra and Spanish and have a chance
Speaker 3: to get more education in Metaiti or even in Panama City.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's dudo education, not because the migrants travel through here.
Speaker 1: Let this be clear, that is not because the migrants
Speaker 1: came here.
Speaker 3: Cly though, the perception of changing their community is a concern.
Speaker 3: She told me that a local woman marries what she
Speaker 3: called a Latino man, they can't live together in the village,
Speaker 3: and she wanted to make sure I knew that the
Speaker 3: children learn in Emberra as well as Spanish. They also
Speaker 3: still knew dances and ceremonies, Bloniolla told me. But some
Speaker 3: of the changes, she said, were positive, including one in
Speaker 3: gender relationship.
Speaker 1: That's an ongoing struggle. I'll say that to show that
Speaker 1: we women have the same capacity for thought creativity as men.
Speaker 1: We are fighting every day, and as you will see,
Speaker 1: it's not easy.
Speaker 3: One thing that surprised me was that the Emberra would
Speaker 3: always remind me that they themselves have been migrants. They
Speaker 3: migrated to Panama City sometimes, they said, and they have
Speaker 3: a little choice if they want postsec and education or
Speaker 3: higher level medical attention. Some of their kids even make
Speaker 3: the journey to the USA to study. What kind of
Speaker 3: hypocrites would they be, they said, if they look down
Speaker 3: on people making the same journey.
Speaker 13: I'm going to tell you that before the immigrants arrived here,
Speaker 13: within this community, we lived in the same way. I mean,
Speaker 13: we came from the countryside, we worked in agriculture, and
Speaker 13: we still continue working in the agriculture stuff, fishing, hunting
Speaker 13: and so on.
Speaker 3: We liked it a lot.
Speaker 13: Now after the immigrants started to come, we are still
Speaker 13: the same and it doesn't affect us having them within
Speaker 13: our community because they are they're people, they're humans. The
Speaker 13: journey that the immigrants make is out of need. It
Speaker 13: is in need. So really we too, for example, if
Speaker 13: we were to deal with problems like them, since we
Speaker 13: are just like them, we also have the right to
Speaker 13: emigrate as well.
Speaker 3: This is not the first influx of migration into Embra
Speaker 3: and Guna land. In fifteen oh one, a wave of
Speaker 3: undocumented immigration from Spain in the form of settler colonia
Speaker 3: like Francisco Balboa, arrived in the Guna and Embera territories.
Speaker 3: Ever since his Europeans first saw for themselves what the
Speaker 3: Embra already knew that this area was part of a
Speaker 3: narrow strip of land between two Great Oceans. People from
Speaker 3: around the world have been coming to what is now
Speaker 3: Panama as part of their journeys from north to south
Speaker 3: or east to west. The thin strip of land that
Speaker 3: joins the two American continents has been at the crossroads
Speaker 3: of the world for half a millennium. Archaeological digs in
Speaker 3: a region show that there were once roads, and that
Speaker 3: gold and jade came here from Afar. This ritinalization is
Speaker 3: one that Vasco Nunies de Balboa first encountered, and it
Speaker 3: was they who first told him that their land lay
Speaker 3: between two oceans. It was somewhere just to the south
Speaker 3: of where I was staying that exactly five hundred eleven
Speaker 3: years ago to the day, Barboa became the first European
Speaker 3: to set eyes upon the Pacific. Since Barbara, many other
Speaker 3: colonizers have come to Dabienne to pit their notions of
Speaker 3: superiority against the might of the rainforest. The Kingdom of
Speaker 3: Scotland sent a group of settlers here in the seventeenth century,
Speaker 3: mounted the side. This isn't a place with any similarity
Speaker 3: to Scotland, and it's easy enough to see why the
Speaker 3: plan failed, killed three out of four colonists and essentially
Speaker 3: bankrupted an entire nation in two years, forcing it into
Speaker 3: a colonial relationship with its own with its neighbor to
Speaker 3: the south. After the Scots left, having failed to create
Speaker 3: what they'd hoped would be a quote Scottish Amsterdam of
Speaker 3: the Indies and a Spanish found a flatter and easier
Speaker 3: connection between the Pacific and Caribbean. The Dadian region returned
Speaker 3: to its indigenous people, whose home it remains, but over
Speaker 3: the course of several hundred years, many empires have come
Speaker 3: to the dai En to die. The French tried to
Speaker 3: build a sea level callout not so far from here,
Speaker 3: the canal without locks, but they ultimately failed. The US
Speaker 3: tried in the eighteen fifties and eighteen seventies to forge
Speaker 3: a route to build a canal to get east coast
Speaker 3: Banks Acces to west coast Gold, before eventually finding an
Speaker 3: easy route further north. A century later, the US and
Speaker 3: Panama openly discussed dropping nuclear bombs on the jungle to
Speaker 3: make it passable and to allow the construction of a road.
Speaker 3: The US offered to shoulder two thirds at a cost
Speaker 3: of building such a road, and hoped to have the
Speaker 3: Pan American Highway completed in time for its nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: six by centennial, but the GAP's hostility in the growing
Speaker 3: environmental movement, as well as a desire to protect US
Speaker 3: livestock from a foot of mouth disease it's endemic in
Speaker 3: South America. One the day, the gap remained a gap
Speaker 3: latly without the influence of the state. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 3: a British Army expedition traversed to Dadien in two range rovers.
Speaker 3: Assisted by horses, parachute drop resupplies and a team of engineers,
Speaker 3: they crossed the jungle in ninety six days. They had
Speaker 3: to make their own bugnets for their horses out of
Speaker 3: the parachutes, so were used to drop corn cobs to
Speaker 3: the animals and rice for the humans. Expedition leader and
Speaker 3: seasons explorer, as well as possibly the most British Man
Speaker 3: in history, Lieutenant Colonel John Blashford Snell wrote, without doubt
Speaker 3: it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
Speaker 3: Calling the daddi Enne a god forsaken place, the daddy
Speaker 3: Inn is one of the wettest places on the planet.
Speaker 3: A particularly cruel twist for that would be colonizers from Scotland.
Speaker 3: In the months before I came here, I spent hours
Speaker 3: trying to work out how to water proof my podcast equipment,
Speaker 3: and most of what you're hearing is recorded on a
Speaker 3: voice recorder that I sealed up with gasket maker, shoved
Speaker 3: inside a condom, inside a dry bag, inside a pelican case.
Speaker 3: This rain causes flash flooding, the kind which sweeps whole
Speaker 3: villages away. The rivers in the Gap onont Bridge largely
Speaker 3: because they simply wash away bridges after a storm. On
Speaker 3: our journey to Bahojigito, I saw the remains of bridges
Speaker 3: that had dared to try. That's why my hosts built
Speaker 3: their houses on stilts, and it's on those stilts that
Speaker 3: I slung my hammock in Maraganti. Ever since the failed
Speaker 3: Daddian scheme, the Gap has been constructed in the Western
Speaker 3: imagination as the deepest and darkest jungle. The Gap today
Speaker 3: is home to every type of malaria and numerous others diseases.
Speaker 3: There are deadly vipers, deadly spiders, big cats, and as
Speaker 3: if the natural threats were not enough, the US dropped
Speaker 3: bombs here in the Cold Wars test this destructive might
Speaker 3: against one of the few areas of the planet that
Speaker 3: hadn't been made amenable to capitalism. Many of them remain
Speaker 3: unexploded in the mountains. Certainly the physical geography of the
Speaker 3: Dallienne posted a challenge, but I would argue that the
Speaker 3: imaginative geography of the gap which is a greater impediment
Speaker 3: to travelers. In Spanish they call it the top on
Speaker 3: the Stopper. Local legend has it that the Spanish conquistado,
Speaker 3: one of the first to take his last breaths in
Speaker 3: the waters of Dallienne. Rivers carved to phrase into the rock,
Speaker 3: which is endured long after he expired. When you go
Speaker 3: to the dalli Ennes and trust yourself to Mary, for
Speaker 3: in her hands of the entrance and he gods the exit,
Speaker 3: it doesn't sound that different to the things I heard
Speaker 3: from migrants and in the modern day they'll tell you
Speaker 3: about the horrific tiktoks they saw before they enter the gap,
Speaker 3: and the decaying remains fellow travelers they saw as they
Speaker 3: passed through. Media reports in a Gap consistently referred to
Speaker 3: it as a nomad's land, but of course it's very
Speaker 3: much someone's land, the land of the indigenous people who
Speaker 3: have been here long before countries, borders or reporters. While
Speaker 3: it may have remained hostile to appolism in the state,
Speaker 3: and it can be deadly for unexperienced travelers. It's supported
Speaker 3: life for thousands of years. And a way to Bahjigito,
Speaker 3: I was reminded of just how comfortable my hosts were
Speaker 3: in a place where I felt so out of place.
Speaker 3: So as we were coming, we got caught in a
Speaker 3: huge range storm, just absolutely bucketing it down suddenly and
Speaker 3: pulled in to a little sort of or just a
Speaker 3: flat area of might really. I helped out to the
Speaker 3: boat and next thing I know, our boat guide ran
Speaker 3: into jungle, chopped some huge palm leaves down and brought
Speaker 3: them back to me to cover me in my bag. Well,
Speaker 3: the umber might have preserved their comfort and culture. It's
Speaker 3: undeniable that migrat should have made a huge economic impact.
Speaker 3: And fifty nine migrants left on one of the days
Speaker 3: I was able to get numbers from Senaflunt. Each of
Speaker 3: them paid twenty five dollars for pedagua, about ten dollars
Speaker 3: for food and lodging, and maybe Wi Fi and pread
Speaker 3: a few bucks more for clean clothes or a pair
Speaker 3: of off bran crops to let their feet heel from
Speaker 3: three days have been constantly wet. At a conservative estimate,
Speaker 3: that's a little more than thirty three thousand per day
Speaker 3: raughly the GDP per capita of Panama. That's a lot
Speaker 3: of money down here, especially for community which has been
Speaker 3: alienated and exploited for solo. Using this money, people have
Speaker 3: been closed the bottom floors of their homes to provide
Speaker 3: more space to house migrants. All around the village, they're
Speaker 3: building better homes. Some of them have satellite internet now
Speaker 3: or Starlink or bigger and more reliable generators. This money
Speaker 3: has been spread around the Amberak communities in the area,
Speaker 3: and every morning each of them sent pedaguas to transport
Speaker 3: the migrants, as almost sixty a needed every day. Rolling
Speaker 3: out of Madaganti at five in the morning as almost
Speaker 3: the entire adult male population of the village joined us
Speaker 3: in a huge flatilla of two stroke smoke dugout canoes
Speaker 3: and the morning mists still sat in the river was
Speaker 3: an incredible experience and this is doubtless an industry for
Speaker 3: the whole area.
Speaker 16: Now.
Speaker 3: If Molino Majorcas ever successfully stops migration here, it will
Speaker 3: be a massive economic detriment to the people, already marginalized
Speaker 3: for centuries. But despite the economic benefits, the people of
Speaker 3: Maragante doesn't seem to want to become like Bahajiguito. On
Speaker 3: our last day there, as we set off back towards
Speaker 3: the dirt road to the borders, here we saw that
Speaker 3: they were building little cabins outside of town. These they
Speaker 3: said were for the migrants. They wanted the migrants to
Speaker 3: be safe and their community to stay the same. They
Speaker 3: might not be able to sell meals to the migrants
Speaker 3: this way, or charge and for Wi Fi or phone charging,
Speaker 3: but they will be able to live a little more peacefully.
Speaker 3: Yamba have gone out of their way to ensure migrant safety.
Speaker 3: They're the ones who mandate life jackets, and the ones
Speaker 3: who build a house for doctors, and they're the ones
Speaker 3: who send free boats for women and children. Of course
Speaker 3: they have an economic incentive to do this, but there
Speaker 3: nearly a week living with them, I didn't hear them
Speaker 3: bad mouth for migrants, and nor did I hear the
Speaker 3: migrants complain about the way they were treated in the
Speaker 3: village of barj Juquito. But before they get to the
Speaker 3: village of Barjuquito, migrants aren't safe, and if you ask them,
Speaker 3: they'll tell you it's indigenous people who are robbing and
Speaker 3: threatening them. Deeper into the jungle. Undoubtedly, robbery, sexual assault
Speaker 3: a murderer not uncommon. In the Daddy and Gap. You
Speaker 3: can hear anecdotes of these on a daily basis in
Speaker 3: ba Juquito, and some of the stories I heard and
Speaker 3: things I saw are among the most horrific experiences I've
Speaker 3: had in years of reporting on pretty terrible things. I
Speaker 3: haven't included a great many of them here because I
Speaker 3: think it's hard for people to meaningfully consent in those
Speaker 3: kinds of circumstances. But yesterday you heard about the human
Speaker 3: remains that almost everyone featured in this series had to
Speaker 3: walk past. This is a problem that's getting worse, not better.
Speaker 3: In just one week in February, medisanten Fontierre, the NGO
Speaker 3: that Americans called Doctors without Borders, treated one hundred and
Speaker 3: thirteen people, including nine children, after they were sexually assaulted
Speaker 3: by criminal groups in a Darienne. This number is close
Speaker 3: to one hundred and twenty people treated during the whole
Speaker 3: of January. These figures are double the monthly average tree
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty three, when six hundred and seventy six
Speaker 3: people were treated for the whole year. As you heard before,
Speaker 3: this is a problem that people in the community sometimes acknowledge,
Speaker 3: and as a village leader mentioned, it's one that could
Speaker 3: be solved as the state would live up to its
Speaker 3: obligation to protect migrants within its borders. The leader also
Speaker 3: shares me that the community has its own punishment mechanisms.
Speaker 1: The place of punishment is the stocks. Three days ago,
Speaker 1: someone behaved very badly and we had to put them
Speaker 1: in the stocks. The man who mistreats women, we also
Speaker 1: put in the stocks. The woman who gossips, we also
Speaker 1: put her in the stocks.
Speaker 3: What she's talking about here is stocks in the old
Speaker 3: fashioned sense, not in the Wall Street bet sense. We
Speaker 3: actually saw someone chatting them one day with their ankles
Speaker 3: locked in place. We didn't ask what they did, how
Speaker 3: long they were there, as it seems difficult again to
Speaker 3: consent to an interview when you're literally pinned in place.
Speaker 3: But this kind of punishment comes from the community, not
Speaker 3: the stick. Aside from these punishments, the community hasn't done
Speaker 3: much to stop things happening in the jungle, and I'm
Speaker 3: not sure if it's really able to. They're Panamanian, they say,
Speaker 3: in the States responsible for the safety of migrants when
Speaker 3: it's borders, and while it does send center front patrols
Speaker 3: into jungle. The state doesn't appear to be doing much
Speaker 3: protect migrants of sexual assault, robbery or murder. Early this year,
Speaker 3: the state did take decisive action to eject Made Saint
Speaker 3: san Fentier after not reviewing their permission to work in
Speaker 3: the Darienne. This is quite a challenging permission to obtain,
Speaker 3: even as a solo journalist. It took months for me
Speaker 3: to get mine, forcing me to rebook my flight several times.
Speaker 3: I had various explanations for why MSF were not allowed
Speaker 3: to keep working. I couldn't get an official response, but
Speaker 3: it's probably worth noting that they published a report headlined
Speaker 3: lack of action, she's sharp rise in sexual violence on
Speaker 3: people transiting the dari Enne Gap on the twenty ninth
Speaker 3: of February, and they refused permission to remain in the
Speaker 3: region in the first week of March. MSF was allowed
Speaker 3: to return in October of this year and wouldn't comment
Speaker 3: further than the following statement, which they emailed me in
Speaker 3: mid October. In October of twenty twenty four, MSF resumed
Speaker 3: medical and humanitarian activities at Lahas Blanca's migration Reception center,
Speaker 3: located at the edge of the dai in jungle. After
Speaker 3: Panamanian authorities approved a three month medical intervention. MSF welcomes
Speaker 3: its decision and advocates to collaborate closely with Panama's Ministry
Speaker 3: of Health to provide comprehensive medical care to migrants crossing
Speaker 3: this route, as well as to the local population of
Speaker 3: the area. Right now, UNICEF med Saint Dumont Corporate and
Speaker 3: Espanola and the Red Cross are helping migrants in Bauciquito.
Speaker 3: UNICEF in salt showers and toilets, Global Brigades in unifests
Speaker 3: provided taps and drinking water, and the medical endeos provide healthcare,
Speaker 3: which is fighting saving lives and providing survivors of sexual
Speaker 3: assault with medical care in a seventy two hour window
Speaker 3: where it can be most beneficial. It's worth noting that
Speaker 3: most migrants too are sexually assaulted won't stay depressed charges.
Speaker 3: I know of one case of sexual assault of a
Speaker 3: child while I was there, but the family wanted to
Speaker 3: continue their journey and so the charges won't be pressed.
Speaker 3: This makes it very hard to ascertain how many cases
Speaker 3: a sexual assault there are in a dai and every year,
Speaker 3: aside from through medical reports from NGOs, and those only
Speaker 3: include the people who make it to ba alahas blancats.
Speaker 3: The numbers are clearly high, and it's a fear that
Speaker 3: many migrants a articulated to me. In the jungle, they're
Speaker 3: their most vulnerable, they said. Most people robbed, they tell me,
Speaker 3: held by armed attackers carrying guns and machetes. But once
Speaker 3: a migrants set foot in Baju Jiqito, they're momentarily safe
Speaker 3: from rory and assault. For the first time in days.
Speaker 3: They can sleep without worry being attacked or washed away,
Speaker 3: and the rest of their journeys north they'll face set
Speaker 3: threat again, but that's not what's on their mind. When
Speaker 3: they enter town. All they want is a cold drink
Speaker 3: and a warm meal and a chance to rest their
Speaker 3: aching feet. It's the chance that they have thanks to
Speaker 3: the Ambra people who receive them there. And I want
Speaker 3: to end with Buono and his reflection on the suffering
Speaker 3: people endure on their way to eat rice and plantain
Speaker 3: in his little front room cafe.
Speaker 13: Truly, the migrants on this route are not here because
Speaker 13: they want to be. They are here because the economy
Speaker 13: and their countries is terrible or something. Everything is going
Speaker 13: badly on their countries. How can we mistreat them knowing
Speaker 13: that we won't not us never. This is a belief
Speaker 13: that we have. We are all children of God. God
Speaker 13: made the world and humanity, and we are not that different.
Speaker 13: We are all brothers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the journey is dangerous, but what can we do.
Speaker 2: We can't stay in a country where the economy is
Speaker 2: getting worse and worse. With a salary of three dollars
Speaker 2: a month, you can't survive. Like my friend said, if
Speaker 2: you have a job in other countries, maybe you can
Speaker 2: invest some money. But where are you going to get
Speaker 2: the money to invest? If before you had a salary
Speaker 2: that fed you paid for your car, your house and
Speaker 2: your children to enjoy it all with. And now you
Speaker 2: can't even afford to put gas in the car. So
Speaker 2: it's true. Yeah, the darien is dangerous, but nothing is impossible.
Speaker 2: We walk hand in hand with God and with the
Speaker 2: faith that we will get there. But that doesn't mean
Speaker 2: it isn't difficult. But I'll say it again, it's not impossible.
Speaker 2: You suffer, you cry, you go hungry cold, but thank
Speaker 2: God we made it through.
Speaker 3: Put around the Toquesa River, the jungle rumbles quat as
Speaker 3: you pass by on your boat, insects, frogs, and birds
Speaker 3: all combined to make a sort of deep throbbing that
Speaker 3: emanates from the darkness between the trees. It seems at
Speaker 3: wants to be calling you in and warning you to
Speaker 3: stay away. I've been in the jungle before, in the
Speaker 3: Rwanda Congo borderlands and in Venezuela, but I've never really
Speaker 3: felt the sense of foreboding I did as we rode
Speaker 3: down the river, protected only by our hollow log, looking
Speaker 3: into the triple canopy forest, and knowing that if I walked
Speaker 3: long enough in the shadows, I'd be confronted with the
Speaker 3: remains of people I might have interviewed if it hadn't
Speaker 3: been for a rolled ankle, a slippery rock, or a
Speaker 3: desperate sip of water. To understand what drives people to
Speaker 3: enter the jungle with their children and their dreams, I
Speaker 3: think we also have to understand what drives them to
Speaker 3: leave wherever they're living. And that's what I want to
Speaker 3: talk about today. The story of migrants crossing the Daddy
Speaker 3: and Gap is an American one. It's impossible to disentangle
Speaker 3: the people making this dangerous journey from the history of
Speaker 3: support for dictatorship sanctions, an imperial plunder that ties to
Speaker 3: the United States to its American brothers and sisters in
Speaker 3: the South. Sometimes I play a game with myself at
Speaker 3: the border where I try and meet people from all
Speaker 3: the countries named in Washington bullets in a single day.
Speaker 3: Since Biden bungled the Afghanistan withdrawal, it's become a lot easier,
Speaker 3: but Tibet can be hard. For two hundred years since
Speaker 3: President Monroe gave his State of the Union address in
Speaker 3: December eighteen twenty three, the US has seen the Western
Speaker 3: hemisphere is its sphere of influence. While is opposed old
Speaker 3: fashioned colonialism, it has used less avert methods of control,
Speaker 3: as well as avert military force across the hemisphere. For
Speaker 3: much of the last century, it supported and installed dictators
Speaker 3: who would prevent what it saw as a threat of
Speaker 3: state socialism in its sphere of influence, and allowed them
Speaker 3: to create economic and political climates that were unsurvivable for
Speaker 3: the majority and extremely profitable for US based corporations. The
Speaker 3: direct result of this policy has been economic insecurity, political instability,
Speaker 3: and state violence across South and Central America, resulting in
Speaker 3: people making the very natural humor decision to flee to
Speaker 3: somewhere safer. As in so many other empires, they've made
Speaker 3: the choice to lead a destabilized colonial periphery. Safety and
Speaker 3: stability in the metropol for more than a century. Money
Speaker 3: and good to be able to travel seamlessly up and
Speaker 3: down the continent, but people have not. The bananaread for
Speaker 3: breakfast this morning made the journey in a few days,
Speaker 3: but people take months, if not years, pay thousands of dollars,
Speaker 3: climb mountains, forded rivers, and risk their lives on trains
Speaker 3: and buses that cost a lot more than the flights
Speaker 3: I took to Panama, but offer considerably less comfort and safety.
Speaker 3: As climate change has have greater impacts, more and more
Speaker 3: people are forced to leave their homes of their livelihoods
Speaker 3: become less sustainable. The Guna, the indigenous people of the
Speaker 3: Panamanian coast in an area called Guna Yala, are having
Speaker 3: to withdraw from some of their islands because of sea
Speaker 3: level rise. Right now, agriculture across the world is increasingly
Speaker 3: threatened by extreme weather and rising temperatures, and Orotionans are
Speaker 3: less able to sustain life than they once were due
Speaker 3: to pollution and overfishing, forced to leave their homes as
Speaker 3: people have been for millennia by weather patterns changing people
Speaker 3: head to places that have a want caused much of
Speaker 3: the ear issue, and tried to insulate themselves from its consequences.
Speaker 3: Their American dreams are modest to overcome the crippling low paid.
Speaker 3: They received a home to bring their children up in
Speaker 3: a place where they have a good chance of surviving
Speaker 3: their twenties, to work and get paid enough to get by.
Speaker 3: They want to be able to protest and not get
Speaker 3: a shot, and to look forward to the future, not
Speaker 3: fear it. These aren't guaranteed in the USA, and as
Speaker 3: many of you listening will know, it can be hard
Speaker 3: for us to make ends meet here as well. But
Speaker 3: despite what you see on social and legacy media, things
Speaker 3: are unlikely to become as bad here as they are
Speaker 3: in Venezuela, Cameroon or Iran anytime soon. I've lived in Venezuela,
Speaker 3: specifically in the formerly Javista neighborhood of La Pastora in Caracas,
Speaker 3: and I've seen how hard it is for my friends
Speaker 3: who still live there, even for people with no other disadvantages,
Speaker 3: making rent and feeding your family can be a challenge.
Speaker 3: That's part of why Venezuelan people make up the majority
Speaker 3: of the folks. I met men Daddy in so much
Speaker 3: so that I'd slip back into using Venezuelan slang in Spanish,
Speaker 3: and after a few days of seeing the same people
Speaker 3: engaging in the kind of friendly mockery and banter that
Speaker 3: I remember well from Caracas, mostly the super form of
Speaker 3: asking them why they crossed Daddy and gap in Man
Speaker 3: United shirts or worse yet, in a Chelsea shit. It's
Speaker 3: important to steal moments of humor in these difficult times,
Speaker 3: to laugh a little among all the suffering, and that's
Speaker 3: something people in Venezuela have done very well for a
Speaker 3: very long time. But despite their humor, I could tell
Speaker 3: the journey had a serious impact on the people I
Speaker 3: spoke to.
Speaker 13: You have to go through a lot, a lot of jungle,
Speaker 13: a lot of hills. There are people, there are dead
Speaker 13: people on the road, so it's something you cannot really explain.
Speaker 13: It's complicated because everything can be explained in a fashion,
Speaker 13: but it's not the same as living it. It's insanity
Speaker 13: three four days with that food and nothing. One thing
Speaker 13: is to live it. Explaining it, talking about it. That's different.
Speaker 13: It's hard to put into words.
Speaker 3: This intere is. When I conducted with one group of
Speaker 3: Venezuelan migrants with my voice recorder in the chest pocket
Speaker 3: of my shirt and whatever bags let me carry in
Speaker 3: my hands, we walked it on the last part of
Speaker 3: the trail, discussing what they'd seen. For a while, we
Speaker 3: joked a little. One guy had crossed it at man
Speaker 3: United Ship. I told him about the team and the
Speaker 3: universe was dislike non Menu fans have for Menu fans.
Speaker 3: Then after a while they opened up more about their
Speaker 3: experiences they had. They said, seen deputies and they couldn't
Speaker 3: stop thinking about what happened if they'd fallen, and they
Speaker 3: wanted to know how when if the dead people's family
Speaker 3: would ever find out.
Speaker 17: The family waits for that person to come out to
Speaker 17: hear that they made it, because if not, who's going
Speaker 17: to let you know? There's no signal and nobody's going
Speaker 17: to grab the body, and you're not going to carry
Speaker 17: them out. The person stays there and eventually years and
Speaker 17: years go by and the family won't know where they
Speaker 17: are or how they died. Those are the sort of
Speaker 17: things that one doesn't expect to see and it makes
Speaker 17: you just want to hurry past. Not that you wouldn't
Speaker 17: want to get the documentation from the body and deliver
Speaker 17: it and tell them how this person that passed away?
Speaker 17: But how dare you just go grabbing a dead body.
Speaker 3: Venetuinan elections were held on the twenty eighth of July
Speaker 3: this year. Venezuelan presidents have a six year term and
Speaker 3: the incumbllent de Corlas Maduro has been in office since
Speaker 3: twenty thirty. And let the Venezuelan people I met introduce
Speaker 3: themselves and explain the result of the election. Now there's
Speaker 3: a bit of background noise here, but that's because we
Speaker 3: were walking on the trails. And it's hard to Avoidezuela.
Speaker 2: I am coming from Venezuela, migrating through the jungle for
Speaker 2: a better future for me and my children. I'll tell
Speaker 2: you it's hard, but it's not impossible. No, that was
Speaker 2: electoral fraud. And I tell you what, one day, you
Speaker 2: just have to leave.
Speaker 3: Moduro was opposed by Ajuardo Gonzalez, an obviously candidate who
Speaker 3: represented a wide coalition increating groups on the left and right.
Speaker 3: While Maduro might have support among Western socialists and even communists.
Speaker 3: The actual Venezuelan Communist Party's youth organization formed part of
Speaker 3: the Popular Democratic Front that opposed him. Despite poul watchers
Speaker 3: telling a massive victory for the opposition, Moduro controls the
Speaker 3: National Lecture Council, I proclaimed himself the victor. People protested,
Speaker 3: and Moduro responded with bullets. Gonzales fled to the Dutch
Speaker 3: and then the Spanish embassy, and later claimed asylum in Spain,
Speaker 3: where his family lived. But for regular working class Venezuelan's
Speaker 3: there's no option to hop on a flight to safety. Instead,
Speaker 3: they have to begin the long walk north. As many
Speaker 3: Venezuelans I spoke to told me, in addition to the
Speaker 3: electoral fraud, Venezuela is undergoing an economic collapse. At least
Speaker 3: an the Chavis. They said most people could eat. When
Speaker 3: I lived in La Pastora, I was able to access
Speaker 3: medical care from Cuban doctors. Now they say things have
Speaker 3: become unsurvival.
Speaker 15: Garlindo, So you're Venezuela monte pero. When Jake Venezuela.
Speaker 13: Well, I would say that Venezuela, you know, yeah, you
Speaker 13: can live, but not on a minimum wage. I would
Speaker 13: say that, for example, working independently in an independent business.
Speaker 13: Maybe you can live good, but working and surviving for
Speaker 13: a minimum wage, no, the truth is that it doesn't work,
Speaker 13: and that's serious. Things are still bad with the new
Speaker 13: elections and the new government. Everything is ugly.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 13: The streets of Caracas are full of protests. Every day.
Speaker 13: People went out to protest. Sometimes they shoot people. The
Speaker 13: government mistreats people. But if you can live with it,
Speaker 13: and you can live with it it's ugly. Well, that
Speaker 13: is why we left there for a better future, and
Speaker 13: we'll keep moving onward onward.
Speaker 3: This group were young men traveling in advance to their families,
Speaker 3: hoping to end some money, save it up, and send
Speaker 3: it home. They knew what they were getting into when
Speaker 3: they go to the USA. The migrants through to end
Speaker 3: it paid. I might struggle to make ends meet, but
Speaker 3: they still thought it was better than staying home and
Speaker 3: watching your children's future disappear.
Speaker 17: If you don't have papers, you don't have a work permit,
Speaker 17: you have to work for it. They want to pay you,
Speaker 17: not for what you demand or anything.
Speaker 3: I met lots of Venezuelan families with children who had
Speaker 3: different illnesses or disabilities. Things they couldn't obtain or afford
Speaker 3: treatment for In Venezuela, they were traveling to the US
Speaker 3: in the hopes of finding a better future for their kids,
Speaker 3: or any future at all. I met young men who
Speaker 3: left their children behind but carried the children of strangers,
Speaker 3: even those with whom they didn't share a language. Christian,
Speaker 3: who he heard from earlier, showed me how he'd carried
Speaker 3: someone else's child on his shoulders until he fell and
Speaker 3: hurt his knee. We all help.
Speaker 13: I put little children up here on my shoulders to
Speaker 13: carry them, but it isn't easy.
Speaker 3: In the jungle, they'd formed chains using their arms to
Speaker 3: cross rivers and carried little children on those who couldn't swim.
Speaker 3: In Barjiquito, sera group of men from Angola, receiving hugs
Speaker 3: from Venezuela and women they'd helped in the jungle without
Speaker 3: the help of the Angolans, said that children wouldn't have
Speaker 3: made it. One slip or a loss of grip, they
Speaker 3: told me, would be fatal, and the remains of those
Speaker 3: who had done just that served as a grisly reminder. Later,
Speaker 3: little boys maybe eight to ten years old gleefully recounted
Speaker 3: seeing a dead body on which the head had quote
Speaker 3: exploded while their parents winked. In recollection, I wanted to
Speaker 3: understand a bit more of what they were fleeing. That
Speaker 3: made it worth getting through all this.
Speaker 15: You're dan Venezuela.
Speaker 18: Well, I left Venezuela because I worked in fishing. But
Speaker 18: right now, in Venezuela, despite the fact that it is
Speaker 18: a country rich and oil, there's not enough gasoline for
Speaker 18: the fishermen to go fishing. And since I did not
Speaker 18: have the ability to even buy basic things such as food,
Speaker 18: the situation was, well, it was a little complicated. I
Speaker 18: had to immigrate. I had nothing else to do. They
Speaker 18: didn't rob me, well, they were going to rob me
Speaker 18: because I didn't have anything to steal. We passed by
Speaker 18: and the group that was behind us got robbed. They
Speaker 18: raped women in that group.
Speaker 3: Almost every Venezuelan migroan I spect to share a similar story.
Speaker 3: One said he'd installed security cameras, but nobody could afford
Speaker 3: them now, as they had to choose between rent and
Speaker 3: groceries or medical procedures that they needed but couldn't afford.
Speaker 3: Overwhelmingly they said the same thing. No aifulturo, there's no future.
Speaker 3: One group said to me that they couldn't wait for
Speaker 3: their country to become like Cuba, as decades of embargos
Speaker 3: took their toll on the population. But others reminded me
Speaker 3: in them that Lisa Cubans seemed to have doctors. Venezuela
Speaker 3: has an eighty percent poverty right now. Though it sits
Speaker 3: on one of the largest oil reserves of any country
Speaker 3: on Earth. It's been plagued by planmmeting oil prices in
Speaker 3: the years of hyperinflation, which got so bad at one
Speaker 3: point the shots stopped putting price tags on things and
Speaker 3: relied on staff to give up to the minute prices. Today,
Speaker 3: alongside a regime that lacks legitimacy, a state that readily
Speaker 3: uses horrific violence against his people, an election that was
Speaker 3: essentially ignored, Venezuelans must also deal with shortages of basic goods, poverty,
Speaker 3: and malnutrition. And like Cubans who have a relatively good
Speaker 3: political lobby in the USA, Venezuelan's coming to the USA
Speaker 3: do not benefit from special laws. Cubans under the Cuban
Speaker 3: Adjustment Act have a part of the citizenship and permanence
Speaker 3: once they set foot on US soil. Venezuelans do not.
Speaker 3: They're covered by something called a temporary protected status, but
Speaker 3: this does not afford them much in the way of stability,
Speaker 3: protection or a secure future. Erekapinhidro of Valatolado, an incredible organization,
Speaker 3: does valuable work with migrant legal aid advocacy and humanitarian relief,
Speaker 3: explaining just how temporary a TPS is.
Speaker 16: So temporary protected status is it's basically a form of
Speaker 16: protecting individuals who are already in the United States when
Speaker 16: their countries have experienced a natural disaster, they are in war,
Speaker 16: there's some kind of situation going on that makes it
Speaker 16: difficult for them to return, and so temporary protected status
Speaker 16: was first created in nineteen ninety and the first individuals
Speaker 16: who receive the status we're from El Salvador. And since then,
Speaker 16: I think there's been a few dozen countries that have
Speaker 16: been designated. But basically the way it works is they
Speaker 16: designate a country and so if you were in the
Speaker 16: United States before that designation date, you can apply for
Speaker 16: temporary protected status within you know, a designated time period,
Speaker 16: and you get a work permit. It's valid for six,
Speaker 16: twelve or eighteen months, and then two months before it expires.
Speaker 16: The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has to
Speaker 16: say whether or not they're going to reauthorize GPS. So
Speaker 16: there's like eight hundred and sixty thousand people in the
Speaker 16: US who have temporary protected status and it's not a
Speaker 16: path of citizenship. So basically people are just in limbo
Speaker 16: sometimes for decades, you know. They just have to reapply
Speaker 16: for this permit every eighteen months. So I have quite
Speaker 16: a few salvador and friends who in the United States
Speaker 16: since the nineties. They have kids, some of them acquirrent
Speaker 16: kids who are US citizen and they can't become permanent
Speaker 16: residents or have a pass of citizenship didn't. Most they
Speaker 16: leave the country and either come back with another type
Speaker 16: of parole or apply through a consulate, which many of
Speaker 16: them are just not willing to take that risk.
Speaker 3: What makes things even more complicated for the Venezuelans is
Speaker 3: that many of them are traveling without documents. It costs
Speaker 3: three hundred bucks to get a passport, they told me,
Speaker 3: and the weight's considerable. This makes their journeys even harder
Speaker 3: as every country the enter has to approve them to
Speaker 3: or without a passport, getting a visa, they said, would
Speaker 3: be nearly impossible, and just trying might result in the
Speaker 3: government coming after them. Such things, they said, are reserved
Speaker 3: for the wealthier citizens, people like Gonzales, who's asylum claim
Speaker 3: and stays at the Dutch and Spanish embassies, and who's
Speaker 3: right to join his family in exile, are all luxuries
Speaker 3: that most of his country people can't expect. It's dead.
Speaker 3: Most Venezualians must ride basses through Columbia, then walk north
Speaker 3: through the jungle buses, stir away on trains, or walk
Speaker 3: again all the way to the border. They all lamented
Speaker 3: to Dadian crossing, and so they wouldn't advise it without
Speaker 3: other options. They all made it anyway. Community. See, they don't.
Speaker 17: Because unfortunately we don't have much in our country. You
Speaker 17: don't have another option when you're dying of hunger and
Speaker 17: you don't have a future. You can't even study. So yeah,
Speaker 17: it's worth it.
Speaker 3: The economic situation is dire in Venezuela. Many families can't
Speaker 3: make ends me their currency is almost worth us, and
Speaker 3: the majorid government seems to have successfully installed itself for
Speaker 3: the foreseeable future. This will mean a continuation of embargoes
Speaker 3: and sanctions, which will harm the people more than the regime. Sadly,
Speaker 3: though economic hardships not a criteria for which one could
Speaker 3: be granted asylum in the USA.
Speaker 16: His Erica again, so severe economic deprivation can be persecution
Speaker 16: if it's linked to one of the other protected grounds,
Speaker 16: so race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a
Speaker 16: particular social group.
Speaker 3: So, for example, if.
Speaker 16: Someone participated in anti Moduro political activity and then we're
Speaker 16: blocked from getting a job or just denied economic opportunities
Speaker 16: to the point where they're starving, economic deprivation could count
Speaker 16: as persecution, but it's a very difficult case to make
Speaker 16: in the United States. In Mexico, you can get protection
Speaker 16: based on generalized conditions in your country, and so you know,
Speaker 16: Venezuelans tweeing economic collapse or even Central Americans fleeing extreme
Speaker 16: violence have a much easier time beating protection in Mexico
Speaker 16: than they would in the United States because of that
Speaker 16: kind of extra category of protection in Mexico. The issue
Speaker 16: with Mexico is just the very limited capacity of this
Speaker 16: asylum system overall, and the very dangerous conditions in which
Speaker 16: people are forced to wait while their cases are adjudicated.
Speaker 3: Going forward from the Dadian, they'll face an enormously difficult journey.
Speaker 3: The US does have a program for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians,
Speaker 3: and Nicaraguans, then in theory allows them to apply, be
Speaker 3: pre approved and fly straight to the USA, but it's
Speaker 3: so delayed and broken. It's just not an option for
Speaker 3: people who barely have enough money for food, let learn
Speaker 3: a plane ticket there.
Speaker 16: HMV program is for cubanations, nick Garaguins, Venezuelans who have
Speaker 16: not crossed into Panama or Mexico in the past few years.
Speaker 16: You do not qualify who've done that or have not
Speaker 16: been interdeed at see if they're Haitian or Cuban. You
Speaker 16: have to have a sponsor in the United States who
Speaker 16: have some kind of legal status. You have to be
Speaker 16: able to pay for the flight, you have to have
Speaker 16: a passport, and you have to be able to wait
Speaker 16: forever long it takes for your application to be approved.
Speaker 16: And the Department of Homeland Security just announced that they
Speaker 16: are not renewing parole for people who are already in
Speaker 16: the United States. So people from those four countries who
Speaker 16: were in the US had up to two years of
Speaker 16: humanitarian parole which is not being renewed, so they either
Speaker 16: would need to apply for something else, or go back
Speaker 16: to their country, or just, I guess, stay in the
Speaker 16: United States undocumented until their cody.
Speaker 3: Had the same orly hundreds of times that week, sometimes
Speaker 3: off mike and sometimes on mike, sometimes holding my voice
Speaker 3: recorder and notebook, sometimes just sitting on the ground or
Speaker 3: walking on the trail or enjoying a bottle of cold
Speaker 3: water in Bahjigito, Crippling poverty and bad governance in their
Speaker 3: country made it difficult to see a future there. They
Speaker 3: wanted better for their children, so they brought them across
Speaker 3: the mountains and risked their lives in the jungle to
Speaker 3: give them a chance in life. I prepared a lot
Speaker 3: for this trip, and I tried to search for everything
Speaker 3: had my experience on the internet. But one thing I
Speaker 3: really didn't expect to learn in the jungle is just
Speaker 3: how much it's possible for parents to love their kids.
Speaker 3: I watched exhausted mothers hoist their babies onto their shoulders
Speaker 3: to keep walking, and somehow come up with a story
Speaker 3: that made the whole thing an adventure, not a tragedy,
Speaker 3: then did the same thing again the next day without
Speaker 3: sleeping or eating. I watched fathers carefully lay out their
Speaker 3: sleeping mac so the children could rest while they tried
Speaker 3: to do the same on the dirt or hardwood floors
Speaker 3: every day as their savings grew lower and they outlooked
Speaker 3: more bleak, watch parents try to smile for their kids.
Speaker 3: The sacrifices I saw them make, starving for days to
Speaker 3: give their kids something to eat, or spending their last
Speaker 3: remaining dollar on clean clothes for their kids while they
Speaker 3: walked barefoo and couldn't afford shoes really brought home for
Speaker 3: me the desire these families had for better future and
Speaker 3: the sacrifices they're willing to make for one. Another week later,
Speaker 3: it's still hard for me to accept that I'm home
Speaker 3: safely and they're still in as much danger, if not more.
Speaker 11: Our walk lasted five days. Thank god I was always
Speaker 11: strong enough and able to get back up when I fell,
Speaker 11: because if I fell and my children had to see
Speaker 11: me fall and not get up, imagine how bad that
Speaker 11: would be. My children want more in the future, but
Speaker 11: they despaired in the jungle. They said, tell me, mommy,
Speaker 11: when are we going to get there? Mommy? What could
Speaker 11: I say to them? My dear, We have to have
Speaker 11: patience because we have to make the crossing. We have
Speaker 11: to move forward. If not, we can't get out of here.
Speaker 3: Even among such difficult times, the Venezuelans always greeted me
Speaker 3: with a laugh and a smile, especially after a few
Speaker 3: days of running into each other. When I used venezuhaleen
Speaker 3: slang or my accents slowly reverted to the Spanish and
Speaker 3: I learned in Karrakas nearly two decades ago, they'd laugh
Speaker 3: at me, as they noted at that time, Karrakas had
Speaker 3: attracted plenty of migrants to his own. Some of them,
Speaker 3: like me, didn't stay, but we came to We wanted
Speaker 3: to see a revolution in the flesh, and they welcomed us.
Speaker 3: For a while in Caracas, I lived in a social
Speaker 3: center in La Pastora. I didn't pay rent, but there
Speaker 3: was a small, empty room and no one seemed to mind.
Speaker 3: Every day I talked to strangers, big friends, and try
Speaker 3: and learn something new. The situation there wasn't ideal. For
Speaker 3: one thing, we didn't really have showers, and also I
Speaker 3: got robbed at gunpoint. So for most of my time
Speaker 3: in the country, I stayed with the Chilean family i'd met.
Speaker 3: They welcomed me a more or less total stranger, into
Speaker 3: their homes and lives. In the evenings, we spent hours
Speaker 3: talking and they'd tell me stories about how they'd suffered
Speaker 3: under Pinochet, the hopes they'd had for their country, and
Speaker 3: how they'd had to flee to Krakas tens of thousands
Speaker 3: of their fellow Chileans. They introduced me to Victor Hara
Speaker 3: and Joy Pan. I introduced them to chumber Wamba, and
Speaker 3: we shared an affection for George Orwell. The song you
Speaker 3: heard after the adverts was not in fact Chumberwamba, but
Speaker 3: Chilean left his folk musician, Victor Haa. He's playing Eldreto
Speaker 3: de vi videnpaz the right to live in Peace in English,
Speaker 3: and it's one of his most famous songs. It confronts
Speaker 3: the US War in Vietnam. Later, after haw I was
Speaker 3: tortured and murdered by the Pinochet regime, it became an
Speaker 3: anthem of protest in the country. Parah and his friend
Speaker 3: Pabu and No Ruda were both symbols of the cultural
Speaker 3: power of the Chilean people and the brutality of the
Speaker 3: Pinochet regime, who broke the hands he used to play
Speaker 3: his guitar before they killed him. Haah and the Rudah
Speaker 3: both moved in the same revolutionary artistic circles as my
Speaker 3: Chilean host in Venezuela. At night, they tell me stories
Speaker 3: about the time they spent together. We'd have to speak loudly,
Speaker 3: as a man who adopted me as a sort of
Speaker 3: surrogate grandson had permanent hearing damage from the torture he'd
Speaker 3: endured under the same regime. Luckily, he'd been able to
Speaker 3: flee with his wife to Venezuela, where they were welcomed.
Speaker 3: They never returned to Chile and happily lived out the
Speaker 3: rest of their lives listening to their Victor Hara records
Speaker 3: in Caracas and living the ideals that have seen them persecuted.
Speaker 3: Their kindness to me, a nineteen year old stranger with
Speaker 3: terrible Spanish and nowhere to sleep at night, reflected the
Speaker 3: kindness they'd received, and I've tried to reflect it in
Speaker 3: turn ever since.
Speaker 18: Oh A life.
Speaker 3: Oh. I never once heard any children crying in Las
Speaker 3: Blancas or Barjiquito. Well note, until the deportations took their
Speaker 3: parents away on my last day there. Most of the
Speaker 3: time the kids entertained themselves. One day in Las Blancas
Speaker 3: where migrants can wait and spend weeks or months they
Speaker 3: don't have the funds to move forward with their journey.
Speaker 3: I left my ficture while she made a call and
Speaker 3: bumped into some little children playing a game where they
Speaker 3: throw water bottle caps into half a breeze block from
Speaker 3: various distance, each of them counting how many they could land.
Speaker 3: I sat down next to them, put maricorder on the
Speaker 3: ground and asked nicely if I could join them. That's
Speaker 3: like a tiny pit buss. One of the kids bought
Speaker 3: me a pile of bottle tops, and I chatted with
Speaker 3: them as we threw a bottle cap to the broken
Speaker 3: piece of concrete. What was it like in America? They asked.
Speaker 3: They's had a lot of questions about Africa, having probably
Speaker 3: met African kids in the casita just across the way.
Speaker 3: Do they have big buildings in Africa? Does it rain there?
Speaker 3: How long does it take to get there in a bus?
Speaker 3: Then they tested by venezuela and legitimacy by drawing me
Speaker 3: in a ripper in my notebook, and I'm asking him
Speaker 3: if I knew what it was, what I passed a test?
Speaker 3: They asked me how to say some things in English,
Speaker 3: and they showed me the toys they bought with them,
Speaker 3: which were very few. One of them had a small
Speaker 3: plastic cow of which he was very proud on avoca.
Speaker 3: After a while, they asked what I was doing, and
Speaker 3: I showed them how I record interviews, at which point
Speaker 3: they began recording themselves and each other, wildly stabbing at
Speaker 3: the buttons on my recorder, which I will admit scared
Speaker 3: the crap out of me, but I didn't have the
Speaker 3: heart to take it off. Then they stroked the fluffy
Speaker 3: WIMD protector I use on my microphone. It told me
Speaker 3: it was like a tiny teddy bear. Eventually I was
Speaker 3: able to trade my recorder for several small wooden animals
Speaker 3: I'd brought with me as gifts, which seemed to be
Speaker 3: a deal. The left all of us feelings that we
Speaker 3: come out ahead. They seemed to unbothered by the suffering
Speaker 3: around them. But Las Blancas is no place for children.
Speaker 3: They should be in school, learning the English phrases they
Speaker 3: kept repeating to me every time I saw them. But
Speaker 3: for a chance to use their English, they first had
Speaker 3: to endure month more danger and deprivation. I guess, as
Speaker 3: son some slightly hold A. Children made the journey alone
Speaker 3: or almost alone. They were accompanied by a spaniel called Channel.
Speaker 3: I saw a future while as people are characters them
Speaker 3: through the Darien Gap. But to my ANALYSI this is
Speaker 3: the first spaniel that has made the treacherous crossing.
Speaker 12: Inezuela.
Speaker 3: Like everyone else, they had terrible memories from the jungle.
Speaker 1: The truth is you have to fight a lot to
Speaker 1: be able to get out of there, because not everyone
Speaker 1: gets out of that jungle, and it's even more difficult
Speaker 1: with small children. There are times when one goes without
Speaker 1: food and it's very stressful because all around us all
Speaker 1: we saw was the jungle, and we never saw the
Speaker 1: way out. But it is complicated. The truth is that
Speaker 1: it is very hard the jungle. Well, I would really
Speaker 1: recommend that people.
Speaker 14: Never go there.
Speaker 1: All our feet are hurting, we can't walk properly. Our
Speaker 1: whole body is hurt. We went days without eating.
Speaker 3: They were traveling. They said to join their parents, and
Speaker 3: because in Venezuela they told me they were always hungry.
Speaker 3: They saw people sleeping on the streets, right, that would
Speaker 3: be their only option. One day they didn't leave.
Speaker 1: I want to see mom. I haven't seen her in
Speaker 1: three years, and I want to have my American dream to.
Speaker 14: I want to see my dad, my aunt, and my uncle.
Speaker 14: I haven't seen them for three years either.
Speaker 3: Despite the heart yet, they didn't blame their parents for leaving.
Speaker 14: We know that we made it because of them. They're
Speaker 14: the ones who sent us money for the things we need.
Speaker 14: We were able to get a few things, not everything
Speaker 14: we needed, but it's all thanks to them.
Speaker 3: The end of their interview, as I always do, I
Speaker 3: asked them if there's anything else that they wanted to share.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but our parents.
Speaker 18: We love them a lot and hope we can see
Speaker 18: them soon.
Speaker 3: Like many of the Valezuela's I spoke to, their American
Speaker 3: dreams were pretty modest for most of them, though they'll
Speaker 3: be unachievable in the current immigration system. They'll end up
Speaker 3: stuck in Mexico, in Mexico City, perhaps so further south
Speaker 3: in Tijuana or Juara's working across the border. They're lucky,
Speaker 3: but if they cried across between ports of entry, we'll
Speaker 3: get caught traveling without red string. In Mexico, there was
Speaker 3: being deported or relocated back to southern Mexico.
Speaker 16: His explaining that process, the Mexican National Guard has been
Speaker 16: detaining people who are trying across the US medical border,
Speaker 16: and they had been sending them south to Mexico City
Speaker 16: and Chiapas to Tapachula. Now there's been this huge effort
Speaker 16: to stop people from weaving, not only at the US
Speaker 16: Mexico border, but even in Mexco City. So we're seeing
Speaker 16: Mexican Immigration and National Guard doing sweeps of migrant camps,
Speaker 16: of apartment buildings, doesn't matter if the person has a
Speaker 16: CBP one appointment. Sometimes they'll just send themselves to either
Speaker 16: Chiapa's an increasingly to Basco so Viere. Mossau, which is
Speaker 16: where people are arriving in Tabasco has one shelter and
Speaker 16: I think the capacity is around two hundred and fifty
Speaker 16: three hundred people, and earlier this year they were sending
Speaker 16: twenty thousand migrants a month there and then they posted
Speaker 16: the military yips so that people can't leave.
Speaker 19: And it's very dangerous there.
Speaker 16: It's a drug tracking area, so it's you know, not
Speaker 16: only are people sleeping in the streets, but they're sleeping
Speaker 16: on the streets of some of the most dangerous cities
Speaker 16: in Mexaco. Win very few services there to help them
Speaker 16: even get their next meal.
Speaker 3: This, of course, didn't happen without the imfluence of the
Speaker 3: United States. In many ways, Joe Biden has done exactly
Speaker 3: what Donald Trump promised to do. Not only has he
Speaker 3: built more wool, he's also forced Mexico to pay for
Speaker 3: a significant amount of the US IS immigration enforcement. But
Speaker 3: when people are sent back to south of Mexico, they'll
Speaker 3: just make their way north again, only this time with
Speaker 3: fewer resources and even greater risk. They're all proud of
Speaker 3: where they're from. About half the groups I saw had
Speaker 3: Venezuelan flags and the cats or backpacks, but they're also
Speaker 3: very aware of the betrayal they get as Venezuelans and
Speaker 3: the US media and many of them made the very
Speaker 3: valid point if American is afraid of Venezuela gangs, they
Speaker 3: ought to consider how much more afraid people are in
Speaker 3: a country where they actually exist. N Solana, I'm thirteen.
Speaker 18: Please don't believe that because one person from Venezuela does crime,
Speaker 18: that all Venezuelans do crime.
Speaker 3: But at least they get it portrayed in the US media.
Speaker 3: Many African migrants don't even get that. Of course, it
Speaker 3: doesn't mean they don't know about the USA his powers
Speaker 3: in her anglophone Cameroonian group again talking about their impressions
Speaker 3: of America where they'd like to live when they arrive here.
Speaker 5: We know America is a very beautiful country, and America
Speaker 5: has human right.
Speaker 3: They care about the citizens.
Speaker 5: In fact, they care about humanity. See, I don't want
Speaker 5: to have a friend that I'm gonna stay with for
Speaker 5: the meantime.
Speaker 3: Then it gets that's great, Yeah, that helps her lot. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Do you know which city your friend lives in? She's
Speaker 3: in merry Land, Oh, Maryland?
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, So if I may asks, if you don't
Speaker 5: mind me asking, of course, what do Americans? How do
Speaker 5: they treat or how do they see immigrants?
Speaker 3: Oh, my friend, it's changing a lot. African bagaants in particular,
Speaker 3: will struggle with a lack of resources. The absence of
Speaker 3: solidarity structures an obvious anti blackness along the journey. Along
Speaker 3: with this, people they meet along the way simply lack
Speaker 3: context of their journeys, why they're leaving, what they're fleeing.
Speaker 3: Language barriers may exclude many of them from using CBP one,
Speaker 3: which is only offered English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. Less
Speaker 3: than fifteen percent of asylum cases are conducted in English,
Speaker 3: but the app ignores huge toasts of the world outside
Speaker 3: the Western hemisphere. But Jikito, I use French to speak
Speaker 3: to min who students speak English, and began to notice
Speaker 3: the complete absence of signage, and I think other as
Speaker 3: Spanish and sometimes English Creole. This is likely an issue
Speaker 3: throughout that long journeys. Here's one migrant from Angola and
Speaker 3: I should probably at this point that Angolan people tend
Speaker 3: to speak Portuguese, it's a national language, but French with
Speaker 3: the language I shared with some of them, as I
Speaker 3: don't speak Portuguese.
Speaker 10: It was too much, very complicated. Like me, I did
Speaker 10: a week in Brazil at Brazil and for Peru, Peru
Speaker 10: to nicol Klee. Then here I did. We did four days,
Speaker 10: four days walking. There are many mountains, many risks, there
Speaker 10: are many animals along the route. You have to follow
Speaker 10: the path for four days and there's no food. But
Speaker 10: we are glad to arrive today. This is the first group.
Speaker 10: There's the second, third, fourth, fifth group. They're still on
Speaker 10: the road. I'm very proud of the fact that we
Speaker 10: made it despite the suffering. But God was with us
Speaker 10: that is what is important.
Speaker 3: There are numerous instances a French speaking micro trying to
Speaker 3: approach the border near me in Santy Ses and being
Speaker 3: turned away for not having an appointment on that that's
Speaker 3: not available in the language they can understand. These language
Speaker 3: barriers might stop the migrants getting information, but they don't
Speaker 3: stop them helping one another. His powers group describing the
Speaker 3: isolation they felt, but also the kindness they experienced. Do
Speaker 3: you think people on the trip treat African people differently?
Speaker 5: Yeah, they do differently differently. They're not being communicated, They're
Speaker 5: just by themselves. They don't associate. They look at us differently.
Speaker 3: Yeah I.
Speaker 6: Had, I had someone who supported me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I saw. I saw how kind of person
Speaker 3: was because of their obvious foreignness and perceived an ability
Speaker 3: to communicate. African migrants are often targeted for crime in Mexico.
Speaker 3: Since leaving Panama, have heard from migrants who are raped, kidnapped, ransomed,
Speaker 3: and I even heard about one who was killed. Because
Speaker 3: of their difficulties accessing this CVP one app many face
Speaker 3: longer way to Mexico, which may in turn leave them
Speaker 3: open to extortion or see them decide to cross the
Speaker 3: border between ports of entry. I've met hundreds of migrants,
Speaker 3: mainly Mauritanians and Guineans, who have made this difficult choice
Speaker 3: since bidons of Silent Bank came into force. Due to
Speaker 3: the distance, African migrants also face a longer, more expensive,
Speaker 3: and more dangerous journey. His premier from Zimbabwe, describing her
Speaker 3: journey just to get to Bao Jiquito.
Speaker 12: The situation for me, it was tough. I just ran
Speaker 12: away to South Africa. In South Africa was not safe
Speaker 12: solofobia and they almost secure me and my boyfriend. Oh no,
Speaker 12: and even my big father was abusive too much because
Speaker 12: of the politics. I'm opposition part.
Speaker 20: So it was.
Speaker 12: Now even in South Africa, I was not safe at all.
Speaker 12: It was those people. They were like following me and
Speaker 12: my daughter. So I spent three months on the road
Speaker 12: coming here. I leave South Africa, I think fourth of
Speaker 12: July till now I'm in Panama. I'm still working using bases.
Speaker 3: Jesus, How you get away from Africa to America? Did
Speaker 3: you fly or take a boat?
Speaker 12: The thing is I fly from Joannespec to Brazil. Then
Speaker 12: I seek asylum in Brazil. Then I wanted to stay
Speaker 12: in Brazil, so people said no, yeah, in Brazil, you
Speaker 12: can't because of language, Yeah, Portuguese. So I start also
Speaker 12: using people's groups like you list take this pass from
Speaker 12: point A to point base. So we take a bus
Speaker 12: from Brazil to Bolivia, then from Bolivia to Peru, Peru
Speaker 12: to Equador, Colombia. Then you start working using Darien cap two.
Speaker 3: I'm here in African migrants will end up in different
Speaker 3: shelters that are more remote or have less connectivity, again
Speaker 3: making their asylum process harder. Unlike migrants from the Western Hemisphere,
Speaker 3: they might struggle to find solidarity networks even inside the
Speaker 3: USA without a significant diaspora, and many of the migrants
Speaker 3: I met in the jungle have struggled to find sponsors
Speaker 3: los Just the people I spoke to here, including Primrose
Speaker 3: and her daughter, are still looking for someone to give
Speaker 3: them a helping hand as they start their new life.
Speaker 3: We spoke a lot over the week I is there,
Speaker 3: and we've spoken most days since. It's heartbreaking for me
Speaker 3: to see her daughter going for months without education or
Speaker 3: even a safe place to sleep. I've seen photos of
Speaker 3: them sleeping on the street, They've ridden crowded buses north,
Speaker 3: and I've heard their frustrated attempts to comply with the
Speaker 3: arcane and complicated restrictions on their right to come here
Speaker 3: and ask for help. And it's been really hard since
Speaker 3: I got home to reconcile this with a national discussion
Speaker 3: that seems to see migration as a number that we
Speaker 3: have to decrease. A migrants are something other than people
Speaker 3: who want to come here for all the same reasons,
Speaker 3: iding happily and peaceably as our neighbors. Now that they've
Speaker 3: come this far, magants from outside the Western hemisphere have
Speaker 3: to keep going. They kind of even file their claims
Speaker 3: on CBP one until they make it to Tapatula, which
Speaker 3: is hundreds of dollars and thousands of kilometers from Panama.
Speaker 3: They likely don't have the funds to go back home
Speaker 3: even if they want to, and they are far more
Speaker 3: likely to be robbed or kidnapped along the way. However,
Speaker 3: their story is often not told. Reporting on the board
Speaker 3: is still largely focused on Spanish speaking migrants, with some
Speaker 3: space of Chinese or Haitians, but magots from Africa rarely
Speaker 3: get much care or attention in the media. In part,
Speaker 3: this has helped them avoid the demonization that Venezuelan migrants
Speaker 3: are all too aware of, but in part it also
Speaker 3: leads to a lack of concern for their needs. I
Speaker 3: want to end today with Gabriel from Equatorial Guinea sharing
Speaker 3: his message for Americans.
Speaker 20: Ah Aca not as Yeah, A lot of people get
Speaker 20: this confused. Africa is not a country. A lot of
Speaker 20: them think when they see you and you're black person,
Speaker 20: they say, are you African? And it's like, there are
Speaker 20: lots of countries in Africa. Kana, Nigeria, you got Guinea,
Speaker 20: you got the more Atinian people. There are loads of countries.
Speaker 20: I wish people would know.
Speaker 10: How do I say this?
Speaker 20: I wish they'd take us into account because really they
Speaker 20: don't consider us when they say Africa is a country.
Speaker 20: They don't care about us the way we care about them.
Speaker 20: And this is the way of seeing things which doesn't
Speaker 20: consider us as human, not the same as them. You
Speaker 20: understand they see us as Africans or animals something like that.
Speaker 17: M h.
Speaker 3: Yeah kid again pretty it's yell of the bat. He said,
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 6: A boy, remain I polo people.
Speaker 10: Ermato you know something?
Speaker 16: Don't have people an annouches?
Speaker 3: Can they have me?
Speaker 16: People?
Speaker 18: Only day was an.
Speaker 3: Agent said I'm an a bad man. Again, you're a logic,
Speaker 3: but it isn't. Young and yea, some of you recognize
Speaker 3: the audio that we opened this show with, and then
Speaker 3: if you weren't, it's a sample from the Fourth Declaration
Speaker 3: of the Lacandan Jungle that Manuchow used to open his
Speaker 3: shows with. It's a piece of music that's very emotive
Speaker 3: for me. Obviously, I'm a white leftist guy in my
Speaker 3: thirties who learned Spanish and decided to live in Barcelona.
Speaker 3: So I have a story about running into Manuchow once
Speaker 3: where he was busking, but that's not what I want
Speaker 3: to share today. Because I'm technology challenged, I can't seem
Speaker 3: to get my phone to download songs, but I've managed
Speaker 3: to download the same Manu Chow playlist that I ripped
Speaker 3: off a rewriteable CD when I was in high school
Speaker 3: and put it on the various headphones and garment watches
Speaker 3: that I've had of the last two decades or so.
Speaker 3: When I'm away for work, I like to run whenever
Speaker 3: I can. Obviously I wasn't just going to go for
Speaker 3: a jog straight into the Darien Gap, but once we
Speaker 3: were out of Bajajiqito, it gave me some time to
Speaker 3: run and think and process the things that I've seen,
Speaker 3: And while I do that, I listen to the same
Speaker 3: doz or so MP three files. I was listening to
Speaker 3: this song one day after I got back from Lahas Blancas,
Speaker 3: as I sweated my way up ahead in the rainforest,
Speaker 3: hoping to see a sloth. I didn't see a sloth,
Speaker 3: but it seemed like an appropriate soundtrack. Manuchoo himself as
Speaker 3: a child of refugees from Francoist Spain. He sings in
Speaker 3: French and Spanish, willoff and Galician and Portuguese, among other languages,
Speaker 3: often several of them in the same song, the product
Speaker 3: of growing up among other migrants of diverse backgrounds. I
Speaker 3: like the way he plays with language because it reminds
Speaker 3: me of the way I so often speak to my
Speaker 3: friends Spanglish, for example, or Frannglais. It's the way people
Speaker 3: talk in border regions and refugee camps, languages that don't
Speaker 3: have the support of a state or the academy, but
Speaker 3: nonetheless convey so much meaning for so many people. That song,
Speaker 3: in particular reminds me of my first time reading about
Speaker 3: Zapatismo in a tiny anarchist cafe in the West Midlands.
Speaker 3: I remember being struck as a kid from europ who
Speaker 3: would frequently drive to France or Belgium to race bikes
Speaker 3: and buy cheap beer, that the USA still maintained a
Speaker 3: fortified border with Mexico. People couldn't travel freely, but money could.
Speaker 3: With its realization and the writings in particular of Suquam
Speaker 3: and Temar course, along with my talks in Spain to
Speaker 3: old anarchists, that encouraged me to learn Spanish, which I
Speaker 3: pursued by spending months in Spain and Venezuela and learning
Speaker 3: thanks to the patient to the people around me. It
Speaker 3: was a new anarchism which came from the periphery, not
Speaker 3: only a liberal cores, which gave me my first serious politics.
Speaker 3: I traveled to Venezuela to understand the revolution there. I
Speaker 3: did a PhD to try and understand the revolution in Spain.
Speaker 3: It's all very well understanding things, but I think it's
Speaker 3: much more important to do things, and I tried to
Speaker 3: practice mutual aid as much as I can. Since I
Speaker 3: got back from the daddy En, I've loaded up a
Speaker 3: heavy backpack and carried water into the desert and spent
Speaker 3: hours trying to connect the friends I made in the
Speaker 3: jungle with services along the way. In the face of
Speaker 3: so much cruelty, it feels good to be doing something
Speaker 3: to help and carrying the water is away. I can
Speaker 3: make a material difference in a terrible situation. But in
Speaker 3: all my time reporting, I've really never felt as disempowered
Speaker 3: and helpless as I did in Last Blancas. Here at
Speaker 3: the first official migrant reception center off to Daddi Enne,
Speaker 3: the Panamanian government registers migrants. NGO's offer a few services,
Speaker 3: and the US funded process of deportation for migrants from Colombia, Cuba,
Speaker 3: Venezuela and India begins. Some of those sent to India
Speaker 3: might well be Nepalese who often travel on fake Indian passports.
Speaker 3: The little cluster of cheap tents, shipping container offices, un shelters,
Speaker 3: and barbed wire offences is where the rubber meets a
Speaker 3: road for the USA's border and migration policy, and it's
Speaker 3: heartbreaking to witness. As migrants were called out to the
Speaker 3: security office to begin the deportation process. I tried to
Speaker 3: narrate the scene into my voice recorder, but I struggled,
Speaker 3: in part because their family members asked me questions, hoping
Speaker 3: I can help. Yeah, planings on the side, But in
Speaker 3: a larger part, this was also difficult because I couldn't help,
Speaker 3: and I deeply wanted to. The best I could offer
Speaker 3: was an arm around someone's shoulder and the promise to
Speaker 3: email any one who I could think of, and asked
Speaker 3: what was going on? This guy's just sobbing. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: really tough. Some people's parents, some people's partners, some who
Speaker 3: I'll explain exactly what was happening in a moment, but
Speaker 3: first I want to explain how I got here. On
Speaker 3: the day we left Maraganti, we set off at the
Speaker 3: same time some migrants who are making their own journey
Speaker 3: to last Blankets. PA. Is carrying only myself and my
Speaker 3: fixed daddy and a pe aguero, so we're moving a
Speaker 3: lot faster than the boats full of migrants. On the
Speaker 3: way north. We passed them, they smiled and waves as
Speaker 3: we rode by. Many of them had met me the
Speaker 3: day before. All of them were ecstatic to have survived
Speaker 3: the daddy enn and be heading north. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: pretty busy stretcher ray that it's party three or four
Speaker 3: pedaguas full of migrant Hello. There are kids shogging at me.
Speaker 3: And taught them some English words yesterday and they're shouting
Speaker 3: them back to me today, which is nice.
Speaker 14: You got it.
Speaker 3: Family from Panama. They might be Enngio people or something.
Speaker 3: They lived a bill shocked to the whole scene. Here
Speaker 3: we are passing another bit agua. Now they're all waving
Speaker 3: at me. It's got to be uncomfortable. Pack that denity
Speaker 3: into a bi agua one, two, three, four, five, three, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
Speaker 3: forty fifty sixteen people. Yeah, once the boat arrived, they
Speaker 3: did embark in LaaS Blancas the next day. I was
Speaker 3: there to meet them. We're just walking into Lahas Blancas.
Speaker 3: Hectic here so it's a new shop here, and outside
Speaker 3: the shop they've made like a line of outlets to
Speaker 3: charge people. It's a dollar an hour to charge your telephone.
Speaker 3: As we go in, there are a row of like
Speaker 3: kind of sheds which represent shops. And then further in,
Speaker 3: every ngo has its own little kind of shed. They're
Speaker 3: all covered in tarps. They're like canvas and tarp tents
Speaker 3: actually here so see unief, I see, oh I am yeah,
Speaker 3: they have that sort of little tent office here. I
Speaker 3: guess see here as for example, has information psychological support,
Speaker 3: safe space for women, Wonnief has some workshops for children,
Speaker 3: and then you know they're hours. I guess, nice little
Speaker 3: chairs in there and yeah, see you can't take photographs
Speaker 3: in there, which is good. Yeah, and then it's just
Speaker 3: a crowd of people coming out. And there's also more
Speaker 3: little Mormon situation. See oh yeah, I guess see. Oh
Speaker 3: I am are supported by Church of Jesus Christ on
Speaker 3: bat Today Saints. Then the Red Cross has got a
Speaker 3: shipping container. I've been hoping last blank Cuts would be
Speaker 3: a better scene than baj Jugito, with more organized sleeping
Speaker 3: arrangements and hopefully basic necessities like clean water, food and
Speaker 3: Wi Fi provided by their numerous NGOs who work there.
Speaker 3: But if anythink it was worse in Baja Jigito. In Bajuquito,
Speaker 3: migrants were exhausted, but also ecstatic to be at the jungle.
Speaker 3: They knew they'd be moving forward the next day and
Speaker 3: for a few bucks. Again, I don't think they needed.
Speaker 3: In the village, the locals told me that if kids
Speaker 3: didn't have the money to eat, they fed them for free.
Speaker 3: I didn't see this, but normally seen that they're having
Speaker 3: a very hard time, and any of the days of
Speaker 3: vice to the village at least not for fine actual reasons.
Speaker 3: Magots can get as far as Bahol Jiguito on a
Speaker 3: few hundred dollars in their tenasty. They pay Columbian guides
Speaker 3: a few hundred bucks to bring them across the ocean
Speaker 3: from Necople and to walk them from the border, and
Speaker 3: they parry them bar Perraguero's twenty five bucks for the
Speaker 3: ride up the river. But once they get to last Blankerts.
Speaker 3: For a good number of migrants, their journey grinds to
Speaker 3: a halt. Many of them told me they've been stuck
Speaker 3: in the camp for weeks or even months because they
Speaker 3: couldn't get that sixty dollars that they needed to pay
Speaker 3: for their travel north. There's no Western Union in the camp,
Speaker 3: and the only way to transfer money is very local
Speaker 3: intermediary who charges between twenty and twenty five percent of
Speaker 3: the sum being transferred as a fee. In the morning,
Speaker 3: migrants arrive on their peraguas just as we did. I
Speaker 3: drop down the boat ramp when I saw them to
Speaker 3: help with their bags and ask about their journey from
Speaker 3: there they formed two lines, one for men and one
Speaker 3: for women and children. They have their bag search and
Speaker 3: their passport checked. They've given a welcome kit for the
Speaker 3: Red Cross with some basic necessities toilet paper, two to brush,
Speaker 3: some soap, stuff like that, or some of them get
Speaker 3: a kid. When the kids ran out, it was long
Speaker 3: before the line of people did. By the time the
Speaker 3: men were finished, they were given little more than a
Speaker 3: shrug and good wishes by the Red Cross volunteers and
Speaker 3: allowed to head off into the camp. Within the camp,
Speaker 3: there are a few rows of small casitas that are
Speaker 3: allocated to u accompany children and families. They're a little
Speaker 3: more than four walls in a roof, but they offer
Speaker 3: a bit of privacy for most migrants, though there isn't
Speaker 3: space and they have to search for a spot of
Speaker 3: empty ground in the crowded camp where they can pitch
Speaker 3: the same tents they bought a necko cley. The Wi
Speaker 3: Fi which a Red Cross usually provides, wasn't working when
Speaker 3: I arrived, so I had to let people hot spot
Speaker 3: off my phone all day. At least the promised food
Speaker 3: really was free, but the migrants told me it was
Speaker 3: far from good. Still, this is supposed to be a
Speaker 3: temporary camp. People register here, get any medical attention they need,
Speaker 3: and then move forward to Costa Rica. That's the theory anyway.
Speaker 3: In practice, if you can't get the sixty bucks, you
Speaker 3: need to move forward, or so one stole it for
Speaker 3: me in the jungle, or you are forced to walk
Speaker 3: to the camp because you didn't have twenty five bucks
Speaker 3: for the boat and then someone rubbed you. Then you're stucks.
Speaker 18: We have been here a month. You have people who've
Speaker 18: been here a month and a half. I've been twenty
Speaker 18: seven days here. Well, I thank god because we have
Speaker 18: three meals a day. We have water, but it still
Speaker 18: hurts the girls. The food and water always make me
Speaker 18: sick with diarrhea.
Speaker 3: It bothers me.
Speaker 18: I vomit and the heat is so desperate. But we
Speaker 18: have to hold on because even though we don't have
Speaker 18: the resources, like we don't have enough to pay for
Speaker 18: a ticket, we have to hold on here a little longer.
Speaker 18: We don't have any family members that can give us support.
Speaker 3: Either. What's keeping the migrants here is money, or rather
Speaker 3: a lack of it. It They need sixty bucks to leave.
Speaker 3: Buses used to take five free passengers per bus, but
Speaker 3: under Panama's new regime, it seems like they don't. Instead,
Speaker 3: migrants just graduate mass in growing number of tents that
Speaker 3: populate the grassy areas of Las Blankets. They might try
Speaker 3: and do some informal work. I saw one guy who
Speaker 3: was cutting hair for a dollar time, but I couldn't
Speaker 3: really get a satisfactory response to what they're expected to do.
Speaker 3: If they don't have the money and can't get someone
Speaker 3: to send us seventy five dollars, they'd need to cover
Speaker 3: their travel costs and the twenty five percent transfer.
Speaker 18: Feel if you're short ten dollars, they don't put you
Speaker 18: on the bus or anything. So things are terrible here.
Speaker 18: There should at least be support for migrants who at
Speaker 18: least come with few resources. They don't have money or anything.
Speaker 18: They can search your bag so they can see that
Speaker 18: you're not lying that you don't have money. Because nobody
Speaker 18: wants to be stuck here, you have to move forward,
Speaker 18: because nobody wants to be stuck here in Panama. The
Speaker 18: idea is to move forward to get further ahead. We
Speaker 18: brought our children to look for a future, not to
Speaker 18: be locked up here in Panama. As if we've been
Speaker 18: in prisoned.
Speaker 3: The group even tried to leave on foot, hoping to
Speaker 3: begin walking north. And so it's for better future and
Speaker 3: a way to make money on their way. But they
Speaker 3: were caught, they say, and returned to the campra.
Speaker 10: And they beat me hard.
Speaker 18: I gave myself up because they had caught her, a
Speaker 18: grandmother with my other daughter. I returned myself voluntarily, and
Speaker 18: they beat me up anyway. And from there we've lost
Speaker 18: the desire to walk back there.
Speaker 3: What can we do?
Speaker 10: Rights?
Speaker 3: They don't care about them.
Speaker 18: We are human beings, but we don't have rights here
Speaker 18: in Panama, they.
Speaker 3: Do have the money. Margarets could take a bus to
Speaker 3: the Costa Rican border. When the buses first arrived, I
Speaker 3: tried to describe the scene as migrants rushed to buy food,
Speaker 3: not only for this journey, but also for their journey
Speaker 3: through Costa Rica, where food and other basics are much
Speaker 3: more expensive. I'm here in Lahablancas when the first buses
Speaker 3: have arrived. It's about noon. The first bus is going
Speaker 3: to be full of people who had been waiting in
Speaker 3: line for hours already, so they're kind of lining up
Speaker 3: by the bus. And then the next bus is people
Speaker 3: seem to be kind of rushing to get to them.
Speaker 3: They're rushing to my food. I could see the sky
Speaker 3: has like an entire carrier bag full of pink wave
Speaker 3: for biscuits and coke bottles. That that's going to be
Speaker 3: his food for the next eleven hours. I guess other
Speaker 3: guys to see with bags of bread, rolls and stuff,
Speaker 3: and they're the first people are getting on the bus. Now,
Speaker 3: these buses aren't entirely safe. In twenty twenty three, forty
Speaker 3: two people died in a bus crash. This year, seventeen
Speaker 3: were intured in a crash in August. Now, migration offices
Speaker 3: ride in each bus with the migrants to check on
Speaker 3: safety protocols and make sure they don't get off anywhere
Speaker 3: else in the country, just like everywhere else on their journey.
Speaker 3: People make money off the migrants in last blankets. A
Speaker 3: bus costs sixty dollars ahead and has fifty five passages
Speaker 3: three three hundred dollars a bus. More than a dozen
Speaker 3: buses leave every day. They even half of the thousand
Speaker 3: or so people who arrived us a transfer service to
Speaker 3: get their bus fare. That's five hundred dollars in transfer
Speaker 3: fees alone. Of course, not everyone in the community is
Speaker 3: making thousands of dollars off the migrants. I interviewed local
Speaker 3: shopkeeper who still sits just outside the camp gates, and
Speaker 3: I asked him to explain his stock, which included the
Speaker 3: oddly popular I backed the blue thin blue Lion T shirt.
Speaker 3: So I've seen several people across the daddy and gap it.
Speaker 12: Okaymo only fucking money.
Speaker 3: I asked him what was the most common shopping list
Speaker 3: for migrants.
Speaker 12: See Gussie Man.
Speaker 10: Yes, almost all of them coming by sets for ten, fifteen,
Speaker 10: twenty dollars. It depends. There are many who don't have them.
Speaker 10: I have children sets for five dollars. I have sets
Speaker 10: for five dollars that are pants and sweaters, which is
Speaker 10: what they're looking for the most those that are socks
Speaker 10: without underwear. Backpacks for fifteen dollars because the backpack is
Speaker 10: so worn out and they need it so much that
Speaker 10: it carries their belongings. Look, it's not really ever who
Speaker 10: can buy. There are certain people who buy, of course,
Speaker 10: if everyone bought, but there are very few who can
Speaker 10: buy something to leave here. Almost seventy percent leave dirty
Speaker 10: because they don't have anywhere to get money, and the
Speaker 10: little they can get often comes from selling their phones,
Speaker 10: their watch, a cap, or their sneakers to be able
Speaker 10: to get money to pay for their fare to keep going.
Speaker 3: I asked him how the migration had impacted the community
Speaker 3: with people making a lot of money, I asked, were
Speaker 3: they mad about the trash and the pollution of the river.
Speaker 3: These are legitimate concerns, even if they're used in bad
Speaker 3: faith against the migrants.
Speaker 9: Now it's a more effect.
Speaker 10: Though nobody is perfect, but I can tell you one thing. Honestly,
Speaker 10: the migrants suffer a lot to be able to carry
Speaker 10: out this journey. And there are many times when I've
Speaker 10: even had to give them clothes, some because they don't
Speaker 10: have any. And well, when a father and family with
Speaker 10: children comes, what can I say, Look, I have a family.
Speaker 1: I have to do this.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I asked him what he felt the solution was to
Speaker 3: the suffering here, the damage done both to people and planet.
Speaker 10: Hekay, I say that oppressing people so that they don't
Speaker 10: go through the dairy and it's not the solution because
Speaker 10: if you put it to the point, even if they
Speaker 10: don't know an exact percentage, the immigrant gives the economy
Speaker 10: of the United States a balance because the people born
Speaker 10: there not to criticize them. People born there want a
Speaker 10: stable job, and he doesn't want to feel like he's very,
Speaker 10: very low. However, the immigrant is there and he's picking fruit,
Speaker 10: going to the fruit trees, going to the vegetable fields,
Speaker 10: going to the garbage dumps, going picking up things that
Speaker 10: many Americans who live there don't do, of course, and
Speaker 10: so they need them to say that they don't go.
Speaker 10: They need the support of the immigrant people to have
Speaker 10: the balance that they have today.
Speaker 3: Like a lot of Panamanians I met, he was broadly
Speaker 3: in solidarity with the migrants. I didn't really encounter anti
Speaker 3: migrants sentiment atall in my time at Panama. In the
Speaker 3: capital city, which locals just called Panama but we can
Speaker 3: call Panama City, migrants are not really physically present, nor
Speaker 3: are they present in conversation. I found the transition the
Speaker 3: jungle and the refugee camps back to the bustling city
Speaker 3: pretty challenging a lot of ways. I find I'm oddly
Speaker 3: comfortable amidst the chale and trauma of a refugee camp.
Speaker 3: It's a familiar environment for me, and I know how
Speaker 3: to conduct myself. I feel safe with the migrants, and
Speaker 3: I tend to find them very open and welcoming to me.
Speaker 3: I can talk to anyone and they can talk to me.
Speaker 3: I bring toys for children and try to bring resources
Speaker 3: for adults, and sometimes I bring my harmonica if I
Speaker 3: being really cliche in a weird way. Refue camps are
Speaker 3: a little safe space for me, and even though I
Speaker 3: know it's bad, I can console myself that I'm helping
Speaker 3: a little or at least giving people some hope and
Speaker 3: some information. That made me feel a bit better. But
Speaker 3: in the city I found it hard, knowing that people
Speaker 3: were in a terrible situation and that nobody here seemed
Speaker 3: to care. I went for a run in the jungle
Speaker 3: near the city, trying to get some perspective and clear
Speaker 3: my head, but I just ended up screaming and the
Speaker 3: inconsiderate driver I was angry at them for nearly hitting me.
Speaker 3: That I was just angry at everyone all over the
Speaker 3: US and even here in Panama City, for their indifference.
Speaker 3: It's so much human suffering, the lack of concern about
Speaker 3: migrants in Panama City. What is so next? At last,
Speaker 3: blancs even more surprising an announcement of the loudspeakers called
Speaker 3: several Colombian passport holders to the migration office. At first,
Speaker 3: it seemed like they were just going to a little
Speaker 3: wooden shed with a couple of CENA Front officers in
Speaker 3: it to return their documents. I'd already noticed that some migrants,
Speaker 3: and seemingly most of the African migrants, were being called
Speaker 3: to a different shed to do biometric scans. I wondered
Speaker 3: if this was part of the same process. But shortly thereafter,
Speaker 3: a truck rolled up and several of the Colombians were
Speaker 3: loaded in. Apparently neither they nor their partners knew what
Speaker 3: was going on. They're taking some of the Columbian guys
Speaker 3: away to report them. You can hear a little kid
Speaker 3: crying for his dad. Okay this, then they've taken his
Speaker 3: brother and his brother's wife, taken some other his husband,
Speaker 3: some of the little kid's dads and making them sit
Speaker 3: on the floor. I don't know why. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: know what they're.
Speaker 4: Going to do.
Speaker 3: Now she's trying to give her husband the money and
Speaker 3: a SIM card so he can call her. Are you
Speaker 3: going to go get some more food? Other morgents approached
Speaker 3: me to us if I knew, which I didn't. But
Speaker 3: one lady who'd been there for weeks. Told me that
Speaker 3: people who leave this way never come back and they
Speaker 3: end up being deported, so we assume that's what's happening here. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this really sucks. Now they're taking the deportation bus. There's
Speaker 3: men crying because their wives are on their women crying,
Speaker 3: their husbands are on their kids are crying because their
Speaker 3: parents are on there, and they've just done this crossing
Speaker 3: and now they're going to send them back. By the
Speaker 3: time I got back to the city, I was getting
Speaker 3: texts from migrants with photos of them and handcuffs. More
Speaker 3: and more of them were being deported, particularly the Colombians.
Speaker 3: One of them, texting me after being returned to Columbia
Speaker 3: on a flight, gave the following account of detention.
Speaker 2: They treated us very badly, verbally and psychologically. We all
Speaker 2: had to do our business in the same cell, and
Speaker 2: they threw food on the floor for us to eat
Speaker 2: as we were all in handcuffs. They told us that
Speaker 2: of Venezuelan had burned down the migrant detention center in
Speaker 2: San Vincente and that we would all pay for it,
Speaker 2: and that the Colombians didn't need to leave the country
Speaker 2: because the president there said it was doing well, and
Speaker 2: there's plenty of work. None of that is true.
Speaker 3: The Mican facility in Sambacinity was burned out, and the
Speaker 3: people working there told me it was a Venezuelan migrant
Speaker 3: who did that. But none of that excuses any of this.
Speaker 3: We weren't able to access that facility. As a people
Speaker 3: who had detained there can't really consent meaningfully to an interview.
Speaker 3: That's a fair enough for the action. But the migrant
Speaker 3: who was deported also alleged that they received no hearings
Speaker 3: or a chance to appeal their deportation. Instead, they were
Speaker 3: detained for eight days, spent their last US dollars, and
Speaker 3: were then kicked out of the country. They were not
Speaker 3: detained or arrested upon reaching Columbia, which makes it a
Speaker 3: little more difficult for me to believe the claim that
Speaker 3: only people without standing warrants in Columbia were being deported.
Speaker 3: These weren't the only allegations of mistreatment I heard. Magrants
Speaker 3: came to me and whispered about the abuse of black
Speaker 3: migrants who were forced to walk to Lahas Blancos because
Speaker 3: they couldn't afford the boat ride. I should note that
Speaker 3: it wasn't the migrants who had been robbed or abuse
Speaker 3: that came to me. It was other migrants. It was
Speaker 3: a group of guys had given a water filter too.
Speaker 3: While they were leaving to walk from Lahas Blancas, I
Speaker 3: hadn't been able to join them, but when they got there,
Speaker 3: we ran into each other again, and they came up
Speaker 3: to me to share their concerns for the black men
Speaker 3: who had walked with them. In one instance, one migrant
Speaker 3: told me he was robbed by what he called quote
Speaker 3: police dressed as thieves. The deportations, which seemed to be
Speaker 3: increasingly commonplace, are being funded by US taxpayer dollars. The
Speaker 3: same day that Molino took office in July, Homeland Security
Speaker 3: Secretary Alejandro Majorcas, himself the child of migrants, visited Panama.
Speaker 3: Panama's a relatively young country and one which the US
Speaker 3: occupied part of for much of the last century, but
Speaker 3: despite a real struggle for independence, the Panamanian government didn't
Speaker 3: seem concerned that the U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security
Speaker 3: was present at the inauguration of a president in a
Speaker 3: country that is decidedly not the U. S. Homeland. The
Speaker 3: official DHS readout of his trip notes that the US
Speaker 3: has enjoyed a flourishing strategic relationship with Panama for over
Speaker 3: one hundred years, which is certainly one way to sell
Speaker 3: up decades of occupation, violence, and profit from the Panama
Speaker 3: Canal and one of the more brutal dictatorships in the
Speaker 3: long list of authoritarian regimes that the US preferred to
Speaker 3: communist or even socialist governments in the Western Hemisphere. They
Speaker 3: also announced that the US government would quote help the
Speaker 3: Panamanian government to remove foreign nationals who do not have
Speaker 3: a legal basis to remain in Panama. Obviously act to
Speaker 3: take this moment to note that under the United Nations,
Speaker 3: refugee can vente and refugees do have a legal right
Speaker 3: to travel through a country on route to another. His
Speaker 3: Erica describing that right.
Speaker 16: The refuge you can mention is complex that does afford
Speaker 16: a lot of rights to people who have fled their
Speaker 16: countries based on persecution. You know, you're supposed to be
Speaker 16: able to pass through whichever country you want, go to,
Speaker 16: whichever country you want, not be criminally prosecuted for crossing
Speaker 16: the border between ports of entry, and not be turned
Speaker 16: back to a country where you face harm.
Speaker 3: The US allocated six million dollars for a six month
Speaker 3: pilot program of repatriations. If the program meets the USA's goals,
Speaker 3: they might consider expanding it to other countries along the
Speaker 3: migrant route. According to reporting in Enruters, as of early October,
Speaker 3: they've deported five hundred and thirty people to Colombia. That's
Speaker 3: half the people I saw arriving in a single day
Speaker 3: in Bahjojigito. Because Panama's government and Venezuela's government have ceased
Speaker 3: relations after the election, Panamara is now struggling to deport
Speaker 3: Venezuelan's back to Venezuela, and it's actively searching for a
Speaker 3: third country into which to deport them. But even if
Speaker 3: the program resulted one planeloaded day, which it hasn't yet,
Speaker 3: that would be roughly ten percent of the total dadly
Speaker 3: in traffic and far fewer planes are traveling. What it
Speaker 3: will do, like so many other DHS policies, is play
Speaker 3: into the hands of smugglers. Already, new ocean roots are
Speaker 3: being used, which see migrants, many of whom cannot swim,
Speaker 3: taking lung journeys around Panama on ill equipped boats. This
Speaker 3: doesn't help anyone apart from the DHS contractors and staff,
Speaker 3: equipping and training Panamanian personnel, and the human traffickers making
Speaker 3: more and more money from migration. I also shopkeeper his
Speaker 3: opinion on this.
Speaker 9: To look.
Speaker 10: I'll tell you I think that instead of giving them
Speaker 10: a reward for deportation, they should give them support, a
Speaker 10: lot of support, because it is a huge sacrifice to
Speaker 10: leave your country where you were born, your children, your family,
Speaker 10: leave it to be able to have a future, and
Speaker 10: you go with your mentality that your future is the
Speaker 10: United States that will give you an opportunity to get
Speaker 10: ahead and give well being to your children. Now, ten
Speaker 10: percent of those who go are going to destroy the
Speaker 10: good name of the migrants, But what people really want
Speaker 10: to do is help their family, and this balance unbalances
Speaker 10: everything that is being done by good people, because there
Speaker 10: are many good people who want to get ahead, and
Speaker 10: I think that the United States should support give support
Speaker 10: to people who really want to fight and move forward.
Speaker 10: As I just told you, they give a lot of
Speaker 10: benefit they contribute to the country.
Speaker 3: After leaving last blank, I felt pretty down about the
Speaker 3: fact that people were just hitting a wall that they
Speaker 3: couldn't overcome. Since then, I've stayed in touch with many
Speaker 3: of them. For some a friend or family members able
Speaker 3: to send the money, and they made it to costantly
Speaker 3: on the bus. From there, they crossed quickly into Nicaragua
Speaker 3: and Guatemala before arriving in the Mexican border city of
Speaker 3: Tapatula in the state of Chiapas and ironically not so
Speaker 3: very far from whether Zapatistas made their revolution thirty years ago.
Speaker 3: Once they crossed the southern border of Mexico, migrants can
Speaker 3: begin their application for asylum using the CBP one app
Speaker 3: that we've talked about so much on the show before.
Speaker 3: They can use it in Tabasco and Chiapas, the southern
Speaker 3: border states, and then once again when they're north of
Speaker 3: Mexico City. To recap very briefly, the app is terrible
Speaker 3: and almost every way, including its inability to recognize blackfaces.
Speaker 3: It's limited functionality on Android phones, which are a vast
Speaker 3: majority of devices used by migrants, It's constant crashing, and
Speaker 3: an eight to nine month wait time for asylum appointments.
Speaker 3: His Erica explaining some of those problems.
Speaker 16: You have to have a relatively new smartphone, you have
Speaker 16: to have an address, all the people you're traveling with
Speaker 16: have to be with you, right and you have to
Speaker 16: first get through the initial kind of registration phase.
Speaker 19: Which doesn't always work. The program is very glitchy.
Speaker 16: You have to take a live photo and you have
Speaker 16: to wait essentially, so you know, it's kind of random too.
Speaker 16: Some people will get an appointment within three months, but
Speaker 16: I would say most people are waiting nine to twelve.
Speaker 19: At this point.
Speaker 16: You don't have any legal status in Mexico while you're waiting,
Speaker 16: unless you can apply for some other status in Mexico independently.
Speaker 3: Then it is yet very poorly designed. It's also a
Speaker 3: de facto a metering system. Want assign Them's Erica explaining.
Speaker 16: That we've been litigating against the use of CBP one
Speaker 16: for a few years now. My organization out at the
Speaker 16: Level and Patient Bridge Alliance, and the reason why we
Speaker 16: are fighting against the required use of CBP one is
Speaker 16: first because it is an illegal metering system. So we've
Speaker 16: already litigated the fact that there is no number limit
Speaker 16: on the amount of individuals who can seek asylum at
Speaker 16: the US Mexico border, and Customs and Border Protection legally
Speaker 16: does not have the right to turn people.
Speaker 19: Away and CBP one essentially allows them to do that.
Speaker 16: You know, there were physical meterings at ports of entry
Speaker 16: before CBP one was implemented as essentially the only way
Speaker 16: to access the US asylum system at ports of entry,
Speaker 16: and now it's a digital metering list and it's very limited.
Speaker 3: Recently, the Department of Homeland Security lost a court case
Speaker 3: which forced them to release records in there with some
Speaker 3: of the app plugs and data regarding CBP one. I'm
Speaker 3: still in the phase of coming through that asking my friends,
Speaker 3: you know more about technologies than I do, to explain
Speaker 3: exactly what the limitations with the app are. But it
Speaker 3: doesn't really matter. DHS is well aware of the app's floors,
Speaker 3: and it doesn't really seem to see the most flaws
Speaker 3: at all. The goal of the app is to make
Speaker 3: it harder for people, even those with very legitimate asylum claims,
Speaker 3: to obtain asylum in the use. As we heard yesterday,
Speaker 3: the CHNV program is no better a recently Reddit thread
Speaker 3: of applicants who've been waiting nearly two years. What it
Speaker 3: didn't mention yesterday is a parallel program for another group
Speaker 3: of migrants, which I'll let Erica explain.
Speaker 19: I want to mention the fact that there is a
Speaker 19: cap right.
Speaker 16: I think it's thirty thousand a month or something like
Speaker 16: that for those four countries. But it's almost identical to
Speaker 16: the Ukrainian United for a Ukraine program, which doesn't have
Speaker 16: a cap right, so there's no limit to how many
Speaker 16: Ukrainians can get the same benefit. And they are renewing
Speaker 16: the humanitarian prole for Ukrainians, which I believe was just
Speaker 16: announced almost within weeks of them announcing that they're not
Speaker 16: renewing for the other four countries. So it's really a
Speaker 16: very stark demonstration of how the US immigration system, even when.
Speaker 19: It's a relatively nearer benefit, is based on race, is
Speaker 19: based on which country you're from.
Speaker 3: What this means is it in practice the migrants I
Speaker 3: spoke to face a long and dangerous way in Mexico
Speaker 3: while others skip ahead. I've got nothing against the Ukrainians,
Speaker 3: and I don't think many of them do either. I
Speaker 3: tried to go to Ukraine and report, but the Avisas
Speaker 3: ended up taking so long that I missed the flights
Speaker 3: that I'd booked. I have, however, a serious problem with
Speaker 3: a Biden administration which left people who fought alongside its
Speaker 3: own US troops to die in Afghanistan and turned away
Speaker 3: migrants small over the world, but then opened its arms
Speaker 3: to a country that just happened to have the majority
Speaker 3: of its citizens be the same race as the president.
Speaker 3: It's cruel and it's wrong, and it's barely ever even
Speaker 3: mentioned in national media coverage. But there's not fortunate enough
Speaker 3: to be Ukrainian. Here's what waiting in Mexico looks like.
Speaker 16: The incidence of crime directed at migrants is horrifyingly high.
Speaker 16: We had done an electronic survey a few years ago,
Speaker 16: and this was during Title forty two, when people were
Speaker 16: just being expelled to Mexico, and if I remember correctly,
Speaker 16: it was like around twenty five to thirty percent of
Speaker 16: people have been either raged, such traffic, assaulted, hidnapped.
Speaker 19: I mean, the list goes on and on.
Speaker 16: We've seen a lot of people lose their lives just
Speaker 16: due to violence, and the kidnapping rates are through the roof.
Speaker 3: Almost every one you've heard from in this series is
Speaker 3: now stuck in Mexico. Some of them have been kidnapped, paid,
Speaker 3: ransomed and released. Some of them have been sexually assaulted,
Speaker 3: many of them have been robbed. Some of them have
Speaker 3: after surviving one of the most deadly land migration routes
Speaker 3: on Earth been killed while waiting in Mexico for an
Speaker 3: app to stop crashing on their phones. Over a week
Speaker 3: since I got home, I've seen them go gradually more
Speaker 3: desperate and afraid just to get to Mexico. Many of
Speaker 3: them have spent several thousand dollars. Once they're in Capatula,
Speaker 3: they're faced with the astronomical costs for the trip north,
Speaker 3: often several thousand dollars more, and many of them, their
Speaker 3: phones exhausted, have slept on the streets. Those who didn't
Speaker 3: speak Spanish struggled to find refuge. Those who did wanted
Speaker 3: to move quickly, but struggle to find the money. Here
Speaker 3: are the Iranian migrants you heard early in the series,
Speaker 3: explaining what they'd already heard about CBP one.
Speaker 9: It's so tough because the some polices in their way,
Speaker 9: they took our money that we came from Iran. It
Speaker 9: was so difficult for us and resumed the way. So Mexico,
Speaker 9: Mexico is so difficult for us, and something is CPP
Speaker 9: one is not working for our for us, for Iranian people, yeah,
Speaker 9: I know the people who are in Mexico City for
Speaker 9: about three months, for three months, yeah, yeah, because of that,
Speaker 9: Iranian people go to.
Speaker 8: The wall and.
Speaker 9: It's it's it's not our choice, we have to do this.
Speaker 3: We don't want them, but it's we have to do this. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's good to explain. According to a study can there
Speaker 3: to the University of Texas, wait times are as high
Speaker 3: as eight or nine months on average. Now Mexico announce
Speaker 3: on the thirty first of August that it will provide
Speaker 3: security and food for migrants who have an appointment to
Speaker 3: travel north from the south of the country to the
Speaker 3: place where they have a CVP one appointment. Migrets absolutely
Speaker 3: have been robbed or kidnapped on their way to their
Speaker 3: appointment and missed it as a result, but they are
Speaker 3: just as honorable in the eight or nine months that
Speaker 3: they have to wait for one. Margarets and Tapajula are
Speaker 3: at a very high risk for kidnapping and are often
Speaker 3: held until their families pay ransoms. But without money or
Speaker 3: an appointment, their little means of leaving the city. Some
Speaker 3: choose to travel a little further north and then hop
Speaker 3: on a freight train known as Labstia the Beast, an
Speaker 3: extraordinarily risky endeavor that several of the people I spoke
Speaker 3: to for this series have undertaken. The only place to
Speaker 3: ride on these trains is on top of carriages, exposing
Speaker 3: migrants to freezing temperatures in the desert night. Even on
Speaker 3: the train, they're not safe from kidnapping. Like many migrants,
Speaker 3: the Ranian group will well informed about domestic politics in
Speaker 3: the US, and they say when they made their journey north,
Speaker 3: they wanted to be sure to avoid the state where
Speaker 3: local law enforcement was likely to turn them over for deportation.
Speaker 3: In reality, that could be any of the states, but
Speaker 3: they're probably right that their life would be a little
Speaker 3: easier on the West coast.
Speaker 9: I heard it's so difficult and about three months, four months,
Speaker 9: more than seven months, they will arrest us in the US.
Speaker 9: I heard in Mississippi it takes us in the middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 9: I think just the California is a little little little bit.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Surely our money is very excuse me, shits money in
Speaker 8: the world, and we have to pay a lot of
Speaker 8: money for this way because because.
Speaker 3: Our one.
Speaker 9: One dollar is sixty thousand.
Speaker 3: Some of course, which used to cross the border between
Speaker 3: ports ventry as they become desperate to see their families
Speaker 3: or afraid of remaining in Exico. Since President Biden's executive
Speaker 3: audier earlier this summer. Doing this can result expedited removal proceedings,
Speaker 3: and effectively, Biden's new ruling denies asylum by default to
Speaker 3: anyone crossing the border when daily crossings have passed twenty
Speaker 3: five hundred. In fact, this is the continuation of extremely
Speaker 3: punitive and cruel politics that have been in place since
Speaker 3: he was finally forced to stop using Title forty two, which,
Speaker 3: if you're not aware, is a public health law used
Speaker 3: by the Trump administration and embraced by the Biden administration
Speaker 3: as an asylum law. It has already resulted in the
Speaker 3: deportation to people back to places where they have extremely
Speaker 3: credible fears of harm and created a system whereby migrants
Speaker 3: have no idea how they will be treated on any
Speaker 3: given day. Again, it's play into the hands of anyone
Speaker 3: seeking to smoke or migrants into the country and detected,
Speaker 3: while also harming innocent people coming to this country to
Speaker 3: ask for protection. His Erica's short history of Biden's asylum
Speaker 3: policy since last year.
Speaker 16: So when the Biden administration lift at Title forty two,
Speaker 16: they essentially imposed what I call transit van.
Speaker 19: So there's a couple of components to it. One is,
Speaker 19: if you do not enter.
Speaker 16: The United States out of port of entry with a
Speaker 16: CDP one appointment, you are presumed ineligible for asylum unless
Speaker 16: you fall under a few narrow exceptions which are not
Speaker 16: consistently applied. So the exceptions are things like you were
Speaker 16: having a medical emergency, you were running for your life,
Speaker 16: you know, you couldn't access the app for some reason.
Speaker 16: But in practice those exceptions are almost never applied at ports.
Speaker 16: There's been a few kind of alternative programs run by
Speaker 16: shelters or local governments, where people with extreme medical vulnerabilities,
Speaker 16: for example, can be let in without an appointment, but
Speaker 16: we don't know whether the ban applies to them once
Speaker 16: they enter without that appointment, right, So it's like I said,
Speaker 16: inconsistently applied exceptions. If you enter between a port of entry,
Speaker 16: you're presumed and eligible for asylum again unless you meet
Speaker 16: some therew except and what that means is you can still.
Speaker 19: Apply for other types of protection in the United States.
Speaker 16: So there's two principal types of protection. One it's called
Speaker 16: withholding of removal, which is like asylum but with a
Speaker 16: higher standard, and then the other is Convention against Torture
Speaker 16: which you just have to prove it's more likely than
Speaker 16: not that your own government will torture you, which is
Speaker 16: more extreme than persecution, but isn't necessarily based on a
Speaker 16: protected ground, So the torture could be for any reason,
Speaker 16: but it's a high hurdle. But the most important thing
Speaker 16: is those two types of protection are not path to citizenship,
Speaker 16: and they do not allow you to petition for your family. So,
Speaker 16: for example, if you get asylum in the US and
Speaker 16: then you want to ask for your wife and children
Speaker 16: to join you, there is an avenue for that, and
Speaker 16: all of you can eventually become citizens. Withholding of removal
Speaker 16: and convention against torture, you basically get a work permit.
Speaker 19: If conditions in.
Speaker 16: Your country change, they can support you, and you can
Speaker 16: never leave states and you can never reunify with your family,
Speaker 16: and you could ever become a citizen.
Speaker 3: This won't deter people. I speak to people every day
Speaker 3: who cross the Daddy, Yet we're kidnapped, robbed, and sometimes
Speaker 3: raped on their way here. They're going through all of
Speaker 3: that because we refuse to give people a dignified or
Speaker 3: safe way to come here. They know it's a risk,
Speaker 3: and they continue to come because they think it's the
Speaker 3: only option his powers from coming rou and explaining that
Speaker 3: it's deadly.
Speaker 5: How will lie to you. It's fifty to fifty alive
Speaker 5: on it, honestly speaking. But we had to take their
Speaker 5: rigs because I think that was only all shroma we had.
Speaker 3: If you can't imagine taking those risks, it's likely because
Speaker 3: you can't imagine the things these people are leaving behind either.
Speaker 3: As a conflict reporter, I've been able to see a
Speaker 3: small amount of what they're fleeing war, death, poverty, state violence.
Speaker 3: I don't know if i'd be brave or strong enough
Speaker 3: to do the same, but I have a lot of
Speaker 3: respect for people who can. Tomorrow we're going to talk
Speaker 3: about the people who help them along the way and
Speaker 3: what you can do to support them. When the state worked,
Speaker 3: just you.
Speaker 6: Finding yourself there and seeing how the environment looks like
Speaker 6: you feel like you should give up. I cried it
Speaker 6: grace of work for you to actually stand by us,
Speaker 6: say no, I'll keep on struggling. A lot of people
Speaker 6: who give up.
Speaker 18: There a lot of people.
Speaker 6: Someone died, the lady died. People who were crying. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 6: we let people swear crying. They didn't know how they
Speaker 6: could continue. It's not an easy situation. It's not really
Speaker 6: an easy situation. It's just the grace of God for us,
Speaker 6: because I can't say it's by my strength. It's actually
Speaker 6: the grace of God. Because what we actually went through,
Speaker 6: we met people living collapsed. We had to help them.
Speaker 6: You meet your body, you give a lifting hand. It's
Speaker 6: not really an easy thing. It's not something that if
Speaker 6: we are fine tomorrow, can advise any of our family
Speaker 6: members to go through, because it's so deaf. It's risky
Speaker 6: if your family member is in there and it's not out.
Speaker 6: It takes the grace of God for you to even
Speaker 6: lie on your bed and close all your eyes either.
Speaker 21: Once I survived by the grace of God, I almost drowned.
Speaker 21: It's fact I was drowning. By the grace of God.
Speaker 21: I was rescued, yeh, some guys that rescued me. I
Speaker 21: was already drowned.
Speaker 7: I was gone.
Speaker 17: I was gone.
Speaker 9: I was drinking water.
Speaker 3: Very readily all throughout the journey. North Margarets have a
Speaker 3: little choice but to rely on one another and the
Speaker 3: solidarity of strangers. I heard dozens of stories that you've
Speaker 3: just heard. My time in the Dai n total strangers
Speaker 3: who saved each other's lives risk their own in the process.
Speaker 3: For vers, it could only be crossed to People from
Speaker 3: three different continents joined arms to form a human chain
Speaker 3: the children and smaller people could hold on to to
Speaker 3: avoid being swept downstream. Not everyone can help. Just surviving
Speaker 3: the Dadian takes all of what many people have. But
Speaker 3: for the people who are in a position to even
Speaker 3: in desperate times, there's mutual support among the migrants. Very
Speaker 3: few people who.
Speaker 6: Are very help you. They're very few people. Only people
Speaker 6: who are time can actually help. That people will pass
Speaker 6: you by, and that people want If you have lost
Speaker 6: your strength, it's not easy for another person to actually
Speaker 6: help break though, we can really appreciate those who help, because, yeah,
Speaker 6: having your strength is another You must help yourself before
Speaker 6: you can help another past, right, So if you can't
Speaker 6: really have the strength, it will be difficult for need
Speaker 6: to help another. So we don't really condemn them, but
Speaker 6: at least we are praying where we are bleeding on
Speaker 6: our brothers worst still behind that if they meet people,
Speaker 6: if they have the ability to herpe, they should do so.
Speaker 6: Of course, it's not really uneasy something.
Speaker 3: Give sometimes reporting on these places compete them as bleak, unwelcoming,
Speaker 3: or just miserable and certainly very sad. Things happen in
Speaker 3: the jungle and in the camps, in human things, But
Speaker 3: just like war or a natural disaster, sometimes the horrible
Speaker 3: circumstances of the migration trail bring out the best in people.
Speaker 3: As I've said before in this series, I'm comfortable in
Speaker 3: the refugee camps, at least in part because people they
Speaker 3: are looking out for one another. Kids don't stop playing
Speaker 3: the moment they become refugees, not an adults stop laughing.
Speaker 3: In fact, these things become even more important that how
Speaker 3: we keep our humanity in a system that's inherently dehumanizing,
Speaker 3: And people don't stop organizing or caring about one another either.
Speaker 3: It's not just the migrants, of course. One of the
Speaker 3: families who've been stuck in Bao Jiguito for almost a
Speaker 3: month was given some money by a local Sender Front
Speaker 3: member to take a bus. In Mexico, those who don't
Speaker 3: have enough money to take buses, we'll hop onto freight trains,
Speaker 3: and as they speed through towns and rail yards at night,
Speaker 3: local people will throw plastic bags of food, water, and
Speaker 3: clothing to them. In Panama City, I visited a Jesuit
Speaker 3: run shelter for migrants called fate Erga.
Speaker 18: Well number Celias Cordnijo is Coordina or the Promotion Social Accompanimento.
Speaker 3: Panama.
Speaker 20: Alberto went down a Darien recently and we know from
Speaker 20: firsthand experience that the difficulty they have is moving. So
Speaker 20: some don't go through the stations, but they stay, so
Speaker 20: they appear here in the city, and so they arrive
Speaker 20: here and some decide to stay and forego all the
Speaker 20: difficulty of moving forward.
Speaker 3: Despite having been set up as a refuge, recent changes
Speaker 3: to Panamanian law had made that work difficult, and you.
Speaker 18: Don't pretty heard.
Speaker 20: We had to stop that service because the state literally
Speaker 20: prohibited us as agencies from providing shelter and under the
Speaker 20: premise that if we gave them shelter without them asking
Speaker 20: for it, they could consider us as human traffickers.
Speaker 3: So what we do now is we give them.
Speaker 20: Food and if they decide to stay, well, we help
Speaker 20: them with certain processes that we can call humanitarian aid
Speaker 20: for sustainability.
Speaker 3: I've seen a wide variety of faith based aid in
Speaker 3: my time at the border. Much of it has been fantastic,
Speaker 3: but with more than a decade of refugee camps from
Speaker 3: resource pot settings, I've also learned to be a bit
Speaker 3: wary of faith based charity. But something Elias said early
Speaker 3: in our talk gave me a great deal of respect
Speaker 3: for him. It's not justin he said it, but he
Speaker 3: took the time to address his comments to me as
Speaker 3: a journalist because he saw this as a problem in
Speaker 3: part created by the media. For its worth, I think
Speaker 3: he's right. I think that as we try and help
Speaker 3: on a difficult journey, we must always keep in mind.
Speaker 3: He might come from a very different background than my
Speaker 3: mutual Aid group, but we do seem to share the
Speaker 3: same belief in solidarity with the migrants.
Speaker 19: Is a.
Speaker 20: Unfortunately much of the media narrative. What they do is
Speaker 20: they victimize and ridicule people in family groups and turn
Speaker 20: them into pariahs and beggars. Then that is insulting to
Speaker 20: the dignity of the person. So the way they portray
Speaker 20: migration is shameful in some cases, and this is very difficult.
Speaker 20: Well for this, yes, I think that's very important.
Speaker 3: After this, I figured I address the issue head on.
Speaker 3: I'm asking about the many churches and Christians I see
Speaker 3: preaching hate against people coming to the southern border of
Speaker 3: the US.
Speaker 20: There is a sector in the Catholic Church and the
Speaker 20: Evangelical Church that opposes it and is more closely linked.
Speaker 20: And they are in fact they are they're benefactors of
Speaker 20: Trump's campaign. So this one and this one are there, well, well,
Speaker 20: those are like groups that are rejecting, let's say, the
Speaker 20: basic principle of the Church, which is that we must
Speaker 20: welcome migrants and refugees. So they fundamentally reject it. So
Speaker 20: they invent all these narratives that Haitians practice voodoo and
Speaker 20: they eat pets, and this and that or that and
Speaker 20: it's shameful mean, or like the Venezuelans, that the majority
Speaker 20: of them are from Triandegua gang or that they come
Speaker 20: from areas that are what you call problematic or chauvannista,
Speaker 20: and that they are infuriating or that or that. All
Speaker 20: the same narrative that was created when when the Maritos
Speaker 20: left Cuba. And it's not that the Cuban government is
Speaker 20: sending all the prisoners on the Madi l boats to
Speaker 20: invade the United States. It's the same narrative.
Speaker 3: Then they asked what he thought of the government's plans
Speaker 3: to close the day enda if they could even do that.
Speaker 20: People ask me, do you think the Darian gap is
Speaker 20: going to close and that migration is going to disappear?
Speaker 20: And I say, ask the Mexicans and the North Americans
Speaker 20: if the Sonara Desert has stopped being a corridor for
Speaker 20: people after Trump, Because there was a time when all
Speaker 20: the media was focused on the migration that passed through
Speaker 20: the Sonara and everything continues to happen, but then it
Speaker 20: became invisible and ceased to exist for them. But people
Speaker 20: continue to pass through, and people continue to die. So
Speaker 20: as you say this, this is going to continue, maybe
Speaker 20: not a half a million people, but the flow is
Speaker 20: going to continue.
Speaker 3: It's going to continue.
Speaker 20: And then the question we should ask ourselves is what
Speaker 20: are we going to do or how are we going
Speaker 20: to accompany this flow? How are we going to accompanies
Speaker 20: these lives? And in what way can let these people's
Speaker 20: lives impact us.
Speaker 3: But like so many of us who work along the board,
Speaker 3: he says, he's constantly fighting. It's negative messaging that encourages
Speaker 3: people not to follow the natural impulse to help and
Speaker 3: take care of one another.
Speaker 20: So it's not a question of how I always say,
Speaker 20: and sometimes they tell me, oh, that you always speak
Speaker 20: so badly of Panama. But it's not speaking badly of Panama.
Speaker 20: I love my country and I feel that we in general,
Speaker 20: the Panamanian communities are very welcoming and very affectionate with
Speaker 20: the migrants. The problem is the narrative that is created
Speaker 20: and then it generates to stimuli that end up with
Speaker 20: a situation where are not seen so positively. And consequently,
Speaker 20: last week we had a meeting perhaps on National Reality,
Speaker 20: and we touched on on the subject of immigrants, and
Speaker 20: the first reaction was, no, it's not the state that
Speaker 20: pays the fare of the migrants.
Speaker 10: It's not that I mean, they pay their own fare.
Speaker 3: After a week of my interview requests being declined by
Speaker 3: NGOs and government offices, I found my talk with Father
Speaker 3: Alifs refreshing. It's nice to know that you're not the
Speaker 3: only one who sees the system as it is, which
Speaker 3: is fundamentally flawed and entirely propped up by misinformation, hatred
Speaker 3: and ignorance. But I don't want to get bogged down
Speaker 3: on that. Father Alias told me that when he sees migrants,
Speaker 3: he sees God. In them, and that he experiences his
Speaker 3: faith by helping others. My early experienced religion came in
Speaker 3: high school from a priest who was a teacher who'd
Speaker 3: been part of the anti apartheid movement in South Africa.
Speaker 3: I'm not a religious person in myself, but I can
Speaker 3: understand how seeing God and other people is not that
Speaker 3: far from my own politics. Lifit seeing God and know
Speaker 3: other people that impels people stand up against apartheid or
Speaker 3: to dedicate their lives to helping migrants, then I respect that.
Speaker 3: So after we come back, I want to try and
Speaker 3: answer the question that pytheay Alias are ask what can
Speaker 3: you do? Huge humor on us at the prop of
Speaker 3: the hill we ran into them. Yeah. After getting back
Speaker 3: from the Dad end and hearing the migrants share their
Speaker 3: struggles as they waited in Mexico for an outlest designs
Speaker 3: to lay and discourage them, I really struggled to come
Speaker 3: to terms with everything I'd seen and was hearing a
Speaker 3: bit to plenty of dangerous places I've seen war, state violence,
Speaker 3: and terrorism. I know the tragedy of death and violence,
Speaker 3: but the slow, deliberate suffering inflicted on migrants for people
Speaker 3: who lied to us every day on television is particularly
Speaker 3: hard to bear for me. As I mentioned at the
Speaker 3: start of this series, I think the grim reality of
Speaker 3: our migration system. On my first day in Bahajiqito, little
Speaker 3: girl's head hanging limply from a makeshift stretcher a strangers
Speaker 3: carried her into town. It's also cruel, so deliberate, and
Speaker 3: so unnecessary, and it felt so disempowering. But that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean there's nothing you can do. It doesn't mean there's
Speaker 3: nothing I can do.
Speaker 22: All right, So basically what we're gonna be doing is
Speaker 22: we're gonna go this way. I mean, we're gonna start,
Speaker 22: We're gonna go down into this well. We're gonna go
Speaker 22: that way and see where the light break is on
Speaker 22: them of the hill in between those hills running cut up.
Speaker 22: I'm not up in that area.
Speaker 3: That's James card Era of Border Kindness, sitting at the
Speaker 3: roof of a group of five of us set out
Speaker 3: on a water drop in the mountains east of Okumba.
Speaker 3: It's an area called Valley of the Moon, where boulders
Speaker 3: the size of trucks stack up against each other, where
Speaker 3: people have been crossing the border for decades. This is
Speaker 3: a remote area and not unlike the Daddy End. Much
Speaker 3: of it is nearly impossible to access in a car.
Speaker 3: To get water out here, we have to walk. And
Speaker 3: if you out of water or injure yourself so you
Speaker 3: can't walk out of here, it's possible you'll die, just
Speaker 3: like the migaants do in the jungle. People get robbed here,
Speaker 3: just like in the dad Enn And if it wasn't
Speaker 3: for the five of us with our backpacks full of water,
Speaker 3: people could die of thirst here just like they do
Speaker 3: in the jungle. I thought I was packing water bottles
Speaker 3: into my frame pack. I thought about little kids I've
Speaker 3: met in Baho Chiquito. This isn't the place for children either,
Speaker 3: but over the last eighteen months, I've met hundreds of
Speaker 3: them out here. I've given them my jackets and hats,
Speaker 3: warmed up milk for babies in my camping stove, and
Speaker 3: even wrapped the little girl up in a milar blanket
Speaker 3: with me to warm her up last year. Just like
Speaker 3: the Dadienne. The suffering here is out of sight and
Speaker 3: out of mind for most Americans, And in a year
Speaker 3: where we're constantly being told democracies under threat, I think
Speaker 3: a bear is mentioning that migrants are treated as humans
Speaker 3: without rights even when they're inside this country, and that
Speaker 3: their lives are seen as dispensable so long as whoever
Speaker 3: is in office can look quote tough on migration and
Speaker 3: make TV pundits and big money don't as happy. There
Speaker 3: weren't any TV pundits or big money doon is on
Speaker 3: our water drop, just a few of us everyday people.
Speaker 3: Some people come out here because their family members across
Speaker 3: the desert. Some come out because everyone who crosses a
Speaker 3: desert is part of our family. Like Bonnio said, in
Speaker 3: all humans are brothers, and none of us want our
Speaker 3: brothers or sisters to die in their mountains, whatever their
Speaker 3: passport might say. And so nearly every weekend, people all
Speaker 3: along the border load up heavy bags for supplies. On
Speaker 3: this drop. Each of us filled our packs with water,
Speaker 3: cans of tuna, pineapple soup, some warm clothing, and in
Speaker 3: this case an audio recorder recording recording in progress. Rhyme,
Speaker 3: of course, just gave me an opportunity to discuss my
Speaker 3: life's calling. Ensuring the correct fit of backpack harness systems.
Speaker 3: It just doesn't wrap the straps. You'd either have to
Speaker 3: drop the waistbelt or like these have adjustable frames, so
Speaker 3: you can make them fit with those of the days.
Speaker 3: For that, that's really pretty with everyone suitably adjusted and
Speaker 3: ergonomically optimized. We twisted on the audio record as I
Speaker 3: had attached the straps of our packs and set off.
Speaker 17: I just feel bad for you, because a lot of
Speaker 17: dumb ship.
Speaker 3: From the edge of the dirt road. We took our
Speaker 3: first steps into the desert.
Speaker 22: The first part is gonna be a little slippery. You
Speaker 22: eat Shit's okay, don't be embarrassed. It happens.
Speaker 3: This part of the border isn't that far from a
Speaker 3: Cumba where this time last year, James and I spent
Speaker 3: a freezing night trying to keep people alive, running our
Speaker 3: camping stoves on full blast, giving away our own jackets
Speaker 3: who needed them more than us. At that time, I
Speaker 3: just returned from a trip to North and East Syria,
Speaker 3: which was stressful in its own way, and seeing both
Speaker 3: what people are leaving and how we treat them when
Speaker 3: they're here really pissed me off. A year later, with
Speaker 3: bags full of water, JMS and I spoke about things
Speaker 3: and how they got so much worse in the last
Speaker 3: two years, but press coverage and more Importantly, donations have
Speaker 3: been way lower. It's same story up and down the border,
Speaker 3: record deaths, newer and harder migration routes, different migration patterns,
Speaker 3: and the people who cried outside ice detention centers in
Speaker 3: Trump's first term cheering for more walls and bigger DHS budgets. Meanwhile,
Speaker 3: unlike the Trump era, we don't have the support of
Speaker 3: thousands of liberal people in California's big cities. After the
Speaker 3: Democrats cynically use migrant suffering in their twenty twenty campaign,
Speaker 3: they abandoned them upon acquiring power, and their supporters have
Speaker 3: mostly followed them. So that left five of us this
Speaker 3: particular morning to load up bags and do the life
Speaker 3: saving work of dropping water. On top of all the
Speaker 3: state violence, there's been more and more interference with the
Speaker 3: water drops, and as we got further into our route,
Speaker 3: we made the increasingly common discovery that someone had taken
Speaker 3: it up on themselves to destroy our supplies. S man
Speaker 3: of ice, sick. That's probably though. These are slash slash.
Speaker 22: Ye try by the person's trinking a smirnof ice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, here's wrong. Yeah, they are fluns matterfuckers.
Speaker 22: I mean, I'm assuming it's a person who brought the
Speaker 22: smirnoff Ice because it seems like a smirnoff Ice activity Feller. Yeah,
Speaker 22: I don't see a VP agent rolling brew with a
Speaker 22: smirnoff Ies.
Speaker 3: This isn't unique to border kindness. Someone has been shooting
Speaker 3: supplies left by Borderlands Relief Collective half an hour west
Speaker 3: of here recently, up and down the border. The combination
Speaker 3: of total liberal and attention a xenophobic right wing hate
Speaker 3: whipped up by streamers who I won't name, and pseudo
Speaker 3: journalistic grifters who I will name, like Bill Maluganlugan, of course,
Speaker 3: was previously famous for claiming that the cop had a
Speaker 3: tampon dropped in his coffee in twenty twenty. Spoiler alert,
Speaker 3: if you're not familiar, this wasn't true. Belugan now works.
Speaker 3: It's a quote I'm quote Border reporter for Fox News, Danny,
Speaker 3: good morning to you.
Speaker 23: We are in Santa Siegro, a part of San Diego
Speaker 23: right now, where hundreds of illegal immigrants have just been
Speaker 23: massed street released from border patrol custody. This bus you
Speaker 23: see right here is apparently an NGO or Volunteer organization bus.
Speaker 23: They've all just gotten off a border patrol bus. Two
Speaker 23: of them. Actually, they're now waiting to board this bus.
Speaker 23: I've talked to several of them from Peru, from India,
Speaker 23: from Colombia. The group from Peru told me they are
Speaker 23: here to work. They are going to Atlanta and Minneapolis
Speaker 23: to see if we can talk to some of them
Speaker 23: real quick. Old espanon the so Ecuadora, don't US and
Speaker 23: New York going to New York.
Speaker 3: They're do on the so On. They're on the so
Speaker 3: Costa Rica. Don't live US? And lost Atlanta, New Jersey,
Speaker 3: don the New Jersey, New Jersey, dont theyve US?
Speaker 15: In Chicago?
Speaker 23: Chicago, Colombia, Columbia, Kereen, Trabaja, No no asilo yet they
Speaker 23: say they want asylum. They don't want to work.
Speaker 3: They've done their own Well, where are you from? Sag Sanag?
Speaker 23: I think Senegal? From Senegal? We saw a lot of
Speaker 23: Senegalese in Lukeville, Arizona.
Speaker 3: Where in the US do you want to go to?
Speaker 9: What city?
Speaker 3: Francis France?
Speaker 23: France?
Speaker 3: France, France speak France. Oh, he speaks French. I obviously
Speaker 3: do not speak French. The Loogan's lack of language competency
Speaker 3: isn't the only issue here. It's a holy ecosystem of
Speaker 3: media built up of yuristically filming migrants without giving them
Speaker 3: a chance to humanize themselves. And it's not just a
Speaker 3: right wing issue.
Speaker 24: This week, each day has been marked by new daily
Speaker 24: records of migrants, both crossing the southern border and landing
Speaker 24: in custody. The federal government is struggling to keep up.
Speaker 24: Three Homeland security official say Customs and Border Protection is
Speaker 24: holding about twenty seven thousand migrants and processing facilities as
Speaker 24: of yesterday. President Biden spoke with Mexico's president about the
Speaker 24: issue earlier today see News Homeland Security Corresponding Julia Ainsley
Speaker 24: joins me now to dig into this trend. So, Julia, first,
Speaker 24: just give us some perspective here. How is Customs and
Speaker 24: Border Protection operating right now? And what are your sources
Speaker 24: saying about this historic rise in migrants at the border.
Speaker 25: Well, in some ways, there's actually a small victory here,
Speaker 25: is in Clay when you look at the fact that
Speaker 25: CBP is seeing a record number of migrants, that they've
Speaker 25: been at a record high now for three days in
Speaker 25: a row. They broke the record of twelve thousand, maintained
Speaker 25: that and There are now almost twenty seven thousand migrants
Speaker 25: in CBP custody. When we got to just about twenty
Speaker 25: thousand and twenty nineteen under the Trump administration, there were
Speaker 25: migrants who were there for weeks and couldn't lie down
Speaker 25: to sleep because they were so overcrowded. Now, because of
Speaker 25: the technology, they're actually able to not even hold people
Speaker 25: past seventy two hours and very quickly release them. But
Speaker 25: the tragedy comes after that. There are a lot of
Speaker 25: migrants who are being released on the streets without being
Speaker 25: taken to nonprofits, and some of them don't exactly know
Speaker 25: where they're supposed to go, even though CBP does try
Speaker 25: to coordinate with the cities where they are released. That's
Speaker 25: definitely happening in the Tucson, Arizona area and Eagle Pass, Texas.
Speaker 25: Even though they are scrambling as fast as they can
Speaker 25: to release migrants, that are still thousands who remain in
Speaker 25: the field, a lot of them crowded under a bridge
Speaker 25: an Eagle Pass, just waiting for CBP to take them in.
Speaker 25: The reason a lot of people can give you different reasons. One,
Speaker 25: perhaps Mexico is interdicting as many migrants as they were
Speaker 25: earlier in the year. They're now lower on funds because
Speaker 25: of these record highs. Another reason sometimes migrants will say
Speaker 25: that they're worried about a future Republican administration or a
Speaker 25: future Trump administration that might be harder ANDed, so they
Speaker 25: think now is the time to come.
Speaker 3: Two minutes into this report and we haven't actually heard
Speaker 3: from a single migrant. All we hear is numbers. We
Speaker 3: also haven't heard about or detention, which is the time
Speaker 3: this was released with at its peak. Again, it's just
Speaker 3: numbers and CBP statements. I should also point out that
Speaker 3: lots of people are held for more than seventy two
Speaker 3: hours or three days. The Department of Homeland Security office
Speaker 3: who inspected general report published in November twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: a month before the new segment that you just heard,
Speaker 3: said that fifty six percent of people were held for
Speaker 3: longer than that, for some people being held for more
Speaker 3: than a month. This information is publicly available and even
Speaker 3: had a press release. I found it very quickly and
Speaker 3: I reported on at the time. But NBC chowse not
Speaker 3: to seeing migrants as a quote homeland security issue, not
Speaker 3: as people. It's fundamentally the problem and the way we
Speaker 3: fix that is showing up as people to help. Despite
Speaker 3: the massive media focus on the border in the last year,
Speaker 3: I very rarely see other journalists actually at the border.
Speaker 3: To give him credit. Malgan does sometimes show up, but
Speaker 3: he doesn't stay long, and he doesn't really have the
Speaker 3: capacity to interview migrants, even if you wanted to. The
Speaker 3: border is vast and mostly empty. It's a place I've
Speaker 3: come to know and come to love in my time
Speaker 3: dropping water and recreating and doing other mutilaid projects out here.
Speaker 3: Now they have a better understanding of the journeys people
Speaker 3: go through to get here, even more determined to make
Speaker 3: this small part of their trip less dangerous. And besides,
Speaker 3: I get to see cool rocks. Oh say, with mister
Speaker 3: potato here, it looks like he's dying off.
Speaker 22: Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, God no, I
Speaker 22: see that. Well, now you say it like that, it
Speaker 22: looks very Yeah, the eyes are real close to each other. Yeah,
Speaker 22: it's a very melting potato.
Speaker 3: Among the cool rocks. Last weekend I found a mini
Speaker 3: mouse doll. It reminded me of Miami, the little girl
Speaker 3: I'd met him. Boo. I give my number to hundreds
Speaker 3: of people before leaving Panama and heard from dozens, but
Speaker 3: up until that I hadn't heard from Miami and her mum.
Speaker 3: I heard of people being kidnapped, robbed, raped, and ransomed
Speaker 3: in Mexico. Some of them have been caught by authorities
Speaker 3: and pushed back to Chiapas, and others have been unable
Speaker 3: to leave Tapatula after having all their money stolen. I
Speaker 3: wanted which, if any of these fates had before been Miami,
Speaker 3: and if she was still having a pepper pig adventure.
Speaker 3: Sadly between where I met her or where I found them,
Speaker 3: Mini mouse Doll, There's nothing else I can do. They're
Speaker 3: here in the mountains outside San Diego, where the wind
Speaker 3: blows so strong sometimes you can barely stand up. I
Speaker 3: can do something without the ability to do something, something
Speaker 3: which I know is meaningful. I don't know how I'd
Speaker 3: managed to stay on this beat. It's just too heartbreaking
Speaker 3: to meet good people, share meals and laughter, in deep
Speaker 3: conversations with them, and then see them fed into a
Speaker 3: teeth of a machine that robs, brutalizes, and kills them.
Speaker 3: So that Joe Biden can stand on a podium and
Speaker 3: say that border crossing to down this month they are down,
Speaker 3: and that's allowedly due to enforcement in Mexico. But I
Speaker 3: want to make sure that everyone who does cross the
Speaker 3: border can do so safely and they don't have to
Speaker 3: die on US soil after fighting so hard to make
Speaker 3: it here. This hasn't been the case for everyone this year.
Speaker 3: My friends up and down the border have carried far
Speaker 3: too many little memorial crosses into the mountains. And depending
Speaker 3: on the election results next week, what we're doing might
Speaker 3: be illegal soon, but that'll never make it wrong. Since
Speaker 3: early September, nine people have died in a little part
Speaker 3: of southern California alone. My friends who searched for them
Speaker 3: sometimes found their remains and undertaken the thankless task of
Speaker 3: sharing the bad news with their families, then constructive memorials
Speaker 3: in their memory. This is just one of the many
Speaker 3: dangerous parts of the migration route north, but it's the
Speaker 3: one that I can help with. If you're nearby are
Speaker 3: visiting for a while, there are several organizations dropping water
Speaker 3: on the border. Border Angels, Border Kindness and Borderlands Relief
Speaker 3: Collective here in San Diego, Arho, Samaritans, noms Perthes in Arizona.
Speaker 3: Groups you search and rescue as well. Obviously, not everyone
Speaker 3: lives here at the USA is Southern border, but more
Speaker 3: than half of the population does live within one hundred
Speaker 3: miles of a border. Even if you don't live in
Speaker 3: the USA, or maybe you do but you don't live
Speaker 3: anywhere near the border, I guarantee there are migrants in
Speaker 3: your community. In the last year, I've worked with migrant
Speaker 3: welcome committees in Maryland, church groups in the rural south,
Speaker 3: Sikhs on the West Coast, occurred on the East Coast,
Speaker 3: to name just a few. Without a type of fanfare,
Speaker 3: people all over this country are making space their homes
Speaker 3: and their hearts for strangers, feeding them, housing them, and
Speaker 3: helping them get set up in a new place. For
Speaker 3: the most part, it doesn't get coverage you a democratic administration.
Speaker 3: It doesn't get much public support either, but that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean it isn't necessary. Aside from all the reasons it's important,
Speaker 3: dropping water on the border is also fun for me.
Speaker 3: It's helped me learn more about where I live. I
Speaker 3: appreciate the desert and make new friends who generally share
Speaker 3: my outlook on the world. I love being outdoors, and
Speaker 3: I'd be outdoors anyway, but it's way. My hiker is
Speaker 3: about much more than myself. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 20: Yeah.
Speaker 3: What does that mean when you get somewhere with signal?
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, please do all of you? Please share it.
Speaker 3: I'd like to follow your journey if that's okay, and
Speaker 3: maybe we can talk again when you're in America. I
Speaker 3: gave my number to hundreds of people in the Daddy Inn,
Speaker 3: as well as some websites they might find useful. Wan
Speaker 3: to NGOs explained the CBP one app are the ones
Speaker 3: that might direct them to resources along their route. Last
Speaker 3: Sunday night, as I was absent by and least thumbing
Speaker 3: through a shotgun reloading manual in my living room as
Speaker 3: I love to do, my phone started buzzing. It's done
Speaker 3: this so many times in the last months. Mostly it's
Speaker 3: a photo of someone I met updating me on their journey,
Speaker 3: or one of the little wooden animals that they give
Speaker 3: to children, which has made its way to Mexico and
Speaker 3: hopefully giving them some comfort along the way. Often it's
Speaker 3: less positive news someone's been robbed or simply run out
Speaker 3: of money and they need help. But I got two
Speaker 3: messages this Sunday which lifted my spirits. No Emi, the
Speaker 3: Little Girl who had an adventure like Pepper Pig in
Speaker 3: the jungle. Why did you know how it's And she
Speaker 3: sent me a photo of the tiny stone bear that
Speaker 3: I'd given her. She also wanted to know if we
Speaker 3: could still go to see Minnie Moles, who she came
Speaker 3: to America, which I assured her we could. I think
Speaker 3: it would be quite apt to visit a place which
Speaker 3: builds itself as the happiest place on Earth, where someone
Speaker 3: I met in one of the most desperate parts of
Speaker 3: the planet. The second message was from one of the
Speaker 3: migrants i'd met in the jungle, telling me she'd made
Speaker 3: it to America, not just to America, but to a
Speaker 3: part of the border where I've been dropping water with
Speaker 3: my friends. Just a few weeks before I left for Panama,
Speaker 3: she sent me a photo of a rock with a
Speaker 3: message on it one way, which I'm very familiar. She
Speaker 3: told me about her walk, one which I've made myself,
Speaker 3: and she taught me how hard it was. I said,
Speaker 3: I knew, but really I don't know, because I wasn't
Speaker 3: carrying months of trauma with me on the mountain. She's
Speaker 3: the only person out of one hundred son I met
Speaker 3: who's made it here. Most of them are in Mexico now,
Speaker 3: and most of them will remain there or maybe get
Speaker 3: sent back home, or maybe they'll make a desperate attempt
Speaker 3: across this week. As you hear this before the election,
Speaker 3: it made me so happy to see someone safely here,
Speaker 3: one person out of hundreds. For so many of the
Speaker 3: migrants I met, America was a dream, and the journey
Speaker 3: with a nightmare. Since the series began airing, I've seen
Speaker 3: videos of people I care about clinging to freight trains
Speaker 3: that bruce bodies after being beaten. I've helped them find
Speaker 3: healthcare after they were sexually assaulted, and tried to find
Speaker 3: room at overcrowded shelters. I've helped trans ladies navigate all
Speaker 3: of this and transphobia and misogyny, and tried to find
Speaker 3: resources in French and English and Portuguese for non Spanish speakers.
Speaker 3: I'd hope that I'd finished this series with a single
Speaker 3: good story, a story of someone who made it, who's
Speaker 3: living the American dream that people died for in the jungle.
Speaker 3: But I can't, because even the people who made it
Speaker 3: here are here temporarily. I'm broadcasting anything about their journey
Speaker 3: would put them at risk whoever wins the election next week.
Speaker 3: So instead I want to end with how you can
Speaker 3: make a difference, and I'll start with a story and
Speaker 3: how little things can make big differences. One day in Baljuquito,
Speaker 3: of sitting around with a few Venezuelan kids, probably four
Speaker 3: to eight years old, ripping pages out of my right
Speaker 3: in the rain note book to make paper aeroplanes. Before
Speaker 3: I interviewed their parents, I asked him about the jungle.
Speaker 3: They said it was scary and they had nightmares. Now,
Speaker 3: I often find kids in these places get scared of
Speaker 3: the dark, and I used to bring these crappy little
Speaker 3: electric lights for them, but they're bulky and they're not
Speaker 3: very good. Recently, I've been carrying the little packets of
Speaker 3: fishing glow sticks instead. They gasped about ten bucks for
Speaker 3: maybe one hundred of the little green lights. So I
Speaker 3: poured out my glove sticks, cut my hands and snapped one.
Speaker 3: The children amaze of the little glowing road. So I
Speaker 3: gave them the rest of the packet. I told them
Speaker 3: they could keep them for any time they were scared
Speaker 3: of the dark. Nearly a month later, I sometimes get
Speaker 3: a message on my phone with a photo of a
Speaker 3: little tiny glow stick on a note of thanks. One
Speaker 3: thing that Father Elia said that really impacted me is
Speaker 3: that when he meets migrants, he asked what he sees
Speaker 3: of God in them, and his work for them is
Speaker 3: where he finds what there is of God and himself. Think.
Speaker 3: I've struggled so much with this serious impart because I've
Speaker 3: seen so much of the best of other people, indeed
Speaker 3: the best of myself, into such hard places. I always
Speaker 3: struggle a little to readjust after trips like this, but
Speaker 3: this one's been particularly hard. In the jungle, I saw
Speaker 3: people helping, and in a sense, we were all in
Speaker 3: it together. When it rained, we all got wet, and
Speaker 3: when it got hot, we all huddled together in the shade.
Speaker 3: We shared bottles of water, We sat at the same
Speaker 3: tables and ate together. I can't really begin to experience
Speaker 3: a full, varily inexperience because I've been lucky enough never
Speaker 3: to have anything that bad to run away from. Better,
Speaker 3: have experienced incredible solidarity and kindness for the people who
Speaker 3: went through it. I've also experienced the incredible indifference of
Speaker 3: people at home, and indeed of the states and governments
Speaker 3: of the world. The Colombian friends I met Las Blancas
Speaker 3: and Barjigito, who are handcuffed and deported and ripped from
Speaker 3: their families, have already invited me to come and stay
Speaker 3: in their homes in Colombia, but if their families make
Speaker 3: it here, they won't encounter that kind of hospitality. Just
Speaker 3: last week, I helped to translate for a Venezuelan family
Speaker 3: living on the street in San Diego. Some of my
Speaker 3: friends do sponsor migrants, and that's something anyone can do
Speaker 3: if you're able to. It's an incredible thing you can
Speaker 3: do to change someone's life, and I can't encourage you
Speaker 3: enough to do so. I really do see the best
Speaker 3: of myself, of my friends, and of humanity, and I
Speaker 3: work to help migrants. I would say that on reflector.
Speaker 3: And I wasn't really an anarchist until twenty eighteen, when
Speaker 3: I watched a state to the world abandoned thousands of
Speaker 3: migros in Tijuana and climbed a fence with my friends
Speaker 3: to take care of them, and specifically to distribute three
Speaker 3: huge backpacks full of waffles and another friend had sent
Speaker 3: from his waffle factory. I'd stopped believing in the benevolence
Speaker 3: of the state a long time before, but it wasn't
Speaker 3: really until then that I really understood the power of
Speaker 3: people organizing horizontally to provide each other with dignity. Ever
Speaker 3: since then, I've drawn a lot of hope for humanity
Speaker 3: in the same place as I despare for people. Maybe
Speaker 3: that's why I keep going back. Since then, at the border,
Speaker 3: I've seen people die. I've held crying babies and crying parents.
Speaker 3: They've also shared meals with people from around the world,
Speaker 3: made friends for life, and learned curdish disco songs about
Speaker 3: killing people. I've danced around campfires with Pep. But I
Speaker 3: couldn't imagined meeting when I first made my own journey here.
Speaker 3: Last Christmas, when i'd normally be at the bar with
Speaker 3: my friends, I stand the rock in the desert, eating
Speaker 3: a cold vegan m Marie with an Ecuadorian family and
Speaker 3: some of my friends. And all the Christmases I can remember,
Speaker 3: I never felt so much like I was in the
Speaker 3: right place, doing the right thing, with the right people.
Speaker 18: What.
Speaker 3: I've seen a lot of terrible things at the border
Speaker 3: in the jungle, and I'll never forget those. More importantly,
Speaker 3: I've seen that together we can do incredible things, and
Speaker 3: we can make the state irrelevant, especially in the places
Speaker 3: it's chosen to be absent. I don't think we should
Speaker 3: make demands of a state anymore. It's simply not in
Speaker 3: its nature to care. But I do think we should
Speaker 3: make demands of ourselves. I don't believe in God, and
Speaker 3: I've written a whole dissertation about people who burn churches.
Speaker 3: But I think I see something that's just as special
Speaker 3: to me in the experience of mutual aid, and in
Speaker 3: a way it fulfills not only people's material needs but
Speaker 3: also our human desire for dignity and mutual respect. When
Speaker 3: I drop water at the border or carry someone's bags
Speaker 3: in the jungle, I see myself in them, and I
Speaker 3: hope they see themselves a little bit of me. But
Speaker 3: right now, asylum system is so broken the very few
Speaker 3: people even make it far enough to drink the water
Speaker 3: I leave at the border, And despite the border featuring
Speaker 3: heavily in this year's election, there seems to be no
Speaker 3: national concern about the way our tax dollars brutalize people
Speaker 3: across the continent. So I want to end by asking
Speaker 3: you what you can do. It might be coming to
Speaker 3: unhere to drop water. It might be sending some money
Speaker 3: to one of the links I include the description. It
Speaker 3: might be offering to translate for asylum seekers. It might
Speaker 3: just be talking to people and helping to change the narrative.
Speaker 3: You can vote or not next week, but there isn't
Speaker 3: a box you can take that will change the things
Speaker 3: I saw in the jungle. Trump wanted to deport millions
Speaker 3: more people. Harris wanted to pass a bill that will
Speaker 3: kill more people. You can't pass your commitments off to
Speaker 3: someone whose box you take every four years. You have
Speaker 3: to take them on for yourself. The way we change
Speaker 3: things is in a way we do things every day,
Speaker 3: every week. No one's every four years. I want to
Speaker 3: end with noise and have a message to the American people.
Speaker 3: I also want to ask if anyone of those how
Speaker 3: to get cheap tickets to Disneyland, because I have just
Speaker 3: looked that up and I cannot stress enough ho but
Speaker 3: I am to afford it.
Speaker 11: Please excuse us because we know that we are knocking
Speaker 11: on that door. There are a lot of us, but
Speaker 11: we are desperate because complaining about the president we have
Speaker 11: is not helping us. No, he's doing almost nothing. So
Speaker 11: our children have no future, and our country won't support us.
Speaker 11: It's not easy to leave our parents, our friends, our relatives,
Speaker 11: our grandparents, and we do not know if we will
Speaker 11: ever return or if we will ever see them again.
Speaker 11: It is not easy. But we also think about a
Speaker 11: future for our children. And I do not know what
Speaker 11: has happened, but we feel like living in a dictatorship.
Speaker 11: We are living something very unpleasant and we do not
Speaker 11: get any help. But those who help us, we want
Speaker 11: to say thank you. They opened that door for us.
Speaker 11: They've opened many doors for many Venezuelans, and well we
Speaker 11: hope in faith that they will open them for us.
Speaker 3: I want to take this opportunity to thank a few
Speaker 3: people who made this possible. Firstly, Daddy and a Brusse
Speaker 3: I fix her. She was incredible. Secondly, I want to
Speaker 3: thank iHeart for paying for this. Like I said, it's
Speaker 3: been nearly a decade that I've been asking to do
Speaker 3: this story and I'm just really happy that they trusted
Speaker 3: me to do it. Thirdly, I want to thank everyone
Speaker 3: who trusted me with their stories, everybody who stayed in
Speaker 3: touch as they've come north. I want to thank Border
Speaker 3: Kindness and Borderland Relief Collective who have both welcomed me
Speaker 3: on their drops, and it's not always easy to be
Speaker 3: around a journalist. It's not easy to let someone record
Speaker 3: everything you're doing out there and their inherent risks to that,
Speaker 3: and I really appreciate them trusting me. I want to
Speaker 3: thank dutch Ware Hammocks, who rush shipped to me a
Speaker 3: hammock when my old one tore right before I left.
Speaker 3: And I think most of all, I want to thank
Speaker 3: all of you for listening, taking the time, and all
Speaker 3: the listeners who have reached out to say they're listening
Speaker 3: to the series, people who have reached out to ask
Speaker 3: how they can help. I would love to organize a
Speaker 3: way to help the people I've spoken to. I spoke
Speaker 3: to someone just this morning who's still stuck in Tapachula
Speaker 3: because she was robbed and her and her daughter are
Speaker 3: five hundred bucks short for the bus to ride north
Speaker 3: to Tijuana. I don't have the capacity to organize that
Speaker 3: right now, but if someone else does, they should reach
Speaker 3: out to me, because I would really like to help
Speaker 3: these people who have become my friends and who I
Speaker 3: care about, and who are right now stuck in a
Speaker 3: very dangerous place because someone in Washington, d C. Has
Speaker 3: made a choice to treat them with cruelty and not kindness.
Speaker 3: So if that's you, if you're the person who could
Speaker 3: to minister that, please let me know. Thanks, and I
Speaker 3: hope you enjoyed the series.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 11: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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