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