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 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: faces at a two months old baby as we both
Speaker 3: marveled at the cloud yellow butterflies. Anywhere else on earth,
Speaker 3: it could be in a dyllic summer day, But in
Speaker 3: these final steps, as a journey across a daddy and gap,
Speaker 3: it's hard to open up your mind to experience joy.
Speaker 3: I'd only been in the tiny Ember village of Bahujiguito
Speaker 3: a couple of days, and I had already seen the
Speaker 3: lifeless body of a little girl, as though the migrants
Speaker 3: carried 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: up stream where it's above head height and rages down
Speaker 3: out of the mountains in steep ravines. Was the migrants
Speaker 3: I 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 be using when I met James. We're in
Speaker 3: a migrant reception center called Las Blancas, to the north
Speaker 3: of the Daliang Gap. To get there, one has to
Speaker 3: take a dugout canoe called a piragua from Bajo Jaquito.
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. They share the boat with nembra piraguero, who
Speaker 3: sits at the back driving the boat with a tooth
Speaker 3: stroke motor, and a guide who sits on the front,
Speaker 3: using a pole when necessary to push the boat through
Speaker 3: shallow sections. The Umbrada people are indigenous to the area.
Speaker 3: That's commonly known as the Daliang Gap, or at least
Speaker 3: to this part of it, and a tiny Emberda village
Speaker 3: of Bajo Jiquito. It's a first settlement migrants encounter as
Speaker 3: they emerge from the perilous crossing of the jungle that
Speaker 3: divides Central America from South America and thousands of people
Speaker 3: from a better future. There's a morale patch that the
Speaker 3: Panamanian Border Patrol and military wear on their uniforms. There
Speaker 3: reflects a slogan in a government messaging campaign, Darien asuna Jungla.
Speaker 3: It says. The campaign was launched in August, and it
Speaker 3: translates to the Darien isn't a route or maybe a
Speaker 3: roads A better translation, it's a jungle. Obviously it's actually both,
Speaker 3: but this is like no route. Most of us will
Speaker 3: be familiar with. The dark and foreboding jungle I saw
Speaker 3: in Bahajiguito is one of the most impenetrable on Earth,
Speaker 3: and the crossing of it is among the most dangerous
Speaker 3: land migration routes. In the nineteen seventies, the British Army
Speaker 3: sent its most experienced explorers to find a way through
Speaker 3: the gap. Their commander called the gap a god forsaken place. Today,
Speaker 3: migrants have their own names for it, lut del Mote
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 4: We are coming from Cameroon. IM My name is Flowers.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of crisis in our country. That's a
Speaker 4: civil war going on in Cameroon right now because of
Speaker 4: our president. President Pombia has been in power over forty
Speaker 4: two years. So I was the anglophone. We started revolting
Speaker 4: for him to step down because he doesn't develop the
Speaker 4: Southern American sorry, the English section of Cameroon anglerphone. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the anglophone sections a revolts that he was set in
Speaker 4: the military and it's killing the citizens of our country.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of harshship, a lot of that. Eye
Speaker 4: for one, I've lost everybody. I lost for my family,
Speaker 4: my mom, my dad, my two brothers, and I'm the
Speaker 4: only one left.
Speaker 3: So things.
Speaker 4: No, there's no job of completed school, but there's nothing
Speaker 4: for me to do. So that's why it decided to migrate.
Speaker 3: To get to baho Jiqito from Columbia. It's 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 Dairying Gap, an area of rainforested mountains,
Speaker 3: so it's one of the most dangerous migration routes in
Speaker 3: the world. For anywhere between two and fifteen days, migrant
Speaker 3: trek through waste time, mud, and rivers deeper than they
Speaker 3: are at all. 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. They
Speaker 3: carry their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other. Across
Speaker 3: mountains and rivers and abou jiqito. They take what, for
Speaker 3: many of them will be the final steps of this
Speaker 3: part of their journey. It's a journey that few of
Speaker 3: us can imagine, and they were lucky to be able
Speaker 3: to avoid. My own migration to the US sixteen years
Speaker 3: ago was much simpler and safer, but for migrants like James,
Speaker 3: the journey's worth it because what they're leaving behind is worse.
Speaker 3: Here's James describing the situation in the state of Cameroon.
Speaker 2: The situation in Cameroon is, how can I put it,
Speaker 2: very very, very very difficult, especially in the Anglophone part
Speaker 2: of the country. Yeah, because for about five to six
Speaker 2: years there's a world the ongoing war in the Anglophone crisis.
Speaker 2: We also have been there has been fighting, There has
Speaker 2: been shooting, killings. I myself speaking to you, Yeah, I've
Speaker 2: been targeted. My cousin was shot and with his husband
Speaker 2: were shot together. Both of them were nursis and they
Speaker 2: were shot by the army that were there to protect
Speaker 2: the people. So the situation back at home, it's very
Speaker 2: very tense. Yeah, the very times when you see most
Speaker 2: of Camaronians traveling taking the rigs part from Columbia brazy
Speaker 2: right up to where I am. It is not because
Speaker 2: they like it. It's because of 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 3: Most of them.
Speaker 2: They choose this part because they will not have a
Speaker 2: direct visard to American Yeah, it's very hard to get
Speaker 2: one yes, it's very, very difficult, so they have to
Speaker 2: use the hard way.
Speaker 3: Which is the only way. The truth is dead bodies,
Speaker 3: terrible stories and families celebrating the end of their work.
Speaker 3: It's nothing out of the ordinary. And bahu Jikito, the
Speaker 3: Enbarra town, with the population of just five hundred and ninety,
Speaker 3: it's a place I've been trying to come to for
Speaker 3: almost as long as I've been writing about migration. There
Speaker 3: are a few stories in my time as a journalist
Speaker 3: that I've been pitching for close to a decade. Most
Speaker 3: of the time I give up if there are no
Speaker 3: bites after a few months, And that's why you won't
Speaker 3: see me right about the people who tried to hire
Speaker 3: mercenaries to intimidate voters in twenty twenty, or the Burmese
Speaker 3: rebels whof I did their revolution with co op produced tea,
Speaker 3: or a surfing team in the Gaza strip, And on reflection,
Speaker 3: you probably won't hear about that last one anywhere. Now.
Speaker 3: The media cycle has a way of coming around to
Speaker 3: these stories eventually, sure, but I not really want to
Speaker 3: go back to what it is who didn't give a
Speaker 3: shit about people before and only care about their stories
Speaker 3: now because they get more traffic. But there's one story
Speaker 3: I've never given up on. That's the story of the
Speaker 3: Daddy and Gap and the people who risk their lives
Speaker 3: crossing it for a shot at the American dream. And
Speaker 3: at this point I do want to tegnlolize. I'm incredibly
Speaker 3: grateful to the people I work with for trusting me
Speaker 3: when I asked them to pay for me to disappear
Speaker 3: in a dugout canoe into the jungle and come back
Speaker 3: two weeks later with a story. The Daddy and looms
Speaker 3: in the stories of migrants I meet in the US
Speaker 3: border as a sort of heart of darkness on what
Speaker 3: is a very difficult and dangerous journey. It's worse than
Speaker 3: the freight trains they hop on in Mexico, worse in
Speaker 3: the crowded worse even than the months of waiting for
Speaker 3: an asylum appointment. I've only believe that you can't really
Speaker 3: understand and write about things you haven't seen, smelt, and heard.
Speaker 3: So for years I've been asking get it Is to
Speaker 3: send me to the tiny ember Our community on the
Speaker 3: banks of the river, so that I could share the
Speaker 3: final steps of this horrific journey with the people who
Speaker 3: see little option but to risk their lives for a
Speaker 3: better future for their children. Because the US refuses to
Speaker 3: create more legal pathways, people instead take a sudden pathway
Speaker 3: straight up and down the mountains to the Darian rainforest.
Speaker 3: The journey will take them past the corpse of the
Speaker 3: people who never left. The terrain is too fierce for
Speaker 3: anyone to carry their remains out, so they must simply
Speaker 3: rut there as a reminder to migrants, so they must
Speaker 3: keep going. It's a sort of deterrent through death that
Speaker 3: has been the unofficial and official US border policy for decades.
Speaker 3: To turn or not. Once you're in the Darien, there's
Speaker 3: no turning back, and the lack of escape routes has
Speaker 3: made the gap popular among criminals to commit untold numbers
Speaker 3: of sexual assaults, murders, and armed robberies every year in
Speaker 3: the jungle. Despite this, more than half a million migrants
Speaker 3: made the perilous journey last year, and if many, if
Speaker 3: not more, will do so this year. Do you understand that, Daddy?
Speaker 3: And you have to first understand US immigration policy, which
Speaker 3: is something I talk about a lot on this podcast.
Speaker 3: I want to include here a clip from Amos, a
Speaker 3: migrant from North Africa who met my friends and helped
Speaker 3: them build shelters in a cumber last year, explaining his
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 6: They do that to Americans.
Speaker 7: Too, So.
Speaker 5: You know where I'm from. They don't have a visa
Speaker 5: to uh as far as for Brazilians, so we don't.
Speaker 5: So a lot of Africans can go to Brazil and
Speaker 5: from Brazil take the the.
Speaker 6: Route all the way.
Speaker 3: That game was Jim couldn't fly here directly that he
Speaker 3: was able to get a little bit closer to the
Speaker 3: US by flying to Columbia. I'll let him explain how
Speaker 3: 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 Biza.
Speaker 3: That is all right.
Speaker 2: From Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to.
Speaker 3: Where we are today. Most are Continental America. We'll have
Speaker 3: to travel to Brazil, just like Amos. Here's one a cap.
Speaker 3: I'll let the speaks introduce himselves.
Speaker 6: My name is so I m I'm from Idan.
Speaker 8: My name is mohade for Omraan, my name is Ali,
Speaker 8: and I'm from Iran.
Speaker 3: They told me why they left a run, but I'm
Speaker 3: sure manygi could wear that went out of yourself, so
Speaker 3: we won't included here. How did you come from Iran?
Speaker 3: To hear you got for Turkey?
Speaker 6: It was so difficult, And we.
Speaker 8: Came from Iran, Tehran to Dubai, after that South all
Speaker 8: of Brazil and after that believe Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and
Speaker 8: Nikoklei and jungle Panama. Here Panama. And it was so
Speaker 8: difficult for us because we are young. We just leave
Speaker 8: our family, my sister, my mother, father. It was so emotional, yeah,
Speaker 8: and it was so hard for us. But because of
Speaker 8: the freedom, because we can't speak in our country.
Speaker 6: You know, if you speaking in your in the street,
Speaker 6: something like it. They will arrest you.
Speaker 8: Yeah, in jail when you are not Muslim, when you
Speaker 8: really like something like a Christian or something else.
Speaker 6: They arrassed.
Speaker 8: Yes, it was. It was so so, so, so difficult
Speaker 8: 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: I said, I didn't prefer it that way, But I
Speaker 3: do always feel obliged to use the platform I have
Speaker 3: here to give people a chance to share their stories,
Speaker 3: their voices, and their struggles.
Speaker 9: So he's their message, We love you, hope too you
Speaker 9: love is that's hard question?
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 worth for that, we
Speaker 9: should be be a real American for the concert.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they know women are very bad situations, have a
Speaker 7: bad situation in Itra. Yeah, for all people, that is saying,
Speaker 7: but for women is very, very, very hard. I think
Speaker 7: American people know about Massa Amini. Yeah, and they really
Speaker 7: they chill us, really they chill women for simple things.
Speaker 3: I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time
Speaker 3: about how Jiqito and the last Blancast migrant reception center
Speaker 3: that migrants traveled to after they arrive in Bajo 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, could
Speaker 3: take a year or more. When napoally Man I met
Speaker 3: in Bajo Juquito, I had 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 stands out as the hardest part. Do understand
Speaker 3: why I want to take you back to that shady
Speaker 3: spot by the river just a few minutes south of
Speaker 3: Bajo Juquito. So what I'm doing right now and you
Speaker 3: can hear from my foot depths is I'm doing what
Speaker 3: it told me not to do. I'm walking along the
Speaker 3: migrant trail. Lots of like vines and creepers, and oh
Speaker 3: fucking hell, that's me nearly eating shit. There's little bits
Speaker 3: of tape marking a trail. I think they just come
Speaker 3: down the river here. Some local guys are pushing out
Speaker 3: wheelbarrows on the trail to dump trash. There's trash everywhere
Speaker 3: to fucking mess the little wood arrows that they've carved
Speaker 3: just outside town to direct people into town. And if
Speaker 3: I heeard, I can see migrants making what's probably hopefully
Speaker 3: their final crossing of the river here. One thing I
Speaker 3: noticed was that as soon as I got out of
Speaker 3: sight in nearshot of the town, the jungle seems a
Speaker 3: lot more intimidating. I'm somebody spends a lot of time
Speaker 3: in the mountains, and I grew up playing in the woods.
Speaker 3: I'm comfortable outdoors, and I frequently camp and hike for
Speaker 3: days on my own. I like it better that way,
Speaker 3: and I might see more comfortable forty feet under the
Speaker 3: sea free diving, or three hours from the nearest road.
Speaker 3: Then I am in a busy city sometimes, but in
Speaker 3: the jungle. After all the stories I'd heard that week,
Speaker 3: I was afraid. I get scary. I don't know why.
Speaker 3: I mean, everything's new to me. I'm, you know, relatively
Speaker 3: comfortable in the outdoors, but fucking there's new animals, there's
Speaker 3: new plants. I don't know what's poisonous. I don't know
Speaker 3: what's going to kill me, and know who's going to
Speaker 3: try and hurt me. Got another fucking horse, Jesus wept.
Speaker 3: I'm jumping out my skin everything Now it's funny. I'm
Speaker 3: in a place that's beautiful, you know, like these better
Speaker 3: paradise plants are just just growing here, gorgeousness. Horses belong
Speaker 3: to people of the bah community. I suppose having snacks,
Speaker 3: you know, eating jungle horse food. And here here, I'm
Speaker 3: at the river. It's wide here, it's sort of shallow,
Speaker 3: and it's been dammed up a little bit with rubbish,
Speaker 3: just like flop some and jets some kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: And then this is where people cross because of that
Speaker 3: little dam. But it's still got some four to it,
Speaker 3: like you wouldn't want to fall and crack your head
Speaker 3: or you know, a lot of these folks can't swim
Speaker 3: without the fear it's hard going. Because you've only hiked
Speaker 3: on trails, you perhaps don't realize how much work goes
Speaker 3: into making that surface possible. There are no trail crews
Speaker 3: in the Darien, and as a result, every step has
Speaker 3: the potential to results in a sprained ankle or another injury,
Speaker 3: which might sound trivial but can be faithal in such
Speaker 3: a remote and challenging place. Trail is all rocks, like
Speaker 3: maybe rocks the size of a fist that way now,
Speaker 3: and then there are sort of in this area we
Speaker 3: only have the lower canopy, so we have ferns, We
Speaker 3: have reeds, bamboo plants growing really tall and straight, that's
Speaker 3: what they use for the poles that they pit I was,
Speaker 3: and then sort of low grassy kind of plants. And
Speaker 3: then where the migrants walk is just this muddy trail
Speaker 3: that every time it rains just turns into like ankle
Speaker 3: to knee deep mud. And I could see them making
Speaker 3: pretty slow progress along the trail towards me. At the
Speaker 3: end of the day, as I took a pedagua back
Speaker 3: to Madragante, where I would be staying the night, I
Speaker 3: reflected again on this and the incredible tenacity it took
Speaker 3: for people with little outdoor experience and terrible equipment to
Speaker 3: pass through the jungle. You know, I'm a fit person.
Speaker 3: I run ultramarathons. I used to be exercised for a living.
Speaker 3: And it's fucking hard. It's wet. Everything's wet all the time.
Speaker 3: You're wet from the rain, then you're wet. If you're
Speaker 3: wet from the sweat, and you're wet. If you cross rivers,
Speaker 3: you get wet. You just can't stay dry. And everyone's
Speaker 3: feet are just fucked when they get into town, like
Speaker 3: the size of the blisters I've seen, And like one
Speaker 3: lady had a cramp today where like it just locked
Speaker 3: up a whole that she like I grabbed her. She
Speaker 3: was falling down and I was able to like hold
Speaker 3: her up. But people are really pushing themselves physically as
Speaker 3: well as psychologically. That river crossing south of Bachigiso was
Speaker 3: as far south as I was going to be to
Speaker 3: get without being forcibly adjaced from Panama, and my request
Speaker 3: to take a boat or walk further south was denied
Speaker 3: by the Panamanian Ministry of Security. So the only part
Speaker 3: of the migrants journey I would share with them was
Speaker 3: the last kilometer or so of their walk. Even then,
Speaker 3: I wasn't really supposed to be leaving town at all,
Speaker 3: So several times over the days I spent in Bahajigito,
Speaker 3: I would look over my shoulder, hop down the river bank,
Speaker 3: jump across the stream, and lightly jog out of town.
Speaker 3: Once on the trail, I'd started to walk slowly and
Speaker 3: try and waive a groups of outcoming migrants. I didn't
Speaker 3: want to scare them. I offered to carry their bags
Speaker 3: and let any help I could, supporting them as they
Speaker 3: walked towards their first meal and clean drink of water
Speaker 3: in up to a week. Just getting to baj Gito
Speaker 3: was a journey in itself for me. I took two flights,
Speaker 3: a five hour drive which was efnally split between paved roads,
Speaker 3: roads that aspired to pavement, and dirt roads. At the
Speaker 3: end of our road journey, the Pan American Highway, the
Speaker 3: links Alaska to Argentina, seems to give up on fighting
Speaker 3: the jungle and Peter's out. Asphalt turned to worse asphalt,
Speaker 3: which turned to dirt, which turned to mud, which led
Speaker 3: us to a river. A driver, however, was prepared for this.
Speaker 3: The drive here was mad like that road was fucked.
Speaker 3: We're in this tiny little guard. The driver took off
Speaker 3: his shoes and socks to conduct the more technical section
Speaker 3: of the drive, which I thought was quite amasing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: really steep, lots of holes, lots of potholes, you know,
Speaker 3: just really rutted out kind of dirt road. And then
Speaker 3: we got here and took to some guys, negotiated a
Speaker 3: price and told him where we wanted to go, and
Speaker 3: they said, yeah, sure, buy some water, you know, snow
Speaker 3: water on the way about three hours and so we
Speaker 3: bought some water right there, and yeah, here we are
Speaker 3: on the boat now, as you can hear. I recorded
Speaker 3: this on a piragua. It's a kind of dugout canoe
Speaker 3: with the hole made out of a single tree and
Speaker 3: a toothstroke motor bolted on the back. It's the only
Speaker 3: way to travel here other than on your feet, and
Speaker 3: it's the only way the Embarra can get the produced
Speaker 3: cigaret to market. The skill of the piragueros, the people
Speaker 3: who drive the piraguas, is incredible. They navigate parts of
Speaker 3: the river so shallow that they have to pull up
Speaker 3: the toothstroke motor. And I noticed all the motors have
Speaker 3: propellers that are covered in chips and bashes from smacking
Speaker 3: into the rocks at the bottom. In the bow of
Speaker 3: the boat, I sat on top of my giant rucksack,
Speaker 3: marveling at the birds, insects, and foliage of the jungle,
Speaker 3: and occasionally I jumped up to make fairly useless contributions
Speaker 3: with the boat's bamboo pole under the close supervision of Marcellino,
Speaker 3: a driver and are soon to be host homstly just
Speaker 3: laughed at me as I leaned my whole way into
Speaker 3: the pole, which notably slipped, and I tried to avoid
Speaker 3: falling face first into the chocolate brown water. On the
Speaker 3: way to bat Jiquito, we passed several small lember our villages.
Speaker 3: Little children waved at us from the banks or from
Speaker 3: the shallows of the river where they washed and played.
Speaker 3: Adults looked on I, doubtless worthy. One nurse's excrect tree
Speaker 3: white dude was doing going the wrong way on the
Speaker 3: river for a migrant, but they smiled and waved back anyway.
Speaker 3: After an overnight flight, a five hour drive, and three
Speaker 3: hours in a dugout canoe, we rounded a corner in
Speaker 3: the river and ba Jigito came into view. Over the
Speaker 3: last few years, it reorientated itself from a tiny indigenous
Speaker 3: village to an unofficial reception center for migrants. On my
Speaker 3: hopelessly outdated topo map, the area has nothing but contours
Speaker 3: and green shading, no roads, no trails, no markets of
Speaker 3: human existence at all. And perhaps that's how the state
Speaker 3: sees this place. That Daddy Inn is as real to
Speaker 3: most Panamanians a Sesame street or Jurassic Park. But for
Speaker 3: the mber this has been their home since long before
Speaker 3: Panama and Columbia and even maps existed. A few dozen
Speaker 3: houses in the village, mostly built on stilts to avoid
Speaker 3: the seasonal floods, now offer up their rooms as hostels
Speaker 3: for the migrants. Some of them have enclosed at bottom
Speaker 3: floor using plywood or cinder blocks. Others have strung hammocks
Speaker 3: from their support posts. For four or five bugs, migrants
Speaker 3: can get their first good night's sleep since they left
Speaker 3: Neck or Clee in Columbia as much as a week before.
Speaker 3: Along the main street, which is really just to raise
Speaker 3: concrete footpath about a meter across, you can buy a
Speaker 3: meal any of half a dozen places for five bucks.
Speaker 3: You can get an hour of Wi Fi for a dollar,
Speaker 3: or charge your phone for the same price. Cold drinks
Speaker 3: for a dollar as well. Are one of the many
Speaker 3: front rooms that have turned into small kiosks. And that's
Speaker 3: where the migrants I have been sitting down with at
Speaker 3: the river went. When they're arrived into town, I let
Speaker 3: them be for a while I went off to interview
Speaker 3: more migrants. About a thousand of them arrive in this
Speaker 3: village every day. Each year since a pandemic has seen
Speaker 3: record numbers arrive, and the little village on the side
Speaker 3: of a hill, surrounded by palm trees and full of
Speaker 3: smiling children in their traditional brightly colored pallumers chasing chickens
Speaker 3: and dogs, has welcomed every single one of them. About
Speaker 3: a thousand of them arrive in this town every day.
Speaker 3: To get here, they also take a boat from neck
Speaker 3: o'clee across the Golf of the Dabienne. They crossed on
Speaker 3: small motor boats to Capolgana or Kandel. Those are both
Speaker 3: towns on the western side of the Gulf of the Darienne.
Speaker 3: From there they begin their walk. Even though they're now
Speaker 3: north of the Dolf, they're still in Colombia and on
Speaker 3: the Colombian side of the border. They're guided by guides
Speaker 3: to whom they pay several hundred dollars and in return
Speaker 3: receive protection and a wrist band that ensures they can
Speaker 3: walk without being robbed. Nobody I spoke to had made
Speaker 3: it this far without paying a guide. The area is
Speaker 3: largely under the control of the Golf Cartel, several members
Speaker 3: of which were sanctioned by the USA. While I was
Speaker 3: in the Uncle the marcos I spoke to you didn't
Speaker 3: really have much bad to say about this part of
Speaker 3: their experience, but universally acknowledged that the next part was
Speaker 3: where they really confronted their fears and nightmares about the Daddy.
Speaker 3: N Here's one Venezuelan migrant sharing his experience.
Speaker 6: A Gandhi.
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 dangerous
Speaker 10: less too, and they have everything you need there. You
Speaker 10: come prepared, you have you come with water, and there
Speaker 10: 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 Las Bandabas, which means to Flags
Speaker 3: to Bajo Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There they
Speaker 3: can't drink from the river because a human waste and
Speaker 3: human remains that constantly fill it like the water deadly.
Speaker 3: They must walk on unmaintained trails. It often turns in
Speaker 3: deep mud. They only have the supplies they carry, which
Speaker 3: often run out, or they jettison to stave weight on
Speaker 3: the incredibly steep mountain path. They climb and descend those
Speaker 3: mountains across rivers, often without eating or drinking for days
Speaker 3: at a time. On the trail, they passed by the
Speaker 3: bodies of their fellow travelers as a constant reminder of
Speaker 3: the risk they're taking. If you ask people in Panama City,
Speaker 3: they'll tell you that Dalian is closed now. New President
Speaker 3: hose Raoul Molino was elected on a promise to shut
Speaker 3: down the gap, end the humanitarian crisis, and deport more
Speaker 3: migrants for the US funding, and that funding has certainly arrived,
Speaker 3: with more than six million already spent since he took
Speaker 3: office in July. Since then, Panama has deported more than
Speaker 3: eleven hundred people to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, and India. Each
Speaker 3: of these has been funded by US taxpayers. Obviously, the
Speaker 3: jungle isn't closed, and it can't really be closed. But
Speaker 3: in an interview before he was elected, Molino said that
Speaker 3: the border of the United States, instead of being in Texas,
Speaker 3: has moved to Panama, and that is something he can
Speaker 3: do with US support. I spoke to some in venezuel
Speaker 3: And ladies help and carry their bag because it's a
Speaker 3: steep hill, and they were saying that no one has
Speaker 3: seen any barriers. I don't know anything about any barriers
Speaker 3: or any fences in a Darien and that like they
Speaker 3: hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not standing in
Speaker 3: front of one hundred people who just got off a
Speaker 3: boat from the Darienn Hubris Aside, the rhetoric of closing
Speaker 3: the daim signals are turned not just in Panamanian politics,
Speaker 3: but in the way the world sees and handles migration.
Speaker 3: The US has always sought to externalize its borders, from
Speaker 3: US train border patrol officers and Dominican Republic along the
Speaker 3: border is Haiti to DHS agents deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 3: As migration has become more politicized, the US has sought
Speaker 3: to move its enforcement away from prying eyes and from compassion,
Speaker 3: and instead brought more trauma to a place that is
Speaker 3: already so hard. I've spent much of the last decade
Speaker 3: of my life watching the state try to bring the
Speaker 3: mountains and desert close to where I live under its control.
Speaker 3: I've stood with Kumiai people as the government dynamited their graveyards.
Speaker 3: I found border walk contractors lost deep in the mountains.
Speaker 3: I've driven the impossibly steep concrete roads that they built,
Speaker 3: worried about my truck turning end on end. I've seen
Speaker 3: billions of dollars thrown at these mountains, and I've seen
Speaker 3: people with twenty dollars angle grinders or ladders made of
Speaker 3: old palettes defeat the wall in moments. Trying to close
Speaker 3: borders doesn't work at home, and it won't work in
Speaker 3: the Daddy and Gap either. Just building the roads to
Speaker 3: get the construction equipment into the gap is a gargantuan task,
Speaker 3: and any attempt to create a barrier across the sixty
Speaker 3: kilometer wide wilderness area or simply push migrants onto other
Speaker 3: more dangerous routes, into places where you can't build and
Speaker 3: the places where nobody can rescue you. If you fall
Speaker 3: down or break your leg. That doesn't mean there's nothing
Speaker 3: the US can do. I saw first hand the impact
Speaker 3: of Americans spending here as migrants had a reception center
Speaker 3: called Lajas Blancas, had their families torn apart, and men,
Speaker 3: women and children cried as their parents and partners were
Speaker 3: taken away for a flight back to Colombia, Cuba, or
Speaker 3: Venezuela that my taxes helped to pay for. I console
Speaker 3: the children with toys and stickers and something to eat
Speaker 3: as their dads were loaded into a flatbed truck. A
Speaker 3: government didn't send money to feed these children, but it
Speaker 3: seemed to have the funds to fund their parents' deportation.
Speaker 3: By deporting people from Panama, the US effectively deprives them
Speaker 3: of much of the due process they should, in theory,
Speaker 3: have the right to in the United States, and the
Speaker 3: US can easily deport them back to places like Cuba
Speaker 3: and Venezuela, which it considers to be dictatorial regimes. The
Speaker 3: US does not and cannot stop migration. People have always moved,
Speaker 3: and 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 and gap which I've seen person on so
Speaker 3: media 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: Aimulcholi, there are many rivers that you're forced into all
Speaker 11: the time. You're putting your life and everything else on
Speaker 11: the line there. I was worried that the indigenous people
Speaker 11: would come out and do something to us. In the nights.
Speaker 11: I was worried that any of the children, god forbid,
Speaker 11: would have an accident. The same for me. It's horrible
Speaker 11: to think about it now.
Speaker 3: This mother hood cross 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 us.
Speaker 11: Yesterday how many died yesterday?
Speaker 3: Three?
Speaker 11: I think three died yesterday. One drowned in the river. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's really tough this. No, no, nobody should do this.
Speaker 3: Nobody.
Speaker 11: We do this out of pure physical necessity to look
Speaker 11: for a better future for our kids. We can't stay
Speaker 11: in our country, We couldn't stay any longer.
Speaker 3: There here are a couple of the kids I spoke to,
Speaker 3: or in some cases, the kids who took my regorda
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 in the river, I was really scared.
Speaker 3: Apparently the whole thing was like an adventure. She'd seen
Speaker 3: Peppa Pig happy, 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. They're really sure to be at home
Speaker 3: washing Pepper Pig and playing with her friends. No 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 ees Mohamma not buying her Mum
Speaker 3: gave us a different account.
Speaker 6: Rahmo.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to cry because I didn't want her
Speaker 1: to see me crying. But sometimes I would explode because
Speaker 1: it's hard for your child to ask you for water,
Speaker 1: to ask you for food, and you don't have any
Speaker 1: to be in a place where you walk. You walk
Speaker 1: from five in the morning, it's five in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: You're walking. You don't know what to do, going through
Speaker 1: more than one hundred rivers and asking God not to
Speaker 1: rain and not wanting it to get worse. It rained,
Speaker 1: and the girl got a fever. She got a fever.
Speaker 1: But well, God is good that we pray a lot.
Speaker 1: I say that we don't know God so much in
Speaker 1: the church from the process and the process that we
Speaker 1: are in, and we don't know we can be so
Speaker 1: strong until we go through that storm and we see
Speaker 1: that He protects us. He knows that He was always
Speaker 1: there watching 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 was a common message I heard
Speaker 3: from migrants. He's a migrant from Zimbabwe telling me how
Speaker 3: her daughter inspired her to keep going when she felt
Speaker 3: 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 had what 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.
Speaker 6: Just go both.
Speaker 12: The gain was tough, really really tough. The mountain, the stones,
Speaker 12: the river. It's not easy at all. It's not very
Speaker 12: I don't even recommended someone to say you use daddy
Speaker 12: and give no. And even by I did know about it. Yeah,
Speaker 12: I was regretting myself. I was crying. I was like, God,
Speaker 12: I don't know my family and my family they don't
Speaker 12: 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 anything, were just asking people, can
Speaker 12: I have a piece of biscuit?
Speaker 6: They just help us.
Speaker 3: That's nice. The other migrants helped.
Speaker 6: You, Yeah, the others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you think that they treat African people differently.
Speaker 12: Very nice, especially these Spanish people, they are very nice.
Speaker 12: I don't want to lie because if you need help,
Speaker 12: you for call them for your look. The other ones
Speaker 12: they might run away, but the other ones they just
Speaker 12: found for health. They even give us tablets on the road,
Speaker 12: give us energy drinks, give my daughter a sweets for energe.
Speaker 12: They push us like, let's go, guys, let's call, let's go.
Speaker 12: You make it injury, 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 half a million people
Speaker 3: across the jungle. This year we might see more Magaret's
Speaker 3: arriving about Jigito spend the day in the village before
Speaker 3: taking off in a piagua of their own up to
Speaker 3: Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier. They
Speaker 3: register with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym Sena Front,
Speaker 3: and they call their families to say they survived. Then
Speaker 3: they dry out their blistered feet, enjoy the cooking of
Speaker 3: several of the families who have turned their homes into
Speaker 3: sort of ersad's restaurants. They sleep on the floors of
Speaker 3: the houses or underneath them, ardge their phones for a
Speaker 3: dollar a time. Certainly, migration has changed this town, and
Speaker 3: 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 antimigrant sentiment here right now, despite the
Speaker 3: gap being a deadly deterrent, numbers are expected to reach
Speaker 3: Arequid again this year, maybe seven hundred thousand people will
Speaker 3: walk the gap. But despite these numbers, which may seem
Speaker 3: high for a small country, I didn't really find much
Speaker 3: anti Migroan sentiment in Panama as a whole. There's plenty
Speaker 3: of it in the US, though, and as the United
Speaker 3: States winds down its war and terror it needs a
Speaker 3: new nebulous enemy to justify its military spending and to
Speaker 3: keep the security into valance companies donating to politicians in
Speaker 3: their millions. In part. It is found that by simply
Speaker 3: opening a floodgate of weapons and funding, they can spew
Speaker 3: forth genocide and death in Palestine and keep some of
Speaker 3: its income streams. But it needs a more long term solution.
Speaker 3: There are only so many Palestinian babies that can balm,
Speaker 3: and we'll run out of Palestinians long before we run
Speaker 3: out of bombs. The USA is new enemy when it
Speaker 3: must seek out all over the world. It's a migrant.
Speaker 3: It's a woman I met carrying her child across the mountains.
Speaker 3: The little Venezuelan girl throwing bottle caps into a cinder
Speaker 3: block with me to pass the time as she asked
Speaker 3: me questions about America. It's a twenty one year old
Speaker 3: man whose remains my friends found in a border on
Speaker 3: a hot day this September. The US will stop at
Speaker 3: nothing and fining and destroying the migrant, and just as
Speaker 3: it did in the War on Terror, it will find
Speaker 3: fast friends in states desperate to avail themselves to the
Speaker 3: seemingly unlimited flow of resources. The US dedicates to keeping
Speaker 3: its conflicts out of the sights and the minds of
Speaker 3: its citizens. The USA's open hostility to migrants isn't something
Speaker 3: that's unknown here. Everyone I met knew about it. Several
Speaker 3: of them had watched with horror as Kamala Harris and
Speaker 3: Donald Trump argued not about how to treat migrants but
Speaker 3: about who could turn more of them away in a
Speaker 3: recent presidential debate. Every migrant I met had questions about CBP, one,
Speaker 3: about US asylum policy, and about how they could get
Speaker 3: to the US before a second Trump administration. Despite this,
Speaker 3: they all clung to their versions of the American dream.
Speaker 3: They wanted to work and be paid a fair wage,
Speaker 3: to send their kids to school, maybe to college, to
Speaker 3: feel safe in their homes, and to be able to
Speaker 3: speak in dress as they wish without varing consequences. All
Speaker 3: of those things are imperiling this country too, and they
Speaker 3: know that, but they still feel their dreams are worth
Speaker 3: the journey. For Noemi, the little girl who took the
Speaker 3: daddy and in Astride, the American dream was pretty simple.
Speaker 3: She wanted two things. To see Minnie Mouse and to
Speaker 3: see her aunt. Why am I mine with seven or
Speaker 3: thousand euros, a studio.
Speaker 6: Not ye Ammia, as you dear Amia.
Speaker 1: 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: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You could
Speaker 1: now find sources for it Could Happen Here, listed directly
Speaker 1: in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.