The Darien Gap is known simply as “hell” to those who survive it. How else to describe this lawless and roadless expanse of dense jungle swamp marking the border between Colombia and Panama?  

Navigating this treacherous crossing requires traversing steep mountain passes patrolled by drug traffickers and armed bandits looking to rape and rob, walking 12-hours a day in stifling humidity and wading through endless swollen rivers which can rise several metres in an instant, sweeping the unsuspecting into their murky depths.  

Then there are the savage insects which bite every inch of bare skin and a multitude of venomous snakes. The jungle paths are lined with the rotting corpses and bones of those fallen by the wayside.

Ten-year-old Anna Ramirez lost her mother in hell several days ago, and has heard no news from her since making it out of the jungle alive. Sitting in the Saint Vicente migrant camp in Panama’s Darien province having arrived following a two-day journey by canoe, she absently colours in a flower while describing how she and her 14-year-old sister became separated from their mother after she injured her foot on a tree branch.  

In such an inhospitable environment, seemingly innocuous injuries can quickly become something far more serious. Anna recounts how her limping mother soon fell behind and could no longer keep up.  

Injured and desperate, at a river crossing she entrusted the care of her two daughters to a group of Venezuelans they were walking with, and promised to catch up with them ahead. “I’m worried, very worried,” Anna says, as tears fill her eyes. “I miss her a lot.” 

Despite the horrors of the Darien Gap, over recent years it has become one of the most prominent routes for migrants travelling to North America. As well as a host of South American and Caribbean countries, people travel here from all over the world to make the lethal jungle crossing, including Africa, China, South East Asia and the Middle East.  

In 2021, according to the Panamanian government’s own figures, 133,000 reportedly made the journey – a figure that is set to be surpassed this year. According to Unicef, in the first five months of this year, the number of children in the jungle was double what it was over the same period in 2021, meaning minors comprised roughly one in five of those attempting to cross. Many of these children are walking with families, but others end up in the jungle alone.

At the last count in August, Unicef recorded a total of 383 unaccompanied children crossing the Darien Gap in the first eight months of the year – in 2021 that overall figure was 113 and in 2019, 69.  

The Darien Gap takes its name from the missing link in the 17,000-mile Pan-American Highway, which runs from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego at South America’s southernmost tip. The ‘gap’ spans only about 60 miles, but encompasses some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth.  

In 1972 a team of British explorers led by Colonel John Blashford-Snell were tasked with attempting the first vehicle crossing of the Darien Gap with two Range Rovers. The expedition took several months with 50 per cent of the team evacuated as medical casualties and a support group of 11 Colombian soldiers killed.

Blashford-Snell remembers the swamplands as a “god-forsaken place”.  Little has changed in 50 years. At Puerto Limon, a makeshift dock on the banks of the Chucunaque River where a steady stream of canoes drop off exhausted migrants recently-emerged from the jungle, Ivanis Martinez recalls a similar experience.

The 25-year-old Venezuelan law graduate, who is clutching her four-year-old son, Thiago, is en route to Orlando, Florida, where her mother has already settled and has spent the past seven days trekking through the jungle. 

“A lot of people died,” she says. “We saw the badly decomposed body of one kid before crossing the mountains and another woman with her dead child who must have been about four. We also found skulls of children about 9-years-old. Everybody saw the bodies.” 

Thiago, who is chewing on a bag of pink strawberry-flavoured ice, and clutching a Mickey Mouse t-shirt, stays silent as we talk. His mother says he is suffering constant nightmares in which they trudge endlessly though the jungle.

The Darien Gap has been used as a people trafficking route since around 2010. Given the multitude of nationalities making the crossing, the explosion in recent years has in part been a reflection of wider events.

This year, for example, there has been a huge rise in the number of Venezuelans as their home country spirals into increasing lawlessness. In previous years Haitians fleeing civil unrest have comprised the bulk of migrants; or Cubans escaping the country’s worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

The rapid rise in children is also thought to be part of a second wave of migration, as families seek to meet up with relatives who have already journeyed ahead and settled in the US. That is the case for Jean Gutierrez, a slight 16-year-old whom I met in a remote jungle camp in Canaan Membrillo in the heart of the Darien Gap. 

From Zulia state in Venezuela, Jean should have been entering into his final year of high school this September. Instead, without even telling any of his friends, he packed up his possessions and decided to make the mammoth land crossing on his own.  

He is travelling with the blessing of his father, who recently arrived as an illegal immigrant in Chicago, and his mother who has remained in Venezuela. As we speak his bare feet are bathed in Vaseline and all he is wearing are long johns and a Nike hoodie which he lifts up to show me his back pockmarked in insect bites. ‘I knew the risks,’ he says. ‘But it has been horrible.’ 

Another unaccompanied teenager staying in the camp is 16-year-old Nicole Estefanie, who is also travelling alone and hoping to be reunited with her father in the US. Her father (who crossed the Darien Gap five months ago) is wiring her money as she travels but already she has been robbed by bandits in the jungle and had her identification documents stolen. ‘I had nothing left and spent two days without eating and thought I was going to die,” she says, her eyelids drooping out of sheer fatigue.

Until 2016 when the first migrants started to arrive here, Canaan Membrillo was an indigenous village largely cut off from the world. A few hundred homes in a jungle clearing with no electricity (bar the occasional generator) or roads, its inhabitants farmed avocado, coffee and plantain and lived in near total isolation. At night, the village would be illuminated by a carpet of fireflies.  

Over the past year, however, Canaan has become a key transit point for people traversing the Darien Gap. On the four-hour journey canoeing along the muddy river from Puerto Limon, a flotsam of human detritus washes past: sleeping mats, camping poles, plastic bottles and children’s lost shoes. 

Every day a fresh wave of desperate migrants washes up in the village. They arrive here by canoe (having paid $25 for another indigenous community further upstream to motor them down) or sometimes simply stumble in through the jungle.

The week we visit the daily arrivals have ranged from 500 to nearly 1,300 people. Most are severely dehydrated, having barely eaten anything for days and drunk only river water which has left them with vomiting and diarrhoea.

Some have twisted limbs and broken bones, early onset trench foot and deep lesions on their feet and legs. Few have proper walking boots or waterproofs: instead attempting the journey in trainers or rubber wellington boots which they slice off at the ankle when the blisters grow too severe. 

In an attempt to cope with the demand, the Panamanian authorities have established a garrison of its national border police in the village and an immigration post which processes the migrants as they arrive.  

The vast majority of migrants only spend a single night here, bedding down in borrowed tents and cooking on open fires before paying another $25 to boatmen in the village to be ferried downstream and continue with their journey.

There is little official infrastructure in place – in part to encourage people to keep moving – but the lack of toilet facilities or clean running water means the entire outskirts of the village have become an open sewer picked over by hundreds of black vultures which are presently migrating from north to south America in the opposite direction. 

Some international NGOs, including Unicef, have a presence here while there is a small medical facility with two beds attached to saline drips and packets of soap, paracetamol and antiseptic wipes that are distributed among the constant line of patients. 

One of the doctors is 30-year-old Castalin Ramirez. She admits the experience is akin to working in a warzone, being confronted with appalling cases of sexual violence and traumatised people encountering dead bodies on the road. “I have a seven-month old baby and it makes what the children are going through very hard to hear,” she says.  

Amid the many stories of human sorrow, those emerging from the jungle also have their own tales of extraordinary resilience. The migrants band together in groups a few dozen strong for protection against bandits and club together to pay the hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, demanded by people traffickers who guide them through the jungle. 

In Canaan I meet 15-year-old Jesmail Diaz from Venezuela who has carried his brother Abraham, 13, through the entire jungle on his back as he suffers from scoliosis of the spine and cannot walk.  

Another Venezuelan, 36-year-old Jose Martinez who is travelling with his wife and 16-year-old son, carried the family dog on his shoulders for two days through the Darien Gap as it couldn’t cope with the thick mud. Martinez said they also shared their last food provisions with the 40kg pitbull called Panthera. “We didn’t take him with us for protection but because we love him,” he says.

With so many unregistered people streaming through the jungle, the numbers that perish are hard to quantify. According to Unicef, last year five children were found dead in the Darien Gap while officially the Panama government says at least 51 people were reported dead or missing in 2021.

The true death toll, however, is feared to be considerably higher. Of the several routes which migrants follow, the most dangerous is known as ‘the road of death’. At the Lajas Blancas reception centre in Darien province, hundreds of migrants who have survived this journey pitch up every day. 

Gabriel Silva Parra, 36, a former corporal in the Venezulan army, took the route with his wife, Yulianai, two-year-old daughter, Gabrielismar, and baby Yuliangel who was only born in July. 

They chose the route as it was cheaper than others, paying only $100 between them although he says it nearly cost them their lives. His two-year-old daughter developed a parasitic infection and he says another day in the jungle and she would have died.

Of the group of 400 they started walking with, six people perished. The last was a fellow Venezuelan who had helped the family throughout, but was drowned in a river whirlpool just two hours before they made it to safety.

Gabriel says they covered the body with stones and branches marked with a makeshift cross and kept walking. 

Others end up taking the road of death unwittingly. 17-year-old Rosibel Flores and her 26-year-old sister, Maria, a law graduate from Venezuela, were mistakenly told by their brother who arrived in the US a few months ago after traversing the Darien Gap that this was the easier road to take.  

The pair, whose father works as a dentist in Venezula, paid $2,000 to people traffickers. Rosibel, a bright, bespectacled girl who in the US wants to train as a dentist, says she saw three dead people in the jungle: a man who had smashed his head upon rocks and two others who had recently drowned. “I wanted to stop and pray for him but the group I was with didn’t let me,” she says. 

She too almost drowned when a sudden downpour caused a river they were crossing into a raging torrent. She recalls seeing snakes the length of her arm fleeing their flooded burrows as the current nearly dragged her away. “I just kept crying, thinking when am I going to get out of this hell?” she recalls. 

After the Darien Gap, migrants make it quickly to the border. Panama has an agreement with neighbouring Costa Rica to essentially move people on as quickly as possible.

From the Saint Vicente migrant camp they pay $50 a ticket to be transported 12-hours in air conditioned buses laid on by the Panama authorities to the Costa Rica border. From there, though, there is still a journey of some 4,000 miles to reach the US border through hostile territory. 

It is a different story for the unaccompanied children. Once identified by the Panamanian authorities, they are kept in a refuge run in partnership with Unicef while attempts are made to track down their families.

Earlier this year a three-year-old child was rescued whose parents had died in the jungle and they were taken into care in Panama – but generally they end up being reunited with their families within a week. 

At Saint Vicente that is the case for Rose-Marie Whaldes, a 33-year-old Haitian, who is enjoying a tearful reunion with her five-year-old son Walter after losing him in the jungle six days previously. “I spent three days without food or sleep, crying because I thought I had lost him,” Whaldes says.

Walter, whose favourite food is spaghetti and idolises the Brazilian footballer Neymar, remains impassive and withdrawn as his mother recounts how she left him with a Venezuelan family she had met en route in order to care for her husband who had collapsed in the jungle out of exhaustion. 

“He is so young that I just hope he has no memory of this,” Whaldes admits. For most, however, the scars of the Darien Gap will never fade.

*Some names have been changed

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