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title: "The Darién Gap: The Deadliest Place on Earth"
description: "It’s a place once thought to be utterly impenetrable, an incredibly dense, and incredibly lethal stretch of jungle where not even the hardiest explorers have a chance at survival. Anchoring the rainforests of Colombia to the narrow Central American isthmus, the region known as the Darién Gap is among planet Earth’s most incredible natural fortresses. It is a forsaken place, one known in Panamanian legend by an inscription carved by a Spanish conquistador centuries ago, not long before that conquistador was found floating dead in the sea: \"When you go to Darién, entrust yourself to Mary, for in her hands is the entrance, and in God’s the exit.\"\n\nIn the twenty-first century, though, the Darién Gap has distinguished itself for another, very different reason: as an expression not just of mortal danger, but of pure, human desperation, and the lengths that a person will go for their own survival. The Darién Gap is, today, just as dangerous as it ever was, just as impenetrable, just as impossible to navigate, so completely left behind by the modern world that not a single road has ever traversed it. Yet it is also a vital conduit—and, increasingly, the only conduit—for migrants from across South America to travel northward. In 2023, they didn’t just cross in the ones, or the twos, or even the dozens; try half a million people, fleeing northward across some of the most inhospitable territory on the planet.\n\n## A Thriving Ecosystem\n\nAbove all else, the Darién Gap is defined by its namesake: the Darién, a sprawling, lush tropical rainforest that blankets some 17,000 square kilometers across southern Panama and northeast Colombia. Although it might feel like a monolith to anyone brave or foolish enough to try and cross it, it’s anything but; high mountain ranges give way to wetlands, and cloud forests fill in the gaps between mangrove coastlines. Rivers cross the landscape in knots and spiderwebs, from the mighty Atrato and its river delta on the Colombian side, to the Tuira and the Sambu tracing oxbows across Panama. It is an extraordinarily geographically diverse place, with just about every variation of a tropical or near-equatorial landscape, other than desert, represented somewhere within its territory.\n\nBut one thing is constant across the Darién: the rain. In this part of the world, the dry season is a brief and relative affair, with most of the year consumed by a constant deluge of water, water, and more water coming from all directions. And nor is this a passive rainfall, either; as storms roll through and inundate groundwaters that are already fully saturated, flash floods thunder across the landscape, and rivers surge high or, at times, appear where no river existed before. To plants, animals, and human travelers alike, the rain in the Darién Gap is a constant threat, rewriting the landscape with mudslides even as forest fires still manage to break out. Of the year’s three hundred and sixty-five days, three hundred and thirty of them will see rain falling across the Darién landscape.\n\nAnd with Darién’s extraordinary geography, comes an incredible biodiversity. The region is host to hundreds upon hundreds of species of vertebrate animals, thousands of species of invertebrates, and almost certainly, numerous species that humanity has not yet discovered. After all, so thick and impenetrable are many of the Darién’s inner reaches that there’s no telling what may lurk on that territory. Among the animals we do know, are rare beasts like the Central American tapir, the great green macaw, the brown-headed spider monkey, the great peacock, and the tiny margay wildcat. Its rivers and streams host booming populations of freshwater fish and reptiles, and over five hundred species of bird find their roosts in the Darién’s trees.\n\nBut just like the forest itself, the Darién’s wildlife is more than capable of putting an end to the humans in their midst. The jaguar is relatively abundant across the Darién, and although they avoid attacking humans most of the time, the attacks they do perpetrate are particularly horrific and typically fatal. The puma, spread all across the American supercontinent, is no less dangerous. The harpy eagle is strong and fierce enough to carry off a child if it so desires, and is known to attack humans relentlessly when their territory is encroached. The American crocodile is common, and has nothing to fear as an apex predator, present in most, if not all, relatively sedentary or slow-flowing water bodies in the forest. Of the area’s most venomous snakes, a few stand out in particular: the ten-foot, three-meter-long Central American bushmaster, the incredibly quick-striking eyelash viper, and the fer-de-lance—described by those in the herpetological community as \"the ultimate pit viper\", and simultaneously known as the American supercontinent’s most abundant snake. As for the Darién’s deadly occupants with more than four legs…well, we’ll allow readers to learn about those on their own.\n\nThe Darién is one of Central America’s few remaining, relatively undisturbed ecosystems, one that’s protected by national park designations in Panama and by their relative isolation in Colombia. It’s a place utterly saturated with malaria-carrying mosquitos and a range of deadly and otherwise nasty diseases, where temperatures can run as high as ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit on an average day, with humidity close to 100 percent. None of the river or bog water of the Darién is potable without filtration, and it’s quite likely to give you a nasty set of parasites if you decide to take a drink anyway. Even the trees are trying to kill you; some are coated with toxins, and others, like the chunga palm, feature spikes long enough to pass clean through most parts of the body. Make no mistake: Darién is a beautiful place, a downright incredible place—but it’s a place where humans aren’t on top. Instead, they’re on the menu.\n\n## A Lost Cause\n\nOver the long arc of history, one of the hardest lessons for humanity to learn has also been one of the most basic: some places, are just not for us. Through sheer, human persistence—or, at times, stupidity—a long line of *Homo sapiens* have worked across continents and generations to avoid hearing that lesson. And by and large, with exceptions made for polar cold, the deep desert, or the very highest altitudes, that effort has been successful. In the Darién Gap, however…no such luck.\n\nOf course, that’s not to say that nobody at all lives inside the Darién Gap today. In fact, several indigenous groups trace their ancestry to the Darién: the Embera, the Waunana, and the Kuna. It’s difficult to estimate just how many among each group still lives within the Darién; some estimates run as low as 1,200, while others are in the multiple tens of thousands. The Embera people cluster around the Choco River and its tributaries, speaking a range of mutually intelligible languages across the full length of their ancestral territories, although most Embera have now settled into villages or even cities outside the Darién. The Waunana are a related people, semi-nomadic like the Embera, and together, their cluster of spoken languages are unlike any other in the world. The Kuna, famous for their unique textiles, have kept their roots in the Darién for several centuries prior to the pre-colonial period, and they’re studied intensely in the modern day for their low rates of heart disease and cancer. Although most of their population has long since left the Darién, they retain a strong cultural identity in the cities where most Kuna now live. Archaeologists have also uncovered evidence of a substantial settlement in the pre-colonial age, including gold and jade artifacts and evidence of paved roads in long-forgotten cities.\n\nBut for non-indigenous settlers, the Darién has been as dangerous through time as it is today. The first Europeans who recorded making contact with the Kuna were a party led by a pair of Spanish conquistadors: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the shores of the New World, and Alonso de Ojeda, who, among other things, gave the territory now called Venezuela its modern name. For a while, the Darién Gap was used to transit silver and gold across the Panamanian isthmus from the Pacific to the Atlantic, although those over-land routes avoided the more impenetrable portions of the Darién. Generally speaking, it was under Spain’s direct control, except for one brief affair, known as the Darién Scheme.\n\nIn the modern day, the Darién Scheme is little more than a footnote in European colonial history, but at the time, it was both the beginning, and the end of the Kingdom of Scotland’s attempt to secure holdings abroad. Scotland’s plan seemed to make decent sense at the time: claim the nigh-on-inhospitable Darién Gap, clear it out, and make it into a critical waypoint for trade, bringing items from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast just like the Panama Canal would, centuries later. But unfortunately for Scotland, the kingdom didn’t quite get the message on just how hard it is to forge one’s way through Darién. Scotland’s first, 1,200-strong expedition departed from the port of Leith in June 1698; their settlement, called New Caledonia, would be abandoned by March 1700. Not only were the settlers ravaged by everything from local diseases to logistical failures to a minimally competent leadership, but, as it turned out, Spain didn’t take kindly to their settlement either. A quick siege, and some suspected sabotage by the East India Company, were enough to see the Scots sailing home. Roughly one-fifth of all money in circulation inside Scotland had been put to use for the so-called Company of Scotland, the trading company that New Caledonia was supposed to make useful, and the financial devastation that came after Scotland’s failure, is considered to be among the major factors that forced Scotland into a union with England seven years later.\n\nOver the following centuries, both the Spanish Empire and the eventual nations of Panama and Colombia would concede that the Darién Gap was basically impassable. For the later colonial years, its interior would go largely untouched and unexploited, despite some logging and hunting around its fringes. The United States would make a couple of fruitless attempts to cross the Darién during the 19th century, but those only ended in the torment and, quite often, the demise of the people who took part. In the twentieth century, much of the discussion around Darién was its implications for the Pan-American Highway, a road system that connects a stretch of thirty thousand kilometers, nineteen thousand miles, all the way from the Arctic settlement of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the Argentinian city of Ushuaia, one of five internationally recognized gateway cities to reach the Antarctic continent. The Pan-American Highway does not, however, pass through the Darién Gap. The reasons for this are plentiful: concerns around the impact of deforestation, worry about the spread of disease, protection of the local indigenous population, and, of course, awareness of the sheer difficulty of surviving in such a place for long enough to build a proper highway, even with a large construction operation. Now, the Pan-American Highway leaves off in the Panamanian town of Yaviza, and picks back up again in the Colombian city of Turbo, with only intermittent periods of ferry coverage on and off over the subsequent decades. Both because of the lack of road access, and because of the rainforest that makes road construction so difficult, the Darién has remained practically untouched through most of human history—and it remains one of the most immaculately preserved parts of Planet Earth, even today.\n\nThese days, the capital city of Darién Province in Panama is La Palma, an isolated town that can hardly be called a town at all. Spread across over five hundred square kilometers, over two hundred square miles, La Palma is home to just past four thousand permanent residents, according to a 2010 estimate. If you’re trying to get there, you’ll only be successful on foot or by sea; the town is completely disconnected from the highway system, and even the people located further inland within the city limits have little ability to travel beyond the few paths that don’t get swallowed up by the jungle. It’s little enclaves like La Palma that form the closest thing to civilization in the entire Darién Gap, and to the people moving across territory inland, La Palma might as well be a world away. Getting there, is no easier than getting northward, and to make the attempt would be little more than a pointless detour.\n\nThat being said, some folks do like a pointless detour every once in a while, and despite the reality that trying to transit the Darién Gap is a hell of a lot more trouble than it’s worth, adventure tourists and hobbyists still try anyhow. The first time the Gap was crossed by vehicle was all the way back in 1928, done by a pair of Brazilian military troops and a mechanic in hopes of bringing attention to the Pan-American Highway initiative. That crossing, by the way, was done in a pair of Ford Model Ts. Occasional motor expeditions followed for the next several decades, including one done by a trio of Chevrolet Corvairs, sponsored by the owner of a Chevy dealership in Chicago. British cyclist Ian Hibell and two friends crossed the Gap on two wheels each, during Hibell’s two-year ride from Cape Horn to Alaska in the early 1970s. Although people have undoubtedly been crossing the Gap on foot for centuries, non-locals started recording successful journeys in the 1970s, including evangelist Arthur Blessitt, who did it while carrying a twelve-foot wooden cross, a machete, and a single backpack, fully on his own. Guided tourist expeditions started up during the 1980s, although they slowed down substantially from the 1990s onward, due to the presence of armed groups involved in Colombia’s long civil war, who gained a reputation for kidnapping and executing travelers on occasion. But although tourist traversals have since picked back up, they’ve been pushed out again by a somewhat larger barrier: thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of migrants.\n\n## A Migration Crisis\n\nTo understand the origins of the Darién Gap’s current role in the global migration crisis—and we do mean *global*, as we’ll get into shortly—we’ve got to look at a map, and we’ve got to zoom way, way out, so that we can see the entire American supercontinent in full view. It’s here, that we see the problem: a nice, big South American continent sitting just south of the Darién Gap, and a nice, big North American continent a little ways to the north, but just one narrow strip of land sitting in between. If you want to travel an over-land route from one American continent to the other, you *must* go through the Darién Gap—even despite the lack of roads, settlements, or even minimal resources that might make the journey easier.\n\nAnd while there are alternatives, they’re all going to cost you. There is, as we’ve said, no ferry service on offer to bring people around the Darién Gap by sea, and while it’s possible to find boats for hire, it’s both an expensive option and a high-risk one. Not only are the seas around Darién dangerous at unpredictable times, but there’s also no clear way to tell who’s going to bring a person across the water safely, and who’s going to kill them, throw them overboard, and keep their belongings. Trying to hug the coast in a kayak or another small boat is a fantastic way to get shot at, smashed against the land by high winds, and probably eaten by saltwater-tolerant American crocodiles, not to mention you’ve got to come into possession of a boat in the first place. Flights that would pass over Darién, like the hopper flights from Medellín, Bogotá, or Cali to Panama City, cost a couple of hundred US dollars at best, and are tough to board if a person doesn’t have the proper documentation to either catch a flight in Colombia, or land in Panama. Unless you’ve got money, you’re going to have to take on the Gap if you want to get out of South America.\n\nThat’s a particular problem for the millions of migrants, asylum-seekers, and displaced people living in South America, or who travel to South America from elsewhere, and hope to travel to the United States in hopes of beginning a new life. Across Latin America, some 20 million people or more have been forced to flee their homes in recent years, from a mix of ongoing conflict, political repression, natural disasters, and local violence across much of the continent. In South America, people flee a long conflict in Colombia, the socioeconomic collapse and authoritarian stranglehold in Venezuela, rising turmoil in Peru, and, most recently, an explosion of violence in Ecuador. Haitians travel toward South America’s shores by boat, rather than North America’s, knowing they’ve got a better chance at making it through the border on land. As countries like Chile and Peru militarize their borders, and certain nationalities, especially Venezuelans, are iced out of the visa process in other South American nations, they’re slowly squeezed north out of the continent, like toothpaste from a tube.\n\nIn the last couple of years, even migrants from other continents have come to South America, considering it to be the landing spot that gives them the best likelihood of completing a journey to the United States, even though an arrival so far south will require crossing the Gap. Migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make the journey, including a very recent influx of Chinese migrants so numerous that many of the shops, markets, and hostels in the areas around the Darién Gap have invested in signs and services translated into Mandarin. As for why these intercontinental migrants want to make the trip so badly, it varies from place to place; many flee war or persecution in their own countries, while others are escaping authoritarian regimes whose policies have made life unlivable, with China being a prime example of the latter. Migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, and other global crisis zones also feature prominently.\n\nBut regardless of where they come from, migrants will find themselves under a single authority when they reach the Colombian side of the Gap—and it’s not the nation of Colombia. Instead, they’re now in the dominion of the Gulf Clan, a powerful paramilitary organization and criminal cartel that traffics both people and drugs through the Gap with impunity. The Gulf Clan sells access to the Darién, they sell temporary lodging while people prepare, they sell food and supplies, they sell guide services, and they sell protection. More importantly, they sell all of the above at exorbitant prices. Not only that, but they are the ones who keep order in and around the Darién, and they are the ones to decide who’s poor enough to turn into drug mules, and who’s rich enough to extort for whatever possessions they have. They’re the ones who employ locals to run their camps, and exercise influence in more populated areas to ensure that new migrant arrivals are funneled straight into their racket. Above all, it’s the Gulf Clan’s violent, ruthless enforcement of the rules of the Gap that makes them stand out. The Clan dominates the Colombian side of the Gap, and with Human Rights Watch estimating that every person through the Gap pays an average of 125 American dollars to the cartel, they stand to gain nearly a hundred million dollars per year at current rates of migration.\n\nWith those sorts of incentives, the cartel actively stands to benefit from drawing people to the Darién. Wrote a team of CNN reporters who braved the crossing in 2023: \"People are the new commodity for cartels, perhaps preferable to drugs. These human packages move themselves. Rivals do not try to steal them. Each migrant pays $400 for access to the jungle passage and absorbs all the risks themselves.\" Online, traffickers go to great lengths to advertise their services in the Gap to people who might find themselves in need. On Facebook, TikTok, and other social media apps popular among migrants, smugglers will pay for advertising in order to send people their way. And it probably shouldn’t be a surprise, that these advertisements can often be less than honest about the situation there. Not only is the crossing made out to be much easier than it actually is, but questions from migrants online are unlikely to be answered honestly, when a lie might be more likely to get them to the edges of the Darién where they can be talked into making the journey. Misinformation about American immigration policy is no less common, with migrants often believing they’ve got a good shot not only at getting into the United States, but getting high-paying jobs, homes, and citizenship easily. Although there are plenty of exceptions, broadly speaking, it’s unlikely that a person coming to the Gap will understand the challenge ahead of them.\n\nAnd that’s a particular problem, because a person who’s not expecting the trek of their lives, also isn’t likely to come prepared for it. The Darién Gap is a difficult trek for even experienced hikers in peak physical fitness, and by and large, the migrants trying to cross the Gap are far from that standard. A high proportion are children or elderly, out of shape, in poor health, or malnourished, and most have never attempted anything remotely as physically demanding as the hike across the Gap. Add to that, a lack of the proper clothing, the proper food, the proper hiking boots, and the requisite knowledge to deal with what they’ll face inside the jungle, and the Darién Gap is a death trap. Officially, the number of migrants who’ve died there is less than two hundred…but experts from across the world and across relevant fields all agree that the real death toll is likely to be orders of magnitude higher, made up of people who came to a new country, never reported their presence to officials, disappeared into the jungle, and never came out.\n\nYet even with the risk of a crossing high, the situation bleak upon arrival, and exploitation of migrants so firmly cemented inside the Darién that it’s impossible to escape…people keep on coming. As we’ve mentioned, these are people being slowly iced out of the rest of South America, especially the Venezuelan population, which in 2023 made up nearly two-thirds of the total crossing the Gap. Those who come from other continents, have already put in so much work and spent so many resources to get to northern Colombia that turning back is all but unthinkable. And more and more often, families are crossing the Darién too; in 2023, one in five migrants in the Darién was a child, and half of those children were five years old or younger, with no way to keep track of the almost-certainly-high death toll among them. To say that the people crossing the Darién Gap are desperate, would almost undersell the reality that really drives them forward: by the time a person reaches the Darién, they’re out of options. The only choice left, is to travel northward, come what may.\n\n## Life in the Gap\n\nJournalists who’ve visited the parts of Colombia where people prepare for their journey through the Darién, recount extraordinary amounts of discarded items that might otherwise have been treated as essential: changes of clothes, extra shoes, even food. The trip through the Darién is even more difficult when weighed down, and those migrants who understand what’s ahead of them, will typically strip their packs down to the barest essentials before traveling through. Those who try and prove themselves more capable than the jungle, usually get a rude awakening very quickly; their belongings, too, will be mostly left behind a few hours into the trek.\n\nThat problem only gets worse when a person doesn’t speak either Spanish or English, as is more and more common at the edge of the Darién these days. More so now than ever before, the jungle is a melting pot of languages, spoken largely by people reliant on translation apps on their cell phones to get by. Depending on the language they speak, they might also be able to access content online that’ll explain to them how to survive the jungle, and the many dangerous people they’re sure to come across.\n\nRegardless of where they’re from, migrants can try and get their hands on packages of equipment that’ll help them navigate: everything from satellite phones, to first-aid kits, to even a traveling cook. But, unsurprisingly, those packages are pay-to-play, and much like a sports arena knowing that it can sell a bottle of water for eight dollars, the people providing the packages know very well that the migrants they’re dealing with have no alternatives and no means to argue about how much they’re charging. If given the chance between dying in the Gap, and struggling to come up with the money to pay…well, the Gulf Clan and the Gap’s other traffickers know damn well which option usually wins out.\n\nWith migrants so firmly under the cartel’s control, the process can get exceptionally well-organized. At some cartel camps, people who’ve paid for the right to move through cartel routes are issued wristbands as if they were at a concert. When it’s time for a given day’s migrants to start the journey, some camps will play them inspirational music, while guides shout through megaphones and encourage people to take their time walking instead of tiring themselves out. When the aforementioned CNN team left their cartel camp, they left alongside 800 other migrants, all released at the same time, most of them either children, or carrying children with them. Along the trail, the cartel has plenty of porters and hands for hire; they’ll carry a bag up a hill, take care of a child for a few minutes, or sell water, all for exorbitant prices designed to squeeze out whatever money the migrants haven’t told them about yet. All the while, cartel buzzsaws cut new routes through the jungle, all in anticipation that there will be even more migrants next month, and more, the month after that.\n\nThe question of who can pay what, is the primary question on the Gulf Clan’s mind—and by hook or by crook, you can bet your soul that the Gulf Clan will find out just how much is in a person’s pocket. By example, Chinese migrants are more likely than many others to be robbed all across South and Central America or targeted within the Darién Gap, since they’re perceived to be more wealthy than many of the other travelers in the area. However, they and other more affluent migrants are also able to benefit from their wealth on the journey, accessing so-called VIP routes that take a shorter period of time, travel through less back-breaking areas, and are supposedly safer to travel. Those routes are kept for only the best-off among the migrants, in secret locations that the Gulf Clan guards closely to prevent their popularization. On occasion, the Gulf Clan might even be able to offer rides on boat or horseback for part of the journey. Those routes can cost as much as 850 American dollars or more over land, or if they’re by boat, as much as five thousand dollars a head—and all this, to cut out just a few dozen miles from a journey that’s dangerous all across Central and South America. The Gulf Clan is deeply in touch with the desperation of the people moving through the Darién, and they understand the moments, and the avenues, to offer relief for a price. Anyone who can pay up, is likely to do just that, no matter how resolved they were to hang onto their cash when they arrived at the edge of the jungle.\n\nBut when it comes time to cross into the Panamanian side of the Darién, even the Gulf Cartel’s informal regime ends up looking like friendly hospitality. In Panama, the Darién jungle is a far more lawless place, a place where gunmen are more than happy to camp out and tuck themselves away into nooks just a few hundred meters from some of the most popular routes. Migrants who survive the journey can often recount stories of passing bodies that showed clear signs of a violent death: hands tied, or shot with guns, or slashed with machetes, or tortured. Sexual violence is incredibly common inside the Gap, with migrants at high risk of being held hostage and being raped, robbed, executed, or all three. According to a Doctors Without Borders representative interviewed in 2023, \"Large groups are being kidnapped, forced to lay down face to the ground, and then robbed, physically attacked, and sexually abused\". And for the groups perpetrating such acts inside the Darién…well, they’ve got very little to fear. These migrants are out on their own, in profoundly hostile territory, where nobody is coming to save them.\n\nWhen it comes to the violence shown to migrants, there are no shortage of stories to tell. Said one Venezuelan migrant, self-identifying to CNN only as Jorge: \"When we were coming down Cañas Blancas, three guys came out, hooded, with guns, knives, machetes. They wanted $100 and those that didn’t have it had to stay. They hit me and another guy—they jumped on him and kicked him.\" Said another, Mariana Tablante, describing her full journey to Doctors Without Borders: \"The first day, we saw a dead woman, and they told us that she had apparently died from a snake bite. That same day, after four hours of walking, the guides left the group, and some hooded armed men arrived and took us to a cave. There they made us take off all our clothes, touched our bodies and robbed us.\" Tablante explained that the armed men also considered taking a young girl, but eventually chose not to. For women, especially minors, traveling through the Gap, the situation is often yet more horrific; the International Crisis Group has published accounts of interviews describing the rape of three girls, age fifteen and sixteen, who had been traveling with a group of minors, and who had negotiated with their attackers to save two younger girls from the same fate.\n\nOther stories, recorded under pseudonyms by Human Rights Watch, tell of a mother and daughter horrifically sexually assaulted by a gang of perpetrators, a group of migrants taken hostage as individual women were taken away and violated, and another group that was brutally beaten, with all men and women in the group sexually assaulted, just to find and steal a sum of two hundred dollars in one of the migrants’ possession. And the threat of brutal sexual violence gives leverage to other armed gangs inside the Gap, too. Two migrants interviewed by Human Rights Watch, under the pseudonyms Luciana and Juan Herrera, described a robbery by a gang of six armed men; wrote Human Rights Watch, \"The men had rifles, guns, and machetes, Juan and Luciana said. ‘Look straight or we will kill you’, one said. The armed men took a young woman aside, letting her go once her brother paid. Frightened, she ran away and almost fell off a cliff, Juan recalled. Those in the group who did not have money were forced to turn back.\"\n\nAnd the people who are attacked, robbed, and sexually assaulted inside the Darién aren’t the only ones at imminent risk. Drownings are exceptionally common, brought on by the rapid flash floods and the constant rainfall all throughout the Darién. Falls are just as common, and frequently deadly, especially when attempting to traverse ledges or other precarious positions. Said one migrant, Yuleidy Peña, in an interview with Doctors Without Borders: \"The hardest thing for me was when my husband fell with our baby, trying to walk across some very big rocks.\" But even those who can avoid the floods and keep their footing, may still die just from walking. Part of the immense physical risk, is the complete lack of medical care in the Gap. Blisters can quickly become infected with all manner of nasty jungle disease, and people who drink from the wrong water sources will quickly find themselves in awful shape. A broken leg is usually fatal; trenchfoot and gangrene are common; and that’s to say nothing of the jungle’s animal threats. Everything from spiders and scorpions, to crocodiles and jaguars lie in wait for people to pass by, occasionally hunting for food, but usually responding to confrontations that human travelers have no knowledge or means to defuse safely. And then, there’s the snakes *everywhere*, easy to step on, all but impossible to see, and incredibly deadly. Said one journalist who crossed the Darién in 2016 after receiving fer-de-lance antivenom, \"If one of us is bitten, we have ten minutes to inject the antivenom before death. We can only carry six vials. If a larger pit viper were to strike, the expert concedes no amount of antivenom would be enough to save us. We might as well lie down and smoke a cigarette until the lights go out.\"\n\nAnd perhaps the one thing worse than braving the conditions of the Darién alongside other migrants, is the thought of doing it alone. One Venezuelan migrant, a woman named Kisbel Garcia who made the journey with her four children and her mother-in-law, gave her account to NBC: first, she’d paid four thousand US dollars to a guide; then, that guide stayed with her and her family for two days and subsequently abandoned them deep in the forest. Over the following six days, Garcia and her children would struggle through the jungle alone, out of food, and wandering past corpses of migrants who hadn’t been so lucky. Said Garcia, it was scraps of blue cloth that kept her family alive, tied around trees by migrants who’d gone before them and tried to leave some clue for those who would follow. In her own words: \"We migrants have to fight against all the risks without any kind of help. The Darién is hell.\"\n\nLuckily, the one thing the migrants often do have going for them, is community. While some among their number will, inevitably, look to improve their own lot by taking from others, in reality there are few ways to do so—and plenty of time to notice the struggling of others. From migrants who choose to leave path markers for others, to people who are willing to carry an extra pack or take someone’s child for a short time, to human chains formed to cross rivers and keep people from stumbling, most journalists who pass through the Gap and report on their experiences will agree that there is no shortage of human kindness among the travelers there. With minimal food or clean water, and almost no medical supplies, there’s a clear limit to how much the migrants can actually do for each other, made worse by decisions made early in the trek where people shared what they had, but hadn’t yet realized that the claim of a two- or three-day journey was a lie.\n\nAll the while, migrants in the Gap are confronted with one more strange irony: the reality that what they see as an exceptionally dangerous and unavoidable frontier, many around the world see as a vacation. Even now, in the worst years of Darién migration ever, the Darién is still a popular tourist attraction. Everybody from adventure hikers, to birdwatchers, to influencers and content creators are drawn to the Darién, enjoying and often profiting from their trips to the same jungle—and even, at times, presenting those trips as adventurer-style survival tests. And when the two worlds of the Darién collide, it’s not always a hostile interaction. Speaking to NBC, one Venezuelan migrant named Alejandra Peña, traveling with her three children, her elderly parents, and her partner, admitted, \"as I traveled, my heart was suffering, but my eyes were in delight\". And she’s not alone; in recent years, hashtags like #salvaDarién, meaning \"Darién jungle\" in Spanish, have gathered incredible numbers of views—with social media users feasting on content made not just by tourists, but by migrants who often celebrate having made the journey, but give little context about just what it took to finish.\n\nThe presence of so many willing tourists in the Darién, typically taking no action to interact with—let alone assist—the people struggling to survive there, raises a long list of ethical questions, and it’s drawn condemnation from aid organizations hard at work addressing the crisis in the Panamanian jungle. But Panama, for its part, seems to quite like the income it gets from tourists, and if anything, it’s worked to present a sanitized version of the Darién as a place where there are bad areas that shouldn’t be traveled, and good areas where tourists are more than welcome. And while that version of reality in the Darién isn’t accurate, it’s a clean enough story that most tourists to the Gap are able to buy it. In such dense, impenetrable jungle, a kilometer’s distance is practically a world away, and while migrants and tourists may get within a few hundred meters of each other, it’s still entirely possible to be completely unaware of each other’s existence. In some parts of the Darién, the tourist industry and the migration crisis collide head-on; in others, they’re strangers passing in the night. And for the indigenous communities still trying to eke out a living in the Darién despite the crisis, tourists are a critical lifeline, who help to provide stability and financial resources that those communities need if they’re going to stay.\n\nFor the migrants trying to survive the Darién, only reaching the Panamanian edge of the jungle can put an end to their ordeal—and even then, things aren’t so simple. In Panama, the border checkpoints outside the jungle are rife with corruption: bus transport guaranteed to all, but provided mostly to those who can pay, and guards known for accepting or even demanding sexual favors from women and girls in exchange for transport. At Panama’s frontier checkpoints, food is often scarce or insufficient, plumbing is incapable of handling human waste, and medical care is absent, leaving infections, stomach illnesses, and other ailments more time to fester and grow while lice are spread among the cramped dormitories. Not only is such an ordeal deeply demoralizing, squashing any hope that might have come out of escaping the Darién, but it doesn’t end when a person leaves the border checkpoints.\n\nDuring the rest of the journey northward, these same migrants are at risk of many of the hardships they faced in the Darién: the robbings, the beatings, the killings and kidnappings along their route. In many places, they’ll again come under the direct control of criminal gangs, or be left without any means to protect themselves from the elements. Make no mistake, things will almost certainly be better than they were in the Darién—but that’s not saying much at all. Instead, it’s simply a reflection of the fact that for as dangerous as the trek through Central America is, the Darién represents an even greater threat. If a migrant is lucky, crossing the Gap will be what they remember as the worst portion of their journey—but surviving it, is no guarantee that a person will reach the United States in the end.\n\n## Future of Darién\n\nWhen it comes to the prospect of putting a halt to migration through the Darién, international observers, aid organizations, and even migrants themselves tend to agree: the current flow of migrants isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. Remember, this is a route that is already a last resort for most people who travel through, and especially for the Venezuelan migrants who make up a bulk of the Darién’s foot traffic. A person who wants to make it to the US border wouldn’t necessarily need to travel through the Darién, except that they’ve been functionally iced out of every other path into the US, and have no real second-choice option among the nations of Latin America. The problems pushing them from their own countries are getting worse, not better, and in some such places, migrants could even face reprisals if they return home after trying to leave. Add to that the constant misinformation around the Darién, and not only is it the only option, but one that’s made to look like far less of a deterrent than it actually is.\n\nWhen governments on the American supercontinent do take action, they’re unable or unwilling to focus on anything other than containment. Panama, in partnership with the United States, has taken action to stop people from heading northward after the Darién in past years, and will likely do it again in the future. But getting word to migrants that they’ll be turned back or held inside Panama, and finding a way to relay that message before migrants have already crossed the jungle, are a different matter entirely. The cartels that control entry to the Darién are heavily incentivized to ensure that people keep showing up, and what happens to them on the other side of the jungle, after the cartels have already collected their money, is of no consequence to them. Between the cartels’ ongoing operations and the worsening conditions driving people from their homes, 2024 is expected to be the Darién’s busiest year yet, as more and more success stories come back from people who made it out, and as the illicit industry coaxing migrants to, and through the Gap continues to gain power. After a record-breaking 2023, a similar rate of escalation this year could put the number of successful migrant crossings close to, or even past a million.\n\nAside from the continuous flood of migrants through the Gap, the rest of the Darién’s situation isn’t much better. Massive portions of the local rainforest have been cut down in recent decades, partly in hopes of gaining access to especially valuable hardwoods, and partly in hopes of making it easier to ferry across migrants in large numbers. Much of the land that was once forest, is now used for cattle grazing. The few non-indigenous people who live there untethered from the migrant situation, are typically quite poor or highly isolated, and they’re increasingly at risk of finding themselves in the crosshairs of illicit industries that are getting bigger, not smaller. Nonetheless, the Darién’s remaining occupants—indigenous or otherwise—continue to oppose the construction of a road, a rail link, or anything else that might ease passage through the jungle. Typically, they’ll cite continued fears around the likely environmental impact, although international observers often speculate that these may be more of a cover for anti-Colombian sentiment, something where the Darién still provides a comfortable buffer zone.\n\nBut the effort to keep the Darién unsullied by large-scale transit infrastructure, increasingly ignores the reality that’s reshaping the Darién as we speak. Like it or not, the Darién is in the process of being dismantled, just as much, if not more so, than a road or a railway would have required. But now, it’s a free-for-all, a mad dash to fell and collect trees, establish ownership claims to the now-open land that results, clear more stable routes where passage can be offered to desperate migrants, and build settlements deep in the forest to support a thriving illegal enterprise. The Darién itself, the jungle, may still exist—although it appears more and more as if it might be on borrowed time. But the idea that the Darién is a gap, appears to be more and more an illusion than a reality.\n\nThe place once known as the Darién Gap, is perhaps better understood today as the Darién frontier: an incredibly dangerous place, where mortal threats human, animal, microscopic, and geographic all vie to be the first to take a person’s life. It’s remote, it’s lawless, it’s the sort of place where it’s nearly impossible to contact the outside world or take control over one’s own survival. But what it is not, or at least not anymore, is a gap. The Darién is no longer impenetrable, and the reality there no longer matches the fantasy portrayed all across the world. And even worse, that lack of understanding around the Darién makes it more likely that people will suffer and die there, even as popular conceptions of the Darién are so compelling that neither Panama, nor Colombia, nor the broader American supercontinent seems to be willing to do the work to make it safer. Said one Panamanian historian, Omar Jaén, to *Americas Quarterly*: \"We have to de-dramatize the Darién Gap, remove the taboo. The Darién myth benefits no one.\"\n\nThe Darién myth is *intended* to benefit its namesake, the Darién, one of the few remaining lush, extravagant jungle ecosystems in the world to resist human exploitation. But look even just a little bit closer, and you’ll quickly find that that idealized version of the Darién no longer exists. Instead, the jungles there are a shadow of what they once were, and even worse, they’re practically a playground for criminals engaging in some of the worst forms of abuse and exploitation that humanity can offer, preying on the desperation of tens or even hundreds of thousands each year. The roads, the structure, and the civilization that might otherwise keep those people safe, have all been sworn off, in order to protect a peace that disappeared a long time ago. In the modern Darién, like in so many other formerly incredible parts of our planet, we are now forced to let go of what once was, and figure out how to deal with the nightmare it’s become. We can only hope that both the Darién itself, and the incredibly vulnerable people passing through it, receive the help they desperately need…before neither the Darién, nor its people, can be saved.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The Darién Gap is a dense, dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama, known for its impenetrability and lethal conditions.\n- Despite its hazards, the Darién Gap has become a crucial migration route, with over half a million people crossing in 2023.\n- The Darién Gap is controlled by the Gulf Clan, a criminal cartel that exploits migrants for profit, charging exorbitant fees for passage.\n- Migrants face extreme dangers, including violent attacks, sexual assault, and deadly wildlife, with a high likelihood of death.\n- The Darién Gap's ecosystem is under threat from deforestation and illegal activities, despite efforts to preserve it.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is the Darién Gap?\n\nThe Darién Gap is a dense and lethal stretch of jungle that connects the rainforests of Colombia to the narrow Central American isthmus. It is known for its impenetrability and the extreme dangers it poses to travelers.\n\n### Why is the Darién Gap significant in the context of migration?\n\nThe Darién Gap is a vital conduit for migrants from across South America traveling northward. In 2023, approximately half a million people crossed this treacherous territory, making it a critical but dangerous route for those seeking to reach the United States.\n\n### What are some of the environmental features of the Darién Gap?\n\nThe Darién Gap features a diverse range of landscapes, including high mountain ranges, wetlands, cloud forests, and mangrove coastlines. It is characterized by heavy rainfall, with about 330 days of rain per year, leading to frequent flash floods and mudslides.\n\n### What kinds of wildlife are found in the Darién Gap?\n\nThe Darién Gap is home to a vast array of wildlife, including jaguars, pumas, harpy eagles, American crocodiles, and numerous venomous snakes like the Central American bushmaster and the fer-de-lance. The region also hosts hundreds of vertebrate species and thousands of invertebrate species.\n\n### What indigenous groups live in the Darién Gap?\n\nSeveral indigenous groups, including the Embera, Waunana, and Kuna, trace their ancestry to the Darién Gap. These groups have historically lived within the Darién and maintain strong cultural identities, even as many have settled in villages or cities outside the jungle.\n\n### What is the Darién Scheme and why did it fail?\n\nThe Darién Scheme was Scotland's attempt in the late 17th century to establish a colony in the Darién Gap to facilitate trade. It failed due to a combination of logistical failures, disease, and Spanish opposition, leading to significant financial devastation for Scotland and contributing to its union with England.\n\n### Why is the Darién Gap not part of the Pan-American Highway?\n\nThe Darién Gap is not part of the Pan-American Highway due to concerns about deforestation, the spread of disease, protection of indigenous populations, and the extreme difficulty of constructing and maintaining a road in such a hostile environment.\n\n### What challenges do migrants face when crossing the Darién Gap?\n\nMigrants face numerous challenges, including extreme physical demands, lack of proper supplies, dangerous wildlife, and the presence of criminal groups like the Gulf Clan, which exploits and abuses migrants. The journey is often deadly, with many migrants dying from exhaustion, injury, or violence.\n\n### How does the Gulf Clan profit from migration through the Darién Gap?\n\nThe Gulf Clan controls access to the Darién Gap and profits by selling services such as temporary lodging, guide services, and protection. They also extort money from migrants and use violence to enforce their control, earning an estimated nearly a hundred million dollars per year.\n\n### What is the future outlook for migration through the Darién Gap?\n\nThe flow of migrants through the Darién Gap is not likely to stop soon due to ongoing conflicts and economic hardships in South America. The Darién is increasingly being deforested and exploited, and the myth of its impenetrability is fading, making it more accessible but also more dangerous.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Places video: The Darién Gap: The Deadliest Place on Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lp4TrJadQk)\n- [https://programs.wcs.org/5greatforests/en-us/Wild-Places/Darién#:~:text=Darién%20is%20the%20forest%20in,Dari%C3%A9n%20Province%20in%20Central%20America](https://programs.wcs.org/5greatforests/en-us/Wild-Places/Darién#:~:text=Darién%20is%20the%20forest%20in,Dari%C3%A9n%20Province%20in%20Central%20America)\n- [https://www.themanual.com/outdoors/Darién-gap-feature/](https://www.themanual.com/outdoors/Darién-gap-feature/)\n- [https://peregrinefund.org/projects/Darién-conservation](https://peregrinefund.org/projects/Darién-conservation)\n- [https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/159/](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/159/)\n- [https://www.tripsavvy.com/snakes-of-central-america-1490991](https://www.tripsavvy.com/snakes-of-central-america-1490991)\n- [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kuna](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kuna)\n- [https://minorityrights.org/communities/embera/](https://minorityrights.org/communities/embera/)\n- [https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/The-Darién-Scheme/](https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/The-Darién-Scheme/)\n- [https://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/scotland-and-Darién/](https://www.nls.uk/exhibitions/scotland-and-Darién/)\n- [https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/month/may2005.html](https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/month/may2005.html)\n- [https://www.historytoday.com/archive/founding-Darién-colony](https://www.historytoday.com/archive/founding-Darién-colony)\n- [https://hias.org/where/latin-america-caribbean/](https://hias.org/where/latin-america-caribbean/)\n- [https://lac.savethechildren.net/what-we-do/migration-and-displacement#:~:text=Children%20and%20adolescents%20in%20Latin,economic%20opportunities%20and%20family%20reunification](https://lac.savethechildren.net/what-we-do/migration-and-displacement#:~:text=Children%20and%20adolescents%20in%20Latin,economic%20opportunities%20and%20family%20reunification)\n- [https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/instability-venezuela](https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/instability-venezuela)\n- [https://reporting.unhcr.org/globalappeal/americas](https://reporting.unhcr.org/globalappeal/americas)\n- [https://hias.org/news/displacement-levels-hit-record-high-latin-america-and-caribbean-hias-continues-support-refugees-need/](https://hias.org/news/displacement-levels-hit-record-high-latin-america-and-caribbean-hias-continues-support-refugees-need/)\n- [https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/2/22/disillusioned-about-china-more-chinese-aim-for-us-via-risky-Darién-gap](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/2/22/disillusioned-about-china-more-chinese-aim-for-us-via-risky-Darién-gap)\n- [https://time.com/6547992/migrants-crossing-Darién-gap-2023/](https://time.com/6547992/migrants-crossing-Darién-gap-2023/)\n- [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/chinese-migrants-are-crossing-panamas-jungle-come-us-rcna122790](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/chinese-migrants-are-crossing-panamas-jungle-come-us-rcna122790)\n- [https://americasquarterly.org/article/the-Darién-gaps-fearsome-reputation-has-been-centuries-in-the-making/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email](https://americasquarterly.org/article/the-Darién-gaps-fearsome-reputation-has-been-centuries-in-the-making/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)\n- [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/Darién-gap-dangerous-migrants-tourists-rcna95925](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/Darién-gap-dangerous-migrants-tourists-rcna95925)\n- [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/migrants-journey-north-through-the-Darién-gap/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/migrants-journey-north-through-the-Darién-gap/)\n- [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/world/americas/venezuelan-migrants-us-border.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/world/americas/venezuelan-migrants-us-border.html)\n- [https://www.npr.org/2021/11/13/1055503661/the-Darién-gap-was-no-mans-land-now-its-a-popular-migrant-path-to-the-u-s](https://www.npr.org/2021/11/13/1055503661/the-Darién-gap-was-no-mans-land-now-its-a-popular-migrant-path-to-the-u-s)\n- [https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-11-09/the-gulf-clan-controlled-Darién-gap-sees-record-breaking-numbers-of-migrants.html](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-11-09/the-gulf-clan-controlled-Darién-gap-sees-record-breaking-numbers-of-migrants.html)\n- [https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-01-05/a-whos-who-of-the-illegal-armed-groups-in-colombias-latest-ceasefire.html](https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-01-05/a-whos-who-of-the-illegal-armed-groups-in-colombias-latest-ceasefire.html)\n- [https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/7/23/panamas-Darién-gap-a-magnet-for-tourists-hell-for-migrants](https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/7/23/panamas-Darién-gap-a-magnet-for-tourists-hell-for-migrants)\n- [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28756378](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28756378)\n- [https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/maps-and-graphics/2024/01/15/Darién-gap-migration-crisis-six-graphs-and-one-map](https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/maps-and-graphics/2024/01/15/Darién-gap-migration-crisis-six-graphs-and-one-map)\n- [https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/15/americas/Darién-gap-migrants-colombia-panama-whole-story-cmd-intl/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/15/americas/Darién-gap-migrants-colombia-panama-whole-story-cmd-intl/index.html)\n- [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/world/americas/migrants-Darién-gap.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/world/americas/migrants-Darién-gap.html)\n- [https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-Darién-gap-migrants-risk-death-journey-us](https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-Darién-gap-migrants-risk-death-journey-us)\n- [https://apnews.com/article/immigration-latin-america-venezuela-ukraine-mexico-712d00c90114568fe8a1b5c9e26fdadd](https://apnews.com/article/immigration-latin-america-venezuela-ukraine-mexico-712d00c90114568fe8a1b5c9e26fdadd)\n- [https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/10/how-treacherous-Darién-gap-became-migration-crossroads-americas](https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/10/how-treacherous-Darién-gap-became-migration-crossroads-americas)\n- [https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/record-half-million-migrants-crossed-latin-americas-dangerous-Darién-gap-2023-2024-01-03/](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/record-half-million-migrants-crossed-latin-americas-dangerous-Darién-gap-2023-2024-01-03/)\n- [https://www.worldvision.ca/stories/child-protection/Darién-gap-migrant-route](https://www.worldvision.ca/stories/child-protection/Darién-gap-migrant-route)\n- [https://apnews.com/article/panama-Darién-colombia-migrants-da582a3f695206f68952dddccaa93f6d](https://apnews.com/article/panama-Darién-colombia-migrants-da582a3f695206f68952dddccaa93f6d)\n- [https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/skull-stake-Darién-gap/?scope=anon](https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/skull-stake-Darién-gap/?scope=anon)\n- [https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/colombia-central-america/102-bottleneck-americas-crime-and-migration](https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/colombia-central-america/102-bottleneck-americas-crime-and-migration)\n- [https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/11/09/hell-was-my-only-option/abuses-against-migrants-and-asylum-seekers-pushed-cross](https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/11/09/hell-was-my-only-option/abuses-against-migrants-and-asylum-seekers-pushed-cross)\n- [https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/into-the-Darién-gap](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/into-the-Darién-gap)\n- [https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap](https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap)\n- [https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap](https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Aerial_landscape_view_%282017%29.jpg) by Saga1111 / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage"
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It’s a place once thought to be utterly impenetrable, an incredibly dense, and incredibly lethal stretch of jungle where not even the hardiest explorers have a chance at survival. Anchoring the rainforests of Colombia to the narrow Central American isthmus, the region known as the Darién Gap is among planet Earth’s most incredible natural fortresses. It is a forsaken place, one known in Panamanian legend by an inscription carved by a Spanish conquistador centuries ago, not long before that conquistador was found floating dead in the sea: "When you go to Darién, entrust yourself to Mary, for in her hands is the entrance, and in God’s the exit."

In the twenty-first century, though, the Darién Gap has distinguished itself for another, very different reason: as an expression not just of mortal danger, but of pure, human desperation, and the lengths that a person will go for their own survival. The Darién Gap is, today, just as dangerous as it ever was, just as impenetrable, just as impossible to navigate, so completely left behind by the modern world that not a single road has ever traversed it. Yet it is also a vital conduit—and, increasingly, the only conduit—for migrants from across South America to travel northward. In 2023, they didn’t just cross in the ones, or the twos, or even the dozens; try half a million people, fleeing northward across some of the most inhospitable territory on the planet.

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<!-- aeo:section start="a-thriving-ecosystem" -->
## A Thriving Ecosystem

Above all else, the Darién Gap is defined by its namesake: the Darién, a sprawling, lush tropical rainforest that blankets some 17,000 square kilometers across southern Panama and northeast Colombia. Although it might feel like a monolith to anyone brave or foolish enough to try and cross it, it’s anything but; high mountain ranges give way to wetlands, and cloud forests fill in the gaps between mangrove coastlines. Rivers cross the landscape in knots and spiderwebs, from the mighty Atrato and its river delta on the Colombian side, to the Tuira and the Sambu tracing oxbows across Panama. It is an extraordinarily geographically diverse place, with just about every variation of a tropical or near-equatorial landscape, other than desert, represented somewhere within its territory.

But one thing is constant across the Darién: the rain. In this part of the world, the dry season is a brief and relative affair, with most of the year consumed by a constant deluge of water, water, and more water coming from all directions. And nor is this a passive rainfall, either; as storms roll through and inundate groundwaters that are already fully saturated, flash floods thunder across the landscape, and rivers surge high or, at times, appear where no river existed before. To plants, animals, and human travelers alike, the rain in the Darién Gap is a constant threat, rewriting the landscape with mudslides even as forest fires still manage to break out. Of the year’s three hundred and sixty-five days, three hundred and thirty of them will see rain falling across the Darién landscape.

And with Darién’s extraordinary geography, comes an incredible biodiversity. The region is host to hundreds upon hundreds of species of vertebrate animals, thousands of species of invertebrates, and almost certainly, numerous species that humanity has not yet discovered. After all, so thick and impenetrable are many of the Darién’s inner reaches that there’s no telling what may lurk on that territory. Among the animals we do know, are rare beasts like the Central American tapir, the great green macaw, the brown-headed spider monkey, the great peacock, and the tiny margay wildcat. Its rivers and streams host booming populations of freshwater fish and reptiles, and over five hundred species of bird find their roosts in the Darién’s trees.

But just like the forest itself, the Darién’s wildlife is more than capable of putting an end to the humans in their midst. The jaguar is relatively abundant across the Darién, and although they avoid attacking humans most of the time, the attacks they do perpetrate are particularly horrific and typically fatal. The puma, spread all across the American supercontinent, is no less dangerous. The harpy eagle is strong and fierce enough to carry off a child if it so desires, and is known to attack humans relentlessly when their territory is encroached. The American crocodile is common, and has nothing to fear as an apex predator, present in most, if not all, relatively sedentary or slow-flowing water bodies in the forest. Of the area’s most venomous snakes, a few stand out in particular: the ten-foot, three-meter-long Central American bushmaster, the incredibly quick-striking eyelash viper, and the fer-de-lance—described by those in the herpetological community as "the ultimate pit viper", and simultaneously known as the American supercontinent’s most abundant snake. As for the Darién’s deadly occupants with more than four legs…well, we’ll allow readers to learn about those on their own.

The Darién is one of Central America’s few remaining, relatively undisturbed ecosystems, one that’s protected by national park designations in Panama and by their relative isolation in Colombia. It’s a place utterly saturated with malaria-carrying mosquitos and a range of deadly and otherwise nasty diseases, where temperatures can run as high as ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit on an average day, with humidity close to 100 percent. None of the river or bog water of the Darién is potable without filtration, and it’s quite likely to give you a nasty set of parasites if you decide to take a drink anyway. Even the trees are trying to kill you; some are coated with toxins, and others, like the chunga palm, feature spikes long enough to pass clean through most parts of the body. Make no mistake: Darién is a beautiful place, a downright incredible place—but it’s a place where humans aren’t on top. Instead, they’re on the menu.

<!-- aeo:section end="a-thriving-ecosystem" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="a-lost-cause" -->
## A Lost Cause

Over the long arc of history, one of the hardest lessons for humanity to learn has also been one of the most basic: some places, are just not for us. Through sheer, human persistence—or, at times, stupidity—a long line of *Homo sapiens* have worked across continents and generations to avoid hearing that lesson. And by and large, with exceptions made for polar cold, the deep desert, or the very highest altitudes, that effort has been successful. In the Darién Gap, however…no such luck.

Of course, that’s not to say that nobody at all lives inside the Darién Gap today. In fact, several indigenous groups trace their ancestry to the Darién: the Embera, the Waunana, and the Kuna. It’s difficult to estimate just how many among each group still lives within the Darién; some estimates run as low as 1,200, while others are in the multiple tens of thousands. The Embera people cluster around the Choco River and its tributaries, speaking a range of mutually intelligible languages across the full length of their ancestral territories, although most Embera have now settled into villages or even cities outside the Darién. The Waunana are a related people, semi-nomadic like the Embera, and together, their cluster of spoken languages are unlike any other in the world. The Kuna, famous for their unique textiles, have kept their roots in the Darién for several centuries prior to the pre-colonial period, and they’re studied intensely in the modern day for their low rates of heart disease and cancer. Although most of their population has long since left the Darién, they retain a strong cultural identity in the cities where most Kuna now live. Archaeologists have also uncovered evidence of a substantial settlement in the pre-colonial age, including gold and jade artifacts and evidence of paved roads in long-forgotten cities.

But for non-indigenous settlers, the Darién has been as dangerous through time as it is today. The first Europeans who recorded making contact with the Kuna were a party led by a pair of Spanish conquistadors: Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the shores of the New World, and Alonso de Ojeda, who, among other things, gave the territory now called Venezuela its modern name. For a while, the Darién Gap was used to transit silver and gold across the Panamanian isthmus from the Pacific to the Atlantic, although those over-land routes avoided the more impenetrable portions of the Darién. Generally speaking, it was under Spain’s direct control, except for one brief affair, known as the Darién Scheme.

In the modern day, the Darién Scheme is little more than a footnote in European colonial history, but at the time, it was both the beginning, and the end of the Kingdom of Scotland’s attempt to secure holdings abroad. Scotland’s plan seemed to make decent sense at the time: claim the nigh-on-inhospitable Darién Gap, clear it out, and make it into a critical waypoint for trade, bringing items from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast just like the Panama Canal would, centuries later. But unfortunately for Scotland, the kingdom didn’t quite get the message on just how hard it is to forge one’s way through Darién. Scotland’s first, 1,200-strong expedition departed from the port of Leith in June 1698; their settlement, called New Caledonia, would be abandoned by March 1700. Not only were the settlers ravaged by everything from local diseases to logistical failures to a minimally competent leadership, but, as it turned out, Spain didn’t take kindly to their settlement either. A quick siege, and some suspected sabotage by the East India Company, were enough to see the Scots sailing home. Roughly one-fifth of all money in circulation inside Scotland had been put to use for the so-called Company of Scotland, the trading company that New Caledonia was supposed to make useful, and the financial devastation that came after Scotland’s failure, is considered to be among the major factors that forced Scotland into a union with England seven years later.

Over the following centuries, both the Spanish Empire and the eventual nations of Panama and Colombia would concede that the Darién Gap was basically impassable. For the later colonial years, its interior would go largely untouched and unexploited, despite some logging and hunting around its fringes. The United States would make a couple of fruitless attempts to cross the Darién during the 19th century, but those only ended in the torment and, quite often, the demise of the people who took part. In the twentieth century, much of the discussion around Darién was its implications for the Pan-American Highway, a road system that connects a stretch of thirty thousand kilometers, nineteen thousand miles, all the way from the Arctic settlement of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the Argentinian city of Ushuaia, one of five internationally recognized gateway cities to reach the Antarctic continent. The Pan-American Highway does not, however, pass through the Darién Gap. The reasons for this are plentiful: concerns around the impact of deforestation, worry about the spread of disease, protection of the local indigenous population, and, of course, awareness of the sheer difficulty of surviving in such a place for long enough to build a proper highway, even with a large construction operation. Now, the Pan-American Highway leaves off in the Panamanian town of Yaviza, and picks back up again in the Colombian city of Turbo, with only intermittent periods of ferry coverage on and off over the subsequent decades. Both because of the lack of road access, and because of the rainforest that makes road construction so difficult, the Darién has remained practically untouched through most of human history—and it remains one of the most immaculately preserved parts of Planet Earth, even today.

These days, the capital city of Darién Province in Panama is La Palma, an isolated town that can hardly be called a town at all. Spread across over five hundred square kilometers, over two hundred square miles, La Palma is home to just past four thousand permanent residents, according to a 2010 estimate. If you’re trying to get there, you’ll only be successful on foot or by sea; the town is completely disconnected from the highway system, and even the people located further inland within the city limits have little ability to travel beyond the few paths that don’t get swallowed up by the jungle. It’s little enclaves like La Palma that form the closest thing to civilization in the entire Darién Gap, and to the people moving across territory inland, La Palma might as well be a world away. Getting there, is no easier than getting northward, and to make the attempt would be little more than a pointless detour.

That being said, some folks do like a pointless detour every once in a while, and despite the reality that trying to transit the Darién Gap is a hell of a lot more trouble than it’s worth, adventure tourists and hobbyists still try anyhow. The first time the Gap was crossed by vehicle was all the way back in 1928, done by a pair of Brazilian military troops and a mechanic in hopes of bringing attention to the Pan-American Highway initiative. That crossing, by the way, was done in a pair of Ford Model Ts. Occasional motor expeditions followed for the next several decades, including one done by a trio of Chevrolet Corvairs, sponsored by the owner of a Chevy dealership in Chicago. British cyclist Ian Hibell and two friends crossed the Gap on two wheels each, during Hibell’s two-year ride from Cape Horn to Alaska in the early 1970s. Although people have undoubtedly been crossing the Gap on foot for centuries, non-locals started recording successful journeys in the 1970s, including evangelist Arthur Blessitt, who did it while carrying a twelve-foot wooden cross, a machete, and a single backpack, fully on his own. Guided tourist expeditions started up during the 1980s, although they slowed down substantially from the 1990s onward, due to the presence of armed groups involved in Colombia’s long civil war, who gained a reputation for kidnapping and executing travelers on occasion. But although tourist traversals have since picked back up, they’ve been pushed out again by a somewhat larger barrier: thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of migrants.

<!-- aeo:section end="a-lost-cause" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="a-migration-crisis" -->
## A Migration Crisis

To understand the origins of the Darién Gap’s current role in the global migration crisis—and we do mean *global*, as we’ll get into shortly—we’ve got to look at a map, and we’ve got to zoom way, way out, so that we can see the entire American supercontinent in full view. It’s here, that we see the problem: a nice, big South American continent sitting just south of the Darién Gap, and a nice, big North American continent a little ways to the north, but just one narrow strip of land sitting in between. If you want to travel an over-land route from one American continent to the other, you *must* go through the Darién Gap—even despite the lack of roads, settlements, or even minimal resources that might make the journey easier.

And while there are alternatives, they’re all going to cost you. There is, as we’ve said, no ferry service on offer to bring people around the Darién Gap by sea, and while it’s possible to find boats for hire, it’s both an expensive option and a high-risk one. Not only are the seas around Darién dangerous at unpredictable times, but there’s also no clear way to tell who’s going to bring a person across the water safely, and who’s going to kill them, throw them overboard, and keep their belongings. Trying to hug the coast in a kayak or another small boat is a fantastic way to get shot at, smashed against the land by high winds, and probably eaten by saltwater-tolerant American crocodiles, not to mention you’ve got to come into possession of a boat in the first place. Flights that would pass over Darién, like the hopper flights from Medellín, Bogotá, or Cali to Panama City, cost a couple of hundred US dollars at best, and are tough to board if a person doesn’t have the proper documentation to either catch a flight in Colombia, or land in Panama. Unless you’ve got money, you’re going to have to take on the Gap if you want to get out of South America.

That’s a particular problem for the millions of migrants, asylum-seekers, and displaced people living in South America, or who travel to South America from elsewhere, and hope to travel to the United States in hopes of beginning a new life. Across Latin America, some 20 million people or more have been forced to flee their homes in recent years, from a mix of ongoing conflict, political repression, natural disasters, and local violence across much of the continent. In South America, people flee a long conflict in Colombia, the socioeconomic collapse and authoritarian stranglehold in Venezuela, rising turmoil in Peru, and, most recently, an explosion of violence in Ecuador. Haitians travel toward South America’s shores by boat, rather than North America’s, knowing they’ve got a better chance at making it through the border on land. As countries like Chile and Peru militarize their borders, and certain nationalities, especially Venezuelans, are iced out of the visa process in other South American nations, they’re slowly squeezed north out of the continent, like toothpaste from a tube.

In the last couple of years, even migrants from other continents have come to South America, considering it to be the landing spot that gives them the best likelihood of completing a journey to the United States, even though an arrival so far south will require crossing the Gap. Migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make the journey, including a very recent influx of Chinese migrants so numerous that many of the shops, markets, and hostels in the areas around the Darién Gap have invested in signs and services translated into Mandarin. As for why these intercontinental migrants want to make the trip so badly, it varies from place to place; many flee war or persecution in their own countries, while others are escaping authoritarian regimes whose policies have made life unlivable, with China being a prime example of the latter. Migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, and other global crisis zones also feature prominently.

But regardless of where they come from, migrants will find themselves under a single authority when they reach the Colombian side of the Gap—and it’s not the nation of Colombia. Instead, they’re now in the dominion of the Gulf Clan, a powerful paramilitary organization and criminal cartel that traffics both people and drugs through the Gap with impunity. The Gulf Clan sells access to the Darién, they sell temporary lodging while people prepare, they sell food and supplies, they sell guide services, and they sell protection. More importantly, they sell all of the above at exorbitant prices. Not only that, but they are the ones who keep order in and around the Darién, and they are the ones to decide who’s poor enough to turn into drug mules, and who’s rich enough to extort for whatever possessions they have. They’re the ones who employ locals to run their camps, and exercise influence in more populated areas to ensure that new migrant arrivals are funneled straight into their racket. Above all, it’s the Gulf Clan’s violent, ruthless enforcement of the rules of the Gap that makes them stand out. The Clan dominates the Colombian side of the Gap, and with Human Rights Watch estimating that every person through the Gap pays an average of 125 American dollars to the cartel, they stand to gain nearly a hundred million dollars per year at current rates of migration.

With those sorts of incentives, the cartel actively stands to benefit from drawing people to the Darién. Wrote a team of CNN reporters who braved the crossing in 2023: "People are the new commodity for cartels, perhaps preferable to drugs. These human packages move themselves. Rivals do not try to steal them. Each migrant pays $400 for access to the jungle passage and absorbs all the risks themselves." Online, traffickers go to great lengths to advertise their services in the Gap to people who might find themselves in need. On Facebook, TikTok, and other social media apps popular among migrants, smugglers will pay for advertising in order to send people their way. And it probably shouldn’t be a surprise, that these advertisements can often be less than honest about the situation there. Not only is the crossing made out to be much easier than it actually is, but questions from migrants online are unlikely to be answered honestly, when a lie might be more likely to get them to the edges of the Darién where they can be talked into making the journey. Misinformation about American immigration policy is no less common, with migrants often believing they’ve got a good shot not only at getting into the United States, but getting high-paying jobs, homes, and citizenship easily. Although there are plenty of exceptions, broadly speaking, it’s unlikely that a person coming to the Gap will understand the challenge ahead of them.

And that’s a particular problem, because a person who’s not expecting the trek of their lives, also isn’t likely to come prepared for it. The Darién Gap is a difficult trek for even experienced hikers in peak physical fitness, and by and large, the migrants trying to cross the Gap are far from that standard. A high proportion are children or elderly, out of shape, in poor health, or malnourished, and most have never attempted anything remotely as physically demanding as the hike across the Gap. Add to that, a lack of the proper clothing, the proper food, the proper hiking boots, and the requisite knowledge to deal with what they’ll face inside the jungle, and the Darién Gap is a death trap. Officially, the number of migrants who’ve died there is less than two hundred…but experts from across the world and across relevant fields all agree that the real death toll is likely to be orders of magnitude higher, made up of people who came to a new country, never reported their presence to officials, disappeared into the jungle, and never came out.

Yet even with the risk of a crossing high, the situation bleak upon arrival, and exploitation of migrants so firmly cemented inside the Darién that it’s impossible to escape…people keep on coming. As we’ve mentioned, these are people being slowly iced out of the rest of South America, especially the Venezuelan population, which in 2023 made up nearly two-thirds of the total crossing the Gap. Those who come from other continents, have already put in so much work and spent so many resources to get to northern Colombia that turning back is all but unthinkable. And more and more often, families are crossing the Darién too; in 2023, one in five migrants in the Darién was a child, and half of those children were five years old or younger, with no way to keep track of the almost-certainly-high death toll among them. To say that the people crossing the Darién Gap are desperate, would almost undersell the reality that really drives them forward: by the time a person reaches the Darién, they’re out of options. The only choice left, is to travel northward, come what may.

<!-- aeo:section end="a-migration-crisis" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="life-in-the-gap" -->
## Life in the Gap

Journalists who’ve visited the parts of Colombia where people prepare for their journey through the Darién, recount extraordinary amounts of discarded items that might otherwise have been treated as essential: changes of clothes, extra shoes, even food. The trip through the Darién is even more difficult when weighed down, and those migrants who understand what’s ahead of them, will typically strip their packs down to the barest essentials before traveling through. Those who try and prove themselves more capable than the jungle, usually get a rude awakening very quickly; their belongings, too, will be mostly left behind a few hours into the trek.

That problem only gets worse when a person doesn’t speak either Spanish or English, as is more and more common at the edge of the Darién these days. More so now than ever before, the jungle is a melting pot of languages, spoken largely by people reliant on translation apps on their cell phones to get by. Depending on the language they speak, they might also be able to access content online that’ll explain to them how to survive the jungle, and the many dangerous people they’re sure to come across.

Regardless of where they’re from, migrants can try and get their hands on packages of equipment that’ll help them navigate: everything from satellite phones, to first-aid kits, to even a traveling cook. But, unsurprisingly, those packages are pay-to-play, and much like a sports arena knowing that it can sell a bottle of water for eight dollars, the people providing the packages know very well that the migrants they’re dealing with have no alternatives and no means to argue about how much they’re charging. If given the chance between dying in the Gap, and struggling to come up with the money to pay…well, the Gulf Clan and the Gap’s other traffickers know damn well which option usually wins out.

With migrants so firmly under the cartel’s control, the process can get exceptionally well-organized. At some cartel camps, people who’ve paid for the right to move through cartel routes are issued wristbands as if they were at a concert. When it’s time for a given day’s migrants to start the journey, some camps will play them inspirational music, while guides shout through megaphones and encourage people to take their time walking instead of tiring themselves out. When the aforementioned CNN team left their cartel camp, they left alongside 800 other migrants, all released at the same time, most of them either children, or carrying children with them. Along the trail, the cartel has plenty of porters and hands for hire; they’ll carry a bag up a hill, take care of a child for a few minutes, or sell water, all for exorbitant prices designed to squeeze out whatever money the migrants haven’t told them about yet. All the while, cartel buzzsaws cut new routes through the jungle, all in anticipation that there will be even more migrants next month, and more, the month after that.

The question of who can pay what, is the primary question on the Gulf Clan’s mind—and by hook or by crook, you can bet your soul that the Gulf Clan will find out just how much is in a person’s pocket. By example, Chinese migrants are more likely than many others to be robbed all across South and Central America or targeted within the Darién Gap, since they’re perceived to be more wealthy than many of the other travelers in the area. However, they and other more affluent migrants are also able to benefit from their wealth on the journey, accessing so-called VIP routes that take a shorter period of time, travel through less back-breaking areas, and are supposedly safer to travel. Those routes are kept for only the best-off among the migrants, in secret locations that the Gulf Clan guards closely to prevent their popularization. On occasion, the Gulf Clan might even be able to offer rides on boat or horseback for part of the journey. Those routes can cost as much as 850 American dollars or more over land, or if they’re by boat, as much as five thousand dollars a head—and all this, to cut out just a few dozen miles from a journey that’s dangerous all across Central and South America. The Gulf Clan is deeply in touch with the desperation of the people moving through the Darién, and they understand the moments, and the avenues, to offer relief for a price. Anyone who can pay up, is likely to do just that, no matter how resolved they were to hang onto their cash when they arrived at the edge of the jungle.

But when it comes time to cross into the Panamanian side of the Darién, even the Gulf Cartel’s informal regime ends up looking like friendly hospitality. In Panama, the Darién jungle is a far more lawless place, a place where gunmen are more than happy to camp out and tuck themselves away into nooks just a few hundred meters from some of the most popular routes. Migrants who survive the journey can often recount stories of passing bodies that showed clear signs of a violent death: hands tied, or shot with guns, or slashed with machetes, or tortured. Sexual violence is incredibly common inside the Gap, with migrants at high risk of being held hostage and being raped, robbed, executed, or all three. According to a Doctors Without Borders representative interviewed in 2023, "Large groups are being kidnapped, forced to lay down face to the ground, and then robbed, physically attacked, and sexually abused". And for the groups perpetrating such acts inside the Darién…well, they’ve got very little to fear. These migrants are out on their own, in profoundly hostile territory, where nobody is coming to save them.

When it comes to the violence shown to migrants, there are no shortage of stories to tell. Said one Venezuelan migrant, self-identifying to CNN only as Jorge: "When we were coming down Cañas Blancas, three guys came out, hooded, with guns, knives, machetes. They wanted $100 and those that didn’t have it had to stay. They hit me and another guy—they jumped on him and kicked him." Said another, Mariana Tablante, describing her full journey to Doctors Without Borders: "The first day, we saw a dead woman, and they told us that she had apparently died from a snake bite. That same day, after four hours of walking, the guides left the group, and some hooded armed men arrived and took us to a cave. There they made us take off all our clothes, touched our bodies and robbed us." Tablante explained that the armed men also considered taking a young girl, but eventually chose not to. For women, especially minors, traveling through the Gap, the situation is often yet more horrific; the International Crisis Group has published accounts of interviews describing the rape of three girls, age fifteen and sixteen, who had been traveling with a group of minors, and who had negotiated with their attackers to save two younger girls from the same fate.

Other stories, recorded under pseudonyms by Human Rights Watch, tell of a mother and daughter horrifically sexually assaulted by a gang of perpetrators, a group of migrants taken hostage as individual women were taken away and violated, and another group that was brutally beaten, with all men and women in the group sexually assaulted, just to find and steal a sum of two hundred dollars in one of the migrants’ possession. And the threat of brutal sexual violence gives leverage to other armed gangs inside the Gap, too. Two migrants interviewed by Human Rights Watch, under the pseudonyms Luciana and Juan Herrera, described a robbery by a gang of six armed men; wrote Human Rights Watch, "The men had rifles, guns, and machetes, Juan and Luciana said. ‘Look straight or we will kill you’, one said. The armed men took a young woman aside, letting her go once her brother paid. Frightened, she ran away and almost fell off a cliff, Juan recalled. Those in the group who did not have money were forced to turn back."

And the people who are attacked, robbed, and sexually assaulted inside the Darién aren’t the only ones at imminent risk. Drownings are exceptionally common, brought on by the rapid flash floods and the constant rainfall all throughout the Darién. Falls are just as common, and frequently deadly, especially when attempting to traverse ledges or other precarious positions. Said one migrant, Yuleidy Peña, in an interview with Doctors Without Borders: "The hardest thing for me was when my husband fell with our baby, trying to walk across some very big rocks." But even those who can avoid the floods and keep their footing, may still die just from walking. Part of the immense physical risk, is the complete lack of medical care in the Gap. Blisters can quickly become infected with all manner of nasty jungle disease, and people who drink from the wrong water sources will quickly find themselves in awful shape. A broken leg is usually fatal; trenchfoot and gangrene are common; and that’s to say nothing of the jungle’s animal threats. Everything from spiders and scorpions, to crocodiles and jaguars lie in wait for people to pass by, occasionally hunting for food, but usually responding to confrontations that human travelers have no knowledge or means to defuse safely. And then, there’s the snakes *everywhere*, easy to step on, all but impossible to see, and incredibly deadly. Said one journalist who crossed the Darién in 2016 after receiving fer-de-lance antivenom, "If one of us is bitten, we have ten minutes to inject the antivenom before death. We can only carry six vials. If a larger pit viper were to strike, the expert concedes no amount of antivenom would be enough to save us. We might as well lie down and smoke a cigarette until the lights go out."

And perhaps the one thing worse than braving the conditions of the Darién alongside other migrants, is the thought of doing it alone. One Venezuelan migrant, a woman named Kisbel Garcia who made the journey with her four children and her mother-in-law, gave her account to NBC: first, she’d paid four thousand US dollars to a guide; then, that guide stayed with her and her family for two days and subsequently abandoned them deep in the forest. Over the following six days, Garcia and her children would struggle through the jungle alone, out of food, and wandering past corpses of migrants who hadn’t been so lucky. Said Garcia, it was scraps of blue cloth that kept her family alive, tied around trees by migrants who’d gone before them and tried to leave some clue for those who would follow. In her own words: "We migrants have to fight against all the risks without any kind of help. The Darién is hell."

Luckily, the one thing the migrants often do have going for them, is community. While some among their number will, inevitably, look to improve their own lot by taking from others, in reality there are few ways to do so—and plenty of time to notice the struggling of others. From migrants who choose to leave path markers for others, to people who are willing to carry an extra pack or take someone’s child for a short time, to human chains formed to cross rivers and keep people from stumbling, most journalists who pass through the Gap and report on their experiences will agree that there is no shortage of human kindness among the travelers there. With minimal food or clean water, and almost no medical supplies, there’s a clear limit to how much the migrants can actually do for each other, made worse by decisions made early in the trek where people shared what they had, but hadn’t yet realized that the claim of a two- or three-day journey was a lie.

All the while, migrants in the Gap are confronted with one more strange irony: the reality that what they see as an exceptionally dangerous and unavoidable frontier, many around the world see as a vacation. Even now, in the worst years of Darién migration ever, the Darién is still a popular tourist attraction. Everybody from adventure hikers, to birdwatchers, to influencers and content creators are drawn to the Darién, enjoying and often profiting from their trips to the same jungle—and even, at times, presenting those trips as adventurer-style survival tests. And when the two worlds of the Darién collide, it’s not always a hostile interaction. Speaking to NBC, one Venezuelan migrant named Alejandra Peña, traveling with her three children, her elderly parents, and her partner, admitted, "as I traveled, my heart was suffering, but my eyes were in delight". And she’s not alone; in recent years, hashtags like #salvaDarién, meaning "Darién jungle" in Spanish, have gathered incredible numbers of views—with social media users feasting on content made not just by tourists, but by migrants who often celebrate having made the journey, but give little context about just what it took to finish.

The presence of so many willing tourists in the Darién, typically taking no action to interact with—let alone assist—the people struggling to survive there, raises a long list of ethical questions, and it’s drawn condemnation from aid organizations hard at work addressing the crisis in the Panamanian jungle. But Panama, for its part, seems to quite like the income it gets from tourists, and if anything, it’s worked to present a sanitized version of the Darién as a place where there are bad areas that shouldn’t be traveled, and good areas where tourists are more than welcome. And while that version of reality in the Darién isn’t accurate, it’s a clean enough story that most tourists to the Gap are able to buy it. In such dense, impenetrable jungle, a kilometer’s distance is practically a world away, and while migrants and tourists may get within a few hundred meters of each other, it’s still entirely possible to be completely unaware of each other’s existence. In some parts of the Darién, the tourist industry and the migration crisis collide head-on; in others, they’re strangers passing in the night. And for the indigenous communities still trying to eke out a living in the Darién despite the crisis, tourists are a critical lifeline, who help to provide stability and financial resources that those communities need if they’re going to stay.

For the migrants trying to survive the Darién, only reaching the Panamanian edge of the jungle can put an end to their ordeal—and even then, things aren’t so simple. In Panama, the border checkpoints outside the jungle are rife with corruption: bus transport guaranteed to all, but provided mostly to those who can pay, and guards known for accepting or even demanding sexual favors from women and girls in exchange for transport. At Panama’s frontier checkpoints, food is often scarce or insufficient, plumbing is incapable of handling human waste, and medical care is absent, leaving infections, stomach illnesses, and other ailments more time to fester and grow while lice are spread among the cramped dormitories. Not only is such an ordeal deeply demoralizing, squashing any hope that might have come out of escaping the Darién, but it doesn’t end when a person leaves the border checkpoints.

During the rest of the journey northward, these same migrants are at risk of many of the hardships they faced in the Darién: the robbings, the beatings, the killings and kidnappings along their route. In many places, they’ll again come under the direct control of criminal gangs, or be left without any means to protect themselves from the elements. Make no mistake, things will almost certainly be better than they were in the Darién—but that’s not saying much at all. Instead, it’s simply a reflection of the fact that for as dangerous as the trek through Central America is, the Darién represents an even greater threat. If a migrant is lucky, crossing the Gap will be what they remember as the worst portion of their journey—but surviving it, is no guarantee that a person will reach the United States in the end.

<!-- aeo:section end="life-in-the-gap" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="future-of-darien" -->
## Future of Darién

When it comes to the prospect of putting a halt to migration through the Darién, international observers, aid organizations, and even migrants themselves tend to agree: the current flow of migrants isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. Remember, this is a route that is already a last resort for most people who travel through, and especially for the Venezuelan migrants who make up a bulk of the Darién’s foot traffic. A person who wants to make it to the US border wouldn’t necessarily need to travel through the Darién, except that they’ve been functionally iced out of every other path into the US, and have no real second-choice option among the nations of Latin America. The problems pushing them from their own countries are getting worse, not better, and in some such places, migrants could even face reprisals if they return home after trying to leave. Add to that the constant misinformation around the Darién, and not only is it the only option, but one that’s made to look like far less of a deterrent than it actually is.

When governments on the American supercontinent do take action, they’re unable or unwilling to focus on anything other than containment. Panama, in partnership with the United States, has taken action to stop people from heading northward after the Darién in past years, and will likely do it again in the future. But getting word to migrants that they’ll be turned back or held inside Panama, and finding a way to relay that message before migrants have already crossed the jungle, are a different matter entirely. The cartels that control entry to the Darién are heavily incentivized to ensure that people keep showing up, and what happens to them on the other side of the jungle, after the cartels have already collected their money, is of no consequence to them. Between the cartels’ ongoing operations and the worsening conditions driving people from their homes, 2024 is expected to be the Darién’s busiest year yet, as more and more success stories come back from people who made it out, and as the illicit industry coaxing migrants to, and through the Gap continues to gain power. After a record-breaking 2023, a similar rate of escalation this year could put the number of successful migrant crossings close to, or even past a million.

Aside from the continuous flood of migrants through the Gap, the rest of the Darién’s situation isn’t much better. Massive portions of the local rainforest have been cut down in recent decades, partly in hopes of gaining access to especially valuable hardwoods, and partly in hopes of making it easier to ferry across migrants in large numbers. Much of the land that was once forest, is now used for cattle grazing. The few non-indigenous people who live there untethered from the migrant situation, are typically quite poor or highly isolated, and they’re increasingly at risk of finding themselves in the crosshairs of illicit industries that are getting bigger, not smaller. Nonetheless, the Darién’s remaining occupants—indigenous or otherwise—continue to oppose the construction of a road, a rail link, or anything else that might ease passage through the jungle. Typically, they’ll cite continued fears around the likely environmental impact, although international observers often speculate that these may be more of a cover for anti-Colombian sentiment, something where the Darién still provides a comfortable buffer zone.

But the effort to keep the Darién unsullied by large-scale transit infrastructure, increasingly ignores the reality that’s reshaping the Darién as we speak. Like it or not, the Darién is in the process of being dismantled, just as much, if not more so, than a road or a railway would have required. But now, it’s a free-for-all, a mad dash to fell and collect trees, establish ownership claims to the now-open land that results, clear more stable routes where passage can be offered to desperate migrants, and build settlements deep in the forest to support a thriving illegal enterprise. The Darién itself, the jungle, may still exist—although it appears more and more as if it might be on borrowed time. But the idea that the Darién is a gap, appears to be more and more an illusion than a reality.

The place once known as the Darién Gap, is perhaps better understood today as the Darién frontier: an incredibly dangerous place, where mortal threats human, animal, microscopic, and geographic all vie to be the first to take a person’s life. It’s remote, it’s lawless, it’s the sort of place where it’s nearly impossible to contact the outside world or take control over one’s own survival. But what it is not, or at least not anymore, is a gap. The Darién is no longer impenetrable, and the reality there no longer matches the fantasy portrayed all across the world. And even worse, that lack of understanding around the Darién makes it more likely that people will suffer and die there, even as popular conceptions of the Darién are so compelling that neither Panama, nor Colombia, nor the broader American supercontinent seems to be willing to do the work to make it safer. Said one Panamanian historian, Omar Jaén, to *Americas Quarterly*: "We have to de-dramatize the Darién Gap, remove the taboo. The Darién myth benefits no one."

The Darién myth is *intended* to benefit its namesake, the Darién, one of the few remaining lush, extravagant jungle ecosystems in the world to resist human exploitation. But look even just a little bit closer, and you’ll quickly find that that idealized version of the Darién no longer exists. Instead, the jungles there are a shadow of what they once were, and even worse, they’re practically a playground for criminals engaging in some of the worst forms of abuse and exploitation that humanity can offer, preying on the desperation of tens or even hundreds of thousands each year. The roads, the structure, and the civilization that might otherwise keep those people safe, have all been sworn off, in order to protect a peace that disappeared a long time ago. In the modern Darién, like in so many other formerly incredible parts of our planet, we are now forced to let go of what once was, and figure out how to deal with the nightmare it’s become. We can only hope that both the Darién itself, and the incredibly vulnerable people passing through it, receive the help they desperately need…before neither the Darién, nor its people, can be saved.

<!-- aeo:section end="future-of-darien" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="key-takeaways" -->
## Key Takeaways

- The Darién Gap is a dense, dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama, known for its impenetrability and lethal conditions.
- Despite its hazards, the Darién Gap has become a crucial migration route, with over half a million people crossing in 2023.
- The Darién Gap is controlled by the Gulf Clan, a criminal cartel that exploits migrants for profit, charging exorbitant fees for passage.
- Migrants face extreme dangers, including violent attacks, sexual assault, and deadly wildlife, with a high likelihood of death.
- The Darién Gap's ecosystem is under threat from deforestation and illegal activities, despite efforts to preserve it.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is the Darién Gap?

The Darién Gap is a dense and lethal stretch of jungle that connects the rainforests of Colombia to the narrow Central American isthmus. It is known for its impenetrability and the extreme dangers it poses to travelers.

### Why is the Darién Gap significant in the context of migration?

The Darién Gap is a vital conduit for migrants from across South America traveling northward. In 2023, approximately half a million people crossed this treacherous territory, making it a critical but dangerous route for those seeking to reach the United States.

### What are some of the environmental features of the Darién Gap?

The Darién Gap features a diverse range of landscapes, including high mountain ranges, wetlands, cloud forests, and mangrove coastlines. It is characterized by heavy rainfall, with about 330 days of rain per year, leading to frequent flash floods and mudslides.

### What kinds of wildlife are found in the Darién Gap?

The Darién Gap is home to a vast array of wildlife, including jaguars, pumas, harpy eagles, American crocodiles, and numerous venomous snakes like the Central American bushmaster and the fer-de-lance. The region also hosts hundreds of vertebrate species and thousands of invertebrate species.

### What indigenous groups live in the Darién Gap?

Several indigenous groups, including the Embera, Waunana, and Kuna, trace their ancestry to the Darién Gap. These groups have historically lived within the Darién and maintain strong cultural identities, even as many have settled in villages or cities outside the jungle.

### What is the Darién Scheme and why did it fail?

The Darién Scheme was Scotland's attempt in the late 17th century to establish a colony in the Darién Gap to facilitate trade. It failed due to a combination of logistical failures, disease, and Spanish opposition, leading to significant financial devastation for Scotland and contributing to its union with England.

### Why is the Darién Gap not part of the Pan-American Highway?

The Darién Gap is not part of the Pan-American Highway due to concerns about deforestation, the spread of disease, protection of indigenous populations, and the extreme difficulty of constructing and maintaining a road in such a hostile environment.

### What challenges do migrants face when crossing the Darién Gap?

Migrants face numerous challenges, including extreme physical demands, lack of proper supplies, dangerous wildlife, and the presence of criminal groups like the Gulf Clan, which exploits and abuses migrants. The journey is often deadly, with many migrants dying from exhaustion, injury, or violence.

### How does the Gulf Clan profit from migration through the Darién Gap?

The Gulf Clan controls access to the Darién Gap and profits by selling services such as temporary lodging, guide services, and protection. They also extort money from migrants and use violence to enforce their control, earning an estimated nearly a hundred million dollars per year.

### What is the future outlook for migration through the Darién Gap?

The flow of migrants through the Darién Gap is not likely to stop soon due to ongoing conflicts and economic hardships in South America. The Darién is increasingly being deforested and exploited, and the myth of its impenetrability is fading, making it more accessible but also more dangerous.

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
## Sources

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- [https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/into-the-Darién-gap](https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/into-the-Darién-gap)
- [https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap](https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap)
- [https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap](https://reliefweb.int/report/panama/we-are-tired-and-desperate-stories-families-who-survived-Darién-gap)
- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Aerial_landscape_view_%282017%29.jpg) by Saga1111 / openverse, by-sa.

<!-- aeo:section end="sources" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="related-coverage" -->
## Related Coverage
<!-- aeo:section end="related-coverage" -->