The inhospitable jungle that separates Colombia and Panama was busier than ever this year. The passage of migrants through this thick green wall known as the Darién Gap is on track to break all historical records. That alarming flow surpassed 30,000 migrants, including 23,000 Venezuelans, last August, according to Panamanian authorities, an unprecedented number that has set off alarm bells from human rights organizations.
“We are facing what is probably an unprecedented number of migrants crossing the Darién Gap,” warns Juan Pappier, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), who has prepared a major report on the humanitarian crisis and visited the field . “This means that more and more people are being subjected to very serious abuse, including rape, at a border where they receive very little protection, inadequate humanitarian assistance and almost no access to justice,” he adds.
According to official figures from the Panamanian authorities, a record number of 133,000 migrants and asylum seekers crossed the border last year, including 29,000 children. So far in 2022, more than 100,000 people have traveled this route, which is considered one of the most dangerous in the world. No one knows exactly how many died along the way.
On busy days, migrants of different nationalities trek through the dangerous jungle that divides the south of the Central American continent. The Haitian diaspora, which has been touring Latin America for a decade, had already become a humanitarian crisis in 2021, but now the Venezuelan exodus has left them outnumbered in that wild place too. This year, Venezuelans have surpassed – by far – Cubans and Haitians as the largest population group to have faced abnormal abuse. By January, their numbers were minimal, but then, under pressure from the United States, Mexico began requiring visas for Venezuelans arriving by plane. Costa Rica and Belize also made new demands.
According to R4V, the inter-agency coordination platform for refugees and migrants from Venezuela, more than 6.8 million Venezuelans have fled in successive waves of the political, social and economic crisis that has rocked their country, with a significant increase in the last year. Nearly 2.5 million have settled in Colombia, the main host country, while thousands are still trying to cross to the United States.
Migrants, most of them from Haiti, set out at dawn in Las Tekas, Colombia, in October 2021 before crossing the infamous Darien Gap on their way to the United States.John Moore (Getty Images)
The increase in both migrant families and unaccompanied minors has also alarmed authorities. In June, the Office of the Ombudsman of Colombia drew attention to the serious risks faced by children and young people with a migrant background who cross Apartadó and Necoclí in the department of Antioquia and the district of Capurganá in Acandí in Chocó, very close to the border between Colombia and Panama. Back in July, HRW warned that the new visa regulations imposed by several Latin American countries had led to a sharp increase in the number of Venezuelans who were exposed to armed groups, river flooding or falls down the steep hills of this place and later headed towards North America. Also to the shipwrecks of the boats with which they often try to shorten the journey. The “coyotes” were the big winners.
The staggering increase in Darién migration is worrying for a number of reasons, agrees Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office for Latin America. (WOLA, for its English acronym) and expert on relations between Colombia and the United States. For starters, there is almost no infrastructure to manage this flow. “Until recently, the Darién was considered a natural barrier to migration. In 2011, Panama only spotted 283 people who had taken this route throughout the year. This year it’s 283 people every 17 hours,” he emphasizes. This lack of infrastructure means migrants have no access to medical care if they fall down these trails or are bitten by a snake. “I spoke to several migrants on the Mexico-US border who told me they saw bodies in the Darién jungle,” Isacson says.
Migrants are at the mercy of criminal groups that operate with complete impunity, and one of the worst indicators of this is sexual violence. MSF, which operates an aid post at the end of the Darien route, said its staff documented a case of migrants suffering sexual violence almost daily, the WOLA expert notes.
“It’s also worrying what a large increase in migration through the Darién means for the rest of the migration route, which isn’t much better regulated,” warns Isacson. “Any rise in darién will soon be felt in Costa Rica, in Tapachula — where Venezuelan migrants hold protests almost daily to obtain cards allowing them transit to the US border — and on the US side of the border. Along this route, criminals and corrupt officials take advantage of migrants who pay huge sums to coyotes, who often mislead them about the journey,” he explains.
The continental scope of the crisis has already become clear. The surge in Venezuelan asylum seekers arriving via the Darien has recently overwhelmed migrant processing capacity in Yuma, Arizona, and now El Paso, Texas, Isacson says. Unlike most previous waves of migrants, Venezuelan asylum seekers arriving now often have no family, contacts, or support networks in the United States, and thus no plan. The record numbers will likely be felt at this other frontier sooner rather than later.
Immigrant families leave a rest stop to climb a mountain near Colombia’s Panama-Panama border in October 2021 in the Darién Gap, Colombia John Moore (Getty Images)
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