Hanging from the ceiling at the open-air albergue, or shelter, in the Colombian village of Capurganá—one of the jumping-off points for traversal of the Darién Gap—was a sign featuring “general information,” in both Spanish and English, for the migrants who had gathered in the hopes of reaching the United States, more than three thousand miles away. The English version read:
Darién jungle crossing Colombia–Panamá
“Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking”
Generating more hope, to achieve the American Dream
A U.S. flag occupied one section of the sign, atop which were perched a pair of rain boots and four dirt-caked children’s shoes, one of them bearing the Nike swoosh. The albergue is where refuge seekers from around the world pay Colombian “guides” for passage to Panama, a journey that can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Said guides do not chaperone the entire trajectory—a detail that is often not made clear to migrants at the outset and revealed only when their smugglers turn back prior to reaching the Panamanian border. The sixty-six-mile Darién Gap is notorious for its lethal perils, ranging from rushing rivers to armed assailants to hostile wildlife, and a countless number of those who have set out “to achieve the American Dream” have ended up corpses in the jungle. (Lest anyone underestimate the intellectual credentials of Colombian organized crime, it bears noting that the inspirational quote directed to the walker is a line from a poem by Antonio Machado, who died in French exile from Spain in 1939, the year that Francisco Franco forged his path to the Spanish dictatorship.)
This was the prevailing scene when I entered the Darién Gap via Capurganá in January 2024, a year before the Donald Trump administration broadcast its intent to close the jungle down, with incoming U.S. border czar Tom Homan declaring ahead of Trump’s reinauguration, “Shutting down the Darién Gap is going to protect our national security. It’s going to save thousands of lives.” In 2023, more than 520,000 people made the crossing, opting to risk their lives and travel thousands of miles rather than remain in existentially precarious situations at home. As a Washington, D.C.–born bona fide gringa myself—and someone who has spent more than two decades in self-imposed semi-exile from the country—I had obviously already been sufficiently disabused of such notions as “the American Dream” and was staging a brief incursion into the Gap for journalistic purposes.
More specifically, I was preparing to write a book on the subject, and I was doing my best to live up to the late and far more intrepid Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s dictum that “it’s wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through.” I had not tried to secure the usual permission to enter the Darién Gap as a reporter, which has allowed many a member of the U.S. press to access the jungle to relay the plight of people on the move while rarely ever mentioning the outsize role of the United States in concomitantly fueling and criminalizing migration. Instead, I entered as a “migrant,” for which effort I had selected a Palestine soccer jersey with the intention of pleading Palestinian-ness if questioned by any of the smugglers—which I indeed was. The young man found my alibi less than convincing and henceforth referred to me, with a roll of the eyes, as “Palestina.”
I was accompanied on my expedition by a twenty-two-year-old Venezuelan named Johan, whom I had met the previous year when he exited the jungle on the Panamanian side of the Darién Gap in the first of his various attempts to reach the United States. In April 2023—forty-one days after I had met him in Panama and one day after we had rendezvoused for far too much beer in Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border—he made it as far as El Paso, Texas, before being detained by immigration authorities for a string of showerless days and then flown, cuffed at the hands and feet, to Arizona, where he was dumped back into the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Months later, Johan took another stab at existence in Caracas and found it still unsustainable—thanks in no small part, of course, to U.S. sanctions, one of the global hegemon’s many tools for making life miserable for folks around the world. As of 2020, sanctions had already caused upwards of one hundred thousand deaths in Venezuela, to say nothing of the less life-threatening but still highly annoying effects of coercive economic measures like shortages of electricity and cooking gas. In August 2023, 77 percent of the record 81,946 people who crossed the Darién Gap were Venezuelan. Against this backdrop, Johan figured he might as well earn a few bucks escorting me in and out of the Gap; his twenty-five-year-old brother, Kelvin, signed up for the excursion too, as I reckoned the more machetes, the better.
Johan, Kelvin, and I met up on January 11 in Medellín, Colombia, and took a nine-hour bus ride to the northern coastal city of Necoclí, which had recently hosted New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, who descended upon the port to warn migrants against travel to the United States because conditions were rough “on the streets of New York.” From Necoclí, it was a two-hour, spine-shattering boat ride to Capurganá, where migration through the Darién Gap was managed by the Clan del Golfo, currently Colombia’s leading drug-trafficking outfit. In Capurganá, we were given complimentary transport by motorized rickshaw to the albergue, where a man in flip-flops charged us $280 apiece and requested our identifying documents. This put me in a momentary bind, as I had intentionally left my passport behind, but “My face?” proved a satisfactory response to the question of what I had to identify myself with after Johan announced that I had lost my documents. I was marked down on a piece of paper as Maria Velen Hernandez, and colored bands were affixed to our wrists to indicate that we had been properly extorted. The human smugglers of the Darién Gap tend to cast their activities in a resolutely humanitarian light. And as one of the guides would later tell me with impassioned altruism, migration was going to happen whether anyone liked it or not—at least on the Colombian side of the Gap, the guides were making it “safe.”
At the albergue, I spoke in English with a pair of Yemeni men who expressed approval at my Palestine shirt and did their best to assuage my apparently visible terror at the prospect of entering the jungle: “If you need anything, we are here.” These, of course, were people who were well acquainted with literal terror, courtesy in part of my actual country of origin, whose covert action program against Yemen, launched in 2002, basically consisted of bombing Yemeni civilians without publicly acknowledging the campaign because it was, you know, covert. In addition to hands-on destruction, the United States also provided key logistical support over the years to the military coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, that had dedicated itself to giddy bombardment of the country, along with a blockade that stimulated famine and helped kill some eighty-five thousand malnourished Yemeni children between 2015 and 2018 alone.
In Yemen, as in so many countries across the planet, the United States is more than happy to wantonly violate other people’s borders both militarily and economically while insisting on the sacrosanctity of its own frontier—which is why so many humans have been forced to contend with the horrors of the Darién Gap as they seek refuge from what are often U.S.-backed horrors at home. Because the United States simultaneously wreaks havoc worldwide while criminalizing migration by the world’s have-nots, two men from Yemen had to travel halfway around said world only to reach the entrance of a deadly jungle that, if navigated successfully, would leave them with thousands of hazard-ridden miles still to go to reach the U.S. border. Throughout the length of Central America and Mexico, migrants suffer assault and extortion by state security forces and criminal groups alike—often operating in concert—while being prey to robbing and kidnapping at the hands of gangs and cartels. In Mexico, many migrants board La Bestia, the country’s infamous “train of death,” another frequent site of armed assault—not to mention mutilation and worse when weary passengers traveling atop the railroad cars fall onto the tracks. Survivors of the journey are deposited at the front lines of the war on migrants: the U.S. border itself.
And yet the Yemenis and other international guests at the albergue that day—which included mainly exhausted Venezuelan families with young children and wailing babies—were, for all intents and purposes, already smack up against the U.S. border right there in Capurganá. The death trap of a jungle having failed to adequately deter desperate migrants with nothing to lose, Joe Biden’s administration had set about harassing the governments of Colombia and Panama to support a militarized crackdown on migration through the Darién Gap, with helicopters and other goodies provided by the imperial benefactors for use in anti-immigration efforts. Still, migrant movement persisted through the jungle, though the helicopters did make for some good photo ops.
In February 2023, U.S. officials met with Colombian and Panamanian counterparts and “committed to close coordination” on migration management, as per the press release from the U.S. embassy in Bogotá. The same communiqué affirmed that the United States continued to “combat illegal human smuggling and trafficking operations that promote and facilitate the dangerous crossing through the Darién Gap”—operations that, mind you, owed their lucrative existence to U.S. policy in the first place. To some degree, extortion-happy smugglers essentially served as de facto U.S. border guards, blocking the passage of the lowest ranks of the have-nots, who were unable to muster the smuggling fee. Many of these migrants were condemned to indefinite limbo sleeping on the streets of Necoclí, where they remained Colombia’s problem and not Eric Adams’s.
The Zone of Interest
Now, Trump’s recent threat to seize the Panama Canal makes all this metaphorical talk about U.S. borders in Central America a little less lofty. While the president of course specializes in being an egregious caricature not only of himself but also of American entitlement, it’s worth recalling that until 1979, the United States presided over a straight-up colony in the middle of Panama in the form of the Panama Canal Zone. In addition to emphasizing the utter unimportance of other people’s borders, the Canal Zone also enabled the colonial administrators to replicate and maintain the metropole’s racist oppressions—think segregated schools, drinking fountains, and so forth—long after such things had gone out of style in the United States proper. The nation of Panama had itself been midwifed into being by none other than the United States, which under the charitable supervision of Theodore Roosevelt sponsored the country’s forcible severance from Colombia in 1903, once the Colombians had been deemed too much of a pain in the ass in terms of negotiating the proposed U.S. Canal Zone. (Incidentally, the Darién region of Panama was on the U.S. radar long before Panamanian “independence.” In 1854, the American Navy dispatched the U.S. Darién Exploring Expedition under the leadership of Lieutenant Isaac Strain to check out prospects for an interoceanic canal on the isthmus of Darién; Strain’s men became hopelessly lost in the jungle, where some died and others lost their minds, clothing, and tooth enamel, the last as a result of a disproportionate consumption of palm nuts.)
The human smugglers of the Darién Gap tend to resolutely cast their activities in a humanitarian light.
The colonial enterprise kicked off immediately, and over ensuing decades it became nearly impossible to maneuver in the Canal Zone without tripping over one or another U.S. military installation. As the headquarters of U.S. Southern Command, the Canal Zone was used as a base from which to assist in terrorizing other countries in the region in the interest of making the world safe for capitalism—causing wreckage that naturally helped pave the way for future migration patterns. From 1946 until 1984, the territory also hosted the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), which produced such illustrious alumni as Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who would make a name for himself dropping thousands of suspected leftists from airplanes, and Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, a key player in the country’s civil war of 1979–92 that killed some seventy-five thousand people. That war also drove countless folks to flee north to the United States, the very nation backing the alliance between the right-wing military and death squads responsible for the vast majority of wartime atrocities in El Salvador.
In December 1989, ten years before the United States formally ceded control of the canal to Panama, the diminutive Central American nation got to experience U.S.-inflicted terror firsthand when the gringos suddenly turned against their longtime buddy (and CIA asset) Manuel Noriega, the ruler of Panama and an SOA graduate himself. During the brief and perversely titled Operation Just Cause, the U.S. military bombed the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City barrio of El Chorrillo and killed up to several thousand civilians. The spectacle earned the neighborhood the moniker Little Hiroshima, and even U.S. General Marc Cisneros would later admit that “we could have done it with less troops and less destruction. We made it look like we were battling Goliath. . . . We are mesmerized with firepower. We have all these new gadgets, laser-guided missiles and stealth fighters, and we are just dying to use that stuff.” At any rate, the stunning U.S. victory over destitute Panamanians living in wooden shacks helped the American public kick that pernicious affliction known as Vietnam Syndrome and set the stage for the unleashing of even more “new gadgets” against Iraq in 1991.
Of course, decolonization is easier said than done, and Panama continues to this day to host an aging population of “Zonians”—the denomination for U.S. citizens from the Canal Zone—many of whom never quite got around to learning Spanish or viewing Panamanians as equal human beings. Even in the postoccupation era, the names of U.S. military officers have been preserved in Panamanian geography, as in Panama City’s Albrook Mall and the upscale residential area of Clayton. The mall is located on none other than Roosevelt Avenue, although the Panamanian capital’s former Fourth of July Avenue has since been renamed Martyrs’ Avenue in honor of the at least twenty-one Panamanians killed by U.S. forces in the Canal Zone in January 1964, after local high school students attempted to raise Panama’s flag next to the U.S. one.
Nor has Panama been able to shake the tradition of being bossed around by its former occupiers. While Biden repeatedly badgered the Panamanian government to crack down on northbound migration through the Darién Gap, Trump promptly augmented his signature deportation spree by roping the country into serving as a sort of black hole into which the United States might disappear migrants whose deportation to their own countries would have been “more challenging,” as the Associated Press put it in a March dispatch. Per the AP’s write-up, hundreds of deportees from Afghanistan, Russia, Iran, and China had been “dropped into limbo in Panama,” where some had consented to return home voluntarily “but others refused out of fear of persecution and were sent to a remote camp in the Darién jungle for weeks.” In other words, the old U.S.-Darién border remained very much in business.
Return to Sender
The U.S. border today persists in its long habit of extending itself wherever it pleases; U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), for example, maintains a presence in no fewer than twenty-six countries. This projection of the border is not, ultimately, done with an eye to fully halting U.S.-bound migration, which would leave the country with a shortage of the undocumented, exploitable labor upon which its economy depends. Rather, the ubiquitous frontier is designed to render the pursuit of refuge so physically complicated and deadly that those who do eventually “achieve the American Dream” aren’t tempted to expect any sort of rights on the other side. In his aptly titled 2019 book Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World, journalist Todd Miller notes that the U.S. border model has been “paramount to the scaffolding of the current order of the globe, managing the antagonisms . . . between the haves and have-nots.” Without these managed antagonisms, global capitalism would naturally be up a creek. Key to this scaffolding, Miller writes, is the “enormous chasm between those who have freedom of movement and those who do not.” After all, the perpetuation of elite tyranny would be far more onerous if just anybody could pick up and fly to the United States instead of having to walk there from Colombia or engage in similarly unfree movement.
The U.S. border today persists in its long habit of extending itself wherever it pleases.
In her 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, scholar Harsha Walia asserts that “in addition to migration being a consequence of empire, capitalism, climate catastrophe, and oppressive hierarchies, contemporary migration is itself a mode of global governance, capital accumulation, and gendered racial class formation.” And on that January day in Capurganá, systemic oppression played out on human bodies as Johan, Kelvin, and I set out with our group of more than twenty people and an assortment of guides that would be reduced to one and then none. The first order of business was to scale a steep ascent in asphyxiating heat, after which it was time to slide down a mountain of mud. At one point during our exercise in ensuring proper global capital accumulation, an older Venezuelan woman who was traveling alone asked some of her compatriots if this first day in the jungle counted as one of the three she had been told it would take to get to Panama. When she was informed that, no, today didn’t count, the response was swift: “Coño de su madre”—literally, “Cunt of your mother.”
My plan had been to walk for a day and return to Capurganá rather than complete the trans-Darién trajectory, as I did not feel like finding out what the Panamanian protocol was for dealing with gringos who turned up out of the jungle sans passport. More importantly, I was scared shitless of being raped or digitally penetrated, practices that had become par for the Darién course but now mainly occurred on the Panamanian side of the Gap. A few months later, the New York Times would report that sexual violence against migrants in the Panamanian stretch of jungle had reached a “level rarely seen outside war.” But with this in fact already being war and the Gap a fortified U.S. border in its own right, I took advantage of being on the grotesquely privileged side of those with freedom of movement; when our group stopped for the night, Johan, Kelvin, and I turned back to confront the mountain of mud in the opposite direction.
Johan would face the Darién Gap once again in March, in another bid to reach the United States; this time, he was robbed and beaten in the jungle, and women in his group were raped. Having opted this time around to solicit a CBP appointment that would allow him “legal” entry into the United States, he spent a full year stuck in Mexico, the entirety of which had been converted into one big U.S. border unto itself as Biden pressured the Mexican government to make life as hellish as possible for northbound refugee seekers—an open invitation for the Mexican police, National Guard, and every other branch of the state security apparatus to engage in continuous and unabashed extortion and abuse of migrants. When the newly reinaugurated Trump then effectively closed the official U.S. border in January to the more than a quarter of a million people who had been waiting in Mexico for a response from CBP, I began preparations to get Johan back to Caracas.
The spontaneous cancellation of the right to seek asylum at the border made it quite a bit easier for Trump to make good on his promise to shut down the Darién Gap, since it makes little sense to undertake a deadly odyssey only to end up at a sealed-off frontier. In March 2025, Panamanian immigration authorities registered just 194 arrivals via the jungle from Colombia, compared to 36,841 in March 2024 and 38,099 in March 2023. This did not, however, represent a noble U.S. victory against those “illegal human smuggling and trafficking operations that promote and facilitate the dangerous crossing through the Darién Gap,” as outlined in the Bogotá embassy press release. The Clan del Golfo and other organized-crime outfits continue to capitalize on reverse migration, which entails all the same dangers as its counterpart—and often even greater extortion.
Johan’s possession of a Venezuelan passport meant that he was able to fly from Mexico City to Caracas on an Avianca ticket purchased by me for approximately half of my monthly income. The majority of migrants stuck in Mexico did not have this option and instead had to scrape together the exorbitant funds necessary to retrace their steps through Mexico and Central America; in most cases, the renavigation of the Darién Gap is now avoided in favor of equally risky transport by boat from Panama to Colombia. Among the various migrants I’ve spoken to who have made this journey, the consensus has been that the return trip is much uglier. And in the end, forcing a whole lot of people back to places they left precisely because life there was unsustainable is nothing but a recipe for unremitting misery—but that, anyway, is the entire point.