Dusk was descending through the rainforest when the Cameroonians and Pakistanis stumbled into the campsite. They were in their twenties and thirties and loaded down with knapsacks, tents, and shoulder bags. Mud covered their rubber boots. They looked dazed, trying to make out who was occupying the small clearing that had just opened up in front of them.

The site was not much to speak of, a patch of dirt dotted with stumps and discarded pieces of tent fabric. Several men lay in hammocks that hung between slender trees. The one extravagance was a kitchen, shaded by a tarp and consisting of a rough wooden table, a couple of open fire pits, and some blackened pots that rested on rocks.

The four Pakistani men, the first to arrive, were breathing hard. Most of the Cameroonians—there were eighteen in all—made straight for a nearby river, their plastic passport holders dangling in the water as they doused their faces. Some stripped off their clothes and washed themselves. A woman named Sandra stood motionless, in obvious pain. Twenty-three years old, she was one of the youngest in the group. Tight ringlets, their ends a rusty blond from old highlights, framed her face. Wrenching off her knapsack, she sat down on a log and hugged her knees. She was worried about her friend Benita, who had twisted her knee the day before and had been struggling. When Benita limped in, leaning heavily on a thick branch, Sandra looked up. “How many more days?” she asked to no one in particular.

Sandra and her group had set out two days earlier from northwestern Colombia and had walked at least fifteen miles on steep, unforgiving trails across a swath of land known as the Darién Gap. Straddling the border of Panama and Colombia, the Gap is approximately ten thousand square miles of dense, mountainous rainforest and marshland. There are no roads. The only way around it is by sea. It has long been considered one of the most dangerous regions in the world: a corridor for drug trafficking and home to jaguars and venomous snakes. This has not stopped thousands of migrants from Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean from traversing it in the hope that they will reach the United States.

From the time of the Spanish, explorers, engineers, developers, and adventurers have tried to conquer the Darién. All have failed. As wild as the Darién is, it’s never been void of humanity—indigenous peoples have been living there for thousands of years. An attempt to establish a Scottish colony in the late seventeenth century ended up almost bankrupting Scotland. The area would later draw the attention of surveyors who assumed, because the isthmus is only 110 miles wide, that it was a logical place to cut a canal that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific. The Darién continued to prove inhospitable. In 1854 a party of U.S. Navy engineers got lost looking for a canal route, seven of them starving to death. When the Pan-American Highway was constructed in the 1930s, the only piece never completed was the Darién. The missing sixty-six-mile link came to be known as the “Darién Gap.”

Starting in the 1990s, the Darién provided cover for Marxist FARC guerrillas and a faction of the right-wing paramilitary. Because it sits on the border, the Darién was an important route to move weapons and drugs, and its isolation and absence of government authority made it an ideal place for armed groups to operate. In addition to fighting one another, these groups punished anyone who ventured in without permission. Over the years missionaries, orchid hunters, and backpackers were kidnapped, and in 2013 FARC rebels killed a Swedish tourist they suspected of being a spy. Today the FARC has retreated from the Darién, thanks to its peace deal with the Colombian government. The paramilitary officially demobilized in the mid-2000s, but many of its factions reorganized into drug-trafficking groups. The largest of these, the Urabeños, now controls entire sections of the Gap.

The Cameroonians and Pakistanis didn’t know any of this history when they arrived in South America. All they knew was that to get to the United States, they had to first cross into Panama, and the only way to do that was through the Darién.

The Cameroonians belonged to the country’s English-speaking minority and were fleeing one of the world’s most underreported terror campaigns. Tensions between the Francophone-led government and its English-speaking citizens date back to independence, but they reached a new pitch in 2016, after the government imposed French-speaking teachers and lawyers on anglophone schools and courts. Peaceful protests were met with military repression, which gave birth to armed insurgency, which led to further government repression, a cycle of violence that continues unabated. According to Human Rights Watch, security forces have committed torture, carried out extrajudicial killings, and torched scores of villages. By the end of last year, the conflict had left an estimated 3,000 dead and displaced about 700,000 Cameroonians in the English-speaking regions.

Almost every one of the Cameroonians who arrived at the smugglers’ campsite had experienced horrific violence. Sandra was at home eating dinner with her family when the military broke open the door and dragged out her brother and shot him. When they set her house ablaze, she ran into the bush, where government forces raped her. It was the last time she saw her family. Security forces also killed Benita’s brother. She was in the room next door when she heard the gunshot. She rushed in and found him lying on the floor, his head “scattered,” she said. “I tried to gather his head,” but there was no way. A few weeks later, security forces came to the house again. This time she was not there, and she knew she had to flee, leaving her three children behind. Another Cameroonian in the group, whom everyone called “Pastor,” lived in the bush for two months with his five-year-old son after his mother and father were killed. While searching for food, he was swept up by the military, and although he managed to escape from jail, he never saw his son again.

With Europe and the United States taking strict measures to keep out migrants and asylum seekers, finding safety abroad had become more difficult. But there was still a way to get to the United States. A few South American countries, notably Ecuador and Brazil, had relatively lax entry requirements, busting open a route through the Americas. Unlike the passage across the Mediterranean, whose dangers were well-known, few images existed on the internet of migrants who had drowned or been murdered crossing the Darién Gap. Benita decided to fly to Ecuador but had no idea what she would do after she arrived. On a layover in the Istanbul Airport, she found some Cameroonians who told her that after Ecuador, they were planning to go to the U.S. “I asked them, ‘Can you walk there?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Huh? So after Ecuador is the United States?’ They said, ‘Yes, you will just walk. You pass through the river, you enter the United States.’ ”

When Benita arrived in Ecuador, she met Pastor and Sandra and found that many Cameroonians were armed with tips on how to get to Colombia’s northern coast: which towns to hit, where to switch buses. As more and more Cameroonians fled the country, this kind of information had gone global, one Whats­App message at a time, as people were getting pushed out of places like Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, India, Bangladesh, and Eritrea. In 2019 Panamanian authorities counted almost 24,000 migrants, more than three times as many who had crossed in 2017. While more than half were from Haiti, the number of Africans and South Asians has continued to grow significantly.

On their fifth day, Pastor woke up with a revelation. It would be their last day walking, he declared. It was true that the terrain began to change as they made their way. The river they had been following merged with two others, and it broadened, offering wide, pebbly beaches. The sky suddenly opened up and became big. When they turned their heads back, the migrants could see the mountains they had just crossed; it was as if the Darién was spitting them out into flatlands.

There was another sign that they were reaching the end: the number of corpses began to increase. There were the corpses that were visible—the rib cage splayed on a rock, the rotting body shoved off to the side of the trail, the skull beside the river. Some of the Cameroonians spotted a new-looking tent off the trail, thinking they might take it for themselves. When they opened it, they discovered three bodies. “We ran,” a Cameroonian named Vitalis said. The bodies kept piling up.

“We entered here,” Benita said, “we meet corpse. We go this way, we meet corpse. We come back inside the water. We enter the river. We come out. We continue just like that.” There was one body—half a body, without its torso and head—that struck Benita with such terror, she screamed and bolted, despite her knee. When she looked at it, she saw what she could become. Pastor yelled at her to slow down, that she would injure her leg, but Benita was off.

Then there was the death that they couldn’t see but that clogged their senses. It was the fetid smell seeping through patches of brush. It was the vultures circling and squawking overhead. Seeing the bodies, Wajid said, “immediately, we got energy.” When night fell, they kept on going, even though they were without a flashlight. “We walked like I have never walked before,” Pastor said.

Eventually, they met a couple of men with horses, who offered, for a fee, to guide them to an indigenous village called Bajo Chiquito. One man led, while the other took the rear, lifting Benita onto his horse. The group followed a muddy path until the man in the lead said he couldn’t go any farther or he risked being arrested for helping them. He assured them, though, that they were only a half hour away from where they could cross the river and head into the village. Benita would later say she had no recollection of how she got to the river. All she knew was that she fainted along the way. “I don’t know whether I come by horse,” she said, “or they carry me. I just discovered myself by that water.” No, Pastor said, she did not faint. She couldn’t remember because she was overcome with exhaustion—“That means she wants to die because the journey is more than you.”

The river was shallow. On the other side, in the distance, the Cameroonians and Pakistanis could see lights. “Euuushh, God!” Sandra exclaimed. She was so happy, she took off her boots and walked barefoot, crossing the river one last time. As the group approached Bajo Chiquito, the din of crickets and birds of the jungle night receded, replaced by the hum of a generator and barking dogs.

From “When Can We Really Rest?” in The California Sunday Magazine, with the Pulitzer Center. Copyright © 2020 by Nadja Drost. Used with permission of the author.

Issue

Back to Issue

Migration

Shop Now