The Darién Gap: Where Dreams Die

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
It's me James, and before we listen to this episode today,
I just did want to make you aware that I
conducted these interviews in French and Spanish, mostly Spanish, and
then transcribed and translated them. So what you're hearing is
a translated interview that's been edited for brevity and content.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
The most difficult part of the Jinney is wing. We
are tricking and your meet dead bodies on It makes
you rep it makes you cry, But there's only one
for coss in the forest ahead. You'll have to keep going.

(01:13):
You'll see modest children. They're crying just to have a
sip of water. It is not easy.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
A few weeks ago I found myself sitting beside the
Tuquesa River on a warm afternoon in late September, making
silly faces at a two minths old baby as we
both marveled at the cloud yellow butterflies. Anywhere else on
earth it could be in a dyllic summer day, but
in these final steps of the journey across the daddy
and gap, it's hard to open up your mind to

(01:52):
experience joy. I'd only been in the tiny Emberra village
of a couple of days, and I had already seen
the lifeless body of a girl as the migrants carried
her into town. The river I was sleeping around him
with this group of migrants resting here in the shade
had swept sleeping children to their deaths earlier this year,
and up to stream of me there were at least

(02:12):
three people's remains here. It was shin deep, but crossing
upstream where it's above head height and raides down out
of the mountains in steep ravines. Was the migrants I
walked back to town with told me the stuff of nightmares.
The voice you just heard was a migrant from Cameroon
who called himself James. That's not his real name, and
astute listeners would have noticed that it is my real name,

(02:35):
but for the protection of James and his family, it's
a name we'll be using when I met James. We're
in a migrant reception center called Las Blancas, to the
north of the Daien Gap. To get there, one has
to take a dugout canoe called a piragua from Bajo Jiquito.
The voyage takes five hours, and for that five hours,
migrants are packed fifteen to a boat wearing bright orange

(02:57):
life jackets. Here the boat with Embra Praguero, who sits
at the back driving the boat with a tooth stroke motor,
and a guide who sits on the front, using a
pole when necessary to push the boat through shallow sections.
The Umbraa people are indigenous to the area that's commonly
known as a Darian Gap, or at least to this
part of it, and a tiny Embrea village of Bajo Juquito.

(03:18):
It's a first settlement migrants encounter is they emerge from
the perilous crossing of the jungle that divides Central America
from South America and thousands of people from a better future.
There's a morale patch that the Panamanian Border Patrol and
military wear on their uniforms. The reflects a slogan in
a government messaging campaign, da Jungla. It says. The campaign

(03:42):
was launched in August, and it translates to the Darien
isn't a route or maybe a road to a better translation,
it's a jungle. Obviously it's actually both. But this is
like no route. Most of us will be familiar with.
The dark and foreboding jungle I saw in Bahajiguito is
one of the most impenetrable on Earth, and the crossing
of it is among the most dangerous land migration routes.

(04:04):
In the nineteen seventies, the British Army said it most
experienced explorers to find a way through the gap. Their
commander called the gap a gold for saken place. Today,
migrants have their own names for it, Route del Morte
or sometimes the Green Hell. Here's a group from Cameroon
explaining why they didn't see a future there and they
decided to take this dangerous route.

Speaker 5 (04:26):
We are coming from Cameroon and my name is Powers.
There's a lot of crisis in our country. There's a
civil war going on in Cameroon right now because of
our president. President Pombia has been in power over forty
two years, so I was the anglophone. We started revolting
for him to step down because it doesn't develop the
Southern American sorry, the English section of Cameroon. Yeah, the

(04:50):
anglophone section a revolt insid he was set in the military,
and what's killing the citizens of our country. There's a
lot of hardship, a lot of that. I for one,
I've lost every body. I lost one of my family,
my mom, my dad, my two brothers, and I'm the
only one left.

Speaker 6 (05:05):
So things a moan.

Speaker 5 (05:06):
There's no job. I've completed school, but there's nothing for
me to do, so that's right.

Speaker 6 (05:10):
We decided to migrate.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
To get to Baho Jiquito from Columbia, as James and
other migrants did. There's no road you can take. You
can't even take a boat or a train. Instead, you
have to walk the Darrying Gap, an area of rainforested
mountains that it is one of the most dangerous migration
routes in the world, for anywhere between two and fifteen days.

(05:33):
Migrants trek through waste timeh mud, and rivers deeper than
they are tall. They must climb giant boulders, cross perilous ravines,
and traverse sheer cliff faces. All of this with barely
any water than what they can carry, little to no food,
inadequate clothing, a terrible footwear, and no medical attention. They

(05:53):
must walk past dead bodies and past people who might
soon become dead bodies, as they beg for help, carry
their children, their dreams, and sometimes each other. Across mountains
and rivers and about Jiqito. They take what, for many
of them will be the final steps of this part
of their journey. It's a journey that few of us
can imagine, and they were lucky to be able to avoid.

(06:17):
My own migration to the US sixteen years ago was
much simpler and safer. But for migrants like James, the
journey's worth it because what they're leaving behind is worse.
His James describing the situation in the stative Cameroon. The
situation in Cameroon is, how can I put it, very

(06:37):
very very very difficult, especially in the anglophone part of
the country. Yeah, because for about five to six years
there's a wall, the ongoing war in the anglophone crisis
we are sort have been.

Speaker 4 (06:58):
There has been fighting the shooting Killing's I myself speaking
to you. Yeah, I've been targeted. My cousin was shot
and with his husband, he was shot together. Both of

(07:21):
them were Nessis and they were shot by the army
that were there to protect the people. So the situation
back at home, it's very very tense. Yeah, it's very
very tense. When you see most of Camaronians traveling taking

(07:44):
the Ric's part from Columbia Brazy right up to where
I am. It is not because they like it. It's
because of the situation back at home and most of it,
and most of the time it is the anglophone population
that is of most of them. They choose this part
because they'll not have a direct result to American.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, it's very hard to get one right.

Speaker 4 (08:06):
Yes, it's very very difficult, so they have to use
the hard.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
Way, which is the only way. The truth is that
dead bodies, terrible stories and families celebrating the end of
their walk is nothing out of the ordinary. And Bahajiqito,
the Enbarra town with the population of just five hundred
and ninety, is a place I've been trying to come
to for almost as long as I've been writing about migration.
There are a few stories in my time as a

(08:30):
journalist that I've been pitching for close to a decade.
Most of the time, I give up if there are
no bites after a few months, and that's why you
won't see me write about the people who try to
hire mercenaries to intimidate voters in twenty twenty, or the
Burmese rebels who if I did their revolution with co
op produced tea or a surfing team in the Gaza strip,
And on reflection, you probably won't hear about that last

(08:51):
one anywhere now. The media cycle has a way of
coming around to these stories eventually, sure, but I not
really want to go back to what it is who
didn't give a sh about people before and only care
about their stories now because they get more traffic. But
there's one story I've never given up on. That's the
story of the daddy En Gap and the people who
risk their lives crossing it for a shot at the

(09:12):
American dream. And at this point I do want to agnolige.
I'm incredibly grateful to the people I work with for
trusting me when I ask them to pay for me
to disappear in a dugout canoe into the jungle and
come back two weeks later with a story. The Daddy
and looms in the stories of migrants I meet in
the US border as a sort of heart of darkness
on what is a very difficult and dangerous journey. It's

(09:34):
worse than the freight trains they hop on in Mexico,
worse than the crowded buses, worse even than the months
of waiting for an asylum appointment. I've only believe that
you can't really understand and write about things you haven't seen, smelt,
and heard. So for years I've been asking, yet it
is to send me to the tiny, en but our
community on the banks of the river, so that I

(09:56):
could share the final steps of this horrific journey with
the people who see little option but to risk their
lives for a better future for their children. Because the
US refuses to create more legal pathways, people instead take
the sudden pathway straight up and down the mountains of
the Darian rainforest. The journey will take them past the
corpse of the people who never left. The terrain is

(10:17):
too fierce for anyone to carry their remains out, so
they must simply run there. As a reminder to migrants,
so they must keep going. It's a sort of deterrent
through death that has been the unofficial and official US
border policy for decades to turn or not. Once you're
in the Darien, there's no turning back, and the lack
of escape routes has made the gap popular among criminals,

(10:38):
who commit untold numbers of sexual assaults, murders, and armed
robberies every year in the jungle. Despite this, more than
half a million migrants made the perilous journey last year
and if many, if not more, will do so this year.
To understand the Dadian you have to first understand US
immigration policy, which is something I talk about a lot
on this podcast. I want to include here a clip

(11:00):
amos Am I going from North Africa, who met my
friends and helped them build shelters in the Cumba last year,
explaining his journey to the United States.

Speaker 7 (11:08):
So another route right now, which is a difficult route,
is through Brazil because Brazil has a I don't know
if you guys know, and I think they do that
for Americans too. Yeah, So Brazil has sort of I
don't know the word, but the equivalent to them is
if you impose a visa on Brazil. Brazilians were imposed

(11:31):
his own news. They do that to Americans too, so
so you know where I'm from. They don't have a
visa to as far as for Brazilians, so we don't.
So a lot of Africans can go to Brazil and
from Brazil take the route.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
All the way was Jims couldn't fly here directly, that
he was able to get a little bit closer to
the US by flying to Columbia. I'll let him explain
how he pulled that off.

Speaker 4 (11:58):
For me to have a pass to Colombia, it was
not easy, so we had we had to. There was
a female female on that twenty World Cup that was
that was taking place in Colombia, so we had to
go to Columbia as football fans.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
That's why they had.

Speaker 4 (12:22):
They had to give us our bizare yes all right?
From Colombia, we'll find our way out of the airport to.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Where we are today, both from the Continental America, we'll
have to travel to Brazil, just like amos. Here's one
a cap. I'll let the speakers introduce themselves.

Speaker 8 (12:43):
My name is tom May, I'm from Ida.

Speaker 6 (12:47):
My name is Mohade from Iran.

Speaker 9 (12:50):
My name is Ali and I'm from ira.

Speaker 3 (12:52):
They told me why they left around but I'm sure Manydicul,
we that went out of yourself, so we weren't included here.
How did you come from Iran? Here you got for
a Turkey.

Speaker 9 (13:02):
It was so difficult, and we came from Iran Tehran
to Dubai, after that South Aul of Brazil and after
that Believe Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Ecokley and jungle Panama
here Panama, And it was so difficult for us because

(13:26):
we're young. We just leave our family, my sister, my
mother and father. It was so emotional and it was
so hard for us. But because of the freedom, because
we can't speak in our country. You know, if you
speak in your in the street something like it, they
will arrest you to and yeah, in the Jaid when

(13:49):
you are not Muslim, when you will be like something
like Christian or something else, they will arrest you. Yes,
it was It was so so, so so the because
living in Iran. But it's a wonderful country, but not government.

Speaker 3 (14:06):
When I talk to migrants, I always want to offer
them the chance to share their stories in ways that
they want to share them. And I asked them what
they would want to say if they could talk directly
to Americans. It's a question I ask a lot, because
in all the coverage of migration I've seen in this country,
I rarely see migrants' voices. I'm very familiar with being
the only journalist in a place, and I'd be lying

(14:27):
if I said I didn't prefer it that way. But
I do always feel obliged to use the platform I
have here to give people a chance to share their stories,
their voices, and their struggles. So here's their message to you.
We love you.

Speaker 9 (14:40):
Hope too, you love is it's hard to share.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's very good.

Speaker 9 (14:49):
It will be our next home and we should be
proud of that. We should be vote for that, We
should be be a real American for the country.

Speaker 8 (15:00):
Yeah, they know Romans are very bad situations, have a
bad situation in Iran. Yeah, for all people, that is saying,
But for women is very, very, very hard. I think
American people know about Massa Amini. Yeah, and they really

(15:25):
they chill us, really, they chill women for simple things.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
I heard hundreds of stories like this in my time
in Bajo Jiquito and the last Blancast migrant reception center,
that migrants travel to after they arrive in Baja Chiquito.
People left horrific things behind them and saw horrific things
on their journey, but they all remained hopeful for a
better future in America. These journeys, in some cases can

(15:59):
take a year or more. When the poorly man I
met in Bajo Gito, I'd spent thirty months just to
get that far, and among his group, his journey had
been the fastest. As long as these journeys are, that
darien often stems out. There's the hardest part to understand why.
I want to take you back to that shady spot
by the river just a few minutes south of Bajoji Keepo.

(16:23):
So what I'm doing right now, you can hear from
my footsteps, is I'm doing what it taught me not
to do. I'm walking along the migrant trail. There's lots
of like vines and creepers. Oh fucking hell, that's me
nely eating shit. There's little bits of tape marking the trail.
I think they just come down the river here and

(16:45):
some local guys are pushing out wheelbarrows on the trail
to dump trash. There's trash everywhere to fucking mess. The
little wood arrows that they've carved just outside town to
direct people into town, and if I heard, I can
see migrants making what probably hopefully their final crossing of
the river here. One thing I noticed was that as

(17:06):
soon as I got out of sight in near shot
of the town, the jungle seemed a lot more intimidating.
I'm somebod who spends a lot of time in the mountains,
and I grew up playing in the woods. I'm comfortable outdoors,
and I frequently camp and hike for days on my own.
I like it better that way, and I might see
more comfortable forty feet under the sea free diving, or
three hours from the nearest road. Then I'm in a

(17:26):
busy city sometimes, But in the jungle, after all the
stories I'd heard that week, I was afraid. I keept scary.
I don't know why. I mean, everything's new to me. I'm,
you know, relatively comfortable in the outdoors. But fucking there's
new animals, there's new plants. I don't know what's poisonous.

(17:49):
I don't know what's going to kill me. I don't
know who's going to try and hurt me. Got another
fucking horse, Jesus wept. I'm jumping out my skin everything.
Now it's funny. I'm in a place that's beautiful, you know,
like these better paradise plants are just just growing here.

(18:11):
It's gorgeousness. Horses belong to people of the black community.
I suppose it's having snacks, you know, eating jungle horse food.
And here here I am at the river. It's wide.
Here it's sort of shallow, and it's been dammed up
a little bit with rubbish. It's like flocks and jets

(18:32):
some kind of stuff. And then this is where people
cross because of that little dam. But it's still got
some force to it, like you wouldn't want to fall
and crack your head or you know, a lot of
these folks can't swim even without the fear. It's hard going.
If you've only hiked on trails, you probably don't realize
how much work goes into making that surface possible. There

(18:53):
are no trail crews in the dry it and as
a result, every step has the potential to results in
a sprained ankle or another injury, which might sound trivial
but can be faithal in such a remote and challenging place.
Trail is all rocks, like maybe rocks the size of
a fist. By that way nows and then there are
sort of in this area we only have the lower canopy,

(19:15):
so we have ferns, we have reeds, bamboo plants growing
really tall and straight. That's what they use for the poles,
so the pitag was and then sort of low grassy
kind of plants. And then where the migrants walk is
just this muddy trail that every time it rains just
turns into like ankle to knee deep mud. And I
could see them making pretty slow progress along the trail

(19:37):
towards me. At the end of the day, as I
took a piaguard back to Madagante, where I would be
staying the night, I reflected again on this and the
incredible tenacity it took for people with little outdoor experience
and terrible equipment to path through the jungle. You know,
I'm a fit person. I run ultra marathons, I used
to be exercised for a living. And it's fucking hard wet.

(20:00):
Everything's wet all the time. If you're wet from the rain,
then you're wet. If you're wet from the sweat and
you're wet. If you cross rivers, you get wet. You
just can't stay dry. And everyone's feet are just fucked
when they get into town, like the size of the
blisters I've seen. Like one lady had a cramp today

(20:21):
where like it just locked up a whole she like
I grabbed her or she was falling down and I
was able to hold her up. But people are really
pushing themselves physically as well as psychologically. That river crossing
south of Bajiqito was as far south as I was
going to be able to get without being forced to
be adjacted from Panama, and my request to take a

(20:42):
boat or walk further south was denied by the Panamanian
Ministry of Security. So the only part of the migrants
journey I would share with them was the last kilometer
or so of their walk. Even then I wasn't really
supposed to be leaving town at all, So several times
of the days I spent in Bahajikito, log over my shoulder,
hop down the river bank, jump across the stream, and

(21:04):
lightly jog out of town. Once on the trail, I
started to walk slowly and try and waive a groups
of outcoming migrants. I didn't want to scare them. I
offered to carry their bags and gant any help I could,
supporting them as they walked towards their first meal and
clean drink of water in up to a week. Just

(21:41):
getting to bahji Ghita was a journey in itself for me.
I took two flights, a five hour drive, which was
equally split between paved roads, roads that aspired to pavement,
and dirt roads. At the end of our road journey,
the Pan American Highway, the links Alaska to Argentina, seems
to give up on fighting the jungle and peters out.

(22:01):
Asphalt turned to worse asphalt, which turned to dirt, which
turned to mud, which led us to a river. A driver, however,
was prepared for this. The drive here was mad, like
that road was fucked. We're in this tiny little car.
The driver took off his shoes and socks to conduct
the more technical section of the drive, which I thought

(22:21):
was quite amusing. And yeah, really steep, lots of holes,
lots of potholes, you know, just really rutted out a
kind of dirt road. And then we got here and
talked to some guys, negotiated a price, and told them
where we wanted to go, and they said, yeah, sure,
buy some water. You know, snow water on the way
about three hours and so we bought some water right there,

(22:44):
and yeah, here we are on the boat now, as
you can hear, I recorded this on a piragua. It's
a kind of dugout canoe with the hole made out
of a single tree and a toothtroke motor bolted on
the back. It's the only way to travel here other
than on your feet, and it's the only way the
embarra can get the produced cigaret to market. The skill

(23:07):
of the piragueros, the people who drive the piraguas, is incredible.
They navigate parts of the river so shallow that they
have to pull up the two stroke motor. And I
noticed all the motors have propellers that are covered in
chips and bashes from smacking into the rocks at the bottom.
In the bow of the boat, I sat on top
of my giant rucksack, marveling at the birds, insects and

(23:28):
foliage of the jungle, and occasionally I jumped up to
make fairly useless contributions with the boat's bamboo pole. Under
the close supervision of Marcellino, our driver, and are soon
to be host. Homoti just laughed at me as I
leaned my whole way into the pole, which notably slipped,
and I tried to avoid falling face first into the
chocolate brown water. On the way to Baajiquito, we passed

(23:50):
several small limber villages. Little children waved at us from
the banks or from the shallows of the river where
they washed and played. Adults slipped on. I doubtless why
there's one nurse six tree. White dude was going the
wrong way on the river for a migrant, but they
smiled and waved back anyway. After an overnight flight, a
five hour drive, and three hours in a dugout canoe,

(24:11):
we rounded a corner in the river. Ba Jigito came
into view. Over the last few years, it three oriented
itself from a tiny indigenous village to an unofficial reception
center for migrants. On my hopelessly outdated topo map, the
area has nothing but contours and green shading, no roads,
no trails, no markets of human existence at all, and

(24:33):
perhaps that's how the state sees this place. The Daddy
n is as real to most Panamanians a Sesame street
or Jurassic Park. But for the mb this has been
their home since long before Panama and Columbia and even
maps existed. A few dozen houses in the village, mostly
built on stilts to avoid the seasonal floods, now offer
up their rooms as hostels to the migrants. Some of

(24:56):
them have enclosed their bottom floor using plywood or cinder blow.
Others have strung hammocks from their support posts. For four
or five bugs, migrants can get their first good night's
sleep since they left neck or Clee in Columbia as
much as a week before. Along the main street, which
is really just to raise concrete footpath about a meter across,
you can buy a meal any of half a dozen

(25:18):
places for five bucks. You can get an hour of
Wi Fi for a dollar, or charge your phone for
at the same price. Cold drinks for a dollar as well.
Are one of the many front rooms that have turned
into small kiosks. And that's where the migrants I have
been sitting down with at the river went when they
arrived into town. I let them be for a while
I went off to interview more migrants. About a thousand

(25:39):
of them arrive in this village every day each year
since a pandemic has seen record numbers arrived, and the
little village on the side of a hill, surrounded by
palm trees and full of smiling children in their traditional
brightly colored pollumers chasing chickens and dogs, has welcomed every
single one of them. About a thousand of them arrive
in this town every day. Here they also take a

(26:01):
boat from neck o'kley across the Golf of the Dabienne.
They crossed on small motor boats to Capolgana or Kandel.
Those are both towns on the western side of the
Gulf of the Darienne. From there they begin their walk.
Even though they're now north of the gulf, they're still
in Colombia and on the Colombian side of the border.
They're guided by guides, to whom they pay several hundred

(26:21):
dollars and in return received protection and a wristband that
ensures they can walk without being robbed. Nobody I spoke
to had made it this far without paying a guide.
The area is largely under the control of the Golf Cartel,
several members of which were sanctioned by the USA. While
I was in the jungle. The marcus I spoke to
didn't really have much bad to say about this part

(26:41):
of their experience, but universally acknowledged that the next part
was where they really confronted their fears and nightmares about
the Daddy. Inne he is one Venezuelan migrant sharing his experience.

Speaker 10 (26:55):
That's nothing compared to what comes from the border to hear, Yes,
the road is better, and I say that the dane
is less too, and they have everything you need there.
You come prepared, you have, you come with water, and
there are also many ravines where you can drink water. Well,
there are springs that come from the mountain, but from
the border on it's pretty ugly.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
It's a stretch from the Colombian Panamanian border at a
place that they call Laspandabas which means to flags to
Bajo Chiquito, where migrants suffer the most. There they can't
drink from the river because a human waste and human
remains that constantly fill it like the water deadly. They
must walk on unmaintained trails. It often turns in deep mud.

(27:38):
They only have the supplies they carry, which often run out,
or they jettison to stave weight On the incredibly steep
mountain path they climb and descend those mountains across rivers,
often without eating or drinking for days at a time.
On the trail, they pass by the bodies of their fellow travelers.
It's a constant reminder of the risk they're taking. If

(27:58):
you ask people in Panamas, they'll tell you that Darian
is closed. Now, your president, nose Raoul Molino was elected
on a promise to shut down the gap and this
humanitarian crisis and deport more migrants with the US funding,
and that funding has certainly arrived, with more than six
million already spent since he took office in July. Since then,

(28:19):
Panama has deported more than eleven hundred people to Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia,
and India. Each of these has been funded by US taxpayers. Obviously,
the jungle isn't closed, and it can't really be closed,
but in an interview before he was elected, Molino said
that the border of the United States, instead of being
in Texas, has moved to Panama, and that is something

(28:43):
he can do with US support. I spoke to some
venezuel And ladies to help them carry their bag because
it's a steep hill, and they were saying that no
one has seen any barriers. I don't know anything about
any barriers or any fences in a Darian and that
like they hadn't heard it was closed. Evidently it's not
a standing in front of one hundred people who just
got off a boat from the day enn Hubris Aside,

(29:06):
the rhetoric of closing the Dati m signals are turn
not just in Panamanian politics, but in the way the
world sees and handles migration. The US has always sought
to externalize its borders, from US train border patrol officers
and Dominican Republic along the border is Haiti to DHS
agents deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. As migration has become

(29:27):
more politicized, the US has sought to move its enforcement
away from prying eyes and from compassion, and instead brought
more trauma to a place that is already so hard.
I've spent much of the last decade of my life
watching the state try to bring the mountains and desert
close to where I live under its control. I've stood
with Kumia people as the government dynamited their graveyards. I

(29:49):
found border wal contractors lost deep in the mountains. I've
driven the impossibly steep concrete roads that they built, worried
about my truck turning end on end. I've seen billions
of dollars thrown at these mountains, and I've seen people
with twenty dollars angle grinders or ladders made of old
palettes defeat the wall in moments. Trying to close borders
doesn't work at home, and it won't work in the

(30:11):
Daddy and Gap either. Just building the roads to get
the construction equipment into the gap is a gargantuan task
in any attempt to create a barrier across sixty kilometer
wide wilderness area, or simply push migrants onto other more
dangerous routes into places where you can't build and the
places where nobody can rescue you if you fall down
or break your leg. That doesn't mean there's nothing the

(30:34):
US can do. I saw first hand the impact of
Americans spending here as migrants had a reception center carded
Lajas Blancas, had their families torn apart, and men, women
and children cried as their parents and partners were taken
away for a flight back to Columbia, Cuba, or Venezuela
that my taxes helped to pay for. I console, the
children with toys and stickers and something to eat as

(30:57):
their dads were loaded into a flatbed truck. A government
didn't send money to feed these children, but it seemed
to have the funds to fund their parents' deportation. By
deporting people from Panama, the US effectively deprives them of
much of the due process they should, in theory, have
the right to in the United States, and the US
can easily deport them back to places like Cuba and Venezuela,

(31:18):
which it considers to be dictatorial regimes. The US does
not and cannot stop migration. People have always moved, and
people will always want a better future for their children.
What it can do is make it as painful and
dangerous as possible. But the rais of word barriers in
the daddy a gap which I've seen person on social media,

(31:39):
didn't exist for the hundreds of migrants I spoke to.
No one I asked had even seen them, but what
they had seen was far worse.

Speaker 11 (31:50):
There are many rivers that you're forced into all the time,
you're putting your life and everything else on the line there.
I was worried that the indigenous people would come out
and do something to us in the nights. I was
worried that any of the children, God forbid, would have
an accident. The same for me. It's horrible to think
about it now.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
This mother hood cruss with a five, six, and sixteen
year old child, the baby of six months. They'd all
made it in one piece, but the journey clearly had
its impact on the children.

Speaker 11 (32:22):
There are many people who are left out there without
food and do not have anything to give to their children.
We had food until last night. Nothing left now, and
we had to each one had to just eat a
little bit because we had nothing else to give them.
You can't find anything there. It's in the middle of nowhere.
People died right now along with those who came with

(32:42):
us yesterday. How many died yesterday? Three? I think three
died yesterday. One drowned in the river. Yeah, it's really tough.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
This.

Speaker 11 (32:52):
No, no, nobody should do this. Nobody. We do this
out of pure physical necessity to look for a better
future for our kids. We can't stay in our country,
We couldn't stay any longer there.

Speaker 3 (33:05):
Here are a couple of the kids I spoke to,
or in some cases, the kids who took my recorder
and conducted interviews with each other.

Speaker 11 (33:14):
The mountains, I was so tired and I couldn't climb anymore,
and when I fell on the river, I was really scared.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
Apparently the whole thing was like an adventure she'd seen
Pepper Pig having, which at once made me giggle and
also one reflection, it's one of the saddest things I've
ever had to record, I'm sure. Her mum told her
that to make it easier for her to pass through
a terrible place, but really sure to be at home
washing Peppa Pig and playing with her friends, not walking

(33:44):
past three dead bodies which are currently decomposing on the trail.
She seemed remarkably resilient. She said the long bus ride
she'd taken to get there one boring because she enjoyed
looking out the window, and the whole journey was well,
I'll let her say it em.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Her mum gave us a different account sah, I didn't
want to cry because I didn't want her to see
me crying. But sometimes I would explode because it's hard
for your child to ask you for water, to ask
you for food, and you don't have any to be
in a place where you walk you walk from five
in the morning, it's five in the afternoon. You're walking,

(34:23):
you don't know what to do, going through more than
one hundred rivers and asking God not to rain and
not wanting it to get worse. It rained, and the
girl got a fever. She got a fever. But well,
God is good that we pray a lot. I say
that we don't know God so much in the church
from the process and the process that we are in,

(34:44):
and we don't know we can be so strong until
we go through that storm and we see that He
protext us. He knows that He was always there watching
over us, taking care of us at all times.

Speaker 3 (34:55):
Parents being amazed at their children and drawing shrink from
them and their faith. It was a common message I
heard from migrants. He's a migrant from Zimbabwe telling me
how her daughter inspired her to keep going, but she
felt like she couldn't walk anymore.

Speaker 12 (35:09):
My daughter, she was strong, she was strong, but she
was crying also, but she has got wounds all over
the body. Even me, I was crying myself. I was like,
I want to just put myself in the water, then
I can just go both. The gene was tough, really
really tough. The mountain, the stones, the river. It's not

(35:29):
easy at all. It's not very I don't even recommended
someone to say you used that and gave no And
even myself I did know about it. I was regretting myself.

Speaker 9 (35:42):
I was crying.

Speaker 12 (35:42):
I was like, God, I don't know my family and
my family they don't know where I am right now.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
But like so many other migrants, when the government of
the world abandoned her, she found strength in the strangers
along the road who wouldn't abandon her.

Speaker 12 (35:58):
We didn't even eat any thing, were just asking people,
can I have a piece of biscuit? They just help us.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
That's nice. The other migrants helped you.

Speaker 12 (36:07):
Yeah, the others.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah. Do you think that they treat African people differently?

Speaker 12 (36:13):
Very nice? The especially these Spanish people, they are very nice.
I don't want to lie because if you need help,
you call them for your Look. The other ones they
might run away, but the other ones, they just come
for help. They even give us tablets on the road,
give us energy, drinks, give my daughter a sweets for energy.

(36:35):
They push us like let's go, guys, let's call let's go.
You make it, and we really make it.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
The journey over the mountains to Banama has become more
and more popular in recent years as other routes have
become more dangerous or closed themselves off to migrants entirely.
It's a route the Embira tell me that started with
people leaving India and then Haiti. It grew as conditions
in Venezuela became more unsustainable and people found themselves too
poor to stay home and too poor to travel north

(37:29):
by any other means, and so they chose a deadly
jungle over a future in a country where their votes
don't matter. Last year, as many as half a million
people cross the jungle. This year we might see more
migrants arriving about Jiguito spend the day in the village
before taking off in a piagua of their own up
to Lahas Blancas, the migrant reception center I mentioned earlier.

(37:51):
They registered with Panamanian Board Patrol known by the acronym
Cena Front, and they call their families to say they survived.
Then they try at their blistered feet, enjoy the cooking
of several of the families who have turned their homes
into sort of ersad's restaurants. They sleep on the floors
of the houses or underneath them charge their phones for
a dollar a time. Certainly migration has changed its town,

(38:15):
and I want to talk about that more in tomorrow's episode.
But despite more than a million people passing through this route,
you don't find anti migrant sentiment here. Right now, despite
the gap being a deadly de terrent, numbers are expected
to reach to Equil again this year, maybe seven hundred
thousand people will walk the gap. But despite these numbers,

(38:35):
which may seem high for a small country, I didn't
really find much anti migroant sentiment in Panama as a whole.
There's plenty of it in the US, though, and as
the United States winds down its war and terror, it
needs a new nebulous enemy to justify its military spending
and to keep the security in surveillance companies donate into
politicians in their millions. In part it is found that

(38:58):
by simply opening a floggate of weapons and funding, they
can spew forth genocide and death in Palestine and keep
some of its income streams. But it needs a more
long term solution. There are only so many Palestinian babies
that can balm, and we'll run out of Palestinians long
before we run out of bombs. The USA is new
enemy when it must seek out all over the world.

(39:20):
It's a migrant. It's a woman I met carrying her
child across the mountains. The little Venezuelan girl throwing bottle
caps into a cinder block with me to pass the
time as she asked me questions about America. It's a
twenty one year old man whose remains my friends found
in the border on a hot day this September. The
US will stop at nothing and fining and destroying the migrant,

(39:41):
and just as it did in the War on Terror,
it will find fast friends in states desperate to avail
themselves the seemingly unlimited flow of resources the US dedicates
to keeping its conflicts out of the sights and the
mines of its citizens. The USA's open hostility to migrants

(40:06):
isn't something that's unknown here. Everyone I met knew about it.
Several of them had watched with horror as Kamala Harris
and Donald Trump argued not about how to treat migrants
but about who could turn more of them away in
a recent presidential debate. Every migrant I met had questioned
about CBP, one about US asylum policy, and about how
they could get to the US before a second Trump administration.

(40:30):
Despite this, they all clung to their versions of the
American dream. They wanted to work and be paid a
fair wage, to send their kids to school and maybe
to college, to feel safe in their homes, and to
be able to speak and dress as they wished without
fearing consequences. All of those things are in periling this
country too, and they know that, but they still feel
their dreams are worth the journey. For Noami, the little

(40:54):
girl who took the daddy and in her stride, the American
dream was pretty simple. She wanted two things. To see
Minnie Mouse and to see her around. Why am I
gros estudia anymore? As to deer a deer? Every day

(41:44):
for the past two years, the population of Bajo Chikito
has more than tripled. At six in the morning, piraka
has come from other Embra villages along the river, dozens
of them, all filled with orange life jackets. Migrants form
a line so long that it stretches from the beach
north of town all the way through the village and
at the other side, and in groups of fifteen, they

(42:06):
hand over their twenty five dollars each and get onto
the piraguas. Each one puts on their bright orange life jacket,
sits with their legs around the person in front, and
they take off at the first official migrant reception center
in last blankets. As the last boat leaves, those who
can't afford the trip begin a walk which could take
eight hours. I couldn't walk with them, but I handed

(42:28):
to group my water filter in one of those overbright
energy bars that are basically trail mix in a rectangular format,
and wish them the best of luck as they force
their tired legs and sore feet to walk again. The
population of Barjaquito dropped back to five hundred or so
indigenous people who live here, and the usual background noise
of chattering dozens of languages gave way to crowing chickens

(42:48):
and barking dogs. By the next morning, as migrants came
walking in from the south, it would grow again to
fifteen hundred. For the last ten years or so, fewer
than two thousand people crossed in a year, but numbers
have been steadily increasing, and now the resident of Bajo
Jiquito see the numbers that they saw in a year.
In a single weekend while you listen to this series,

(43:10):
thousands of people will take their lives into their hands
as they leap into mudcolored rivers, ascend towering mountains in
the pouring rain, and desperately fight the urge to drink
from a river polluted with human waste to decaying corpses.
All of those who survive will walk out of that jungle,
up the river bank, along a muddy path, and into
Bajo Chiquito, where they'll buy themselves a cold drink and

(43:33):
enjoy the hospitality of the locals for a night before
leaving to head north. At first, the locals told me
didn't charge people at all. They were shocked to see
the migrants and wanted to help them, But as numbers grew,
they had to start asking for money as they couldn't
afford to feed and house all the migrants arriving. Over time,
they said, the costs rose, and now a bed costs

(43:53):
about five dollars for a night, and a meal's about
the same. As they pointed out, that's less than half
what I paid in Meta Tea, the nearest town a metait.
He doesn't have to haul its supplies up the river
in a canoe using seven dollars per gallon fuel in Bahjigito.
I sat down with oder man whose front room I
just had luncheon. I wanted to get a sent to
the change he'd seen over his lifetime in his community

(44:14):
and how he felt about it.

Speaker 13 (44:25):
We saw how they arrived injured, sick, with vomiting diarrhea.
Then there was no healthcare here. What did we do?
We had to speak for the government. It wasn't easy.
It was not easy. We told him that we needed
a doctor, and finally, now, thank god, we have doctors here.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
The community, which has long been socially and economically marginalized
and acutely underprovided with government services, had built a house
themselves for the doctors and another house for migration officials.
It was the only way to help migrants access services,
which in turn allowed them to move on with their
journeys quicker, he said. However, like almost every other ember

(45:06):
our person I spoke with, he felt that the government
should be doing more here. Even after all these years
serving as the first Panamanian village, many thousands of people
enter every year, they still don't have electricity or a
road that's successible year round, both of which would make
their lives and the transit of the migrants much safer.
But that doesn't mean the state's totally absent here. It

(45:28):
used to be possible for migrants to take a paragua
from come Galina little further south up river and avoid
some of the most dangerous river crossings. Bonio told me
that authorities in the Cormarca, which is like a state
in the USA, have prohibited this. I wanted to see
more of what was going on further south and what
made it so dangerous, but I wasn't permitted to join
a center front patrol going out that way despite my request.

(45:50):
I asked Bonnio what made things more dangerous than that
part of the river. First, he explained that the wide
and low lying beaches often seemed like good points for
migrants to sleep, but that any rain in the mountains above,
which result in a rapid increase for the water level,
turning those beaches into rapids in minutes, he told me,
looking down at the table. But not so long ago,
a storm had washed away sleeping migrants, drowning them in

(46:12):
their sleep and washing their remains towards his village. But
terrible as it is, that isn't the only risk.

Speaker 9 (46:20):
What they say.

Speaker 13 (46:25):
You know very well that there's not a single country
that does not have criminals. In every country, there are criminals. Yeah,
so what happens at that point in the river, as
I was saying, at that point, and clearly it is
not everyone, but there are some certain young men who
engage in robbery and even rape. So that's why in
this community, in this village, in coordination with the community

(46:47):
and the leaders, we will The leader spoke to the
national government to ask for a chance to transport people
from came Gaya so that nothing would happen to them.
The government talked and talked, and for a while it
was possible and it was safe, and nobody died and
nobody robbed. It was all going well. But what happened.

(47:09):
We have a leader at Casika. I don't know if
you've heard about it, but the regional leader he put
a barrier, he stopped it.

Speaker 12 (47:19):
No.

Speaker 13 (47:23):
Look, to be honest, these people with their degrees in
this classic person, they're not humanitarians.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
Despite the struggles and the relative absence of the government
of rule, he felt that the migration had been a
positive for his community. He'd learned a lot from the migrants.
He said, and enjoyed learning about their cuisines. In particular,
there's a common narrative in media that mentions Boito that
this village has been somehow stripped of its culture or
ruined by migration, but the locals don't seem to agree
with this. I also speke to is leader. She's the

(48:01):
first woman in the whole con marker to hold such
a position.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
I'm chief of the community police and leader of the community.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
She explained to me that Balji Guito was just one
of several communities along the river, each with its own leader.
Those leaders meet in the council, an answer to the
Comarca Mara anti di yact in over here. She also
explained that as the first woman in the position, she'd
made sure to advance the cause of women in her community.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
So I've had my administration, which has been seven months
asnoko or leader, I have put some women to work.
They were waiting for the migrants.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
There After that, I asked her to explain to listeners
what exactly a migrant encounters when they first set foot
in her village and the various steps that they might
go through before leaving the next morning.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
Is there is a check in at first verification of
whether they have a crime in their country. From there
they got immigration, their documents are checked and then they
are free to choose where they're going to wait and
rest for the next part of their journey. On behalf
of UNISEF we have free toilets from the community. We

(49:15):
also have a free place where they can camp or rest.
That's theirs now. If they want better things better rest,
they can find accommodation available in almost every house here.
The next day we prepare everything at together with the
Center front security.

Speaker 14 (49:31):
We go to the.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Beach there and at the beach we also coordinate with
a coordinator from each village. I also want to make
it clear as well that the boat driver must have
their idea and be of legal age.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
From there, the migrants pay twenty five dollars ahead and
take the five hour boat trip north to Lahasblancas, which
is the UN and government run camp and the first
official migrant welcome center outside the dai N. Having boat
drivers who are of age is important. Can't swim trust
their lives to these boat drivers in high water. Once
they're at last Blankers, they're close to the Pan American

(50:06):
Highway and the beginning of the rest of their journey north.
They don't have to walk any further unless they run
out of money for buses. I asked what happened when
someone couldn't afford the right to last blankers?

Speaker 15 (50:18):
Yes, then.

Speaker 1 (50:21):
What does the community do? The community takes responsibility presending them,
not the state, the state migration center front. They don't
pay for the fuel or the transport of these people.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
Specifically, she told me the community sends three free boats
to day. Most of these are filled of women and children,
and in my time there, it seemed that these people
paid whatever they could those leftover, usually men would have
to make the walk on their blistered feet and tired
legs and risk further sickness, robbery, and heat exhaustion. I
also wanted to ask a leader about the problems with

(50:55):
theft and sexual assault that the migrants encountered on their
walk into Bajo Jiquito, and she was pretty forthright this
was an issue for the state, not for her community
to fix.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Then where is Senafron. Aren't Centafrat supposed to be on
all the banks of the river, Yes, so where are
those staffs?

Speaker 3 (51:12):
Despite being able to prevent the Embira from using their
boats on their river to transport migrants. The government at
any level above the village isn't really present in Bahjigitofront,
Panama's combined Border Patrol and military received migrants and register
them there, but all the services provided to the migrants
come either from the Emperor or from non governmental organizations.

(51:34):
This pattern of the state failing to provide basic services,
when Neil told me, is one that goes back a
long time before the migrants began arriving here.

Speaker 13 (51:45):
So now, before the migrants began arriving here, we had
a town, a town that the government is supposed to
give what it has to give us as Panamanians, but
it doesn't. It was a town without anything. All we
did was sell our products and sell stuff here for us.
We grow rice, corn plantains, everything. Well, it was a lot,

(52:10):
but products that we grow are not enough to get by.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
Even today in late twenty twenty four, the village doesn't
have mains electricity, nor does it have a connection to
telephone networks or a road that it can take year
round to connect it to the rest of the country.
And a few clean water taps in the town come
from UNICEF, not Panama City. Doctors here come from European NGOs,
and even the policing of the community is largely done

(52:34):
by the community, by a group called the Zara. And
never to better understand there but our communities, both with
and without migrants. I wanted to visit another Embero village
and after the break, we'll hear about that ring, all right.

(53:07):
So I'm just in my hammock now kind of the
end of the day. We were staying in another in
village today just probably, I mean, but it's a kilometer
two kilometers away, you know, probably a decent walk, but
it was pretty fast in the Agua. Just it's a

(53:27):
little more peaceful here. And a boat driver passed us
to stay his house. We said we would. You can
probably hear like, I don't know how much of this
is getting picked up. It's a nice little village, you know.

(53:51):
The fucking way to the dogs have stopped. I guess
when I wasn't in, I took a boat every evening
to Maraganti. Maraganti is only a couple of kilometers away
on a different branch of the river, but the walk
might take hours through a thick jungle. A Perraguero had
invited us to stay with his family and to see

(54:12):
another Inmbara village. I'm always down to sleep outside, so
I gladly accepted his invitation and slung my hammock across
his front porch after a long discussion on whether the
dynamic cordage I was using would actually hold my weight,
and on my part of probably ill advised free solo
onto the roof of his house to find a good
anchor point for my hammock. In my time in Maraganti,

(54:33):
I found myself growing fonder and fond of his little community.
Everyone's doors were open and the village's children enjoyed unsupervised
playtime everywhere. There was never not a pick up game
going on at the concrete football and basketball court, and
despite the fact that they were on average several feet
short than me and playing on concrete without shoes, local
kids humiliated me at a wide variety of sports with

(54:55):
no electricity of them generators, one Wi Fi connection in
the whole village as far as I can tell, and
a few hours to myself. In the evening, I happily
settled into a routine of washing in a river along
with everyone else in the hour before sunset, walking around
town chatting with the inhabitants, who seemed surprised but happy
to see a gangly British man ambling around their neighborhood
and petting their dogs. Once it got dark, I'd spend

(55:16):
my evening sitting in my hammer, because the grandchildren of
our host asked me how to say various things in English.
I played with the little toys I always bring along
in case I run into children on my work trips.
Being in Maragantine made me think a lot about my
own life and the US in general. I certainly have
a lot more possessions here, but my neighbors don't let
their kids run around in the streets, and cars would
hit them if they did. People in my community, if

(55:38):
the next door Wrapp is anything to go by, spend
seeing mely countless hours bitching about the unhoused in other
people's children. But here everyone had a roof over their heads,
and other people's children ran in and out my host's
kitchen without anyone batting an eyelid. Aside from laughing at
my paleness when I was washing in the river, nobody
here seemed that concerned that I was different. They let
me hold their babies while they cooked. They didn't overcharge

(55:59):
me for the It was a water of snacks that
I brought from their front room convenience stores. What seemed
that bothered about sharing their meals and their homes with me.
At night, we sat on tiny plastic chairs and talked
about our shared interest in woodwork and what they wanted
for their children. We talked about their boats and the river,
and about how terrible things must be for migrants to
risk their lives and abandon their homes making the journey

(56:20):
across these mountains that the Embrara and their Kuna neighbors
call home. Ever since I left their village, I've been
thinking a lot about the part of The Dawn of
Everything in which Grab and Wengrove detail how many indigenous
people were adopted into colonial society but chose to return
to their communities. How by settlers in indigenous communities often
chose to remain among the indigenous communities. I don't wish

(56:43):
to romanticize the very real struggles the Mbra have with
their economic marginalization and lack of access to basic services
compared to other Panamanians, But I just want to reflect
on the fact that there was something really special about
the little river community, where dogs and chickens and ducks
woke me up in the morning, little children welcome me
back evening. They told me what they did at school,
or just a little ball back and forth, and seemed

(57:05):
entirely comfortable chatting to an adult from across the world.
The people a Baho Jiqito have shown that same hospitality
to migrants and indeed to me, and so I wanted
to ask the village leader how migration had changed her community.
Like everyone else I spoke to, she insisted that they
had held on to important parts of their culture, which
he illustrated by giving me a history lesson.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
Well, the town of Bajo Chikito was founded in nineteen
sixty five. At first there were three families, the Vaparizo,
the Rosales, the Chagos. They came here for education reasons.
Before everyone lived on their own, the education came and

(57:45):
that is why we grew this town.

Speaker 3 (57:49):
It was the education, she said, that had changed town,
not the migrants. They have night school now for adults
and a school for all the children with seven teachers.
The children speak Emberbra and Spanish and have a chance
to get more education in Metaiti or even in Panama City.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
Yes, it's dudo education, not because the migrants travel through here.
Let this be clear, that is not because the migrants
came here.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
Cly though, the perception of changing their community is a concern.
She told me that a local woman marries what she
called a Latino man, they can't live together in the village,
and she wanted to make sure I knew that the
children learn in Emberra as well as Spanish. They also
still knew dances and ceremonies, Bloniolla told me. But some
of the changes, she said, were positive, including one in

(58:34):
gender relationship.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
That's an ongoing struggle. I'll say that to show that
we women have the same capacity for thought creativity as men.
We are fighting every day, and as you will see,
it's not easy.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
One thing that surprised me was that the Emberra would
always remind me that they themselves have been migrants. They
migrated to Panama City sometimes, they said, and they have
a little choice if they want postsec and education or
higher level medical attention. Some of their kids even make
the journey to the USA to study. What kind of
hypocrites would they be, they said, if they look down
on people making the same journey.

Speaker 13 (59:13):
I'm going to tell you that before the immigrants arrived here,
within this community, we lived in the same way. I mean,
we came from the countryside, we worked in agriculture, and
we still continue working in the agriculture stuff, fishing, hunting
and so on.

Speaker 3 (59:28):
We liked it a lot.

Speaker 13 (59:30):
Now after the immigrants started to come, we are still
the same and it doesn't affect us having them within
our community because they are they're people, they're humans. The
journey that the immigrants make is out of need. It
is in need. So really we too, for example, if
we were to deal with problems like them, since we

(59:54):
are just like them, we also have the right to
emigrate as well.

Speaker 3 (59:59):
This is not the first influx of migration into Embra
and Guna land. In fifteen oh one, a wave of
undocumented immigration from Spain in the form of settler colonia
like Francisco Balboa, arrived in the Guna and Embera territories.
Ever since his Europeans first saw for themselves what the
Embra already knew that this area was part of a
narrow strip of land between two Great Oceans. People from

(01:00:21):
around the world have been coming to what is now
Panama as part of their journeys from north to south
or east to west. The thin strip of land that
joins the two American continents has been at the crossroads
of the world for half a millennium. Archaeological digs in
a region show that there were once roads, and that
gold and jade came here from Afar. This ritinalization is
one that Vasco Nunies de Balboa first encountered, and it

(01:00:44):
was they who first told him that their land lay
between two oceans. It was somewhere just to the south
of where I was staying that exactly five hundred eleven
years ago to the day, Barboa became the first European
to set eyes upon the Pacific. Since Barbara, many other
colonizers have come to Dabienne to pit their notions of
superiority against the might of the rainforest. The Kingdom of

(01:01:06):
Scotland sent a group of settlers here in the seventeenth century,
mounted the side. This isn't a place with any similarity
to Scotland, and it's easy enough to see why the
plan failed, killed three out of four colonists and essentially
bankrupted an entire nation in two years, forcing it into
a colonial relationship with its own with its neighbor to
the south. After the Scots left, having failed to create

(01:01:28):
what they'd hoped would be a quote Scottish Amsterdam of
the Indies and a Spanish found a flatter and easier
connection between the Pacific and Caribbean. The Dadian region returned
to its indigenous people, whose home it remains, but over
the course of several hundred years, many empires have come
to the dai En to die. The French tried to
build a sea level callout not so far from here,

(01:01:48):
the canal without locks, but they ultimately failed. The US
tried in the eighteen fifties and eighteen seventies to forge
a route to build a canal to get east coast
Banks Acces to west coast Gold, before eventually finding an
easy route further north. A century later, the US and
Panama openly discussed dropping nuclear bombs on the jungle to
make it passable and to allow the construction of a road.

(01:02:09):
The US offered to shoulder two thirds at a cost
of building such a road, and hoped to have the
Pan American Highway completed in time for its nineteen seventy
six by centennial, but the GAP's hostility in the growing
environmental movement, as well as a desire to protect US
livestock from a foot of mouth disease it's endemic in
South America. One the day, the gap remained a gap
latly without the influence of the state. In the nineteen seventies,

(01:02:32):
a British Army expedition traversed to Dadien in two range rovers.
Assisted by horses, parachute drop resupplies and a team of engineers,
they crossed the jungle in ninety six days. They had
to make their own bugnets for their horses out of
the parachutes, so were used to drop corn cobs to
the animals and rice for the humans. Expedition leader and
seasons explorer, as well as possibly the most British Man
in history, Lieutenant Colonel John Blashford Snell wrote, without doubt

(01:02:56):
it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
Calling the daddi Enne a god forsaken place, the daddy
Inn is one of the wettest places on the planet.
A particularly cruel twist for that would be colonizers from Scotland.
In the months before I came here, I spent hours
trying to work out how to water proof my podcast equipment,
and most of what you're hearing is recorded on a
voice recorder that I sealed up with gasket maker, shoved

(01:03:18):
inside a condom, inside a dry bag, inside a pelican case.
This rain causes flash flooding, the kind which sweeps whole
villages away. The rivers in the Gap onont Bridge largely
because they simply wash away bridges after a storm. On
our journey to Bahojigito, I saw the remains of bridges
that had dared to try. That's why my hosts built
their houses on stilts, and it's on those stilts that

(01:03:39):
I slung my hammock in Maraganti. Ever since the failed
Daddian scheme, the Gap has been constructed in the Western
imagination as the deepest and darkest jungle. The Gap today
is home to every type of malaria and numerous others diseases.
There are deadly vipers, deadly spiders, big cats, and as
if the natural threats were not enough, the US dropped
bombs here in the Cold Wars test this destructive might

(01:04:01):
against one of the few areas of the planet that
hadn't been made amenable to capitalism. Many of them remain
unexploded in the mountains. Certainly the physical geography of the
Dallienne posted a challenge, but I would argue that the
imaginative geography of the gap which is a greater impediment
to travelers. In Spanish they call it the top on
the Stopper. Local legend has it that the Spanish conquistado,

(01:04:22):
one of the first to take his last breaths in
the waters of Dallienne. Rivers carved to phrase into the rock,
which is endured long after he expired. When you go
to the dalli Ennes and trust yourself to Mary, for
in her hands of the entrance and he gods the exit,
it doesn't sound that different to the things I heard
from migrants and in the modern day they'll tell you
about the horrific tiktoks they saw before they enter the gap,

(01:04:43):
and the decaying remains fellow travelers they saw as they
passed through. Media reports in a Gap consistently referred to
it as a nomad's land, but of course it's very
much someone's land, the land of the indigenous people who
have been here long before countries, borders or reporters. While
it may have remained hostile to appolism in the state,
and it can be deadly for unexperienced travelers. It's supported

(01:05:04):
life for thousands of years. And a way to Bahjigito,
I was reminded of just how comfortable my hosts were
in a place where I felt so out of place.
So as we were coming, we got caught in a
huge range storm, just absolutely bucketing it down suddenly and
pulled in to a little sort of or just a
flat area of might really. I helped out to the

(01:05:24):
boat and next thing I know, our boat guide ran
into jungle, chopped some huge palm leaves down and brought
them back to me to cover me in my bag. Well,

(01:05:52):
the umber might have preserved their comfort and culture. It's
undeniable that migrat should have made a huge economic impact.
And fifty nine migrants left on one of the days
I was able to get numbers from Senaflunt. Each of
them paid twenty five dollars for pedagua, about ten dollars
for food and lodging, and maybe Wi Fi and pread
a few bucks more for clean clothes or a pair
of off bran crops to let their feet heel from

(01:06:14):
three days have been constantly wet. At a conservative estimate,
that's a little more than thirty three thousand per day
raughly the GDP per capita of Panama. That's a lot
of money down here, especially for community which has been
alienated and exploited for solo. Using this money, people have
been closed the bottom floors of their homes to provide
more space to house migrants. All around the village, they're

(01:06:36):
building better homes. Some of them have satellite internet now
or Starlink or bigger and more reliable generators. This money
has been spread around the Amberak communities in the area,
and every morning each of them sent pedaguas to transport
the migrants, as almost sixty a needed every day. Rolling
out of Madaganti at five in the morning as almost
the entire adult male population of the village joined us

(01:06:57):
in a huge flatilla of two stroke smoke dugout canoes
and the morning mists still sat in the river was
an incredible experience and this is doubtless an industry for
the whole area.

Speaker 16 (01:07:07):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
If Molino Majorcas ever successfully stops migration here, it will
be a massive economic detriment to the people, already marginalized
for centuries. But despite the economic benefits, the people of
Maragante doesn't seem to want to become like Bahajiguito. On
our last day there, as we set off back towards
the dirt road to the borders, here we saw that
they were building little cabins outside of town. These they

(01:07:29):
said were for the migrants. They wanted the migrants to
be safe and their community to stay the same. They
might not be able to sell meals to the migrants
this way, or charge and for Wi Fi or phone charging,
but they will be able to live a little more peacefully.
Yamba have gone out of their way to ensure migrant safety.
They're the ones who mandate life jackets, and the ones
who build a house for doctors, and they're the ones

(01:07:50):
who send free boats for women and children. Of course
they have an economic incentive to do this, but there
nearly a week living with them, I didn't hear them
bad mouth for migrants, and nor did I hear the
migrants complain about the way they were treated in the
village of barj Juquito. But before they get to the
village of Barjuquito, migrants aren't safe, and if you ask them,
they'll tell you it's indigenous people who are robbing and
threatening them. Deeper into the jungle. Undoubtedly, robbery, sexual assault

(01:08:14):
a murderer not uncommon. In the Daddy and Gap. You
can hear anecdotes of these on a daily basis in
ba Juquito, and some of the stories I heard and
things I saw are among the most horrific experiences I've
had in years of reporting on pretty terrible things. I
haven't included a great many of them here because I
think it's hard for people to meaningfully consent in those
kinds of circumstances. But yesterday you heard about the human

(01:08:34):
remains that almost everyone featured in this series had to
walk past. This is a problem that's getting worse, not better.
In just one week in February, medisanten Fontierre, the NGO
that Americans called Doctors without Borders, treated one hundred and
thirteen people, including nine children, after they were sexually assaulted
by criminal groups in a Darienne. This number is close

(01:08:55):
to one hundred and twenty people treated during the whole
of January. These figures are double the monthly average tree
in twenty twenty three, when six hundred and seventy six
people were treated for the whole year. As you heard before,
this is a problem that people in the community sometimes acknowledge,
and as a village leader mentioned, it's one that could
be solved as the state would live up to its
obligation to protect migrants within its borders. The leader also

(01:09:16):
shares me that the community has its own punishment mechanisms.

Speaker 1 (01:09:22):
The place of punishment is the stocks. Three days ago,
someone behaved very badly and we had to put them
in the stocks. The man who mistreats women, we also
put in the stocks. The woman who gossips, we also
put her in the stocks.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
What she's talking about here is stocks in the old
fashioned sense, not in the Wall Street bet sense. We
actually saw someone chatting them one day with their ankles
locked in place. We didn't ask what they did, how
long they were there, as it seems difficult again to
consent to an interview when you're literally pinned in place.
But this kind of punishment comes from the community, not
the stick. Aside from these punishments, the community hasn't done

(01:09:57):
much to stop things happening in the jungle, and I'm
not sure if it's really able to. They're Panamanian, they say,
in the States responsible for the safety of migrants when
it's borders, and while it does send center front patrols
into jungle. The state doesn't appear to be doing much
protect migrants of sexual assault, robbery or murder. Early this year,
the state did take decisive action to eject Made Saint
san Fentier after not reviewing their permission to work in

(01:10:19):
the Darienne. This is quite a challenging permission to obtain,
even as a solo journalist. It took months for me
to get mine, forcing me to rebook my flight several times.
I had various explanations for why MSF were not allowed
to keep working. I couldn't get an official response, but
it's probably worth noting that they published a report headlined
lack of action, she's sharp rise in sexual violence on

(01:10:40):
people transiting the dari Enne Gap on the twenty ninth
of February, and they refused permission to remain in the
region in the first week of March. MSF was allowed
to return in October of this year and wouldn't comment
further than the following statement, which they emailed me in
mid October. In October of twenty twenty four, MSF resumed
medical and humanitarian activities at Lahas Blanca's migration Reception center,

(01:11:00):
located at the edge of the dai in jungle. After
Panamanian authorities approved a three month medical intervention. MSF welcomes
its decision and advocates to collaborate closely with Panama's Ministry
of Health to provide comprehensive medical care to migrants crossing
this route, as well as to the local population of
the area. Right now, UNICEF med Saint Dumont Corporate and

(01:11:20):
Espanola and the Red Cross are helping migrants in Bauciquito.
UNICEF in salt showers and toilets, Global Brigades in unifests
provided taps and drinking water, and the medical endeos provide healthcare,
which is fighting saving lives and providing survivors of sexual
assault with medical care in a seventy two hour window
where it can be most beneficial. It's worth noting that
most migrants too are sexually assaulted won't stay depressed charges.

(01:11:44):
I know of one case of sexual assault of a
child while I was there, but the family wanted to
continue their journey and so the charges won't be pressed.
This makes it very hard to ascertain how many cases
a sexual assault there are in a dai and every year,
aside from through medical reports from NGOs, and those only
include the people who make it to ba alahas blancats.
The numbers are clearly high, and it's a fear that

(01:12:05):
many migrants a articulated to me. In the jungle, they're
their most vulnerable, they said. Most people robbed, they tell me,
held by armed attackers carrying guns and machetes. But once
a migrants set foot in Baju Jiqito, they're momentarily safe
from rory and assault. For the first time in days.
They can sleep without worry being attacked or washed away,

(01:12:26):
and the rest of their journeys north they'll face set
threat again, but that's not what's on their mind. When
they enter town. All they want is a cold drink
and a warm meal and a chance to rest their
aching feet. It's the chance that they have thanks to
the Ambra people who receive them there. And I want
to end with Buono and his reflection on the suffering
people endure on their way to eat rice and plantain
in his little front room cafe.

Speaker 13 (01:12:53):
Truly, the migrants on this route are not here because
they want to be. They are here because the economy
and their countries is terrible or something. Everything is going
badly on their countries. How can we mistreat them knowing
that we won't not us never. This is a belief

(01:13:15):
that we have. We are all children of God. God
made the world and humanity, and we are not that different.
We are all brothers.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
Yeah, the journey is dangerous, but what can we do.
We can't stay in a country where the economy is
getting worse and worse. With a salary of three dollars
a month, you can't survive. Like my friend said, if
you have a job in other countries, maybe you can
invest some money. But where are you going to get
the money to invest? If before you had a salary

(01:14:17):
that fed you paid for your car, your house and
your children to enjoy it all with. And now you
can't even afford to put gas in the car. So
it's true. Yeah, the darien is dangerous, but nothing is impossible.
We walk hand in hand with God and with the
faith that we will get there. But that doesn't mean
it isn't difficult. But I'll say it again, it's not impossible.

(01:14:39):
You suffer, you cry, you go hungry cold, but thank
God we made it through.

Speaker 3 (01:14:52):
Put around the Toquesa River, the jungle rumbles quat as
you pass by on your boat, insects, frogs, and birds
all combined to make a sort of deep throbbing that
emanates from the darkness between the trees. It seems at
wants to be calling you in and warning you to
stay away. I've been in the jungle before, in the
Rwanda Congo borderlands and in Venezuela, but I've never really

(01:15:14):
felt the sense of foreboding I did as we rode
down the river, protected only by our hollow log, looking
into the triple canopy forest, and knowing that if I walked
long enough in the shadows, I'd be confronted with the
remains of people I might have interviewed if it hadn't
been for a rolled ankle, a slippery rock, or a
desperate sip of water. To understand what drives people to
enter the jungle with their children and their dreams, I

(01:15:36):
think we also have to understand what drives them to
leave wherever they're living. And that's what I want to
talk about today. The story of migrants crossing the Daddy
and Gap is an American one. It's impossible to disentangle
the people making this dangerous journey from the history of
support for dictatorship sanctions, an imperial plunder that ties to
the United States to its American brothers and sisters in
the South. Sometimes I play a game with myself at

(01:15:59):
the border where I try and meet people from all
the countries named in Washington bullets in a single day.
Since Biden bungled the Afghanistan withdrawal, it's become a lot easier,
but Tibet can be hard. For two hundred years since
President Monroe gave his State of the Union address in
December eighteen twenty three, the US has seen the Western
hemisphere is its sphere of influence. While is opposed old

(01:16:20):
fashioned colonialism, it has used less avert methods of control,
as well as avert military force across the hemisphere. For
much of the last century, it supported and installed dictators
who would prevent what it saw as a threat of
state socialism in its sphere of influence, and allowed them
to create economic and political climates that were unsurvivable for
the majority and extremely profitable for US based corporations. The

(01:16:42):
direct result of this policy has been economic insecurity, political instability,
and state violence across South and Central America, resulting in
people making the very natural humor decision to flee to
somewhere safer. As in so many other empires, they've made
the choice to lead a destabilized colonial periphery. Safety and
stability in the metropol for more than a century. Money

(01:17:04):
and good to be able to travel seamlessly up and
down the continent, but people have not. The bananaread for
breakfast this morning made the journey in a few days,
but people take months, if not years, pay thousands of dollars,
climb mountains, forded rivers, and risk their lives on trains
and buses that cost a lot more than the flights
I took to Panama, but offer considerably less comfort and safety.

(01:17:25):
As climate change has have greater impacts, more and more
people are forced to leave their homes of their livelihoods
become less sustainable. The Guna, the indigenous people of the
Panamanian coast in an area called Guna Yala, are having
to withdraw from some of their islands because of sea
level rise. Right now, agriculture across the world is increasingly
threatened by extreme weather and rising temperatures, and Orotionans are

(01:17:48):
less able to sustain life than they once were due
to pollution and overfishing, forced to leave their homes as
people have been for millennia by weather patterns changing people
head to places that have a want caused much of
the ear issue, and tried to insulate themselves from its consequences.
Their American dreams are modest to overcome the crippling low paid.
They received a home to bring their children up in

(01:18:10):
a place where they have a good chance of surviving
their twenties, to work and get paid enough to get by.
They want to be able to protest and not get
a shot, and to look forward to the future, not
fear it. These aren't guaranteed in the USA, and as
many of you listening will know, it can be hard
for us to make ends meet here as well. But
despite what you see on social and legacy media, things

(01:18:30):
are unlikely to become as bad here as they are
in Venezuela, Cameroon or Iran anytime soon. I've lived in Venezuela,
specifically in the formerly Javista neighborhood of La Pastora in Caracas,
and I've seen how hard it is for my friends
who still live there, even for people with no other disadvantages,
making rent and feeding your family can be a challenge.
That's part of why Venezuelan people make up the majority

(01:18:52):
of the folks. I met men Daddy in so much
so that I'd slip back into using Venezuelan slang in Spanish,
and after a few days of seeing the same people
engaging in the kind of friendly mockery and banter that
I remember well from Caracas, mostly the super form of
asking them why they crossed Daddy and gap in Man
United shirts or worse yet, in a Chelsea shit. It's
important to steal moments of humor in these difficult times,

(01:19:14):
to laugh a little among all the suffering, and that's
something people in Venezuela have done very well for a
very long time. But despite their humor, I could tell
the journey had a serious impact on the people I
spoke to.

Speaker 13 (01:19:28):
You have to go through a lot, a lot of jungle,
a lot of hills. There are people, there are dead
people on the road, so it's something you cannot really explain.
It's complicated because everything can be explained in a fashion,
but it's not the same as living it. It's insanity
three four days with that food and nothing. One thing
is to live it. Explaining it, talking about it. That's different.

(01:19:52):
It's hard to put into words.

Speaker 3 (01:19:54):
This intere is. When I conducted with one group of
Venezuelan migrants with my voice recorder in the chest pocket
of my shirt and whatever bags let me carry in
my hands, we walked it on the last part of
the trail, discussing what they'd seen. For a while, we
joked a little. One guy had crossed it at man
United Ship. I told him about the team and the
universe was dislike non Menu fans have for Menu fans.

(01:20:15):
Then after a while they opened up more about their
experiences they had. They said, seen deputies and they couldn't
stop thinking about what happened if they'd fallen, and they
wanted to know how when if the dead people's family
would ever find out.

Speaker 17 (01:20:32):
The family waits for that person to come out to
hear that they made it, because if not, who's going
to let you know? There's no signal and nobody's going
to grab the body, and you're not going to carry
them out. The person stays there and eventually years and
years go by and the family won't know where they
are or how they died. Those are the sort of
things that one doesn't expect to see and it makes

(01:20:53):
you just want to hurry past. Not that you wouldn't
want to get the documentation from the body and deliver
it and tell them how this person that passed away?
But how dare you just go grabbing a dead body.

Speaker 3 (01:21:04):
Venetuinan elections were held on the twenty eighth of July
this year. Venezuelan presidents have a six year term and
the incumbllent de Corlas Maduro has been in office since
twenty thirty. And let the Venezuelan people I met introduce
themselves and explain the result of the election. Now there's
a bit of background noise here, but that's because we
were walking on the trails. And it's hard to Avoidezuela.

Speaker 2 (01:21:27):
I am coming from Venezuela, migrating through the jungle for
a better future for me and my children. I'll tell
you it's hard, but it's not impossible. No, that was
electoral fraud. And I tell you what, one day, you
just have to leave.

Speaker 3 (01:21:42):
Moduro was opposed by Ajuardo Gonzalez, an obviously candidate who
represented a wide coalition increating groups on the left and right.
While Maduro might have support among Western socialists and even communists.
The actual Venezuelan Communist Party's youth organization formed part of
the Popular Democratic Front that opposed him. Despite poul watchers
telling a massive victory for the opposition, Moduro controls the

(01:22:04):
National Lecture Council, I proclaimed himself the victor. People protested,
and Moduro responded with bullets. Gonzales fled to the Dutch
and then the Spanish embassy, and later claimed asylum in Spain,
where his family lived. But for regular working class Venezuelan's
there's no option to hop on a flight to safety. Instead,
they have to begin the long walk north. As many

(01:22:27):
Venezuelans I spoke to told me, in addition to the
electoral fraud, Venezuela is undergoing an economic collapse. At least
an the Chavis. They said most people could eat. When
I lived in La Pastora, I was able to access
medical care from Cuban doctors. Now they say things have
become unsurvival.

Speaker 15 (01:22:44):
Garlindo, So you're Venezuela monte pero. When Jake Venezuela.

Speaker 13 (01:23:02):
Well, I would say that Venezuela, you know, yeah, you
can live, but not on a minimum wage. I would
say that, for example, working independently in an independent business.
Maybe you can live good, but working and surviving for
a minimum wage, no, the truth is that it doesn't work,
and that's serious. Things are still bad with the new

(01:23:25):
elections and the new government. Everything is ugly.

Speaker 9 (01:23:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:23:28):
The streets of Caracas are full of protests. Every day.
People went out to protest. Sometimes they shoot people. The
government mistreats people. But if you can live with it,
and you can live with it it's ugly. Well, that
is why we left there for a better future, and
we'll keep moving onward onward.

Speaker 3 (01:23:47):
This group were young men traveling in advance to their families,
hoping to end some money, save it up, and send
it home. They knew what they were getting into when
they go to the USA. The migrants through to end
it paid. I might struggle to make ends meet, but
they still thought it was better than staying home and
watching your children's future disappear.

Speaker 17 (01:24:07):
If you don't have papers, you don't have a work permit,
you have to work for it. They want to pay you,
not for what you demand or anything.

Speaker 3 (01:24:14):
I met lots of Venezuelan families with children who had
different illnesses or disabilities. Things they couldn't obtain or afford
treatment for In Venezuela, they were traveling to the US
in the hopes of finding a better future for their kids,
or any future at all. I met young men who
left their children behind but carried the children of strangers,
even those with whom they didn't share a language. Christian,

(01:24:35):
who he heard from earlier, showed me how he'd carried
someone else's child on his shoulders until he fell and
hurt his knee. We all help.

Speaker 13 (01:24:42):
I put little children up here on my shoulders to
carry them, but it isn't easy.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
In the jungle, they'd formed chains using their arms to
cross rivers and carried little children on those who couldn't swim.
In Barjiquito, sera group of men from Angola, receiving hugs
from Venezuela and women they'd helped in the jungle without
the help of the Angolans, said that children wouldn't have
made it. One slip or a loss of grip, they
told me, would be fatal, and the remains of those
who had done just that served as a grisly reminder. Later,

(01:25:10):
little boys maybe eight to ten years old gleefully recounted
seeing a dead body on which the head had quote
exploded while their parents winked. In recollection, I wanted to
understand a bit more of what they were fleeing. That
made it worth getting through all this.

Speaker 15 (01:25:25):
You're dan Venezuela.

Speaker 18 (01:25:28):
Well, I left Venezuela because I worked in fishing. But
right now, in Venezuela, despite the fact that it is
a country rich and oil, there's not enough gasoline for
the fishermen to go fishing. And since I did not
have the ability to even buy basic things such as food,
the situation was, well, it was a little complicated. I
had to immigrate. I had nothing else to do. They

(01:25:49):
didn't rob me, well, they were going to rob me
because I didn't have anything to steal. We passed by
and the group that was behind us got robbed. They
raped women in that group.

Speaker 3 (01:26:02):
Almost every Venezuelan migroan I spect to share a similar story.
One said he'd installed security cameras, but nobody could afford
them now, as they had to choose between rent and
groceries or medical procedures that they needed but couldn't afford.
Overwhelmingly they said the same thing. No aifulturo, there's no future.
One group said to me that they couldn't wait for
their country to become like Cuba, as decades of embargos

(01:26:23):
took their toll on the population. But others reminded me
in them that Lisa Cubans seemed to have doctors. Venezuela
has an eighty percent poverty right now. Though it sits
on one of the largest oil reserves of any country
on Earth. It's been plagued by planmmeting oil prices in
the years of hyperinflation, which got so bad at one
point the shots stopped putting price tags on things and
relied on staff to give up to the minute prices. Today,

(01:26:46):
alongside a regime that lacks legitimacy, a state that readily
uses horrific violence against his people, an election that was
essentially ignored, Venezuelans must also deal with shortages of basic goods, poverty,
and malnutrition. And like Cubans who have a relatively good
political lobby in the USA, Venezuelan's coming to the USA
do not benefit from special laws. Cubans under the Cuban

(01:27:07):
Adjustment Act have a part of the citizenship and permanence
once they set foot on US soil. Venezuelans do not.
They're covered by something called a temporary protected status, but
this does not afford them much in the way of stability,
protection or a secure future. Erekapinhidro of Valatolado, an incredible organization,
does valuable work with migrant legal aid advocacy and humanitarian relief,

(01:27:28):
explaining just how temporary a TPS is.

Speaker 16 (01:27:30):
So temporary protected status is it's basically a form of
protecting individuals who are already in the United States when
their countries have experienced a natural disaster, they are in war,
there's some kind of situation going on that makes it
difficult for them to return, and so temporary protected status

(01:27:54):
was first created in nineteen ninety and the first individuals
who receive the status we're from El Salvador. And since then,
I think there's been a few dozen countries that have
been designated. But basically the way it works is they
designate a country and so if you were in the
United States before that designation date, you can apply for

(01:28:16):
temporary protected status within you know, a designated time period,
and you get a work permit. It's valid for six,
twelve or eighteen months, and then two months before it expires.
The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has to
say whether or not they're going to reauthorize GPS. So

(01:28:38):
there's like eight hundred and sixty thousand people in the
US who have temporary protected status and it's not a
path of citizenship. So basically people are just in limbo
sometimes for decades, you know. They just have to reapply
for this permit every eighteen months. So I have quite
a few salvador and friends who in the United States

(01:29:01):
since the nineties. They have kids, some of them acquirrent
kids who are US citizen and they can't become permanent
residents or have a pass of citizenship didn't. Most they
leave the country and either come back with another type
of parole or apply through a consulate, which many of
them are just not willing to take that risk.

Speaker 3 (01:29:20):
What makes things even more complicated for the Venezuelans is
that many of them are traveling without documents. It costs
three hundred bucks to get a passport, they told me,
and the weight's considerable. This makes their journeys even harder
as every country the enter has to approve them to
or without a passport, getting a visa, they said, would
be nearly impossible, and just trying might result in the
government coming after them. Such things, they said, are reserved

(01:29:43):
for the wealthier citizens, people like Gonzales, who's asylum claim
and stays at the Dutch and Spanish embassies, and who's
right to join his family in exile, are all luxuries
that most of his country people can't expect. It's dead.
Most Venezualians must ride basses through Columbia, then walk north
through the jungle buses, stir away on trains, or walk
again all the way to the border. They all lamented

(01:30:05):
to Dadian crossing, and so they wouldn't advise it without
other options. They all made it anyway. Community. See, they don't.

Speaker 17 (01:30:24):
Because unfortunately we don't have much in our country. You
don't have another option when you're dying of hunger and
you don't have a future. You can't even study. So yeah,
it's worth it.

Speaker 3 (01:30:37):
The economic situation is dire in Venezuela. Many families can't
make ends me their currency is almost worth us, and
the majorid government seems to have successfully installed itself for
the foreseeable future. This will mean a continuation of embargoes
and sanctions, which will harm the people more than the regime. Sadly,
though economic hardships not a criteria for which one could
be granted asylum in the USA.

Speaker 16 (01:30:58):
His Erica again, so severe economic deprivation can be persecution
if it's linked to one of the other protected grounds,
so race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a
particular social group.

Speaker 3 (01:31:12):
So, for example, if.

Speaker 16 (01:31:14):
Someone participated in anti Moduro political activity and then we're
blocked from getting a job or just denied economic opportunities
to the point where they're starving, economic deprivation could count
as persecution, but it's a very difficult case to make
in the United States. In Mexico, you can get protection

(01:31:39):
based on generalized conditions in your country, and so you know,
Venezuelans tweeing economic collapse or even Central Americans fleeing extreme
violence have a much easier time beating protection in Mexico
than they would in the United States because of that
kind of extra category of protection in Mexico. The issue

(01:32:01):
with Mexico is just the very limited capacity of this
asylum system overall, and the very dangerous conditions in which
people are forced to wait while their cases are adjudicated.

Speaker 3 (01:32:10):
Going forward from the Dadian, they'll face an enormously difficult journey.
The US does have a program for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians,
and Nicaraguans, then in theory allows them to apply, be
pre approved and fly straight to the USA, but it's
so delayed and broken. It's just not an option for
people who barely have enough money for food, let learn
a plane ticket there.

Speaker 16 (01:32:30):
HMV program is for cubanations, nick Garaguins, Venezuelans who have
not crossed into Panama or Mexico in the past few years.
You do not qualify who've done that or have not
been interdeed at see if they're Haitian or Cuban. You
have to have a sponsor in the United States who
have some kind of legal status. You have to be

(01:32:52):
able to pay for the flight, you have to have
a passport, and you have to be able to wait
forever long it takes for your application to be approved.
And the Department of Homeland Security just announced that they
are not renewing parole for people who are already in
the United States. So people from those four countries who

(01:33:13):
were in the US had up to two years of
humanitarian parole which is not being renewed, so they either
would need to apply for something else, or go back
to their country, or just, I guess, stay in the
United States undocumented until their cody.

Speaker 3 (01:33:59):
Had the same orly hundreds of times that week, sometimes
off mike and sometimes on mike, sometimes holding my voice
recorder and notebook, sometimes just sitting on the ground or
walking on the trail or enjoying a bottle of cold
water in Bahjigito, Crippling poverty and bad governance in their
country made it difficult to see a future there. They
wanted better for their children, so they brought them across

(01:34:21):
the mountains and risked their lives in the jungle to
give them a chance in life. I prepared a lot
for this trip, and I tried to search for everything
had my experience on the internet. But one thing I
really didn't expect to learn in the jungle is just
how much it's possible for parents to love their kids.
I watched exhausted mothers hoist their babies onto their shoulders
to keep walking, and somehow come up with a story

(01:34:42):
that made the whole thing an adventure, not a tragedy,
then did the same thing again the next day without
sleeping or eating. I watched fathers carefully lay out their
sleeping mac so the children could rest while they tried
to do the same on the dirt or hardwood floors
every day as their savings grew lower and they outlooked
more bleak, watch parents try to smile for their kids.

(01:35:02):
The sacrifices I saw them make, starving for days to
give their kids something to eat, or spending their last
remaining dollar on clean clothes for their kids while they
walked barefoo and couldn't afford shoes really brought home for
me the desire these families had for better future and
the sacrifices they're willing to make for one. Another week later,
it's still hard for me to accept that I'm home
safely and they're still in as much danger, if not more.

Speaker 11 (01:35:28):
Our walk lasted five days. Thank god I was always
strong enough and able to get back up when I fell,
because if I fell and my children had to see
me fall and not get up, imagine how bad that
would be. My children want more in the future, but
they despaired in the jungle. They said, tell me, mommy,
when are we going to get there? Mommy? What could

(01:35:49):
I say to them? My dear, We have to have
patience because we have to make the crossing. We have
to move forward. If not, we can't get out of here.

Speaker 3 (01:36:00):
Even among such difficult times, the Venezuelans always greeted me
with a laugh and a smile, especially after a few
days of running into each other. When I used venezuhaleen
slang or my accents slowly reverted to the Spanish and
I learned in Karrakas nearly two decades ago, they'd laugh
at me, as they noted at that time, Karrakas had
attracted plenty of migrants to his own. Some of them,
like me, didn't stay, but we came to We wanted

(01:36:22):
to see a revolution in the flesh, and they welcomed us.
For a while in Caracas, I lived in a social
center in La Pastora. I didn't pay rent, but there
was a small, empty room and no one seemed to mind.
Every day I talked to strangers, big friends, and try
and learn something new. The situation there wasn't ideal. For
one thing, we didn't really have showers, and also I
got robbed at gunpoint. So for most of my time

(01:36:43):
in the country, I stayed with the Chilean family i'd met.
They welcomed me a more or less total stranger, into
their homes and lives. In the evenings, we spent hours
talking and they'd tell me stories about how they'd suffered
under Pinochet, the hopes they'd had for their country, and
how they'd had to flee to Krakas tens of thousands
of their fellow Chileans. They introduced me to Victor Hara

(01:37:04):
and Joy Pan. I introduced them to chumber Wamba, and
we shared an affection for George Orwell. The song you
heard after the adverts was not in fact Chumberwamba, but
Chilean left his folk musician, Victor Haa. He's playing Eldreto
de vi videnpaz the right to live in Peace in English,
and it's one of his most famous songs. It confronts
the US War in Vietnam. Later, after haw I was

(01:37:25):
tortured and murdered by the Pinochet regime, it became an
anthem of protest in the country. Parah and his friend
Pabu and No Ruda were both symbols of the cultural
power of the Chilean people and the brutality of the
Pinochet regime, who broke the hands he used to play
his guitar before they killed him. Haah and the Rudah
both moved in the same revolutionary artistic circles as my
Chilean host in Venezuela. At night, they tell me stories

(01:37:49):
about the time they spent together. We'd have to speak loudly,
as a man who adopted me as a sort of
surrogate grandson had permanent hearing damage from the torture he'd
endured under the same regime. Luckily, he'd been able to
flee with his wife to Venezuela, where they were welcomed.
They never returned to Chile and happily lived out the
rest of their lives listening to their Victor Hara records
in Caracas and living the ideals that have seen them persecuted.

(01:38:12):
Their kindness to me, a nineteen year old stranger with
terrible Spanish and nowhere to sleep at night, reflected the
kindness they'd received, and I've tried to reflect it in
turn ever since.

Speaker 18 (01:38:25):
Oh A life.

Speaker 3 (01:38:28):
Oh. I never once heard any children crying in Las
Blancas or Barjiquito. Well note, until the deportations took their
parents away on my last day there. Most of the
time the kids entertained themselves. One day in Las Blancas
where migrants can wait and spend weeks or months they

(01:38:49):
don't have the funds to move forward with their journey.
I left my ficture while she made a call and
bumped into some little children playing a game where they
throw water bottle caps into half a breeze block from
various distance, each of them counting how many they could land.
I sat down next to them, put maricorder on the
ground and asked nicely if I could join them. That's

(01:39:19):
like a tiny pit buss. One of the kids bought
me a pile of bottle tops, and I chatted with
them as we threw a bottle cap to the broken
piece of concrete. What was it like in America? They asked.
They's had a lot of questions about Africa, having probably
met African kids in the casita just across the way.
Do they have big buildings in Africa? Does it rain there?
How long does it take to get there in a bus?

(01:39:41):
Then they tested by venezuela and legitimacy by drawing me
in a ripper in my notebook, and I'm asking him
if I knew what it was, what I passed a test?
They asked me how to say some things in English,
and they showed me the toys they bought with them,
which were very few. One of them had a small
plastic cow of which he was very proud on avoca.

(01:40:05):
After a while, they asked what I was doing, and
I showed them how I record interviews, at which point
they began recording themselves and each other, wildly stabbing at
the buttons on my recorder, which I will admit scared
the crap out of me, but I didn't have the
heart to take it off. Then they stroked the fluffy
WIMD protector I use on my microphone. It told me
it was like a tiny teddy bear. Eventually I was

(01:40:27):
able to trade my recorder for several small wooden animals
I'd brought with me as gifts, which seemed to be
a deal. The left all of us feelings that we
come out ahead. They seemed to unbothered by the suffering
around them. But Las Blancas is no place for children.
They should be in school, learning the English phrases they
kept repeating to me every time I saw them. But
for a chance to use their English, they first had

(01:40:47):
to endure month more danger and deprivation. I guess, as
son some slightly hold A. Children made the journey alone
or almost alone. They were accompanied by a spaniel called Channel.
I saw a future while as people are characters them
through the Darien Gap. But to my ANALYSI this is

(01:41:09):
the first spaniel that has made the treacherous crossing.

Speaker 12 (01:41:13):
Inezuela.

Speaker 3 (01:41:21):
Like everyone else, they had terrible memories from the jungle.

Speaker 1 (01:41:27):
The truth is you have to fight a lot to
be able to get out of there, because not everyone
gets out of that jungle, and it's even more difficult
with small children. There are times when one goes without
food and it's very stressful because all around us all
we saw was the jungle, and we never saw the
way out. But it is complicated. The truth is that

(01:41:48):
it is very hard the jungle. Well, I would really
recommend that people.

Speaker 14 (01:41:53):
Never go there.

Speaker 1 (01:41:54):
All our feet are hurting, we can't walk properly. Our
whole body is hurt. We went days without eating.

Speaker 3 (01:42:01):
They were traveling. They said to join their parents, and
because in Venezuela they told me they were always hungry.
They saw people sleeping on the streets, right, that would
be their only option. One day they didn't leave.

Speaker 1 (01:42:14):
I want to see mom. I haven't seen her in
three years, and I want to have my American dream to.

Speaker 14 (01:42:20):
I want to see my dad, my aunt, and my uncle.
I haven't seen them for three years either.

Speaker 3 (01:42:26):
Despite the heart yet, they didn't blame their parents for leaving.

Speaker 14 (01:42:30):
We know that we made it because of them. They're
the ones who sent us money for the things we need.
We were able to get a few things, not everything
we needed, but it's all thanks to them.

Speaker 3 (01:42:40):
The end of their interview, as I always do, I
asked them if there's anything else that they wanted to share.
I don't know, but our parents.

Speaker 18 (01:42:47):
We love them a lot and hope we can see
them soon.

Speaker 3 (01:43:01):
Like many of the Valezuela's I spoke to, their American
dreams were pretty modest for most of them, though they'll
be unachievable in the current immigration system. They'll end up
stuck in Mexico, in Mexico City, perhaps so further south
in Tijuana or Juara's working across the border. They're lucky,
but if they cried across between ports of entry, we'll
get caught traveling without red string. In Mexico, there was

(01:43:23):
being deported or relocated back to southern Mexico.

Speaker 16 (01:43:26):
His explaining that process, the Mexican National Guard has been
detaining people who are trying across the US medical border,
and they had been sending them south to Mexico City
and Chiapas to Tapachula. Now there's been this huge effort
to stop people from weaving, not only at the US
Mexico border, but even in Mexco City. So we're seeing

(01:43:50):
Mexican Immigration and National Guard doing sweeps of migrant camps,
of apartment buildings, doesn't matter if the person has a
CBP one appointment. Sometimes they'll just send themselves to either
Chiapa's an increasingly to Basco so Viere. Mossau, which is
where people are arriving in Tabasco has one shelter and

(01:44:11):
I think the capacity is around two hundred and fifty
three hundred people, and earlier this year they were sending
twenty thousand migrants a month there and then they posted
the military yips so that people can't leave.

Speaker 19 (01:44:24):
And it's very dangerous there.

Speaker 16 (01:44:25):
It's a drug tracking area, so it's you know, not
only are people sleeping in the streets, but they're sleeping
on the streets of some of the most dangerous cities
in Mexaco. Win very few services there to help them
even get their next meal.

Speaker 3 (01:44:37):
This, of course, didn't happen without the imfluence of the
United States. In many ways, Joe Biden has done exactly
what Donald Trump promised to do. Not only has he
built more wool, he's also forced Mexico to pay for
a significant amount of the US IS immigration enforcement. But
when people are sent back to south of Mexico, they'll
just make their way north again, only this time with
fewer resources and even greater risk. They're all proud of

(01:45:00):
where they're from. About half the groups I saw had
Venezuelan flags and the cats or backpacks, but they're also
very aware of the betrayal they get as Venezuelans and
the US media and many of them made the very
valid point if American is afraid of Venezuela gangs, they
ought to consider how much more afraid people are in
a country where they actually exist. N Solana, I'm thirteen.

Speaker 18 (01:45:25):
Please don't believe that because one person from Venezuela does crime,
that all Venezuelans do crime.

Speaker 3 (01:45:31):
But at least they get it portrayed in the US media.
Many African migrants don't even get that. Of course, it
doesn't mean they don't know about the USA his powers
in her anglophone Cameroonian group again talking about their impressions
of America where they'd like to live when they arrive here.

Speaker 5 (01:45:47):
We know America is a very beautiful country, and America
has human right.

Speaker 3 (01:45:51):
They care about the citizens.

Speaker 5 (01:45:54):
In fact, they care about humanity. See, I don't want
to have a friend that I'm gonna stay with for
the meantime.

Speaker 3 (01:46:01):
Then it gets that's great, Yeah, that helps her lot. Yeah.
Do you know which city your friend lives in? She's
in merry Land, Oh, Maryland?

Speaker 5 (01:46:09):
Okay, yeah, So if I may asks, if you don't
mind me asking, of course, what do Americans? How do
they treat or how do they see immigrants?

Speaker 3 (01:46:20):
Oh, my friend, it's changing a lot. African bagaants in particular,
will struggle with a lack of resources. The absence of
solidarity structures an obvious anti blackness along the journey. Along
with this, people they meet along the way simply lack
context of their journeys, why they're leaving, what they're fleeing.
Language barriers may exclude many of them from using CBP one,
which is only offered English, Spanish and Haitian Creole. Less

(01:46:43):
than fifteen percent of asylum cases are conducted in English,
but the app ignores huge toasts of the world outside
the Western hemisphere. But Jikito, I use French to speak
to min who students speak English, and began to notice
the complete absence of signage, and I think other as
Spanish and sometimes English Creole. This is likely an issue
throughout that long journeys. Here's one migrant from Angola and

(01:47:05):
I should probably at this point that Angolan people tend
to speak Portuguese, it's a national language, but French with
the language I shared with some of them, as I
don't speak Portuguese.

Speaker 10 (01:47:18):
It was too much, very complicated. Like me, I did
a week in Brazil at Brazil and for Peru, Peru
to nicol Klee. Then here I did. We did four days,
four days walking. There are many mountains, many risks, there
are many animals along the route. You have to follow
the path for four days and there's no food. But

(01:47:41):
we are glad to arrive today. This is the first group.
There's the second, third, fourth, fifth group. They're still on
the road. I'm very proud of the fact that we
made it despite the suffering. But God was with us
that is what is important.

Speaker 3 (01:47:57):
There are numerous instances a French speaking micro trying to
approach the border near me in Santy Ses and being
turned away for not having an appointment on that that's
not available in the language they can understand. These language
barriers might stop the migrants getting information, but they don't
stop them helping one another. His powers group describing the
isolation they felt, but also the kindness they experienced. Do

(01:48:18):
you think people on the trip treat African people differently?

Speaker 5 (01:48:22):
Yeah, they do differently differently. They're not being communicated, They're
just by themselves. They don't associate. They look at us differently.

Speaker 3 (01:48:32):
Yeah I.

Speaker 6 (01:48:34):
Had, I had someone who supported me.

Speaker 3 (01:48:37):
Yeah, yeah, I saw. I saw how kind of person
was because of their obvious foreignness and perceived an ability
to communicate. African migrants are often targeted for crime in Mexico.
Since leaving Panama, have heard from migrants who are raped, kidnapped, ransomed,
and I even heard about one who was killed. Because

(01:48:57):
of their difficulties accessing this CVP one app many face
longer way to Mexico, which may in turn leave them
open to extortion or see them decide to cross the
border between ports of entry. I've met hundreds of migrants,
mainly Mauritanians and Guineans, who have made this difficult choice
since bidons of Silent Bank came into force. Due to
the distance, African migrants also face a longer, more expensive,

(01:49:20):
and more dangerous journey. His premier from Zimbabwe, describing her
journey just to get to Bao Jiquito.

Speaker 12 (01:49:26):
The situation for me, it was tough. I just ran
away to South Africa. In South Africa was not safe
solofobia and they almost secure me and my boyfriend. Oh no,
and even my big father was abusive too much because

(01:49:49):
of the politics. I'm opposition part.

Speaker 20 (01:49:55):
So it was.

Speaker 12 (01:49:58):
Now even in South Africa, I was not safe at all.
It was those people. They were like following me and
my daughter. So I spent three months on the road
coming here. I leave South Africa, I think fourth of
July till now I'm in Panama. I'm still working using bases.

Speaker 3 (01:50:18):
Jesus, How you get away from Africa to America? Did
you fly or take a boat?

Speaker 12 (01:50:23):
The thing is I fly from Joannespec to Brazil. Then
I seek asylum in Brazil. Then I wanted to stay
in Brazil, so people said no, yeah, in Brazil, you
can't because of language, Yeah, Portuguese. So I start also
using people's groups like you list take this pass from

(01:50:46):
point A to point base. So we take a bus
from Brazil to Bolivia, then from Bolivia to Peru, Peru
to Equador, Colombia. Then you start working using Darien cap two.

Speaker 3 (01:50:58):
I'm here in African migrants will end up in different
shelters that are more remote or have less connectivity, again
making their asylum process harder. Unlike migrants from the Western Hemisphere,
they might struggle to find solidarity networks even inside the
USA without a significant diaspora, and many of the migrants
I met in the jungle have struggled to find sponsors

(01:51:19):
los Just the people I spoke to here, including Primrose
and her daughter, are still looking for someone to give
them a helping hand as they start their new life.
We spoke a lot over the week I is there,
and we've spoken most days since. It's heartbreaking for me
to see her daughter going for months without education or
even a safe place to sleep. I've seen photos of
them sleeping on the street, They've ridden crowded buses north,

(01:51:41):
and I've heard their frustrated attempts to comply with the
arcane and complicated restrictions on their right to come here
and ask for help. And it's been really hard since
I got home to reconcile this with a national discussion
that seems to see migration as a number that we
have to decrease. A migrants are something other than people
who want to come here for all the same reasons,
iding happily and peaceably as our neighbors. Now that they've

(01:52:03):
come this far, magants from outside the Western hemisphere have
to keep going. They kind of even file their claims
on CBP one until they make it to Tapatula, which
is hundreds of dollars and thousands of kilometers from Panama.
They likely don't have the funds to go back home
even if they want to, and they are far more
likely to be robbed or kidnapped along the way. However,
their story is often not told. Reporting on the board

(01:52:26):
is still largely focused on Spanish speaking migrants, with some
space of Chinese or Haitians, but magots from Africa rarely
get much care or attention in the media. In part,
this has helped them avoid the demonization that Venezuelan migrants
are all too aware of, but in part it also
leads to a lack of concern for their needs. I
want to end today with Gabriel from Equatorial Guinea sharing

(01:52:48):
his message for Americans.

Speaker 20 (01:52:50):
Ah Aca not as Yeah, A lot of people get
this confused. Africa is not a country. A lot of
them think when they see you and you're black person,
they say, are you African? And it's like, there are
lots of countries in Africa. Kana, Nigeria, you got Guinea,

(01:53:16):
you got the more Atinian people. There are loads of countries.
I wish people would know.

Speaker 10 (01:53:21):
How do I say this?

Speaker 20 (01:53:23):
I wish they'd take us into account because really they
don't consider us when they say Africa is a country.
They don't care about us the way we care about them.
And this is the way of seeing things which doesn't
consider us as human, not the same as them. You
understand they see us as Africans or animals something like that.

Speaker 17 (01:54:00):
M h.

Speaker 3 (01:54:12):
Yeah kid again pretty it's yell of the bat. He said,
I was.

Speaker 6 (01:54:29):
A boy, remain I polo people.

Speaker 10 (01:54:34):
Ermato you know something?

Speaker 16 (01:54:36):
Don't have people an annouches?

Speaker 3 (01:54:38):
Can they have me?

Speaker 16 (01:54:39):
People?

Speaker 18 (01:54:40):
Only day was an.

Speaker 3 (01:54:40):
Agent said I'm an a bad man. Again, you're a logic,
but it isn't. Young and yea, some of you recognize
the audio that we opened this show with, and then
if you weren't, it's a sample from the Fourth Declaration

(01:55:02):
of the Lacandan Jungle that Manuchow used to open his
shows with. It's a piece of music that's very emotive
for me. Obviously, I'm a white leftist guy in my
thirties who learned Spanish and decided to live in Barcelona.
So I have a story about running into Manuchow once
where he was busking, but that's not what I want
to share today. Because I'm technology challenged, I can't seem
to get my phone to download songs, but I've managed

(01:55:24):
to download the same Manu Chow playlist that I ripped
off a rewriteable CD when I was in high school
and put it on the various headphones and garment watches
that I've had of the last two decades or so.
When I'm away for work, I like to run whenever
I can. Obviously I wasn't just going to go for
a jog straight into the Darien Gap, but once we
were out of Bajajiqito, it gave me some time to

(01:55:44):
run and think and process the things that I've seen,
And while I do that, I listen to the same
doz or so MP three files. I was listening to
this song one day after I got back from Lahas Blancas,
as I sweated my way up ahead in the rainforest,
hoping to see a sloth. I didn't see a sloth,
but it seemed like an appropriate soundtrack. Manuchoo himself as

(01:56:06):
a child of refugees from Francoist Spain. He sings in
French and Spanish, willoff and Galician and Portuguese, among other languages,
often several of them in the same song, the product
of growing up among other migrants of diverse backgrounds. I
like the way he plays with language because it reminds
me of the way I so often speak to my
friends Spanglish, for example, or Frannglais. It's the way people

(01:56:28):
talk in border regions and refugee camps, languages that don't
have the support of a state or the academy, but
nonetheless convey so much meaning for so many people. That song,
in particular reminds me of my first time reading about
Zapatismo in a tiny anarchist cafe in the West Midlands.
I remember being struck as a kid from europ who
would frequently drive to France or Belgium to race bikes

(01:56:48):
and buy cheap beer, that the USA still maintained a
fortified border with Mexico. People couldn't travel freely, but money could.
With its realization and the writings in particular of Suquam
and Temar course, along with my talks in Spain to
old anarchists, that encouraged me to learn Spanish, which I
pursued by spending months in Spain and Venezuela and learning

(01:57:08):
thanks to the patient to the people around me. It
was a new anarchism which came from the periphery, not
only a liberal cores, which gave me my first serious politics.
I traveled to Venezuela to understand the revolution there. I
did a PhD to try and understand the revolution in Spain.
It's all very well understanding things, but I think it's
much more important to do things, and I tried to

(01:57:29):
practice mutual aid as much as I can. Since I
got back from the daddy En, I've loaded up a
heavy backpack and carried water into the desert and spent
hours trying to connect the friends I made in the
jungle with services along the way. In the face of
so much cruelty, it feels good to be doing something
to help and carrying the water is away. I can
make a material difference in a terrible situation. But in

(01:57:50):
all my time reporting, I've really never felt as disempowered
and helpless as I did in Last Blancas. Here at
the first official migrant reception center off to Daddi Enne,
the Panamanian government registers migrants. NGO's offer a few services,
and the US funded process of deportation for migrants from Colombia, Cuba,
Venezuela and India begins. Some of those sent to India

(01:58:14):
might well be Nepalese who often travel on fake Indian passports.
The little cluster of cheap tents, shipping container offices, un shelters,
and barbed wire offences is where the rubber meets a
road for the USA's border and migration policy, and it's
heartbreaking to witness. As migrants were called out to the
security office to begin the deportation process. I tried to

(01:58:35):
narrate the scene into my voice recorder, but I struggled,
in part because their family members asked me questions, hoping
I can help. Yeah, planings on the side, But in
a larger part, this was also difficult because I couldn't help,
and I deeply wanted to. The best I could offer

(01:58:56):
was an arm around someone's shoulder and the promise to
email any one who I could think of, and asked
what was going on? This guy's just sobbing. Yeah, that's
really tough. Some people's parents, some people's partners, some who

(01:59:24):
I'll explain exactly what was happening in a moment, but
first I want to explain how I got here. On
the day we left Maraganti, we set off at the
same time some migrants who are making their own journey
to last Blankets. PA. Is carrying only myself and my
fixed daddy and a pe aguero, so we're moving a
lot faster than the boats full of migrants. On the
way north. We passed them, they smiled and waves as

(01:59:47):
we rode by. Many of them had met me the
day before. All of them were ecstatic to have survived
the daddy enn and be heading north. Yeah, it's a
pretty busy stretcher ray that it's party three or four
pedaguas full of migrant Hello. There are kids shogging at me.
And taught them some English words yesterday and they're shouting

(02:00:07):
them back to me today, which is nice.

Speaker 14 (02:00:10):
You got it.

Speaker 3 (02:00:15):
Family from Panama. They might be Enngio people or something.
They lived a bill shocked to the whole scene. Here
we are passing another bit agua. Now they're all waving
at me. It's got to be uncomfortable. Pack that denity

(02:00:39):
into a bi agua one, two, three, four, five, three, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
forty fifty sixteen people. Yeah, once the boat arrived, they
did embark in LaaS Blancas the next day. I was
there to meet them. We're just walking into Lahas Blancas.

(02:01:00):
Hectic here so it's a new shop here, and outside
the shop they've made like a line of outlets to
charge people. It's a dollar an hour to charge your telephone.
As we go in, there are a row of like
kind of sheds which represent shops. And then further in,
every ngo has its own little kind of shed. They're

(02:01:20):
all covered in tarps. They're like canvas and tarp tents
actually here so see unief, I see, oh I am yeah,
they have that sort of little tent office here. I
guess see here as for example, has information psychological support,
safe space for women, Wonnief has some workshops for children,

(02:01:47):
and then you know they're hours. I guess, nice little
chairs in there and yeah, see you can't take photographs
in there, which is good. Yeah, and then it's just
a crowd of people coming out. And there's also more

(02:02:11):
little Mormon situation. See oh yeah, I guess see. Oh
I am are supported by Church of Jesus Christ on
bat Today Saints. Then the Red Cross has got a
shipping container. I've been hoping last blank Cuts would be
a better scene than baj Jugito, with more organized sleeping
arrangements and hopefully basic necessities like clean water, food and

(02:02:33):
Wi Fi provided by their numerous NGOs who work there.
But if anythink it was worse in Baja Jigito. In Bajuquito,
migrants were exhausted, but also ecstatic to be at the jungle.
They knew they'd be moving forward the next day and
for a few bucks. Again, I don't think they needed.
In the village, the locals told me that if kids
didn't have the money to eat, they fed them for free.

(02:02:53):
I didn't see this, but normally seen that they're having
a very hard time, and any of the days of
vice to the village at least not for fine actual reasons.
Magots can get as far as Bahol Jiguito on a
few hundred dollars in their tenasty. They pay Columbian guides
a few hundred bucks to bring them across the ocean
from Necople and to walk them from the border, and
they parry them bar Perraguero's twenty five bucks for the

(02:03:14):
ride up the river. But once they get to last Blankerts.
For a good number of migrants, their journey grinds to
a halt. Many of them told me they've been stuck
in the camp for weeks or even months because they
couldn't get that sixty dollars that they needed to pay
for their travel north. There's no Western Union in the camp,
and the only way to transfer money is very local
intermediary who charges between twenty and twenty five percent of

(02:03:36):
the sum being transferred as a fee. In the morning,
migrants arrive on their peraguas just as we did. I
drop down the boat ramp when I saw them to
help with their bags and ask about their journey from
there they formed two lines, one for men and one
for women and children. They have their bag search and
their passport checked. They've given a welcome kit for the

(02:03:56):
Red Cross with some basic necessities toilet paper, two to brush,
some soap, stuff like that, or some of them get
a kid. When the kids ran out, it was long
before the line of people did. By the time the
men were finished, they were given little more than a
shrug and good wishes by the Red Cross volunteers and
allowed to head off into the camp. Within the camp,

(02:04:17):
there are a few rows of small casitas that are
allocated to u accompany children and families. They're a little
more than four walls in a roof, but they offer
a bit of privacy for most migrants, though there isn't
space and they have to search for a spot of
empty ground in the crowded camp where they can pitch
the same tents they bought a necko cley. The Wi
Fi which a Red Cross usually provides, wasn't working when

(02:04:38):
I arrived, so I had to let people hot spot
off my phone all day. At least the promised food
really was free, but the migrants told me it was
far from good. Still, this is supposed to be a
temporary camp. People register here, get any medical attention they need,
and then move forward to Costa Rica. That's the theory anyway.
In practice, if you can't get the sixty bucks, you

(02:04:58):
need to move forward, or so one stole it for
me in the jungle, or you are forced to walk
to the camp because you didn't have twenty five bucks
for the boat and then someone rubbed you. Then you're stucks.

Speaker 18 (02:05:12):
We have been here a month. You have people who've
been here a month and a half. I've been twenty
seven days here. Well, I thank god because we have
three meals a day. We have water, but it still
hurts the girls. The food and water always make me
sick with diarrhea.

Speaker 3 (02:05:29):
It bothers me.

Speaker 18 (02:05:30):
I vomit and the heat is so desperate. But we
have to hold on because even though we don't have
the resources, like we don't have enough to pay for
a ticket, we have to hold on here a little longer.
We don't have any family members that can give us support.

Speaker 3 (02:05:45):
Either. What's keeping the migrants here is money, or rather
a lack of it. It They need sixty bucks to leave.
Buses used to take five free passengers per bus, but
under Panama's new regime, it seems like they don't. Instead,
migrants just graduate mass in growing number of tents that
populate the grassy areas of Las Blankets. They might try
and do some informal work. I saw one guy who

(02:06:07):
was cutting hair for a dollar time, but I couldn't
really get a satisfactory response to what they're expected to do.
If they don't have the money and can't get someone
to send us seventy five dollars, they'd need to cover
their travel costs and the twenty five percent transfer.

Speaker 18 (02:06:20):
Feel if you're short ten dollars, they don't put you
on the bus or anything. So things are terrible here.
There should at least be support for migrants who at
least come with few resources. They don't have money or anything.
They can search your bag so they can see that
you're not lying that you don't have money. Because nobody

(02:06:41):
wants to be stuck here, you have to move forward,
because nobody wants to be stuck here in Panama. The
idea is to move forward to get further ahead. We
brought our children to look for a future, not to
be locked up here in Panama. As if we've been
in prisoned.

Speaker 3 (02:06:58):
The group even tried to leave on foot, hoping to
begin walking north. And so it's for better future and
a way to make money on their way. But they
were caught, they say, and returned to the campra.

Speaker 10 (02:07:11):
And they beat me hard.

Speaker 18 (02:07:13):
I gave myself up because they had caught her, a
grandmother with my other daughter. I returned myself voluntarily, and
they beat me up anyway. And from there we've lost
the desire to walk back there.

Speaker 3 (02:07:25):
What can we do?

Speaker 10 (02:07:27):
Rights?

Speaker 3 (02:07:28):
They don't care about them.

Speaker 18 (02:07:30):
We are human beings, but we don't have rights here
in Panama, they.

Speaker 3 (02:07:34):
Do have the money. Margarets could take a bus to
the Costa Rican border. When the buses first arrived, I
tried to describe the scene as migrants rushed to buy food,
not only for this journey, but also for their journey
through Costa Rica, where food and other basics are much
more expensive. I'm here in Lahablancas when the first buses
have arrived. It's about noon. The first bus is going
to be full of people who had been waiting in

(02:07:56):
line for hours already, so they're kind of lining up
by the bus. And then the next bus is people
seem to be kind of rushing to get to them.
They're rushing to my food. I could see the sky
has like an entire carrier bag full of pink wave
for biscuits and coke bottles. That that's going to be
his food for the next eleven hours. I guess other

(02:08:17):
guys to see with bags of bread, rolls and stuff,
and they're the first people are getting on the bus. Now,
these buses aren't entirely safe. In twenty twenty three, forty
two people died in a bus crash. This year, seventeen
were intured in a crash in August. Now, migration offices
ride in each bus with the migrants to check on
safety protocols and make sure they don't get off anywhere

(02:08:39):
else in the country, just like everywhere else on their journey.
People make money off the migrants in last blankets. A
bus costs sixty dollars ahead and has fifty five passages
three three hundred dollars a bus. More than a dozen
buses leave every day. They even half of the thousand
or so people who arrived us a transfer service to
get their bus fare. That's five hundred dollars in transfer

(02:09:01):
fees alone. Of course, not everyone in the community is
making thousands of dollars off the migrants. I interviewed local
shopkeeper who still sits just outside the camp gates, and
I asked him to explain his stock, which included the
oddly popular I backed the blue thin blue Lion T shirt.
So I've seen several people across the daddy and gap it.

Speaker 12 (02:09:25):
Okaymo only fucking money.

Speaker 3 (02:09:30):
I asked him what was the most common shopping list
for migrants.

Speaker 12 (02:09:33):
See Gussie Man.

Speaker 10 (02:09:36):
Yes, almost all of them coming by sets for ten, fifteen,
twenty dollars. It depends. There are many who don't have them.
I have children sets for five dollars. I have sets
for five dollars that are pants and sweaters, which is
what they're looking for the most those that are socks
without underwear. Backpacks for fifteen dollars because the backpack is
so worn out and they need it so much that
it carries their belongings. Look, it's not really ever who

(02:10:00):
can buy. There are certain people who buy, of course,
if everyone bought, but there are very few who can
buy something to leave here. Almost seventy percent leave dirty
because they don't have anywhere to get money, and the
little they can get often comes from selling their phones,
their watch, a cap, or their sneakers to be able
to get money to pay for their fare to keep going.

Speaker 3 (02:10:20):
I asked him how the migration had impacted the community
with people making a lot of money, I asked, were
they mad about the trash and the pollution of the river.
These are legitimate concerns, even if they're used in bad
faith against the migrants.

Speaker 9 (02:10:31):
Now it's a more effect.

Speaker 10 (02:10:32):
Though nobody is perfect, but I can tell you one thing. Honestly,
the migrants suffer a lot to be able to carry
out this journey. And there are many times when I've
even had to give them clothes, some because they don't
have any. And well, when a father and family with
children comes, what can I say, Look, I have a family.

Speaker 1 (02:10:49):
I have to do this.

Speaker 9 (02:10:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:10:51):
I asked him what he felt the solution was to
the suffering here, the damage done both to people and planet.

Speaker 10 (02:10:57):
Hekay, I say that oppressing people so that they don't
go through the dairy and it's not the solution because
if you put it to the point, even if they
don't know an exact percentage, the immigrant gives the economy
of the United States a balance because the people born
there not to criticize them. People born there want a
stable job, and he doesn't want to feel like he's very,

(02:11:19):
very low. However, the immigrant is there and he's picking fruit,
going to the fruit trees, going to the vegetable fields,
going to the garbage dumps, going picking up things that
many Americans who live there don't do, of course, and
so they need them to say that they don't go.
They need the support of the immigrant people to have
the balance that they have today.

Speaker 3 (02:11:41):
Like a lot of Panamanians I met, he was broadly
in solidarity with the migrants. I didn't really encounter anti
migrants sentiment atall in my time at Panama. In the
capital city, which locals just called Panama but we can
call Panama City, migrants are not really physically present, nor
are they present in conversation. I found the transition the
jungle and the refugee camps back to the bustling city

(02:12:03):
pretty challenging a lot of ways. I find I'm oddly
comfortable amidst the chale and trauma of a refugee camp.
It's a familiar environment for me, and I know how
to conduct myself. I feel safe with the migrants, and
I tend to find them very open and welcoming to me.
I can talk to anyone and they can talk to me.
I bring toys for children and try to bring resources
for adults, and sometimes I bring my harmonica if I

(02:12:25):
being really cliche in a weird way. Refue camps are
a little safe space for me, and even though I
know it's bad, I can console myself that I'm helping
a little or at least giving people some hope and
some information. That made me feel a bit better. But
in the city I found it hard, knowing that people
were in a terrible situation and that nobody here seemed
to care. I went for a run in the jungle

(02:12:46):
near the city, trying to get some perspective and clear
my head, but I just ended up screaming and the
inconsiderate driver I was angry at them for nearly hitting me.
That I was just angry at everyone all over the
US and even here in Panama City, for their indifference.
It's so much human suffering, the lack of concern about

(02:13:58):
migrants in Panama City. What is so next? At last,
blancs even more surprising an announcement of the loudspeakers called
several Colombian passport holders to the migration office. At first,
it seemed like they were just going to a little
wooden shed with a couple of CENA Front officers in
it to return their documents. I'd already noticed that some migrants,
and seemingly most of the African migrants, were being called

(02:14:19):
to a different shed to do biometric scans. I wondered
if this was part of the same process. But shortly thereafter,
a truck rolled up and several of the Colombians were
loaded in. Apparently neither they nor their partners knew what
was going on. They're taking some of the Columbian guys
away to report them. You can hear a little kid
crying for his dad. Okay this, then they've taken his

(02:14:56):
brother and his brother's wife, taken some other his husband,
some of the little kid's dads and making them sit
on the floor. I don't know why. Yeah, I don't
know what they're.

Speaker 4 (02:15:13):
Going to do.

Speaker 3 (02:15:13):
Now she's trying to give her husband the money and
a SIM card so he can call her. Are you
going to go get some more food? Other morgents approached
me to us if I knew, which I didn't. But
one lady who'd been there for weeks. Told me that

(02:15:34):
people who leave this way never come back and they
end up being deported, so we assume that's what's happening here. Yeah,
this really sucks. Now they're taking the deportation bus. There's
men crying because their wives are on their women crying,
their husbands are on their kids are crying because their
parents are on there, and they've just done this crossing

(02:15:56):
and now they're going to send them back. By the
time I got back to the city, I was getting
texts from migrants with photos of them and handcuffs. More
and more of them were being deported, particularly the Colombians.
One of them, texting me after being returned to Columbia
on a flight, gave the following account of detention.

Speaker 2 (02:16:15):
They treated us very badly, verbally and psychologically. We all
had to do our business in the same cell, and
they threw food on the floor for us to eat
as we were all in handcuffs. They told us that
of Venezuelan had burned down the migrant detention center in
San Vincente and that we would all pay for it,
and that the Colombians didn't need to leave the country
because the president there said it was doing well, and

(02:16:36):
there's plenty of work. None of that is true.

Speaker 3 (02:16:40):
The Mican facility in Sambacinity was burned out, and the
people working there told me it was a Venezuelan migrant
who did that. But none of that excuses any of this.
We weren't able to access that facility. As a people
who had detained there can't really consent meaningfully to an interview.
That's a fair enough for the action. But the migrant
who was deported also alleged that they received no hearings

(02:17:01):
or a chance to appeal their deportation. Instead, they were
detained for eight days, spent their last US dollars, and
were then kicked out of the country. They were not
detained or arrested upon reaching Columbia, which makes it a
little more difficult for me to believe the claim that
only people without standing warrants in Columbia were being deported.
These weren't the only allegations of mistreatment I heard. Magrants

(02:17:22):
came to me and whispered about the abuse of black
migrants who were forced to walk to Lahas Blancos because
they couldn't afford the boat ride. I should note that
it wasn't the migrants who had been robbed or abuse
that came to me. It was other migrants. It was
a group of guys had given a water filter too.
While they were leaving to walk from Lahas Blancas, I
hadn't been able to join them, but when they got there,
we ran into each other again, and they came up

(02:17:44):
to me to share their concerns for the black men
who had walked with them. In one instance, one migrant
told me he was robbed by what he called quote
police dressed as thieves. The deportations, which seemed to be
increasingly commonplace, are being funded by US taxpayer dollars. The
same day that Molino took office in July, Homeland Security
Secretary Alejandro Majorcas, himself the child of migrants, visited Panama.

(02:18:08):
Panama's a relatively young country and one which the US
occupied part of for much of the last century, but
despite a real struggle for independence, the Panamanian government didn't
seem concerned that the U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security
was present at the inauguration of a president in a
country that is decidedly not the U. S. Homeland. The
official DHS readout of his trip notes that the US

(02:18:29):
has enjoyed a flourishing strategic relationship with Panama for over
one hundred years, which is certainly one way to sell
up decades of occupation, violence, and profit from the Panama
Canal and one of the more brutal dictatorships in the
long list of authoritarian regimes that the US preferred to
communist or even socialist governments in the Western Hemisphere. They
also announced that the US government would quote help the

(02:18:50):
Panamanian government to remove foreign nationals who do not have
a legal basis to remain in Panama. Obviously act to
take this moment to note that under the United Nations,
refugee can vente and refugees do have a legal right
to travel through a country on route to another. His
Erica describing that right.

Speaker 16 (02:19:06):
The refuge you can mention is complex that does afford
a lot of rights to people who have fled their
countries based on persecution. You know, you're supposed to be
able to pass through whichever country you want, go to,
whichever country you want, not be criminally prosecuted for crossing
the border between ports of entry, and not be turned
back to a country where you face harm.

Speaker 3 (02:19:25):
The US allocated six million dollars for a six month
pilot program of repatriations. If the program meets the USA's goals,
they might consider expanding it to other countries along the
migrant route. According to reporting in Enruters, as of early October,
they've deported five hundred and thirty people to Colombia. That's
half the people I saw arriving in a single day
in Bahjojigito. Because Panama's government and Venezuela's government have ceased

(02:19:49):
relations after the election, Panamara is now struggling to deport
Venezuelan's back to Venezuela, and it's actively searching for a
third country into which to deport them. But even if
the program resulted one planeloaded day, which it hasn't yet,
that would be roughly ten percent of the total dadly
in traffic and far fewer planes are traveling. What it
will do, like so many other DHS policies, is play

(02:20:11):
into the hands of smugglers. Already, new ocean roots are
being used, which see migrants, many of whom cannot swim,
taking lung journeys around Panama on ill equipped boats. This
doesn't help anyone apart from the DHS contractors and staff,
equipping and training Panamanian personnel, and the human traffickers making
more and more money from migration. I also shopkeeper his

(02:20:31):
opinion on this.

Speaker 9 (02:20:34):
To look.

Speaker 10 (02:20:38):
I'll tell you I think that instead of giving them
a reward for deportation, they should give them support, a
lot of support, because it is a huge sacrifice to
leave your country where you were born, your children, your family,
leave it to be able to have a future, and
you go with your mentality that your future is the
United States that will give you an opportunity to get
ahead and give well being to your children. Now, ten

(02:21:01):
percent of those who go are going to destroy the
good name of the migrants, But what people really want
to do is help their family, and this balance unbalances
everything that is being done by good people, because there
are many good people who want to get ahead, and
I think that the United States should support give support
to people who really want to fight and move forward.

(02:21:21):
As I just told you, they give a lot of
benefit they contribute to the country.

Speaker 3 (02:21:49):
After leaving last blank, I felt pretty down about the
fact that people were just hitting a wall that they
couldn't overcome. Since then, I've stayed in touch with many
of them. For some a friend or family members able
to send the money, and they made it to costantly

(02:22:11):
on the bus. From there, they crossed quickly into Nicaragua
and Guatemala before arriving in the Mexican border city of
Tapatula in the state of Chiapas and ironically not so
very far from whether Zapatistas made their revolution thirty years ago.
Once they crossed the southern border of Mexico, migrants can
begin their application for asylum using the CBP one app
that we've talked about so much on the show before.

(02:22:32):
They can use it in Tabasco and Chiapas, the southern
border states, and then once again when they're north of
Mexico City. To recap very briefly, the app is terrible
and almost every way, including its inability to recognize blackfaces.
It's limited functionality on Android phones, which are a vast
majority of devices used by migrants, It's constant crashing, and
an eight to nine month wait time for asylum appointments.

(02:22:53):
His Erica explaining some of those problems.

Speaker 16 (02:22:56):
You have to have a relatively new smartphone, you have
to have an address, all the people you're traveling with
have to be with you, right and you have to
first get through the initial kind of registration phase.

Speaker 19 (02:23:10):
Which doesn't always work. The program is very glitchy.

Speaker 16 (02:23:13):
You have to take a live photo and you have
to wait essentially, so you know, it's kind of random too.
Some people will get an appointment within three months, but
I would say most people are waiting nine to twelve.

Speaker 19 (02:23:25):
At this point.

Speaker 16 (02:23:26):
You don't have any legal status in Mexico while you're waiting,
unless you can apply for some other status in Mexico independently.

Speaker 3 (02:23:34):
Then it is yet very poorly designed. It's also a
de facto a metering system. Want assign Them's Erica explaining.

Speaker 16 (02:23:39):
That we've been litigating against the use of CBP one
for a few years now. My organization out at the
Level and Patient Bridge Alliance, and the reason why we
are fighting against the required use of CBP one is
first because it is an illegal metering system. So we've
already litigated the fact that there is no number limit

(02:24:02):
on the amount of individuals who can seek asylum at
the US Mexico border, and Customs and Border Protection legally
does not have the right to turn people.

Speaker 19 (02:24:10):
Away and CBP one essentially allows them to do that.

Speaker 16 (02:24:16):
You know, there were physical meterings at ports of entry
before CBP one was implemented as essentially the only way
to access the US asylum system at ports of entry,
and now it's a digital metering list and it's very limited.

Speaker 3 (02:24:31):
Recently, the Department of Homeland Security lost a court case
which forced them to release records in there with some
of the app plugs and data regarding CBP one. I'm
still in the phase of coming through that asking my friends,
you know more about technologies than I do, to explain
exactly what the limitations with the app are. But it
doesn't really matter. DHS is well aware of the app's floors,
and it doesn't really seem to see the most flaws

(02:24:53):
at all. The goal of the app is to make
it harder for people, even those with very legitimate asylum claims,
to obtain asylum in the use. As we heard yesterday,
the CHNV program is no better a recently Reddit thread
of applicants who've been waiting nearly two years. What it
didn't mention yesterday is a parallel program for another group
of migrants, which I'll let Erica explain.

Speaker 19 (02:25:13):
I want to mention the fact that there is a
cap right.

Speaker 16 (02:25:17):
I think it's thirty thousand a month or something like
that for those four countries. But it's almost identical to
the Ukrainian United for a Ukraine program, which doesn't have
a cap right, so there's no limit to how many
Ukrainians can get the same benefit. And they are renewing
the humanitarian prole for Ukrainians, which I believe was just

(02:25:37):
announced almost within weeks of them announcing that they're not
renewing for the other four countries. So it's really a
very stark demonstration of how the US immigration system, even when.

Speaker 19 (02:25:50):
It's a relatively nearer benefit, is based on race, is
based on which country you're from.

Speaker 3 (02:25:57):
What this means is it in practice the migrants I
spoke to face a long and dangerous way in Mexico
while others skip ahead. I've got nothing against the Ukrainians,
and I don't think many of them do either. I
tried to go to Ukraine and report, but the Avisas
ended up taking so long that I missed the flights
that I'd booked. I have, however, a serious problem with

(02:26:17):
a Biden administration which left people who fought alongside its
own US troops to die in Afghanistan and turned away
migrants small over the world, but then opened its arms
to a country that just happened to have the majority
of its citizens be the same race as the president.
It's cruel and it's wrong, and it's barely ever even
mentioned in national media coverage. But there's not fortunate enough

(02:26:38):
to be Ukrainian. Here's what waiting in Mexico looks like.

Speaker 16 (02:26:41):
The incidence of crime directed at migrants is horrifyingly high.
We had done an electronic survey a few years ago,
and this was during Title forty two, when people were
just being expelled to Mexico, and if I remember correctly,
it was like around twenty five to thirty percent of
people have been either raged, such traffic, assaulted, hidnapped.

Speaker 19 (02:27:07):
I mean, the list goes on and on.

Speaker 16 (02:27:09):
We've seen a lot of people lose their lives just
due to violence, and the kidnapping rates are through the roof.

Speaker 3 (02:27:16):
Almost every one you've heard from in this series is
now stuck in Mexico. Some of them have been kidnapped, paid,
ransomed and released. Some of them have been sexually assaulted,
many of them have been robbed. Some of them have
after surviving one of the most deadly land migration routes
on Earth been killed while waiting in Mexico for an
app to stop crashing on their phones. Over a week

(02:27:37):
since I got home, I've seen them go gradually more
desperate and afraid just to get to Mexico. Many of
them have spent several thousand dollars. Once they're in Capatula,
they're faced with the astronomical costs for the trip north,
often several thousand dollars more, and many of them, their
phones exhausted, have slept on the streets. Those who didn't
speak Spanish struggled to find refuge. Those who did wanted

(02:27:59):
to move quickly, but struggle to find the money. Here
are the Iranian migrants you heard early in the series,
explaining what they'd already heard about CBP one.

Speaker 9 (02:28:07):
It's so tough because the some polices in their way,
they took our money that we came from Iran. It
was so difficult for us and resumed the way. So Mexico,
Mexico is so difficult for us, and something is CPP

(02:28:28):
one is not working for our for us, for Iranian people, yeah,
I know the people who are in Mexico City for
about three months, for three months, yeah, yeah, because of that,
Iranian people go to.

Speaker 8 (02:28:46):
The wall and.

Speaker 9 (02:28:49):
It's it's it's not our choice, we have to do this.

Speaker 3 (02:28:54):
We don't want them, but it's we have to do this. Yeah,
it's good to explain. According to a study can there
to the University of Texas, wait times are as high
as eight or nine months on average. Now Mexico announce
on the thirty first of August that it will provide
security and food for migrants who have an appointment to
travel north from the south of the country to the
place where they have a CVP one appointment. Migrets absolutely

(02:29:14):
have been robbed or kidnapped on their way to their
appointment and missed it as a result, but they are
just as honorable in the eight or nine months that
they have to wait for one. Margarets and Tapajula are
at a very high risk for kidnapping and are often
held until their families pay ransoms. But without money or
an appointment, their little means of leaving the city. Some
choose to travel a little further north and then hop

(02:29:36):
on a freight train known as Labstia the Beast, an
extraordinarily risky endeavor that several of the people I spoke
to for this series have undertaken. The only place to
ride on these trains is on top of carriages, exposing
migrants to freezing temperatures in the desert night. Even on
the train, they're not safe from kidnapping. Like many migrants,
the Ranian group will well informed about domestic politics in

(02:29:58):
the US, and they say when they made their journey north,
they wanted to be sure to avoid the state where
local law enforcement was likely to turn them over for deportation.
In reality, that could be any of the states, but
they're probably right that their life would be a little
easier on the West coast.

Speaker 9 (02:30:13):
I heard it's so difficult and about three months, four months,
more than seven months, they will arrest us in the US.
I heard in Mississippi it takes us in the middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I think just the California is a little little little bit.

Speaker 14 (02:30:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:30:32):
Surely our money is very excuse me, shits money in
the world, and we have to pay a lot of
money for this way because because.

Speaker 3 (02:30:44):
Our one.

Speaker 9 (02:30:48):
One dollar is sixty thousand.

Speaker 3 (02:30:52):
Some of course, which used to cross the border between
ports ventry as they become desperate to see their families
or afraid of remaining in Exico. Since President Biden's executive
audier earlier this summer. Doing this can result expedited removal proceedings,
and effectively, Biden's new ruling denies asylum by default to
anyone crossing the border when daily crossings have passed twenty

(02:31:14):
five hundred. In fact, this is the continuation of extremely
punitive and cruel politics that have been in place since
he was finally forced to stop using Title forty two, which,
if you're not aware, is a public health law used
by the Trump administration and embraced by the Biden administration
as an asylum law. It has already resulted in the
deportation to people back to places where they have extremely
credible fears of harm and created a system whereby migrants

(02:31:37):
have no idea how they will be treated on any
given day. Again, it's play into the hands of anyone
seeking to smoke or migrants into the country and detected,
while also harming innocent people coming to this country to
ask for protection. His Erica's short history of Biden's asylum
policy since last year.

Speaker 16 (02:31:52):
So when the Biden administration lift at Title forty two,
they essentially imposed what I call transit van.

Speaker 19 (02:32:00):
So there's a couple of components to it. One is,
if you do not enter.

Speaker 16 (02:32:06):
The United States out of port of entry with a
CDP one appointment, you are presumed ineligible for asylum unless
you fall under a few narrow exceptions which are not
consistently applied. So the exceptions are things like you were
having a medical emergency, you were running for your life,
you know, you couldn't access the app for some reason.

(02:32:27):
But in practice those exceptions are almost never applied at ports.
There's been a few kind of alternative programs run by
shelters or local governments, where people with extreme medical vulnerabilities,
for example, can be let in without an appointment, but
we don't know whether the ban applies to them once

(02:32:49):
they enter without that appointment, right, So it's like I said,
inconsistently applied exceptions. If you enter between a port of entry,
you're presumed and eligible for asylum again unless you meet
some therew except and what that means is you can still.

Speaker 19 (02:33:02):
Apply for other types of protection in the United States.

Speaker 16 (02:33:05):
So there's two principal types of protection. One it's called
withholding of removal, which is like asylum but with a
higher standard, and then the other is Convention against Torture
which you just have to prove it's more likely than
not that your own government will torture you, which is
more extreme than persecution, but isn't necessarily based on a

(02:33:26):
protected ground, So the torture could be for any reason,
but it's a high hurdle. But the most important thing
is those two types of protection are not path to citizenship,
and they do not allow you to petition for your family. So,
for example, if you get asylum in the US and
then you want to ask for your wife and children
to join you, there is an avenue for that, and

(02:33:47):
all of you can eventually become citizens. Withholding of removal
and convention against torture, you basically get a work permit.

Speaker 19 (02:33:55):
If conditions in.

Speaker 16 (02:33:56):
Your country change, they can support you, and you can
never leave states and you can never reunify with your family,
and you could ever become a citizen.

Speaker 3 (02:34:04):
This won't deter people. I speak to people every day
who cross the Daddy, Yet we're kidnapped, robbed, and sometimes
raped on their way here. They're going through all of
that because we refuse to give people a dignified or
safe way to come here. They know it's a risk,
and they continue to come because they think it's the
only option his powers from coming rou and explaining that

(02:34:25):
it's deadly.

Speaker 5 (02:34:26):
How will lie to you. It's fifty to fifty alive
on it, honestly speaking. But we had to take their
rigs because I think that was only all shroma we had.

Speaker 3 (02:34:37):
If you can't imagine taking those risks, it's likely because
you can't imagine the things these people are leaving behind either.
As a conflict reporter, I've been able to see a
small amount of what they're fleeing war, death, poverty, state violence.
I don't know if i'd be brave or strong enough
to do the same, but I have a lot of
respect for people who can. Tomorrow we're going to talk

(02:34:58):
about the people who help them along the way and
what you can do to support them. When the state worked,

(02:35:30):
just you.

Speaker 6 (02:35:32):
Finding yourself there and seeing how the environment looks like
you feel like you should give up. I cried it
grace of work for you to actually stand by us,
say no, I'll keep on struggling. A lot of people
who give up.

Speaker 18 (02:35:46):
There a lot of people.

Speaker 6 (02:35:47):
Someone died, the lady died. People who were crying. Yeah, yes,
we let people swear crying. They didn't know how they
could continue. It's not an easy situation. It's not really
an easy situation. It's just the grace of God for us,
because I can't say it's by my strength. It's actually
the grace of God. Because what we actually went through,

(02:36:09):
we met people living collapsed. We had to help them.
You meet your body, you give a lifting hand. It's
not really an easy thing. It's not something that if
we are fine tomorrow, can advise any of our family
members to go through, because it's so deaf. It's risky
if your family member is in there and it's not out.
It takes the grace of God for you to even

(02:36:30):
lie on your bed and close all your eyes either.

Speaker 21 (02:36:33):
Once I survived by the grace of God, I almost drowned.
It's fact I was drowning. By the grace of God.
I was rescued, yeh, some guys that rescued me. I
was already drowned.

Speaker 7 (02:36:46):
I was gone.

Speaker 17 (02:36:47):
I was gone.

Speaker 9 (02:36:48):
I was drinking water.

Speaker 3 (02:36:50):
Very readily all throughout the journey. North Margarets have a
little choice but to rely on one another and the
solidarity of strangers. I heard dozens of stories that you've
just heard. My time in the Dai n total strangers
who saved each other's lives risk their own in the process.
For vers, it could only be crossed to People from
three different continents joined arms to form a human chain

(02:37:11):
the children and smaller people could hold on to to
avoid being swept downstream. Not everyone can help. Just surviving
the Dadian takes all of what many people have. But
for the people who are in a position to even
in desperate times, there's mutual support among the migrants. Very
few people who.

Speaker 6 (02:37:27):
Are very help you. They're very few people. Only people
who are time can actually help. That people will pass
you by, and that people want If you have lost
your strength, it's not easy for another person to actually
help break though, we can really appreciate those who help, because, yeah,
having your strength is another You must help yourself before
you can help another past, right, So if you can't

(02:37:49):
really have the strength, it will be difficult for need
to help another. So we don't really condemn them, but
at least we are praying where we are bleeding on
our brothers worst still behind that if they meet people,
if they have the ability to herpe, they should do so.
Of course, it's not really uneasy something.

Speaker 3 (02:38:06):
Give sometimes reporting on these places compete them as bleak, unwelcoming,
or just miserable and certainly very sad. Things happen in
the jungle and in the camps, in human things, But
just like war or a natural disaster, sometimes the horrible
circumstances of the migration trail bring out the best in people.

(02:38:28):
As I've said before in this series, I'm comfortable in
the refugee camps, at least in part because people they
are looking out for one another. Kids don't stop playing
the moment they become refugees, not an adults stop laughing.
In fact, these things become even more important that how
we keep our humanity in a system that's inherently dehumanizing,
And people don't stop organizing or caring about one another either.

(02:38:50):
It's not just the migrants, of course. One of the
families who've been stuck in Bao Jiguito for almost a
month was given some money by a local Sender Front
member to take a bus. In Mexico, those who don't
have enough money to take buses, we'll hop onto freight trains,
and as they speed through towns and rail yards at night,
local people will throw plastic bags of food, water, and
clothing to them. In Panama City, I visited a Jesuit

(02:39:12):
run shelter for migrants called fate Erga.

Speaker 18 (02:39:15):
Well number Celias Cordnijo is Coordina or the Promotion Social Accompanimento.

Speaker 3 (02:39:26):
Panama.

Speaker 20 (02:39:27):
Alberto went down a Darien recently and we know from
firsthand experience that the difficulty they have is moving. So
some don't go through the stations, but they stay, so
they appear here in the city, and so they arrive

(02:39:47):
here and some decide to stay and forego all the
difficulty of moving forward.

Speaker 3 (02:39:53):
Despite having been set up as a refuge, recent changes
to Panamanian law had made that work difficult, and you.

Speaker 18 (02:39:59):
Don't pretty heard.

Speaker 20 (02:40:01):
We had to stop that service because the state literally
prohibited us as agencies from providing shelter and under the
premise that if we gave them shelter without them asking
for it, they could consider us as human traffickers.

Speaker 3 (02:40:18):
So what we do now is we give them.

Speaker 20 (02:40:21):
Food and if they decide to stay, well, we help
them with certain processes that we can call humanitarian aid
for sustainability.

Speaker 3 (02:40:32):
I've seen a wide variety of faith based aid in
my time at the border. Much of it has been fantastic,
but with more than a decade of refugee camps from
resource pot settings, I've also learned to be a bit
wary of faith based charity. But something Elias said early
in our talk gave me a great deal of respect
for him. It's not justin he said it, but he
took the time to address his comments to me as

(02:40:53):
a journalist because he saw this as a problem in
part created by the media. For its worth, I think
he's right. I think that as we try and help
on a difficult journey, we must always keep in mind.
He might come from a very different background than my
mutual Aid group, but we do seem to share the
same belief in solidarity with the migrants.

Speaker 19 (02:41:11):
Is a.

Speaker 20 (02:41:14):
Unfortunately much of the media narrative. What they do is
they victimize and ridicule people in family groups and turn
them into pariahs and beggars. Then that is insulting to
the dignity of the person. So the way they portray
migration is shameful in some cases, and this is very difficult.

(02:41:34):
Well for this, yes, I think that's very important.

Speaker 3 (02:41:40):
After this, I figured I address the issue head on.
I'm asking about the many churches and Christians I see
preaching hate against people coming to the southern border of
the US.

Speaker 20 (02:41:51):
There is a sector in the Catholic Church and the
Evangelical Church that opposes it and is more closely linked.
And they are in fact they are they're benefactors of
Trump's campaign. So this one and this one are there, well, well,
those are like groups that are rejecting, let's say, the

(02:42:14):
basic principle of the Church, which is that we must
welcome migrants and refugees. So they fundamentally reject it. So
they invent all these narratives that Haitians practice voodoo and
they eat pets, and this and that or that and
it's shameful mean, or like the Venezuelans, that the majority

(02:42:38):
of them are from Triandegua gang or that they come
from areas that are what you call problematic or chauvannista,
and that they are infuriating or that or that. All
the same narrative that was created when when the Maritos
left Cuba. And it's not that the Cuban government is
sending all the prisoners on the Madi l boats to

(02:43:01):
invade the United States. It's the same narrative.

Speaker 3 (02:43:05):
Then they asked what he thought of the government's plans
to close the day enda if they could even do that.

Speaker 20 (02:43:13):
People ask me, do you think the Darian gap is
going to close and that migration is going to disappear?
And I say, ask the Mexicans and the North Americans
if the Sonara Desert has stopped being a corridor for
people after Trump, Because there was a time when all
the media was focused on the migration that passed through
the Sonara and everything continues to happen, but then it

(02:43:35):
became invisible and ceased to exist for them. But people
continue to pass through, and people continue to die. So
as you say this, this is going to continue, maybe
not a half a million people, but the flow is
going to continue.

Speaker 3 (02:43:52):
It's going to continue.

Speaker 20 (02:43:54):
And then the question we should ask ourselves is what
are we going to do or how are we going
to accompany this flow? How are we going to accompanies
these lives? And in what way can let these people's
lives impact us.

Speaker 3 (02:44:09):
But like so many of us who work along the board,
he says, he's constantly fighting. It's negative messaging that encourages
people not to follow the natural impulse to help and
take care of one another.

Speaker 20 (02:44:21):
So it's not a question of how I always say,
and sometimes they tell me, oh, that you always speak
so badly of Panama. But it's not speaking badly of Panama.
I love my country and I feel that we in general,
the Panamanian communities are very welcoming and very affectionate with
the migrants. The problem is the narrative that is created

(02:44:43):
and then it generates to stimuli that end up with
a situation where are not seen so positively. And consequently,
last week we had a meeting perhaps on National Reality,
and we touched on on the subject of immigrants, and
the first reaction was, no, it's not the state that

(02:45:06):
pays the fare of the migrants.

Speaker 10 (02:45:07):
It's not that I mean, they pay their own fare.

Speaker 3 (02:45:12):
After a week of my interview requests being declined by
NGOs and government offices, I found my talk with Father
Alifs refreshing. It's nice to know that you're not the
only one who sees the system as it is, which
is fundamentally flawed and entirely propped up by misinformation, hatred
and ignorance. But I don't want to get bogged down
on that. Father Alias told me that when he sees migrants,

(02:45:32):
he sees God. In them, and that he experiences his
faith by helping others. My early experienced religion came in
high school from a priest who was a teacher who'd
been part of the anti apartheid movement in South Africa.
I'm not a religious person in myself, but I can
understand how seeing God and other people is not that
far from my own politics. Lifit seeing God and know
other people that impels people stand up against apartheid or

(02:45:52):
to dedicate their lives to helping migrants, then I respect that.
So after we come back, I want to try and
answer the question that pytheay Alias are ask what can
you do? Huge humor on us at the prop of

(02:46:24):
the hill we ran into them. Yeah. After getting back
from the Dad end and hearing the migrants share their
struggles as they waited in Mexico for an outlest designs
to lay and discourage them, I really struggled to come
to terms with everything I'd seen and was hearing a
bit to plenty of dangerous places I've seen war, state violence,

(02:46:45):
and terrorism. I know the tragedy of death and violence,
but the slow, deliberate suffering inflicted on migrants for people
who lied to us every day on television is particularly
hard to bear for me. As I mentioned at the
start of this series, I think the grim reality of
our migration system. On my first day in Bahajiqito, little
girl's head hanging limply from a makeshift stretcher a strangers

(02:47:05):
carried her into town. It's also cruel, so deliberate, and
so unnecessary, and it felt so disempowering. But that doesn't
mean there's nothing you can do. It doesn't mean there's
nothing I can do.

Speaker 22 (02:47:19):
All right, So basically what we're gonna be doing is
we're gonna go this way. I mean, we're gonna start,
We're gonna go down into this well. We're gonna go
that way and see where the light break is on
them of the hill in between those hills running cut up.
I'm not up in that area.

Speaker 3 (02:47:35):
That's James card Era of Border Kindness, sitting at the
roof of a group of five of us set out
on a water drop in the mountains east of Okumba.
It's an area called Valley of the Moon, where boulders
the size of trucks stack up against each other, where
people have been crossing the border for decades. This is
a remote area and not unlike the Daddy End. Much
of it is nearly impossible to access in a car.

(02:47:57):
To get water out here, we have to walk. And
if you out of water or injure yourself so you
can't walk out of here, it's possible you'll die, just
like the migaants do in the jungle. People get robbed here,
just like in the dad Enn And if it wasn't
for the five of us with our backpacks full of water,
people could die of thirst here just like they do
in the jungle. I thought I was packing water bottles

(02:48:17):
into my frame pack. I thought about little kids I've
met in Baho Chiquito. This isn't the place for children either,
but over the last eighteen months, I've met hundreds of
them out here. I've given them my jackets and hats,
warmed up milk for babies in my camping stove, and
even wrapped the little girl up in a milar blanket
with me to warm her up last year. Just like
the Dadienne. The suffering here is out of sight and

(02:48:38):
out of mind for most Americans, And in a year
where we're constantly being told democracies under threat, I think
a bear is mentioning that migrants are treated as humans
without rights even when they're inside this country, and that
their lives are seen as dispensable so long as whoever
is in office can look quote tough on migration and
make TV pundits and big money don't as happy. There
weren't any TV pundits or big money doon is on

(02:49:00):
our water drop, just a few of us everyday people.
Some people come out here because their family members across
the desert. Some come out because everyone who crosses a
desert is part of our family. Like Bonnio said, in
all humans are brothers, and none of us want our
brothers or sisters to die in their mountains, whatever their
passport might say. And so nearly every weekend, people all

(02:49:23):
along the border load up heavy bags for supplies. On
this drop. Each of us filled our packs with water,
cans of tuna, pineapple soup, some warm clothing, and in
this case an audio recorder recording recording in progress. Rhyme,
of course, just gave me an opportunity to discuss my

(02:49:44):
life's calling. Ensuring the correct fit of backpack harness systems.
It just doesn't wrap the straps. You'd either have to
drop the waistbelt or like these have adjustable frames, so
you can make them fit with those of the days.
For that, that's really pretty with everyone suitably adjusted and

(02:50:05):
ergonomically optimized. We twisted on the audio record as I
had attached the straps of our packs and set off.

Speaker 17 (02:50:11):
I just feel bad for you, because a lot of
dumb ship.

Speaker 3 (02:50:21):
From the edge of the dirt road. We took our
first steps into the desert.

Speaker 22 (02:50:25):
The first part is gonna be a little slippery. You
eat Shit's okay, don't be embarrassed. It happens.

Speaker 3 (02:50:39):
This part of the border isn't that far from a
Cumba where this time last year, James and I spent
a freezing night trying to keep people alive, running our
camping stoves on full blast, giving away our own jackets
who needed them more than us. At that time, I
just returned from a trip to North and East Syria,
which was stressful in its own way, and seeing both
what people are leaving and how we treat them when

(02:50:59):
they're here really pissed me off. A year later, with
bags full of water, JMS and I spoke about things
and how they got so much worse in the last
two years, but press coverage and more Importantly, donations have
been way lower. It's same story up and down the border,
record deaths, newer and harder migration routes, different migration patterns,

(02:51:21):
and the people who cried outside ice detention centers in
Trump's first term cheering for more walls and bigger DHS budgets. Meanwhile,
unlike the Trump era, we don't have the support of
thousands of liberal people in California's big cities. After the
Democrats cynically use migrant suffering in their twenty twenty campaign,
they abandoned them upon acquiring power, and their supporters have

(02:51:42):
mostly followed them. So that left five of us this
particular morning to load up bags and do the life
saving work of dropping water. On top of all the
state violence, there's been more and more interference with the
water drops, and as we got further into our route,
we made the increasingly common discovery that someone had taken
it up on themselves to destroy our supplies. S man

(02:52:08):
of ice, sick. That's probably though. These are slash slash.

Speaker 22 (02:52:14):
Ye try by the person's trinking a smirnof ice.

Speaker 3 (02:52:16):
Yeah, here's wrong. Yeah, they are fluns matterfuckers.

Speaker 22 (02:52:22):
I mean, I'm assuming it's a person who brought the
smirnoff Ice because it seems like a smirnoff Ice activity Feller. Yeah,
I don't see a VP agent rolling brew with a
smirnoff Ies.

Speaker 3 (02:52:32):
This isn't unique to border kindness. Someone has been shooting
supplies left by Borderlands Relief Collective half an hour west
of here recently, up and down the border. The combination
of total liberal and attention a xenophobic right wing hate
whipped up by streamers who I won't name, and pseudo
journalistic grifters who I will name, like Bill Maluganlugan, of course,
was previously famous for claiming that the cop had a

(02:52:54):
tampon dropped in his coffee in twenty twenty. Spoiler alert,
if you're not familiar, this wasn't true. Belugan now works.
It's a quote I'm quote Border reporter for Fox News, Danny,
good morning to you.

Speaker 23 (02:53:03):
We are in Santa Siegro, a part of San Diego
right now, where hundreds of illegal immigrants have just been
massed street released from border patrol custody. This bus you
see right here is apparently an NGO or Volunteer organization bus.
They've all just gotten off a border patrol bus. Two
of them. Actually, they're now waiting to board this bus.
I've talked to several of them from Peru, from India,

(02:53:26):
from Colombia. The group from Peru told me they are
here to work. They are going to Atlanta and Minneapolis
to see if we can talk to some of them
real quick. Old espanon the so Ecuadora, don't US and
New York going to New York.

Speaker 3 (02:53:41):
They're do on the so On. They're on the so
Costa Rica. Don't live US? And lost Atlanta, New Jersey,
don the New Jersey, New Jersey, dont theyve US?

Speaker 15 (02:53:53):
In Chicago?

Speaker 23 (02:53:54):
Chicago, Colombia, Columbia, Kereen, Trabaja, No no asilo yet they
say they want asylum. They don't want to work.

Speaker 3 (02:54:05):
They've done their own Well, where are you from? Sag Sanag?

Speaker 23 (02:54:11):
I think Senegal? From Senegal? We saw a lot of
Senegalese in Lukeville, Arizona.

Speaker 3 (02:54:16):
Where in the US do you want to go to?

Speaker 9 (02:54:17):
What city?

Speaker 3 (02:54:19):
Francis France?

Speaker 23 (02:54:21):
France?

Speaker 3 (02:54:23):
France, France speak France. Oh, he speaks French. I obviously
do not speak French. The Loogan's lack of language competency
isn't the only issue here. It's a holy ecosystem of
media built up of yuristically filming migrants without giving them
a chance to humanize themselves. And it's not just a
right wing issue.

Speaker 24 (02:54:39):
This week, each day has been marked by new daily
records of migrants, both crossing the southern border and landing
in custody. The federal government is struggling to keep up.
Three Homeland security official say Customs and Border Protection is
holding about twenty seven thousand migrants and processing facilities as
of yesterday. President Biden spoke with Mexico's president about the
issue earlier today see News Homeland Security Corresponding Julia Ainsley

(02:55:02):
joins me now to dig into this trend. So, Julia, first,
just give us some perspective here. How is Customs and
Border Protection operating right now? And what are your sources
saying about this historic rise in migrants at the border.

Speaker 25 (02:55:14):
Well, in some ways, there's actually a small victory here,
is in Clay when you look at the fact that
CBP is seeing a record number of migrants, that they've
been at a record high now for three days in
a row. They broke the record of twelve thousand, maintained
that and There are now almost twenty seven thousand migrants
in CBP custody. When we got to just about twenty
thousand and twenty nineteen under the Trump administration, there were

(02:55:36):
migrants who were there for weeks and couldn't lie down
to sleep because they were so overcrowded. Now, because of
the technology, they're actually able to not even hold people
past seventy two hours and very quickly release them. But
the tragedy comes after that. There are a lot of
migrants who are being released on the streets without being
taken to nonprofits, and some of them don't exactly know
where they're supposed to go, even though CBP does try

(02:55:57):
to coordinate with the cities where they are released. That's
definitely happening in the Tucson, Arizona area and Eagle Pass, Texas.
Even though they are scrambling as fast as they can
to release migrants, that are still thousands who remain in
the field, a lot of them crowded under a bridge
an Eagle Pass, just waiting for CBP to take them in.
The reason a lot of people can give you different reasons. One,

(02:56:19):
perhaps Mexico is interdicting as many migrants as they were
earlier in the year. They're now lower on funds because
of these record highs. Another reason sometimes migrants will say
that they're worried about a future Republican administration or a
future Trump administration that might be harder ANDed, so they
think now is the time to come.

Speaker 3 (02:56:36):
Two minutes into this report and we haven't actually heard
from a single migrant. All we hear is numbers. We
also haven't heard about or detention, which is the time
this was released with at its peak. Again, it's just
numbers and CBP statements. I should also point out that
lots of people are held for more than seventy two
hours or three days. The Department of Homeland Security office

(02:56:57):
who inspected general report published in November twenty twenty three,
a month before the new segment that you just heard,
said that fifty six percent of people were held for
longer than that, for some people being held for more
than a month. This information is publicly available and even
had a press release. I found it very quickly and
I reported on at the time. But NBC chowse not
to seeing migrants as a quote homeland security issue, not

(02:57:20):
as people. It's fundamentally the problem and the way we
fix that is showing up as people to help. Despite
the massive media focus on the border in the last year,
I very rarely see other journalists actually at the border.
To give him credit. Malgan does sometimes show up, but
he doesn't stay long, and he doesn't really have the
capacity to interview migrants, even if you wanted to. The

(02:57:41):
border is vast and mostly empty. It's a place I've
come to know and come to love in my time
dropping water and recreating and doing other mutilaid projects out here.
Now they have a better understanding of the journeys people
go through to get here, even more determined to make
this small part of their trip less dangerous. And besides,
I get to see cool rocks. Oh say, with mister
potato here, it looks like he's dying off.

Speaker 22 (02:58:03):
Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, God no, I
see that. Well, now you say it like that, it
looks very Yeah, the eyes are real close to each other. Yeah,
it's a very melting potato.

Speaker 3 (02:58:21):
Among the cool rocks. Last weekend I found a mini
mouse doll. It reminded me of Miami, the little girl
I'd met him. Boo. I give my number to hundreds
of people before leaving Panama and heard from dozens, but
up until that I hadn't heard from Miami and her mum.
I heard of people being kidnapped, robbed, raped, and ransomed

(02:58:43):
in Mexico. Some of them have been caught by authorities
and pushed back to Chiapas, and others have been unable
to leave Tapatula after having all their money stolen. I
wanted which, if any of these fates had before been Miami,
and if she was still having a pepper pig adventure.
Sadly between where I met her or where I found them,
Mini mouse Doll, There's nothing else I can do. They're

(02:59:05):
here in the mountains outside San Diego, where the wind
blows so strong sometimes you can barely stand up. I
can do something without the ability to do something, something
which I know is meaningful. I don't know how I'd
managed to stay on this beat. It's just too heartbreaking
to meet good people, share meals and laughter, in deep
conversations with them, and then see them fed into a

(02:59:27):
teeth of a machine that robs, brutalizes, and kills them.
So that Joe Biden can stand on a podium and
say that border crossing to down this month they are down,
and that's allowedly due to enforcement in Mexico. But I
want to make sure that everyone who does cross the
border can do so safely and they don't have to
die on US soil after fighting so hard to make
it here. This hasn't been the case for everyone this year.

(02:59:48):
My friends up and down the border have carried far
too many little memorial crosses into the mountains. And depending
on the election results next week, what we're doing might
be illegal soon, but that'll never make it wrong. Since
early September, nine people have died in a little part
of southern California alone. My friends who searched for them
sometimes found their remains and undertaken the thankless task of

(03:00:09):
sharing the bad news with their families, then constructive memorials
in their memory. This is just one of the many
dangerous parts of the migration route north, but it's the
one that I can help with. If you're nearby are
visiting for a while, there are several organizations dropping water
on the border. Border Angels, Border Kindness and Borderlands Relief
Collective here in San Diego, Arho, Samaritans, noms Perthes in Arizona.

(03:00:31):
Groups you search and rescue as well. Obviously, not everyone
lives here at the USA is Southern border, but more
than half of the population does live within one hundred
miles of a border. Even if you don't live in
the USA, or maybe you do but you don't live
anywhere near the border, I guarantee there are migrants in
your community. In the last year, I've worked with migrant
welcome committees in Maryland, church groups in the rural south,

(03:00:53):
Sikhs on the West Coast, occurred on the East Coast,
to name just a few. Without a type of fanfare,
people all over this country are making space their homes
and their hearts for strangers, feeding them, housing them, and
helping them get set up in a new place. For
the most part, it doesn't get coverage you a democratic administration.
It doesn't get much public support either, but that doesn't
mean it isn't necessary. Aside from all the reasons it's important,

(03:01:16):
dropping water on the border is also fun for me.
It's helped me learn more about where I live. I
appreciate the desert and make new friends who generally share
my outlook on the world. I love being outdoors, and
I'd be outdoors anyway, but it's way. My hiker is
about much more than myself. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 20 (03:02:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:02:01):
What does that mean when you get somewhere with signal?
Yeah yeah, please do all of you? Please share it.
I'd like to follow your journey if that's okay, and
maybe we can talk again when you're in America. I
gave my number to hundreds of people in the Daddy Inn,
as well as some websites they might find useful. Wan
to NGOs explained the CBP one app are the ones

(03:02:22):
that might direct them to resources along their route. Last
Sunday night, as I was absent by and least thumbing
through a shotgun reloading manual in my living room as
I love to do, my phone started buzzing. It's done
this so many times in the last months. Mostly it's
a photo of someone I met updating me on their journey,
or one of the little wooden animals that they give
to children, which has made its way to Mexico and

(03:02:43):
hopefully giving them some comfort along the way. Often it's
less positive news someone's been robbed or simply run out
of money and they need help. But I got two
messages this Sunday which lifted my spirits. No Emi, the
Little Girl who had an adventure like Pepper Pig in
the jungle. Why did you know how it's And she
sent me a photo of the tiny stone bear that
I'd given her. She also wanted to know if we

(03:03:04):
could still go to see Minnie Moles, who she came
to America, which I assured her we could. I think
it would be quite apt to visit a place which
builds itself as the happiest place on Earth, where someone
I met in one of the most desperate parts of
the planet. The second message was from one of the
migrants i'd met in the jungle, telling me she'd made
it to America, not just to America, but to a
part of the border where I've been dropping water with

(03:03:25):
my friends. Just a few weeks before I left for Panama,
she sent me a photo of a rock with a
message on it one way, which I'm very familiar. She
told me about her walk, one which I've made myself,
and she taught me how hard it was. I said,
I knew, but really I don't know, because I wasn't
carrying months of trauma with me on the mountain. She's
the only person out of one hundred son I met

(03:03:46):
who's made it here. Most of them are in Mexico now,
and most of them will remain there or maybe get
sent back home, or maybe they'll make a desperate attempt
across this week. As you hear this before the election,
it made me so happy to see someone safely here,
one person out of hundreds. For so many of the
migrants I met, America was a dream, and the journey

(03:04:06):
with a nightmare. Since the series began airing, I've seen
videos of people I care about clinging to freight trains
that bruce bodies after being beaten. I've helped them find
healthcare after they were sexually assaulted, and tried to find
room at overcrowded shelters. I've helped trans ladies navigate all
of this and transphobia and misogyny, and tried to find
resources in French and English and Portuguese for non Spanish speakers.

(03:04:30):
I'd hope that I'd finished this series with a single
good story, a story of someone who made it, who's
living the American dream that people died for in the jungle.
But I can't, because even the people who made it
here are here temporarily. I'm broadcasting anything about their journey
would put them at risk whoever wins the election next week.
So instead I want to end with how you can

(03:04:51):
make a difference, and I'll start with a story and
how little things can make big differences. One day in Baljuquito,
of sitting around with a few Venezuelan kids, probably four
to eight years old, ripping pages out of my right
in the rain note book to make paper aeroplanes. Before
I interviewed their parents, I asked him about the jungle.
They said it was scary and they had nightmares. Now,

(03:05:12):
I often find kids in these places get scared of
the dark, and I used to bring these crappy little
electric lights for them, but they're bulky and they're not
very good. Recently, I've been carrying the little packets of
fishing glow sticks instead. They gasped about ten bucks for
maybe one hundred of the little green lights. So I
poured out my glove sticks, cut my hands and snapped one.
The children amaze of the little glowing road. So I

(03:05:33):
gave them the rest of the packet. I told them
they could keep them for any time they were scared
of the dark. Nearly a month later, I sometimes get
a message on my phone with a photo of a
little tiny glow stick on a note of thanks. One
thing that Father Elia said that really impacted me is
that when he meets migrants, he asked what he sees
of God in them, and his work for them is
where he finds what there is of God and himself. Think.

(03:05:55):
I've struggled so much with this serious impart because I've
seen so much of the best of other people, indeed
the best of myself, into such hard places. I always
struggle a little to readjust after trips like this, but
this one's been particularly hard. In the jungle, I saw
people helping, and in a sense, we were all in
it together. When it rained, we all got wet, and
when it got hot, we all huddled together in the shade.

(03:06:18):
We shared bottles of water, We sat at the same
tables and ate together. I can't really begin to experience
a full, varily inexperience because I've been lucky enough never
to have anything that bad to run away from. Better,
have experienced incredible solidarity and kindness for the people who
went through it. I've also experienced the incredible indifference of
people at home, and indeed of the states and governments

(03:06:38):
of the world. The Colombian friends I met Las Blancas
and Barjigito, who are handcuffed and deported and ripped from
their families, have already invited me to come and stay
in their homes in Colombia, but if their families make
it here, they won't encounter that kind of hospitality. Just
last week, I helped to translate for a Venezuelan family
living on the street in San Diego. Some of my

(03:06:59):
friends do sponsor migrants, and that's something anyone can do
if you're able to. It's an incredible thing you can
do to change someone's life, and I can't encourage you
enough to do so. I really do see the best
of myself, of my friends, and of humanity, and I
work to help migrants. I would say that on reflector.
And I wasn't really an anarchist until twenty eighteen, when
I watched a state to the world abandoned thousands of

(03:07:19):
migros in Tijuana and climbed a fence with my friends
to take care of them, and specifically to distribute three
huge backpacks full of waffles and another friend had sent
from his waffle factory. I'd stopped believing in the benevolence
of the state a long time before, but it wasn't
really until then that I really understood the power of
people organizing horizontally to provide each other with dignity. Ever

(03:07:40):
since then, I've drawn a lot of hope for humanity
in the same place as I despare for people. Maybe
that's why I keep going back. Since then, at the border,
I've seen people die. I've held crying babies and crying parents.
They've also shared meals with people from around the world,
made friends for life, and learned curdish disco songs about
killing people. I've danced around campfires with Pep. But I

(03:08:00):
couldn't imagined meeting when I first made my own journey here.
Last Christmas, when i'd normally be at the bar with
my friends, I stand the rock in the desert, eating
a cold vegan m Marie with an Ecuadorian family and
some of my friends. And all the Christmases I can remember,
I never felt so much like I was in the
right place, doing the right thing, with the right people.

Speaker 18 (03:08:21):
What.

Speaker 3 (03:08:21):
I've seen a lot of terrible things at the border
in the jungle, and I'll never forget those. More importantly,
I've seen that together we can do incredible things, and
we can make the state irrelevant, especially in the places
it's chosen to be absent. I don't think we should
make demands of a state anymore. It's simply not in
its nature to care. But I do think we should
make demands of ourselves. I don't believe in God, and

(03:08:42):
I've written a whole dissertation about people who burn churches.
But I think I see something that's just as special
to me in the experience of mutual aid, and in
a way it fulfills not only people's material needs but
also our human desire for dignity and mutual respect. When
I drop water at the border or carry someone's bags
in the jungle, I see myself in them, and I
hope they see themselves a little bit of me. But

(03:09:04):
right now, asylum system is so broken the very few
people even make it far enough to drink the water
I leave at the border, And despite the border featuring
heavily in this year's election, there seems to be no
national concern about the way our tax dollars brutalize people
across the continent. So I want to end by asking
you what you can do. It might be coming to
unhere to drop water. It might be sending some money

(03:09:24):
to one of the links I include the description. It
might be offering to translate for asylum seekers. It might
just be talking to people and helping to change the narrative.
You can vote or not next week, but there isn't
a box you can take that will change the things
I saw in the jungle. Trump wanted to deport millions
more people. Harris wanted to pass a bill that will
kill more people. You can't pass your commitments off to

(03:09:47):
someone whose box you take every four years. You have
to take them on for yourself. The way we change
things is in a way we do things every day,
every week. No one's every four years. I want to
end with noise and have a message to the American people.
I also want to ask if anyone of those how
to get cheap tickets to Disneyland, because I have just
looked that up and I cannot stress enough ho but

(03:10:08):
I am to afford it.

Speaker 11 (03:10:15):
Please excuse us because we know that we are knocking
on that door. There are a lot of us, but
we are desperate because complaining about the president we have
is not helping us. No, he's doing almost nothing. So
our children have no future, and our country won't support us.
It's not easy to leave our parents, our friends, our relatives,

(03:10:36):
our grandparents, and we do not know if we will
ever return or if we will ever see them again.
It is not easy. But we also think about a
future for our children. And I do not know what
has happened, but we feel like living in a dictatorship.
We are living something very unpleasant and we do not
get any help. But those who help us, we want

(03:10:56):
to say thank you. They opened that door for us.
They've opened many doors for many Venezuelans, and well we
hope in faith that they will open them for us.

Speaker 3 (03:11:13):
I want to take this opportunity to thank a few
people who made this possible. Firstly, Daddy and a Brusse
I fix her. She was incredible. Secondly, I want to
thank iHeart for paying for this. Like I said, it's
been nearly a decade that I've been asking to do
this story and I'm just really happy that they trusted
me to do it. Thirdly, I want to thank everyone

(03:11:34):
who trusted me with their stories, everybody who stayed in
touch as they've come north. I want to thank Border
Kindness and Borderland Relief Collective who have both welcomed me
on their drops, and it's not always easy to be
around a journalist. It's not easy to let someone record
everything you're doing out there and their inherent risks to that,
and I really appreciate them trusting me. I want to

(03:11:55):
thank dutch Ware Hammocks, who rush shipped to me a
hammock when my old one tore right before I left.
And I think most of all, I want to thank
all of you for listening, taking the time, and all
the listeners who have reached out to say they're listening
to the series, people who have reached out to ask
how they can help. I would love to organize a
way to help the people I've spoken to. I spoke
to someone just this morning who's still stuck in Tapachula

(03:12:17):
because she was robbed and her and her daughter are
five hundred bucks short for the bus to ride north
to Tijuana. I don't have the capacity to organize that
right now, but if someone else does, they should reach
out to me, because I would really like to help
these people who have become my friends and who I
care about, and who are right now stuck in a

(03:12:38):
very dangerous place because someone in Washington, d C. Has
made a choice to treat them with cruelty and not kindness.
So if that's you, if you're the person who could
to minister that, please let me know. Thanks, and I
hope you enjoyed the series.

Speaker 2 (03:12:53):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 11 (03:12:59):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (03:13:01):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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