Braving Robbery and Rape in Race to Reach US Before Trump Takes Over

In a distant corner of southeastern Panama, 15 men, women and children sat on a fallen tree in the forest, resting. They had been walking for three days through one of the most inhospitable tracts of jungle in the world. Besides torrential downpours, mountainous terrain and raging rivers, they had to endure horrors that may haunt them forever.

A day before, a group of four men with shotguns and machetes had emerged from a bamboo thicket, shouting at them to kneel on the ground. “They took all our money and food,” said Abel Rojas, 42, a street-seller from Venezuela. A woman in a pink T-shirt and black leggings stood up and put her hands on her chest and groin, mimicking what the men had done to her, sexually assaulting her while they searched for money they believed she had hidden on her.

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From the Sahara to the Mediterranean and the English Channel, this is the age of mass migration and dangerous odysseys for those fleeing desperate situations in search of a better life. There can hardly be a more daunting gateway to this dream than the so-called Darién Gap: a roughly 70-mile stretch of isolated mountainous jungle which spans the border of Colombia and Panama. As the only strip of land connecting North and South America, it has become the world’s busiest highway for migrants trying to get into the US.

For many the journey starts on a plane to wherever they can afford in south America and a bus journey up to Colombia. From there it involves entering the dense jungle of the Darién Gap to cross the border into Panama, on foot and in boats aided by people smugglers and trafficking gangs. If they make it out the other side, they continue on through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and finally into Mexico; the last frontier before the United States border and, on the other side of it, the American dream.

From wild animals to venomous snakes and insects, the threats faced by migrants here are legion. Many of those who wander into this wilderness never come out, their skeletons grim landmarks for those who follow, a terrifying reminder of the dangers they face.

Yet migrants come from all over the world, not only from the region’s failed states — such as Venezuela, which has lost roughly one third of its population over the past few years — but also from troubled countries much further away, including Syria, Iran, Bangladesh and China.

Last year alone, some 500,000 migrants walked through the Darién jungle. The figure for 2024 is expected to be even greater.

When I followed part of the jungle trail last week, I met a Nigerian entrepreneur, an Angolan electrician and a shoe salesman from Haiti. They had all got on flights from their countries to South American cities from where they boarded buses up to the northeast of Colombia. Young and old, men and women, all I spoke to were united by a single vision: reaching America before president-elect Donald Trump reaches the White House on January 20. For many the peril is worth it to reach a country where they can live safely, seek asylum, and may already have friends and relatives to help them set up a life.

Many brought with them tales of robbery and sexual violence. Some bore grim videos of those who had died along the way. “Americans must be more conscious of the fact that this is their problem, not Panama’s,” the Panamanian leader, José Raúl Mulino, told me in his presidential palace last week. “They (the migrants) want to go north, it’s their dream, the American dream …We must resolve this in a bilateral way with the US.”

Panama, a close American ally, was trying to control the migrant flow, he said. It was fencing off parts of the remote and mountainous border with Colombia and beginning repatriation flights of some migrants. But “everything indicates that this human drama unfolding in the jungle is going to continue, leaving families with dead and children without fathers”, he said.

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In a muddy alley I met Mangena Nadege, 36, a schoolteacher from Cameroon in central Africa. She looked depressed, wishing she could return to her homeland. “I thought that the Darién Gap was a highway with cars,” she said.

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In the line was Juan Olmedo, a vegetable seller from the Venezuelan city of Barquisimeto, who had sold a car for $1,000 to finance his journey and hoped to reach Houston in Texas, where he has a cousin. Like all the others, he was eager to get to America before Trump’s inauguration.

“Trump doesn’t want migrants in America,” he said. “But he should show a humanitarian spirit and help us, we are decent, hard-working people.”

Olmedo had left behind children of 10 and 7 at home with their mother and began to cry as he thought of them. But he was glad he had not brought them with him: he and other Venezuelans he was travelling with had been targeted by the machete gang of robbers too.

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Women and two girls suffered a worse fate, subjected to the same sexual assaults as those in the other group. Two women in their twenties were held back to be raped, said Olmedo. They were allowed to rejoin their families later.

Many more perils lurk along the road to the north, particularly in lawless Mexico, much of whose territory is under the sway of ruthless drug cartels which often kidnap and kill migrants. Some suffocate in poorly ventilated lorries on their way north to the American border.

This is a terrifying prospect for Nadege, the teacher from Cameroon, who had no idea she would have to walk through the jungle, let alone risk kidnapping by gangsters. “I would never have come if I had known what I was facing,” she said. “Now I cannot go back.”