Inside the Darién Gap: A Capurganá Diary

Counter Punch

Plastered onto the side of the glassed-in immigration office at the dock in Necoclí – the northwestern Colombian city just across the Gulf of Urabá from the Darién Gap – is a poster warning of the hazards of northbound migration. Over recent years, more than 1.2 million people from a mind-boggling array of countries have risked their lives to cross the Gap, the 106-kilometer stretch of roadless territory and formidable jungle that spans Colombia and Panama and constitutes the only land bridge between South and Central America. Most of them hoped to reach the United States, the very country that makes much of the world unlivable in the first place while simultaneously criminalizing migration, thereby forcing the global have-nots down increasingly lethal routes. 

The protagonists of the poster are the Díaz family – mom, dad, and two young daughters – whose portrait appears superimposed over an image of a small boat packed with passengers. According to the poster, which is in Spanish, la familia Díaz had set out “in search of a better future,” boarding just such a boat as they made their way toward los Estados Unidos: “Two days later, a rescue team found their lifeless bodies, together with 59 other people who had also succumbed to the river’s fury.” 

When I last visited Necoclí in January, the sign had already lost its intended audience. Hardly any migrants transit the Darién Gap these days, a result of the decision by current gringo sociopath-in-chief Donald Trump to effectively shut down the US border with Mexico and dispense with the concept of asylum. In the first three months of 2026, for example, Panama recorded a total of 92 arrivals from Colombia via the jungle; in August 2023 alone, there were 81,946. I, however, certainly found myself thinking a lot about la familia Díaz over the two-hour course of a high-speed, spine-shattering boat ride from Necoclí to the village of Capurganá, which lies inside the Darién Gap and which along with the nearby village of Acandí served as the principal points of departure for migrants entering the jungle. 

This was my second visit to Capurganá, the first having taken place in January 2024, when I, too, entered the jungle as a “migrant.” READ MORE AT COUNTER PUNCH.

Israel and the US are erasing Iran and Lebanon's ancient heritage

Middle East Eye

In early 2001, the Taliban blew up two giant Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, which dated from the sixth century.

The world erupted in outrage at the destruction of cultural heritage, and western media engaged in handwringing over the loss of statues that most people presumably had not known existed in the first place but were nonetheless symbolic of our "collective humanity".

Philip T Reeker, deputy spokesman for the State Department of the United States, issued a press statement declaring the US to be "distressed and baffled" by the Taliban's decision to demolish the Buddhas and other ancient artefacts: "Deliberate destruction of statues and sculpture held as sacred by peoples of different faiths is incomprehensible."

Of course, when the US launched the so-called "war on terror" later that same year and undertook to bomb Afghanistan to smithereens, there was no similar distress over the "deliberate destruction" or the mass slaughter of "peoples of different faiths". . . .

Since October 2023, the US-backed genocidal war on Gaza has officially killed more than 73,000 people, although the true death toll is undoubtedly much higher.

But it's not just about killing. In both Gaza and Lebanon, genocide, ecocide and historicide are inextricably linked. And as Israel continues with US help to pursue the annihilation of peoples and cultures, it's also an annihilation of the very pretence of a collective humanity. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The US border runs straight through the World Cup

On June 11, the FIFA World Cup 2026 kicked off in Mexico, which, along with the United States and Canada, is cohosting this year’s tournament in an ostensible display of continental unity.

From the get-go, the whole shared hosting concept was rather ludicrous, given that one of the hosts is particularly bad at playing with others. For starters, the US maintains a system of overzealous visa restrictions and “travel bans” for citizens of an array of nations, which renders an already socioeconomically exclusive event even more so and shatters the illusion of international camaraderie that the World Cup is supposed to embody.

The US also presides over an insanely militarised frontier with cohost Mexico, a country US commander-in-chief Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to bomb and invade. In other unsportsmanlike behaviour, Trump has referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists; in 2019, The New York Times reported his suggestion that US soldiers shoot migrants and that an alligator-filled moat be installed along the border. . . .

For its part, Mexico’s decision to cohost an abominably expensive tournament – rather than devote such vast resources to, say, tracking down the country’s more than 134,000 disappeared persons – has been seen as a slap in the face by many Mexicans. Most of the disappearances took place following the US-backed launch of the so-called “war on drugs” in 2006, which has amounted to a war on the poor. . . Meanwhile, FIFA’s lengthy history of corruption, greed, hypocrisy and assorted other vices has been dutifully upheld by the organisation’s president, Gianni Infantino, who in December presented Trump with the very first “FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World”.

The prize was apparently spontaneously invented by Infantino in a shameless act of brown-nosing to coax Trump out of his tantrum at having been denied the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. And who better to receive the inaugural FIFA award than the number one backer of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. READ MORE AT ALJAZEERA ENGLISH.

Western Media Normalize Ethnic Cleansing of Lebanon by Viewing It Through Israel’s Eyes

 FAIR

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.  

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. . . . Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? . . . 

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. . . . And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy. 

While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip. READ MORE AT FAIR.

The US, Israel and the normalisation of scandal

Al Jazeera English

In late April, the Hondurasgate platform and the Spanish media outlet Canal Red began leaking incriminating audios regarding recent machinations by the United States and Israel in Latin America.

One batch of audios, for example, indicates that Israel financed the release from prison of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year sentence in the US for drug trafficking and other transgressions. As per the write-up on the Hondurasgate website, Hernandez will now play a key role in carrying out US-Israeli military and economic designs in the region. . . . 

The second, perhaps, is that the world has reached such a distinctly abominable state that nothing really shocks us any more. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one

 Middle East Eye

On 23 April, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that "dozens of children go missing each week" in the Gaza Strip "against the backdrop of the postwar chaos" - a curious euphemism, no doubt, for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the Palestinian territory, which proceeds apace despite the ceasefire that was ostensibly implemented last year.

The article begins with four-year-old Mohammed Ghaban, who disappeared in early April in northern Gaza: "[H]e had been playing with his brother in front of his displaced family's tent. He went inside, asked for a hug, put on his sandals and went out." And then he was gone.

The author cites an estimate from the Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared that 2,900 children "disappeared during the war", with 2,700 bodies thought to be trapped under the rubble and the remaining 200 simply missing.

Such statistics are in keeping with the modus operandi of the Israeli military, which, according to the official fatality count, has killed more than 72,500 Palestinians in Gaza since the launch of the genocide in 2023, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

May Day in the age of AI: The new war on workers

 Al Jazeera English

On May 1, much of the world celebrates International Workers’ Day, or May Day, honouring workers’ rights and the history of the labour movement. A public holiday in many countries, May Day has traditionally been stifled in the United States, a nation that has never been big on either international labour solidarity or workers’ rights.

The US and its tagalong to the north, Canada, instead celebrate their own exclusive Labour Day in September. But the origins of May Day lie in the US itself, where, on the first of May in the year 1886, mass strikes on behalf of an eight-hour workday broke out and were quickly met with deadly police repression.

Nowadays, workers’ rights are under fire from another direction: artificial intelligence (AI), which threatens the very right of workers to, well, work.

In January, Amazon – the second-largest employer in the US after Walmart – moved to lay off 16,000 employees, the latest round of sweeping layoffs on account of AI. In October 2025, The New York Times reported that the company had plans “to replace more than half a million jobs with robots”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel's campaign of terror in Lebanon takes another psychopathic turn

How Iran is a victim of US-Israeli terrorism

Middle East Eye

My first visit to Iran took place in September 2015, when I attended a conference in Tehran on the subject of “Iranian terror victims” - ranging, in this case, from the thousands of Iranians killed by the pathological regime-change cult known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq, to the Iranian scientists assassinated with the apparently not-so-secret help of the Israeli Mossad. . . .

At the conference, I spoke with Shohreh Pirani, the widow of Iranian scientist Dariush Rezaeinejad, fatally shot outside his home in 2011 at the age of 35. Pirani and her four-year-old daughter had witnessed the assassination, but despite the ensuing psychological trauma, Pirani assured me she felt nothing but pity for her husband’s killers. After all, she reasoned, such acts of terrorism were unquestionably driven by desperation.

Fast forward to the present moment, and the number of Iranian victims of terrorism has skyrocketed in accordance with the unprovoked and downright psychopathic war launched against the country by the United States and Israel on 28 February. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

US Media Mostly Care for Iranians When They Can Be Used to Justify Bombing

FAIR

The United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28, propelling the entire region into a predictable cataclysm of unprecedented proportions.

This puts paid to the alleged “peacemaking” project of US President Donald Trump, who was supposed to be keeping the country out of international wars rather than actively seeking to expedite the end of the world.

The attacks put an abrupt end to the negotiations underway between the US and Iran—to the delight of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always viewed as anathema anything remotely resembling diplomacy or the pursuit of peace.

Three days before the joint strikes, a Politico exclusive (2/25/26) reported that “senior advisers” to Trump “would prefer Israel strike Iran before the United States launches an assault on the country.” As per the report, administration officials were “privately arguing that an Israeli attack would trigger Iran to retaliate, helping muster support from American voters for a US strike.”

So much for subsequent US/Israeli attempts to cast the assault as “preemptive” in nature. Indeed, there is nothing at all “preemptive” about forcing Iran to retaliate; this is instead what you would call a deliberate provocation. READ MORE AT FAIR.