In November of last year, Jesús, a 33-year-old man from the Venezuelan state of Falcón, spent 10 days traversing the Darién Gap – the treacherous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama – with his wife and two-year-old son. They were but three of the nearly 250,000 people who survived the crossing in 2022, most of them hoping to eventually reach the United States several thousand kilometres to the north.
I spoke with Jesús recently in the town of Metetí in Panama’s Darién province, where he is washing cars in an attempt to scrape together funds for his family’s onward journey. He recounted to me how, at one point in the jungle, he had been tumbling down a near-vertical hill of mud and had frantically grabbed what he thought was a tree root – but which turned out to be a hand belonging to a human corpse. He had been disconcerted at first, he said, but had then thought to himself: “That hand saved my life.”
The same cannot be said for US President Joe Biden, who, despite continuously promising to lend a helping hand to persons seeking refuge, is currently working to dismantle the very concept of asylum – in contravention of both international and domestic law. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.