The first time I spoke with survivors of the Darién Gap – the notoriously deadly stretch of jungle on the border between Colombia and Panama – was in 2021 during my brief imprisonment in Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest immigration detention centre, located in the Mexican state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala.
I was the only detainee who hailed from the United States – the very country responsible for Mexico’s migration crackdown in the first place – and I had ended up in migrant jail purely on account of my own stupidity and laziness in renewing my tourist visa. My fellow inmates were facing rather more existential predicaments, and many of them – from Haiti, Cuba, Bangladesh, and beyond – had been forced to traverse the Darién Gap as they fled political and economic calamity in the hopes of eventually finding refuge in the US.
Within the walls of Siglo XXI, where dreams of refuge had been indefinitely put on hold, the Darién was a recurring topic of conversation – a sort of spontaneous exercise in group therapy, it seemed. Women recounted the numerous cadavers they had encountered during their journeys. Rape, it was clear, was rampant in the jungle – to the extent that even those who were not personally assaulted, were vicariously traumatised. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.