MAGA warnings of an enemy invasion through the gap helps justify cruel policies targeting vulnerable people who have been victimized by U.S. foreign policy
Known in Spanish as Tapón del Darién, the Darién Gap is a 106-kilometer stretch of jungle straddling Panama and Colombia that encompasses two UNESCO world heritage sites and national parks[1] and constitutes the only roadless interruption in the Pan-American Highway linking Alaska to the tip of Argentina.
In the 1550s, the Darién Gap hosted the first successful European settlements on the continental Americas, and was subsequently the site of the horrendous massacre of Indigenous peoples by Vasco Nunez de Balboa and other Spanish conquistadors.
Nearly a half millennium later, some 800,000 migrants undertake the perilous journey along the gap each year as part of their quest to reach the U.S., which is still another 3,400 miles away.
Like the Bermuda Triangle, many people who enter the Darién Gap do not make it out alive.
Those who do are forever haunted by what they experience.
Routinely, they have to step over rotting corpses and skulls, are shaken down, beaten and robbed, and forced to endure being sexually assaulted, all while navigating treacherous jungle terrain, often on limited food and water, which is difficult to carry.
Surviving the elements over a long distance in the jungle requires outstanding stamina and dexterity (one survivor said you had to be like “spiderman”) and usually a bit of luck.
Among the hazards on the Darién Gap—which migrants call the “green hell”—are venomous snakes and other threatening animals along with onrushing currents that can sweep people up in a flash.
Belén Fernández[2] is a radical journalist who has just published a book with Rutgers University Press, The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey Through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, which describes her own experience undertaking the perilous trek through the Darién Gap.
Fernández’s journey follows on the heels of bandana-clad backpackers in the 1960s who “saw something sacrosanct in the blot of roadless rain forest dividing South America,” which symbolized a “break in the paved dagger of civilization” known as the Pan-American Highway.[3]
Today, the Darién Gap epitomizes the gross injustices of the global economy and deadliness of life for the Earth’s have-nots who have to risk their lives to survive and are often criminalized for doing so.[4]
Quoting from Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, Fernández believes that “it’s wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through.”[5]
Fernández had developed a vague conception of the Darién Gap because her father spent a portion of his youth in the Panama Canal Zone, where her grandfather served as the director of military intelligence for the Pentagon’s Southwest Command.
The Darién Gap re-entered Fernández’s consciousness in 2020 when she heard stories about it from inmates at the Tapachula detention facility in Chiapas, Mexico, where she was imprisoned for a brief period after overstaying her Mexican visa.
The inmates, who were primarily Cuban and Venezuelan, talked about the Darién Gap being strewn with corpses in various stages of decomposition, and how they had navigated mountains of mud and rushing rivers on their journey and witnessed some of their compatriots rescued from certain death in a ravine by other migrants who were selfless and brave.[6]
Disturbingly, a 13-year-old girl they had traveled with was routinely raped.
After Fernández was finally given something to write with at the detention center, she wrote down a line of Cuban jungle wisdom: “Cubans say no one leaves their country and walks thru selva for a week if they don’t have to.”[7]
These comments should be heeded by everyone living in the Global North who are being fed incendiary political rhetoric denouncing migrants as criminals.
When MAGA spokesperson Laura Loomer visited the Darién Gap in February 2024, she characteristically warned about it being the source of a “migrant invasion of America.”[8]
Never venturing beyond reception centers outside the jungle, Loomer showcased in her reporting a Bank of China sign outside the Panama city airport and a Chinese migrant at the Darién Gap that supposedly epitomized the Chinese government’s hand in the “alien invasion [of the U.S.].”
Loomer went on to mock some African migrants for wearing “tribal outfits” and had fun wth a Venezuelan migrant who was wearing an Obama hat and said that he loved Biden.[9]
Absent from Loomer’s racist presentation is any analysis of how U.S. foreign policy had destabilized and impoverished many Latin American countries, fueling mass migration.
Fernández, by contrast, makes clear the connection between large-scale migration and the U.S. war on socialist governments that aim to assert national control over their resources and escape neo-colonial domination.
In the case of Venezuela, Fernández points out that the U.S. sanctions have caused at least 100,000 deaths and made millions of people food insecure, prompting more than 7.7 million to leave in 2023 alone “in search of protection and a better life,” according to the UN Refugee Agency.[10]
In Colombia, Fernández discusses how the Clinton administration’s Plan Colombia fueled the displacement of peasants and empowerment of right-wing paramilitaries that were implicated in a false-positives scandal by which they were rewarded for killing civilians while counting them as leftist guerrillas [Fuerzas Armada Revlucionario de Colombia-FARC].[11]
El Salvador and Guatemala were turned into violent dystopias during the 1980s U.S.-fueled civil wars, and in Haiti, the Obama administration worked to block an increase in the minimum wage for assembly zone workers making only 31 cents an hour.[12]
In Honduras, the Obama administration backed a coup against a left-leaning leader, Manuel Zelaya, who was replaced by a narco-dictator, Juan Orlando Hernández, whose “homicidal security forces,” as Fernández termed them, went on to terrorize Hondurans.
The situation in Honduras reminds Fernández of Panama where in the 1980s the U.S. supported another narco-dictator (Manuel Noriega) whom it later turned on like with Hernández—both were ultimately given life sentences in U.S. prisons.[13]
The damage to the environment bred by U.S. policies fueling mass migration was made clear in a 2024 report cited by Fernández, which lamented that “the scale of pollution in the Darién Gap [as a result of the growing number of migrants] was extreme: on top of corpses, and bodily waste, the jungle is now littered with plastic bottles, empty food tins and dirty diapers.”[14]
During the Cold War, the U.S. had explored the possibility of nuclear bombing of the Darién Gap in order to potentially change the sea level to enable construction of a better version of the Panama Canal to expedite trade from Latin America and exploit its natural resources.
Although the plan did not materialize, the U.S. military managed to litter the Darién Gap with “loads of unexploded ordnance,” the fallout of aerial training runs over the jungle, which present yet another hazard to migrants today.[15]
Despite the incessant attacks on illegal immigrants by Donald Trump and GOP politicians, Fernández presents evidence that migrant labor is actually of great benefit to the U.S. economy because it helps to fill a large employment gap.
Fernández quotes from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which calculated that, if every unemployed person in the U.S. found a job, there would still be millions of open jobs.
A May 2024 CNBC analysis further determined that “America’s strong jobs market” had been “bolstered post-pandemic by strength in the immigrant workforce,” and that, as Americans aged out of the labor force and birth rates remained low, “economists and the Federal Reserve are touting the importance of immigrant workers for overall future economic growth.”[16]
Fernández undertook her own journey through the Darién Gap in January 2024 with her Venezuelan boyfriend Johan, who previously worked on a coca plantation in the Catatumbo region of Colombia, and his brother Kelvin who both had previously crossed the Darién Gap.
Fernández was able to survive her journey, though noted that her incursion into the jungle “did not have to be succeeded by weeks or months of navigating hostile terrain in Central America and Mexico to reach the United States,” as with the other migrants.[17]
Fernández added that she “did not have to suffer repeated extortion by police and other officials, serve as robbing or kidnapping prey for gangs and cartels, or board La Bestia, Mexico’s notorious ‘train of death.”’
The latter, she said, “delivers surviving passengers to the front-lines of the bipartisan U.S. war on migrants: the border itself where the Donald Trumps and the Joe Bidens alike have labored to disappear the very concept of asylum.”[18]
When Colombian President Gustavo Petro sensibly pointed out that the U.S. could stem the tide of migration if it removed the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, which accounts for more than half the migrants each year through the Darién Gap, he was predictably ignored.[19]
The reason is not too hard to discern: There is too much money to be made through a militarized border; too much money potentially to be made off Venezuela’s oil necessitating the destruction of its socialist government; and too much political capital to be gained from scapegoating migrants along with other vulnerable people.
The parks are the 72,000-acre Los Katios National Park in Colombia, and even larger Darien National Park of Panama. ↑
Fernández is a freelance writer for Al Jazeera and editor with Jacobin magazine who has published previous books on the injustice of the migrant detention system in Mexico, and on the vapid political analysis of New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, whom she calls “the imperial messenger.” ↑
Belén Fernández, The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey Through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2025), 4. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 165. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 142, 143. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 3. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 4. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 13. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 13, 14. Loomer’s companion, Special Forces veteran Michael Yon, claimed that migrants were orchestrating a “Planet of the Apes style invasion” of the U.S. with the aim of subjecting the white race to “genocide and cannibalism.” ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 114. Some 22% of Venezuelan children were stunted because of the sanctions, which resulted in outbreaks of previously controlled diseases. The sanctions have also led to shortages of water, electricity and cooking gas. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 22. Colombia’s president during the false-positives scandal, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, was a top recipient of U.S. aid with strong ties to the Medellín drug cartel who, Fernández notes, “followed up his blood-drenched presidency with a professorship at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.” ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 107, 113. Some of the migrants Fernández encountered were from Yemen, a country devastated by U.S.-Saudi military intervention and persistent U.S. bombing. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 43. Noriega’s downfall was followed by U.S. support for a series of corrupt right-wing leaders in Panama who further contributed to the flow of migration through adoption of neo-liberal economic policies that resulted in ever higher poverty rates as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 157. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 19. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 183. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 6. Fernández presents the Darién Gap as an extension of the U.S. border “without AI-equipped surveillance towers, drones, robot dogs” or other “creatures of dystopian fantasy” relished by public officials like Texas Governor Greg Abbott. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 6. ↑
Fernández, The Darién Gap, 58. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
