The Path Is Made by Walking

By Belén Fernández

Recently, Trump has floated the idea of “reclaiming” the Panama Canal for the United States. In our new issue, Belén Fernández explains how the U.S. border extends into Central America.

HANGING FROM THE CEILING at the open-air albergue, or shelter, in the Colombian village of Capurganá—one of the jumping-off points for traversal of the Darién Gap—was a sign featuring “general information,” in both Spanish and English, for the migrants who had gathered in the hopes of reaching the United States, more than three thousand miles away. The English version read:

Darién jungle crossing Colombia–Panamá

“Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking”

Generating more hope, to achieve the American Dream

A U.S. flag occupied one section of the sign, atop which were perched a pair of rain boots and four dirt-caked children’s shoes, one of them bearing the Nike swoosh. The albergue is where refuge seekers from around the world pay Colombian “guides” for passage to Panama, a journey that can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Said guides do not chaperone the entire trajectory—a detail that is often not made clear to migrants at the outset and revealed only when their smugglers turn back prior to reaching the Panamanian border. The sixty-six-mile Darién Gap is notorious for its lethal perils, ranging from rushing rivers to armed assailants to hostile wildlife, and a countless number of those who have set out “to achieve the American Dream” have ended up corpses in the jungle. (Lest anyone underestimate the intellectual credentials of Colombian organized crime, it bears noting that the inspirational quote directed to the walker is a line from a poem by Antonio Machado, who died in French exile from Spain in 1939, the year that Francisco Franco forged his path to the Spanish dictatorship.)

This was the prevailing scene when I entered the Darién Gap via Capurganá in January 2024, a year before the Donald Trump administration broadcast its intent to close the jungle down, with incoming U.S. border czar Tom Homan declaring ahead of Trump’s reinauguration, “Shutting down the Darién Gap is going to protect our national security. It’s going to save thousands of lives.” In 2023, more than 520,000 people made the crossing, opting to risk their lives and travel thousands of miles rather than remain in existentially precarious situations at home. As a Washington, D.C.–born bona fide gringa myself—and someone who has spent more than two decades in self-imposed semi-exile from the country—I had obviously already been sufficiently disabused of such notions as “the American Dream” and was staging a brief incursion into the Gap for journalistic purposes.

“A countless number of those who have set out ‘to achieve the American Dream’ have ended up corpses in the jungle.”

More specifically, I was preparing to write a book on the subject, and I was doing my best to live up to the late and far more intrepid Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s dictum that “it’s wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through.” I had not tried to secure the usual permission to enter the Darién Gap as a reporter, which has allowed many a member of the U.S. press to access the jungle to relay the plight of people on the move while rarely ever mentioning the outsize role of the United States in concomitantly fueling and criminalizing migration. Instead, I entered as a “migrant,” for which effort I had selected a Palestine soccer jersey with the intention of pleading Palestinian-ness if questioned by any of the smugglers—which I indeed was. The young man found my alibi less than convincing and henceforth referred to me, with a roll of the eyes, as “Palestina.”

I was accompanied on my expedition by a twenty-two-year-old Venezuelan named Johan, whom I had met the previous year when he exited the jungle on the Panamanian side of the Darién Gap in the first of his various attempts to reach the United States. In April 2023—forty-one days after I had met him in Panama and one day after we had rendezvoused for far too much beer in Ciudad Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border—he made it as far as El Paso, Texas, before being detained by immigration authorities for a string of showerless days and then flown, cuffed at the hands and feet, to Arizona, where he was dumped back into the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Months later, Johan took another stab at existence in Caracas and found it still unsustainable—thanks in no small part, of course, to U.S. sanctions, one of the global hegemon’s many tools for making life miserable for folks around the world. As of 2020, sanctions had already caused upwards of one hundred thousand deaths in Venezuela, to say nothing of the less life-threatening but still highly annoying effects of coercive economic measures like shortages of electricity and cooking gas. In August 2023, 77 percent of the record 81,946 people who crossed the Darién Gap were Venezuelan.

Against this backdrop, Johan figured he might as well earn a few bucks escorting me in and out of the Gap; his twenty-five-year-old brother, Kelvin, signed up for the excursion too, as I reckoned the more machetes, the better.

Continue reading “The Path Is Made by Walking,” an essay by Belén Fernández, on our site.

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