The only roadless interruption in the Pan-American Highway linking Alaska to Argentina is a deadly jungle crucible for hundreds of thousands of migrants en route to the United States every year, as journalist Belén Fernández (Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World) investigates in The Darién Gap.
The 106-kilometer stretch of jungle straddling Panama and Colombia is known to migrants as el infierno verde, or "the green hell." Not only is the arduous physical crossing perilous, with rugged mountains, rushing rivers, and "all-consuming mud," but there is unspeakable violence--countless murders of people, including children--that makes the Darién Gap a "mass migrant graveyard." It is also a horrorscape of sexual violence perpetrated by guides, paramilitaries, and even Indigenous inhabitants upon male and female migrants. Fernández's gonzo journalism is fearless (reckless, even), as when she details her 2024 incursion into the Darién Gap (before she turned back). Her insightful conversations with refugees, human smugglers, and fellow travelers reveal in dark focus all the ways people can die in the Darién, not to mention the "psychological impact on migrants of having to step over decomposing bodies."
What is clear by the end is that the Darién Gap is the "site of an ongoing made-in-USA migration crisis." The Darién Gap is a revelatory, yet heated, examination of the human costs of seeking asylum and a better life in America that skewers the notion of national borders and ultimately blames the misery of U.S.-bound "have-nots" on the "bipartisan U.S. war on migrants." --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer in Denver