Bittersweet Infamy - #32 - The Darién Gap

Episode Date: November 28, 2021

Josie tells Taylor about the many failed attempts to tame a remote part of Panama. Plus: the morbid story behind the CPR doll, Resusci Annie.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy. The shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Josie, for this week's Mymphamous, I'm going to tell you the story of my first hickey. Ew. Okay.

I was 11 years old. Okay. This is a strictly PG story, I assure you. Okay. Get that out of the way up front. Still needs parental guidance, though. Yes. Listen, we're talking about hickeys, aren't we?

Yes. guidance though just yes listen we're talking about hickeys aren't we yes so i was in the sixth grade and we were doing a first aid cpr class in the portable okay and when it was my turn they had resusa annie laid out on the ground and they poured a big glug of like rubbing alcohol into her mouth to disinfect it. So she had this like fragrant waft to her, you know? Yeah. And I leaned in and I gave her the breath of life. Yeah. And then we went through, we continued to go through the protocol, whatever.

Fun fact, apparently this feels like it can't be true. So take it with a grain of salt. But it is something that I read in the Michael Jackson song Smooth Criminal when he's saying, like, Annie, are you okay? That's, like, based on, like, the lines that you feed to recess Annie as part of your training. Oh, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie? Exactly.

How cute. Interesting. That's who this story's about. Okay. And then the next time I looked in the mirror, I noticed I had a little purple blotch right above my lip. And I was like, what is that? Like, is something wrong? And then I realized that the doll had given me a hickey right on my upper lip.

Oh, my gosh. Just in the, and that's probably down to my not having amazing cpr technique because i was an 11 year old um maybe maybe i got i didn't try to like slipper the tongue or anything but maybe i you know whatever yeah um little did i know that i had just received my first hickey from a dead woman. According to Wikipedia, where all of this comes from, Resuscit-Annie, also known as Rescue-Anne, Resuscit-Anne, CPR-Annie,

Resuscitation-Annie, Little-Annie, or CPR-Doll. That one, that last one kind of lacks the personalization, I gotta say. There's not a lot of personality in it. It is a medical simulator used for teaching first aid to both emergency workers and members of the general public. It was originally developed by a Danish toy maker in partnership with two physicians. The face of Rassassa Annie is modeled on L'Inconnu de la Seine, also known as La Belle Italienne, the death mask of a young woman who drowned in la Seine, also known as La Belle Italienne,

the death mask of a young woman who drowned in the Seine River in the late 1880s. Oh. Supposedly. Supposedly. The best known story goes that a woman drowned herself in the Seine, and the pathologist at the morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had to cast her face in plaster. According to another story, the impression was taken from the face of a young model who died of tuberculosis around 1875. Okay. Yeah, a floating body might not have the nicest face.

That's what people say. That's what they say. But have you read the short story, The Most Handsome Drowned Man in the World? Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's about a drowned man who appears in this little village and they fall in love with him because he's the most handsome man they have ever seen. That's this. That's basically this. Yeah. And he accounts for the fact that the body has like, you know, bloated out, but the bloating has made him handsome. Wow. Yeah. Wow. It must be handsome if you look good in a bloat.

Well, or maybe he wasn't and the bloat helped. I don't know. You never know. All types of self-care these days. It's new every day. New shit every day. According to yet another story, the subject was the daughter of a mask manufacturer the cpr doll version of the story yeah and according to one final version the subject

of the mask was struck by a smooth criminal uh either way the mask and its mystique made reproductions popular among france's upper crust as just like sort of these obj art oh huh albert camus compared her enigmatic expression to the mona lisa i like that the mask and the story behind it remain a popular source of inspiration for art it's been depicted in literature uh ballet paintings uh there's a beach house song called l'Inconnu. But never did the mask make its mark more than it did on my upper lip when I was 11 years old. Cute.

You must have been terrified. Or did you think it was like candy or grape juice or something? I was a little proud, I feel like, because I didn't have any friends who'd gotten hickeys yet. And so I was like, me and my girlfriend Annie, you know? Yeah, yeah, that's true. You're just like sporting around me like this one. I can still smell the alcohol.

Oh, no. Before my story gets started, I just want to take a quick note and recognize that some of the publications that I quote from are pretty harmful and outdated in their views on indigenous peoples. So please listen with caution. Thanks. Taylor, I'm going to take you to a spot in the world that not many people get to see. Okay. Technically you won't see it because we're talking about it but you're hearing about it you'll hear a lot about it you'll see i can see it already we're talking about a space where the land itself is either too harsh for Western settlement, or weirdly enough, at the same time, it's deemed too precious for settlement.

Okay. even for the proposed betterment and enlightenment of humankind even with the natural bounty and preservation in mind what happens when every attempt fails throughout oh no oh no history this sounds terrible dude oh no Welcome to a hundred mile long and 30 mile wide stretch of Central American rainforest, mountains, and rivers. Referred to as one of the last bastions of biodiversity and in quote unquote untouched biodiversity in the world. Right, right. Right, right. This is a narrow stretch that provides a land bridge between two colossal continents, an area that has confounded and fascinated settlers, conquistadors, colonists, neocolonists, tourists, national geographic bullshit to the max, all of that.

Okay, okay. Confounded them for the last 500 years i feel confounded myself right now taylor welcome to the darien gap the darien gap i've never heard of this lonely planet refers to the darien gap as you pass through spectacular jungle inhabited by jaguars and mountain lions and Indians who until recently did most of their hunting with blowguns. Okay. That's the 2004 Lonely Planet. So that's wow. That's pretty fucking retrograde for 2004. National Geographic, an online correspondent named Andrew Evans in his column, Bus to Antarctica, where he chronicles his journeys from Washington, D.C. to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, or, you know, Antarctica. He talks about passing through this infamous plot of land when he writes, as many of my Twitter followers have recently

pointed out. Always a great start to a sentence. Always a great start. My proposed path to Antarctica runs right through the geographical difficulty known as the Darien Gap. This little tribulation is the 100 mile gap in the Pan-American Highway consisting of of dense nearly impassable jungle and swamp filled with bad guys like narco-terrorists robbers and your run-of-the-mill bandana wearing bandits some travelers have dared to cross the darien gap on foot and made it others get kidnapped as up for adventure as i might be a writer for national geographic as is, my goal here is to actually make it to Antarctica. I may be crazy, but I'm not suicidal. Wow, everyone, people are really hyping this place up. Yeah, people are really, this is, this is the Everest of jungles, okay? And everyone who lives

here is criminally insane and will kill you the first time they look at you. I understand. I mean, of course, Lonely Planet and National Geographic don't know everything about places. Is that so? Yeah. But I saw so many of those yellow spines in my youth. So many yellow spines. Yeah, I always remember the National Geographic that appears in Waterworld. That's proof that there was land.

My mom was just telling me she watched Waterworld last night. Ah, such a mom movie. Ask her, ask her, ask her what her favorite Kevin Costner movie is. I think that's an appropriate question for all moms. I don't think my mom's that into Kevin Costner. It doesn't matter. I bet she has a favorite. It's going to be fucking Waterworld is the thing.

It's 100% going to be Water be water that's a fantastic movie okay okay so let me tell you a little bit about where the darien gap is because that might be helpful right you leave panama city and you take a right. Or a left, depending on which way you're facing. If you're facing the Atlantic, you take a right. I'm not very good with my left and right. Hopefully Google Maps this. No, I know where it is. So it's in what is now Panama, the country of Panama. Yeah.

And a little bit of Northern Columbia. Okay. So when you think of the map of North and South America and Panama, you're like, boo boo, it's a straight little isthmus and it goes down and it connects to South America. But when you actually- It's got a curve. Enhance, enhance, it does have a curve so what actually happens is the atlantic ocean when you're in panama city when you're like in the central of the country the

atlantic ocean is to the north of you and the pacific is to the south so the land runs east to west which is not really how we think of you draw it by hand or whatever. Not exactly how it happens. I'm often drawing the continents by hand. Tearing them out in paper and creating them. Yeah, just freestyle, yeah. Yeah. So the Darien Gap is east of Panama City. So as you move further down the isthmus,

it takes you through the east and southern area of Panama and into the northern northwest portion of Colombia. Okay. It is where the Pan-American Highway stops. The terminus of the highway is at the Darien Gap. Okay. The Pan-American Highway picks up again in Colombia. They just skip it. Outside of the Darien Gap. Okay. The Pan American Highway picks up again in Columbia. They just skip it.

Outside of the Darien Gap. They just fucking skip it, my dude. They have tried and tried and tried but they just skip it.

It just dead end. Thanks for coming. Get your t-shirt. I survived the Darien Gap. Take a ferry or get on a plane you're not driving you're cut off across these two continents yeah the name of the area is

attributed to a bastardization of an indigenous language there and it the name originally was tanela okay that's how i would say it but it's in this urbana area river so the name through exploration and conquistadors got um filtered and mutated as as names do yeah and it's known as darien um and it's it's one of those terms too like with any place that holds kind of mystique uh in in panama um the the darien area is known as just like anything that is east of panama city it's just like oh well that's that's darien and then there's like a specific provincial boundary that is termed the darien area but then of course it crosses an international border and it crosses into col as well. So it is the name for like a biodiversity area and like rainforest area as well. So it has a few different, a few different

boundaries on it, but generally it's this stretch of land that is very narrow, just 30 miles wide and about at this point, a hundred miles long. And of course it has shrunk with more modern development and infrastructure and before it was a little bit bigger before all of this three million years ago because you're coming for my crown i see how it is i'm coming i'm coming three million years ago just a tick tick tick three million years ago this whole area wasn't quite continental shelf it wasn't like you know the big pangea shoobies this was between the continents sedimentation filling up this area to create the isthmus okay which now is considered continental land and you know fingers crossed

will remain so will remain as such yes tectectonic plates, man, you never know. You never know. You never know. So it becomes this land bridge between two colossal continents. And so it also becomes a bridge for biodiversity. Right. So all of a sudden, these two continents, any of the plants and animals can traverse between two of them, which...

Their organisms are cross-pollinating kind of deal. Exactly. Yeah. can traverse between two of them. Their organisms are cross-pollinating kind of deal. Exactly, yeah. And because it's such a narrow area, it becomes a highway for biodiversity well before highways were ever invented, right? But it's a conservation hotspot because of this. In the archaeological sense of the area, which of course is dominated by a western view of study and academia, there is very little known about the Darien area. In fact, it is termed the Darien archaeological gap. Oh. Because

to the west and to the south, there are all these archaeological sites. They can find certain temples. They can find certain evidence of cultivation, blah, blah, blah. You know, hard structures that are still around, more or less. But they cannot find anything in the Darien Gap. And there's, you know, there's a mix of a lot of things here. An archaeologist named Warwick Bray said of the non-existence of a gold

that's particular to the area. He says, we have to ask ourselves, are we looking at the evidence of absence or the absence of evidence? So there's kind of a back and forth. You don't have to be a psychic to predict. Oh, oh. I liked it. I liked the little turn of friends. It was good, it was good, it was good. because it's so thickly forested so densely tropical yeah it's really hard to excavate

i mean that's true in a lot of places that are still being excavated. But what happens with this archaeological gap is that it double downs the region's ambiguous prehistory, which kind of builds this reputation being like people-less, or this region of just transit that's kind of like open. Right. If we don't specifically know the names of the people there, then they're not there kind of thing. Exactly. Exactly. but even with that there was evidence of some people having lived there at least three thousand about four thousand years ago okay and they they're looking at the land clearing and certain cultivation practices and that evidence also shows 350 years ago cultivation, the clearing had stopped, which, based on a timeline of Spanish invasion, lines right up.

So the Spaniards came, conquistadors came, and what they believe to be a people loosely called, what they call the Cueva people, they believe were wiped out. So very little trace. Right, right right as the conquistadors were wont to do exactly and the fact that there's none of this very particular gold being there it could be that conquistadors plundered it all yeah or plundered a vast majority of it yeah in this area pre-contact there's guesstimates that there was about 200,000 to 2 million people living in the area which is a very large gap another gap lots of gaps lots of gaps lots of gaps but even if it were just 200,000 for 200,000 people to just be gone is insane pretty remarkable yeah and so all the cueva people were gone by about 1535 which is not even 100 years after columbus landed in hispaniola right right so that was the playbook though like

just come loot every natural resource you can commit a genocide for no reason and leave like exactly oh yeah oh yeah a depressing amount of those stories in that part of the world, I feel. And in this area, because there was absolutely no indigenous knowledge that was carried through, all of it was completely wiped out. What takes over in terms of this land is just the Spanish knowledge of it, which, of course, is zilch. They haven't been there for very long they're uninvited guests yes yes exactly they know nothing so it's a big blank slate and of course what did the spaniards do with

a blank slate but just colonize the fuck out of it yeah yeah so panama, but also including the island of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and mostizing term that they reported back to King Ferdinand in Spain and was like, this is what's, you know, what we're going to get. Darien, this part of Panama, was the center of Tierra Fermi because it was such a trade spot. So first we have an explorer, Juan de la Cosa, who comes through. He heard that there was an indigenous town, what they called Darien, led by a chief Camaco. And so the Spanish explorer decided to travel there and sack it, of course. As you do. Two years later, there was another Spaniard who came through, but he moved the settlement further west on account of the poison dart-wielding indigenous peoples

were trying to run him and his people out. As they should. Yeah, good on ya. If you got darts in the quiver, that's what you got to fight with? Dippamines and poison. Apparently it was enough to get him to at least move for a little while. It was near there in what is now modern Colombia that the Spanish established the first mainland colonies in this area of the world. It's the first Spanish colony.

And it was 1509. And they called it Santa Maria la Antigua de Darien. Okay. Or Darien. Si. And then everything kind of west of there was called Castilla de Oro. Gold. There's like fucking gold.

Yeah, when you put Oro right in the name, eh? Which is funny because the archaeological record shows that there isn't actually a lot of gold in that area. Okay. Either was extracted, which could be part of the archaeological record or it was just it's not even found there naturally so it was just never there and the reality that the conquistadors were creating was enough to spur all of this investigation and and yeah combat and whatever yes yeah so around this time claims in what it was called tierra firma were being disputed by a lot of spanish explorers and then we get our big dude balboa coming through he takes control of santa maria la antigua the darien in 1511 okay so it's this is like 1492 columbus and then 1511 so like not a lot of time has left right in

the thick of it right in the thick of that i don't think i realize how fast everything moved like once columbus like touched land it was just like oh shit's about to yeah blow up be destroyed stuff is like going down my sense too of when all of this kind of early colonization happened is skewed the way that our countries market themselves they were started at contact which is not true and it gives you this real skewed sense of time on when all this happened how fast it happened why it happened blah blah blah yeah not why it happened we know why it happened but yeah so spain goes ahead and makes balboa the governor of this province that they've set up of darien okay and balboa immediately searches for more gold he has some pretty elaborate schemes to

befriend indigenous peoples only then to kill them later. He gets a little uppity with his requests from the Spanish monarch. And King Ferdinand is like, nah, I'm going to name somebody else's governor. It's just going to be easier that way. Greedy, greedy. I mean, watch out who you're dealing with. This guy's like, oh, kill millions of people. No problem.

And then you're like, oh, my God, he took away my governorship like yeah whatever talking to the manager like ridiculous yeah karen yeah he was the original karen yeah the original karen there we go so this new guy named davila is made governor a Spaniard, who's also infamous for being extremely brutal to the indigenous populations. Okay. So because Balboa wasn't the governor of the town anymore, or of the province, he takes his free time and starts searching out for more gold. And what ends up happening is he moves across the Isthmus. Across-mas. Across-mas, if you will. If you like. He begins in the Caribbean coastal town in modern day Panama called Caretta. And he moves along a river tributary until he gets to the Pacific coast.

And he becomes his follower, you know know his group of men become the first europeans to view the pacific ocean so balboa is our dude who quote-unquote discovers the pacific ocean and discovers quote-unquote discovers the width of this piece of land and what it's doing in connecting a cartographical realization yes yes okay which i'm sure thousands and billions were made during these years and you know only a fraction of them came true balboa was lucky enough that like when he saw a big body of water it was actually another ocean not a bottle or whatever the fuck yeah yes. Yeah, whatever it could have been. I mean, fucking Columbus thought he was in India, right?

Yeah. Idiot. And Balboa, that's kind of what he's known for, right? He's the dude who discovered the Pacific Ocean. Right. discover the Pacific Ocean. There's a big statue of him in Panama City where he is standing on a globe that's being supported by these four men who are representative of

the four races. I don't know what those... They did do a season of Survivor where it was the four races against each other. That was it. I think that was it. And there was only the four. There was only the four. They did white, black, Hispanic, and Asian. And I mean, I guess everyone just neatly fits into one of those four categories.

Wow. That's... Great. So yeah, this is not very subtle imagery. They're going on for Rocky Balboa here, hey? Like, world beater. It's true. It's true. And I was thinking like, well well why the fuck is that still up that should be taken down and then i was like oh wait the huge public park in san diego is called

balboa park yeah that's the thing is that like you hear about it every now and then when someone proposes changing a street name because um somebody was a such and such you know or often involving being very cruel to the people who like originally inhabited that land but i'm sure there's a much larger percentage of schools of parks of streets of geographical landmarks named after people who are actually pretty reprehensible when you get down to it so there's just so much of that discussion surrounding the Confederacy, especially in the South. Yeah, for sure.

And renaming stuff, which there is some happening. There was a street close to my house that was renamed Emancipation, and that was nice. It used to be a Confederate General, and now it's Emancipation. So that's good. God. Little by little. I'm not laughing because it's funny.

I'm laughing because it's not, you know? It's not, God. Little by little. I'm not laughing because it's funny. I'm laughing because it's not, you know? It's not, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So Balboa establishing this area as this connection point or as this narrow connection point between the two countries is pivotal because it identifies this region as the connecting point between the two oceans, but also the two continents. So not only is it rich in resources, gold, timber, whatever you want to have, it's there. But also it's this highway between the oceans and the land. As a realtor will say location location location did you like that i enjoyed it yeah actually yeah good job i don't know if i did no

it's good so what happened when the cueva people were wiped out was that the region opened up for other indigenous groups to kind of move into the area. Of course, further afield from the Spaniards, mindful of where the Spaniards are. But there was kind of this transitory element that took place in this area. So the Gana, the Embera, and the Wunan, as well as groups of escaped black slaves started to inhabit this area more and more. Okay. So the idea that it's completely like a people-less, like, Bermuda Triangle is not true. Not true. It never has been true.

It's just dumbass Europeans can't hack it. Yeah. Okay. So this is a pivotal trade route. There's a lot of gold coming through but the spaniards are kind of losing their shit and it's becoming a really big hot spot for piracy like stuff is getting picked off left right and center there's violence not only i mean a very small fraction of the violence at the time is happening due to piracy most of it is due to genocide of the native people yes so

with the spanish weakness happening there were a few scottish leaders who began to take an interest in the darien area everyone's really getting interested in the darien area hey i mean this is 1698 how the fuck did scotland find out about this loose lips there were so many little expeditions spaniards they gave some spanish guy a bottle of wine and he fucking gave up the whole thing i guarantee you that's what happened so the scots move in and they established the colony of new edinburgh on a cove on the Caribbean side of the Darien. Okay. So William Patterson, the colony's founder, wrote a description.

You're talking about Chatty Cathy is the Scottish as well. Yeah. Wrote a description of the area that gained international interest. He says, these doors of the sea and the keys of the universe would be capable of enabling our possessors to give laws to both oceans and to become the arbiters of the commercial world. So he's seeing this particular little colony as like, Scotland's gonna take over, baby. Who called Scotland? Nay fucking aroon, let's go. There also were Scottish reports coming out saying,

this place affords legion of monstrous plants, enough to confound all the methods of biology ever hitherto thought upon. Jesus, hitherto thought upon. Yeah, my dude. Ever hitherto thought upon, wow. That is how gnarly they thought the place was. Wow. These are people from Scotland, though. They've never seen like a tree before.

Not yet. We lost Scotland. I'm so sorry. Well, Scotland lost this little chunk of land because within two years two years between illness death corruption happening spanish attacks inadequate supplies being shipped over from scotland the venture nearly bankrupt scotland oh wow the entire country or you know region that sounds like a money pit colonizing this place sounds like a fucking money pit it's totally it's totally money pit too starring tom hanks and but they think there's gold at the end exactly i did i did catch your

money pit joke there by the way thank you thank you i forget who it's it's tom hanks and uh shelly what's her face shelly long shelly long it's shelly long of course it's shell i can't believe i forgot that shelly long is such a particular presence. Those little bug eyes. Yeah. Hyper. Lover. I don't think Kelly Long could live here either.

I'm just... Shelly. Shelly. Shelly Long. No, dude, you saw it. You never watched Troop Beverly Hills, though. She gets those girls into shape. She learns about the environment.

That's true. She's pretty capable. Yeah. Troop pretty capable. Yeah. Troop, dairy, and gap. So around this time, so we're looking at the early 1700s. Yeah. More and more colonial powers

are getting interested in the area because they want a succinct way to travel between the two oceans. So they're already talking about what a canal would look like. They have built a railroad at this point, kind of a conglomerate of different colonial powers that move in and out of the area based on what their powers are doing in the world, right? But there's a railroad that connects the two coasts at this point. But then in about the mid 1800s, the California gold rush starts. And all

of a sudden there's this huge population from the Eastern U.S. who wants to make it all the way over to California. And moving across land is really, really difficult. and so people are starting to take ships over to california and it would take you eight months to get from the eastern seaboard depending where miami i don't know around all of south america and the cape of good hope and up to california if they could go through the panama canal or a canal we'll say it would only take a month okay so there's this huge economic incentive to get people through a canal and at that point a lot of gold rushers, 49ers, were still getting dropped off in Panama and taking the railroad across and then picking up a new boat. Like, that was still happening.

But there were so many people that they thought, you know what? If we can build a canal, this is going to be perfect. 1869 is when the Suez Canal is built. Yes. So if you have that kind of in your purview, you're like, well, if they can connect those two huge oceans, then they can certainly connect these two huge oceans, right? So is the prevailing thought. So there's a whole bunch of countries that come through this area, Panama and the Darien too, right?

But like the whole stretch of the Isthmus, pursuing possible routes for a canal. The Suez Canal built by the French is a, it's a sea level canal. It just goes straight through. Imagine you're like, you know, in the sand. They just dug and dug and dug and dug and dug and dug. The Suez Canal, one of the instrumental figures in its being

made was a guy named de Lesseps who is the forebear through marriage of Real Housewives of New York star Countess Luanne de Lesseps. Countess Luanne has ties to the Suez Canal? Countess Luanne married into the Suez Canal family and they also

gifted the Statue of Liberty to United States of America on behalf of France married into the suez canal family yeah and they also gifted the statue of liberty to to united states of america on behalf of france and she'll tell you about it anytime she can oh i wonder if she knows anything about the panama canal too i wonder if she's like secretly like a doctorate in colonial oh no because her whole thing her whole thing obviously until the housewives came along was that she was kind of just this like rich wife who entertained the Count's people and, you know, would make would make little like cocktail party patter about etiquette and shit with them and about and about the Suez Canal. Yes, the Count's family did that. Yes.

You know, so I'm sure she was very well studied on it. The Egyptians love it. It's great. The Egyptians love it it's great the egyptians love it really did them a big favor jesus but go on yes the suez canal is was just dug right through yeah yeah it's a sea sea level canal that's what's called sea level canal and so everyone was like well that's how you build a canal to connect to oceans. So we'll just go to Panama and do that.

But no. Oh, but no. Okay. Oh, but no, my sweet thing. Okay. So there was an Irish. He was a doctor. Oh, jeez.

He seemed a little like, oh, a doctor. Oh, my. Edward Cullen. seemed a little like a doctor edward cullen oh no yes yes yes yes i'm just realizing that now yes dr edward cullen yes yes you thought trick-or-treat infamy was over. Well, do I have some news for you. It's never over. Vampire doctor Edward Cullen, what does he do? What does he do? Don't give me a suspense. I'm so sorry.

He comes into the Darien region and he claims that there is a low pass through this continental divide he's like oh my gosh you guys I'm sparkling beautiful in the sunlight I was just gonna say I hope this is a nighttime meeting where he's giving himself away we have we have the capability of a sea level canal through the Darien area. Okay. So there's all of this reporting and expeditions that happen looking for the best route for the Panama Canal. They go to where it's the narrowest. They think, oh, here's a river. We could get the river and that could take out pretty much like a chunk of what we need to get done.

There's all these different proposals by all these different countries. France is at the forefront of it because they've had such success with the Suez. All right. They're feeling pretty hot on their canal game. They can get a lot of investment for it too. Okay. But the Darien area cannot really be passed through. That's so everybody keeps saying.

Everybody keeps saying it. Maybe it's true. I don't know. So there are multiple expeditions through the Darien area. A French engineer, Lionel Gisborne. That was not a French accent. No. I don't know what that was, actually.

I feel like you really overthought that last name. Yeah. Yeah. Gisborne. Lionel Gisborne. Oh, God. So Lionel, our good buddy Lionel, wrote in a report of his expedition, The reasons generally given for this lack of knowledge about the Isthmus of Darien is the difficulty of visiting the country, the climate, the rains, and the savage state of the Indian tribes, all combining to render the entry difficult and the return more so. be added the usual obstructions of an unexplored district such as impenetrable woods swamps rivers mountains snakes wild beasts etc etc end quote he does include etc etc lionel does yeah wild beasts wild beasts etc etc so i get it you you all really really really have a boner for conquering this place but it's really really really hard and everybody says that it's really really really hard but then you keep trying

to do it and then you leave yeah wow this was really really hard like there's loads of expeditions and multiple people die there's a u.s expedition where they succumb to starvation because they were following the chukunukwa river which parallels the isthmus instead of going through it that won't get you anywhere no there was another unfortunate expedition led by a lieutenant with the ironic name of Strain. Lieutenant Strain. Bad sign. A strenuous journey through the Darien Gap. That's apt, yeah. But there's so much speculation going around at this time that there's still reports that the Darien area is like primo for a canal.

And one of the most outstanding reports comes from a french architect and his name i cannot say um ariel i'll say ariel for now the french architect ariel he creates this whole booklet inclusive of a map the whole booklet a whole booklet makes a zine and then he's like problem solved let me make a zine about this this will solve everything do you want a single from my all-girl punk band like what are we doing here um his zine is called solution del canal de panama okay and the solution is colonization is that so is is so to so needed he needed to make a new booklet on that he proposed not only that the canal go through this certain area and he depicts the area as being flat as holland dotted with prosperous farms and orchards and traversed by broad straight artificial

waterways a smiling open country so this is a historian writing about um r.e.r.'s So this is a historian writing about RER's zine, more or less. What the fuck? Okay. Yeah. Holland. Okay. Yeah.

Well, because you think of all the canals through Holland? Like the flatland? It's a reach. Feels like a reach. Okay. I don't know. I'm not impressed with that. I don't buy it. He does include plans to create a utopic city in the middle of the isthmus.

And it's based on these like nine concentric zones that would create a circular shape. And the canal would run straight through the city. And it would be a utopia of enlightenment and thought in the rainforest. And be this major crossroads for the world between these two continents and these two great oceans. And his zine is, is very popular. People love it.

He has created a pamphlet for Celebration, Florida. Do you know Celebration, Florida? No. It's like the Disney owned suburb. They build like littlekey heads into the houses because if you're living there you're a fucking disney maniac oh no and so he just wants to do

that in this like yeah notoriously difficult to navigate okay exactly well this is like when the baroness wanted to make floriana the new miami beautiful it It's dumb. It's a dumb idea. It's a very dumb idea. So of course this was not going to happen. More people were trying to go to the Darien area and explore it but they couldn't get anything. At this time in particular the technology of the photograph was coming online and so people were able to take photographs of the area instead of just having like sketches and illustrations and the source that i used had an image had an illustration next to a like a an original you know like turn of the century photograph and the image is still black and white but it's like a palm tree and like, oh, oh, it's a fort,

rain fort, monkey, orchid. Like, you know, it's like, oh, and there's like, you know, the sky in the background or whatever. And then there's the actual photograph. And it's like, that is dense forest. It is dark in there 24 seven. Like there is just like, it is a lot of tree cover. Penetrable.

Yes. So I keep hearing. I'm not, I feel like you're trying to talk me out of going and you don't need to. Okay. I'm just saying. So finally people take a hint that maybe the Darien Gap is not where they can build a canal and so they move further west there's initial attempts to make the sea level canal with the french same french backers of the suez canal the french bomb they can't get it it completely bankrupts it's a whole big thing of course they started but they can't finish it but don't they know that that's how this has ended every like are they not doing their research no well they did the swiss canal and i was like countess luann is is letting

everybody know that's true that is true that is true so they came in on a very high horse and got and they got knocked down pretty far and who came in to scoop up all the leftovers was this young buck of a nation, the United States. Oh my God, as they do. So at this point, Panama is not yet a country. The area is not called Panama at this point. It's the turn of the century. The area is still governed by what is now modern day Colombia. So, okay. But all of the attempts to build this huge canal were happening

further west, away from the Darien Gap, away from Colombia. And because the Darien Gap was such a gap between communications, between trade, between all of that. The further western Panama was starting to recognize, you know what? We're kind of our, we're kind of our own deal here. We're not part of Colombia. We're kind of our own thing. You don't live on an isthmus. Yeah, no, exactly. You're just, you're just on a landmass. Yeah. Nobody's trying to dig a canal through you. Like, no way okay and so there's more and more independence movements that are happening and when the u.s sweeps in after the french have left they're like oh yeah you guys yeah definitely you should really think

about independence we did it it was great look at us now oh my god yeah give it a shot when you open your marriage it just changed you feel so much free that's exactly it and so and so and so and so the panamanians in 1903 gained their independence. Okay. But their independence is financially backed by the U.S. In exchange, they give the U.S. a 10-mile-wide swath across the center of the country. And it's going to be owned by the U.S. in perpetuity. So there's no real end date.

It isn't until later that there's the Panama Canal Treaty and an end date is determined, which is 1999. But, you know, we're still at the very beginning of the century. Was that for, like, Y2K-related reasons? I think so. Because once the clock rolls over, we can't trust you anymore. All your nukes may go everywhere. All. All your nukes may go everywhere. All of Panama's nukes may go everywhere.

Well, we'll get to some nukes. Don't worry. Oh, no! No, I think actually the 1999 number was just a number agreed upon through the Carter administration. Okay. There was also some sneaky dealings right before and during the carter administration with panama and this you know a cia killing of a dictator backed by the u.s i mean the u.s and central america is like that's a messy yeah yeah and

part of it is because of the panama canal because the.S. had a huge influence over this very important strategic area. Right. So, right. Panama declares independence and the U.S. is like, way to go. Thank you for all the resources. Love it. Love it. Great.

We're talking Theodore Roosevelt. And this is the era when he would come in, Rough Rider. He coined the term panama hat ah i'm learning so much about panama today the hat was just a hat and then he came and then it was a fan what i mean to say is that the stupidest thing you've ever told me on this show this is gonna be a really great like anticolonial little tidbit but i think i ruined it

no it's fine we're good we're good so the hat was originally called a tokiya straw hat and then roosevelt came in on his big horse and was like it's pamela hat so that's yeah so good rose i haven't i've never heard roosevelt speak but uh about what i imagine so the u.s gets to build the panama canal they own the area around it it's the panama canal zone it's pretty much just like a military base more or less where it's completely americanized there's mixed feelings in panama about that according to the museo del canal there's generally a feeling that the u.s fucking sucked which you know not incorrect so yeah but again this is not the darien area they moved west to build this canal okay so we're not because i've

been thinking is the the panama canal doesn't run through the Darien Gap, does it? It does not run through the Darien Gap. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah. The Darien Gap is still a few, I'd say like, it's a, from Panama City to the Darien Gap area is about a four hour drive. On which side does the canal go through? Does it go through the side near Columbia or the side near Central America? It goes through both sides. Of the, no, no listen let me explain i know i know it guided straight through i got that if i'm looking at the darien gap on a map yeah where is the panama canal relative to it closer

to south america or closer to central america central america Thank you. Okay. So the Panama Canal is in place, buku bucks, lots and lots of money, but still the area, Panama being the area, is connecting the two oceans. But now there's a push in like mid, mid 1900s, early to mid 1900s, a push to connect the two continents. And that is the Pan-American Highway. It was originally conceived, of course, for commercial gain, because you could connect Alaska all the way down to Tierra del Fuego. So the U.S. and Latin American governments are really into getting this highway through, of course, for trade reasons. But when it comes to Panama, there's this Darien Gap, the impenetrable Darien Gap. So there's a subcommittee created,

like whenever you have a problem, you just make a subcommittee. I fucking hate subcommittees. I know. According to a history of the project, Panamanian engineer Tomas Guardia Sr. coined the term the Darien Gap. Okay. To give a graphic idea, almost comical, of what Darien represented in the struggle to establish road communication for the Americas. The Spanish equivalent is Tapón de Darien, the Darienien stopper which i kind of like it's so a big pain in everybody's ass all the time i hate tampons i got it now i got it now i misheard you um nobody can get over the fact that this piece of land uh exists and won't be conquered by them in order to implement i I don't know,

infrastructure? Yeah, yeah. The enlightenment of infrastructure. Like, you already got the canal. The canal is going through. Yeah, yeah. Why do you need to... Who gives a shit?

Make them change roads. Because people want to... They want to go to Alaska to tear the Fuego. National Geographic, my dude. The adventure. The adventure. Right. of the yellow spine. Let's go. That's true. The Pan American Highway Congress sponsored a Jeep and Land Rover transit

contest in 1960. So there was like a contest to see who could traverse the unpaved forest. And many people have done it. Motorcycle transits,its car transits and then of course by foot so during this era of the the vehicular transit of the Darien Gap there was a lot of curiosity about it of course because it was like this untamed space but in that narrative too there was a lot of positive press about the native people who lived there and positive i think might be relative i think for the era it was positive okay but looking back on it it's probably like oh my gosh wow look at them they're so primitive they're not even connected to the modern world they don't have a car or whatever you know blah. Right. But at the same time, this idea of the happy disconnected

native or whatever, the same time, the movie, the B horror movie Attack of the Jungle Woman comes out. Okay. And the movie, have you ever seen it? No. Okay. Neither have I. So I mean, I'll watch it. I'll watch it and report back. I can imagine what it's all about. It's fine. It was largely made from ethnographic footage shot in Panama in the late 1950s in the Darien Gap. So they pull a lot of the native garb from the Embera, the Wunan, and the Ghana peoples.

garb from the Embera, the Wunan, and the Ghana peoples. And I think some of those actual peoples are in the film, but it's from ethnographic. Right. National Geographic kind of stuff. Yeah. Photos that have been repurposed into this B-horror movie. And that kind of fuels, again, another fueling of how disconnected and wild. Interest and remote. Yeah. And the subcommittee, if you can believe it, the subcommittee couldn't solve the problem of what to do with the Derry and Gap. These damn subcommittees. They just don't have their shit together. We couldn't decide if we wanted mini muffins or bagels, so we just scrapped the whole thing.

I'm just going to stay home and have toast god damn it so the pan-american highway stops at the darien gap and it picks up again on the colombian side of the darien gap and goes all the way down the continent interesting yeah i bet that pisses if you're like a road guy and you're like this is my one great infrastructural contribution that I can make to humanity, I can be the guy who makes it so it's one road instead of two. Yeah. Then you go in there with a machete and apparently you get blow darted on sight there is what I've heard. So you're done. Like. Yeah.

Like, yeah. Around the same time, too, in the 60s, the Panama Canal is becoming too small for the enormous ships that are coming through. So there's some plans that are coming online about how to make the canal bigger. And one of the plans is to go ahead and follow the French dream of a sea-level canal. We're still on the canal. The problem's been solved. Wrap it up. Well, but now it's too small, Taylor.

Now they need to make it bigger. Oh, yeah, we need a big canal, and it's never, never enough. Never enough. Okay. So the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission creates a project called Project Plowshare, in which they seek to use a peaceful application of nuclear explosives, such as mining, excavation, and natural gas production, and carve out a new canal in essentially what was the same route laid out in the mid-19th century through the Darien Gap. Their plan was to use more than two dozen nuclear bombs, each at this point a hundred times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima, in order to excavate this impenetrable

land. Okay, so I went to Hiroshima when I was in Japan. And a nuke is nothing to fuck around with, folks. Let me tell ya, you never forget that for a second when you're there. Yeah, I don't

know why we need to bring in a bunch of nukes to make a canal happen no when is this when are we 60s okay so do you know about you probably know about this it's like space race adjacent it's been one that i've thought of doing for the show a million times it was called like project a119 okay and i don't know anything about it except that it involved nuking the moon for some reason oh my god yes so that's been on the back of you might hear me do that one someday yeah i hope so it's in the middle of the space race too and i'm really just like why are they nuking them like you don't need to stop nuking if you can't get there then just destroy it oh my god that's totally like you're losing a monopoly and you like flip the board.

You're like, fuck this. And also, meanwhile, has it ever occurred to any of them that their characterization of the people who actually do reside there as violent may have to do with the fact that like every 50 years someone new comes along and tries to destroy it for no reason? Exactly. Yeah. Or destroy reason. Totally. Exactly. Yeah. Or destroy them. Yeah. Yeah. So luckily, by 1970, there's a different relationship to the use of nuclear explosives.

Limited Test Ban Treaty is in place, and it just prohibits any type of nuclear explosion to cross at an international border so the nukes are off the table which is fantastic we love that love that what also is happening during this time in the darien area is that the embera the wunan and the gunna are starting to create initiatives for villages. Right. So previously it wasn't recognizable to like a Western government kind of thing happening. Right.

But now because there's so many visitors coming through, because there is a road at least to the area, there's a little bit more interaction and there's a push for having schools and language acquisition, all of that. And so the Panamanian government says, great idea. So they provide funds, they provide teachers, missionaries come in, vaccinations come in, churches come in. And of course, with this continued governmental support, there's also more governmental control of the area. Yes. Which also means that the government controls the people, the timber and the mining resources. Okay.

Which, because the Pan American Highway is where it is, there are still some like tributaries of resource extraction. So there's like teak extraction and extracting water and resources from rivers. It's pretty clear because the Darien Gap doesn't have a road through it, how it has remained a natural biodiversity hotspot. And then anywhere that's close to the roads has started to kind of like yellow out, right? Like it's pretty clear what a road can do to the area so when that becomes part of the narrative there's a lot more conservation efforts the sierra club gets involved there's a lot of yeah a lot of like western do-good volunteerism kind of that thing about this area being like we can't touch it.

It's the lungs of Central America. Like, the Panamanian government has made it a park, but of course it's really hard to access any big swath of the park because you can only get to it by road at a certain area, right? So then the area in about the 90s takes on this other element because FARC is becoming an issue in Colombia. And FARC, meaning the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the People's Army. So a guerrilla faction that's created because of the war on drugs and how the U.S. is trying to like snub out cocaine in Colombia. There's a lot of political corruption. And one of the things that come out of it is this

guerrilla campaign. And they are along the Colombian border to the north for various reasons. And one of them is to traffic drugs through the darien gap up into the u.s but then that also puts a lot of these guerrilla soldiers in this impenetrable space so even though there's a lot of tourism and there's national parks people are being kidnapped often right yeah and so all these national geographic hiking boot young bucks are coming through being like i'm gonna walk between the continents doop-de-doo and then they get abducted and kidnapped by fark and it becomes a international crisis and yeah big problem so at this point the darien gap is like not only are there is it like a dangerous jungle, but there's gorillas who will kidnap you in there and stuff like that.

It's like a no-go zone. You know what I mean? So everyone has repeatedly said for like... Again and again. For a million years. There are some people that live there because they can tough it out there. Good for them. Respect their space.

You're clearly not meant to be here. One of the adventurers who was kidnapped wrote a book young pelton is his name and he wrote about the darien gap he said it is a place where you can find abandoned scottish settlements isolated indian villages gun runners and drug gangs left-wing gorillas and right-wing death squads it was a place i was drawn to and then he got kidnapped i feel like he might not be understanding maybe some of the of the larger implications of the history of this place and what it means to for him to be there and for him to call it dangerous too in your research at any point did you come across the story of John Chow? No.

So there's this guy named John Chow in America. I forget what his situation and background was, but he was basically like a missionary who decided that he was going to go and be the one who brought God to this isolated community that had thus far resisted contact in the sentinelese islands which are i think in the indian ocean and he had this the same thing where he was like i know i'm running headlong into my death most likely but i feel compelled by a force greater than myself to go or whatever and he got killed there because it was another situation where this was a population that had really resisted attempts to interlope on them with things like God, however well-intentioned. Yeah, that is ringing a bell to me. Yeah. Well, now there's that story of the missionaries in Haiti who were kidnapped, the 19 missionaries. Have you heard that story?

I haven't heard this story. Oh, Haiti's really going through it lately. My goodness. Haiti's having a rough time and then the news cycle probably like at the beginning of this week filled with all these stories about 19 missionaries in in haiti who were who are still maybe kidnapped and my god yeah it sucks and it also sucks that that's taking up a lot of the reporting on haiti instead of haitians who are have been there and have been going through a rough time for years now it's kind of like oh the white people came in and got hurt so now they get the attention you know

yeah for sure the helen lyles of haiti are getting their their day in press for sure and that's that's a common story yeah unfortunately yeah and Haiti actually he's having such a bad time that there are Haitian migrants who are moving through the Darien Gap trying to get to the U.S. wow in fact about a month ago from the time of this recording there is the reporting that nearly 19 000 children have crossed the darien gap on foot this year predominantly from a haitian diaspora wow yeah yeah and that's that's stressful very stressful and a lot of them are under the age of five on foot nonetheless right jesus oh my god yes and all the issues that you can imagine happening with that yeah i'll end with a quote

from a paper that i found written by an author julie velasquez runk i'll of course put the full thing in the in the credits but she's really interested in this idea of imagining geographies and understanding places not by their historical record or what is actually there, but by what we perceive to be there or what certain people perceive to be there. Right, which is very much the story of the Darien Gap. People thought there was something there. Yeah, and whatever it was, they thought it was riches or they thought it was danger. Or they thought it was infrastructure and transportation or they thought it was this, that or the other. Yeah.

Or like this jewel of biodiversity that needed to be protected or these native peoples that either needed to be colonized or needed to be protected too. Or feared and avoided. Yeah. Yeah. So she writes, Darien's imaginative geography fosters land speculation, including plantations, tourism, narco investments, and logging. The centuries-old notion of a Darien as a wild and dangerous place allows repeated efforts to tame it, thus privileging outsiders in the process that has resulted in the region's domestication and a normalization of an incipit yet constant violence. Yeah.

And I've had the chance to go to Panama. My aunt is in the process of moving there. My aunt is in the process of moving there. And I opened up a map and I remember thinking, well, what's over here? What's to the east? And I was told by other tourists, don't go there. It's not safe. The road ends there.

There's not a lot to see. There's not a lot of infrastructure to see anything if it is there. And it's unsafe. Yeah. So there's a very clear distinction when you get to Panama where it's like, that's not for travel. That's not for commerce. The city of Panama City is not going to look in that direction as much. You know, this is a very superficial and touristic view of it. I'm sure a Panamanian has a much deeper understanding of it than I do.

Yeah. I don't want to say that that's end all be all of the current Panamanian view of Darien, but it seems to me that it's a global South situation, you know? Yeah. Even within the country of Panama, it's like, well, that's that area. Oh, oh, the U. panama it's like well that's that area oh oh the the u.s south well that's that area you know there's there's always that conversation no matter where you are but i lastly want to make the note too that darian and the people who live there is not infamous. They are not infamous. No. It's the imagined geography. It's the imagined dangers, the imagined riches, the imagined infrastructure, the imagined, you know, whatever you want to adventure, whatever you want to extract from a place.

That imagined entity is what is infamous. Because it's resulted in a lot of pain yeah i completely agree uh and there's so many of these stories that some of which we've even covered on the show where it's again what can you extract and what would it say about you to be the one who finally solved this problem this this gap, who finally filled the gap? Right. Yeah, exactly. But then it's like, why is it a problem at all? It's a gentrification push and pull where it's like, the place is dangerous. So it needs to be like redone and the gap filled in, or it's a precious commodity and we need to have people access, have free access to all that it offers and then it gets extracted the other half of the problem there is too is that any attempts

to intervene on whatever you we have perceived to be the problem in this situation have repeatedly contributed new problems yeah many new problems so that darian gap mind the gap mind that gap babies or don't mind it just leave it alone just leave it the fuck alone it's totally fine it's totally fine thanks for tuning in if you want more inf, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find podcasts. We usually release new episodes every other Sunday. You can also follow us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. If you like the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review, or just telling a friend.

Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this episode were first and foremost the article Creating Wild Darien, Centuries of Darien's Imaginative Geography and its Lasting Effects, written by Julie Velasquez-Runk, published in the Journal of Latin American Geography, October 1st, 2015. I also read the digital nomad travel series, Bus to Antarctica, Crossing the Darien Gap by Andrew Evans, published on nationalgeographic.com in 2010. I looked at history.com's article, This Day in History, November 3rd, 1903, the day Panama declares independence from Colombia. And lastly, I read the article nearly 19,000 children crossed the dangerous Darien Gap on foot this year, published October 11th,

2021 on cnn.com and written by Caitlin Hu. The interstitial music that you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins. And the song that you're listening to right now is T Street by Brian Steele.