Fresh Air - Migrants Risk It All On The Treacherous Darién Gap

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

Each year, nearly half a million migrants cross the perilous stretch of jungle between South and Central America. Many face snakes, flash floods, sweltering heat, sexual violence, and death. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caitlin Dickerson talks to Tonya Mosley about what she saw and the migrants she followed for the September Atlantic cover story.John Powers reviews the Apple TV+ series Women in Blue, about women cops in '70s Mexico City.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Immigration remains a pivotal issue in this presidential election, with former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris presenting starkly different visions for America's immigration policy. Trump has doubled down on his hardline stance, promising an unprecedented crackdown if reelected. He's vowed on his first day in office

to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and reinstating controversial policies like the Remain in Mexico program. Harris, on the other hand, says she will attempt to reframe the immigration debate, emphasizing her experience as California's attorney general in prosecuting transnational gangs and human traffickers. She's pledged, if elected, to revive bipartisan border security legislation and address the root causes of migration from Central America. My guest today, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caitlin Dickerson, has been covering U.S. immigration for several years now. Last winter, Dickerson and photojournalist Lindsay Adario traveled the Darien Gap, one of the most dangerous paths to the U.S., to give a firsthand account of the journey,

where nearly half a million migrants a year face the threat of snake-filled jungles, flash floods, sweltering heat, sexual violence, and even death. Caitlin Dickerson chronicles what she saw and the migrants she followed in the Atlantic's September cover story, The Impossible Path to America. Caitlin Dickerson, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks, Tanya. I'm grateful to be here. The Darien Gap, as I understand it, has historically been seen as a last resort because it's difficult to navigate through and really dangerous. So why has it exploded in popularity over the last few years? That's right. What's happened is a couple things. One, we have more people who've been displaced

from the homes than ever before in history. So about one in 69 people on the planet right now are migrating. And at the same time, to try to prevent migration to the United States, our government in particular has imposed restrictive policies at our border and pressured our Latin American neighbors to impose restrictions as well and block migrants from getting visas. This includes people who might be seeking refugee status, asylees, I'm using the umbrella term migrant to describe all of them. And these policies make it impossible for people from countries where most people in the Darien Gap are from, Venezuela, Ecuador, Haiti, make it impossible for them to go online and buy a plane ticket to a country closer to the United States. This hasn't minimized migration, but what it has

done is shifted routes. So if you can't take a safer route by plane to the United States, what you end up doing is crossing a jungle like the Darien Gap. Can you place us in the Darien Gap? Where does the route start and where does it end? Sure. So we're talking about the northwest part of Colombia. That's where the jungle begins and then stretches across the border into southern Panama. It's the only strip of land that stretches out from South America, meaning the only way to get from South America to the United States eventually on foot is to cross the Darien Gap. Okay. And you mentioned where some of those migrants are coming from, places like Venezuela and Ecuador. Where are some of the other places they're coming from and how do they actually get there?

You have representation from essentially every habitable part of the world in the Darien Gap. So meaningful numbers of people coming from China, Vietnam, Thailand, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all over Africa, the Caribbean, everywhere. You've even seen Ukrainians in the Darien Gap. And they're getting there, by and large, by using the help of smuggling organizations. Trafficking groups that have become very efficient at moving drugs and moving illegal weapons across the globe have basically transitioned quite seamlessly into a business of moving people. They charge people, they make connections across the globe so that you can hire someone in northern India, as a person whose family I interviewed did, and they'll get you on a plane, perhaps first to Europe and then to Colombia or Guyana or another South American country where they can find a hole in visa policies to get you on land there. And then through that smuggler's connections that they've made, they'll set you up with whether it's taxi rides, bus rides, or just routes for you to walk, moving you from point A to B until you get to the United States. Of course, these routes are

very dangerous, and the safety of people who are being moved is not a priority for these smuggling groups, which is part of why the routes can be so deadly on top of the natural dangers that come with them. You write about the Gulf Clan Cartel, the largest smuggling organization there. They're a criminal organization that seems like they've basically set up, as you say, a system. Darien Gap from Colombia. It controls the region of northern Colombia where the jungle begins. So that includes drugs that move through the Darien Gap, weapons, any other illicit contraband, and migration. They came out of a former paramilitary group in northern Colombia and evolved over the years into the country's most prominent drug cartel. And so, you know, you'll see a dynamic in northern Colombia that exists elsewhere in the world where there's essentially no government presence.

There are no Colombian police in this part of the country. And the gang is the police and the mayor and all of the positions that would normally be elected. And so they've systematized migration through the Darien Gap. They allow anyone who lives in the region or who comes to the region to make money to work there as long as they've been vetted and as long as they turn over a portion of their profits to the cartel. The photographs that Lindsay Adario took, along with your reporting, it really gives this stunning look at the conditions and the experiences of these migrants, and you actually recorded yourself in some of your interviews during this journey. I want to play some of what you recorded,

where you describe the terrain. A lot of times you're making the choice between scaling really high rocks, basically bouldering or mountain climbing. We're going through really fast running water. Really fast. So right now we're on boulders. Maria had a towel. Her towel draped over her backpack. It was getting caught on rocks. So she just ripped it off, threw it down and kept going.

Which might mean no towel for her three kids. That was my guest, Caitlin Dickerson, recording herself while traversing the Darien Gap. Caitlin, tell us why you decided to start recording yourself. So in the jungle, I couldn't use a notebook, right? I needed both hands at all times. And so I basically recorded myself as much as possible, remembering, trying to make note of what I was seeing so I could refer back to it later. This clip is from the last day I was in the jungle with a woman named Maria Fernanda and her family, and everyone was exhausted. So people were reaching their wits end.

They were dropping even the most basic supplies that they had with them in order to lighten the weight on their backs and try to get them to keep going. At this point, food was really dwindling within the group she was traveling with. They didn't able to prepare ourselves physically for this journey. And so they'd struggled from day one. And I think her leaving this towel behind, which is pretty essential, right? We're in one of the rainiest places on earth. It's raining every day more than it isn't. And so something simple like that can really be helpful

and be necessary. And so when I saw her rip it off of her bag and drop it, I realized, you know, she's really hitting her limit. And, you know, I hope she's able to keep going. I'm wondering, Caitlin, what did Maria and some of the folks that you had talked to know about the complexity of moving through the Darien Gap before they got there? Because in the photographs, we really see that people are very ill-equipped. They just have on T-shirts and regular shoes, and they have lots of things on their back. But they're going to be traveling something like 60 miles through a dense jungle. So smugglers advertise trips through the Darien Gap like their nature walks. You know, some of their videos say we provide all the food and water that you'll need.

We provide tents. We provide all the supplies you'll need. This isn't true. People are often quoted a low price. I think the cheapest now that people are told is $170 to cross the Darien Gap. When you get there, you find out that you actually have to pay for shelters that you stay in along the way. And then really the least you can pay is $300. That doesn't include supplies that come next. So people arrive there with a variety of perspectives on what they're about to get themselves into. Maria Fernanda and the group she was traveling with were predominantly

Venezuelans. And so they knew people, lots of people, who'd left Venezuela and crossed the Darien Gap. I mean, that country right now, more than about a quarter of the population has fled because of the regime that's in place. And so it wasn't that Maria Fernanda didn't know what the terrain in the Darien Gap was like, but that like all of the Venezuelans essentially who are in the Darien Gap, she was very poor. She couldn't afford to go to REI and buy the best camping gear. You know, they brought what they could, t-shirts. A lot of people were hiking in tennis shoes. You know, they had backpacks that by the end were ripping. And so people would have to stop and sew their backpack back together. You know, shoes had big holes in them. And that's

really just because of the economic reality of their lives leading up to reaching the dairying gap. How much did you bring with you? And did you have to offload anything, you and Lindsay? So no, kind of the opposite. We ran out. I mean, we mostly lived on protein bars and goo, runner's goo. We did bring with us some cans of tuna and bread, but those were the supplies that ran out and why we had to race out of the jungle at the end. And so on my person at any given time, I usually had two protein bars and a bit of water. So it wasn't like you had a lot of supply. During your time out there, did you share water or food with others who were on the journey?

If I had it, I did. And I talked to journalists who'd done the same thing in advance about what happens. You know, you actually have very little, right? It's not like you, even if you wanted to, could cross the daring gap with a bunch of extra supplies. We carried the bare minimum just like anybody else. It wasn't often that I was asked for food directly. You know, I think about two moments that were was following on my first route through the Darien Gap, we had to turn back. We didn't have permission to continue on with the Panamanian government at that point. And, you know, I'd spent a couple days at that point getting to know these families and their children really closely. The youngest was two. And a father asked me, do you have any water for the kids? We just ran out of

water. And I didn't have any left myself. And neither did anybody else in the group. And so, you know, very soon after, Panamanian border guards arrive arrive and we actually had to run down the mountain because we were with porters who said they'd been shot at by those guards before. And so you can imagine that until I heard from those families again, I wondered, we all wondered if they were okay, just knowing that they were going to have several more days of walking, that they didn out in Spanish, water, water. And it's very difficult to see people in that kind of situation. Very difficult to see that. You notified the government that you were going, right? But that didn't necessarily make things safe for you. No, I mean, it was very difficult to get the Panamanian government to engage when I was first planning this trip. And of course, there's a debate among journalists. You know, do you want to go on your own almost as if you're a migrant and try to have the exact same experience that they do?

I think that's really impossible. And it's also quite dangerous. You know, that requires you then to essentially traffic yourself and work more closely with smuggling groups. So we decided to tell the Panamanian government and try to get their permission that we were going to cross the Darien Gap so that we wouldn't have to risk things like being detained for crossing the border illegally if we were encountered on the Panamanian side of the jungle. And so they eventually, after a lot of cajoling, responded, agreed for us to cross through Panama and said that they would have to send with us a team of border patrol officers who stood back, who didn't really get

involved, but who were essentially tailing us to look out for risks like robbery and sexual assault, which have become real issues there. Of course, their presence doesn't do anything to make the terrain any less dangerous. And a lot of them struggled to keep up, too. So these are officers who were trained to work in the jungle and who spend a lot of time there, but who were really struggling. I mean, at one point, one of them broke down. He had diarrhea from drinking the river water, which is contaminated with human waste and even with human bodies. And he sliced open a bottle of saline solution I'd given him along with antivenom for vipers, just in case anyone got a snake bite. The antivenom requires dilution, but he chugged

the saline solution because he was desperate. So that's the experience of somebody who is trained and paid to work in the Darien Gap. Kaitlin, can you describe how technology is used out there? Because many of these payments that people were making for food and water and other things, it didn't come from like actual cash. They were using apps and things like that. Is that right? Yes. Technology in the Daring Gap is expanding, as is the infrastructure, really on a week-to-week basis. So over the course of six months traveling there, I saw new roads being built. I saw camps go up where people could sleep overnight on either edge of the jungle, not in the middle of it, but on either edge, you know, on concrete slabs, sometimes with a roof over their head.

And when it comes to payments, people are able to buy things on the internet because places on either side of the jungle use Starlink, the company that Elon Musk started, to create Wi-Fi hotspots, and they use generators for electricity. And this allows people to have cell phone service deeper into the jungle and to transfer money and make purchases along the way. So the cost of crossing the Darien Gap is really adding up as these resources are built in. But at the same time, migrants there will say, you know, I'm so glad that I could buy two bottles of Gatorade, even if it cost me $5, because if not, I might have gone an additional day without anything to drink. It's a very complicated dynamic. And just since I went in December for the first time, I've already seen lots of places

along these routes that were, of course, not on Google Maps when I first traveled to the Darien Gap and didn't expect them to be. I've seen them shown up on Google Maps, and I've seen them with reviews by migrants, you know, some of whom say, that was horrible, I would never do it again. Some say, you know, basically offer a blessing or good luck to people who follow behind them. But every time I look at these places I visited, I see more of them noted as locations with reviews on Google Maps. Our guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caitlin Dickerson. We're talking to her about her latest article for The Atlantic, The Impossible Path to America. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Can you describe what sleeping overnight in the jungle was like and how long were your trips? So we spent about five days and four nights in the jungle total. Sleeping in the jungle, it's very wet. So the first thing you have to do is look out for high ground because flash floods can sweep away tents in the middle of the night and people do die that way. When you seek out high ground, though, what you find is you're in a place where

many, many other people who are migrating have slept before you. And so there's lots of trash. I mean, trash so thick that in some places you can't see the dirt beneath it. There are no bathrooms. And so you see remnants of that. And it's raining often all night. There's no light pollution. So there's kind of this interesting rhythm where, you know, you walk for about 12 hours a day from first light in the morning until right before sunset. And then right before sunset, you race to set up camp because once the sun is gone, it's pitch black and you can't see anything. And then you spend a long time trying to sleep. to set up camp because once the sun is gone, it's pitch black and you can't see anything. And then you spend a long time trying to sleep. The jungle is very loud, but you're exhausted. And so I actually did sleep. I think most people did somehow. And then you get up the next morning and start again. A lot of what you were told to keep safe wasn't exactly

foolproof, right? Because you write about how porters you paid to travel with you told you to stay close together because that would intimidate large groups, but you later learned that it was actually the opposite. That's right. So the dynamics in the Darien Gap change really quickly, which makes it impossible to fully report out in advance what you're going to come upon. When I was planning the trip, journalists advised me to always be in a group. You know, that's the way to avoid being robbed, facing sexual violence, which lots of women, particularly on the Panamanian side of the border, face. And so that was our plan going in. Once we reached the other side of the jungle, though, and I started to do interviews,

spoke to dozens and dozens of people right at the edge of the jungle as they were emerging, and they described to me being robbed systematically in very large groups of people. So basically, what that told me was that these groups of bandits who are armed had figured out a way to maximize their profits by setting up almost an informal checkpoint where they would round people in groups of about 100 up, wave guns at them, search them aggressively. The women described being groped. Some of the women said that they were digitally penetrated under the guise of being searched for hidden cash, and that basically traveling in large numbers did nothing to protect them.

A lot of these groups of bandits are actually indigenous Panamanians, and there's a very complex dynamic at play. So indigenous Panamanians have lived in the jungle for a long time. They live in one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America, but are deeply poor and have had to deal with drug traffickers moving through their territory for a very long time. And so some have taken up arms to protect themselves or even gotten involved in trafficking themselves as a way of survival. And I think that's what's given rise to a dynamic in which some prey on migrants who cross through the jungle. And I should say that leaders of these Panamanian communities have asked for help from the government, you know, to crack down on the

assaults and the robberies of migrants. And Panamanian authorities have so far done very little to address these issues. You mentioned how folks from Venezuela that you talked with, like Maria, they actually do know the dangers of this route. Many of them told you that they would have preferred to stay in their home country. Some of them also had strong feelings about what they think the government should do. What did some of them share with you? election and all of the candidates were campaigning on a platform to bring migration back, kind of the opposite of what a lot of people might assume. Now, this would pose many challenges, right? So first and foremost, a concern from the U.S. government would be if you allow people to cross borders openly and without limit that it could create an even greater mass movement of people.

You know, that's a fear that exists. But within this community, you know, again, what people say is we've had migration here for as long as anyone can remember. And if we had a system where the government allowed us to, in the light of day, move people in the safest way possible for a reasonable price, it would be better for migrants who are right now risking their lives to cross the jungle, and it would be better for us. Migration really is seen as a money-making proposition worldwide. I've seen that again and again in my reporting. And sometimes those exchanges of money are mutually beneficial, and sometimes they're exploitative. When human trafficking groups are involved and they're lying to people about what

migration actually looks like and risking people's lives, that's obviously exploitative. But in Panama, this community was hoping for a dynamic, however unrealistic it may be in the current political context, that would help migrants and help them. If you're just joining us, my guest is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Caitlin Dickerson. We're talking to her about her latest article for The Atlantic, The Impossible Path to America. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. Caitlin, you also witnessed children who were alone. What were the circumstances? Children in the Darien Gap are actually the fastest growing demographic of people crossing that jungle.

30,000 crossed actually between January and April of this year alone. So I saw children, and you've got two different dynamics there. One is teenagers who are crossing the Darien Gap alone, migrating on their own. And others are children who are separated from their parents in the jungle. These children arrive every day on the other side. And sometimes their parents follow. Sometimes they don't. I met a five-year-old girl from Ecuador in the Darien Gap just as she emerged from the jungle, and she was with a group of adults who'd only just met her, they explained.

They said this young girl named Kelly had been with an older woman. They didn't know if the woman was her mother or her grandmother, but that she'd been struggling physically. And so that at some point during the journey, the woman with Kelly handed her over to a man they weren't related to, but seemed to know, and that he'd cared for her for the next few days as they continued through the jungle. And then just before they reached canoes that are driven by indigenous Panamanians for a price that helped people make that final stretch out of the jungle, the man got hurt. And so he handed Kelly over to this group of virtual strangers. And that's where I met her. You know, what was so striking about what happened next is that

Panamanian authorities had explained to me in advance they have a process. If a child arrives and they're not with their parents, for whatever reason, they're taken aside and kept in government custody. You know, they're given food and given clothing, I was told, until their parent comes to get them. That's not what happened. This group reached the front of a processing line where they were interviewed by Panamanian authorities. And they simply said, you know, we don't have our documents with us. They're with somebody else who is traveling behind us who's going to get here soon. And the authorities just waved them through into this indigenous community, which acts as a reception

point for people emerging from the jungle. You know, there was a sea of people moving through town. It was packed. And very quickly, I saw Kelly kind of disappear into the distance. And so I kept tabs on her over the next couple of days. The man she'd been with arrived later that day. And then the woman who'd brought her into the jungle, who turned out to be her mother, finally arrived the following day. But you can see how easily children can get lost. And of course, there are cases where a child enters the jungle and their parent dies during the journey. That happens too. In your piece, you tell us about a mother that you met who, during the trek,

watches her nine-year-old son get swept away by a current. And it's a horrifying story. Can you describe what happened? When I reached the indigenous community where people who make it out of the Darien Gap first emerge, I saw signs printed on computer paper posted on the sides of a couple of houses with a picture of a young boy and a phone number, you know, saying that they were seeking information. I reached out to the phone number and I met a woman named Bae Thi Le, who's from Vietnam. And she told me that the picture was of her

nine-year-old son, Khan. So Bae had worked in Vietnam as an administrator at a school. She lost her job during the pandemic and never got it back. They were living in a very poor community, struggling, surviving. But she saw on the internet videos of the Darien Gap depicting this easy trek. And unlike people from Venezuela, she didn't know any better. And so she spoke to family. She had relatives in the United States. They decided to send her money so that she and Khan could make their way here. I think her story is important for a lot of reasons. But one of them is that she's someone who may not have crossed the Darien Gap, right, if smuggling groups had not taken over these

routes and were not using their profit motivation to encourage more and more migration, not just of people who need to migrate, but of people who are willing to if they think it's going to be easier than it actually is. And so T and Khan make their way over the course of about a month, first to Europe, then to South America, finally to the entrance of the Darien Gap does, that you're crossing rivers dozens of times a day and that flash floods can entered yet another river. It had been raining all day, but the rain picked up and a flash flood started. They could tell because the water had been clear, but all of a sudden it turned dark, thick brown. Bey and Khan had linked arms with a man from Ecuador named Juan to just stable themselves as they made their way across. But when the water rose, all three of them were swept off their feet. They turned and grabbed onto a boulder to try to keep

from being washed down the river. And Juan tried to do the same thing, but he was wearing a backpack and it filled with water. This happens a lot. And the backpack took him under. And when that happened, Khan slipped out of his arms. So Juan and Bae, they scrambled quickly to the other side of the river and looked out in the direction where Khan had been swept and he was gone. You've kept up with Bey. What has she asked of you? When I first spoke with Bey, she immediately began asking if I could help her find Khan. I think because, like so many people who disappear in the Darien Gap, you know, he's never been found. His remains have never been found. She doesn't have

a body to mourn. And she worries that maybe he actually survived and is looking for her somewhere, hasn't been able to contact her. I mean, this is a grieving mother who has no closure. And so her question for me was, can you help me find my son? And can you tell our story as well? And so I knew of an initiative that the International Committee of the Red Cross has. It exists globally to try to help connect migrants who lose track of family members with their loved ones, whether they're alive or dead. And so I contacted the Red Cross to find out if they had found anyone who matched Khan's description. I contacted American immigration officials as well, but as you can imagine, they hadn't. I mean, it's just nearly impossible, especially when someone disappears in this way, to ever find them. And because Bae knew that I had begun to look into what happened to Khan, I tried to tell their story in its entirety.

She latched on to me, and she would send me messages every day and she still sends me messages and she would say please help me find my son you know can you help me find Khan is there anything you can do she's still struggling you know they they cross the Darien gap just a week after I did that first time in last December and it's now August and it seems to me when we speak like she's still there. She hasn't moved forward in time. I'm wondering, Caitlin, how do you describe to the migrants what you do and how much help you're able to offer them? And is there ever an expectation, was there ever an expectation during your time out there that you were there to offer them? And is there ever an expectation, was there ever an expectation during your time out there that you were there to help them?

There was never an expectation that I was there to help anyone. I mean, this is a really difficult dynamic that we all deal with as journalists, right? I'm sure you have too, Tanya. And the Darien Gap might be one of the most challenging instances of it that I've encountered, but it's part of all of our jobs. I'm very clear with everyone I meet and was very clear with everyone I met in the Darien Gap that, you know, I'm a journalist. I write about migration. My job is to tell the stories of people who are involved in crossing the Darien Gap, as well as the officers who are working there, people working as porters, you know, the Gulf cartel, to help the public understand

what's really happening. And they understood that. And, you know, at the same time, you see people really struggling. And I guess there's not that much that you can do. You know, certainly in the Darien Gap, if you fall, somebody sticks their arm out to help you up. It doesn't matter if you've never met them before, you're never going to see them again. You know, people did that for me and I did that for them. I'm a human being. And people did say, and I hear this often, you know, that they were glad that we were there. I think it means a lot to people who are in a really difficult situation to just know that someone thinks they're important enough to ask how they're doing. And it is our job explaining to the public the dynamics that play here from every perspective and tell people so that they can decide for themselves how they feel about it. You know, what policies they want to push for, which candidates they want to support. That's

what the reader does, and I help them do it. Kaitlin Dickerson, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you, Tanya. Kaitlin Dickerson is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her September cover story is titled The Impossible Path to America. Coming up, our critic at large, John Powers, reviews the new Apple TV Plus series, Women in Blue.

This is Fresh Air. The new crime series, Women in Blue, from Apple TV Plus, is set in Mexico in the 1970s. It's about four women cops, the first ever in Mexico City, who band together to catch a serial killer while battling their male colleague's belief that women can't do the job. Our critic-at-large John Powers says

that it's a story about the battle to shift consciousness. Over the years, TV has offered up an entire precinct worth of women cops. From Angie Dickinson's spicy Pepper Anderson, in the 70s hit Police Woman, to Helen Mirren's flinty Jane Tennyson in the great 90s series Prime Suspect, to Mariska Hargaday's driven Olivia Benson, who will doubtless still be solving sex crimes on Law & Order SVU long after the oceans have swallowed New York City. We've watched so many women with badges that it's easy to forget that there was a time when

most men believed there shouldn't be any. That belief is the starting point of a new Mexican-made TV series, Women in Blue, which is streaming on Apple TV+. Set in the hyper-conservative Mexico of 1971, this lively ten-part drama focuses on four vastly different women who go to work for the police and discover that it's easier to capture a serial killer than to deal with the assorted misogynies of the men around them. As the story begins, Mexico City is being terrorized by a woman-killing maniac known as the Undresser

for the way he leaves his victims. To distract from the force's failure to catch this killer, the police chief cooks up a publicity stunt. He announces that he's opening up the police department to women, an idea he feels sure will get scads of upbeat coverage. We follow four new recruits. Foremost among them is Maria, who once dreamed of being a detective, but wound up an elegant bourgeois mother with a husband you know is cheating the instant you see him. There's her sister Valentina, a revved-up feminist who hates the government. There's Angelis, a loner who does most of the actual crime-solving. And finally there's Gabina,

whose policeman father slaps her face for joining the force against his wishes. These four shine in training, but when it comes time to do the job, dressed in blue miniskirts, they're treated as a joke. Sent out to patrol a park, they're given not weapons but a bag with coins

to call the cops if they uncover a crime. Naturally, they do uncover one. They find the undresser's latest victim. And even though they're ordered not to, they throw themselves into tracking down the killer. Early on, I got a bit bored watching the relentless sexism faced by our heroines. I don't doubt it's realism, but nothing is more tiresome than having to watch people be bigoted in stupid ways that the world has passed by. This is 2024, and hearing some macho detective snarl that women can't be cops made me fear that Women in Blue might be one of those shows that simply flatters its audience by letting us feel more enlightened than the people from an earlier era.

Happily, the show grows more interesting, with each of the quartet facing a different form of misogyny, even within their own families. And like them, we discover some startling wrinkles in Mexican law back then, like Article 169 of the country's civil code. It held that a Mexican woman could be forced to quit a job if it affects the, quote, integrity, unquote, of her family. And the person who got to decide on this was her husband. It's since been repealed.

Although there are original works about the shocking level of femicide in Mexico, most famously Roberto Bolaño's great novel 2666, Women in Blue's crime plot is pretty generic. It resorts to such tired standbys as the cultivated serial killer Who gives them brainy tips from his prison cell And the murderer deciding to target the women in blue who are investigating him The show's real strength lies in showing how each of the heroines is transformed by joining the force Be it Angelis breaking free of her emotional isolation, or the idealistic Gabina discovering the brutal, corrupt truth about policing in Mexico. The story's feminist

angle is clearest in Maria, who with her nice house, elegant clothes, and George Clooney-looking husband is the one who would seem to have had it made. She's the one who must decide whether she'll sacrifice comfort to work in a police department whose men don't want women in it. By the end of Women in Blue, its heroines and its audience come face to face with a radical truth. What drives the undresser to kill women is grounded in the ingrained patriarchal values that ordinary women lived with every single day. John Powers reviewed the new series Women in Blue on Apple TV+. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, pediatric surgeon Dr. Ayla Stanford.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Stanford made the decision to step away from her role as surgeon to address health inequities in Black and brown communities. Her new memoir is Take Care of Them Like My Own. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Dani Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Susan Nakundi directed today's show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR.