The Daily - A Mother, a Daughter, a Deadly Journey

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

With mountains, intense mud, fast-running rivers and thick rainforest, the Darién Gap, a strip of terrain connecting South and Central America, is one of the most dangerous places on the planet.Over the past few years, there has been an enormous increase in the number of migrants passing through the perilous zone in the hopes of getting to the United States.Today, we hear the story of one family that’s risking everything to make it across.Guest: Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: The pandemic, climate change and growing conflict are forcing a seismic shift in global migration.Two crises are converging at the Darién Gap: an economic and humanitarian disaster underway in South America, and the bitter fight over immigration policy in Washington.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. The jungle connecting Central and South America is among the most dangerous and deadly terrain in the world. Yet over the past few years, the number of migrants trying to cross it to reach the United States has exploded. Today, my colleague Julie Terkowitz with a first-hand account of crossing the Darien

Gap. It's Friday, January 20th. Julie, tell us what we should know about this place, the Darien Gap. So the Darien Gap is this narrow sliver of land between Colombia and Panama. It connects South and Central Americas. And this slip of land is a jungle and it's an extremely inhospitable jungle. And this is because the territory is sheer mountains,

intense, intense mud. To be able to traverse it on foot is very dangerous because there are deadly animals, bugs, snakes, fast-running rivers. Wow. And it's sort of a changing territory, too, because it's incredibly wet. This place has no road. You know, there's a highway called the Pan-American Highway that connects Argentina to Alaska. And the only portion of that highway that was never constructed, that could not be constructed by engineers who tried

to do it, is this 66-mile portion of the jungle called the Darien Gap. So for years, what you saw was that a small number of migrants who sort of heard word of mouth about the possibility of crossing, that they could do it, were braving this trek. And so you saw between 2010 and 2020, an average of under 11,000 people crossing a year. What you've seen in the last two years is an enormous historic rise in people crossing this very dangerous, in many cases, deadly jungle. How many more people? What we saw in 2022 was almost 250,000 people crossed the Darien Gap. And what explains why so many people are trying to take this treacherous journey right now? So first of all, the pandemic really hit economies in South America hard.

And because the crisis was region wide, this left one way out. And that way out was north through the Darien Gap. That demand really triggered supply. And so that opened a business opportunity for a lot of traffickers to, you know, take advantage of what was happening in their midst. And so we see traffickers advertising on social media, encouraging people to come through the gap, talking about this trek as if it's a vacation. And suddenly the Darien, which was, you know, once considered this impassable space, has become a highway out of the continent. And there's one group in particular that all of

this really affects. Venezuelans, whose sort of economic and political humanitarian crisis is well known. And for Venezuelans, there was an extra incentive to try and cross the gap because at the moment, there's this sort of de facto exception in U.S. policy that is allowing them to cross the border, stay temporarily, and apply for asylum in the United States. And this is something that almost no other nationality in Latin America has. And Julie, quickly remind us what's behind this de facto exception. So what we've seen since the pandemic began is that the U.S. is rejecting most people who come

to the border seeking asylum. They don't let them stay, or if they do enter, the U.S. has the option of deporting them while they process their asylum request. That situation is different for Venezuelans, and that is because the relationship between the United States and the Venezuelan government is extremely strained. There is very little diplomatic or economic relationship between the two nations. And so it's extremely difficult to put Venezuelans on an airplane from the U.S. back home. So the result has been this sort of de facto exception. The U.S. lets Venezuelan migrants who travel to the U.S. stay while it

is rejecting many other people. And Venezuelans have come to understand this. Got it. Thus, there is now a strong reason for Venezuelans to try to make this journey. Exactly. So I needed to make sense of this contradiction that I was seeing between this incredibly harsh terrain, this idea that this place is an impassable jungle, and these numbers that we were seeing, which were really just absolutely astounding. And so my colleague Fede, Federico Rios, photographer, and I decided that the only way really to do this was to do the trek ourselves. And so we set out to cross the Darien Gap. So tell us, Julie, about this journey.

So I started the journey in Nicocli, the beach town in Colombia that serves as the jumping off point for the trip through the Darién. Hola. Buenas. So from Necocli, the migrants have to cross this large body of water, this gulf, to get to the point where the jungle begins. Gulf to get to the point where the jungle begins. And so I have to say, we were totally struck by the organization and the operation of the entire thing. So there are calls on the loudspeaker where the people who run these formerly tourist boat, now migrant boat companies, are calling the migrants one by one to, you know, get on their assigned boat after they've bought their ticket. So here we're starting to see the business component of this right away.

Absolutely. right away. Absolutely. So we get on this boat with a large group of migrants on their way to start this journey. And we reach Capurganá, which is the town on the other side of the Gulf,

the last town before people enter the jungle. So we are leaving now to begin this hike. We've just left what people here are calling a refugio, which is a sort of refuge set up by the town to help migrants find guides. We're a group of maybe a hundred people. There's lots of children. Everybody is completely laden down with bags and mats to sleep on and things like that.

So we set off for what would be, for most of these migrants, a journey of somewhere between six and ten days in the jungle. We walked on this sort of dusty road past a couple of sort of modest homes, and then you see the trees sort of looming before you, and it's quite beautiful but also quite ominous because of all of the terrible stories that you have heard about this jungle.

Mm-hmm. And pretty soon, the terrain gets very steep, and it's very hot. It's very hot. So we just climbed another hill. This one isn't so muddy, but it's just dirt, obviously, and it's very steep. Amid that steep terrain, which is quite muddy. People are struggling. They're breathing hard. Some people start to cry. We were in a space where a man was sort of like

yelling in frustration, like, man, they told me, like, it's hard, but you can do it. That's bullshit. And then it starts to get really difficult. The mud becomes extremely thick. So at this point, we're hiking through a river. Everybody has this like bedraggled look about them, just like covered in mud. You're just slipping and sliding and sinking into the mud in a way that the mud covers your rubber boots, if you're lucky enough to have rubber boots, there's this one tree that if you reach out for has these giant spikes in it.

And you reach out and you just be spiked through the hand. You know, fire ants everywhere. Right, and somehow people are getting through this with children in their arms or on their backs. Yes, lots of children. Lots and lots of children. Wow. or on their backs?

Yes. Lots of children. Lots and lots of children. Wow. So by the time that we are two days in, we really start to see people fall apart. They start to get sick. They start to get injured. There's a pregnant woman who we watch fall down an extremely steep hill.

She just fell down, like she was sliding and just like released the rope and just like sliding, sliding, sliding, sliding and like bumping on these rocks. And it becomes clear that some people aren't going to make this journey. They're not going to survive. Some people aren't going to make this journey. They're not going to survive. And just a few days in... We're also approaching a body. We did come across a dead body on the trail.

Wow. A person who apparently died on the route. It smells like... Wow, I'm dead. out. It smells like death. And I can hear the response of person after person after person who comes across this body. There's people passing through. There's little kids. Cuidado por aqui, they say. Careful, careful. And I can hear them trying to shield their children, you know, from what is really a pretty horrible part of this trek. Mm-hmm. And then we continue on.

And, you know, what is jarring is that just a bit later, you can hear people cheering in the background. Like maybe they made it past a certain point. I hear cheers. People encouraging each other, supporting each other. I was very happy when I saw you. Bartolito sang like this. each other. You often heard adults singing with kids just to keep their spirits up. So by the fourth day, we have crossed into Panama. We are about halfway through the journey,

and we're about to do the most difficult part of the trek, what is called the Hill of Death. So some more notes that I've been meaning to say, just all together. The hike is definitely, definitely much harder. We're going up and down, up and down, up and down hills. Very, very muddy hills. You slip and slip and slip.

It's almost impossibly difficult to rain. We are scaling trees with roots as tall as me. And it's on this hill that I meet Sarah. And Sarah, where are you from in Venezuela? Punto Fijo. Punto Fijo. Falcón. Sarah is this tiny six-year-old girl from Venezuela. She's wearing this tiny pink t-shirt with sparkles on it.

And she is climbing the hill of death with a man named Angel. He's not her father, which is, of course, what I thought. And I see Angel help Sarah to make it up and then down the hill of death. So we arrived at the top of Banderas. We came down the hill, but it got really late at night. It's really dark. We're going to camp between a couple of trees by the river. Fede is making a clearing, basically, with a machete.

And when we get there, Angel asked us if he and Sara could spend the night, you know, sleeping near us. How are you, Sara? Can we sleep here? What do you think? Yes, all together. And of course, we said yes. Mm-hmm. Okay. La gloria de Dios

Gigante y sagrada Me cargan sus brazos And, you know, as we're setting up camp for the night, I got to know Sarah a little bit more. Estos amigos son amigos de la ruta. Ajá. Hasta con... And so what I learned that night as I sat with Sarah and I sat with Angel is that earlier in the journey, Sarah's mother had made friends with Angel and several of Angel's friends. Sarah's mother had then become injured. I didn't really understand how.

Sarah's mother had then become injured I didn't really understand how and that morning had asked Angel if he could help her by carrying Sarah at points by guiding her while she trudged along in her injured state and at some point Angel and Sarah had looked back

and Sarah's mother was gone and by the time I met them, no one knew where her mother was. It wasn't clear to us if she was even alive. It's insane. It's just insane. While we're camping that night, Feli and I are sort of trying to process everything that we'd heard from this sweet little girl and what she must have gone through that day and also what her mom must be thinking. I bet her mom has to be sleeping somewhere else asking herself if she just lost her daughter. That's scary. That's scary because it's not the first thing... It really seemed to exemplify what a cruel journey this was,

that a mother would be pushed, some would say forced, to hand her child, the fate of her child, to someone she had really just met, all in the hopes of making it for the Daring Gap and making it to the United States. We'll be right back. So what happens the next morning? So Sarah's group wakes up very early, and they tell us that they are going to head out.

They're going to continue. But before they left, I asked Sarah for a description of her mother in case I saw her later that day and could interview her, could tell her that Sarah was okay. And I'm told that Sarah's mother looks exactly like her, that physically she's identical, same hair, same skin.

Sarah's group leaves and Fede and I decide that we are going to stay behind and we're going to wait and hope that we find the mother. And sure enough, a few hours later, a woman matching the description we were given comes down the hill. And I ask her, are you Sarah's mother? And she exclaims and and she wants to know immediately if her daughter is okay.

By this point, it's been more than a day since she'd seen her only child. They'd been on this journey for about six days so far. Her name is Alexandra. Sarah's mom tells me that she has terrible blisters on her feet, blisters that are so bad she could barely walk. So we sat down on a log by a river, and I asked her what landed her here.

How did she get here? Why is she here? She told me she was a lawyer in Venezuela and she made reasonable money for some time. But when the country's oil industry collapsed, her business collapsed. And for years she had to wait in long lines for food, for Sarah's diapers, for basic supplies. And in her mind, Venezuela was no place to raise a family. So earlier that year, she had left Venezuela, crossed on foot the Atacama Desert to make it into Chile, where she thought that she could build a new life. But the salaries were too low. new life. But the salaries were too low. She couldn't practice law there because she didn't have the right paperwork. And Alexandra tells me that she's under the impression that the U.S.

will let her in and let her stay in the country. And this is where she wants to raise her daughter. That's what brought her on this trek in the first place. So we talk about what this experience has been like for her, and she's just horrified by the fact that she's become separated from her daughter. She's horrified by what her daughter is going through. I'm scared not to see myself. And when she sees me, she's going to complain.

I know, but she'll understand. All she can think about is what this experience must be like for this tiny six-year-old. I know they're walking hard, but I'll try. Yes, bye. See you later. See you. Thank you. So we say goodbye, and I continued on,

hoping that I might catch back up with Sarah and tell her that her mother was alive and okay and that it seemed they were going to be able to find each other. By this point, it's day seven. We are exhausted, but Fede and I are still moving much faster than Alexandra and we think we might be able to catch up with Sara at the next camp. So we're finally finally arriving at a place called El Abuelo.

The next camp is a place called El Abuelo. This camp is a pretty big stopping point near the end of the journey. El Abuelo is run by a family that sells food. There are police officers. There's a little bit of infrastructure around. Food. Yeah. Second, let's see.

Uh-huh. And as we settle in, I start scanning for Sarah. As we settle in, I start scanning for Sarah. And I spot Sarah and Ángel, and I immediately tell Sarah that I've met her mom, that she's just a day or two behind. And Ángel tells me that since I last saw them, Sarah has been crying a lot. She's been asking about her mom nonstop.

And as I'm talking to her, she's asking to wait at this camp, to wait at El Abuelo for her mom to meet them there. But it's pretty clear that this camp, El Abuelo, her mom to meet them there. But it's pretty clear that this Camp El Abuelo, although it has some infrastructure, is not fit for a child to be sitting around and waiting for days for their parent. It's dirty. There's really no sewage system. So Ángel has decided that what they need to do is get to the end of the trek where there's a government camp where children who have been separated along this journey can stay until they are reunited with their parents, with their adults. And that's where they want to take Sarah. So I tell them that I'm staying behind to do reporting and that I will be there when her mother arrives.

Alexandra is probably a day behind. I know I can wait and try and connect with her at this camp. So what happens next? So we're waiting in El Abuelo. I see this boat arrive. Alexandra has just arrived on a boat. She can barely walk. She can barely get out of the boat. She's just limping. Alexandra is on the boat. Her face is just like twisted in pain. Her feet are so destroyed that she can't walk.

She's like crying and she's shaking. She tells me that they spent the night before outside because their tent has broken. She's covered in these bug bites. Her skin is just red and inflamed. She hasn't eaten or had anything to drink in two days. She just keeps asking about Sarah and she just keeps asking where is Sarah and she just wants to keep going right away

to get as quickly as possible to find Sarah. And... I tell her that I saw Sarah, that Sarah is just up ahead. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! And all she wants to do is get moving immediately. She doesn't want to eat. She doesn't want to sleep. She doesn't want to rest. She just wants to find her daughter. And so we get in this boat to head toward the government UN camp together. So this is Alexandra arriving at Canaan, which is this community in Panama where her daughter should be. She should be able to see

her. So we get off the boat. As before, she needs to be carried. she can barely lift her legs oh one of the boat drivers is helping her she's scanning for her daughter she's gonna have to climb up this small hill i know that's gonna be really hard she's scanning and scanning and alexandra's face is just like pure pain you can really like the hope, but mostly the desperation. And finally, she is taken by Panamanian officials to one of the shacks,

and there, inside the shack, is Sarah, is her daughter. So I'm in that room with my colleague, and we are watching this reunion happen. And Alexandra just, you know, she grabs her daughter, she holds her, and she starts asking for forgiveness right away. Please forgive me, please forgive me. You know, I didn't abandon you, is what she says.

She wants Sarah to know that she didn't do this on purpose. She would never leave her daughter on purpose. That's like the most important thing for her to say to Sarah. Alexandra was, like, touching Sarah all over, like, scanning her body, and she wanted to, like, confirm that they're together. But I also think she wanted to know that her daughter wasn't hurt. They had been separated now for three days. Lots of things could have happened to her.

Sarah seemed kind of to be in shock. And she almost seemed not to believe that her mom was there. She seemed to be struggling to sort of understand, like, what had happened over these last three days. She just kept telling her mom that they'd made it out of the jungle. It was a very bittersweet reunion, because they were together finally. After enduring so much, each of them, they had just experienced something so difficult that i know is going to mark both of them for

their entire lives but they hadn't even made it near the united states they still had so much more to do well we'll talk about that for a moment. Do Alexandra and Sarah end up making it to the United States after everything that they have just been through? Yeah, that's a really heartbreaking question. Sarah and her mother, you know, they rest for a day or two, and then they head north. and then they head north. They have to pay for buses that take them up through Central America and they end up in Honduras. And when they are in Honduras, they hear about a new policy put in place by the Biden administration.

And what is that policy? The Biden administration has ended the exception that allowed people like them from Venezuela to enter the United States at a time when very few other nationalities from South America were being let into the country. And essentially, Sarah and Alexandra learn that after doing this harrowing, harrowing traumatic journey, they will be rejected

when they arrive at the US border. And the Biden administration did this because they were looking at the same numbers that we were looking at. They were seeing that this exception had helped drive people through the jungle. And they were seeing this very large number of people headed toward the United States. And frankly, they were freaking out. And so they put in place this new policy. Venezuelans will now be turned away. And Sarah and Alexandra find out about this just two days after they emerged from the jungle. But what is interesting about this new Biden policy is that it also creates a new way to come and stay in the country temporarily while they seek asylum. And essentially what the Biden administration is saying is, please, Venezuelans, don't come to the Darien Gap. Please apply for this new way into the United States, what the US is calling a humanitarian parole, in which you have to meet various

requirements like having a passport and like having a person in the United States who will sponsor you, who will sponsor you, who will essentially say, I will be their financial backer for a couple of months when they arrive. And so Sarah and Alexandra think, okay, maybe this is what we can do. We'll try that. And they apply. And as I'm speaking to you right now, that is where they are. They're living in Honduras. They have no family there. They have very little support.

And they're just waiting. So as it happens, in this cruel twist of fate and timing, given the Biden policy change, this entire harrowing journey through the Darien Gap for Alexandra and Sarah was essentially for naught. It was in vain. There was no way it was going to lead them into the U.S. Yeah, which is, I think, a pretty intense thing for a mother to wrestle with,

having put themselves and, even more than that, their child through this incredibly traumatic experience in search of something bigger, in search of something better, in search of some kind of safety. If you were the United States, there is a logic to this, as painful as it clearly is for Alexandra and for Sarah and for everyone like them who went through this journey. And the logic is that they want to discourage this trip because it's dangerous and because the U.S. can't accept this many people, according to the White

House. And so has this policy change had the intended impact that it sought? Has the number of people trying to cross the Darien gone down since it went into place? There are two parts of that answer. The first part is that, yes, in the immediate sense, the policy worked, right? When we left the jungle, there were about 5,000 people leaving the jungle, crossing the jungle in a single day. When that policy was put in place, the number went down significantly, almost immediately, within 10 days. But the thing is that you still have 700, 800 people a day going through the jungle. And if you look at 700 or 800 people a day times 365 days a year, you're talking about almost 300,000 people possibly crossing the Darien Gap in 2023. This

would follow a year in which 250,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, and we considered it an astounding, sort of eye-popping, shocking number. And so what this tells us is that despite this policy, people are still willing to take this enormously difficult trek. So even though the number of migrants has dropped, it hasn't reverted back to that much smaller number from years ago. And it sounds from what you're saying, like there are still so many more people crossing the Darien than ever before. Absolutely. And if you ask me, you know, sort of why is this happening,

you have to look first at the fact that from South America, U.S. migration policies look extremely confusing. They're changing constantly. And so people think, well, the policy might be X when I leave. But by the time I arrive at the border, it's going to be different. And maybe I will be the one to get through. The second thing is that, you know, this desperation continues. The sort of financial fallout from the pandemic continues. And the

third thing, you know, you have to look at what's happening on the internet, the way that traffickers are luring people, advertising to people as if this is a vacation. And so all of those factors mean that despite this U.S. policy that is trying to stop people from taking this journey, the Darien is now open. The Darien is an open migrant corridor that will continue to be used unless something major changes in the U.S. or unless something major changes in the jungle. And what that means is more families putting themselves in these extremely traumatic situations because they believe that they have no other choice. Julie, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks, Michael.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Supreme Court said that an internal investigation had failed to identify the person who leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade in May, an extraordinary breach of the court's rules of secrecy. The investigation included 126 interviews, as well as an examination of the court system of computers, printers, and phones. But in the end, the mystery of who disclosed the

historic ruling may never be solved. And the United States hit its debt limit on Thursday, prompting the Treasury Department to begin using a series of accounting maneuvers to ensure that the federal government can keep paying its bills. Republicans have said they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling unless the Biden administration agrees to a series of major spending cuts, a strategy expected to produce a high-stakes showdown in the coming weeks. Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper and Carlos Prieto,

with help from Nina Feldman and Claire Tennesketter. It was edited by MJ Davis-Lynn and Patricia Willans, with help from Lisa Chow. Fact-Checked by Susan Lee contains original music by Alisha Ba'etube and was engineered by Brad Fisher. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Eileen Sullivan. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.