Darien

For a long time the refugees went en masse towards the south and thus reached the southern end of the continent. There is no longer a point on the map where a shipwreck or a road accident with a balance of Venezuelan deaths has not been recorded. Two million two hundred thousand Venezuelans, perhaps more, remain in Colombia.

It will never be enough to extol the solidarity that these unfortunates have found throughout our America. In Colombia, however, is where the diligence and foresight of officials have provided exemplary guarantees of all kinds to the human rights of refugees, notably those of access to health and the right to an identity. All this in the midst of the calamity that the pandemic represented for the Government of Ivan Duque.

In recent weeks, however, coinciding with the protests against the high cost of living that are paralyzing neighboring Panama, the Panamanian authorities and the competent UN agencies have released very dismaying figures: the National Migration Service of Panama has observed that So far in 2022, 48,430 people have entered the country through the dangerous Darien jungle. 58% of these migrants are Venezuelan.

This was reported for El Pais America, just four months ago, by the journalist Catalina Oquendo: “The dreaded Darien route that 133,000 migrants crossed in 2021 no longer sounds like a Creole. Haitians, who used to cross that dangerous trail en masse, where countless numbers have disappeared or lost their lives, are no longer the majority. They continue trying to get from Colombia to the United States, but Spanish and the sonorous “panas” of Venezuelan migrants are now imposed on the trail.”

The single word, Darien, is a figure of stalking and death in the buccaneer memories written by Alexandre Exquemelin, a filibuster enrolled in the Brotherhood of the Brothers of the Coast on the Island of Tortuga in the second half of the 17th century. In his memoirs, this “gentleman of fortune” who came to join the crews of Henry Morgan and El Olones as a surgeon, places all the dangers and torments imaginable in the swamps and mangroves of this jungle stretch of the Central American isthmus.

Garcia Marquez puts Blacaman el Bueno, seller of miracles, to shout his antivenoms and consolation herbs “climbing on a table in the port of Santa Maria del Darien”. He confesses that because of things like that magnificent story by Gabo, the place was always an exotic historical novel for me until it began to appear more and more frequently in the chronicles about the migratory crisis that shakes the region.

I recently met a talkative lady, a native of eastern Venezuela, who has a job as farms in Cedritos, the Bogota district “colonized” by emigrants from my country. Granjerias we call home-made sweets in my land, like the famous “oven bread”. The lady already has five children scattered with her families throughout the geography of the continent. It was her who for the first time heard of a mountain that in the Darien they call La Llorona. I remembered the place when, a few days ago, I read the account that a Venezuelan emigrant made of her odyssey to the Caracas newspaper TalCual.

After countless mishaps, betrayals by the coyotes, extortions by the police and nights of insomnia and disorientation spent in the open, you reach the foot of La Llorona, so called because there is the beach of all fainting, the place where the spirit falters. until many burst into tears.

It is on this mountain where many people have been abandoned by coyotes and where terrible massacres of migrants have occurred. Their few resources exhausted, faced with a sea voyage in flimsy boats and fearful of dying at the hands of robbers, that is where many give up.

The young woman in the story published in As it is she lived her sad night there, together with her husband, but they got over it and continued on, through Costa Rica, Nicaragua. Honduras, Guatemala… Not so my friend from Cedritos. “In La Llorona was where my daughter and I cracked up and said what’s up.”

Still, the courage of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Colombians, Central Americans and people from all over the Caribbean basin who, in defiant caravans, are heading for the United States border is overwhelming. The determination of those who break with the helplessness in which they live in their countries and, they would say in Cuba, take the road to Yuma cannot be dissuaded. There is no Darien plug or Trump wall that can with so much desire to prosper, so much affliction, so much hunger together.

Subscribe here to newsletter of EL PAÍS America and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of the region