The Darién Gap

A Reporter's Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas

By Belén Fernández

Rutgers University Press

The narrow Darién Gap, the only land bridge connecting South and Central America, encompasses a spectacularly hostile jungle, covered in steep mountains, dense rainforests, and flood-prone marshes. Known in Spanish as el infierno verde, or “the green hell,” it is one of the most inhospitable places in the world. Its terrain is too treacherous for roads, yet hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers contend with its horrors every year in the hopes of reaching the United States, still some three thousand miles away. And of the countless who set out for the border, an untold number never arrive.

In this book, journalist Belén Fernández visits the Darién Gap to report on the dehumanizing and deadly stretch of land that has become a mass graveyard for migrants. Fernández’s travels bring her into contact with refuge seekers, people smugglers, law enforcement officials, and many more whose stories bring life to a place overwhelmingly associated with death. Combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis, she shines light on a largely made-in-the-USA crisis that has come to define our modern era.

Engrossing and heartrending, The Darién Gap is a poignant and compassionate indictment of structural inequality and institutionalized inhumanity in a world where the have-nots must risk death for a chance at a better life—or any life at all.

The world could use more writers like Belén Fernández. Her curiosity is relentless (and contagious). And she brings an astonishing worldliness as well as a deep fount of smarts and empathy to whatever she takes on. This is a highly original and intrepid book about immigration and what it means to travel across borders of every sort. Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Cris

Belén Fernández is among our most intelligent 'on-the-spot' journalists. She knows much of the world firsthand, and she critically connects its various hot spots into a larger whole. Her excellent The Darién Gap brings the reader into what was a thick jungle in a thin land but now is a well-trodden chokepoint on the global migrant highway. Fascinating and beautifully written. Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth

Belén Fernández is a fearless journalist with deep empathy for her subjects. Her on-the-ground reporting is in the same spirit as George Orwell. She delivers the unvarnished truth of our time about people seeking safe harbor in a chaotic world. Melissa del Bosque, cofounder, The Border Chronicle

BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ is an opinion columnist for Al Jazeera and the author of several books, including Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico's Largest Immigration Center. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin and her work has appeared in the New York Times.

Contents
Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Notes
Further Reading

Introduction 1
The Darién Gap 9
Notes 185
Further Reading 193

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