I was born in Santiago, Chile and have spent a good part of my life photographing news and conflicts across Latin America. I’ve been in Colombia documenting the war between The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government. I’ve spent time in in Mexico, getting into all kinds of difficult situations, including covering cartel wars.
I got into documentary photography when I found a town controlled by FARC guerillas south of Colombia, where locals used cocaine as their de facto currency. These are places where you really think, ‘why the hell did I come here, this is crazy’? You can feel it’s dangerous just by being there.
But the Darién Gap is something else. It’s fascinated me for more than twelve years. In 2004 while doing a photo story for the New York Times, I got hooked on the idea of it. There’s an impossibly long highway, Pan-American Highway, that starts at the bottom of Argentina in Tierra del Fuego and goes all the way to Alaska in the United States – and in the middle, there’s this gap, this stretch of uncharted jungle.
That’s the Darién Gap. For me it was like basic instinct – you’ve gotta cross it. So when I discovered that the stretch of jungle was being taken on by migrants, crossing from Colombia to Panama on their way to the USA, I knew I had to join them. But it took two failed attempts before I attempted it with Dateline.
The walk I think is the most difficult thing. What makes it incredibly hard is the humidity and the heat. I’ve never felt so thirsty in my life. I was actually kneeling down to get some water out of puddles on the ground.
When you’re lost in the Darién, there’s a point you reach where only survival matters. All you’re thinking is; “I’m not gonna die of thirst here in this jungle”.
Death is something you gotta be prepared to confront in the Darién. In 2013, a 26-year-old Swedish man was picked up by the FARC and executed. The young man had been missing in the Darién for two years and his family was desperately looking for him from Sweden.
I had contacts with the FARC who passed on what they’d heard about his disappearance. Apparently the FARC had said, ‘Yeah we saw this guy, he didn’t speak any Spanish, he had a GPS, we didn’t know, we thought he was a DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] spy,” so boom, he was dead.
On my fourteenth trip to the Darién I found the body of a young Cuban immigrant. Just 200 metres past the Panama border, and there he was alone in the jungle with this little backpack beside him. His body was very badly decomposed and it looked like it had been there at least ten days. He was just abandoned there along the trail. I learnt that his body stayed there forever, becoming a skeleton and skull. Eventually some indigenous youngsters threw his bones to the jungle – scared of seeing it all the time on their own journey back and forth. This was the first time I saw first-hand what happens to some of these immigrants, the ones who don’t have luck on their side.
Dehydration and exhaustion are a constant threat in the Darién. Source: Jason Motlagh
Preparation is the key to surviving the Darién. Being unprepared can be a fatal error.
I realised on this trip the migrants don’t know what they’re getting into. They don’t know the place, they don’t know how humid it is, they don’t know how thirsty they’re going to be. I witnessed guys who didn’t buy anything, just crisps in their bag and sandals on their feet. They think it’s gonna be a walk in the woods.
At one point I felt kind of bad. I was sleeping on a hammock with a mosquito net attached to it and was woken up at two or three in the morning to the sounds of these guys talking. I looked over and saw them lighting fires, burning wood so the smoke would keep the mosquitos away. I even saw a guy climbing a tree, trying to sleep up there because he was so desperate to escape the mosquito bites. If you’re not prepared, this is how the Darién breaks you.
It’s also unpredictable. You’re in the middle of the Darién with ‘coyotes’, a name for local guides, who you don’t trust. When you’re pushed to extremes and operating at your absolute physical and mental limits, things can turn bad very quickly. You have to keep your wits about you and know how to keep your cool.
The Darién has a weird feeling. It unsettles and captivates you. It can kill you but it’s full of life.
In the middle of the jungle, someone stole a migrant’s bag and our local guide made a joke, and the migrant jumped on him like, ‘What are you laughing about and who do you think you are?”
I said, “Look this stops right now. You’re not gonna fight with this guy because this guy can abandon you or he can kill you.
“And if he kills you, he’s gonna have to kill all of us so there’s no witnesses or anything”.
The migrant thought I was exaggerating. Then 20 minutes later we found a skull on a stick.
As a photographer, when I saw that skull I thought, ‘this is the image I needed to find – to really capture just how strange and scary this place is’.
If you find a skull on a stick pointing straight towards Colombia, it’s not something that happens by chance, it’s a sign. It was made by someone who wanted to tell people walking into Colombia ‘be careful, this is our territory’.
The Darién has a weird feeling. It unsettles and captivates you. It can kill you but it’s full of life – filled with every species of flora and fauna from across South America and Central America. It’s the middle of the continent.
After this trip, I felt like I was done with the Darién. I’d photographed indigenous life, the paramilitaries, the gold diggers, and the loggers. But the environment is fascinating too. So now I’m thinking I’ve gotta go back and photograph the plants, the flowers, the insects. You think this way as a photojournalist. You’re always thinking maybe another trip will be the one to seal the deal.
I know that more and more immigrants will keep making this journey too. These guys really want to get to a place where they can feed their families. When I got back to New York I went from seeing guys from Africa and Cuba sweating in the jungle wondering what will happen with their lives, to seeing guys from the same regions selling food in New York’s grocery stores.
The world is made up of immigrants. I was born in Chile, I’ve lived 10 years in New York and it was great. It made my life better. Through my own experience of immigration I’ve found greater things. If migrants are prepared to cross the Darién for it, they should be entitled to a better life too, and a chance to prove they are good people. Don’t you think?
