A Mother, a Daughter, a Deadly Journey: An Update

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Julie, tell us what we should know about this place, the Darien Gap.

This place has no road. 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.

And so, my colleague, 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, from Necocli, the migrants have to cross this large body of water, this 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. Daniel José Muñoz, Daniel José Muñoz. 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, we get on this boat with a large group of migrants on their way to start this journey, and we reach Capurganá, the last town, before people enter the jungle. So, we are leaving now to begin this hike. We're a group of maybe a hundred people. There's lots of children. Everybody is completely laid in 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. And pretty soon, the terrain gets very steep. And it's very hot. It's very hot. People are struggling.

They're breathing hard. Some people start to cry. And then it starts to get really difficult.

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. And it becomes clear that some people aren't going to make this journey.

They're not going to survive. We did come across a dead body on the trail. Wow. 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.

And it's on this hill that I meet Sarah.

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 Ángel.

He's not her father. And I see Ángel, help Sarah to make it up and then down the Hill of Death. We're going to camp between a couple of trees by the river. Fede is making a clearing, basically, with a machete.

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.

Earlier in the journey, Sarah's mother had then become injured. And that morning had asked Ángel if he could help her by carrying Sarah at points, by guiding her while she trudged along in her injured state. 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 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 through the Daring Gap and making it to the United States.

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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, same hair, same skin. Sarah's group leaves and Fede and I decide 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 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.

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, but when the country's oil industry collapsed, her business collapsed. 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.

She couldn't practice law there because she didn't have the right paperwork.

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.

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.

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 OK. 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 Sarah 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. And as we settle in, I start scanning for Sarah.

And I spot Sarah and Angel, and I immediately tell Sarah that I've met her mom, that she's just a day or two behind.

And Angel tells me that since I last saw them, Sarah has been crying a lot.

Her feet are so destroyed that she can't walk. She's like crying and she's shaking.

She hasn't eaten or had anything to drink in two days.

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. So we get off the boat. As before, she needs to be carried. She's scanning for her daughter.

And finally, she is taken by Panamanian officials to one of the shacks. And there inside the shack is Sarah, is her daughter.

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.

They had been separated now for three days. Sarah seemed kind of to be in shock.

It was a very bittersweet reunion, because they hadn't even made it near the United States. They still had so much more to do.

border. Instead, the government was going to open up slots for Venezuelans in a program called humanitarian parole. And it was going to give them a safe, legal way to get into the United States.

So, Alexandra decides that she has just suffered too much. She does not want to risk her daughter's life anymore on any other part of the journey. And she's going to apply for this legal option. She just has one problem. And that's that for the humanitarian parole program, you need to have a person in the United States who says, Hey, I commit to supporting this person, even financially, when they get to the United States.

And then the article comes out. And we had a huge, huge response from New York Times readers, several of whom reached out and said, We want to be the sponsors. And they submitted applications for this humanitarian parole program. So now we are more than a year later. All Alexandra has heard from the U.S.

government is that it has been received. And she wakes up every morning, checks the status of her application, and refreshes and refreshes, hoping that one day it will say that her application has been accepted and that she will be able to come to the United States.

Meantime, they are in a pretty unstable situation. They've asked us not to reveal their specific location. They are in a situation of poverty. And Alexandra really tries to maintain hope. In the time since the episode aired, I have also been speaking with Angel.

Angel is the man who is in charge of the program. He is the man who helped Sarah when she lost her mother in the jungle. He took a very different path. And he decided to continue on to the United States. He eventually made it to Pennsylvania.

He got a work permit and a social security number. And now he's making $140 a day as a mechanic. And you know, life is difficult. His family is now broken apart. But he feels that in the U.S., making this amount of money, he can deliver on what he set out to do.

And this is what made him cross the Darien. He can help his child back home. And he can fulfill what he sees as his duties as a father. So, last year, when we were with Alexandra and Sarah, 248,000 people crossed the Darien Gap. That was a record annual high.

This year, we are about to hit 500,000 people crossing this jungle. The word is out that the Darien Gap is this treacherous pathway to the United States. And you see large numbers of Ecuadorians, of people from China, people from Afghanistan, taking this route. And they are fleeing economic instability, political instability, conflict, war.

It's not that they don't know that the Darien Gap is dangerous. It's that many of them are making the calculation that the potential reward is worth the risk.

And was engineered by Brian Lee. Special thanks to Brad Fisher and Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Eileen Sullivan.

That's it for The Daily. I'm, Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.