Steep mountains, muddy swamplands, dense forests, turbulent rivers, dangerous wildlife, and high levels of humidity and precipitation make the landscape too hostile for infrastructure and immensely difficult to police. For these reasons, the Darién jungle has long held a reputation for being impenetrable. But as the only land bridge connecting South and Central America, this remote, treacherous terrain has become a major route for irregular migration as the only corridor to the United States for desperate asylum seekers traveling on foot.
A decade ago, only several thousand people dared to cross the Darién Gap each year. Today, this once inaccessible jungle has become a traffic jam. A “perfect storm” of economic insecurity, political upheaval, rising violence, climate change, and region-wide crackdowns on immigration pushed a stunning 133,653 migrants to cross in 2021. This figure has continued to double annually, jumping to 248,284 in 2022 and a record 520,085 migrants in 2023—more than 40 times the annual average between 2010 and 2020. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one in five of these migrants is a child and one in ten is under the age of five.
As of 2023, around 84 percent of those crossing the gap are from Venezuela, Haiti, and Ecuador, where catastrophic combinations of economic collapse, political dysfunction, and violent crime have forced thousands of families to flee. Although Venezuelans remain the most represented nationality for the past two years by a wide margin, with 328,667 individuals crossing in 2023, there has also been an unprecedented surge in extracontinental migrants from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, who travel to South America in the hope of reaching the U.S.-Mexico border via the Darién Gap. According to a November 2023 report by the Crisis Group, an estimated 97 different nationalities crossed through the Darién in the first seven months of 2023, including significant numbers of Chinese migrants and Afghan refugees.
