CAPURGANA, Colombia – ‘Hi! Hey you! Alto! Stop!’ three Colombian cartel soldiers shouted at me and my translator as we ducked into a small shop, pretending not to hear their orders.
I had come to Capurgana, a dusty coastal town on Colombia’s northwest coast, to investigate international efforts to close one of the most notorious human smuggling routes in the world: the Darien Gap.
It is a 112-kilometer stretch of dense jungle connecting South America and Panama, through which 1.5 million migrants from 170 countries passed between 2021 and August 2024.
Capurgana is one of the last major stops before these travelers enter Central America in search of a new life further north, invariably in the US.
What I discovered shocked me – and for a heartbreaking moment I thought I would never make it through the story.
Instead of finding any progress toward curbing a historic illegal immigration crisis here, I found the opposite.
I had come to Capurgana, a dusty coastal town on Colombia’s northwest coast, to investigate international efforts to close one of the most notorious human smuggling routes in the world: the Darien Gap.
Capurgana (above) is one of the last major stops before these travelers enter Central America in search of a new life further north, invariably in the US.
Migrants arrive in Capurgana by the hundreds every day from all over South America and from countries as far away as Africa, the Middle East and China.
They are met at the port by foot soldiers from the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a powerful paramilitary drug cartel that controls the region’s smuggling routes.
The migrants each pay hundreds of dollars for passage and permission to travel north through the Darien Gap to Panama and beyond.
I had been warned that the cartel was keeping a close eye on everything here, so I pretended to be a tourist.
For an entire day, I had flown a drone out of my hotel room window and filmed the Gaitanistas as they ferried men, women, and children from the port to the Darien Gap to begin their journey.
But when I started documenting the operation from the ground, I was spotted and chased into a supermarket by three Gaitanistsa goons.
“Hand over the camera,” one of the hulking men demanded.
I backed up to the cash register.
My phone contained the devastating images of their activities. It felt that keeping it secret could be a matter of life and death.
I’m just a ‘gringo’, I told them through my translator, an ‘adventure tourist’.
They didn’t buy it.
I briefly considered an escape, thinking about the taser I carry in my front pocket. But even if we escaped, there was only one way out of Capurgana: the boats controlled by the Gaitanistas.
As I started documenting the operation from the ground, I was spotted and chased into a supermarket by three Gaitanistsa goons. “Hand over the camera,” one of the hulking men demanded. (Above) Author Todd Bensman
They are met on the dock (above) by foot soldiers from the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a powerful paramilitary drug cartel that controls the region’s smuggling routes.
I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, I’ll tell you the truth about everything,” I said.
Around a cheap plastic table in a restaurant next door, I explained that I was an American journalist. Luckily, even the Gaitanistas aren’t so bold as to harm a Yankee.
They let me leave on the condition that I take the first boat out of town the next morning, and in the meantime I was ordered to stay away from them.
They had work to do. And they have never been so busy.
For decades, fewer than 10,000 migrants a year passed through towns like Capurgana to cross the Darien Gap.
But after President Joe Biden came to power, abolished his predecessor’s security measures and essentially opened the U.S. southern border, that number rose to 133,000 immigrants in 2021.
At that time, the seven-day crossing was still infamous for rapes, robberies and murders.
Indigenous residents on the Panamanian side routinely killed migrants for their money and valuables. Women were at risk of sexual abuse by fellow migrants and cartel guides. Flash floods along the river were known to wipe out entire families camping in the middle of the night. The weak and wounded were routinely left to die by the roadside.
Now almost everything has changed.
The current passage through the Darien Gap is no longer a torturous seven-day trek, but is a two- or three-day hike along trails heavily patrolled by the Panamanian Border Police.
Why? In April 2022, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signed an agreement with Panama to help alleviate the humanitarian disaster – which the White Hoyuse helped create by throwing open the gates of America.
The government stated its commitment to “safe, orderly and humane migration” worldwide.
In 2023, U.S. State Department agencies further increased contributions to the United Nations International Organization for Migration to as much as $1.4 billion, according to a database tracking federal spending.
Hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars poured into Panama.
The current passage through the Darien Gap is no longer a torturous seven-day trek, but is a two- or three-day hike along trails heavily patrolled by the Panamanian Border Police.
The country built new migrant processing centers and welcomed dozens of non-governmental organizations to provide assistance to the illegal travelers.
The investment was so large that the once dangerous passage now resembles an American-built ‘superhighway’ for migrants. As a result, illegal immigration in the Darien Gap has exploded even further.
The number of crossings grew to 250,000 by the end of 2022.
In 2023, 520,000 people crossed the gorge.
By the middle of this year, almost a quarter of a million people had made the journey.
The flow of migrants is now so overwhelming that the head of Panama’s National Border Service told me his country is screening fewer than one percent of migrants.
They used to ask up to 90 percent questions about their criminal history and possible ties to terrorism.
It was no wonder the Panamanians had had enough.
Panama’s new president, Raul Jose Mulino, has pledged to close the border crossing — and the Biden administration has agreed, at least in writing, to help.
On July 1, DHS Secretary Mayorkas said the US would help fund deportation flights of illegal migrants from Panama back to Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
But that assistance has not yet been realized, according to President Mulino.
“I will never tire of reiterating my position to the international community,” he wrote on Twitter this week. “Darien will no longer be the path through which thousands of illegal immigrants continue to cross into the United States; this humanitarian crisis will end.”
On Tuesday, Biden’s Treasury Department announced sanctions on a handful of leaders of Colombia’s Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces — calling the cartel “one of the country’s largest drug trafficking organizations and a major contributor to human trafficking through the Darién Gap.”
Some may see this move as progress, but others in the region know that sanctions will not change the situation on the ground.
It is difficult for critics to see this as anything less than a weak response to a humanitarian crisis of the government’s own making.
As long as this Biden-built “superhighway” remains open to migrants, the misery and crime that feeds on it will continue.