Paths of Desperate Hope, Federico Ríos Escobar's photography

In 2022, an estimated 250,000 people trekked through the Darién, which connects Centraland South America. The figure was nearly twice that for 2021 and nearly twenty times the yearly average for 2010–20. At least 33,000 of the 2022 migrants were children, and in the first four months of 2023 almost as many of them crossed as in the whole of last year.
Those who crossed in 2022 were mostly Venezuelan, many of them worn down by years of economic calamity, but they are just part of a diverse movement of migrants: Cubans, Haitians, Ecuadoreans, and Peruvians are also making the journey in significant numbers. Afghans, many escaping the Taliban, are among the fastest-growing groups.
The Darién jungle’s inaccessibility left it for a long time as one of the world’s most untouched rainforests. When engineers built the Pan-American Highway, begun in the 1930s to link Alaska to Argentina, they left one major stretch unfinished — the sixty six roadless miles of the Darién Gap.
In the past, only a few thousand migrants braved the arduous crossing, but now it has become a human traffic jam, a wave of people pushed from their homes by pandemic-battered economies, climate change, and conflict, hoping eventually to enter the United States.
I followed the migrants’ route, along with Julie Turkewitz of The New York Times, in September and October 2022.

We started at a Colombian beach town, passed through farms and indigenous communities, crossed the menacing Hill of Death, where being stranded overnight can be fatal, and followed winding rivers to arrive at a government campin Panama. The trek through the gap itself took nine gruelling days. Rivers rose up to our chests, mud sucked at our boots, every area of exposed skin was scorched by the sun and bitten relentlessly by bugs. But we were dressed and equipped for the journey. The migrants, by contrast, were in shorts and flip-flops, their possessions stuffed in plastic bags, carrying babies, and holding children by the hand, with hardly any food, lacking waterproof clothes or tablets to disinfect the water. Twisted ankles were routine and blisters quickly turned into infected wounds. Mothers sobbed as they ran out of breast milk to feed their babies.
Many of my photographs focus on the hardships suffered by the children. Some had become separated from their parents, others still had the strength to comfort the adults. Amid the horrors, we witnessed countless acts of kindness: people putting out a hand to help a stranger escape a fast-moving current, or breaking off pieces of papelón, the brown sugar blocks they carried, to share with fellow trekkers. Everyone knew that, somehow, they had to keep going. I’ll never know how many of those we met made it — and how many didn’t.