The first time I spoke with survivors of the Darién Gap, I was in jail in Mexico. It was July 2021, and I was serving a brief stint as the token gringa inmate in Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest immigration detention center, located in the city of Tapachula, Chiapas, just west of the border with Guatemala.

Over two thousand kilometers to the southeast of Tapachula lies the Darién Gap, known in Spanish as el Tapón del Darién or “the Darién Plug”: a 106 kilometer stretch of territory that straddles Panama and Colombia and constitutes the only roadless interruption in the Pan-American Highway linking Alaska to the tip of Argentina. The Darién Gap encompasses a spectacularly hostile jungle that has in recent years become a mass migrant graveyard, as hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers from across the world are forced to contend with its horrors while pursuing the prospect of a better life in the United States, still some five thousand kilometers away.

With the blessing of the US government, the Tapachula jail was inaugurated in 2006 during the presidency of former Coca-Cola Mexico CEO Vicente Fox, whose administration had — with either witting or unwitting irony — bestowed the name “Siglo XXI” upon the facility, meaning “twenty-first century.” Having overstayed my Mexican visa during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and then relied on the fake-Mexican-entry-form-mongering services of an immigration official in Mexico City, I was nabbed at Tapachula airport while attempting to board a domestic flight and hauled off to Siglo XXI for a twenty-four-hour glimpse of a twenty-first-century border apparatus designed to thwart the movement of US-bound migrants.