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.

Under normal circumstances, journalists are banned from entering the prison — and it’s not hard to see why. The overcrowded, unhygienic conditions reek of human rights abuses, while the space resembles a psychological torture den for folks who have so often risked their lives to get this far and who are given no idea of when they might be released or deported. I met women who had already been held for over a month and heard more than one detainee proclaim matter-of-factly: “I’m going to leave this place traumatized.”

And it was within the walls of Siglo XXI that the Darién Gap first entered my consciousness as something more than another nebulous epicenter of the global “migration crisis” — a crisis in which the United States forever portrays itself as being the foremost victim despite perpetrating much of the international havoc that makes people migrate in the first place. It was not for nothing, after all, that Martin Luther King Jr appointed the United States the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” a distinction the country retains to this day.

My introduction to the jungles of the Darién Gap transpired on the cement court in the women’s section of Siglo XXI, which with its single deflated ball represented the lone recreation option for inmates. I had no way of knowing at the start of my incarceration that my release would be so swift, having been assured otherwise by the powers that be, and I had taken to plodding around the perimeter of the court in my sneakers — relieved of their shoelaces “for my security” — in an effort to ward off a nervous breakdown.

As happened at various times during my expedited stopover, I was rescued from the perils of my own mind by my fellow detainees. When I told them I was a US citizen, their reactions were nothing short of hysterical laughter — after all, I was a US citizen in a Mexican migrant jail. Although perplexed by my fear of being deported to the very country they were risking their lives to reach, a homeland I had spent the past eighteen years avoiding thanks to the international freedom of movement conferred by my US passport, my prison mates offered nothing but solidarity in the face of made-in-USA structural inhumanity. They amiably invited me to sit with them.

These women hailed from Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, all nations with rather extensive histories on the receiving end of nefarious imperial meddling and even “large-scale terrorist war,” as Noam Chomsky has described US-backed Contra activities in Central America in the 1980s. One of the Hondurans, a bespectacled twenty-year-old university student fleeing the homicidal sh*t show in her country — which had only gotten worse in the aftermath of the 2009 US-facilitated coup d’état — would subsequently hold up her towel for me in the curtainless bathrooms so that I would not have to bathe in full view of a uniformed Mexican immigration official. For the moment, though, the student was lying on the ground with her head in another woman’s lap as the Cubans and Venezuelans in the group recounted stories from the Darién Gap, which geographical circumstances had spared the other present nationalities from having to traverse.

The Cubans did most of the storytelling. It had taken them one week to cross la selva del Darién, the Darién jungle, by the end of which time they had run out of food and water. They had navigated mountains of mud and rushing rivers and had witnessed some of their compatriots rescue a group of other migrants from near-certain death in a ravine, prompting the following satisfied analysis from one of the storytellers: “Say what you will about our manners, but at the end of the day el hombre cubano is very humanitarian.”

The selva was strewn with corpses, the Cubans reported, which were in varying stages of decomposition and which served as further terrifying motivation to keep moving. They had personally known more than one individual who had gone into the jungle and never come out, and yet the most traumatizing component of the whole experience, it seemed, had involved a thirteen-year-old girl of unspecified nationality who had been raped repeatedly along the way. The girl’s screams clearly continued to haunt the Cubans — and even more so now that they had been condemned to indefinite limbo in Tapachula. At least in the jungle, one of the women reasoned, you were focused on forward motion and didn’t have much time to think.

For most of my own time in the Siglo XXI detention center I was deprived of a writing utensil, having had mine confiscated along with my shoelaces upon admittance to the facility. During one of the brief interludes when I was able to seize hold of the prison’s only pen, which was attached to the wall, I frantically scribbled some notes, including a line of wisdom for traversing the Gap: “Cubans say no one leaves their country and walks thru selva for a week if they don’t have to.”

Although this sentiment naturally does not jibe with xenophobic fearmongering about malevolent migrant hordes bent on upending the world order and vanquishing the white race, it is at the end of the day a most accurate reflection of reality. And while migration has, since the dawn of time, been the most natural of phenomena, its current criminalization for the have-nots of the world helps sustain a lucrative global order predicated on the tyranny of capital and a hierarchy of human life.

My sole night in Siglo XXI was spent on half of the floor mat assigned to a young Cuban woman named Daniely, who insisted that I share it with her when the only available space for my own floor mat was next to the toilet. Daniely also provided me with some spare clothes for use as a pillow, as well as an opinion on my decision to wear a coronavirus face mask: “Will you take that fucking thing off? I feel like I can’t breathe.”

Following one very long night in July 2021, meanwhile, I was sprung from the suffocating confines of Siglo XXI thanks only to an intervention by a Mexican journalist friend of mine who pulled some political strings. The US Embassy in Mexico City, for its part, had hung up on my mother after professionally inquiring whether I was a genuine US citizen or just some naturalized “María Belén Fernández.”

Of course, whether or not the United States cared about me did not ultimately impact the privilege that comes with my American passport. Rather than being justly punished for breaking Mexican immigration law, I was instead presented with a brand-new six-month entry permit for Mexico. Post-incarceration, I gradually resumed my pre-pandemic modus operandi of complete itinerance, manically dashing between countries but now utilizing the coastal town of Zipolite in the Mexican state of Oaxaca as a base of operations.

I flew to Turkey and Albania and returned to Zipolite; I flew to El Salvador and Suriname and returned again. I paid two more visits to Tapachula, both mercifully sans jail time, and two visits to Panama, all of which served to bring me into contact with more and more migrants — from Venezuelans to Haitians to Afghans to Bangladeshis — who had no other option but to leave their countries and take their chances in the selva.

In 2023 alone, more than 520,000 refuge seekers would survive the Darién Gap crossing, which was more than double the nearly 250,000 who crossed in 2022 and nearly four times the 133,000 who crossed in 2021. The drastic uptick was attributed to a combination of factors, including the disproportionate repercussions of the pandemic on the global poor and punitive 2022 visa restrictions leveled against Venezuelans by Mexico, Costa Rica, and Belize.

This eliminated the possibility of air travel for many Venezuelans and thus made them the most over-represented nationality in the Gap. The number of migrants who have died trying to cross the Darién Gap will never be known, but it is next to impossible to speak to anyone who has been through the jungle without receiving a rundown of all the muertos they encountered en route. This is to say nothing of the armed assault, rape, and other sexual violence that has become par for the Darién course.

It would not be until January 2024, a full two and a half years after my stint in Siglo XXI, that I would enter the Darién Gap. This I did after spending months trying to come to terms with the very real possibility of sexual assault via digital penetration, a common practice deployed by armed assailants against both female and male migrants in the hopes of finding money tucked away in the vagina or anus. Indeed, as if folks who are forced to traverse thousands of kilometers in search of political and economic safety were not already in a sufficiently punishing state of precarious vulnerability, they must also effectively relinquish control over their own bodies.

Obviously, I lived to tell the tale of the Darién Gap, and my incursion into the jungle did not have to be succeeded by weeks or months of navigating hostile terrain in Central America and Mexico to reach the United States. I did not have to suffer repeated extortion by police and other officials, serve as robbing or kidnapping prey for gangs and cartels, or board La Bestia, Mexico’s notorious “train of death,” which delivers surviving passengers to the front lines of the bipartisan US war on migrants: the border itself, where the Donald Trumps and the Joe Bidens alike have labored to disappear the very concept of asylum.

And yet the Darién Gap is an extension of this very border in its own right, albeit featuring none of the AI-equipped surveillance towers, drones, and other high-tech accoutrements that define the modern-day US-Mexico frontier — a dystopian arsenal promoted with relish by Texas governor Greg Abbott. “The only thing that we’re not doing [in Texas] is we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” as Abbott put it, “because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

The Darién is instead a place where lawlessness and nature have combined to produce a landscape many migrants refer to as el infierno verde, or “the green hell.” But at least in terms of dehumanizing brutality, it is a most twenty-first-century border indeed.