The Hill of Death

Listen to a woman from Cuba describe her journey through the Darién Gap, the only land connection between North and South America:

… The paths lead you to the Loma de la Muerte [Hill of Death]. Those who can do it cross over the Loma de la Muerte in one day. It is the Loma de la Muerte because it has a horribly steep slope, and you walk along paths where there is nothing on either side. You cannot look down because you run the risk of falling and losing your life.

After that, there are more paths and more hills, and, of course, rivers, and you are always wet. You sleep wet every night. Everything you carry you throw away on the road because the weight holds you back when you walk. The strongest and most agile people leave you behind. When you get to a certain section about halfway to the camp (in Bajo Chiquito, Panama), you see dead bodies swollen and decomposing. In my case, I saw three dead bodies, separately. This is real. Everything is real.

Two or three days before reaching the camp, seven or eight young people assault you; they're armed, they take your food, mobile phones, and money, and rape women. But the worst is not over yet.

You meet people who have been walking through the jungle for 27, 15, and 10 days because they have problems with their legs, and they have nothing left. You meet men and women with children of all ages.

I saved a healthy six-month-old baby girl. She fell from her father's arms and, luckily, I was behind them on the lower part of the hill. I was able to grab her by her right foot just when her head was about to hit a rock. The girl was saved, thank God.

1,001 Demons

The “Darién Gap” is a mountainous isthmus (narrow strip of land with water on two sides) about 100 miles long and 30 miles wide that connects North and South America.¹ It is primarily in Panama, with its southern end in Colombia. The Darién Gap is infested with many types of poisonous snakes and other reptiles, with spiders and biting ants, alligators, swarms of disease-carrying mosquitos and ticks—even plants that have eight-inch spikes. The temperature is always close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is suffocating. Its rivers are turbulent, and flash floods are frequent.

Over the past several years, hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants traveling north have attempted to cross Darién. People trying to get through it almost immediately become caked with the mud, which is everywhere. Many develop painful sores on their feet that often become dangerously and painfully infected. Many get sick from drinking from the muddy rivers. Darién teems with criminal gangs who prey upon people trying to cross it, robbing and raping them, and using some to traffic narcotics.

A 40-year-old Colombian man, who was lost in the jungle of Darién for 14 days before he escaped, told the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, “This is a nightmare with 1,001 demons. I saw a child get dragged down the river when he let go of his parents’ hands. I have seen dead bodies, drowned, four of them. I have smelled corpses decomposing in the ravine.”

Imagine the terror felt by young children clinging to their parents and struggling to survive this sweltering chamber of horrors. Imagine the anguish that drives parents to abandon their homes and the rest of their families and friends, to leave behind the lives they had lived, and take their children through this hell on Earth. Could you do it? What level of desperation would make you risk stepping out on this journey?

And if you survive it—you will still be over 1,000 miles from your goal. You will have six more borders to cross, at each of which you could be detained and deported; you will have to travel through Central America and Mexico—where hundreds of thousands of others are also fleeing poverty, violence, and environmental devastation  trying to get to “el Norte.” And if you ever get that far, you will be confronted with the razor wire, patrol boats, drones, and armed enforcers of immigration law that demarcate the self-proclaimed “land of the free.”

A Planet Soaked in the Blood of Migrants

“We're the bones under your feet, the white lie of American prosperity.”

—From “Creature Comfort,” by Arcade Fire

People from all over the world have been risking, and sometimes losing, everything—even their lives and the lives of their children—to cross the Darién Gap. The people entering Darién come from countries all over the world—Haiti, Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, Uzbekistan, and many others. A decade ago, a little over a hundred people a year crossed Darién. Between January and September this year, according to the government of Panama, over 151,000 people crossed the Darién Gap into Panama; 32,488 of those people were children, and 900 of the children were unaccompanied.

The number of people crossing Darién from Venezuela has skyrocketed. In 2018, about 100 Venezuelans were detained by border authorities at the U.S.’s southern border. Between January 2021 and August 2022, “US officials detained more than 200,000 Venezuelans at the US-Mexico border.” By mid-October this year, 107,600 of the people entering Panama through the Darién Gap were Venezuelans. They are among the millions of Venezuelans fleeing the imperialism-caused demolition of their homeland. (See last week’s Revolution article, “Mass Migration from Venezuela: A Catastrophe of Human Suffering, Made in the USA.”)

Darién isn’t the only part of this planet soaked in the blood of migrants. A report from the United Nations estimated that in 2020 there were over 281 million migrants in the world. Think about the sheer magnitude of that. And think about the anguish inflicted on each person—young, old, and in-between—driven across the planet by wars, by the pollution of the soil on which they had farmed or the drying up of any source of water, by the intense violence that wracks their impoverished homelands.

It’s not just in this hemisphere either. Far from it. The Mediterranean Sea has become a tomb for migrants trying to reach Europe. It is the “most fatal migration route in the world ... where over 17,900 people died between 2014 and 2018. It is also the deadliest place for children, with 678 deaths recorded.” The land routes across north Africa are “among the most deadly for migrants” in the world. A 2020 report by the United Nations refugee agency and the Danish Refugee Council spoke of the “unspeakable brutality and inhumanity” migrants face in north Africa, and said in 2018 and 2019 at least 1,750 people died making the journey. Even many of those who make it to their intended destination have died once they are there, from dehydration, snake bites, drowning, freezing, and suffocating while they are packed into the backs of trucks in places like Burgenland, Austria; Essex, England; and San Antonio, Texas.

Urgently Needed: Revolutionary System Change

Why are such horrors happening all over the Earth? Because the entire planet is dominated by the system of capitalism-imperialism—an economic system organized around profit, with a brutal social order to reinforce it; a system in which a tiny fraction of humanity—the capitalist-imperialist ruling class—owns and controls enormous wealth, and the means of producing that wealth. Billions of people are crushed in the process.

What is urgently needed—and what everyone who wants to put an end to these horrors needs to actively work towards and prepare for—is, as Bob Avakian (BA) wrote, “…Revolution—a real revolution to overthrow this system, and bring into being a radically different and much better system.”

It is this system which is the basic cause of the tremendous suffering that people, all over the world, are subjected to; and this system poses a growing threat to the very existence of humanity, in the way that this system is rapidly destroying the global environment, and in the danger of war between nuclear-armed capitalist-imperialist powers, such as the U.S. and China.

From Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution, by Bob Avakian