The Daily - A Mother, a Daughter, a Deadly Journey: An Update

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened in the time since they first ran.With mountains, intense mud, fast-running rivers and thick rainforest, the Darién Gap, a strip of terrain connecting South and Central America, is one of the most dangerous places on the planet.Over the past few years, there has been an enormous increase in the number of migrants passing through the perilous zone in the hopes of getting to the United States.Today, we hear the story of one family that’s risking everything to make it across.Guest: Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief for The New York TimesBackground reading: Listen to the original version of the episode here.The pandemic, climate change and growing conflict are forcing a seismic shift in global migration.Two crises are converging at the Darién Gap: an economic and humanitarian disaster underway in South America and the bitter fight over immigration policy in Washington.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Hey, it's Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year, listening back and hearing what's happened in the time since they first ran. Today, we return to a mother and daughter who, along with hundreds of thousands of others, made a harrowing journey through the Darien Gap, and we find out where they ended up. It's Thursday, December 28th. Julie, tell us what we should know about this place, the Darien Gap. So the Darien Gap is this narrow sliver of land between Colombia and Panama.

It connects South and Central Americas. And this slip of land is a jungle, and it's an extremely inhospitable jungle. And this is because the territory is sheer mountains, intense, intense mud. To be able to traverse it on foot is very dangerous because there are deadly animals, bugs, snakes, fast-running rivers.

Wow. And it's sort of a changing territory too because it's incredibly wet. This place has no road. So for years, what you saw was that a small number of migrants who sort of heard word of mouth about the possibility of crossing, that they could do it, were braving this trek. And so you saw between 2010 and 2020 an average of under 11,000 people crossing a year. of under 11,000 people crossing a year.

What you've seen in the last two years is an enormous historic rise in people crossing this very dangerous, in many cases, deadly jungle. How many more people? What we saw in 2022 was almost 250,000 people crossed the Darien Gap. And what explains why so many people are trying to take this treacherous journey right now? So first of all, the pandemic really hit economies in South America hard. And because the crisis was region- wide, this left one way out. And that way out was north through the Darien Gap. And so we see traffickers advertising on social media,

encouraging people to come through the gap, talking about this trek as if it's a vacation. app talking about this trek as if it's a vacation. So I needed to make sense of this contradiction that I was seeing between this incredibly harsh terrain, this idea that this place is an impassable jungle, and these numbers that we were seeing. And so my colleague Fede, Federico Rios, photographer, my colleague Fede Federico Rios, photographer, and I decided that the only way really to do this was to do the trek ourselves. And so we set out to cross the Darien Gap. So tell us, Julie, about this journey. So I started the journey in Nicocli, the beach town in Colombia that serves as the jumping off point for the trip through the Darien. So from Necocli, the migrants have to cross this large body of water, this gulf,

to get to the point where the jungle begins. And so I have to say, we were totally struck by the organization and the operation of the entire thing. These formerly tourist boat, now migrant boat companies are calling the migrants one by one to, you know, get on their assigned boat after they've bought their ticket. So we get on this boat with a large group of migrants on their way to start this journey and we reach Kapurgana, the last town before people enter the jungle. So we are leaving now to begin this hike. We're a group of maybe 100 people. There's lots of children. Everybody is completely laden down with bags and mats to sleep on and things like that.

So we set off for what would be, for most of these migrants, a journey of somewhere between six and ten days in the jungle. And pretty soon, the terrain gets very steep, and it's very hot. It's very hot. People are struggling. They're breathing hard. Some people start to cry. And then it starts to get really difficult. Right, and somehow people are getting through this with children in their arms or on their backs.

Yes, lots of children. Lots and lots of children. Wow. So by the time that we are two days in, we really start to see people fall apart. They start to get sick. They start to get sick. They start to get injured. There's a pregnant woman who we watch fall down an extremely steep hill. And it becomes clear that some people aren't going to make this journey.

They're not going to survive. We did come across a dead body on the trail. Wow. You often heard adults singing with kids just to keep their spirits up. So by the fourth day, we have crossed into Panama. We are about halfway through the journey, and we're about to do the most difficult part of the trek, what is called the Hill of Death.

What's your name? My name is Sara. Sara. And it's on this hill that I meet Sara. How old are you? Six. Six. And Sara, S-A-R-A...

Sara is this tiny six-year-old girl from Venezuela. She's wearing this tiny pink T-shirt with sparkles on it. And she is climbing the hill of death with a man named Angel. named Ángel. He's not her father. And I see Ángel help Sarah to make it up and then down the hill of death. We're going to camp between a couple of trees by the river. Fede is making a clearing, basically, with a machete.

Okay. And, you know, as we're setting up camp for the night, I got to know Sarah a little bit more. Earlier in the journey, Sarah's mother had then become injured and that morning had asked Angel if he could help her by carrying Sarah at points, by guiding her while she trudged along in her injured state. And by the time I met them, no one knew where her mother was. It wasn't clear to us if she was even alive. It really seemed to exemplify what a cruel

journey this was, that a mother would be pushed, some would say forced, to hand her child, the fate of her child, to someone she had really just met, all in the hopes of making it through the Darien Gap and making it to the United States. We'll be right back. So what happens the next morning? So Sarah's group wakes up very early and they tell us that they are going to head out. I asked Sarah for a description of her mother

in case I saw her later that day and could interview her, could tell her that Sarah was okay. and could interview her, could tell her that Sarah was okay. And I'm told that Sarah's mother looks exactly like her, same hair, same skin. Sarah's group leaves, and Fede and I decide we're going to wait and hope that we find the mother. And sure enough, a few hours later, a woman matching the description we were given comes down the hill. And I ask her, are you Sarah's mother?

And she exclaims and she wants to know immediately if her daughter is okay. By this point, it's been more than a day since she'd seen her only child. They'd been on this journey for about six days so far. Her name is Alexandra. Sarah's mom tells me that she has terrible blisters on her feet. So we sat down on a log by a river and I asked her what landed her here. How did she get here? Why is she here? She told me she was a lawyer in Venezuela,

but when the country's oil industry collapsed, her business collapsed. So earlier that year, she had left Venezuela, crossed on foot the Atacama Desert to make it into Chile, where she thought that she could build a new life. But she couldn't practice law there because she didn't have the right paperwork. And Alexandra tells me that she's under the impression that the U.S. will let her in and let her stay in the country. And this is where she

wants to raise her daughter. That's what brought her on this trek in the first place. She's just horrified by the fact that she's become separated from her daughter. She's horrified by what her daughter is going through. So we say goodbye and I continued on, hoping that I might catch back up with Sarah and tell her that her mother was alive and okay. By this point, it's day seven. We are exhausted, but Feli and I are still moving much faster than Alexandra, and we think we might be able to catch up with Sarah at the next camp.

So we're finally, finally arriving at a place called El Abuelo. The next camp is a place called El Abuelo. And as we settle in, I start scanning for Sarah. And I spot Sarah and Ángel, and I immediately tell Sarah that I've met her mom, that she's just a day or two behind. And Ángel tells me that since I last saw them, Sarah has been crying a lot. She's been asking about her mom nonstop. And as I'm talking to her, she's asking to wait at this camp, to wait at El Abuelo for her mom to meet them there.

But Ángel has decided that what they need to do is get to the end of the trek, where there's a government camp where children who have been separated along this journey can stay until they are reunited with their parents. So I tell them that I'm staying behind to do reporting and that Alexandra is probably a day behind. I know I can wait and try and connect with her at this camp. So what happens next? So we're waiting in El Abuelo. I see this boat arrive. Alexandra has just arrived on a boat.

I'm so tired. I can't walk. I had a fever and a cold. I had a cold. Her feet are so destroyed that she can't walk. She's like crying and she's shaking. We've been eating for two days now. We don't eat or drink liquid. Are you eating right now? No. She's like crying and she's shaking. She hasn't eaten or had anything to drink in two days. I tell her that I saw Sara, that Sarah is just up ahead.

And all she wants to do is get moving immediately. She doesn't want to eat. She doesn't want to sleep. She doesn't want to rest. She just wants to find her daughter. And so we get in this boat to head toward the government UN camp together. So this is Alexandra arriving at Canaan, which is this community in Panama where her daughter should be. So we get off the boat. As before, she needs to be carried. She's scanning for her daughter.

And finally, she is taken by Panamanian officials to one of the shacks. And there inside the shack is Sarah, is her daughter. is her daughter. And we are watching this reunion happen. And Alexandra just, you know, she grabs her daughter, she holds her, and she starts asking for forgiveness right away. Please forgive me, please forgive me. You know, I didn't abandon you, is what she says.

They had been separated now for three days. Sarah seemed kind of to be in shock. It was a very bittersweet reunion because they hadn't even made it near the United States. They still had so much more to do. After the break, Julie Turkowitz gives us an update on what Alexandra and Sarah are now doing. This is Julie Turkowitz, Andy's bureau chief. Since this episode aired, my colleague Federico Rios and I have kept in touch with Alexandra.

After Alexandra and Sarah crossed the Darien Gap, they continued their journey north to try and get to the United States. And as they were traveling through Central America, they heard that the Biden administration had made a really important policy change. The new policy would no longer allow Venezuelans to enter at the Mexico-U.S. border. Instead, the government was going to open up slots for Venezuelans in a program called humanitarian parole. And it was going to give them a safe legal way to get into the United States. So Alexandra decides that she has just suffered too much. She does not want to risk her daughter's life anymore on any other part of the journey. And she is going to apply for this legal option.

She just has one problem. And that's that for the humanitarian parole program, you need to have a person in the United States who says, hey, I commit to supporting this person, even financially, when they get to the United States. And then the article comes out. And we had a huge, huge response from New York Times readers, several of whom reached out and said, we want to be the sponsors. And they submitted applications for this humanitarian parole program. So now we are more than a year later. All Alexandra has heard from the U.S. government is that it has been received and she wakes up every morning, checks the status of her application and refreshes and refreshes, hoping that one day it will say that

her application has been accepted and that she will be able to come to the United States. been accepted and that she will be able to come to the United States. Meantime, they are in a pretty unstable situation. They've asked us not to reveal their specific location. They are in a situation of poverty and Alexandra really tries to maintain hope. In the time since the episode aired, I have also been speaking with Angel. Angel is the man who helped Sarah when she lost her mother in the jungle. He took a very different path and he decided to continue on to the United States. He eventually made it to Pennsylvania. He got a work permit and a social security number. And now he's making $140 a day as a mechanic.

And you know, life is difficult. His family is now broken apart. But he feels that in the U.S., making this amount of money, he can deliver on what he set out to do. And this is what made him cross the Darien. He can help his child back home and he can fulfill what he sees as his duties as a father. So last year, when we were with Alexandra and Sarah, 248,000 people crossed the Darien Gap. That was a record annual high. This year, we are about to hit 500,000 people crossing this jungle. The word

is out that the Darien Gap is this treacherous pathway to the United States. And you see large numbers of Ecuadorians, of people from China, people from Afghanistan, taking this route. And they are fleeing economic instability, political instability, conflict, war. It's not that they don't know that the Darien Gap is dangerous. It's that many of them are making the calculation that the potential reward is worth the risk. Thank you. by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Patricia Willans, with help from Lisa Chow. Fact Check by Susan Lee contains original music by Alisha Baetube and Dan Powell and was engineered by Brad Fisher and Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg

and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Eileen Sullivan. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.