They Crossed the Darien Gap to Reach the US. Now, Boat-By-Boat, Migrants Are Returning

They once braved the jungles of the Darien Gap, trekking days along the perilous migrant passage dividing Colombia and Panama with a simple goal: seek asylum in the U.S.

Now, boat-by-boat, those migrants – mainly from the Andean nations of Venezuela and Colombia – have given up after President Donald Trump’s crackdown on asylum, and are returning to the countries they once sought to escape.

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It’s part of what authorities call a “reverse flow” of migrants. The speed boats depart from a rural swathe of Panama and cross the seas in packs, hopping island to island until they reach the northern tip of Colombia.

The boats were part of a well oiled migrant smuggling machine that once raked in money from the steady flow of hundreds of thousands of people headed north nearly a year ago.

The boat route, which crosses through Indigenous Guna Yala lands, was once part of what smugglers called the VIP route, in which migrants paid more so they wouldn’t have to take the deadly trek through the Darien Gap.

But now that much of the Darien’s migrant smuggling industry has collapsed, some smugglers are taking advantage of the reverse migration to charge steep costs to migrants – between $200 and $250 per person, including minors – for the boat rides.

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It’s unclear exactly how many people cross through the boat route daily, but for weeks, large groups, including several hundred from mainly Venezuela and Colombia, have been flocking to the area, where Indigenous laws govern. They’re offered overnight stays and sea transfers.

That falls in line with figures offered by neighboring Costa Rica, which says it’s seen between 50 and 75 people crossing through their country going south every day. Though it’s just a drop in a bucket to figures seen a year ago, when the government said it saw thousands of migrants headed north daily.

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Some of the migrants waiting for their boat back to Colombia said they refused to return to Venezuela after the country’s recent elections, which have fueled democratic alarm and violence. They’d rather struggle in the same economic and legal precarity they faced for years in other countries, which have long pleaded with the international community for more funds to take on the migratory crisis.

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