After surviving the Darien Gap, a Venezuelan migrant must choose between leaving his ill mother behind or missing his only chance to cross the U.S.-Mexico border before Title 42 would close it again.

After surviving the Darien Gap, a Venezuelan migrant must choose between leaving his ill mother behind or missing his only chance to cross the U.S.-Mexico border before Title 42 would close it again.

“The Darién’s rugged, mountainous rainforest made construction of the Pan-American Highway untenable, leaving a “gap” in the roadway between South and Central America, which is how the route got its name.” Photo by Natalie Gallón for CNN

The gray dim light of dawn nudged at his eyelids, as the shrieks of wildlife from the nearby jungle awakened him. He lay beneath the canopy of a wild, overgrown cocobolo tree and on top of a hard wooden picnic bench on which he had spent the last two nights. All around him on the damp mush of soil, were strewn an endless disarray of small, round camping tents. Soft murmurs began to float from them. Inside each of the nylon capsules were migrants. Each had their own reasons, ridden with hardship and horrors, to have embarked on this treacherous journey northward towards the United States’ southern border. In this makeshift camp in Panama, they had finally gotten a night’s rest after many days traversing the treacherous Darien Gap, dodging human traffickers, venomous snakes and paramilitary groups. But Jose Piña did not have a tent. Instead, he lay on the bench, full of regret, remembering how his mother’s body had fallen and collapsed on the riverbank, deep in the jungle. He kept asking himself if this journey was the biggest mistake of his life.

Four years had passed since anti-riot police shot a bullet which had pierced his skin, fractured his collar bone and formed a four-inch scar of mashed skin just underneath his left shoulder for taking part in anti-government protests in Venezuela. His brother had already been killed for voicing his opposition to the government. Piña wanted to spare his mother a second burial. After that bullet, he chose to keep his head down as he watched his country spiral out of control. Piña had already found a safer place in Colombia for his wife and their newborn child. She was the one who encouraged him to leave, with the mission of finding a better future for their family.

As Piña’s fingers let go of his t-shirt’s collar, the scar disappears under the black cotton. His brown eyes are alert under his black baseball hat and his black winter jacket hides his heavy frame. He measures his words but speaks fluidly. Each word seems to encourage the next, steadily unraveling what he has lived these past five months. A story he has kept pent up, releasing select segments to others, but never in one continuous account. His blue backpack is next to him on the bench on which he is seated in a McDonald’s just around the corner from the academy where he is attending free English language classes in Brooklyn.

In early September of 2022, Piña set out from his late father’s home in Maracaibo, Venezuela with his mother, his stepfather and some acquaintances. Each of them had waited in vain for Venezuela to regain a bit of its past economic vitality and for the violence to calm down.

At each step of the way, they paid coyotes, clandestine guides, who set them up on boats, buses or car rides to cross the next few hundred miles. First, they made their way the border with Colombia. They knew they were approaching one of the most challenging parts of their journey: the slither of land where Colombia gives way to Panama. This border is hidden in the thick of the Darien Gap, one of the world’s most dangerous jungles that has claimed the lives of countless people that have attempted to cross it.

If everything goes smoothly, one can cross the Darien Gap in a week. It was at the base of la Loma de la Muerte, the Hill of Death, which requires six hours of continuous steady climb, that Piña accepted someone’s offer to carry his backpack in exchange for a few dollars. With the steep hill ahead of him, he readily gave this stranger his backpack, which carried the group’s food. They never saw it again. For the next four days, the group was lost in the jungle, without food or water, and with no idea in which direction to walk to reach Panama. They came across other lost migrants. They saw bodies half-engulfed by the mud, hastily covered with a piece of cloth. “I watched men step on corpses, mistaking them for rocks,” recalls Piña in horror.

On the fourth day they met a group that shared a life-saving tip: the trick was to find the river and then follow the trail of blue plastic bows tied to trees, always heading downstream. After two days of walking by the river, Piña’s mother collapsed. “I thought she was dead,” he remembered. He swung her body over his shoulder and kept walking. Every ten minutes Piña stopped to catch his breath and unplug his feet that sank with each step into the muddy riverbank. As night began to fall, the group heard drums in the distance.

The sound came from a camp called el Abuelo at the very edge of the Darien, where the jungle spits out survivors into the hands of the local Indians that run this area of Panama. Migrants had set up tents everywhere, even under the staff’s wooden huts on tilts. The group had no tent, so they slept under a tree.

Piña wanted to let his wife know that they had survived the Darien, but his phone’s battery had died. Upon arriving at camp, Piña handed over his phone to a man who offered to recharge Piña’s cellphone in one of the wooden huts. The next day he walked into the hut to fetch his phone, but a staff member told him that no one had brought any phone and picked up a machete in case Piña wanted to contest the answer.

By the third day, Piña’s mother had regained some strength to continue. The next leg cost $25 to be transported by canoe to an island. There, migrants passed an immigration checkpoint where they were charged another $25. Finally, they arrived at an area controlled by the Panamanian military which charged them another $25. The migrants were then bused to a camp, but not before paying $5 for the ride. By now, Piña’s mother had a fever and violent bouts of vomiting and diarrhea.

At this camp, the overwhelmed medical team could only offer her rehydration salts and pain relievers. The next day her agony continued, and she asked to be taken to a local hospital where she was immediately admitted.

Piña borrowed someone else’s phone, logged onto Facebook Messenger and spoke to his wife. She began to cry. Their one-year-old baby was in the intensive care unit and the doctors didn’t know what was wrong.

A new storm was brewing. The migrants spoke of rumors that the United States would be closing its border in ten days. An infectious haste descended upon the camp. Everyone wanted to reach the border as soon as possible. The acquaintances that Piña had set out with did not want to risk waiting. They also knew that he had no more money to continue paying coyotes along the way, so they left him. This is when Piña found himself alone, with no money and no cellphone, on the wooden bench of the picnic table.

“I asked myself what I was doing there. Why I had ever come,” says Piña. In Venezuela he lived in fear of the constant violence organized by the colectivos, armed groups that support President Nicolas Maduro, as well as the infamous Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization implanted throughout the country, but at least he was sure he could eat once a day. Piña considered turning back, giving up on everything he had already sacrificed to make it this far.

But in the hospital his mother told him, “Son, keep going. I´m not going to make it, but you must keep going, because I know you will.” Torn between leaving his mother behind or following her advice, he reminded himself of why they came in the first place. “It hurt me a lot. Many people have asked me how I could have left my mother behind, but I knew my stepfather was with her. Believe me, I doubted so much what to do.” This doubt haunted Piña when he left the camp the next day and for the entire remainder of the journey.

Throughout South America and up through Mexico, a business has flourished on the heels of the tens of thousands of migrants making their way northwards. The only way out of this camp was by bus. For Panamanians, the bus cost $19, but the migrants had to chalk up $50. Piña was at a dead end without any cash. His wife took out a loan. The money wire services kept 20% commission on the money his wife wired him. For every 100$, they kept 20$. Every step of the way, people found ways to make money off the desperate migrants.

Costa Rica was a respite. Right near the border, a kind woman named Señora Nelsia opened her home to him and fed him. She said he could stay longer, but Piña was pressed to reach the American border before it closed. She told him, “I know you’ll make it” and blessed him before he left.

Crossing Nicaragua proved to be less hospitable, as the police continuously chased down the buses carrying migrants. Every 100 kilometers, Piña’s bus would be stopped. Police officers would board the bus and walk down the aisle, charging each migrant $5 before the bus could go on. He made his way through the next countries, Honduras and then Guatemala.

At its northeastern edge, Guatemala is separated from Mexico by the Suchiate River. Here, Piña, and about eight other migrants, paid a man that could take them across on a makeshift raft that consisted of wooden planks laid on top of two big black rubber inflatables. As the man rowed across the muddy brown waters, Piña saw Mexican military members waiting on the shore. Luckily, they only asked each migrant to pay $50 and did not deport them.

Throughout his odyssey, Piña had no way of knowing how his mother was doing. He remained focused on accomplishing what she had told him last: to reach the U.S.-Mexico border before it closed.

In Mexico, Piña continued to discover a very well-organized system of clandestine buses, coyotes who helped migrants circumvent checkpoints and taxis that brought him all the way to Chiapas. There, penniless, he found a dishwashing job and slept on the sidewalk until his wife was able to send him more money. With $200 he was able to go on.

“Mexico was extremely tough. Especially the police. Brutal,” says Piña. “They have the whole route completely monopolized.”

In Chiapas, migrants must make a choice. Either they risk jumping aboard la Bestia, the beast, an infamous train that migrants can hop onto and off while the train is in motion, before pulling into the official stops where immigration police are on the lookout. As a migrant jumps onto the rushing ground beneath, their body will immediately bounce either away from the train or towards it. Countless limbs have been cut off in this gamble. Others are crushed underneath la Bestia. Piña opted to avoid the train. Instead, he followed someone’s advice and paid a bit more, $500, in exchange for yet another coyote to guide him through Mexican immigration checkpoints through an organized relay system. The driver would drop him off at a safe distance before the police checkpoint. He would then walk over mountains and through forests. The former driver would call the next driver who would be waiting to pick him up. Piña lost count of how many Mexican checkpoints he circumvented like this.

He hesitates on whether it is OK to explain what happened next. He was on a bus traveling to Ciudad Juarez, the last leg of the journey that would bring him right up to the border with the United States. A group of men with weapons ordered the bus to pull aside. They were Mexican cartel members. After boarding the bus, they asked the migrants to pay $1000 each. “Where were we supposed to get $1000 from?” asks Piña. “I had heard this happened, but I didn’t think it really did.” When Piña said he didn’t have that sum, he was ordered to get off the bus with 11 other migrants who didn’t pay. Outside, on the side of the road, Piña saw that the back door of the bus was open. In the commotion caused by more migrants being ordered off the bus, and the pile up of three additional buses behind theirs, Piña took his chance and quickly reentered through the back door and slipped into the bathroom. There he prayed until the bus took off. Piña never knew what happened to the other migrants that were left behind. “Who knows if I’d be here if I had stayed back there with them.”

It was 3 a.m. The bus dropped the migrants off at Ciudad Juarez’s 197-foot-tall, bright red statue in the form of an X. Barely 500 feet away runs the Rio Grande, the official border between Mexico and the United States. As soon as they stepped off the bus, the migrants dashed towards the river and pushed across the water that reached up to their thighs. No one said a word. The bus driver had given them clear directions: on the American side, there would be a fence. They had to follow that fence, always walking westwards, towards the left, until they came upon a big iron gate.

“For me the most surprising thing was when that giant iron door opened, and the U.S. immigration guard told me ´Welcome to the United States´. That is the last thing I ever expected. Until that moment I had come across so many agents, police officers and soldiers that only humiliated us. I will never forget those words. Then they gave us coffee, water and a sandwich. I thought, ´Oh my God, I’ve reached heaven´ after so many days of hunger and abuse.”

That was October 5. Exactly one week later, the Biden administration closed the border by reinstating Title 42, which former President Trump had already used during his presidency.

Under the pretext of preventing the spread of Covid-19, Trump had relied on this obscure public-health measure to thwart the arrival of immigrants. Title 42 is a code from the 1944 Public Health Service Act that granted the U.S. Surgeon General the power to close borders to prevent the spread of malaria and tuberculosis from soldiers returning home after World War II. Overwhelmed by the record number of people entering the United States’ southwestern border, Title 42 allowed President Biden to buy some time to fix what he described as “a broken immigration system”.

After being processed through the immigration detention center at the border, Piña accepted one of the many free bus rides to New York City that were being organized by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. When he arrived in New York on October 10, he cried. Through other migrants’ phone, Piña checked his Facebook Messenger. There were never any messages from his mother. He kept thinking of the last time he saw her, lying in a hospital bed in Panama. Every day, he wondered if he shouldn’t have stayed with her.

His mother had no way of telling him that the hospital had diagnosed her with severe dehydration. A week after he had left, she had been released. Nor could she tell him how she had survived a kidnapping attempt in Mexico and extortion. When she finally made it to the Rio Grande, a little over a week after her son had crossed the big iron gate, the border was closed. Her and her partner’s phones had been ruined underwater while crossing a river weeks ago. She had no way of letting anyone know.

Rumors spread among the thousands of migrants that piled up at the closed US-Mexico border that it would reopen just before Christmas. A group of non-profit organizations for immigrants’ rights had filed a lawsuit arguing that Title 42 was unlawful. But Christmas came and passed. Piña’s mother was still waiting at the border. On December 27, all hopes were dashed when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of extending Title 42 indefinitely. It was around this time that Piña’s mother was able to reach her sister in Venezuela to tell her that she was OK and waiting at the border. She relayed the message to Piña’s sister in Chile, who in turn finally passed it on to him. But he still had not heard his mother’s voice.

One day in late January, he answered a phone call from a number he didn’t recognize. It was her voice. She was in Colorado. She had been able to find a coyote that helped them pass the US border. She finally felt safe. Piña cried again, but much more this time.

“I was calm and finally at peace. All this time, I felt it had been my fault my mother was in the hospital, and I had lost track of her.”

He doesn’t plan on joining his mother in Colorado. “I’ve fallen for New York,” he says. “I love the constant activity, the diversity of the people.” He’s eager to work hard to leave his shelter in Brooklyn and find his own place. At the moment he usually wakes up early to wait in front of Home Depots to find work as a day laborer, helping with moves and unloading trucks. “The city gave us a NYCID,” he says. “I know it’s not worth much, but it means a lot to me. I’m so grateful for this.”

Piña is 20 minutes late for his English class. Usually, he arrives thirty minutes before the start of class, but today he needed to shed his story.