A Mother, a Daughter, a Deadly Journey: An Update

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 Times

Transcript

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0:00.0	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.
0:11.0	Today, we return to a mother and daughter who, along with hundreds of thousands of others,
0:17.0	made a harrowing journey through the Darien Gap, and we find out where they ended up.
0:23.2	It's Thursday, December 28th.
0:27.0	Julie, tell us what we should know about this place, the Darien gap.
0:37.0	The Darien gap is this narrow sliver of land between Colombia and Panama connects south and
0:45.8	Central Americas and this slip of land is a jungle and it's an extremely
0:51.4	inhospitable jungle.
0:53.6	And this is because the territory is
0:58.1	sheer mountains, intense, intense mud.
1:03.0	To be able to traverse it on foot is very dangerous because there are deadly animals, bugs, snakes, fast-running rivers.
1:11.0	Wow.
1:12.0	And it's sort of a changing territory too because it's incredibly wet.
1:16.8	This place has no road.
1:18.8	So for years, what you saw was that a small number of migrants who sort of heard word of mouth
1:27.6	about the possibility of crossing that they could do it were braving this trek and so you saw between 2010 and
1:37.8	20 an average of under 11,000 people crossing a year.
1:44.0	What you've seen in the last two years
1:48.0	is an enormous historic rise in people crossing this very dangerous, in many cases, deadly jungle.
2:00.4	How many more people?
2:02.4	What we saw in 2022 was almost 250,000 people cross the Darien gap.
2:08.0	And what explains why so many people are trying to take this treacherous journey right now?
	...

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