From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is a daily.

The jungle connecting Central and South America is among the most dangerous and deadly terrain in the world.

Yet over the past few years, the number of migrants trying to cross it to reach the United States has exploded.

Today, my colleague, Julie Turgoids, with a first-hand account of crossing the Darian gap.

It's Friday, January 20th.

Julie, tell us what we should know about this place, the Darian gap.

So the Darian gap is this narrow sliver of land between Columbia and Panama, connects South and Central America's.

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.

You know, there's a highway called the Pan American Highway that connects Argentina to Alaska.

And the only portion of that highway that was never constructed, that could not be constructed by engineers who tried to do it, is this 66 mile portion of the jungle called the Darian gap.

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.

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?

Well, we saw in 2022 was almost 250,000 people cross the Darian 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.

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