Editor’s Note: “The Trek: A Migrant Trail to America” premiered on April 16 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CNN’s new Sunday primetime series, The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.
Darién Gap, Colombia and Panama (CNN) — There is always a crowd, but it can feel very lonely.
To get closer to freedom, they have risked it all.
Masked robbers and rapists. Exhaustion, snakebites, broken ankles. Murder and hunger.
Having to choose who to help and who to leave behind.
The trek across the Darién Gap, a stretch of remote, roadless, mountainous rainforest connecting South and Central America, is one of the most popular and perilous walks on earth.
Almost 250,000 people made the crossing in 2022, fueled by economic and humanitarian disasters – nearly double the figures from the year before, and 20 times the annual average from 2010 to 2020. Early data for 2023 shows six times as many made the trek from January to March, 87,390 compared to 13,791 last year, a record, according to Panamanian authorities.
They all share the same goal: to make it to the United States.
And they keep coming, no matter how much harder that dream becomes to realize.
A team of CNN journalists made the nearly 70-mile journey by foot in February, interviewing migrants, guides, locals and officials about why so many are taking the risk, braving unforgiving terrain, extortion and violence.
The route took five days, starting outside a Colombian seaside town, traversing through farming communities, ascending a steep mountain, cutting across muddy, dense rainforest and rivers before reaching a government-run camp in Panama.
Along the way, it became evident that the cartel overseeing the route is making millions off a highly organized smuggling business, pushing as many people as possible through what amounts to a hole in the fence for migrants moving north, the distant American dream their only lodestar.
At dusk, the arid, dusty camp on the banks of the Acandí Seco river near Acandí, Colombia, hums with expectation.
Hundreds of people are gathered in dozens of tiny disposable tents on a stretch of farmland controlled by a drug cartel, close to the Colombian border with Panama. The route ahead of them will be arduous and…
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