Luke Taylor and Kate Connolly write, “Travel startup says it doesn’t ‘holiday where people suffer’ but offers trek in Darién Gap known for dangerous migration routes.” The Darién is a 100-mile section of jungle between Colombia and Panama. Read full article at The Guardian.

“We go where no one goes,” is Wandermut’s tagline, but one of the German tour agency’s packages has left people asking whether some places are better left unexplored. The travel startup’s 10-day Panama Jungle Tour has been criticised across Latin America in recent weeks for offering tour packages in a region which is home to one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes.

The agency markets its trek through the Darién Gap as a chance to see the unique natural beauties of one of the world’s most pristine tropical forests – and the ultimate survival test for the intrepid. “Reaching our destination and the course of the entire tour are uncertain,” Wandermut says in its edgy promotional material.

The Darién, a 100-mile swath of jungle between Colombia and Panama, is home to incredible natural beauty, including cascading waterfalls, myriad endemic species and crystal-clear streams.

But its inaccessibility and lack of development have also turned it into a haven for drug trafficking militias, armed bandits and one of the world’s most desperate migrant crossings.

Tourism in any part of the Darién is reckless due to the treacherous terrain, lack of state presence and pervasive organised crime, said Giuseppe Loprete, the International Organization for Migration’s chief of mission in Panama. “The Darién jungle is a notoriously remote region of swampland and dense rainforest spanning 100km of the border between Colombia and Panama. There are no roads, the access is very dangerous for border authorities and even more so for humanitarian actors. Even fully equipped and trained border authorities such as Panama’s national border service … can access the Darién jungle [only] to a certain point, just on the Panama side,” Loprete said.

“Today, while you read this, there are privileged people from the first world travelling to Colombia to an area full of migrant corpses to live out an adventure in the jungle. If that does not make you want to vomit, I don’t know what will,” commented one Twitter user.

A record 250,000 migrants – mostly Latin Americans but also a growing number of people from as far afield as Afghanistan and China – took the 10-day trek through the Darién in 2022 in the hopes of eventually making their way to the US.

As the number of people fleeing economic strife and persecution has increased the migrants making the trek are increasingly poorly equipped and weak, say medical NGOs tending to sick people who emerge from the jungle in Panama.

Doctors without Borders (MSF) says it is seeing a growing number of families with small children, malnourished and diabetics who are at higher risk of being lost to the mountainous jungle.

Migrants are frequently robbed, women raped and young children have been shot dead by armed bandits. [. . .]

Read full article at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/darien-gap-tour-wandermut-criticism

[First photo from The Darien Landscape Collection by Oyvind Martinsen/Alamy: The Panama landscape is seen at dawn at Cerro Pirre, Darién National Park. Second photo by Iván Valencia/AP: Haitian migrants wade through water as they cross the Darién Gap in hopes of reaching the US in May.]