ABOUT THIS BOOK

The narrow Darién Gap, the only land bridge connecting South and Central America, encompasses a spectacularly hostile jungle, covered in steep mountains, dense rainforests, and flood-prone marshes. Known in Spanish as el infierno verde, or “the green hell,” it is one of the most inhospitable places in the world. Its terrain is too treacherous for roads, yet hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers contend with its horrors every year in the hopes of reaching the United States, still some three thousand miles away. And of the countless who set out for the border, an untold number never arrive.

In this book, journalist Belén Fernández travels through the Darién Gap to report on the dehumanizing and deadly stretch of land that has become a mass graveyard for migrants. Fernández’s journey brings her into contact with refuge seekers, people smugglers, law enforcement officials, and many more whose stories bring life to a place overwhelmingly associated with death. Combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis, she shines light on a largely made-in-the-USA crisis that has come to define our modern era.

Engrossing and heartrending, The Darién Gap is a poignant and compassionate indictment of structural inequality and institutionalized inhumanity in a world where the have-nots must risk death for a chance at a better life—or any life at all.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ is an opinion columnist for Al Jazeera and the author of several books, including Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico's Largest Immigration Center. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, and numerous other publications

REVIEWS

"Belén Fernández is a fearless journalist with deep empathy for her subjects. Her on-the-ground reporting is in the same spirit as George Orwell. She delivers the unvarnished truth of our time about people seeking safe harbor in a chaotic world."— Melissa del Bosque, author of Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dy

"The world could use more writers like Belén Fernández. Her curiosity is relentless (and contagious). And she brings an astonishing worldliness as well as a deep fount of smarts and empathy to whatever she takes on. This is a highly original and intrepid book about immigration and what it means to travel across borders of every sort."— Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Centra

"[Fernandez] writes with wit and candor, using the Darién Gap as a case study of how a multitude of global crises—including climate change, state violence, and narco trafficking—are all connected. In doing so, she forces the reader to consider their own freedom of movement across borders."

— The Progressive Magazine

"A tale of adventures well outside of middle America's experience and comfort zone. It’s also a critique of the role US capitalism plays in maintaining, exploiting and intensifying migration from South America to its neighboring continent to the north. . . . Fernández's The Darien Gap is a work that is timely, disturbing and engaging. Her seamless integration of personal stories (hers and those she meets), history, politics and economics makes for a captivating read. If one wished to read only one book on the issues of the current migration to the United States, The Darien Gap should be among the shortlist."

— Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch

"Fernandez makes clear the connection between large-scale migration and the U.S. war on socialist governments that aim to assert national control over their resources and escape neo-colonial domination."

— CovertAction Magazine

"Fernández has the unique ability to capture the absurdity, terror, and sorrow of a situation—often in the same sentence—and add a biting layer of sociopolitical and economic analysis on top of that."

— The Border Chronicle

"Belén Fernández is among our most intelligent 'on-the-spot' journalists. She knows much of the world firsthand, and she critically connects its various hot spots into a larger whole. Her excellent The Darién Gap brings the reader into what was a thick jungle in a thin land but now is a well-trodden chokepoint on the global migrant highway. Fascinating and beautifully written."— Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth

“Fernández's gonzo journalism is fearless. . . . The Darién Gap is a revelatory, yet heated, examination of the human costs of seeking asylum and a better life in America that skewers the notion of national borders. . . . [A] chilling exposé.”

— Shelf Awareness

"Riveting. . . . A travelogue punctuated by bouts of critical analysis, The Darién Gap offers a harrowing glimpse into the reality of a natural phenomenon made criminal."

— Foreword Reviews, starred review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
The Darién Gap
Notes
Further Reading