Mm
Like, they really do.
What?
Each dorm is a little more desperate,
especially day for
water.
The stuff of life
can save, but also poison.
We use state of the art filters
on river water to keep healthy.
Was hard enough for us with all of this
expensive gear
to filter water and things.
But you wake up here and there are people
burning the forest to live off,
drinking straight
from the stream, eating.
Maybe the last crackers
that they brought with them
thinking the journey
was just a matter of a couple of days.
It's really quite depressing.
The fight to live
here is not just against nature.
This tent, we are told,
was used by thieves
where they spend the nights between
picking their targets.
It is a short walk from this
transport
has a major crossroads
close to the end of the walk
where migrants camp and key rivers meet
those who at times
seemed unlikely to make it are pushing on
fuels by hearing the boats.
Taking them to safety inside
Panama are a matter of hours away,
even salvaging her stick from the water.
Yet this is where stories of survival now
merge with a darker past of death
and violence,
where our path
still relatively new and clean.
Used for only 12 days
by the cartel meets a much older one.
Occasionally people still emerge
from this route,
but it's mostly
walked by the ghosts of those before
their clothes
and plastic caught in the trees
from when the rains took
the rivers higher.
Now it is
flat, silent and speaks of decay.
The bodies here have traces of a past,
but there's no burial, no name,
no memory.
No matter how busy it evidently
got, people were left behind.
Fragments of lives abandoned
or childhoods interrupted.
A cast aside,
moments almost frozen in time
and the sound of the river
giant yet calm echoing
the people who pass us
say they set out in a group of 400
from Colombia.
But something has changed.
Locals tell us the cartel is fracturing.
And now this old route competes
with the new
to be the safest and fastest.
It's clearly losing
its
good.
This is likely a crime scene.
There are three bodies here
in similar decay, a little less certain,
but it is unlikely
they died of natural causes
in the same place at about the same time.
The first
part of a man
lying face down
amid the roots on the pathway.
The second is a woman
on her back in the tent.
The third body has a rope near her neck.
She was found three weeks ago
with her bra around her head,
according to photographs.
Panamanian authorities
were told about this three weeks earlier,
but there is no indication
they have been here.
People just walk by past
the cautionary tale nobody is heeding.
It's just a reminder in a place
that should be peaceful.
This of the sickening violence
that potentially faces
migrants here every day.
Vultures float above the bones
will likely soon be picked clean
the old route.
We're told by one survivor
who didn't want to be identified,
is now preyed on by armed
men in ski masks.
It is his second bid
to reach
New Jersey,
where his brother lives
on the first trip.
Masked men raped women in his group,
he says.
On this trip,
they demanded $100 from each of them
just days earlier.
You're looking up
and you think we're all human beings.
I mean, they don't catch us.
Or like
I don't know about why he went off
and how do these men look
at where they were
and what were they carrying?
They all thought growing up
without an empty dollar, a
now larger market that they knew before
you can get them.
And what happens if you don't a lawyer
and you're allowed to
you have nothing to fear
at Transport Baucus that night.
The tents are pitched close together
with the word of a thieves has spread.
Plastic provides fuel,
almost catching the jungle itself,
choking the air Talk is a food.
The lack of it.
They should be for hours from the boats
to the rest of Panama and its roads.
But the dry season
has exposed the riverbed
and it could be a lot longer.
And so it is only the night
that floods in around the tents.