For many years, the Darien Gap, a dense jungle in the eastern end of the Republic of Panama, has featured, often prominently, in novels and movies. It was an impenetrable barrier to movement from Panama to the rest of South America. (Yes, traditionally, academically, geographically, and politically, Panama is not a Central but rather a South American nation. As American military personnel stationed there for a century were told.) Fiction about the place actually was well-supported by facts regarding the deadly region.

(For those interested, you can read about the Darien in several science fiction stories in John Ringo’s Aldenata (Posleen) cycle and Tom Krautman’s Carrera series.)

In fact, the Pan American Highway, a significant trade route and symbol of New World peace (or at least live-and-let-live, mostly), does not go through the Darien jungle. (It is a 66-mile gap.) It is a place of triple-canopy forests, incredible swamps and waterways of all sorts, an extreme climate, and filled with dangerous predators, both human and animal. As bad as any place in equatorial Africa or South Asia. Or worse.

Attempts to “bridge” the gap were defeated by a combination of terrain, weather, and environist pressure. Today there are not even plans to construct a road or railroad. Despite the high demand for travel through the place.

There are no highways or roads through its deadly mountains: only trails, if that. For years the Gap served to keep some pretty nasty illnesses out of the rest of South America, and out of Central and North America. Even military 4×4 and 6×6 vehicles found it impassable. Tanks? Ha! A few roads going out from Colon (named in Spanish for Christopher Columbus) and Ciudad Panama and Balboa (named for Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama), turning to trails and vanishing into the green terror.

That was the Darien Gap from its identification by Balboa of Spain in 1513 to sometime early in this century. 500 years.

Today? See the picture! Wearing shorts, halters, tee-shirts, and tennis shoes, carrying little, hundreds of thousands of migrants trudge across this inhospitable land, seeking wealth (and perhaps peace) in Del Norte: the North, the United States. In 2023, it is reported that at least 520 thousand men, women, and children made it to the civilized portion of Panama. Already by May of 2024, an additional 174,000 have made it. No record of how many dead litter the trails. They probably number thousands.

Panama, with only four-and-a-half million people, is overwhelmed, and crime comes with the migrants. As do drugs and weapons and disease. But the regime of Uncle Joe is nothing but compassionate: he has authorized unknown millions to be spent to fly the migrants from Tocumen Airport back to their home countries (or so it is claimed). Particularly to Venezuela and China and some claim Haiti.

The “popularity” of this route is rightly the doing of Uncle Joe and both his reputation and policies. As with the booming gun market in the States, and especially in places like Colorado and California, government policies are the cause. Of course, meddling by DC in places like China and Venezuela over decades has created the problems that cause people to either seek asylum elsewhere (like the States) or to look for ways to get sleepers, spies, and agents of change into the States to disrupt and feed off American society.

What goes around comes around, doesn’t it?

Today’s reality is often worse, far worse, than most fiction written about places like Darien. Because we let government run amok. (And other criminals, as well.)