The Darien Gap—the rugged, marshy isthmus straddling the rainforests of Colombia and Panama—has become a bottleneck in the flow of migrants from South America to the United States. In recent years, migrants have begun pouring across the previously impassible narrow crossing. Though human rights advocates have lamented the tremendous suffering that this dangerous path entails for migrants, relatively little attention has been paid to the reasons underlying Darien Gap’s “opening.” The nearly 400,000 migrants who have traveled from South America to the US-Mexico border this year alone would not have been able to cross the Darien Gap save for the egregious corruption of local Colombian authorities. Corruption has enabled people to escape the abuses of repressive regimes in Venezuela and elsewhere. Yet in so doing, it has created its own humanitarian disaster by facilitating a journey full of death and despair.

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