Nabbed at the airport, I was thrown into Mexico’s largest immigration detention center. There I learned from my fellow detainees about the terrible secrets and horrible violence of the Darién Gap, the global epicenter of the migrant crisis.

This is an excerpt from The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas by Belén Fernández, now available from Rutgers University Press.

The first time I spoke with survivors of the Darién Gap, I was in jail in Mexico. It was July 2021, and I was serving a brief stint as the token gringa inmate in Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest immigration detention center, located in the city of Tapachula, Chiapas, just west of the border with Guatemala.

Over two thousand kilometers to the southeast of Tapachula lies the Darién Gap, k

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