“Brazil?” is asked to Haitian immigrants accompanied by young children. Their expressions are of exhaustion, but the chance of a positive nod accompanied by a smile is high.

They are the Haitians who emigrated throughout the 2010s, after the major earthquake of that year, built their families, and had Brazilian children. Many now find themselves without prospects and seek in the Darién Strait, the so-called “jungle of death,” a route towards the United States.

In this inhospitable territory between Colombia and Panama–controlled, on one side, by drug trafficking and, on the other, by indigenous groups-the most serious migratory crisis in the Americas today unfolds as a routine.

Every day, more than a thousand people, on average, manage to complete the dangerous crossing. Among them, Brazilian children and teenagers. Since 2020, more than 15.7 thousand, mostly children of Haitians, have crossed the suffocating tropical forest, in a walk of about 100 km. The count, official, is admittedly underreported.

There is no road connection that links South and Central Americas, as the Pan-American Highway is interrupted precisely by Darién. Most migrants usually arrive by the Tuqueza River and disembark from the piraguas, canoes with a capacity to carry an average of 15 people that dock daily in indigenous communities.

An unknown number of lives are lost along the way.

Lining up in a narrow corridor between fragile wooden constructions of the Bajo Chiquito community, region of the Emberá-Wounaan people, 3-year-old Fiedimio wears a shirt with the colors of Brazil. A native of Minas Gerais, he is the son of Haitians who had been living in Araguari, a neighboring municipality of Uberlândia, for seven years.

On that Tuesday morning of a dry season, with thermometers above 35°C, he was in his exhausted mother’s arms, awaiting screening by the Panamanian border service, Senafront. Bajo Chiquito is one of the first points accessed by immigrants after crossing the jungle. It took three days and three nights within the forest.

“Brazil is the best country to live in. The only problem is the salary. I need to make more money to help my family in Port-au-Prince,” says the father, Fiednir Demosthenes, next to his brother, Michelt, the first of the family to arrive in Brazil ten years ago, and also the father of a 5-year-old Brazilian boy. “One day I want to go back to Brazil, buy a house, and stay,” says Fiednir.

At least 15.7% of Haiti’s GDP comes from remittances from expatriates, according to the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank)–in Brazil, the share is 0.2% of GDP.

Less than 24 hours later and a few kilometers from where Fiednir’s family was, Mackenson, 31, caressed his youngest, the Brazilian Guerlens, 7 months old, clinging to his father’s chest with a sling. Beside him, his wife Ruudeline, 27, and also Brazilian Leonardo, 3, whose first language is Portuguese. “But he seems not to want to speak. He’s a bit upset, tired,” says the father.

Forming a line with hundreds of other immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the Haitian parents who had lived in Brazil for nine years skirted the Tuqueza River. They were waiting for piraguas that, for $25 (about R$125), take newcomers to the Lajas Blancas Immigration Reception Station. It is a private land loaned to the Panamanian government to shelter immigrants, where a new journey awaits them.

Mackenson had enough money to take his family. But around him, dozens of others sat on the stone floor, sometimes injured from wounds inflicted in the jungle, begging for some boatman to take them for free. The money had run out or had been stolen by small gangs operating on the Panamanian side of the jungle.

“What brings us here is money,” says Mackenson, who worked in construction in the east zone of São Paulo. “In Brazil, I had my house, my car. I had built a life. But with a salary of R$1,500, I can’t send US$100 (R$500) to my parents. It’s sad to have to give up everything.”

The family was on their 15th consecutive day of travel to Darién. They left from the bus terminal in Barra Funda, São Paulo, and went to Corumbá (MS), on the border with Bolivia. They crossed to the Bolivian side and continued by land, always by bus, until they reached Colombia.

There, they had to pay $350 (R$1,750) per person to the Gulf Clan, a drug trafficking cartel that controls the Colombian portion of Darién, to enter the jungle, where they spent three days. “I regretted coming here a lot. It was the real hell,” Mackenson reports. Despite that, Mackenson recounted, ‘it was the real hell.’ Nevertheless, he had already decided to continue with the endeavor of the ‘American dream,’ a term so common in Darién.

The desperation to support the family and the misinformation about the hostile conditions of Darién partly explain why the flow does not cease.

25 kilometers by land from Bajo Chiquito–or at least five hours by piragua, in a season of the year when the low level of rivers hinders navigation–David seeks some space with minimal breeze outside the small tent he shares with his family at the chaotic Lajas Blancas station.

Just a few days ago, he was in Manaus, where he bought fruits and tapioca flour at a market and resold them on the streets. He tries to help his elderly mother who is still in Haiti and raise his three children, the Brazilians Joseph Mathias, 13, Rebeca, 4, and Débora, 1 year and 9 months old.

“The salary is not enough. When I sold fruit, I earned R$2,500 to R$3,000 per month. With three children and my wife unemployed, it wasn’t enough,” says David. Like many others housed in Lajas Blancas, he reports intestinal discomfort after consuming the drinks and foods at the site. Overcrowded, the migration station housed about 1,260 people that day.

David says he cannot afford to pay for the bus ticket–$40 (R$200) per person–that crosses Panama via the Pan-American Highway to the Costa Rican border.

Just over a year ago, on the eve of Brazilian Carnival, an accident with one of these vehicles killed two Brazilian children in the province of Chiriquí, nearly 700 kilometers from Darién: 2-year-old Milena and 6-month-old Biden Victor.

The children were part of a group of more than ten Haitians who left from Navegantes (SC).

Eight of them, including Milena, were relatives of the Uber driver Samuel Emilé, a native of Porto Príncipe and in Brazil since 2013. In the accident, he also lost his brother Julio, 38, and sister Gisleine, 42.

By messages, the family communicated with Samuel, who did not want to migrate again. The decision to head to the US came after Julio was unjustly fired and faced difficulties. “Overnight, their messages stopped coming. So I went to look for news and found out about the accident.”

Samuel even went to Panama to fetch the surviving relatives, but they decided to move forward. “What hurt me the most is that when I arrived, they were already buried in a mass grave, like dogs.”

Far from the jungle, another surviving Brazilian child of Darién spends her childhood on the outskirts of the capital, Panama City. She is the girl Delícia Chama, 7 years old. “Delícia” was reportedly the only word she verbalized, besides “mommy,” when she was found alone in the jungle, at the end of 2019.

It is not known if the girl, who arrived without documents and whose age was estimated through a dental examination, was abandoned or lost her mother during the crossing. Her few memories allowed her to be connected to the state of Acre, where she supposedly grew up, but no relatives were found.

Delícia has just been naturalized as Panamanian with a name chosen by herself and which will be omitted in this report to preserve her. She has also been put up for adoption.

In the same place, there are two other Brazilian babies, also characters of the migratory crisis. At the end of 2023, in a coincidence that surprised child services, the two girls, one the daughter of Haitian parents, and the other, of Angolans, arrived on the same day without their families in Bajo Chiquito, in the arms of Haitians who claimed to have found them in the jungle, unaccompanied.

In the case of the daughter of Angolans, about a year old, the expectation of the Brazilian diplomacy is to reunite her with her mother, who lives in São Paulo, as soon as possible. The baby was taken out of the country by the biological father without authorization.

According to UNICEF, the UN agency for children, at least 3,300 minors arrived alone at the end of the Darién crossing in 2023–this count includes those whose parents are still in the jungle and are soon to be reunited with their children, and those who were abandoned or lost their family in the forest.

This is three times the number recorded in 2020 (1,079) and approximately 50 times what was observed in 2019 (65), when monitoring began by UNICEF. Of the more than 520,000 migrants who crossed the jungle of death in 2023, at least 22% were minors.

“Every day, we have identified 15 to 18 unaccompanied or separated children,” says Margarita Sánchez, head of the UNICEF office in Darién, in the city of Metetí, on the banks of the Pan-American Highway.

“Many report that they never wanted to leave, without being heard by their parents. But they carry a feeling of hope, of wanting to reach a place and be able to study, to resume life.”