by A sevenfold increase in sexual assaults against people crossing the Darién Gap is adding to the misery of people trekking one of the world’s most dangerous and underreported border crossings, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said.
Total impunity for armed gangs in the legal stretch of jungle that connects South and Central America led to one victim of sexual violence every three and a half hours in December, the overstretched medical organization said.
Related: A record half a million people crossed the treacherous Darién Gap in 2023
“It’s a huge and unexpected increase and it’s especially worrying since December is one of the months with the lowest number of migrants,” said Carmenza Galvez, MSF’s Darién program coordinator. “Our staff was already overspent with 30 to 35 cases a month, so we’re very concerned about the increase of seven.”
MSF warned in November that rapists and kidnappers were increasingly targeting the greater number of people crossing the dense jungle that connects Colombia and Panama.
More than half a million people – mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean, but also from China and Africa – made the treacherous week-long journey in 2023 to escape poverty and persecution. That figure is up from 8,500 in 2020.
However, the number of horrific stories of sexual abuse told to MSF staff has risen sharply in recent months, even as the number of people falls.
“There is no longer any correlation between migrant flows and sexual violence. Cases continue to rise even as the number of migrants falls,” said Natalia Romero, head of communications for MSF Colombia.
The medical NGO recorded 214 cases of sexual violence in the Darién Gap in December 2023 – seven times the monthly average recorded between January and September last year.
Many cases go unreported because victims are in a hurry to continue the harrowing journey to the United States or because abusers are intimidated into silence, MSF said.
The spike in the number of victims means that doctors cannot identify and treat all survivors with counseling or medical treatment to prevent pregnancy, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
MSF medical staff treated almost 60,000 patients in 2023, including 3,000 who needed mental health consultations.
Doctors often deal with severe cases of malnutrition, dehydration and aggressive fungal diseases caused by the journey, but also the mental and physical damage caused by robberies, attacks and kidnappings by armed groups. Thousands of people die every year in the swampy jungles after being swept away in landslides or turbulent rivers.
Related: Endangering it: brave Darién Gap migrants in pursuit of the American dream
“We can’t touch all these people. We had to leave one of our jobs, San Vicente, last year due to lack of resources,” said Galvez.
Among the worst cases of sexual violence are the rape of men and women in front of their families as a form of punishment for not paying traffickers.
“I worked in the Central African Republic where we have programs dedicated exclusively to sexual violence. We are now surpassing the numbers recorded in places like that in the Darién. It’s very worrying, not only for the victims but for the mental health of our staff,” Galvez said.
There is an “alarming” increase in the frequency of cases of mass sexual violence, sometimes involving more than 100 victims at a time, MSF has warned.
Masked men are detaining large groups of people after entering the Panamanian jungle from Colombia before forcing them to strip to search their orifices for money or performing a series of sexual assaults.
The exponential growth in the number of people roaming the Darién has led to people trafficking big businesses to local politicians and drug trafficking groups, who are taking advantage of the state’s lack of presence in the lawless jungle and money from the crisis.
On the Colombian side of the border, no one is making more profit than the Gulf Coast. Once right-wing paramilitaries and now Colombia’s largest drug cartel, the armed group has ordered the killing of rapists to protect its lucrative human trafficking business, meaning sexual abuse is not on the side. Colombia’s rainforest is so common.
On the Panamanian side of the jungle, however, the combination of a small state presence and no hegemony of the armed groups left people at the mercy of small groups of armed bandits.
“On the Panamanian side, we see that the presence of the state focuses too much on border control and does not prioritize the protection of migrants,” said Bram Ebus at the International Crisis Group. “It’s even worse because we know that Panamanian border guards have sexually abused migrant women.”
MSF and other NGOs on the ground have repeatedly called on regional governments to do more to protect the human rights of migrants since the number of people began to grow during the pandemic, but they have seen no change in the land, Galvez said.
“We understand that it is not up to us to tell governments how to do their jobs and we know that it is a wild and vast place that is difficult to patrol, but we believe that more can be done. Right now, the criminals are comfortable committing these crimes because there are no consequences,” she said.
