The 8-year-old girl from Venezuela had slept restlessly the night before, crying in her sleep, her mother said, about the men trying to kill her.
Days before, the family had entered the Darién Gap, the jungle between Colombia and Panama that In the last three years it has become one of the busiest migratory routes in the world. After climbing mountains and crossing rivers in their attempt to reach the United States, their group was accosted by half a dozen men wearing ski masks, brandishing long weapons and uttering threats.
“Women, take off your clothes!” the attackers shouted, the mother said, before probing each woman's private parts in search of cash. Sons, brothers and husbands were forced to watch. The men then ordered the girl to strip naked so they could search her, her mother said.
Aid groups working in the Darien Gap say they have been documenting an extraordinary increase in attacks on migrants, with patterns and frequencies rarely seen outside war zones. Almost all of the attacks, they say, occur on the Panamanian side of the jungle.
Aid groups, including Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF, say the attacks are organized and exceptionally cruel. The perpetrators beat the victims and take away food, including baby formula, leaving people battered and starving in the forest. And many times, dozens of women are raped in a single event.
In January and February, Doctors Without Borders recorded 328 reports of sexual violence, compared to 676 in all of 2023. This year, 113 came in a single week in February.
Several humanitarian organizations, including Human Rights Watch, accuse Panama's border police, in charge of security in the jungle and which has agents patrolling the forest, of failing to protect migrants and allowing perpetrators to commit crimes with impunity.
The New York Times recently spoke to more than 70 people who said they had been assaulted by groups of armed men in the jungle. Of them, 14 were women who said they had been sexually assaulted, from forced touching to rape. (The Times is not revealing the names of the alleged victims to protect their privacy.)
At a public event, Edgar Pitti, top official of Senafront — Panama's 5,000-strong border police — in Darien, said agents were doing everything possible to protect migrants, considering the challenging terrain of the jungle. “It's important to understand the geographic context,” he said.
Several Panamanian officials said the problem was not as serious as aid groups and migrants describe it. The prosecutor in charge of leading investigations into organized crime, Emeldo Márquez, insisted in an interview that sexual violence “has decreased.”
But data from his office shows that investigators opened 17 sexual assault cases on the Panamanian side of the jungle in 2023, and 14 so far this year. Márquez explained that in some of this year's cases he was still verifying victims' claims.
The mother of the 8-year-old Venezuelan girl said that during the attack in March, the mother was beaten and then, naked, searched between her legs, and a man groped her with his fingers demanding money. Then the masked men threatened to kill the girl if she did not undress.
“Mommy, I'll take off my clothes! “I don’t want to die,” the mother recalled her daughter shouting. The men did not touch the girl, her 35-year-old mother said, and when they made sure she had no money, they quickly left.
Last year, Panama arrested four people accused of sexual assault in the jungle, according to Márquez, who declined to say whether there were any arrests this year.
The mother of the 8-year-old girl said the perpetrators of the attack took the last of her savings: $280.
“They stole my daughter's innocence,” he said. “I can handle anything, but she can’t.”
Finally, the family arrived in southern Mexico. There, the mother said, the family was kidnapped and held for two days in a cockfighting arena. The mother was again forced to strip naked and searched for valuables, she said. Once freed, the family sold candy on the street, planning to use their profits to try to continue north.
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