Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said a seven-fold increase in sexual assaults on people crossing the Darién Crossing had further increased the misery experienced by people trekking across one of the world’s most dangerous and underreported border crossings.
Complete impunity for armed gangs in the lawless jungle linking South and Central America meant that one person was the victim of sexual violence every three-and-a-half hours in December, the embattled medical body said.
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Carmenza Galvez, coordinator of MSF’s Darién programme, said: “This is a huge, unexpected increase and is particularly worrying as December is one of the months with the lowest migrant flows.” “Our team was already struggling with 30 to 35 cases a month, so we are seriously concerned about a seven-fold increase.”
In November, MSF warned that rapists and kidnappers were increasingly targeting record numbers of people wandering the dense jungle connecting 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 march in 2023 to escape poverty and persecution. This figure increased to 8,500 in 2020.
The number of harrowing stories of sexual abuse told to MSF staff has increased significantly in recent months, even as the number of visitors has decreased.
“There is no longer a relationship between immigrant flows and sexual violence. “Although the number of migrants has decreased, cases continue to increase,” said Natalia Romero, MSF Colombia communications manager.
The medical NGO recorded 214 cases of sexual violence in the Darién Gap in December 2023; This was seven times the monthly average recorded between January and September last year.
MSF said many cases go unreported because victims rush to continue the arduous journey to the United States or are pushed into silence by the perpetrators of the abuses.
The sudden increase in the number of victims means doctors are unable to diagnose and treat all survivors and provide counseling or medical treatment to prevent pregnancy, HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
MSF’s medical staff treated approximately 60,000 patients in 2023; of these, 3,000 required mental health consultations.
Doctors mostly treat cases of severe malnutrition, dehydration, and aggressive fungal diseases that occur during walking; They also treat mental and physical damage resulting from robberies, assaults and kidnappings by armed groups. Dozens of people die every year from landslides or being swept into turbulent rivers in swampy forests.
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“It is not possible for us to reach all of these people. We had to leave San Vicente, one of our duty stations, last year due to lack of resources,” Galvez said.
The most egregious examples of sexual violence include 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 had programs specifically addressing sexual violence. We are now exceeding the numbers recorded in places like Darién. “This is extremely concerning, not only for the victims but also for the mental health of our team,” Galvez said.
MSF has warned of a “worrying” increase in the frequency of mass sexual violence incidents, sometimes involving more than 100 victims at once.
Masked men are increasingly detaining large groups of people entering the Panamanian jungle from Colombia before forcing them to take off their clothes to search their holes for money or carrying out a series of sexual assaults.
The exponential increase in the number of people hiking in Darién has made smuggling people into big business for local politicians and drug trafficking groups who take advantage of the lack of state presence in the lawless jungle and cash in on the crisis.
No one on the Colombian side of the border makes more profits than the Gulf Clan. The armed group, once right-wing paramilitaries and now Colombia’s largest drug cartel, ordered the killing of rapists to protect their lucrative human trafficking business; This means that sexual exploitation is less common on the Colombian side of the rainforest.
However, on the Panamanian side of the jungle, little state presence and lack of armed group hegemony left the people at the mercy of small groups of armed bandits.
“On the Panamanian side, we see the state presence being overly focused on border control and not prioritizing the protection of migrants,” said Bram Ebus of the International Crisis Group. “The situation is even worse because we know that Panamanian border guards are sexually harassing immigrant women.”
Galvez said MSF and other NGOs on the ground have repeatedly called on regional governments to do more to protect the human rights of migrant people since numbers began to rise during the pandemic, but they have not seen any change on the ground.
“We understand that it is not our place to tell governments how to do their job, and we know that this is a wild and vast place that is difficult to patrol, but we believe more can be done. Perpetrators are comfortable committing these crimes because there are currently no consequences,” he said.