For $4,000, intrepid tourists can see a stunning array of nature in one of the world’s most uninhabitable jungles. But critics are alleging that a tour along the Panama-Colombia border is poverty porn that profits off a deadly migrant route.
The issue has blown up in Spanish-language media in recent weeks following the release of a documentary, as media outlets and journalists have criticized a tour offered by a Germany company of the Darién Gap, the mountainous, swamp-filled jungle that separates Colombia and Panama. The company argues that the area includes a national park and that their route is far away from the one migrants take.
In recent years, the Darién Gap has become one of the world’s most heavily trafficked migrant routes, with hundreds of thousands of desperate people, from China to Venezuela, attempting to cross it every year in hopes of reaching the U.S. At least 158 people have died or disappeared crossing the Darién since 2022, according to the International Organization for Migration, although that’s believed to be a small fraction of the actual number of dead.
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“For $4,000, tourists can ‘experience’ one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes, where thousands risk death and disappearance each year,” journalist Max Granger wrote on Twitter. He told VICE News that the tour is “an absurd and profoundly horrifying expression of the obscene logic of borders—of a world where capital crosses national boundaries with ease and the rich travel the world without restriction, while the majority are walled-off in ghettos of precarity and violence.”
Wandermut, the German company that organizes the two-week trek of the Darién, has offered the tour since 2019. The controversy appears to have become headline news now because of a recently released German documentary about the trip. A description of the documentary asks whether a tour through the jungle is “morally justifiable” given the hundreds of thousands of migrants who risk their lives trying to cross it.
Spanish newspaper El Pais then wrote about the documentary, questioning “what it means to go on a package vacation in a place where thousands of people are suffering through a record-breaking humanitarian crisis.”
Wandermut markets the trek as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a “breathtakingly high level of biodiversity,” including anteaters, toucans, various species of monkeys, sloths, and a frog with transparent skin. The trip is not for the faint of heart, the company advertises. “Our route will always be criss-crossed by small mountains and rivers. On the way we will have to cross rivers, overcome steep slopes and fight our way through the undergrowth.”
In an email to VICE News, Wandermut’s founders, Tom Schinker and Martin Druschel, rebuffed the notion that they are profiting off a deadly experience, noting that the Darién is a national park and UNESCO World Heritage site. They said the tour operates on the Pacific Coast while migratory routes are concentrated along the Caribbean, some 50 miles away.
“Our focus is on experiencing nature and immersing [visitors] in the culture of the Indigenous Emberá [tribe], with whom we have been working closely for several years now and who benefit greatly from our collaboration in one of the most fascinating regions of the world,” they wrote. “Our expeditions cannot be compared to migrants fleeing across borders.”
Wandermut is not unique in offering tours of the Darién. Guided tours of the region have been occurring for some two decades because of its rich biodiversity, and Indigenous tribes often make significant income from tourists. A five-day guided trek of the park offered by Ecotour Darien, a competitor, costs $2,784 per person.
Erasmo De León, a guide with Ecotour Darien who has led tours of the Darién for 17 years, said the criticism of Wandermut is “exaggerated and bad-intentioned.”
“It’s not just doing damage to this company but the other ones that are working here,” he said. “It’s hurting local guides, the porters, and the people who own the boats and taxis that the tourists take.”
De León said the influx of migrants crossing the Darién Gap has, in fact, limited the scope of where tour guides operate because of the huge amounts of trash they leave along the journey. “It’s had a massive environmental impact,” he said.
Asylum seekers have traversed the Darién Gap en route to the U.S. by the thousands since as far back as 2010. But what began as an alternate route has turned into a superhighway as the U.S. and its southern neighbors have cracked down on migration, leading more refugees to begin their journey in South America and make their way north by foot. Last year, more than 248,000 migrants and asylum seekers crossed the Darién Gap—a record. This year is expected to surpass that.
Wandermut cautions interested tourists that while the Darién is dangerous, guides are equipped with the “latest technology” that help tourists stay on the right path and also allow them to communicate with rescue organizations should anything happen.
By contrast, migrants who attempt the deadly crossing often lack basic supplies like clean water or medicine. Many are robbed and raped along the route by gangs of armed bandits who roam the region preying on migrants.
“To me, their struggle is still unimaginable, yet I experienced a little glimpse of it,” said filmmaker Katja Döhne, who made the documentary about Wandermut’s Darién tour that fueled the controversy. Along the trek, she caught such a bad case of “jungle rot” — fungal infections on her feet — that she couldn’t walk on her own by the end of it, she said.
“To really put it in a graphic way: I would not have made it out of there if my group would not have carried me on their shoulders for the last miles,” Döhne told VICE News. “I would say that the Darién Gap in my opinion is just too harsh of a jungle in order to hike it as an adventure trip as a tourist…But I think that the majority of the participants would probably have a different opinion about this, and I respect that. They went there in order to challenge themselves, and their expectations were met.”
