Aid groups detail sexual assaults on migrants in Panama

Accuse police of failing to protect travelers

DARIÉN GAP, Panama — The girl, 8, from Venezuela, had slept fitfully the night before, wailing in her dreams, her mother said, about the men trying to kill her.

Days earlier, the family had entered the Darién Gap, the jungle straddling Colombia and Panama that, in the last three years, has become one of the world’s busiest migrant highways. After climbing mountains and crisscrossing rivers in their quest to reach the United States, their group was accosted by a half-dozen men in ski masks, holding long guns and issuing threats.

“Women, take off your clothes!” the assailants shouted, the mother said, before they probed each woman’s intimate parts looking for cash.

Sons, brothers, and husbands were forced to watch. Then the men turned to the girl, her mother said, ordering her to undress for a search, too.

Assault, robbery, and rape have long been a grim risk of migrant journeys around the globe. But aid groups working in the Darién Gap say that in the past six months, they have documented an extraordinary spike in attacks, with patterns and frequencies rarely seen outside of war zones.

Nearly all the attacks, they say, are happening on the Panamanian side of the jungle.

Long-established aid groups, including Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF, with experience working in conflicts, say the attacks are organized and exceptionally cruel. Perpetrators beat victims and take food, even baby formula, leaving people battered and starving in the forest.

And the assaults often involve cases in which dozens of women are violated in a single event.

In January and February, Doctors Without Borders recorded 328 reports of sexual violence, compared with 676 in all of 2023. This year, 113 came in a single week in February.

“The level of brutality is extreme,” said Luis Eguiluz, the organization’s director in Colombia and Panama.

Several humanitarian organizations, including Human Rights Watch, accuse Panama’s border police, which is charged with security in the jungle and has officers patrolling the forest, of failing to protect migrants and allowing perpetrators to commit crimes with impunity.

These accusations come as top Panamanian officials voice growing frustration with the financial and environmental cost that migration has inflicted on the small nation and amid growing calls among political leaders — including candidates in an upcoming presidential election — to halt the flow of people.

Two reporters for The New York Times captured a snapshot of the violence in March, speaking with more than 70 people during a four-day period who said they had been robbed by clusters of armed men in the jungle.

Of those who were interviewed, 14 were women who said they had been sexually assaulted, ranging from forcible touching to rape.

“They do all kinds of evil to you,” said one woman, 40, a mother of six who had been living in Chile. She was surrounded by a half-dozen masked men and raped, she said, after the group she was traveling with left her alone in the jungle. (The Times is withholding the names of people who say they had been victims of sexual violence to protect their privacy.)

Panama’s top security official, Juan Manuel Pino, whose ministry oversees the 5,000-person border police, known as Senafront, declined repeated requests for an interview.

Speaking at a public event, Edgar Pitti, the top Senafront official in the Darién, said officers were doing all they could to protect migrants, considering the jungle’s challenging terrain.

“It’s important to understand the geographic context,” he said.