I find it pretty funny that someone posted about the Pan American highway yesterday, and then the Darien gap today. It’s interesting how ignorant most HN’ers are just south of the USA.
The user PanamaNewb covered most of it correctly. It’s still a dangerous area. There are famous bloggers that have gone missing and literally only their bones have come back. The famous one thus far is: http://travelswithmitzi.blogspot.com/2018/10/killed-in-darie... Jan Philip
Most people mistake the issue there as a technical or engineering one. It isn’t. It’s political and human centric. The indigenous people don’t have a true connection or believe in the government of Panama or Colombia. Go back over a century and the whole land was just Colombia, but Roosevelt (yes, that US president!) wanted the a Canal thru Panama and thus Panama became a country.
Decades later it came up again for road construction but it was already heavily used for smuggling and other curious business. During the 60s through 90s it came up a lot for the cocaine trade. When that was gone, the power vacuum created a few gorilla militants that aligned themselves with the indigenous- most notably the FARC.
That doesn’t really exist anymore, but the people that belonged to several faction still do and many still have revenue from passage or related business.
Most people that need to legitimately get through just take a ferry to Turbo and vice Versa. The migrants walking through is a new phenomena in the volume that try to go through. If you can read Spanish and can find the telegram/signal groups you can even get day by day news of what happens and which days the migrants are told to wait and not try. It correlates to some curious activity or so I understand.
Most people outside of South America lack the understand the above history and the dynamics in general of this graft. But before you point fingers - everyone most likely is somewhat related from Panama to Panama military, Colombia and Colombian military. The anti government groups and the idginious people.
Tl;dr no one wants change except government of Colombia and people on the internet that have no idea of what happens there. Colombia government wants to build roads and tunnels for trade and then eventually enforce laws. But the later always has bad outcomes in Colombia.