The word they use is “purgatory”.
In the Panamanian port village of Miramar, the migrants wait in abandoned houses and makeshift tents, the air heavy with unease. Few know how they will pay for the passage on a crowded boat to their next destination, 10 hours south. All are weary and despondent.
“I was hoping for a better future, but it was all for nothing,” said Gabriela, a 26-year-old Venezuelan mother. “I don’t know what I will do.”
Gabriela is one of thousands who, after months travelling north to the United States – across the perilous Darién Gap, through gang-controlled territories and treacherous terrain – are now retracing their steps. More than 14,000 migrants, mainly Venezuelans, have turned south since Donald Trump closed the borders and began his immigration crackdown, according to a report published last week.
The phenomenon, known as the “reverse flow”, represents an abrupt reversal in one of the biggest population displacements in modern history.
A former government employee, Gabriela left her home after Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in last year’s widely disputed elections. She was one of about 8 million people to have fled the country since 2017, and planned to join her brothers and father in the US. “It felt like a bleak future back home,” she said. “I didn’t want to live in a dictatorship.”
With four other family members and her 11-year-old daughter, who altogether paid about $20,000 to smugglers, she made it to Mexico, where she waited for her visa appointment. It was scheduled for 3 February but on 20 January, the day of Trump’s inauguration, it was cancelled. “None of us got in,” she said. “All of our plans were destroyed.”
Migrants are mostly travelling back by bus through Mexico and Central American countries until they reach Panama, from where they take overcrowded boats to Colombia. Now separated from the rest of her family, Gabriela waits in Miramar with her daughter, hoping to raise the $500 needed for the next leg south to Colombia. “We can’t swim, but there’s no other choice,” she said.
Lawyers, NGOs and even government officials warn that the reverse flow – largely invisible and unmonitored – is proving as dangerous as the northward trek, with smugglers quick to move in. The Migration Policy Institute’s Latin America and Caribbean Initiative has said the return journey is taking place in an “even more hostile environment”.
In February, one migrant boat sank, killing an eight-year-old. At the same time, shelters have shut down due to cuts in international aid. “I’ve encountered a lot of danger, from gangs and scams,” said Gabriela.
Scott Campbell, Colombia’s representative for the UN high commissioner for human rights, said that many of the reverse migrants had been victims of human rights violations on the journey north and face “a repeat gauntlet of abuse on their return to the south”.
“Many have been on the move for a long time, forced out of their temporary places of living on multiple occasions – with very scarce resources,” he said. “On their way back south, migrants are again exposed to gender-based violence, human trafficking, discrimination, kidnapping and extortion, as well as facing a lack of access to drinking water, food and shelter.”
Migrants are often dropped into regions with a heavy presence of criminal groups that increasingly prey upon them, the report said. Campbell explained that some groups have left the migrants on the Pacific coast of Colombia or in Panama with no money. “It exacerbates their risks of suffering sexual violence or being recruited by non-state armed groups in Colombia,” he said.
Abuses against people in reverse migration go unpunished, with the impunity empowering armed groups and criminals, “leaving migrants further exposed and at their mercy”, he added.
Abril Staples, field coordinator of the migrant project at the Panamanian Red Cross, who accompanied the Guardian to Miramar, said that anywhere between 30 and 130 migrants arrive at the village daily. She said that migrants were arriving “malnourished and desperate”, adding that “they don’t have any resources to continue”.
“People went to chase the American dream, and they are coming back crushed,” Staples said.
Governments have failed to engage with the crisis, said Campbell, who warned that contingency plans had not been implemented.
“In one of the cases our teams saw, a three-year-old baby was living on the street, with health problems, insect bites and skin problems, whose family has no financial resources, and without possibility to receive medical care by state health institutions,” he said.
Windel, 18, has been in Miramar for five days, sleeping in a tent on the beach. The Venezuelan teenager spent four months travelling north towards the US, and another four months travelling south. “I’ve been hungry, cold, everything. We don’t have enough money to survive the week,” she said. “I’ve met Venezuelans who can’t return to Venezuela because they don’t want to die. I want it all to be over.”
Both Gabriela and Windel fear what awaits them back home. Venezuela, crippled by Maduro’s authoritarian rule, has been in deep political and economic crisis for years. Its exodus is the largest displacement crisis in the western hemisphere – and among the largest in the world.
“It’s difficult having to return, with empty hands, without the American dream,” said Gabriela. “But there is nothing left to do.”
