What You’re Not Seeing From the Darién Gap

San Vicente, Panama, is a place where the road ends. Or, for many, it’s where the road begins—or begins again. It’s one of the first places you’ll encounter if, somehow, you’ve made it through Darién Gap, 60 miles of jungle on the border with Colombia. The Darién has been classified as unpassable for many years, but desperation has changed that. Now, thousands of migrants pass through this region on a long trek north to the U.S. border with Mexico.

Ken Bensinger of the New York Times visited the region a few weeks back. “Out of the jungle are coming thousands of people a day, hitting this area of Panama that was basically unprepared. And it’s just turned everything upside down,” he said. “These indigenous villages have turned their entire economic business toward serving the migrant community. Instead of growing the plantanos, they are providing temporary shelter and internet service and river transport to migrants, and making a lot of money doing it”

Stories about the Darién Gap in the mainstream press often focus not just on the number of people moving through this region but on the brutality of their journey. Migrants arrive in Panama injured, hungry. Some die in the jungle mud. But it’s particularly interesting to see how this suddenly booming region is being talked about in conservative media. On Breitbart or Tucker Carlson, the Darién Gap has become synonymous with a multinational invasion.

On a recent episode of What Next, we went through the looking glass in the Darién Gap. A portion of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, has been transcribed below.

Mary Harris: You might be used to right-wing media using a certain kind of image to provoke fear around immigration: pictures from American border towns, places like Eagle Pass and El Paso; migrants climbing over fences or camped out in the street. And I wanted to talk to Ken Bensinger about why these images seemed to be changing, focusing hundreds of miles south, on the Darién Gap. There is one man in particular who’s made it his mission to get eyes on who is coming through this newly popular route on their way to the U.S.

Ken Bensinger: There’s one person, Michael Yon, who I talked to extensively. He, in 2021, is at the Jan. 6 event in Washington. He’s there documenting it. He told me he later was at Joe Biden’s inauguration in protest. And he told me that soon after the inauguration, he realized that immigration was going to be the big theme. And he had spent time in Eagle Pass in Texas and in El Paso, and he had met some people there who were from Panama who said, “You’ve got to come down to Panama and check this out.” And he, as early as February 2021, starts going down there. Within a few months, he’s decided that he needs more people to come and see it—people who have a bigger cultural and media reach than he does, to get out the message that the “immigration invasion” is now focused there. That’s the focal point of the world.

Among the people he’s brought down there are congressmen, candidates for elected office, podcasters, photographers, lots of social media influencers, people who work for conservative newspapers, a lot of people who work for web shows on the same platform as Steve Bannon’s show called Real America’s Voice. It’s gotten to the point where people in that world are covetous of an invitation from Michael Yon.

You went down to watch what happened when a conservative influencer named Laura Loomer went down for her tour. She’s only 30 years old. She’s a right-wing provocateur. She’s run for Congress in Florida. She’s described herself as a “proud Islamophobe,” though I believe she’s distanced herself from that that label recently. What was she doing in Panama? Why did she want to go? Did this just become something you have to do if you are in this world?

That’s exactly what I wanted to find out. My primary beat is looking at media figures on the right, and she’s one of the people I follow. She’s been very close to the campaign of Donald Trump and went to the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, essentially to boost Trump and more than anything to go after his opponents, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley in particular. She’s got a very unique style. She likes to essentially ambush people. She calls it “Loomering.” You get “Loomered” when she jumps out from behind a pillar and sticks the camera in your face. She told me she got a trademark or something with the government for the term “Loomered.”

So, I just thought, Well, I want to go see her in action. And I was looking at her social media feed, and she announces, early in February, that she decided not to go to the primary in South Carolina, that instead she decided to accept an invitation from Michael Yon to go to Panama to see the Darién Gap.

So, Laura Loomer was shooting video the whole time you were with her, is that right?

I’m sure there are moments down there where the camera wasn’t rolling, but there were not many. Every time I saw her, someone was filming it.

I want to talk about one video in particular because it really seemed to catch fire online. This is this video that Loomer took with a 20-year-old migrant named Ayub Ibrahim from Somalia. He had traveled to Turkey and Brazil and then to the Darién Gap on foot. What did Loomer want to know from him?

They’re walking around this camp, and there’s a lot of Venezuelans there, some Colombians, some Ecuadorians, and here and there are people from the rest of the world. And sitting against a trailer are a bunch of people who obviously look like they’re not from South America. It turns out they’re Somalian. There’s a couple Somali women wearing, I think, hijabs. So, the whole crew, not just Laura Loomer, fast-walked over there and asked if any of them would talk.

They were clearly casting for what they wanted to see, which is someone Muslim.

That’s right. This guy, Ayub, was trying to be very polite. He speaks pretty good English, so there was maybe a bit of a pride in the fact that he speaks good English. So he agreed to do this, and all the cameras point at him. And the questions very quickly go toward American politics.

They’re asking specific questions about Joe Biden and about Donald Trump and about immigration. And he’s saying that he doesn’t follow American politics very well, that during the Trump presidency he was too young to even really pay attention, didn’t know what was going on. But they’re pushing him and asking him over and over again: Do you support Biden or Trump? Who’s better for immigrants? He eventually says Biden.

That’s the gotcha thing they wanted him to say. They’re trying, over and over again, to get migrants to the point of saying they like Biden better than Trump and they think Biden is good for migrants.

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When this interview was done, when it eventually was edited and uploaded, did what was sent around seem accurate to the conversation to you?

Well, it was real footage. It so happened that I recorded the conversation as well. And there’s three or four or five questions that Laura Loomer and others were asking at the tail end that don’t end up on the version that’s posted online. For example, they’re trying to get him to admit that the United Nations or the U.S. government has secretly sent him money to help him pay for his voyage to the U.S. And he denies that and says he didn’t get any help from anybody. Then, Laura Loomer asks him a bunch of questions about Islam, trying to get him to admit that Islam thinks of women as second-class citizens, or thinks of homosexuals as second-class citizens, and he doesn’t take the bait. He keeps denying that he thinks that. He believes that people can do what they want, and he doesn’t believe that religion should dictate people’s lives. Those answers didn’t seem to be what this group is looking for because they’re on the cutting room floor. You won’t find them on the internet, at least not the internet that Laura Loomer’s posting to.

After this interview was posted, Laura Loomer went on Infowars and talked about how people like Ayub Ibrahim were “jihadists,” or “people with jihadist tendencies.” And my understanding is that’s not what you actually saw from him.

That was not at all what I saw from him. If anything, he’s telling a story of trying to get out of a country with a problem with violent political fundamentalist. He had a story he told me, and even to some degree, what he told Laura Loomer was that that’s why he left, to get away from that. And he took a huge personal and financial risk to do so, and made giant sacrifices to get there.

I kept in touch with Ayub as he made his way further north, and this is a person who was excited about the idea of starting a new life in America and not living a life of risk and fear. And certainly, he wasn’t a religious fundamentalist at any level. And he felt, in conversations with me, very upset about the way that interview went. He felt that he was steered into places that he hadn’t intended to go. When he saw the video, he wrote me, “Oh my God. You know the truth. Can you please post the truth? Can you tell the world what that conversation was really about?” And he seemed really upset.

Listen to the full episode here.