Much of the content about Darién and the rest of the journey is aspirational, featuring everyday people overcoming great odds, sometimes accompanied by religious music. A TikTok video of a disabled man walking through the jungle behind another man has more than 10,000 comments.
Even a Darién parody subgenre has emerged, building on a long tradition of using humor to confront tragedy. A video featuring a fake Hugo Chávez, the father of Venezuela’s socialist revolution, the move through Darién has been shared more than 23,000 times.
Here, Fake Chávez curses his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, who has held power for the last decade. The bit carries the hashtag #hunger #corruption and #fear.
Facebook and TikTok are also flooded with the faces of people who have disappeared or died in Darién, often accompanied by desperate pleas from family members asking for any information about their loved ones.
“It’s been 34 days without any news from them,” said one Facebook post, above photos of two boys from Ecuador.
Another, with a picture of a child in diapers, included a plea for the child’s name and relatives because his mother had “drowned in a swamp.”
Sasha Arteaga, 33, a Venezuelan immigrant to Colombia, built a TikTok following by posting these cases, then scrolling the internet for hours looking for signs of a missing person in other migrants’ videos. Sometimes he finds people in the forest this way, and then pleads with the Panamanian police to perform a rescue.
His channel, which he started in August, has grown in popularity, though he says he doesn’t make any money from it. “As soon as I opened it, I had 10,000 followers,” he said.
One more series of TikTok videos speaks to the deep toll of travel. Staring at the camera, Yorthin Alexander Valera and Jessica Hernández asked for help to find their son Ignacio, 6, who had disappeared in the forest. They fear that he has drowned or been kidnapped.
