For female migrants coming from South America to the US, there has always been a risk of sexual assault, but over the last few months the rate at which this is happening seems to have spiked dramatically.

Colombia and Panama are failing to protect hundreds of thousands of migrants who cross the Darien jungle on their way to the U.S. and have become increasingly vulnerable to robberies and sexual violence, Human Rights Watch said in a report published on Wednesday.

The watchdog called on both countries to appoint high-level officials to coordinate the response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Darien and recommended that their governments work jointly to improve security and ensure more assistance from international groups.

“Whatever the reason for their journey, migrants and asylum-seekers crossing the Darien Gap are entitled to basic safety and respect for their human rights along the way,” Juanita Goebertus, Americas director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement issued before the report’s publication.

Doctors Without Borders also warned last month that the numbers of sexual assault claims they are seeing this year are far above previous totals.

“Every month we record a higher number of total cases [of sexual violence],” says Carmenza Gálvez, MSF medical coordinator in Colombia and Panama. “This is appalling.” 

The number of sexual violence survivors treated by MSF teams in December constitute one-third of the 676 cases treated throughout 2023. MSF has repeatedly raised the alarm about escalating sexual violence against migrants in the Darién Gap, but the situation is only worsening.

In recent months, and with increasing frequency, MSF patients have described mass events of sexual violence. Survivors describe armed men in the Darién Gap detaining groups of up to 200 migrants within a few hours of  crossing the border from Colombia to Panama, forcing them to remove their clothes, and committing a range of sexual assaults, from unwanted touching to rape. MSF received reports of  two such group attacks in October, two in November, and four in December.

The NY Times had reporters in the Darient Gap and spoke to more than a dozen women who claimed to have been victims.

Of those interviewed, 14 were women who said they had been sexually violated, 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.)...

Until recently, Doctors Without Borders was the primary nonprofit providing health care to migrants at the end of the Darién route, with 67 staff serving roughly 5,000 people a month, the organization said. It was also the main group collecting testimony of sexual assault claims.

But in early March, following the organization’s repeated public statements about violence against migrants, Panama ordered Doctors Without Borders to suspend operations.

Panama claimed the decision to suspend the group's access to the Darien Gap was not retaliation for them raising an alarm about sexual assaults, but health minister Luis Fernando Sucre did blame the group for directing migrants toward the Darien Gap and contributing to problems created by hundreds of thousands of migrants passing through Panama each year.

Panama, a nation of just over four million people, has seen a million migrants pass through in just three years. Ms. Gozaine, the director of the National Migration Service, says this tide of people has cost the country $70 million, including money spent on lodging and food at government-run camps at the end of the jungle.

The US has sent $40 million to Panama during the same three years to help them deal with the problem. But obviously the number of migrants has only gone up and now we're seeing related problems with people preying on the migrants. 

I'm honestly not sure what the solution is here. The migrants just keep coming no matter how harrowing the journey becomes. So long as our border is effectively open to anyone who claims asylum, they'll keep crossing the Darien Gap.