Dispatch from Colombia

The sensational media dispute over Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the nitpicking over individual anecdotes from that town is obscuring a far more important reality. Whatever else we know, it is a documented fact that the Biden-Harris Administration is complicit in a multinational effort, aided by major NGOs and U.N. organizations in collusion with drug smugglers and human traffickers, to funnel migrants into the U.S. at completely disruptive and unsustainable levels.

This became clear on my recent reporting trip to Acandi, Colombia, where a powerful paramilitary force controls all human and drug smuggling into Panama. The “Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia”—a 6,000-man armed force also known as the “Gulf Cartel”—rules its vast domain in northwestern Colombia with a brutal iron fist, killing and kidnapping perceived wrongdoers on a dime.

The leaders of the Gaitanistas take enormous pride in having built such a massive and fine-tuned smuggling machine. They were so childishly eager to vaunt their accomplishment that I recently found myself FaceTiming with a high-ranking Gulf Cartel chieftain willing to show it all off.  

Through the mobile phone screen, the bearded criminal bureaucrat eyed me and my interpreter with suspicion at first. We had just come off a speed boat from across the Gulf of Urabá and asked a motorcycle cabbie to take us to the immigrants. He spat that we couldn’t just show up unannounced, without pre-approvals arranged by trusted interlocutors somewhere very far away.

“You just can’t just come in here and do what you want,” he said.

He softened a bit when, under interrogation, I said I was there as a research analyst from the Center for Immigration Studies to evaluate a plan by Panama’s new president, José Raúl Mulino, to close the notorious Darien Gap migrant passageway. This is the route through which nearly two million foreign nationals were funneled over the course of three years en route to enter the U.S. illegally at the Southwest border.

Panama’s first-ever policy U-turn, from organizing bus caravans northward to blockading the Darien Gap, portended far-reaching consequences for U.S. national interests. In recent years, the Biden-Harris White House has used diplomatic muscle and American taxpayer money to transform the passageway from a country lane used by less than 10,000 migrants annually into a thrumming superhighway of 135,000 in 2021, 250,000 in 2022, then 520,000 in 2023. So far in 2024, another quarter million have come through.

A closed migration checkpoint along the Darien Gap can regulate threats of U.S. border infiltration by Islamic terrorists from Muslim-majority nations (378 watch-listed terror suspects were caught at the U.S. border from 2021 through July 2024); spies from adversarial China, Iran, and Russia; African war criminals on the lam from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, and Nigeria; and regular criminals of every other stripe who pass through alongside regular economic migrants.

Why did the FaceTime boss grant me permission to access a clandestine boat dock and one of Acandi’s two trailhead camps? Short answer: pride of ownership.

Above all he wanted to boast of how well his team protected and treated immigrants, whom they regard as customers. Each one pays about $500 a head for their guided, three- or four-day Darien Gap treks. “We protect these people. We take care of them. It’s a smooth operation,” the local boss told me afterward. “Here you’ll see how everything is very organized. Yes, very organized.”

That was for sure. This machine continued to run smoothly on both sides of the Urabá Gulf after the July 1 Panama “crackdown,” showing that Colombia’s central government was most definitely not on board. And neither, it turns out, was the other essential partner: the Biden-Harris White House.  

The Undimmed Flood

The Biden-Harris government looks to be welching on a U.S. “Arrangement with Panama to Implement Removal Flight Program,” signed July 1—inauguration day—by U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Panamanians thought it said the Americans would pay for the crackdown’s central ingredient: air deportations from Panama frequent enough to deter those wanting to come into Colombia and then out through the gap.

On the Panamanian side, the stage was all set. Panama’s National Border Service, known as SENAFRONT, strung miles of barbed wire across at least three main trails leading out of Acandi, Capurganá, and other Gaitanista-controlled towns. They intended to funnel the immigrants into one main trail where they could be screened for security and sorted for deportation.

Panamanian coast guard vessels went on the hunt for smuggling boats on the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines with orders to detain “irregular migrants” for deportation. Panama mounted diplomatic talks with Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, China, India, and other countries to accept the flights. SENAFRONT Director General Jorge Gobea told me during an August 7 interview and in subsequent communications that his force, working with the Colombians, was going to treble down on disrupting the Gaitanistas.

“The other line of effort is directly against the Gulf Cartel because we understand they have links with our Indians,” Gobea told me in his headquarters in Panama City, referring to the Emberá Tribe through which gap traffic empties. “[The Gulf Cartel] have links with different groups in Panama and they want to continue smuggling people through Panama.”

The new Panamanian government then waited for the promised U.S. assistance to ramp up, both the flights and diplomacy with prospective receiving countries.

Then President Mulino went public several times in July and August, complaining that the promised American check hadn’t arrived. He said the Americans actually told him they’d only support expulsion flights for immigrants who volunteered to board the flights, which of course nullifies any real deterrent.

“If migrants don’t want to return to their countries, then they’ll go to the United States,” Mulino said. “I can’t arrest them. We can’t forcibly repatriate them. This is a United States problem that we are managing.”

Reacting to these public displays of disaffection, the Biden-Harris Administration ponied up some money for a few flights for criminal alien Colombians that Panama already sent back, and also for a couple flights to India with additional plans to send a flight to China as of this writing.

But while migration rates were down drastically when I was there, that was because immigrants sheltered in place to see if Panama would really send anyone home. Many dozens of immigrants I interviewed in Colombia said they were going through because Panama was letting them through.

“They say it’s closed, but they’re passing us through,” one Venezuelan man in a crowd of freshly arrived Venezuelans in Turbo told me in a typical testimonial. “They put barbed wire up, but then that’s it.”

A Cameroonian immigrant carrying a heavy backpack in the town of Necoclí, preparing to board a ferry over the Urabá Gulf said Panama’s plans didn’t worry him a whit. “We got information that it is closed, but we are willing to try,” he said. “We are willing to risk it.”

Wedded Bliss

Perhaps my most important finding was that there was no evidence of Colombian interdiction in the smooth-running Gaitanista human smuggling machine. Instead, I discovered a wide-open marriage between the Gaitanistas and local, state, and federal Colombian government agencies, the United Nations, and non-governmental migrant help groups, altogether engaged in the most productive, functionally well-oiled, and industrialized human smuggling assembly line operation anywhere on the planet.

All the action happens in the towns on both sides of the gulf, in Capurganá and Acandi on the east side of the gulf closer to Panama, and Turbo and Necoclí on the west side. The Gaitanistas on that side hit up all arriving immigrants they can find to collect permission money to board ferry company boats over to the other side (they must all buy one-way boat tickets too). The immigrants then go about acquiring camping gear at open street kiosks and fixed shops.

With transit costs paid for, all are given black dry bags to hold their gear inside for the gulf crossing. The Gaitanistas ensure everyone gets a claim ticket with a name and number that matches a sticker placed on each black bag. The Gaitanistas collect the bags and run the luggage over in boats.

Once reunited with the black bags in Acandi and Capurganá, motorcycle taxis take them with their guides to trailhead camps, where they pay more fees for the long hikes ahead.

All involved know that the people they are moving fully intend to break the immigration laws of a half dozen countries up the trail—including, ultimately, the American ones.

That implicates the United Nations agencies, foreign migrant-aid non-profits, and state, local, and federal Colombian governments. Gaitanista operatives move openly among these agencies, shaking down the immigrants for the unofficial crossing toll money of $175 to $300 a head. Furtively, immigrants pointed them out to me, whispering how it all works.

“When the people get off the bus, they are waiting for you,” one English-speaking Ecuadorian told me in Necoclí. “They say yeah, yeah, I got the hotel and the passage. You must pay for entrance.”

Immigrants reported that Gaitanista money collectors take pictures of passports and collect names for future baggage claim, creating payment verification.

Evidence of what happens when they don’t pay is pervasive: makeshift Turbo and Necoclí camps on beaches and in streets are filled with those trying to raise the Gaitanista payment. None of these scofflaws may cross the gulf. The U.N. and NGOs provide aid and assistance to them while they raise the money.

Witting Symbiosis

No official could plausibly claim ignorance about the main activity in any one of these gulf towns. Large, permanent U.N. billboards and street signs offer migrants help and point the way in Turbo and Necoclí. 

The agencies provide the ubiquitous black bags, some supplies, trail conditions, equipment advice, money transmission services, cell phone docking stations, and much more to prepare foreign nationals they well know are going to illegally breach the borders of at least the next half dozen nations.

Officials are easily able to spot the migrants, making their disregard willful. After my own taxi arrived to enter the gated ferry docks in Turbo, one of a group of Gaitanista operatives outside the gate suddenly stepped in front of the vehicle, abruptly blocking us, and slapped a hand hard on the driver’s windshield. But when the man peered through the front window and saw me, obviously a gringo, he stepped aside and waved my taxi in.

“What just happened?”, I asked the driver.

“They make [the immigrants] stay outside and won’t let them in unless they pay,” my driver explained.

“But how did they know I wasn’t an immigrant?”

“Because of the way you look.”

When I asked who those guys were, the driver answered, “I have to go now.”

Colombia’s local and federal governments are fully and openly complicit. Uniformed tax collectors for the towns of Necoclí and Turbo, for example, require a $1.50 tax from every backpack-toting ticket-holder about to board a ferry. That money adds up for small towns like these.

Federal migration officers check for identification papers on every foreigner just before they board boats with all their camping equipment. They entirely ignore unofficial boat launch spots just up the road for those going without identification, as immigrants waiting at one such location in Turbo explained to me.

Once I got permission to look around in Acandi on the west side of the gulf, the symbiosis became obvious. Inside Acandi’s “Camp 1” with an assigned guide, I spied a money-wiring kiosk run by Colombian banks whose signs were out in the open. They had Gaitanista permission to operate, their tellers working shifts to help the immigrants get money to pay Gaitanista guides for the next leg to Panama. Also in the camp were Gaitanista-approved non-profit migrant help groups that provided doctors, treatment, and medicines. Others provided meals and legal advice for when immigrants crossed borders.

A Prognosis

Panama’s plans to permanently return traffic through the Darien Gap to pre-Biden levels depend greatly on U.S. funding for enough expulsion flights to create deterrence, and also on U.S. diplomacy to persuade countries elsewhere in the world to accept their passengers.

Early U.S. responses to Panamanian pleas for required financial and diplomatic assistance strongly indicate that the Biden-Harris government is not authentically interested, despite its signed “arrangement” of July 1.

No one interested in reducing U.S. security threats and ending the ongoing U.S. border crisis should expect a genuine U.S. policy reversal in the near term. Panama, therefore, will more likely find itself operating alone with token U.S. involvement until the Biden-Harris term ends on January 20, 2025.

Success or failure of Panama’s gambit and appreciable improvements in U.S. security therefore becomes a 50-50 possibility, hinging on the outcome of the November 5 presidential election.

Based on assessments of her current and prior positioning on mass migration, Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris can be expected, beyond token moves for public consumption, to withhold the funding and diplomacy that Panama requires to succeed. By contrast, Republican Party nominee Donald Trump should be expected to provide all the requisite U.S. support.

If Panama falls to the 50% chance of long-term failure, this whole enterprise would enter the history books as that rare golden opportunity to serve U.S. national interests, missed for no real good reason.

The post Dispatch from Colombia appeared first on The American Mind.