Much of the content of the Darién and the rest of the journey is ambitious, with ordinary people overcoming great difficulties, sometimes accompanied by religious music. A TikTok video of a disabled man making his way through the jungle on the back of another man has more than 10,000 comments.
A subgenre of Darién parody also emerged, building on a long tradition of using humor to address tragedy. TO video depicting a fake Hugo Chávez, the father of the Venezuelan socialist revolution, migrating through the Darién has been shared more than 23,000 times.
In it, Fake Chávez curses his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, who has remained in power for the past decade. The bit carries the hashtags #hunger, #corruption and #fear.
Facebook and TikTok are also flooded with the faces of missing or dead people in Darién, often accompanied by the desperate pleas of family members asking for information on their loved ones.
“34 days have passed without any news from them,” reads a post on Facebook, above photographs of two boys from Ecuador.
Another, featuring a picture of a baby in a diaper, includes a request for the name of the baby and his relatives because his mother “drowned in a swamp.”
Sasha Arteaga, 33, a Venezuelan who immigrated to Colombia, built a sequel to TikTok publishing these cases and then scrolling the Internet for hours looking for signs of the missing person in videos of other migrants. Sometimes she located people in the jungle this way and then begged the Panamanian police to perform a rescue.
Her channel, which she opened in August, has grown in popularity, although she says she makes no money from it. “As soon as I opened it, I had 10,000 followers,” she said.
Another TikTok video series speaks to the profound toll of the journey. Staring into the camera, Yorthin Alexander Valera and Jessica Hernández begged for help finding their son Ignacio, 6, who they lost in the forest. They feared he had drowned or been kidnapped.