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346 nACLA—report on the Americas| VOL. 55, nO. 4

2022 to 2023—has provoked enormous spatial and socioeconomic changes, overwhelmed the public healthcare system, and increased the commercialization of migrant trajectories. Yet stigmatizing and racialized depictions of a death-producing space, inhabited by irregularized migrants, coyotes, drug traffickers, guerrillas, and paramilitaries, has diverted attention away from both the political production of violence and the vital struggles of diverse bodies experiencing mobility and immobility along the migrant trail. Behind the headlines, Darién’s multiple lives reveal stories of tenacity and transformations against a backdrop of extremely profitable transnational legal and illegal economies.“The jungle has changed,” the cacique or Indigenous leader of the Emberá-Wounaan tells us. He describes not only the heaps of abandoned clothes, empty food wrappers and …