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... They gathered in the predawn dark. Bleary-eyed children squirmed. Adults lugging babies and backpacks stood at attention as someone working under the command of Colombia's most powerful drug cartel, the Gulf Clan, shouted instructions into a megaphone, temporarily drowning out the cacophony of the jungle's birds and insects: Make sure everyone has enough to eat and drink, especially the children. Blue or green fabric tied to trees means keep walking. Red means you're going the wrong way and should turn around. ...

Next came prayers for the group's safety and survival: "Lord, take care of every step that we take." When the sun peeked above the horizon, they were off.

More than 600 people were in the crowd that plunged into the jungle that morning, beginning a roughly 70-mile journey from northern Colombia into southern Panama. That made it a slow day by local standards. They came from Haiti, Ethiopia, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela, headed north across the only strip of land that connects South America to Central America. ...

@#1 ... Next came prayers for the group's safety and survival: "Lord, take care of every step that we take." ...

Whoa, that does not seem like the criminals that fmr Pres trumps the migrants to be.

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... Bergkan and Orlimar had planned for a different life. They'd met as teenagers and gone to college together, Orlimar studying nursing and Bergkan engineering.

But Venezuela's economy imploded in 2014, the result of corruption and mismanagement. Then an authoritarian crackdown by the leftist president, Nicols Maduro, led to punishing American sanctions. The future they had been working toward ceased to exist. In the past decade, at least 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled.

Bergkan and Orlimar spent five years taking any job they could get, first in Venezuela and then in Peru, while they watched their friends and classmates leave, one after another, for the United States. Then Orlimar's cousin Elimar, who was like a sister to her, came to them with an offer: Her boyfriend, who was living in Dallas, would pay for Bergkan's family to take the cheapest route across the jungle, if Elimar and her two children"who were 6 and 8"could go with them.

"No one in Venezuela can lend you money, much less that amount," Bergkan told me. "It was our moment." They planned to stay in the U.S. only until Venezuela's economy recovered and they could return home. ...