There are places on the map where the roads end. It can be easy to forget that.
I drove to what you might call the end of the roads once.
Started here in New Hampshire… we drove first 4 miles North to Montreal… that’s where the big yellow roads — the closed access highways, the interstates — that’s where those end. But we kept going.
Another seven hours, straight North, to Matagami. That’s where the highways built by the normal processes of government end, and a road built by a process of colonial corporate expansionism began.
And then we drove another 10 hours through the low black spruce trees that fight their way up from the thin soils of the Canadian shield. To Chisasibi, a thriving Cree town at 53 degrees North, latitude.
There is another road that goes east that we could have driven along for longer, but to get to the next village up the coast, we would have had to gone by boat, or plane, or snowmobile...
It felt like we had driven to the end of the roads.
[pause]
Today I want to tell you about another place where the road ends.
Nixon [Voiceover]: THE AGREEMENTS signed today by Secretary of Transportation Volpe, Panamanian Minister of Public Works Fabrega, and Colombian Minister [fades down]
In English, we call it the Darien Gap. In Spanish, it’s called El Tapon del Darien… or the Darien Plug. It’s a stretch of rainforest in southern Panama, just about right at the border of Central and South America.
Nixon [Voiceover]: — the Darien Gap — needed to link together existing sections of the Pan American Highway System.
This is not Richard Nixon you’re hearing by the way. It’s my coworker Nick Capodice very convincingly reading a written statement Nixon made, in 1971, about the completion of a 14,000 mile road from Alaska to the tip of South America.
Nixon [Voiceover]: Upon completion, this link for the Pan American Highway will allow the motorist to drive the entire 14,000 mile journey from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the southernmost tip of South America.
The Darien has been the many things to many people. In the late 1600s, Scotland, of all countries, made one of its attempts at colonialism, by sending five ships to the Darien Coast. This obviously didn’t work out, and it’s now alternately called the Darien Scheme or the Darien Fiasco.
Drivers have taken the Darien Gap as a challenge. The fact that this space has defied the dominance of roads seems to attract them. The first time a jeep managed to drive the whole way, it took fully TWO YEARS. One publicity stunt, meant to literally sell Chevy’s resulted in a Chevy Corvair being permanently abandoned in the rainforest of the Darien.
Nixon [Voiceover]: For a long time experts thought that this section could not be built: the "bottomless" Atrato Swamp which it must cross could not be conquered; the fact that this project will now be undertaken is a tribute not only to modern engineering but also to the determination of our countries to forge this final link in a great, unifying international project.
From a globetrotter’s perspective, today the Darien seems to exist mostly as an obstacle to tourists who want to drive from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego. You can read about a thousand travel bloggers who have written nearly identical tales about taking the boat around it.
Despite Nixon’s sunny outlook. It has never been completed. Though now, the Darien Gap is only some 40ish miles wide.
[pause]
What is a place that defies roads?
A wilderness?
Roland Kays: You know, right at the edge of two continents, right where north america ends and south america begins.
A swamp?
Jorge Ahumada: It’s unbelievable, you’re standing in the middle there and you’re surrounded by mosquitos. There’s clouds and clouds of them there's nothing you can do.
A crucible?
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: muchísima gente pues… ha quedado ahí, en el Darien.
A refuge?
Alicia Korten: the roads bring with them loggers, miners, farmers development.
[Theme music]
This is Outside/In, a show about the natural world and how we use it. Today on the show, el Tapon del Darien: a place that has defied roads, despite more than a century of efforts to build one. But roadlessness does not mean no one is there.
What happens, and does not happen, in a place without roads.
[theme music]
I want you to consider this place through three frames. And the first frame, is through the eyes of the coyote.
Jorge Ahumada: So if they survive through the through the danger to the very and, you know, plug, as we call it in Colombia, I think they could become an invasive species very quickly.
To kinda start with the punchline… the Darien is the last thing standing between the Coyote… and basically all of South America.
Jorge Ahumada: This is a process that could take several hundred years, but we could well see coyotes down to in the southern tip of Argentina.
This is Jorge, by the way.
Jorge Ahumada: Yeah my name is Jorge Ahumada, and I’m a senior wildlife conservation scientist at conservation international.
Jorge is from Colombia. Just below the Darien Gap.
And Jorge has done a lot of research with a very specific scientific tool.
Jorge Ahumada: Camera traps.
Cameras that you strap to a tree and which go off automatically when something walks by. It was really only in the last like 10 years that these became cheap enough to become a ubiquitous scientific tool
[music]
Jorge Ahumada: So, I mean, a lot of these animals, you don't see them, I mean, they're there, but because they're so rare, So the beauty of camera traps is they catch these things very easily. And if you put enough of them in a in a forest, in a protected area, you will get 90, 95, 96 percent of all the mammals that dwell in the floor.
Which like… prior to camera traps was a very difficult thing to do. One quick camera trap tangent. Once, in the pre-camera trap days, back when studying animal behavior meant chasing them around with binoculars, Jorge saw something in the rainforest in Colombia.
Jorge Ahumada: And I thought what… what is this? It looked like a little dog with little ears and a stubbed tail. And so I went back to the camp and I told everybody I saw this animal. And everybody was looking at me like I was crazy,
It wasn’t until like 25 years later that Jorge realized he had been one of only a very few people to observe a very rare species that is mostly found East of the Andes… in like Brazil. A species which you should absolutely google because it’s adorable, called a bush dog.
Jorge Ahumada: I was like. That’s! I saw these guys
Sam Evans-Brown: I saw this!
Jorge Ahumada: 25 year! Pumping the air!
The reason we’re telling you all this is because camera traps are how we know that coyotes are about to cross into South America. [music out]
Sam Evans-Brown: I don’t have video on my end, but I appreciate your video because I get to see that you’ve got a wall covered with strange implements back there.
Roland Kays: That’s right that’s my skype background, those are my gardening tools.
This is Roland Kays, a professor at North Carolina State University and a coyote researcher of the most swash-buckling kind.
Sam Evans-Brown: Is that actually true? It looks like a couple of bow and arrows back there.
Roland Kays: Yeah, well sometimes you get harassed… no actually it’s just stuff I’ve collected as I’ve traveled around.
The post-card version of the history of Coyotes is that they’re native to North America. But they weren’t always so wide spread
Roland Kays: Yeah so coyotes were in the Western United States, Canada and Mexico. They were in sort of drier, more open country, so pretty wide-spread across that area in grasslands, savannah’s desserts and more open woodlands.
Coyotes are AMAZINGLY adaptable. They eat whatever. They’ll eat deer, if they can get it, but also little stuff… mice, rabbits… your cat.
Roland Kays: And they can also handle a fair amount of fruit and insects.
Sam Evans-Brown: When you say fruit are we talking like apples?
Roland Kays: Well sure apples, they’d love some apples. Down here it’s a lot of persimmon.
Sam Evans-Brown: Ok
Roland Kays: But you know in New England it’s probably going to be less fruit but certainly blueberries are going to be big for them during a certain time of year.
Unlike, say, wolves… they have a ton of pups. And they have more, when food is abundant
Roland Kays: If it’s a good year, if there’s a lot of food around. Two animals can make 15 animals or 12 animals whatever it was.
And all those pups. When they’re born, they head off trying to find a new territory.
Roland Kays: And that’s one of the reasons they’re so hard to get rid of or control or limit their population. Because if you remove one, if it’s a breeder you know, 3 or 4 more or going to come in and try to take their place… but if you keep removing these coyotes you're basically creating a vacuum. You’re sucking in these coyotes from the surrounding country-side that are out there looking for an opening.
In the pre-colonial days, anywhere there was forest, wolves and mountain lions kept the coyotes out.
But then we killed huge numbers of wolves and mountain lions, and in the 1900s coyotes started to move into their place.
Roland Kays: Yeah so they really moved in all directions.
North… into Alaska.
Roland Kays: Through the Yukon and into Alaska, that’s the one we actually don’t know very much about that hasn’t been well studied.
They moved into the temperate rainforests of the Northwest. They colonized the whole East Coast, which used to be very wolfy and mountain lion-y.
But they also moved south.
Roland Kays: Yeah so they moved south pretty quickly. And apparently it’s not super well documented but when a new animal like a coyote shows up in Costa Rica or Panama people notice it. And it seems like they crossed the Panama canal it seems like around 2010.
If you’re asking yourself how… We have no idea how.
Roland Kays: So we went down in 2015, we went to kind of see ok where are they. How far have they gotten because it’s not too far from the Panama canal to South America.
Roland Kays: So we ran a transect of cameras from panama city, basically… towards an area called the Darien.
[Music]
El Tapon Del Darien. The quote unquote bottomless swamp that the roads never quote unquote “conquered.” That last unfragmented forest that can still support jaguars, who don’t treat coyotes very well. Roland says they’ve seen plenty of coyotes in the ranchlands leading up to the Darien, but so far they’ve only seen two coyotes in their camera traps actually in the Darien forest.
Roland calls this leading edge of the spreading population dispersers.
Roland Kays: The wave of colonization has made it about half-way to about Lago Bayano, it’s a big dammed lake. And there’s just these disperses that are out in front, looking for other coyotes. And they’re not going to find any, because there’s none there. But they are right… there are now at least two coyotes that have been found in the Darien province right at the footstep of South America.
But the Darien is different from every other area that Coyotes have moved through so far.They do best around the edges that we create. They ride the cresting wave of disturbed forests, ranch-lands… suburban sprawl opens up the land to them. But the Darien is a National Park. It’s a UNESCO world natural heritage biosphere reserve. It’s miles and miles of unfragmented jungle.
Jorge Ahumada: So it could be a little bit more hairy for them if for coyotes, if they if they run into this environment, they might get attacked by by jaguars or by other cats that already live there. There's pumas there, too, you know, certainly they could take coyotes down.
This is not the only time the Darien Gap has served as a kind of ecological barrier. Occasional outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in South America have meant that North and Central American cattle ranchers have been very glad to have a forest full of jaguars separating the continents.
And for decades the US and Panama have collaborated on an effort to keep a horrifying flesh eating parasite out of North America by airdropping millions of sterilized screwworms over the Darien Gap. A kind of wall of infertility in the wilderness..
And so now the whole world is watching. Well,- in certain circles - specifically researchers like Jorge Ahumada — who run camera traps on the Colombian side of the Darien are watching, but more metaphorically the rest of us are too.
Waiting to see if this versatile little canine, that has already conquered North America, often despite our efforts to flat-out exterminate them with hunting and poison, will spread South America too… with all of the ecological fall out that might entail.
When a mesopredator makes its debut in an ecosystem - the results CAN be cascading. The classic example is house cats… which have contributed to the extinction of somewhere between 30 and 60 species worldwide.
It is also possible that the coyote WON’T be disastrous, at least at first — Colombia is one of the most diverse places in the world, and the coyote might have a hard time proliferating. They might just wind up skulking around the edges of towns, competing with stray dogs.
We don’t know what will happen. Both Roland and Jorge think the coyote will make it through… in part because another species already has. A south American species, the Crab-eating fox, already made it north into Panama… Roland and Jorge say the fox probably skirted up the coast, walking along beaches where it could… to make the journey less dangerous and the coyote could do the same in the opposite direction.. But still the Darien is the coyotes last obstacle. To the South.
Jorge knows all the researchers running camera traps on the Colombian side.
Sam Evans-Brown: Well I guess… also one of my questions is, how confident are we that they will be detected.
Jorge Ahumada: Oh, no, it will be like a shot in the dark, you know, there's so much area you can cover with camera. There's there's probably you only need a pair to go through to start it. Right. So it will be a pretty rare event.
[Music]
If you wanted it to be… this could be the story of the Darien Gap. The ecological bulwark. The last barrier keeping coyotes from colonizing all of South America. We could then move on to Jorge talking about whether or not he thinks it’s actually likely a species like the coyote would result in some sort of ecological disaster.
Jorge Ahumada: [00:22:26-00:22:33] if you look at where invasive species have been most successful, is usually an island where there's not a lot of diversity. But here you're facing… [fades down]
We could hear from Roland Kays again about what might happen to Coyote genetics in South America, when the first few make it through, and have no other coyotes to breed with.
Roland Kays: You know a coyote breeds with a dog and it’s 50 percent coyote and 50 dog, but then as they breed with more dogs and then it would be more dog and less coyote… [fades down]
All interesting stuff… but is that the story of the Darien?
More after a break.
[Music]
[pots banging]
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Si pues, tengo hermanas, tengo primos, tengo primas, tengo tios, tengo tias tambien… [baby crying] pues disculpame por el ruido es que…
This is Ustin Pascal Dubuisson. He’s from Haiti, but is currently living in Florida waiting to hear about his pending asylum application. While he waits, he’s started a Youtube channel, news and commentary directed at a haitian audience.
He came to the US, because he has family here...
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: [quick post] Si si, nosotros Haitianos. Como cada haitiano. Como cada haitiano que está allá en Haití tiene por lo menos una familia a quien Estados Unidos.
...in fact he says he has too much family here in the US.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Y a mi tambien. Y yo tengo demasiados. [laughter]
There’s a chance that if you’ve heard of the Darien, it’s because you’ve heard about it through the context of people like Pascal.
He was one of tens of thousands of migrants , many from Haiti but also Africa, who made their way overland through Central America to the US border in 2016. He wrote a book about the experience, called Sobrevivientes.
I asked him, of that whole trip...
Sam Evans-Brown: Cuál fue el parte más difícil?
… what was the hardest part?
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Fue el Darien.
He said it was the Darien gap that was the hardest. Because in the Darien you felt your life...
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Porque en el Darién tu vida no estaba completamente segura.
… was not completely safe. Which, feels like an understatement.
[Music]
In the first story, the Darien is an untrammeled wilderness. A biodiversity hot-spot. A sanctuary for jaguars and endangered species.
In the second story, the Darien is a liminal space, occupied by the extralegal personalities.. One 2010 Reuters headline screams: “Panama’s Darien Teems with FARC drug runners.”
Pascal says his trip through the Darien started with a boat ride from Turbo, Colombia across the Golf of Uraba, ending in the famous “bottomless” Atrato swamp.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Hemos pagado como ciento dolares.
He was traveling with several hundred others, because numbers brought safety. When the landed in the Darien, they were met by coyotes.
That’s the name in Spanish for people who are engaged in smuggling people across the border. Coyotes.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson:: Si el grupo tiene cien personas te pueden pedir viente, o cince o trienta dolares por persona.
He says the guides didn’t really guide you. If you walked too slow, they left you behind. They simply walked at the head of the group to show the way.
And the first night, the guides brought them to a bar. A little store in the middle of the jungle where they sold beer and rum and cigarettes and played dance music.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Los colombianos, como ya saben que los migrantes están haciendo este camino, pues y ya decían. Pues vamos a hacer. Vamos a hacer negocios con ellos. Pues.
And it was there that Pascal first experienced the Darien’s infamous rain.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: habían demasiado. Demasiado, demasiado.
Jorge Ahumada: I mean, the region is just like one of the most rainy places in the world.
This is Jorge Ahumada again
Jorge Ahumada: I think it's like 13 metres of rain a year or something like that.
I struggled to verify that fact. But it’s not wildly out of sync with what I could find. The third rainiest city in the world is Tutunendo, a city in the nearby rainforests of Northern Colombia. And it rains more than 11 meters a year there.
Jorge Ahumada: Here, you have like mountains combined with a lot of rain, combined with a lot of mud. And that gives you a lot of mosquitoes and a lot of other things. I mean, it's just like very difficult to go through. it is unbelievable. You're standing in the middle there and there's that. You're surrounded by mosquitoes. It's like there's clouds and clouds of them. There's nothing you can do about it,
[Music]
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Durante todo el camino hasta aquí llegamos allá en Panamá. Así fue que cada noche, cada noche, estuvo lloviendo.
Pascal says it rained so hard that first night, sleeping next to the bar, that he basically never slept. The first full day of walking started at 5 am. He says they were walking in rubber boots they had bought after hearing about the mud, and that first day they climbed up a slippery mountain trail that took eight hours to reach the high point. [wooooo! tape?] He says many in their group didn’t make it to the second night’s camp on the other side of that climb until after dark.
And when they did try to bed down, next to a river, it rained again.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: y una persona nos gritó que público estaba subiendo y todo el mundo empezó a subir de nuevo a la montaña.
Someone shouted that the river was rising, and they all scrambled, in the middle of the night, for high ground.
[Music]
After two full days of walking, Pascal and his group were delivered to a camp that had been set up by the Panamanian military to process the thousands of the migrants that were crossing the Darien.
They were still in the jungle, it would be another week of waiting at a series of military camps, of wading across small rivers and floating downstream in improvised rafts before they finally emerged in a town on the other side.
Pascal had got a cut on his foot that was badly infected by that time.
But he made it. Many don’t. I couldn’t find an estimate of deaths in the Darien, and I read in Spanish language press reports that no estimate exists. But I found plenty of accounts just like Pascal’s, that make it clear that people do die. And it’s not just death. Again, it’s hard to find precise numbers, but sexual violence, especially against women and LGBTQ migrants, along the route is quite common.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Están como... ellos están no usando a la naturaleza en en contra nosotros.
He says not completing the road is like using nature against migrants. Its like using the jungle as a wall.
Ustin Pascal Dubuisson: Y funcionó porque muchísima gente pues… ha quedado ahí, en el Darien.
He says, it works.
[pa use]
In the United States, it has been well documented that it was an actual federal policy to push migrants onto ever more dangerous routes — through deserts, over mountains, across rivers. In the US this has resulted in thousands… perhaps tens of thousands of deaths. [music]
There are many reasons why Panamerican highway was never finished… and not building a road is not quite so deliberate an action as choosing to build a wall… and Panamanian government officials have not been so blatant as to say, we’re not building a road because we don’t want immigrants from the South.
But whether it’s deliberately meant to be or not, the Darien is an ordeal that looms large in the minds of those who make plans to walk north.
[music]
In this second story, the lack of a road through the Darien is a humanitarian crisis… fueling crime and death.
What the first story makes seem like unspoiled wilderness, in the second story is home to guerrillas, backwoods bars, and is spiderwebbed with illicit trails.
[music]
Hector Huertas: Recuerda que cuando se hace la creación de la Republica de Panama y la Republica de Colombia, existían las comunidades fronterizas.
This is Hector Huertas: one of Panama’s indigenous Guna people and an attorney who represents the seven indigenous communities in the country. He says, when the borders of South America were drawn on the map by Spanish colonials … some of those communities were carved up by those new borders.
Like the communities living inside the Darien.
Hector Huertas: De ahí que la existencia de caminos culturales han sido utilizados por los migrantes para pasar por el Darien.
… and so when migrants and those who profit off of them began to pass through the Darien there were trails already.
What in both the first and second stories was empty wilderness, a national park… a UNESCO biodiversity preserve visited occasionally by drug runners and human traffickers, was and is occupied.
There are around 10,000 of the Embera-Wounan people scattered through two dozen villages in the Darien.
And it is precisely this fact that has allowed this liminal place to continue to exist. Let me explain.
[Music]
The idea of connecting the Americas via one massive transportation network, has been around since the heyday of the rail building days… the Civil War.
But the impulse to build a giant highway to serve the commercial interests of the United States, has been implicit in how American Presidents have seen Central America since Teddy Roosevelt’s “Big Stick Diplomacy…”
In English, this phrase is funny… it’s kind of a punchline. But in Spanish they call it …
Hector Huertas: La política de Garrote
….la politica del garrote. If you don’t speak spanish, just trust me… it sounds way more sinister, when you’re on the other end of the stick.
But even so, it was slow going. It never hurt that Panama didn’t have a huge incentive to complete the highway, since most of its trade was going North… and they already had a road in that direction.
Hector Huertas: Teníamos científicos norteamericanos que combatieron por la la fiebre aftosa.
Hector says, in the 1970s, despite the brave pronouncements of Nixon that we heard at the beginning, North American scientists recommended against opening el Tapon del Darien.
Hector Huertas: Te recomendaron que eso no se podía abrir todavía.
They were afraid that outbreaks of foot and mouth disease that had been seen in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia would spread north if there was a highway… they wanted to protect the North American cattle industry
This bought valuable time for the indigenous movement to gather steam.
In 1983, the EmberA-Wounan people were given control of their Comarca… what we in the United States would call a reservation. And that comarca...
Hector Huertas:[00:15:37-00:15:41] Que precisamente hace un cordón por todo el Darien.
… formed a cordon… a blockade if you will... across the Darien Gap. Right across where the Panamerican highway was being planned.
[Music]
Of course, infrastructure projects have been built through indigenous lands without ever really asking permission before. And this time too, it looked like it was set to happen. The Inter-American Development Bank had set aside the financing to complete the highway. Panama and Colombia formed a “Good Neighbors Commission” whose principal goal was to finish it. The political window had opened.
But… something happened.
Hector Huertas: [00:19:29-00:19:37] una compañera norteamericana por aquí, Alicia Corder, que empezó a alertar pluguiera tanteaba alertar a la comunidad indígena
Hector says a North American woman, named Alicia Korten, started to travel around to the indigenous communities inside the Darien telling them about the coming road.
Alicia Korten: [00:00:04-00:00:17] My name is Alicia Korten,
And here she is.
Alicia Korten: And I run a company called the Culture Company, and I lived in Panama for a few years. Ninety three to nineteen ninety six.
Alicia spent years slowly going between the dozens of communities that would be affected by the highway. She says the deeper into the Darien you get, the more the families there are still living a traditional lifestyle… dependent on the rainforest.
Alicia Korten: So when I came into the region, you can see exactly what a highway does. So I started in this bus where everything I saw on the right and left of the road that I was on was denuded. It was burned and denuded, so the rain forest starts where the road stops and those the roads bring with them loggers, miners, farmers development.
When you look at a map, you might see that much of the Darien Gap is designated a national park. But National Parks are … complicated. They’re often created as a result of top-down initiatives, driven and financed by international interest groups. They’re sometimes plunked on top of communities that don’t want them. Sometimes governments themselves don’t sustain much interest in enforcing the park’s protections. And in the case of the Darien, it’s left up to the indigenous people who live there.
So according to Hector, it was less the protected status of the land, and more the financing that brought the project to a halt.
Hector Huertas: [00:21:42-00:22:00] planteó en Washington. En Wass lo decía el Banco Mundial. A que no se podían dar los préstamos, que eran 80 millones de dólares para terminar la construcción hasta cierto lugar.
Hector says the loans for the road came from the World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank… or the IDB. And they were given with certain contingencies, about human rights. About indigenous title, to indigenous land.
Hector Huertas: ...si antes no se legaliza las tierras indígenas.
Which meant that when the bulldozers started to roll, there was a fully unified indigenous movement, ready to call foul.
Alicia Korten: And so And and so then the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund and a whole bunch of different environmental players now kind of descended on the IDB and said, hey, you know, we have this resolution from five indigenous Congresses in Panama saying that they don't want this project in violation of these regulations and what's going on. And so everything kind of started moving really quickly at that point. And the bulldozers actually got pulled back out and the project stopped.
After that, the political window of opportunity seems to have closed. So far, the Panamanian Government has shown no interest, of late, in again taking up the fight to build a road through the Darien Gap.
[music]
So what is this place without roads. This place that mostly figures in most people’s imaginations as the one remaining impediment to a truly epic road trip.
The thing I like about my job… about getting to make this show… is that in talking to the people I did for this story. I went through the same journey that hopefully I just walked you all through.
I personally started picturing the Darien Gap as spotless rainforest... and ended with it as part of a broad story of indigenous resistance. At first it was a tapon, a plug… separating the biota, and the people of North and South America… but I finished seeing it as part of an interconnected geography… a rainforest filled with people defending their way of life.
[pause]
I started this story describing another place where looking on a map… it looks like the end of the road. In Canada — north past Montreal, past Matagami, past the spruce trees and into the taiga… to the Cree town of Chisasibi…
But while most roads might stop there… human movement does not. Whether by air or by river or by ocean… in many ways, the winter opens up the land even more… by blanketing the underbrush with snow to slide over…
So the arctic tundra is not empty. And of course, neither is the Darien gap.
These places without roads are not blank spaces on a map. They aren’t anomalies waiting to be corrected.
A road is a way of moving, but really it’s just one way to get somewhere.
CREDITS
OUTSIDE/IN IS WAS PRODUCED THIS WEEK BY me Sam Evans-Brown with help from Justine Paradis and Taylor Quimby.
Erika Janik is our Executive producer.
Maureen McMurray is director of our Coyote Fancy Fan Club.
If you’re interested in a VERY detailed history of the Panamerican highway and how it came to be that it is still incomplete, there’s a book you should check out: It’s called “The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas.”
Special thanks to its author, Eric Rutkow.
Special thanks also to Pedro Mendez of the University of Panama, and to Ross Irwin of Humanizando la Deportacion
If you love the show there are so many ways to stay in touch. We’re on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Find us by searching @outsideinradio. We have a newsletter which you can subscribe to at our website outsideinradio dot org.
And remember, we’re a public radio show. We depend on donations to make this all happen. You can give at our website as well.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE BY Blue dot Sessions
OUR THEME MUSIC WAS MADE BY BREAKMASTER CYLINDER.
OUTSIDE IN IS A PRODUCTION OF NEW HAMPSHIRE PUBLIC RADIO.