Drawing on direct fieldwork in Panama’s Darién province, this report argues that the prevailing image of an ungovernable, cartel-run jungle has always been wrong, and that the region’s recent transformation offers a working template for how the United States should approach contested corridors across the hemisphere. This template treats Darién and Darién-like corridors as deeply influenceable by policy incentives, and as a military-operational problem demanding new strategic thinking and skillsets in order to pursue the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Field Report: Uneven Modernization
On a remote farm some miles upriver in the Darién wilderness, a man emerges from the edge of the jungle. The brush is too thick to see someone coming until they break free of it, spit out by the wall of greenery. He had taken an unmarked trail, similarly invisible in the dense foliage unless you know it by heart. A native to the area, he knows it well. The purpose of his trip was hunting javelina, a small sort of wild hog; but a jaguar had been seen nearby earlier that day, and he was on alert for them too. To this end he carries a single-shot rifle, no less than three generations old. Much newer is his hat, emblazoned with the Fortnite logo, a game which he has never played. Later that night, while everyone present fiddled with a broken generator, he would play American drill rap from his phone. He gets reception on it around once a week, and at great effort. Like everyone else on the farm, he was excited to use our Starlink panel – a technology which has recently changed life in the region. Lacking an electrical grid, the Internet is gas-powered in Darién. Everything is gas-powered, for that matter – even though the nearest gas station is four hours away by boat.
This is life in the Emberá-Wounaan Comarca, the largest indigenous territory in Darién province. It alone accounts for a quarter of the land making up the Darién Gap – traditionally El Tapón, “the stopper.”
The Gap is a 60-mile stretch of jungle, the only break in the Pan-American Highway. It has eluded formal development for centuries, from a disastrous 17th-century Scottish settlement to the modern Highway project. Today, the region is famous for its pristine wilderness and apparent lawlessness. Darién has long been a hotbed for drug and human trafficking; the latter peaked in 2023, with over half a million people facing down “seventy miles in hell” (The Atlantic) to migrate north. The region has a reputation as a remote, hostile, and cartel-dominated place.
However, media coverage of Darién tends to be sensational, and to focus only on its negative space: the untouched wilderness that eludes development, law and order, and any sort of monitoring. In reality, this wilderness only accounts for around 34% of the region, and it remains so untouched precisely because it’s so punishing to work in. The rest of the Gap – including all of the primary routes famous for cartel exploitation – is inhabited indigenous territory. In fact, almost 60% of the Gap is indigenous land, if you include the Tierras Colectivas. This world of self-governed jungle villages forms a complex riverine economy and political ecosystem, and even the remotest parts of Darién are far more peopled and interconnected than popular media would suggest. Despite lacking a developed through-road, Darién as it exists today is less a gap than a corridor system.
Nothing proved this more than the recent crisis of migration through the Gap. Rather than a single jungle march, this phenomenon was a series of trips between pockets of both longstanding and ad hoc development. That core logic – a series of waypoints – in many ways defines the region.
Like many remote but geopolitically-important regions, Darién stands as a perfect example of uneven modernization. Our Fortnite-hat wearing host on the Tupisa River stands as one small illustration of the region’s broader disjunction. It is a place where Starlink panels provide Internet to towns without running water, and government-funded concrete-pad and steel-beam projects exist alongside hand-built wood houses lacking doors or windows.
This dichotomy lends itself to some unexpected scenes in rural indigenous towns. In Unión Chocó, the Emberá-Wounaan administrative capital, a small barber shop with a dirt floor and thatch roof hangs an AI-generated banner advertising its prices. In Marraganti, the Comarca’s largest town, the toilets aren’t connected to any kind of plumbing, but an LED-adorned speaker blasts Europop when the sun goes down. In the small village of Punta Grande, a few farmers grow small plots of coffee; however, lacking roasting or grinding equipment, they sell the beans in Yaviza and the coffee they actually drink is imported from overseas.
On a more fundamental level, this makes the development and governance situation in Darién quite different from many remote places. Food and water are always available, for example; plantains can be harvested year-round, and the river always provides. Roads are few and far between, but all transportation is riverine in the first place. Freedom of movement thus depends on seasonal river fluctuations: at the peak of dry season, sections of many Chucunaque tributaries fall to ankle-depth and require frequent, laborious portage.
Sanitation and healthcare can be quite poor, with the latter often requiring travel. Both are heavily influenced by policy; during peak migration, Emberá natives could earn more by working with migrants than in farm work, which led to an outsized reliance on imported food from which some towns are still recovering. Medical facilities in Bajo Chiquito, built for the increased load of migrants from 2021-24, are now understaffed and partly closed-off; similarly, water-purification equipment built by NGOs no longer functions.
The most important, scarce resource is – like in many remote and underdeveloped places – gasoline. Everything from generators to outboard motors to chainsaws and weedwhackers runs off a supply chain that is effectively nonexistent past Yaviza, but absolutely central to daily life. Traveling upriver in a loaded pirogue can take hours, and many gallons of fuel; constant weedwhacking is necessary to keep towns clear; and generators are relied upon for everything from refrigeration to Internet access, both of which are inherently limited in actual use. An outboard motor is typically the most expensive thing owned by any Emberá household, and they are universally brought inside between uses. Small-engine repair is a crucial survival skill, and maintenance to a very high standard is a matter of necessity.
Authority in Darién remains near-entirely local and informal, via elected town dirigentes and informal governmental roles. SENAFRONT (Panama’s border service, and its closest analogue to an army) is stationed at some villages, but even its agents retain a high degree of local autonomy. To illustrate this point, my group once told a SENAFRONT agent that we had permission from a certain commander to be there – a ranking officer directly in his chain of command, responsible for the whole region. He replied: “I don’t know who that is.” This is how authority tends to function in Darién. Power is informal and discretionary, with infrequent communication between links in the chain of command. This node-based distribution of power helps explain why policy changes from Panama City or Washington can transform the region so dramatically, despite the weakness of centralized governance on the ground. Darién is difficult to micromanage, but its key nodes are highly sensitive to incentives: money, access, legal permission, transport demand, security pressure, and the availability of work.
The Gulf Clan cartel understands this well. While the cartel directly controls territory on the Colombian side of the Gap, it does not operate in the same fashion on the Panamanian side. Instead, it subcontracts: smuggling and human trafficking on the Panamanian side are undertaken by locals, in a manner closer to gig-work than cartel membership. In practice, Afro-Panamanian locals (in/around Yaviza) and various indigenous youths do the bulk of what would be considered “cartel work.” This was particularly the case during the peak of the migration years, but remains true today regarding cocaine and other smuggling. This helps the cartel itself avoid direct confrontations with SENAFRONT, instead passing the risk onto low-paid locals, but it’s also a practical necessity: despite the modern interconnectedness of Darién, the jungle and even the rivers still require local expertise to navigate. Rain, human use, and rapid brush growth cause frequent-enough change that any map will necessarily become outdated within a few months of its creation.
Darién, then, is not ungovernable because it is empty. It is difficult to control because it is governed locally, unevenly, and through nodes that are rarely legible from the outside. The jungle of course matters, but only as a contrast to the movement system running through it. To treat Darién as a “gap” is to miss the more important fact: that it is a corridor, and corridors can be opened, closed, taxed, formalized, or denied.
Lawlessness as a Policy Choice
The clearest example of Darién’s conversion from frontier society into formalized corridor was the crisis of mass migration. From 2021-2024, nearly 1.2 million people crossed the Gap as part of their migration toward the United States. Trump’s election in the US (and Mulino’s in Panama) have cut migration down to almost nothing, but the region remains impacted by the sheer scale of the crisis.
Unlike the image presented in The Atlantic, mass migration through Darién was an industrialized and well-funded pipeline. The vast majority of migrants – after paying a hefty toll to Gulf Clan members in Colombia, or carrying cocaine as their payment – took a route involving a boat drop-off on the Caribbean side, followed by a largely derisked, two-day hike to the headwaters of the Tuquesa River. There, they were picked up in pirogues by indigenous locals and taken downriver, to Bajo Chiquito – a remote Emberá town that was converted into a migrant reception and aid center by various foreign NGOs. Organizations involved ranged from USAID and UNHCR to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the peak years, the Cortizo administration made Bajo Chiquito into a legal entry point, and international aid money made trans-Darién migration a fully-supported and formalized process. Migrants transferred cleanly from the custody of Gulf Clan coyotes to the NGO complex, with indigenous guides and government processing along the way. Today, the remains of that project – from concert gates to water treatment equipment – slowly crumble in place, a ghost-town addendum to what would otherwise be a normal Emberá village.
This reality stands in stark contrast to the media image of migration through Darién, which presented it as an inevitable march of people through “ungovernable,” empty jungle. Like many other aspects of life in Darién, migration was heavily influenced by policy incentives, rather than a natural outgrowth of the jungle environment. Human trafficking only became such a profitable business for the cartels because of this policy-enabled pipeline, and the incredible scale of migration was only made possible by tens of millions in international aid funding. The popular depiction of the crisis served only to frame it as inevitable – rather than the international, incentive-driven project that actually moved so many people through the Gap.
Today, with those incentives cut by Trump’s enforcement of immigration policy, the entire pipeline has evaporated. Monthly Darién immigration numbers are in the low double-digits, and drug smuggling faces far more significant barriers than ever before. Comarca towns are pursuing serious infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges, and expanded school facilities.
Starlink ownership is also changing the relationship between remote towns and the outside world. Communications that once depended on rare cell reception or hours of physical travel can now support commerce, medical coordination, school administration, contact with government offices, and directly-networked law enforcement. In short, Darién is stabilizing and developing at a rate never before thought possible. Instead of a lawless black box, it is gradually becoming a legible and governable geostrategic juncture.
This sea change in conditions should stand as a case study of successful US policy. The total shutdown of migration – and ensuing stabilization in a region once seen as impenetrable – shows US domestic policy affecting regional stability by acting on incentive structures. American (and more broadly Western) facilitation of irregular migration to the US promoted instability in Darién by empowering human-trafficking cartels, and financially incentivized Panama to contort itself to serve this disembodied goal; this tracked alongside Panama further courting Chinese investment and cooperation. Now that relevant US domestic policy prioritizes American sovereignty and security, Darién is stabilizing, the cartels have taken a major financial hit, and Panama itself is courting a much closer relationship with the US. In this sense, enacting the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is inseparable from domestic security and prosperity. Darién, then, can stand as an example for future US stabilization efforts in the Western hemisphere. Pursuing American security and prosperity above misplaced humanitarian aims (which take policy-created conditions as givens, rather than variables) is what actually creates stability in the US sphere of influence.
This conclusion extends to the means and methods of US influence in areas of interest. The post-Cold War strategy of pursuing foreign policy aims via the international-aid NGO complex must be recognized as a failed experiment – a vestigial apparatus in the era of the Trump Corollary, and the broader goals of the 2025 National Security Strategy report. This method of “soft power projection” has been repeatedly proven ineffective at promoting peace or stability, advancing US interests, or in many cases even providing aid in the first place.
Crucially, NGO presence in places like Darién has been inherently destabilizing. These organizations – from international bodies like UNHCR to former American agencies like USAID – have spent billions in US-provided funding only to further destabilize key geostrategic theaters, while presenting a media front of inevitability and humanitarian necessity. In the case of Darién, international aid for irregular migration only empowered the Gulf Clan, destabilized Darién by disrupting its economy, and furthered the broad negative effects of the mass global displacement and migration to the United States of unvetted foreign nationals.
Today’s policy posture toward Darién presents a far more promising alternative. The May 27th, 2026 announcement of a $3 million partnership with Panama to clean up and restore migrant-affected parts of the Darién jungle is a strong step toward further stability and development in the region. Initiatives like this provide jobs superior to cartel work and make deeper parts of Darién more legible to law enforcement – thus making the corridor more deniable. Future partnerships could include local road and bridge construction, educational initiatives, and collaborative mapping efforts with indigenous groups and MiAmbiente. All of these provide relatively low-cost, high-impact opportunities to make the region more governable, and to invest its people in retaining Darién’s “stopper” function as a crucial part of their own development and modernization. The Emberá-Wounaan – whose territory includes a number of the most convenient routes – are expressly willing to pursue this goal, especially in exchange for further infrastructure investment.
Though Darién will retain its unique form of uneven modernization for many years, its development can be shaped by US policy such that modernization makes the corridor more transparent and deniable – both for drug smuggling and for any future attempts at mass migration. The recent history of Darién proves that the existence of “lawless frontiers” in our hemisphere is an active policy choice – not an inevitability. By altering incentive structures and investing in development through the legitimate local government – rather than opaque aid organizations – Darién’s status as an ungoverned periphery can be treated as a solvable policy problem, rather than a foregone conclusion.
The New Operational Problem
Conditions in Darién may be rapidly changing on the ground, but its strategic future remains unwritten. While the overland migration routes have been shuttered, the broader corridor from South to North America has not closed – only changed. It remains porous and exploitable by cartels, with record-high cocaine production necessarily passing either overland into Panama, by sea in speedboats, or smuggled alongside legitimate shipping.
In recent months, Operations Southern Spear and Pacific Viper have succeeded in heavily damaging cocaine smuggling via “go-fast” boats, narco-subs, and disguised fishing vessels. These methods account for as much as 75% of all cocaine shipped out of production areas in Colombia. This aggressive interdiction has been effective, but creates a situation in which cartels are incentivized to find new methods of shipment. While overland routes through Darién have traditionally been slower and more expensive than naval smuggling, these routes may appear more attractive to the Gulf Clan in a time of significant naval interdiction. Therefore, the new operational question is: will Darién denial become a permanent state of affairs, or will the overland corridor simply reshape itself as a primary cocaine smuggling route?
This question is inseparable from larger regional dynamics. Panama, broadly, is the centerpiece of US strategic interests in Central America, due to both the Canal and the isthmus’ role as a natural chokepoint between South and North America. American interests in Panama revolve around the dual objectives of destroying FTO networks and excising Chinese influence from the Canal region.
The former issue has been discussed at length, but the latter is no less complex: Chinese state-linked firms have spent the past decade investing in Canal-adjacent infrastructure, in order to gain institutional access to (and strategic leverage over) the Canal itself. Hutchison Whampoa’s ports at Balboa and Cristóbal, sitting at both ends of the Canal, were only stripped from Chinese control in early 2026 – when Panama’s Supreme Court annulled the concession and handed interim operations to Maersk and MSC. Historically, China has offered huge capital investments at rates too good to turn down – but with conditions that create dependency and serve mainly to increase PRC strategic control in the area. This approach is meant to work without requiring Beijing to directly contest the Canal. It only requires Panama to remain the kind of state that needs what China is offering: institutionally thin, financially exposed, and reliant on external actors to perform functions its own government cannot. Beijing’s financial playbook continues elsewhere in Panama City regardless; the Hutchison reversal is best read as one opening move in a longer contest over Chinese leverage at the Canal.
While these problems initially appear separate, they are in fact linked by way of Panamanian institutional reliability. This central premise should be the overarching frame for American policy and operations in the region. A Panama that cannot govern Darién – or stop littoral drug smuggling – cannot reliably govern the Canal, and will come to depend more on Chinese investment. A government exploitable by cartel corruption or apathy is exploitable by Chinese espionage and incursion into infrastructure. The more informal, porous, and dependent Panamanian governance is on outside actors, the worse the situation becomes for US strategic interests. The broader problem at play is strengthening Panamanian sovereign governance and institutional competence.
Darién’s recent history demonstrates this dynamic. American policy that has contributed to making Darién more legible and governable has been that which strengthens Panamanian local governance, and mainly aims to advance US interests. The prior posture of implementing parallel institutions to regularize migration only served to hollow out state capacity, and to increase the operational ability of the Gulf Clan in the region.
Similarly, US investments in SENAN (Panama’s air and sea defense force) have begun to build a lasting capacity for Panamanian-led littoral denial of cartel smuggling – a capacity which has aided in Operation Pacific Viper. While efforts have been made to build a similar relationship with SENAFRONT, it has not reached the same scale as joint aeronaval operations in recent months.
The 2025 US-Panama security pact provides the legal basis for both efforts, ruling out US permanent basing but enabling partner-force cooperation and security collaboration around the Canal. So far, that agreement has been put to more visible use near the Canal than in Darién – a gap that the corridor’s new strategic salience should close. Ultimately, investments in Darién security are investments in Canal security; a dollar spent on expanding state capacity in Darién is a dollar spent on both counter-cartel operations and a long-term investment in insulating Panama against Chinese incursion. The best route to advance US strategic interests involves a mix of bolstering law enforcement, investing in development, and direct military interdiction – all focused on building Panamanian sovereignty, rather than dependency.
To this end, Pacific Viper and Southern Spear should be framed as the first steps of something that must evolve into a coherent doctrine for hemispheric conflicts. What is unfolding in Darién is a distinct operational challenge, defined by the need to extend governance into a long-under-governed space without the tools of either conventional occupation or traditional state-building.
Darién is far from unique in this regard. The same combination of indigenous self-governance, corridor geography, and exploitable informality recurs from the Mosquito Coast to the Arauca corridor to Sahelian trafficking routes. Meeting that challenge in Darién is therefore a test case for the kind of force, policy, and strategic thinking the United States will need across a hemisphere – and a world – full of corridors like it.
Revitalizing Small Wars Thinking in the Trump Corollary Era
Darién corridor denial – and the broader commitment to a renewed Monroe Doctrine – demands a different sort of military thinking. Theaters characterized by uneven modernization, node-based self-governance, an intelligence vacuum, and hostile terrain present a different problem than the past twenty years of COIN state-building doctrine has been built to address. There is no central government to build in Darién, no local force to raise, and no need to create legitimacy from whole cloth. Instead, the region’s core problem takes the form of a combined diplomatic and military puzzle.
We have already seen a walk-back of the diplomatic and policy approach that made the problem worse in recent years. Engagement by aid NGOs and domestic support for mass migration is (rightfully) being replaced by investment in the relevant local government, aiming to bolster state capacity and infrastructure in the region.
The same concept – revisiting older approaches to statecraft in order to find new solutions to problematic places – should apply to the military problem. If a revived Monroe Doctrine means a permanent American commitment to denying corridors like Darién, the operative question becomes: what type of fight does the United States need to get good at, and how rapidly can we (re)learn it?
To this end, we revisit a 1940 doctrine built explicitly for conflict areas where “military force is combined with diplomatic pressure” in a place where governance is “unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory”: the USMC Small Wars Manual. Written in part “to pursue the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine,” Small Wars laid out a framework for solving exactly this type of problem, and was only superseded by doctrine built for different sets of challenges in different theaters (namely, the Global War on Terror). The specific lessons below were worked out, in detail, eighty years ago – in the same Central and South American theaters under scrutiny today, and to the same policy ends. Today, they are more applicable than ever.
Central among these lessons is an inversion of the post-Cold War approach to conflicts “short of war.” Recent counterinsurgency thought has placed institution-building at its center, with the goal being to support and legitimize a central authority in an unstable area. In unevenly-modernized, self-governed areas, this approach would collapse – just as it did in the mountains of Afghanistan. Authority is decentralized and local in Darién, and will remain so for the indefinite future. This state of affairs exists both by legal design and by practical necessity. Therefore, any approach to policing it and denying it as a corridor must be decentralized, and built around local trust-building. SENAFRONT already demonstrates this in action; their style of policing involves stationing officers in towns, rather than running patrols from their base in Yaviza. Despite that force’s issues elsewhere, this is a strong approach.
In a similar vein, small wars in the Monroe context require small-unit autonomy without much of the support structure used in many recent Middle Eastern deployments. Large bases, dense ISR, convoy logistics, and rapid air support would be difficult or impossible in many situations. Broad swathes of unused or unusable terrain under dense canopy, combined with poor transportation infrastructure and degraded communication, are what create the node-based governance of Darién. Those same factors govern any operations undertaken in it. Stabilization efforts can aim to change these conditions, but in the meantime they require adaptation. Operations in a place like Darién are necessarily decentralized, and heavily dependent on shifting local conditions. Ground units need the ability – and confidence – to judge and act on these of their own accord.
Third, and perhaps most obviously – the US military has not engaged in significant riverine operations in many years. Riverine capacity was rallied during the Iraq War, but the last time it represented a major commitment was during Vietnam – and the Mekong Delta finds few parallels in the Western Hemisphere. However, a number of volatile theaters in our backyard present the possibility of significant riverine engagement, with operational constraints similar to Darién: the Amazon Tri-Border Area, the Putumayo River region, the Guyana Shield, La Mosquitia, etc. These areas demand familiarity with not only riverine operations, but river-dependent ones. The terrain otherwise impairs land travel, and presents complications for even movement by helicopter. As a result, rivers serve as these regions’ most valuable logistical assets and objectives – as well as a uniquely demanding battlespace.
All of these capacities – local trust-building, extreme small-unit autonomy, and riverine operations – exist among the US Special Warfare community. However, if the United States aims to revive the Monroe Doctrine permanently – and with the potential for many unevenly modernized battlespaces to take center stage in the near future – the relevant skills can and should be developed in more generalized units.
This generalization would carry a dividend that extends far beyond Panama. The same conditions that make Darién a difficult place to operate – degraded communications and maps, zero infrastructure, intelligence gaps, etc. – are a close approximation of what a force should expect to encounter in a contested or denied electromagnetic environment, against a peer or near-peer adversary. Unevenly modernized environments already partly function according to the logic of an EW-contested area: communication is intermittent, movement is long and self-directed, and information/planning must often be passed face to face before breaking off and regrouping later. A unit that has learned to operate in this environment has already trained, almost incidentally, for the EW-denied battlespace the Pentagon is otherwise trying to manufacture through exercise conditions. Darién does not need to be simulated; it imposes the constraint by nature. Therefore, any training or partner-force work in Darién, alongside its primary force – SENAFRONT – would be dual-purpose by default. Aside from counter-narcotics gains and jungle experience, this sort of rotation would produce warfighters more comfortable operating without the digital scaffolding that a peer adversary would be working hard to deny them in a future conflict.
Winning the Second Southern Border
The United States is already running this exact model on the maritime side of the problem. Southern Spear and Pacific Viper have produced record interdiction numbers in only a few months. The Coast Guard alone seized nearly 510,000 pounds of cocaine in 2025, more than triple its historical average. However, the more durable output is the tactics and technology built in the process – namely, experience with precise takedowns of go-fast, low-profile vessels in open water. The gains provided by these operations extend far beyond Panama; the problems of littoral small-boat monitoring and interdiction are central to future naval battlegrounds, with new unmanned technologies and blurred lines between civilian and military craft. A major naval confrontation with China would likely involve similar situations around the Philippine and Indonesian island chains; perhaps more directly, Chinese fishing fleets in the Pacific have demonstrated the ability to be rallied for military aims. Pacific Viper is – beyond its success at destroying cocaine shipping – a live-fire rehearsal for problems the US will face well outside this hemisphere.
In the process of these operations, the US has invested heavily in SENAN. New interceptor vessels, light attack aircraft, and joint exercises with SOUTHCOM elements have made that force far more capable and formidable, as part of the long-term play to make strong counter-narcotics enforcement a lasting reality in Panama.
The same approach has not yet applied to SENAFRONT. As naval interdiction continues to succeed, the overland route through Darién becomes the obvious pressure valve – and despite major gains made by SENAFRONT action under Mulino, it remains a porous corridor for smuggling. The same local knowledge and subcontractor networks still exist, and the region remains illegible-enough to the state to enable smuggling. Denying that route in a lasting sense presents an immediate case for investment, along the lines of the investment and training recently poured into SENAN.
But Darién is also the more interesting problem of the two, because the work required there demands a different approach. Naval interdiction can be American-led across the board; a ground campaign in Panama cannot, without undermining the sovereignty this entire framework is meant to build. SENAFRONT has to be the visible hand. The American role is to make that hand more capable via training, equipment, and the joint exercise tempo SENAN now receives.
Darién, then, is a test case not just for corridor denial, but for whether the United States can build partner-force capacity in a theater that politically demands it. And the units that rotate through to do that work would, beyond denying a smuggling route, spend months working with degraded communications, weak maps, austere logistics, uncertain local intelligence, and partner-force dependence – many of the practical conditions the Pentagon otherwise struggles to simulate for future denied environments.
More broadly, denying Darién must remain a key strategic priority in the hemisphere, with diplomatic and force-design implications downstream of that goal. America’s interests in the Western hemisphere today – governmental stability and prosperity, resistance to foreign influence, and the destruction of transnational cartels – all pass through Darién.
Therefore, this underdeveloped and eccentric stretch of jungle demands reexamination. As Darién exists today, it is not a gap, but a corridor. Rather than lacking law and order, its ground-level reality is highly sensitive to US policy incentives. In recent years, it has begun developing in a unique and uneven fashion – a process which can either be shaped to fit American interests in denial, or to accommodate illegal traffic.
As a military-operational problem, Darién presents a set of conditions quite different from recent American conflicts. It should stand as an example (and test case) for potential near-future hemispheric theaters. Investment and partner-force work in Panama should extend to denying this land corridor, and to empowering Panama to do so itself into the future.
