- Novelo. - Novelo.
The Novelo is starting.
I am Branca Viana.
In today's episode, we will go through a jungle.
I know I sometimes get here talking about allegories and metaphors,
but this is a real jungle.
The jungle of Darien, which is between Colombia and Panama.
The one who guides us on this trip is our reporter, Carol Pires.
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The idea of entering Darien was mine,
but it wasn't me who went through the jungle of death.
At the end of April this year,
I was on a line at the Panamá airport,
along with one of the people I convinced to do it,
the plastic artist Fabricio Brambat.
We were on the line of the X-ray, and it was called "to the magazine".
I was dressed in a social outfit, a cardigan, with a discreet bag,
and he was kind of a wimp.
Falsified crocs on his feet, a dirty shirt,
a white shirt written "Panamá",
which I had bought for him at a souvenir store.
His shirt was very dirty, and it smelled bad.
But what pulled us to that magazine was a knife,
a knife that was a knife,
but what pulled us to that magazine was a knife,
that was in the middle of his bag.
I was anxious, and I explained to the police
that Fabricio had just returned from a trail,
that it was a camping backpack,
and he just started believing in the story,
when a giant gorilla, dead,
fell on the floor in the middle of the magazine.
We were four there, the security guard, Fabricio, the gorilla, and me.
And I could only think of how that whole scene was surreal.
I was there because I had agreed to wait for the group
on the other side of the border,
since the idea of putting them in that hell had been mine.
Tomas just took it and said, "It looks like an opportunity."
"Man, I think it's going to be amazing, everything, the Darien."
Who introduced me to Fabricio was Tomas Prott, a photographer.
Okay, he said the Darien, Darien, and I was like, "X," you know?
I didn't understand anything.
We went to a samba, at the end of the week, in Italy,
but it was like this, he said, "It's a place for us to go,
that there are immigrants, trying to explain a samba, you know?"
And I said, "No, it's fine."
I didn't know Tomas had invited Fabricio like this, in the middle of a samba.
But let me explain how I ended up trusting them and other people in it.
I'm going to tell you a story how I lived it, from afar,
which I confess is a little weird place for me.
As a journalist, I'm used to reporting,
to see things with my own eyes.
But this time, in this special report,
I was in charge of coordinating, at a distance,
the team that was going to record everything in first hand.
The idea of reporting about the Darien
was born at the beginning of this year, in 2024.
I was talking to a friend of mine, who is a reporter,
a Baita reporter, by the way, John Lee Anderson,
who writes for the New York magazine,
who has almost 50 years of journalism in the back.
John had the idea of creating a project called BOOM,
a vehicle to cover Latin America in a new way.
He wanted to make big reports that he called "expeditions",
because they were made by groups, and not just by a journalist.
And we were thinking about one of the most important issues
of this decade in Latin America, is immigration.
And to warm up even more the Baita,
2024 is the year of presidential election in the United States,
which is the great fate of Latin immigrants.
So the idea was to make the first big report,
the first "expedition", to Darien.
And why Darien?
Try to visualize the map of Latin America.
Up there, in the North Hemisphere, there is Mexico.
And then the countries that come down to the South Hemisphere
are getting increasingly stricter.
Panama appears to be a little bridge that reaches Colombia,
connecting the corridor that comes from North America to South America.
And there, between Panama and Colombia,
is Darien, a place about which I knew very little.
As you explained to your friends today,
I had never heard of it, and you tell me what happened there.
As Brazilians don't know much about Darien,
now I tell it in a very practical way.
It is a piece of the trajectory of immigrants to the United States,
which is between Colombia and Panama,
which is an intransitable piece, basically.
You have to make it at the foot of an extremely dangerous jungle.
And then I try, in some way, to show how bad this place is,
how dangerous it is, how horrible this place is,
but it is very difficult to explain.
At the beginning of all this, my knowledge was also not very good.
But I needed to know much more than that
to organize the expedition there.
So I did what any reporter would do.
I went to read, I went to see,
and I heard everything I could find about the subject.
In general, I tried to start from the back to the front,
which I managed to find in the past until the latest news.
I found the first time that Darien Gap was mentioned by New York Times.
A note came out in August 1957,
saying that Darien was among the Aspas,
one of the most difficult engineering problems in the Pan-American route.
Close the Aspas.
The Pan-American route is a 30,000-kilometer road
that the United States were planning to build
to go from Alaska to Argentina.
Here, the Pan-American highway ends.
And here begins the Darien Gap.
Darien only gave the faces in New York Times again
four years later, in 1961.
In a report that said that construction equipment
of the United States' army had been sent to Panama
to try to open the road.
It is called impassable because it is filled with rugged hills,
valleys, and mountains.
This narration is from the movies I found
about an expedition made in the 1960s.
Two groups tried to cross Darien Gap
to prove that it was possible to open a road there and shoot.
One of the groups managed to cross Panama to Colombia in a jeep.
It took 101 days.
This with the support of the British Armed Forces,
from Colombia, from Panama, and from the United States.
We were immensely tired.
Some of us had lost two or three steps.
Our bodies were a mess of bites,
and our feet rotting with jungle foot.
In 1973, 16 years after that first note,
New York Times published the obvious
that there would be no road cutting Darien.
But today, there is.
A road that was not opened by American army machinery.
Not even by cars designed to face hostile terrain.
But by the desperate immigrants,
who face the jungle,
sequestered,
stolen,
stupor,
and hungry,
trying to get to the United States by land.
I saw a document from CNN about this road, made in 2023,
which convinced me that to talk about immigration in Latin America,
we would have to talk about Darien.
A scene caught me,
of a Venezuelan woman called Natalia.
She is holding her daughter, Ana,
a 12-year-old child,
who has epilepsy and some deficiency that the reporter does not say which is.
And gets epileptic convulsions.
The first one was the child.
I have a five-year-old daughter who has autism.
And I was thinking how desperate I would be
to take her to a place like this.
And I cried a lot, imagining her there, in the place of Ana.
The second thing was what Natalia said,
that she thought it would take only two hours.
Many people go to Darien without knowing what they will find.
They are attracted to there.
For promises of a better life,
and for people who benefit from the journey.
There are many people earning money with Darien,
exploring the hope of the immigrants' despair.
Only last year,
half a million people crossed this region.
130,000 were children.
And us, Eu and John,
we wanted to make a movie and a podcast telling this story.
Not that no one had ever done this.
But all the records I saw had a journalistic distance,
in which I felt that the dimension of the problem was lacking.
There was always a reporter leading the story,
some generic talks of immigrants.
But I wanted people to be able to put themselves in the place of those who are there.
That they felt, even just for a few minutes,
that they were inside that jungle.
John agreed with me and we started thinking about the expedition team.
Actually, I was responsible for meeting people.
I spent a while thinking about who could go there,
capture not only information and factual data, but the feeling of being there.
The first person I chose was Tomas Prott.
He was excited, trying to convince Fabrício to board with us on the mission,
in the middle of the samba.
Tomas is a photojournalist,
and this Italian name is because he is really Italian.
But he lives in Brazil for a while and works a lot in the Amazon.
The second person I chose to see was that CNN documentary I just mentioned.
When I finished watching the documentary, I went to look at the credits.
In a list of 15 people, there was only one woman,
called Nathalie Gayon, an American journalist from the Colombian family.
At our first call, Nathalie told me that that Venezuelan mother
who made me emotional took the daughter to Darien
because she was no longer able to find her remedy in Venezuela.
Think of those people that the former President Donald Trump calls animals,
and accuse the United States of committing crimes.
Just to win votes, exploring the fear and ignorance of people.
In the case of a Venezuelan mother, she also told her decision to go to Darien,
the false information that she would go through would be short, easy and cheap.
All a lie.
Nathalie told me that this had been the most exhaustive report she had ever made.
She lost a lot of kilos and came back to the haunted house.
And then, after she told all this, I said,
"Would you like to go back to Darien?"
And she agreed.
Let's see.
Today is Monday, April 22.
It's still raining in Candi.
It's been two weeks and we haven't even started our trip into the jungle.
It has been an obstacle after an obstacle.
Nathalie takes care of documenting the journey in audio,
telling how Darien would go through being a woman.
She also introduced me to a British soldier named Adam Cratham,
who today works as a paramedic, following the recording team in a place of risk.
Adam got on board, being safe and a doctor at the same time.
To close the team, I wanted someone who wasn't a journalist.
And that's when Fabrício Brambat, the giant grillo,
who is, remembering, a Brazilian plastic artist and the most exausted of the group.
My name is Fabrício, but people know me as Urso Morto,
which is an old nickname because of a job I did,
which was a drawing of a dead urso and such.
Fabrício was engraving on the walls of Sao Paulo a white urso,
with all the blood on his back,
some dead by arrows, others crucified.
Before Tomas invited him to the samba,
Fabrício had never even heard Darien speak.
And that's exactly what I wanted,
someone with a fresh look,
who would let the camera be led by his own attention.
And then, when I met Fabrício, he told me a story of how he became a plastic artist,
which only reinforced my conviction that I couldn't have been someone better than him on this adventure.
It's a kind of funny, kind of bizarre story,
nothing to do with a very serious subject that we're talking about here,
but I wanted to tell you,
because things connected to me after he came back from Darien.
Fabrício came from a middle class family in Sao Paulo.
His grandfather was an operator, his parents didn't teach in the middle,
and he, for a while, was a publisher,
who was already a very distant profession from the family's reality.
But that's not what I want to do, I want to be a plastic artist,
I want to work with the ideas that I believe in,
and not with the ideas of the clients, the brands, and such.
And then I abandoned the job, which was already a big shock for my family, right?
It was like that, you left the job, that thing of the letter signed and such, right?
Fabrício then gave me an idea to convince his parents that they had to support his will to be a plastic artist.
It was an experiment.
And then I started painting a series that was called "Thinking about the death of my parents".
And then I started painting a portrait of them dead, right?
Which was an exercise of mine, which was not something like,
"Ah, no, Dio, I want to make an exhibition with that."
It looks like a mass of death.
So, but it wasn't very good because it was something like the experimentation of art, you know?
Like, "What if I paint this? What would it be like?"
And then there were two portraits of them super realistic, like that,
of them inside a box, in real size, like if the box had been caught on a wall and the two, right?
Real size?
Real size.
So they are like, a super big screen, like that.
Separated.
Separated, there was one for each.
As if it were in different places, different environments, different colors and such, right?
So my mother was in a position there in the box, the box had some flowers.
I already wanted to elaborate in a way and from my father in another way, for example, right?
When his mother saw the result, she said she was thinking that if she died at that time,
there was a lot of things she wanted to have done and still hadn't achieved.
She was in this thought and such, and my father no longer, so my father looked at him like that.
And my father lived naked at home, right?
And then I painted him like that.
And my father specifically looked very similar.
He looked extremely similar.
And then when he saw it like that, it took a while for him to say, "Hey, what did you think?"
"Yeah, I think you don't look that much like that, you didn't look like it."
The only comment from my father about that was this, saying that he wasn't like that.
My grandmother, for example, in her house, never came back to this comfort of the house until today, she doesn't come in there.
And she didn't even get to see it, it was just her thinking about them dead there, so...
Fabrício thought and thinks a lot about death.
And I knew that death was something that he, Tomasso, Anatoly and Adam would see a lot on the way.
And Fabrício's role there was to capture images for us to make a short film.
The focus was on the children, which are already 20% of the immigrants who pass through the Darien.
So, the full team, it was time to start the expedition.
All of them arrived in Bogotá, the Colombian capital, on April 10, 2024.
From there, they took another flight to a more northern city.
And from there, they made a part of a car, another one of a boat and another one of a car,
until they reached the first camp called Las Tecas.
That's where the Darien entrance gate is.
Every illegal immigration business in this region is controlled by the Klanda El Gúlfo,
one of the largest factions in Colombia.
We had a contact that negotiated with them the presence of the team there.
There is no way to comment on that.
The condition was that only the immigrants would be filmed.
We assumed that the crossing would take 6 days if everything went well.
So, in the bags, in addition to all the reporting equipment, there was military food,
caloric bars, enough for this period.
Everyone was with boots made for the jungle, with very light camping equipment,
with two super-modern water filters and electrolytes to keep the hydration of the body.
And there was Adam there, with a super kit of first aid,
and all kinds of medicine that could be imagined.
We also rented a device that could send a "ping" of location
whenever they found a light and that the sky was clean.
The life insurance of everyone was paid.
Combined, it was that if they stayed 48 hours without giving news,
I would get the rescue plan.
And that I and John were going to wait for them at the end of the crossing in Panama.
It's like 5 in the morning.
Right now, all the immigrants are waiting behind a fence.
This is Anapan, who was making a diary in audio throughout the trip.
It was through her recordings and the images of Tomasso's factory
that I managed to reconstruct a little of what they went through there.
They finally entered Darien, under the rain, on April 23rd,
with a group of 825 immigrants who had paid $ 350 each to follow the route.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Yes.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Yes.
At least we all understand what's going on.
We all know what's going on.
We all know what's going on.
The Panaman government is talking about profits of up to $ 820 million
for all the organized crime that controls this route.
Mom!
Don't make a fool of yourself.
That's how it works.
That's how it works.
The immigrants pay those $ 350 each to cover the guide's help
that will walk with them in the jungle for two days.
And a lot of people go there thinking that in those two days
Darien will be able to cross Darien.
But two days is the time that takes from the camp of Las Tecas
to the border of Colombia with the Panamá,
precisely where the path is easier.
When you get to the border, the guides say bye.
They say goodbye to you.
And the immigrants are lucky.
On the other side of the border,
there are criminal groups specialized in kidnapping and robbing immigrants.
And a lot of people, when they arrive at the Panamá,
are already exhausted, without water, without food, without money.
And how do you do that?
If I don't have money,
I don't have any more money,
not even to drink a cup.
I'm just thinking about that, that I don't have money to pay that,
there in the Panamá.
What guides Darien's path ahead are the river's margins.
But the margins sometimes turn into rows.
There are times when, in order to continue,
immigrants need to cross to another margin,
facing the current.
To walk without making a mistake,
the immigrants have to cross to another side,
facing the current.
To walk without making a mistake,
walking without making a mistake is getting more and more difficult.
As each one walks at a different pace,
hundreds of immigrants that left together start to wake up.
And the families with children and even dogs of estimation
start to stay behind.
After the sun starts to set,
there is no more way to move forward.
Our team had special equipment to camp,
but the immigrants were carrying improvised lawns,
some cheap bars.
To make things worse, which was already bad,
it was raining a lot.
It seemed like there was nothing left completely dry in that place.
The humidity was not only uncomfortable,
it was also a risk.
I don't know if you've heard of the word "Peditrincheira".
It has this name because it was diagnosed in soldiers in the war.
If you do not remove the wet shoes for at least a few hours a day,
your skin will be taken by fungus and bacteria.
The cure is relatively simple.
Pass the talc and wait a few days.
But without treating it,
this condition hurts a lot and can be recorded.
It can lead to amputation or even death.
And not being able to walk in the sand can also be fatal.
Your food ends, your water ends,
you get dehydrated.
Drinking water from the river is also not a good idea,
since the rivers are now contaminated by the garbage left by the immigrants.
Our team had taken a lot of talc to put on the feet at night
and recover the skin.
In addition, they were with a boot made for wet land.
But the immigrants had nothing to do with it.
Many slept in tents,
but with fear of having to run in the middle of the night.
Right on the first days,
the crew began to leave the place of the observer.
There was no way to pretend that they were not inside the story,
that they were not part of it.
So they began to share the talc with what they found
and alert everyone who needed to remove the shoes at night.
They also talked and decided to limit their own food.
They only ate once a day.
The rest they distributed to the immigrants.
Meanwhile, in Panama,
John and I spent the days waiting for their life signals.
Because after they crossed the border
and entered the most challenging part of Darien,
the signals stopped coming.
None of the locations arrived.
The device we rented
also allowed them to send short messages.
But nothing.
The 25th of April began, ended and nothing.
I thought of the worst things.
I visualized in my head the most tragic scenarios.
I thought of my friend Don Phillips,
in the Valley of Javari.
I thought I would tell the crew's families.
I thought how I would be able to live
if something irremediable had happened to someone there.
And then, 46 hours after the last contact,
a message finally arrived.
Bad weather yesterday, continuing now.
We are going to die of hunger and cold, what's next?
Trust in God, that everything will be fine.
But God is great, God is great and He will give us strength to everything.
Especially for the child who has just finished the water
and has just finished eating.
He doesn't have to worry.
Many people leave the weight of the things
they had brought back.
They leave barracks, clothes, documents,
family albums.
It was a windy day.
Today it's full of garbage.
At this point, in the recordings of Natali,
the cry of the children is getting more and more constant.
It becomes almost a background noise,
mixed with the river running
and the lamures of those who can't stand that hell anymore.
Fabrício said that the birds were no longer singing
and they were screaming.
On the fifth day of the expedition,
our team crossed with a woman
who had entered Darien on the same day as them.
This voice is from Tomas.
Maria told that she was already standing there for two days.
I can't walk.
How old were your children?
13 and 4 years old.
Maria Fernanda Vidalis had come from Venezuela
with her cousin and two children,
a 13-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy.
On the second day of the expedition,
she was sleeping on the edge of a river
when the level of the water was very high.
She was sleeping on the edge of a river
when the level of the water suddenly rose
in the middle of the morning
and carried her backpack.
She and the cousin followed the children
without food or water.
Then, tired,
Maria ran into a mountain
and heard the noise of something breaking,
as if it were a pencil that broke in the middle.
That's what I felt.
I was afraid, I was afraid.
Maria couldn't walk anymore.
They waited a little,
maybe the pain was gone,
but she only cried.
The cousin decided to continue
to seek help,
but Maria's children didn't want to leave her behind.
Maybe because they had already understood
that this would be a path back.
On the way we crossed,
even with the wife of a woman,
who had broken her leg.
And besides that,
we had already seen another body
inside a barrack.
Also alone, inside the barrack.
It's not just the bodies we saw.
There are several other stories we have heard
of people who had fractured their legs,
got hurt,
had some complication,
stayed there waiting for help
and help never came.
People were talking about this,
we heard a lot about it,
that in Darien they didn't even rescue
alive or dead.
When Fabrice and the rest of the team
went through Maria,
they didn't know what to do.
Darien's departure was 12 hours from there.
But everyone was very tired
to carry Maria.
To carry the body itself was already difficult.
Fabrice was already thinking about leaving
even our electronic equipment behind.
We were in a very difficult physical situation,
with a lot of pain,
physics.
We were eating 250 grams
of food a day,
once a day.
So I lost 10 kilos.
At that time I already had 10 kilos less.
So I didn't even have
how to imagine doing this.
I didn't even have how to imagine
carrying her.
Then we walked, I don't know,
for another half an hour.
I don't remember exactly,
but I imagine a little bit like this.
And we stopped in a place to camp at night.
And we were there,
setting up a camp,
talking to people.
Then two guides appeared,
who were following our team,
carrying Maria.
They came back there
and carried her.
And Jay carried her on the back.
And he came carrying her.
I saw them carrying her and he came like this, exhausted.
Because it was really a very difficult thing.
She was a big woman,
she was not a small woman.
He came and left her like this,
and fell like this, completely without air and such.
And at that time I was very emotional.
I was very emotional because
they were looking for her, you know?
It was an extremely heroic act.
They joined together,
found a empty barrack,
left by someone who passed by there before,
and put Maria there.
It was the worst night of all,
everyone was very sick.
People had no more clothes,
no more clothes, no more food,
they were sleeping,
sitting in the rain, you know?
So it was very ugly.
Adam, who was carrying a bag of first aid,
applied a medicine for pain in Maria's vein
and made a descent plate in her ankle.
While the children fell asleep.
After we gave you the medicine,
I talked to her.
She had also seen the body.
She had also seen the bones,
because they were exposed.
They had seen the body in decomposition in the barrack,
they had seen the bones.
They are all in the sample.
So she knew what it meant.
Her daughter knew what it meant, you know?
The next day was the last day of the guides with our team.
From there, they would go back to Colombia for the jungle.
And Natalia, Adam, Tomás and Fabricio would go by themselves,
now carrying all the weight.
Before going on a trip,
they left food for Maria and the children
and some pills that served to clean the water.
Fabricio gave her the last 100 dollars he had in his pocket
and explained to her 13-year-old daughter
that she had to ask for help for everyone who was there.
Maybe one of them was a young man walking alone
with more energy and strength
to get her out as quickly as possible.
The end of the trail through the forest
is not the end of the road.
In a place they call Piráguas,
who arrives needs to pay 25 dollars to be taken
to the Panamanian immigration post.
From there, those who meet on the way meet up again,
hug each other,
and tell the stories of those who were not lucky.
From there, the team took a taxi to the capital of the Panamanian.
Me and John were waiting for them on the road.
The next day, each one went to his house.
Me and Fabricio went back together to São Paulo,
on the same plane.
When we were waiting in the boarding room,
after passing through that magazine
to throw the dead gray in the trash,
Fabricio received a video by WhatsApp.
Four days ago, I broke my leg.
Many people have come to help me.
Someone had recorded Maria.
In this video, Maria is inside a barrack
with a very dirty gray shirt.
Her hair is all messed up
and her 4-year-old son is sitting next to her,
wearing an adult shirt without a coat.
His situation was much worse
than Fabricio had seen three days before.
The next day, at home,
Fabricio received another message,
now from a woman in Venezuela.
She was Maria's sister
and wanted to know if he knew where she was.
Maria's husband was thinking of crossing the river
to try to save her.
I thought it would be better to call Senafrom,
an immigrant from Panamania,
and warn about Maria's case.
Senafrom was on my mind
because we had asked for permission
to document the crossing of immigrants for months.
We wanted to have it legally,
but this authorization never came out.
It should not be the interest of the Panamanian government
to show that families are dying in their territory.
Neither is the Colombian's interest
to admit that a drug cartel
is legal without any resistance from the authorities.
As it is not the interest of Venezuela and Haiti,
to recognize that they are from their nationalities,
the majority of immigrants passing through the Darien.
But we thought that Senafrom was going to be in a fair way,
if they could rescue a person we had recorded
and that we were informing that there was danger.
After three or four weeks, she sent me a message.
She was on Costa Rica already.
She was doing surgery on her foot,
and she bought a phone with $100.
She bought a cell phone, clothes, things like that.
She wanted to go back to Ecuador.
Because I would not be able to travel to Mexico anymore.
Because I really do not feel capable
to continue with them, my legs do not give me.
Later, we found out that it was not Senafrom
nor the army that saved Maria.
It was a group of indigenous people
who had gone with the mission of saving another family,
including her in the rescue.
This and other stories of Darien did not stay there.
Fabricio continued to keep in touch with several immigrants,
besides Maria.
After Panama, they were still going to have to cross Nicaragua,
Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico
until reaching the southern border of the United States.
2,000 km from there.
I was thinking about that scene at the airport,
that time when Fabricio had to try to explain to the security
where he had just passed and why.
How do you communicate this experience?
How do you explain what this path is for the value of death?
This was the mission that we had at the end.
To find a way to make people feel that,
and care for themselves.
Even after arriving home to wash clothes and backpack,
Fabricio continued with Darien entrained for a long time.
Not only in memory, but watching and re-watching
all the images that he had captured there,
on the mission of editing the documentary
and trying to communicate what he lived for other people.
To find a driver's wire that summarized that experience.
And what stayed the most with him was this thing about families.
How would Darien swallow families?
And how much do they need to fight to get out of the United States?
The movie we made is hard to see.
It only has 12 minutes.
We don't even call it a documentary,
but rather a horror movie.
Fabricio thought about the movie as if it were a little child's story.
But it's a horror story,
in which Darien is a monster.
I'm going to tell you a horror story.
A story of desperate people,
humiliated, abandoning their lives, destroying them.
Darien would swallow his children, eat their feet,
steal their things, decompose their dreams.
Everything became a delirium, Febrile.
In most cases, the immigrants who flee this hell
are fleeing from other hells.
From wars, armed conflicts, hunger and violence.
Whether it's political violence, economic violence, family violence.
In 2019, 8,500 people crossed Darien.
And then, due to North American pressure,
many countries in Central America started to restrict
more and more sightseeing.
So, you can't get by plane to Mexico, for example,
and go on land to the American border.
For many immigrants, the country closest to the land
to which sightseeing is the Ecuador.
And they need to cross Darien
and go tripling the migratory posts along the way.
In some cases, such as Panama and Costa Rica,
governments themselves threaten the bus and charge the immigrants
to leave them on the next border.
They prefer to go ahead with the problem
than to stay with the immigrants standing in their territory.
The result was this jump of 8,500 immigrants in 2019
to the record of half a million people crossing Darien in 2023.
The forecast is that until the end of 2024,
800,000 people will take this route.
And the migratory trend is getting worse,
as climate changes are also forcing people to change.
And it's no use closing this route,
because others will be open.
And it doesn't matter how intransitable the path is.
There is no populist discourse, there is no wall,
there is no authoritative measure
that will be able to prevent people from looking for a way
where they no longer need to escape.
[music]
This was Carol Pires.
The podcast that Carol mentions is Novengan,
which was produced here by Rádio Novello and by Boom.
It is presented by Natali Galón in Spanish.
You can listen to any audio player
or on the website www.boom.press.
There you can also find a video in 360° of the team
on the trip to Darien.
The movie El Maldito Darien, signed by Carol Pires,
by Fabrício Brambat and by Tomás Prott,
with the executive production of John Lee Anderson,
you can see it on the site www.boom.press
and also on YouTube, with legends in Portuguese.
Hi, I'm Lucas Lítik.
And I'm André Alves.
André and I are psychoanalysts and researchers,
and together we do Vibes and Analysis,
a videocast of psychoanalysis and cultural studies
that have the challenge of investigating
the subversive vibes in the collective unconscious.
Lately we have been asked
why it is so difficult to deal with rejection,
or with guilt.
Well, with the fight then, it is not even talked about.
And can we forgive a betrayal?
After all, how is it related
in times of synthetic intimities?
Yes, the current world has not been economized in complexity.
It is times of defensive pessimism,
culture of attention deficit,
and even artificial unconscious.
But with some theoretical and elaborate base,
we can navigate all this with more critical thinking.
In Vibes and Analysis, we reflect
on the paradoxical dilemmas
that cross our chronically online life.
Who knows, vibrating together,
we can do some of these adventures.
So come and watch us after
we finish the newscast.
The new season of Vibes and Analysis
is available on Spotify, YouTube
and on all audio platforms.
In this week's episode
we are sending postcards
of the end of the world.
In the case of Darien, it is the end of the world
in an end of the world.
A humanitarian tragedy in a remote place
where there was not even so many people like that.
And in our second act
a being arrives from a distant universe
with a potentially apocalyptic message.
The one who counts is Victor Hugo Brandelise.
Another day I found a fish story.
A very peculiar sea fish.
I usually don't really care about fish.
I don't have aquarium, I don't know the name of fish.
It's not my thing.
But this fish, I have to say,
made me crazy.
It's a fish that lives in deep waters.
The longest bone fish in the world.
It can reach 9 meters in length.
And it can swim vertically.
Think of me.
9 meters.
The height of a building of 3 floors.
3 floors of fish moving
from foot to ocean.
I imagine a moai, you know?
One of those giant heads of the Easter Island
moving away from the bottom of the sea.
Coming towards an uninhabited one.
Go there.
For those who are afraid of things from the sea,
like me, it's even a business.
But this fish, with such a weird way of doing it,
is very rare.
In 100 years it had only been seen 19 times
on the coast of California,
which is a state that records these apparitions.
Well, 20 times now.
Because one of these fish appeared once again there.
In last August.
For my friend Gabriela.
I'm glad I was able to talk to you, Gabriela, about this story.
I didn't understand why it came to this.
Because when we were in the water,
and my friend said,
"This is going to be in the news tomorrow."
And I said, "No, it's just a fish."
Gabi, Gabriela Cruz, is a scientist.
She lives in California and studies bacteria.
She works with genetic engineering
and protects bacteria.
And she's not that connected to marine animals.
I'm not that connected to the sea.
I swim very fast.
I go to the beach and I don't fall.
But the friends who were with her on the day of the meeting
with the weird fish, are...
The fish nerds,
who were the people with whom I shared the house
that I lived in in 2020.
Everyone connected to the center of the scenography
called Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
It's part of the University of California, San Diego.
It's the best scenography institute I have.
And I came to do the last year of my master's
in a laboratory in this institute.
But my research is a lot of laboratory.
I studied marine bacteria.
But when you take a bacteria to the laboratory,
it doesn't matter much that it comes from the sea, you know?
While my colleagues from the house
do a lot of things like that.
From the sea.
Old sea wolves in the range of their 30 and a few years.
One makes scientific illustrations of marine animals.
The other biologist spends weeks in the sea
in a fishing boat without a swimmer, searching.
And the other friend lives in a boat
and won a profile in the National Geographic magazine
in a series entitled "Explorers".
Everyone, thank you very much to the sea.
It's been a long time since we met.
And once, like, in 2020, we went to the beach a lot, right?
Because it was a pandemic, so it was where we kind of could go out.
And now they're going to meet again, in that same place.
La Roya Beach.
I thought we were only going to swim.
It would be something more relaxed.
But of course, the fishing nerds were going to appear with kayak.
And Emily, like, a few days before, said,
"Ah, I'm with a kayak, and there's an inflatable kayak."
This kayak was covered.
And it was sinking. Like, there was a hole.
But obviously, they had a bomb.
And a remand, bombing the water outside.
All at the same time.
Gabina was very hungry for a remand.
She would take a remand with emergency bombings.
But they were there.
And then you go out to the beach.
And it's pretty quick.
In about 20 minutes, the remand comes to an area,
which is a conservation area.
Which has, like, some walls of pine trees.
And down there, there's, like, some caverns.
So you can enter.
And it's, like, very cool.
And kind of we just stop there to, like,
eat and, like, drink.
They brought things.
And they were swimming and stuff.
And we heard a guy talking.
"Ah, you saw Orphish, you saw Orphish."
Gabi had never heard of such Orphish.
But her friends already.
And they sighed.
"And Emily, who is my friend, still doesn't come back."
She said, "Oh, no, so I'm going to have to go into the water."
And look, she was wearing a mask, like, snorkel.
And then she snorkeled and saw the fish.
And then she came back and said, "Ah, he's dead.
I'm going to snorkel to bring him to the top."
So she snorkeled and she brought him to the top.
And then the people went, "Oh, oh, oh, oh."
The Orphish came.
"Wow, it's a huge fish."
Then it was an operation to rescue the rare fish.
Which, as Gabi said, was already dead.
They removed the fish from the water carefully so as not to break it.
They put the fish on top of the stand-up board of a gaya that was passing by.
They called to ask for permission to remove the fish from the water.
Among the authorities of the fish and managed to get this authorization.
They called the people at the institute to come and look for the fish.
They faced the waves until they reached the sand without letting the fish fall.
The Orphish was coming to the beach.
Orphish.
By the way, what is the name of this fish in Portuguese?
It's...
The fish of the end of the world, I'm calling it.
The fish of the end of the world.
This is the fantasy name of the search fish.
In English, it also has this nickname.
"Doomsday Fish."
I didn't know that.
Gabi didn't know the name of the Orphish before this adventure.
And she didn't even know the mythology around this fish.
At this point, I was like, "Oh, some fish nerds found a very big fish."
You know?
Only these five people in the world are very interested in this.
They will take it to the institute to, I don't know,
study how they understand that there is this fish specialist in the world.
The idea was the same.
Take the fish to be studied at the Oceanography Scripts Institute.
And we only helped after putting the fish in a truck and taking the fish.
And Gabi thought this would be the end of her story with the rare fish.
But it wasn't what happened.
But then it was, I think, one day later,
this other couple who helped us take the fish to the beach,
the woman posted a TikTok, which was like scenes of us in the water,
of her husband coming to the beach with the fish and we put it in the truck.
And then I went to open it and said, "What's going on in the comments?"
And all the comments were like, "The world is going to end, you know?"
Definitely, it wasn't a fish only known to some five people in the world.
There were already thousands of comments on TikTok's videos,
and most of them with the same tone.
"The world is going to end, there's going to be a disaster, there's going to be a disaster, there's going to be a disaster."
Yes, it didn't end.
Gabi could not know, but the internet was already a specialist in fish at the end of the world.
This fish has the reputation to be an heir to the disgrace,
as it is in the title of Los Angeles Times article that reported the new appearance of the fish.
And the TikTok videos and the most important.
And then I was kind of trying to open it, trying to understand,
and it was kind of like this,
that it seems that the fish is an indication of when there's going to be a huge earthquake,
when there's going to be a tsunami.
Besides, it's from Japan,
that when they see this fish, it means that there's going to be a tsunami in Japan.
In addition to this fish, it was born in Japan in the 17th century.
It was known as Moriugonotsukai, a palace messenger of the sea god.
According to the legend, from time to time, the fish comes from the bottom of the sea to the surface
to bring the announcement of some disaster.
It was kind of forgotten until 2011,
when a big earthquake followed by a tsunami hit Japan.
Months before, some of these fish had been found in a beach,
and this lit up the old belief.
There's a fact about the Orphish that feeds this legend.
It's that the fish has this characteristic, real,
of living right in the bottom of the sea.
There are more than a thousand meters of depth.
And by living so low down there,
a lot of people started to believe that it can feel the earthquake
before the people on the surface.
And when you feel the tremor, the fish vanishes there.
It goes up to less deep waters.
That would be the message.
The extrapolation is that only the presence of this fish
is the premonition that something bad will happen.
And then, it's like everyone says "the next",
because they say "the next big one",
for this earthquake that can happen at any moment in California.
They joined the appearance of the end-of-the-world fish
with studies around the next big one.
A huge earthquake that, in fact,
can hit any moment across the west of the United States.
And this is proven by serious research.
And you know that there are geological conditions
for a gigantic earthquake that happens in this area.
So big that, even afraid to speak,
the map covers several cities, including Los Angeles.
This caught Gabi.
Gabi was still dealing with her decision to embark on that kayak
when another wave began to hit.
There were comments on TikTok.
And then there was a comment that was very good,
which was a guy saying "unfortunately,
a life of randomness to everyone who played this fish".
At that point, I was like "no, I didn't think I'd get involved in that,
because I'm kind of a big fish,
so I didn't expect it, I was like "wow,
I thought it was just a beach day,
now I'm condemned, you know?
A life of terror".
Because besides this fish,
according to the comments that Gabi read on TikTok,
it's not only that he denounced great collective disasters.
Apparently, for those who lean on it,
the fish also brings individual luck.
And you played the fish, right?
Why did you play the fish?
Yes, yes.
So, I was trying to help.
At first, I tried to catch the fish and put it in the kayak,
but I couldn't, I put it on the beach.
And then when it arrived on the beach,
we had to lift the fish
to put it behind the truck,
the truck net.
And then there's another comment too,
because when the guy put it on the stand-up board,
it was longer than the board.
So, the fish's tail was outside,
and the fish's tail was almost falling.
I was only with this part of the tail,
in my hand,
to support the tail,
not to deflate completely.
And then, in this TikTok video,
I only had my back holding the tail,
and there was another comment,
right down there,
from a woman who spoke like,
"Oh, look at this black girl,
she just wants to do part of something,
she just wants to appear."
And that's what she's holding the tail.
You can't even help the science in peace.
If you're listening now,
by chance, if you're a TikTok woman,
it's important to make it clear
that Gabi did very well in holding the tail of the animal.
Because the tail is an important part to understand the Orphish.
He is a little-known animal,
precisely because he has so few encounters with it so far.
And the suspect is that the tail has an important role
for him to be able to swim vertically.
So be careful, okay?
It was crazy.
Like, a person watches a video,
and she starts analyzing what each one is doing.
I just want to make a point of commenting.
It's really crazy, like that.
And there was still the question of the photo.
At this point,
the tail of Gabi's tail had already come out
in all the news.
Guardian, BBC,
New York Post, CBS,
a bunch of vehicles.
But she didn't send it to anyone.
Because there was a photo, like,
I was in the kayak trying to catch the fish,
very upset about the reportage
of L.A. Times.
There was this photo, like,
I was in the kayak,
it was very strange, like,
"Oh, no!"
Like, "No, it's not!"
Like, "I shouldn't have left this photo, you know?"
The photo that Gabi doesn't like
has been around a lot.
And we solidified.
Everyone here had a photo that doesn't like
circulating as much as they should.
Maybe not with so much reach.
Then I started looking, and I saw that there was, like,
in several newspapers around the world,
this news was appearing.
She was already laughing.
And she was still worried.
Because I was kind of tense,
like, "Oh, will bad things
start to happen to us?
Will my life be horrible
from now on?"
And then something strange happened.
It was on August 12, 2024.
Two days after Gabi's fishing
appeared on the coast of San Diego.
Southern California is still reeling
from a 4.4-magnitude earthquake.
It hit Los Angeles yesterday afternoon.
The U.S. Geological Survey says
the epicenter was about six miles northeast
of LA's city hall.
People could feel the quake
all the way to San Diego.
A earthquake reached Los Angeles and San Diego.
It was very weak.
4.4-magnitude.
Nobody got hurt.
It just broke some of its requirements.
Gabi didn't feel it.
It definitely wasn't the Big One.
But, of course, the Internet was shaking.
People also said,
"Oh, okay, there was a big earthquake,
so I went to the fish's house."
But...
And did you really believe
you were going to go to the fish's house?
No, because then I said,
"No, it's going to be the opposite.
It's going to be whoever touched the fish.
It's going to be protected
from this Big One."
First, Gabi dealt with the earthquake
by trying to positiveize the story.
Did you see that?
But she's a scientist.
So she went after facts.
According to statistics,
there is no correlation
with the appearance of the fish and the earthquake.
And another thing with the earthquake,
there's always something happening
in the world,
but even where I live,
there's always,
every two or three days,
there's a very, very, very weak earthquake.
But there is always, you know?
In these failures,
the Earth is always moving a little bit.
So it's like this.
There was this very weak earthquake
in Los Angeles two days later.
Then they started saying,
"Oh, no, it's almost the fish."
And in fact, a search for 2019
from the University of Tokyo
finally showed, after centuries of legend,
that there is no correlation
between the rise of the fish
and the end of the world on the surface
and some disaster that is to happen.
The study authors
called the attempt to link these two things
of a typical illusory correlation.
You can always
connect because it's always happening.
The rational side of Gabi
was quiet.
But, as every superstitious person
knows, it's not so easy
to turn off this little key.
Two weeks after the meeting
with the fish and even the bank of Dr.
Adderna Natalia, one of Gabi's
fishing experts.
And I remember I went to her defense
thinking, well,
if it's too bad, if it doesn't pass
it's because of the fish.
But if it's all right,
you know?
Like, ok, this is going to be
the first test, if we are
murdered or not, you know?
You know, there are three films,
which take place with a group of friends.
There's always the first one,
and we say, "Ah, there's the first test."
Do you remember which one?
I think it's the name.
It's the premonition.
I also thought it was a group of friends.
It's like each one is dying.
You think of premonition.
You think.
Maybe few things
are more quiet, I want to say,
in terms of risk of life than a bank
of Dr. Adderna Natalia.
Yes, exactly.
And she passed.
It was all great.
She's a doctor now.
Gabi and Natalia, who is now a doctor,
passed through this first test.
And the ideas of the end of the world
were left behind little by little.
This shadow of him
appeared as it did
in the sense of the bank
of your life.
It also appeared.
I think it was so comical.
And I liked this comment so much,
because this guy,
"Unfortunately, it's a life for everyone."
I think it's expensive.
Because he first seems
to feel with us
and feel, you know,
"I feel a lot."
"It's good to suffer forever."
But I don't know,
it's just this little world
of Tiktok versus
the world of my friends.
They knew more about the fish
and were more excited
to discover
how the fish got there
and make
analysis of
how the fish had died.
The meeting with Gabi,
with this fish of the depths,
at the end of the story,
took her to ask a very terrain question.
The real world versus
the depths of the social networks.
Which of them is worth diving into?
In the case of Gabi,
some elements well on the floor
helped her choose.
The artist who makes the impression,
like, he takes the fish
and puts a paint underneath
and makes, like, a impression
and it's super beautiful.
It's called "Giotaco" painting.
An artist puts a paint on the whole fish,
puts a paper on top and then takes it off.
It kind of turned the fish into a carimbo.
In this case,
a carimbão of 3.5 meters in length.
Which is the size of the fish they found.
They put it in the aquarium
of...
the Scripps.
It has a picture of us with the fish.
That picture.
Now she likes it.
It looks like I'm an adventurer
on top of a kayak,
like...
taking wild animals.
It's a picture
of this impression
of the fish's body.
And then I asked,
"What happens later?"
They put the fish in pieces
and file it
to someone
who wants to study anatomy
and so on.
It's a fish that I saw as a choice.
"Oh, will I take
the time of my life
to answer those comments?"
"Will I turn on
a picture of me?"
I'm not very pretty,
but I look like a cool person
who does cool things.
My group of friends,
very cool people
who take me to do cool things
and take me to adventures.
So I think it was a kind of
"To what extent do I want to be pulled?"
A little erotic about
"Is that what happens
in my life because of the fish?"
Or did people believe
"No, it was something cool."
And fish nerds
will be able to do cool things
because of that.
The nerds have already rejected the demands.
A few days after the discovery,
the Institute of Scienography
announced several research lines
that they will do
about the fish and the place where it lives.
The fact that it lives
from the bottom of the sea,
it brings information about the bottom of the sea.
I think it's these experiments
that they will still do.
"What do fish eat?"
I think it's the most interesting
thing that exists in it.
It lives in a place where
we don't have much access.
This fish will help show
how life is at the end of the world.
Or at the beginning, depending on where you live.
Researches have already started.
And they still intend to reveal
another message brought by the fish
from the bottom.
This microplastic thing,
"Where, in what depth
is this pollution affecting?"
It's another interesting thing
from this fish coming from the bottom of the sea.
Microplastics and also pesticides.
The Institute will analyze
the organs and tissues of the fish
to try to detect these contaminants.
Have we already managed
to make them get there
at the end of our world?
Maybe that's it.
Maybe it's this disaster that the fish
is trying to talk about.
This was Victor Hugo Brandalisi.
An original podcast from Radio Novelo
that we launched in 2022
and that investigated who was winning
while we were getting back
in the climate crisis.
In November of this year,
all the world's eyes will be back to Brazil.
Especially for Belém do Pará,
where the COP30 will take place,
which is the 30th conference
of the United Nations
about climate change.
To understand what's going on in the game,
Radio Novelo, the Public Agency
and the Climate Observatory
are launching a special season
for the hot weather in the COP30.
In this hot weather,
each episode I talk to someone
who will help us understand, for example,
what are the main diplomatic entries
in the COP30 negotiations this year.
Will we see the practical sounds
being taken?
And who will pay for this account?
Hot weather, hot weather
for COP30 is already available
in all audio applications.
Until then!
Thank you for joining our work every week
for talking to us about it.
For suggesting stories.
The presentation is from all over the world
and we want it to last
for a long, long time.
Here comes the episode 101,
the 150, the 200,
the 500.
And well,
you know that every week,
besides the episode,
we publish a short post on our website
with some extra references and materials.
This time there are, of course,
pictures of the fish of the end of the world
which is the tomb of Gabi Catonumar
and there are also all coordinates
for you to watch the movie
and listen to the podcast about Darien
which Karol Pires directed.
The podcast, in fact, is with the production
of the novel too.
On the website, you also know,
you can sign up for our newsletter.
And I also invite you
to follow us on other channels.
You can follow Radio Novelo on WhatsApp
and follow us on social media
@radionovelo
on Instagram, on Treads or on Blue Sky.
If you prefer,
you can also send an email
to
[email protected].
The Radio Novelo presents
is the original of the Radio Novelo.
There is a new episode every Thursday.
The creative direction
is from Paulus Carpin
and from Flora Thompson Devaux.
The executive production is from Marcela Casaca
and the product management
is from Juliana Yeager.
Natalia Silva is the executive editor.
Our reporters
and writers are
Vítorio Gubrandalize, Revelyn Argenta,
Bia Guimarães, Sara Zalbel,
Karol Pires,
Barbara Robira and Karolina Morais.
Ash Leicalvo is the producer.
The production of this episode
was made by Karolina Fará
and Bruno Lima.
We had the support of Mariana Leão,
who signed the production of this episode,
along with Sara Zalbel.
In this episode,
we used original music
from Chico Correia
and also from Blue Dot.
The mixing is from Pipoca Sound.
The product development
and audience development
is done by Bia Ribeiro.
The design of our pieces
is from Gustavo Nascimento.
Our administrative and financial analyst
is Tainá Nogueira.
Our executive coordinator
is Lara Martins
and our studio is Isabel de Santana.
Thank you and see you next week.
A little break
to tell you about the episode
of this week of Fida Meada.
The conversation was with Adriano Silva,
an activist of the assisted death
in Brazil.
The debate about assisted death
is getting more mature
in the Brazilian society.
There have been several movies
to stimulate this conversation,
like "O quarto ao lado" by Omo Dover
and also some cases,
such as the poet Antonio Cicero,
who chose assisted death
and left a beautiful letter
so that everyone could say goodbye to him.
Adriano defends
that we talk more about this moment
of the life of us.
It's a mess that we have to die.
But we will die.
Everything that is left of us
is like that.
We have to have this rationality
to plan a little,
to think a little about
what conditions this event
will have in our lives.
Adriano and a group of Jewish,
artists and doctors
created the first group of assisted death
in Brazil.
The goal is that in the future
the assisted assisted death
will become a public policy in Brazil.
What we propose to do
is to educate,
to instruct, to debate
and eventually take this discussion
to the judiciary,
to the legislative,
to bring forward a demand
of the Brazilian society,
because today this is a civil right
that we don't have.
It's a matter full of nuances
and when it's like that,
there are people like Adriano Silva
that help a lot.
When I finish listening here
send it to FIDA Meada
who is already available
in all applications
and also on the Novel site.
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