‘The Worst Thing In The World’

CNN correspondent Nick Paton Walsh has traveled the world covering stories, but never had an experience like the five days he spent hiking the perilous 66-mile Darien Gap through South and Central America with migrants hoping to reach a better life in the U.S. “I think the strangest thing about all of this experience is that it is utterly agonizing and exhausting,” Paton Walsh told me, “and tries so many of the people that we met on it to their utter physical and emotional limits, and indeed, some people don’t survive it.” One migrant told Paton Walsh “you have to live this to realize that crossing through this jungle is the worst thing in the world.”

Paton Walsh’s report, “The Trek: a Migrant Trail to America,” airs Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET on the debut of The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper, a new show that will focus each week on telling just one immersive, hour-long story—part of CNN chief Chris Licht’s emphasis on the kind of deep reporting that has long been a CNN hallmark. “I think the great thing about the format that Chris wants us to stick with— this proper, solid, immersive experience—is that it gives people a chance to really feel it, to be there with other people,” Paton Walsh told me. “And that gives you a chance to see something which the sound bites and the politics and the polarization and all the foreknowledge you think you have and your confirmation biases…peels away because you’re just seeing people doing something extraordinarily dangerous and difficult and grueling.”

Paton Walsh and his CNN crew—field producer Natalie Gallón, cameraman Brice Laîné, local producer Carlos Villalón and security and jungle expert Crendon Greenway—prepped for the trip and were well-equipped with food, water and state-of-the-art equipment, and yet they encountered challenges they hadn’t expected. “I think I hadn’t really anticipated what role physical exhaustion would play in the reporting process,” Paton Walsh told me. “You can buy the stuff, you can buy the fancy hammock or the water filter that costs $500 that can you know, take pond water or urine and turn it into Evian. You can do all that stuff and think that you’re ready for it. But until you actually go through the rivers, slide down the hills, climb through the rocks, worry all day long about whether you’re going to twist your ankle and become a burden to your colleagues and friends.”

“It’s very humbling to have the kind of tiny window into the intimacy of other people’s lives like that,” Paton Walsh said. “And it’s one of the privileges of this job that you get to actually briefly be near people really going through some of the most intense moments of their lives.”

With the time to tell a deeper story, Paton Walsh gets past the superheated politics of migration and the border and to the migrants themselves, and the calculations each of them made, weighing the risks of attempting this dangerous trip—many traveling with children. “There’s one little kid we saw from Haiti, separated from his parents, because they paid a porter to move him ahead faster on one of the harder bits,” Paton Walsh said. “And, you know, he was so sort of deliriously happy about the idea of making it to Miami and that going in the swimming pool. I was deeply worried that he may never see (his parents) again, because there’s thousands of people in the jungle at a time. And so you get separated, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever see each other again, but he did get reunited.”

“I’ve been to Haiti, I’ve been to Venezuela,” Paton Walsh said. “And I know that if you’re a parent in one of those two countries, the decision is tough, because to decide to not do something and say ‘this is where my family is going to be forever,’ is tough. Because it’s not fun in either of those two places, and they’re not bound to get any better.”

For Paton Walsh, living with migrants and hearing their stories about making the excruciating decision to risk their lives in the hopes of reaching America—driven in many cases by a belief of what the United States represents. “People are willing to put themselves through hell,” he said, for a life of freedom and “the prosperity that that Americans enjoy.”

Paton Walsh told me about one of the people he hiked alongside, a 27-year-old man from Venezuela who carried a 12-year-old disabled girl through the jungle so that she could stay with her mother, who couldn’t carry her. “It shows you something which isn’t part of the approval process (for entry into the United States),” he told me. “A nation built on migrants that America is should still be bringing in incredible human talent and generosity like that.”