Inclusive counting: an essential but insufficient approach to account for missing migrants in Panama and Colombia’s shared Darien Gap

ABSTRACT

International organisations increasingly call for, and support efforts to gather, more comprehensive data on missing migrants incidents. This article explores current practices of counting missing migrants, focusing in particular on Panama and Colombia’s shared Darien Gap. Drawing on a novel database of some missing migrants cases in the Darien, I demonstrate how insufficient counting practices can still provide essential information on the missing. The article examines, first, how detailing the demographic and event patterns of known missing migrants incidents can assist in estimating what may have happened to others travelling on the same migration pathway. Second, the article demonstrates how current institutional enumeration practices privilege state actors’ knowledge while failing to account for other forms of crucial knowledge on missing migrants held by non-institutional actors. To remedy these challenges, this article incorporates information held by migrants’ families and travel acquaintances on the missing together with institutional information. Ultimately, this article argues that by implementing a more inclusive counting approach for missing migrants, we can more explicitly begin accounting for the missing in the Darien Gap.

KEYWORDS:

• Missing migrants
• counting
• transit migration
• Darien Gap
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

I thank both anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. Their input significantly improved the manuscript. I would also like to thank Dr. Shaylih Muehlmann and Stephanie Leutert for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Previous versions of this article were also presented at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and to the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative at the University of California at Berkeley, where the argument benefited from participants’ insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While counting is a universal practice, a number of scholars have demonstrated how different societies use distinct models of counting and conceptualise numbers in distinct ways. This body of scholarship substantiates the use of numbers and the practice of counting but critiques any notion that Western conceptualisations of numbers are universal or somehow more accurate or objective than other models of counting (Crump 1992; Urton and Nina Llanos 1997; Verran 2001; Nelson 2015).

2 I use the term irregular migration to refer explicitly to all instances where individuals do not present themselves to authorities before crossing an international border, and if found to have entered the country outside of state-permitted ports of entry, would not be able to provide travel documents (like a visa or passport) considered permissible to the government authorities in the country where the individual is based.

3 Devanney et al. (2021, 3586) have argued that migration related data at a subnational or local level are often inadequate and inconsistent. Their argument is substantiated in the context of the Darien Gap, at least as it relates to missing migrants.

4 The Darien Gap is also my long-term, ethnographic fieldsite and I have a deep knowledge of the jungle and the routes taken by migrants in the jungle which assisted me as I coded the estimated locations of the missing migrants incidents within the Darien Gap.

5 Last et al. (2017) similarly combined data sources on missing migrants in the context of the Mediterranean, but they did so through death registry archives rather than news media.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported with a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.