Wave of migrants that halted trains in Mexico started with migrant smuggling

Thousands of migrants riding atop railway cars in Mexico this week or waiting in mile-long lines by the tracks to hitch a ride to the U.S. have triggered the closure of one U.S. border crossing and forced Mexico’s largest railroad to suspend dozens of freight trains.
But the upsurge has also revealed a much larger phenomenon – an almost unbroken chain of migrants being shuffled from Colombia through the Darien Gap jungle into Panama on an industrial scale that could approach 500,000 this year.
Those migrants are then moving steadily without interruption up through Central America into Mexico and on to the U.S. border.