From the article yesterday about the failed pan American highway due to the Darien gap, it pointed out that Colombia and Panama are the only two neighboring countries in the world without a road between them. It also explicitly stated that many citizens support that to reduce undocumented immigrants from Colombia.
Nowadays, most of the attention are definitely on the Venezuelan immigrants that come to Panama without much money or much of a plan.
But if the government signed a deal to construct a highway, I predict it would be mostly environmentalists protesting in the street than xenophobes.
Without roads, you cannot build mines or forestries within the area to extract the resources from the land. Just interesting because I've never thought about roads in this way.
Feels like not building roads is a good thing if preserving the land is the intention.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-27/ambler-ac...
and
Also, man-eating parasites known as screwworms.
Same context: a thick jungle.