Inside North Korea: bleak photos capture rare glimpse of life in closed-off hermit nation

To get the photos, Pedro Pardo went to part of North Korea’s border with China’s Jilin province – a remote stretch of frontier that was virtually inaccessible to reporters while Beijing and Pyongyang upheld some of the world’s strictest pandemic-era travel curbs.

After the restrictions were unwound, Pardo and his team travelled to the region in late February – peering back at the guards standing sentry at the entrance to the secretive nuclear nation.

Between rusting factories and peeling housing blocks were glimpses of everyday life, as North Koreans eked out their living by hauling timber and burning crop fields. In one town, two goods trucks waited patiently on a bridge into China – a sign of resumption in the cross-border trade crucial to Pyongyang’s moribund economy.

Beyond the eagle-eyed guards, portraits of the ruling Kim dynasty watch over the populace, while monumental propaganda banners laud their socialist ideology. One slogan, written in huge red and white letters on a hillside, simply states: “Our country is the best!”

North Korea was founded in 1948 under Kim Il-sung as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), inspired by strict Marxist-Leninist principles.

North Korea’s self-imposed isolation is largely due to its guiding principle of “juche” – or “self-reliance” – the idea that it should be able to function completely independently and remain separate from the rest of the world.

In practice, this has achieved little other than to stifle the country’s economy and trade, and many of its citizens face high poverty levels and severe food shortages. The CIA says North Korea “remains one of the world’s most isolated and one of Asia’s poorest.”

North Korea’s chronic food shortages are believed to have grown