“For another dollar, I’ll show you how I can climb the wall,” this young man named Victor said in Spanish. It was August 23, 2019, and we were at the border wall that separates Sunland Park, New Mexico, from Anapra, Mexico. I handed the dollar bill through the bars of the wall, and Victor immediately scampered upward.

For about eight years previously, I had been making monthly trips to the border—mostly Ciudad Juárez—to document conditions there and assist a variety of humanitarian organizations and families. In April 2019, at the beginning of the migrant surge, my wife and I began to explore this area of the wall to try to see how so many could be crossing there. We followed the wall down a narrow dirt road and discovered that it just ended at the shoulder of Monte Cristo Rey. This is just to the west of the cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.

Along this wall is where we would meet Victor and other Anapra residents. They knew our car and would come running over to get a few dollars for photos. Victor seemed the most mature of the young people there, and I actually prepared a written questionnaire for him that I hoped to use for an article about growing up in the impoverished community of Anapra. Soon, however, he stopped showing up at these little gatherings.

I wrote an article about these border wall experiences for Fountain Valley several years ago. At that time, however, I hadn’t yet recognized the overwhelming influence of the drug cartels on young men like Victor.

Beginning years earlier, we worked with two other families, the hope being that they could stay free of these cartels. While the capture of major cartel leaders like El Chapo makes the headlines, what is probably even more important is the ability of these cartels to recruit young people for whom there is no other source of employment.

Hector Beltrán was one example. In February 2011, I first met him and his sister, Yeira, in Visión en Acción, a mental asylum located in the desert on the west edge of Juárez. Aged 12 and 13 then, they would spend weekends in the patio where all the patients gathered because their grandmother, Elvira Romero, the cook, didn't dare leave them at home, where it was very dangerous. For years, I would pay them to help me photograph and document the patients there or to write essays for me about their hopes for the future. I raised the money to build a house for them after my wife, Julie, died in 2016. Then Elvira died, and Yeira went off with another dodgy boyfriend. Hector, living alone in the house, began getting into drugs. Then, last winter, he seemed to be recovering and had started a good business selling firewood and making furniture. Last spring, however, he relapsed; he and an uncle were involved in a cartel-related robbery. The uncle was shot to death, and Hector disappeared. I’m sure that he has been taken out in the desert and killed.

Enrique Cisneros was the oldest grandchild of Reina Cisneros in tiny Palomas, Mexico, some seventy miles west of Juárez and just across the border from Columbus, New Mexico, the town that Pancho Villa’s troops invaded on March 9, 2016. This handsome kid seemed like a leader, but as soon as he turned fifteen, he slipped away from his family and began living on the streets of Palomas. Every time I visited, he would spot me and come by for a $20 bill. Reina claimed that he was associated with a cartel. Now he has disappeared.

All of this came to a head last August 16, when I rode up the slopes of Monte Cristo Rey with several Border Patrol agents, and we looked down into Anapra. The Border Patrol had built this steep road as a way to spot migrants gathering in Anapra to attempt a dash across the border into Sunland Park. There, just below us on the slope of the mountain, were maybe eight boys, most of them masked.

“Lookouts,” one of the agents said. “They make a lot more money working for a cartel than your dollar bills for photos.”

No wonder Victor no longer comes to our little photo ops at the wall. No wonder Angelica Parra, a now-retired Border Patrol agent, no longer comes to the wall with food and candy for the Anapra residents. “The area has been taken over by cartels,” she says.

No wonder many of the houses there have been renovated. Even though the residents have no work, they are getting paid by cartels to house migrants who are to slip across either the wall or the slope of the mountain.

Hector and Enrique were involved in the drug trafficking part of cartel life. These young boys on the slope of the mountain are involved in what has become an even more lucrative and brutal business—the highly organized and multinational smuggling of humans.

I’m sure that Hector is dead now. Enrique has disappeared, probably swallowed up in cartel life. But where is Victor? Was he one of those on the mountainside with his face masked? It’s impossible not to develop great affection and, more important, hope for smart, resourceful young men like these three, but the odds against their success are overwhelming.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge for Mexico, and especially its impressive new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, but it’s also a challenge for young men in the United States. I made plenty of mistakes as a student, but FVS stood by me when I went off track. I am still deeply grateful to teachers like Jack Smith, Lou Palmer, the Perrys, Henry Newman, and Ralph Quintana. But who is there for young men on Mexico’s border?

 

Written by Morgan Smith, Class of 1956, can be reached at Morgan-smith@comcast.net