“For another dollar, I’ll show you how I can climb the wall,” a young man named Victor said in Spanish. It was Aug. 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.
I subsequently used my photo of Victor for the cover of the Nov. 4, 2020, issue of the Santa Fe Reporter.
Morgan Smith
For about eight years previously, I had been making monthly trips to the border—mostly Ciudad Juárez—to document and assist a variety of humanitarian organizations and families there. In April 2019, however, my wife and I also began to explore the Sunland Park section of the border wall. It was the beginning of a migrant surge, and we wondered how so many could be crossing in that area. On April 19, we followed the wall down a narrow dirt road and discovered it ended at the shoulder of Monte Cristo Rey, 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 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.
Morgan Smith
Victor on the Anapra side of the border wall with one of the mothers who live there. I always paid them a few dollars for the right to take their photos, a game with lots of laughs and bargaining.
Over the years, we worked with two other families in hopes they could stay free of the powerful influence of local cartels. While the capture of major cartel leaders like El Chapo makes 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 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 asylum with the patients because their grandmother Elvira Romero worked there as a cook and didn’t dare leave them at home. I helped Hector and Yeira for years and even raised the money to build them a house after my wife Julie died in 2016. But Hector, who had seemed to be getting out of the drug life at the time, was involved in a robbery four months ago. His uncle was killed—Hector disappeared. I am sure that he has been taken out in the desert and killed.
Morgan Smith
Yeira and Hector Beltrán in 2012. They are holding essays about their life aspirations that I had paid them to write. We all had high hopes then.
Enrique Cisneros, meanwhile, was the oldest grandchild of Reina Cisneros in tiny Palomas, Mexico, some 70 miles to the west and just across the border from Columbus, New Mexico—the town Pancho Villa’s troops invaded in March of 1916. As soon as Enrique turned 15, he slipped away from his family and began living on the streets of Palomas. Reina claimed he was associated with a cartel.
Morgan Smith
The handsome Enrique Cisneros on the dark streets of tiny Palomas, Mexico, in December 2021. Who knows where he is now.
All of this came to a head on Aug. 16, when I rode up the slopes of Monte Cristo Rey with several Border Patrol agents and we looked down into Anapra. 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 than your dollar bills.”
Morgan Smith
Young cartel lookouts on the mountainside above Anapra.
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.
Morgan Smith
A young man who has been detained by the Border Patrol. They believed he was the coyote who brought the other migrant detainees across.
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 awaiting a dash across either the wall or the slope of the mountain. These young boys on the slope of the mountain are involved in what has become a bigger business—the highly organized and multi-national smuggling of humans.
I’m sure Hector is dead now. Enrique has disappeared. 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 importantly, hope for smart, resourceful, handsome young men like these.
Morgan Smith
Another young lookout on the ridge.
