Chapter 2: The River and the Line

The two boys cried for help as soon as we came into sight. 

It was a bit longer before we could hear them. Our small craft headed downriver along the hot Rio Grande at a deliberate and even leisurely pace, because the engine noise at full power would provide too much warning to the cartel men manning this stretch of the south shore outside Reynosa. We wanted to see them, and they certainly saw us. Men lounging next to fishing poles eyed us as we floated past and called in their reports. A man in a squalid migrant camp shooed away rooting hogs to light a signal fire in a trash pile. Another man followed us along the shore for about a half mile, hiding as best he could in the thick brush and cane, taking photos with his phone as he went. As these things went, it was a quiet day: sometimes the cartel controlling Reynosa and environs — it changes depending on when you go and who is killing whom most expeditiously — will direct the migrants to erupt from their camps and throw rocks at American riverine craft. Sometimes they’ll motor up in their own boats and let the pilot know they’ll kill him and all his passengers if he comes back. They haven’t followed through on this yet, but it only has to happen once.

You see the signs of crossings everywhere. We floated past a corrugated-metal pipe on the north bank, perhaps three feet in diameter, emerging from the mud and stuffed with industrial foam. It used to be a crossing: the cartel controlling the south bank tunneled under the river and this was the exit point. I marveled at the laborious ingenuity of it all, and wondered how many other times it has been tried. It’s risky work: the traffickers don’t especially care about workplace safety and comparable tunnels have been found flooded, or partially flooded with rudimentary pumps to keep them clear. Whoever crossed there risked a horrifying fate — sealed in a lightless tunnel, shoulder width, river water rushing in — but perhaps after the horrors of the long migration, the Darien Gap, La Bestia, sexual assaults as fares for passage, and the traffickers themselves, it didn’t matter. The end was in sight, one way or another.

Another cause for wonder is that this tunnel, sealed and jutting from the bank, was built in a well-trafficked and well-populated area. The Rio Grande Valley is remote from American consciousness, but it is not remote. There are perhaps two million souls on the north bank, and another two million or so in the conurbations and settlements around Reynosa and Matamoros along the south bank. This isn’t wild and trackless country, not what you’d find out west — not like what I have actually found out west, in Presidio County, where there are active crossing points and trafficking safehouses in the open, because no one is around for the next twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred miles. Crossing here in the RGV means crossing a heavily surveilled frontier with ample people and resources to monitor and (one assumes) stop it.

It happens anyway. The infrastructure, in tunnels and watercraft and simple landings on both shores, is built anyway. The demand for crossing is there, and it is well understood by those who operate on the Mexican side that the Americans will not respond in any decisive fashion. Sure, the Americans will take tactical measures — they’ll even take operational ones from time to time. But they won’t do the strategic thing to stop the traffic, which would be exceptionally simple in concept: a near-impassable physical barrier plus immediate expulsion upon capture. The governing class of the United States has across time persuaded itself that the former is unachievable and the latter is immoral. The human traffickers and their partners in Mexican governance who plague this river — and the thousands of miles south of it — know better. Their business model, with its billions in annual revenue, depends upon the Americans failing to grasp that truth. It has yet to fail.

So, we see the tunnels, and we know there are more. We see the landings, strewn with trash and clothing, and we know there are more. We see the traffickers’ lookouts, both men and children, and we know there are more.

We also see the evidence of the traffickers’ reign on the south side. We pass by once-thriving riverside restaurants that in days gone by flourished, thanks to tourists who no longer come. We pass by homes, abandoned by whatever family invested their hopes and dreams into them because the traffickers told them to get out — or else. (This happens on the north side too, but typically through more implicit pressure. I spoke with a woman in Del Rio, Texas, who said her neighbors left after the mother looked out her daughters playing in the yard — and saw a group of migrants, fresh out of the river, at the fence line, also looking at her girls.) We pass by structures made of cinderblock, two and sometimes three stories tall: these are lookout towers with dogs at the base. We pass by an abandoned zoo, surreal and post-apocalyptic in its presentation, emptied, we are told, by traffickers some time ago. Horses meander down to the riverbank. Joining them, a llama—a survivor of the zoo, unwanted by the cartel men who prefer more vigorous exotic pets.

The traffickers rule on the north side too, but the nature of their reign there — here — is different.

The boys cried for help, and it was both easy to see why and hard to see how they came to need it. They were of that indeterminate age when a child is no longer small and not yet a definitive teenager. Both wore shorts and t-shirts, along with flotation vests one would normally see in a neighborhood swimming pool. Both were standing, perhaps trapped, on the base of the southmost pillar of the Hidalgo-Reynosa bridge, perhaps twenty feet from the Mexican shore with a strong moving channel between them and land.

We moved closer, into earshot, and it became clear they wanted our boat to take them back to the south shore. We discussed it. How had they gotten there? Why were they dry? What about their floatation vests? Very little made sense, so we shouted questions at them to ask what happened. The taller boy responded merely by clasping his hands in prayer: “Please help.”

“They’re probably helping with illegal crossings,” remarked the pilot. “The cartels use kids for this all the time.” Having had a teenage cartel lookout call in some bad guys on me in Matamoros some years back, I knew firsthand. “Maybe,” continued the pilot, “I could throw them some extra flotation gear.” At some distance I spotted the green-and-white vehicles of the Border Patrol on the north shore, in a clearing beyond the embankment brush: “Look, your theory may be right —they’ve got someone out there.” “Yeah,” said the pilot. He fell silent, and we glided downstream.

“Hoy por mi, mañana por ti,” said one of the boys, and they both clasped their hands in mock prayer toward us. “Today for me, tomorrow for you.”

“You’re not going to throw them the gear,” I said to the pilot. “And explain to them why I’m aiding a crossing?” he replied, gesturing toward the vehicles on the north side. My noticing had killed a plausible charitable act. One of our companions, a good-hearted person who had never been to south Texas before and therefore assumed the best of all things, spoke up: “We should take them aboard.”

He replied, “Ma’am, as soon as I pass the centerline, we are in Mexico. As soon as I land a party ashore, we lose the boat, and all of us must proceed by foot to a lawful port of entry. And if I take them aboard and one of them produces a firearm, then you’ve got bigger problems than that.” I considered each statement, and each was plausible.

This is the river.

We passed them by, the boys on the river, trapped or not, at the base of the Reynosa bridge, and it felt terrible to do so. It is contrary to all instinct and charity, and it may have been a grave wrong. Perhaps they were just kids doing something stupid that they regretted, having swum to the pillar and now reluctant to reenter the current. I woke up in the dead of night, nearly convulsing with nausea at the thought of them alone, struggling toward shore, and reaching it lifeless. Children. We passed by children.

But no one enters that river, child or adult, except under the hideous authority of the controlling cartel. I remember that too.

Later in the day, no longer afloat, we gazed into Mexico from the high riverside bluffs in Roma, Texas. Directly across the river was Ciudad Miguel Aleman. Somewhere to the north, lost in the heat-risen haze of the horizon, was Ciudad Mier. That city, one of the historic settlements of the mid-eighteenth century Nuevo-Santander colonization — as is Roma itself — claims more than one piece of specifically Texas history. When the Texans staged a counter-invasion of Mexico in response to post-independence Mexican invasions of the Republic of Texas, a too-small and poorly led force — acting against orders from the Republic’s own government — was captured and imprisoned in its attempt to capture Ciudad Mier. Following an escape attempt, the prisoners were ordered to draw lots, in the form of white and black beans, with those drawing black beans condemned to execution. Supposedly, there is a museum in Mier’s historic plaza with the Texans’ flags and arms, and I would very much like to see it. (There is also an Alamo flag on display at Mexico’s Castillo Chapultepec, and a U.S. Army flag from Buena Vista at the Churubusco convent, upon which the American visitor may gaze and dream of repatriating, perhaps in exchange for Santa Anna’s leg.) But I cannot see it, because Ciudad Mier and its environs are firmly under cartel control. In 2010, Los Zetas effectively emptied the town, creating a minor refugee crisis there that spilled into Roma, which was mostly ignored by America’s national media, and Mexico’s too. Today civic life in Ciudad Mier is back, I am reliably told, tenuously sustained by the presence of a sizable unit of the Mexican Army.

Ciudad Mier is my great-grandmother’s hometown. Roma is my grandfather’s.

Turn toward the river on the Roma bluffs, and you can see miles into Mexico. Over a decade ago, I did just that and listened to a gun battle underway in Ciudad Aleman. Face away from the river, and you can see the house on the historic plaza built by my Ramirez ancestors, patches of paint from a century past fading away in the hot frontier sun. (Nearly everyone on this stretch of the border, on both sides of the river, could point out similar structures and inheritances if they chose: the settlement cohort for Nuevo Santander along the Rio Grande was small, and they were fruitful and multiplied.) During the Mexican Revolution, over a century ago, the United States Army put a small artillery piece atop the house. The building is in slow ruin now, unlived-in and uncared-for, but the need for a defense against the violence to the south remains.

A bit farther upriver, directly across from Ciudad Mier, in the Texas-side community of Fronton, I spoke with a man who showed us the bullet hole in his home’s facade, and the 7.62mm round that made it—usually Soviet-bloc ammunition for the AK-47. He felt lucky. His neighbor was shot in the hip with a full .50-caliber round sitting in his living room. This would ordinarily be a fatality, but it was on a ballistic trajectory and went through both the solid outer and inner walls of the house first. The neighbor also felt lucky. These are Texans, citizens of the United States, in the United States, describing their experiences of being under fire in their own country. What happened to them was fairly straightforward: the Texas Military Department was clearing out the adjacent Rio-Grande island of Fronton, and the frustrated cartel men — the same ones controlling Mier — expressed that frustration by subjecting this community to indirect fire. Just another day on the border.

Some hours later we picked our way across a dense and green thicket of cane and sharp trees, a spot at which it appeared several hundred people had recently crossed. Women’s clothing and personal items, discarded as useless, littered the vegetation. It was, I thought, the debris of wartime. A colleague spotted a torn bit of notebook paper and retrieved it from the matted brush. It was from a child’s notebook, the handwriting in light blue ink, likely a woman’s. It was a list:

El nombre de mi padre es Luis.

El nombre de mi madre es Flor.

El nombre de mi hermano es Juan.

On and on.

The name of my father is Luis.

The name of my mother is Flor.

The name of my brother is Juan.

A whole family’s worth of names, written down for a child and lost here, on the southernmost reach of Texas. Our guide peered at it while cradling his M-4: this is to coach a child purchased by traffickers in Mexico. Or, I thought, it is a list given by a mother to a child she knows she won’t see again, to remind the little one who his family was.

As much as passing the boys on the bridge, this hurt to see.

A war is raging, quiet and cruel, until it briefly becomes loud and cruel. The cruelty is the only constant. The cartels, worship their evil gods, put guns in the hands of children often enough that we leave them behind when we encounter them on the water. They operate slave markets — we should call them what they are — in which children are bought and sold to increase the chances that the norteamericanos will admit a supposed family unit, and to supply the vile, ravenous sex market. They do this often enough that we find evidence of it scattered in the dirt. They make their choices, and we are forced into choices downstream of theirs, a series of secondary evils. Maybe it was manageable once. Now, the only way forward is through. They must be ended.

The rivers flows on, and the children of the river cry for help.