On the edge of the United States, Paola and Vera stood with their daughters in the dried-out riverbed of the Rio Grande, looking up at the clouds of concertina wire that blocked their way.
Less than ten feet above them, on the other side of the wire, stood a soldier from the Texas National Guard, rifle slung across his body, drinking what looked like a Coca-Cola.
The two friends were desperate. It had been six months since they left Ecuador with their children. Six weeks since they had been abducted by the cartels here in Ciudad Juárez. Two weeks since their families paid $4,000 for their release. Several hours since they started walking up and down the border fence looking for an unattended gap that wasn’t there.
They knew they could be taken again at any moment. “Coyotes” — smugglers linked to the cartels — roam this last strip of Mexico threatening and cajoling migrants to pay them for their services. If they don’t, sometimes they kidnap them.
Paola and Vera had no money left. They needed luck, something they hadn’t had for a long time.
Advertisement
Ciudad Juárez is a place where you can disappear, as easy as breathing, and be reborn only with a large transfer of dollars. A place where the cartels rule, and have infiltrated the police and the border guard so deeply that when you ask whether it was the authorities or the criminals who detained someone, you’re met with a blank stare.
“The cartel were dressed like immigration officers,” said Maria, 28, an accounting student from Venezuela. She was, like many of the women here, wearing big, loose clothes, her face covered with a mask, with a hood drawn up, trying to hide her gender. “I was with eight people yesterday, and out of those eight people one of them disappeared. They were chasing us and they took him. It was in the desert just near here. He was young, with a beard, from Venezuela.”
In the last month, the US border force has registered nearly 180,000 encounters on the US-Mexico border, a rough denotation of how many people are trying to cross. That is down from a December peak of more than 300,000.
What has changed is that the Mexican authorities, at the urging of the Biden administration, are doing more to stop migrants travelling through Mexico to the border — detaining them and, according to migrant testimonies, sometimes beating and robbing them along the way.
“Mexican people have been so kind to us and brought us food, but it’s the immigration [officers] who have made this hell,” said Maria.
Advertisement
For the cartels, lower numbers of people reaching the border, and paying for their services as smugglers means a loss of revenue. At the Casa del Migrante centre in Ciudad Juárez, Father Francisco Javier Bueno Guillen, 29, says that has made them more brutal.
“Many of the people who come here are victims of organised violence,” he told us. “A lot of them don’t want to talk about it. They’re terrified.”
He estimated that about one in five of the migrants who pass through his shelter had been kidnapped by organised criminal groups: a dramatic intensification of a decades-long trend. “There are different motives [for the kidnapping],” he said. “Either they want a ransom from the family, or they want to use them for human trafficking.”
Two weeks earlier the shelter had received a group of 400 people — men, women, children — who had been kidnapped by the cartels and held for a month in Ciudad Juárez. They had escaped together from the “safe house” where they were imprisoned when a water delivery distracted their captors.
“They were all wearing the same T-shirts,” said the priest. “So that the cartel could spot them easier. They all wanted to take them off when they got here.”
Advertisement
Ivonne Leticia Lopez de Lara Avila, a social worker and human rights co-ordinator at the shelter, said that she’d noticed one of the children in the group, an 18-month-old girl, had been entranced by the sun, squinting directly at the sky. “Her parents told me it was because they hadn’t seen the sun for two weeks,” she said.
Among the group were young women who had been raped: they told her the cartels sent videos of the attacks to their families. “People here think it only happens to women but men get raped too,” Avila said. “We try to help them psychologically but a lot of them don’t want to talk about it.”
Adam Isacson, who works on borders and migration for Wola, a human rights organisation, said that kidnappings were increasing at several points on the border — with migrants who are thought to have relatives in the United States, particularly Cubans and Central Americans, targeted more than those from countries such as Venezuela, who are presumed to be poorer.
In Ciudad Juárez, he said, “we’ve seen groups fighting each other for the ability to kidnap the migrants in the area”.
A US government initiative to reduce the number of illegal crossings has, migrant groups said, heightened the risks for those trying to make it over the border. The CBP One app was introduced in 2020 and allows people to register for an appointment to claim asylum at an official border crossing point.
Advertisement
Yet the waiting time for the appointment is often weeks or months, meaning that migrants are left in limbo in Ciudad Juárez: sitting ducks for the cartels.
Every stage of the journey to the border brings with it a risk of kidnap. Adriana, 26, and her girlfriend Luisa, 30, were taken by smugglers in southern Mexico.
“They took us to a jail, like a house, and they said, ‘You need to pay,’” Adriana said. The place was full of children who didn’t have the money to buy their freedom. The cartel asked Adriana and Luisa for about £80 each, by chance the exact amount they had with them. They paid and the gang stamped their arms with a phoenix symbol. “They said, ‘Now you are reborn.’”
Many migrants travel through Mexico on la Bestia (the Beast), a train that runs through the spine of the country, from the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco right up to Ciudad Juárez, where you can see a branch of a Wells Fargo bank through the border fence in El Paso, Texas.
Michael, an anti-government activist from Cuba, lost the tips of the fingers on his left hand when he grabbed on to a brake lever between the carriages. “I’ve still got my arms and legs,” he said with a shrug as he walked the border wall at Ciudad Juárez, looking for a place to cross.
Advertisement
The train he’d taken had been stopped near Chihuahua for three days by the cartel or the police — no one knew which — before he and a group of others decided to leave. They walked through the desert to come here; none of them know what happened to the ones who stayed behind.
“You’d see people go out for a second from the train, to wash, and they would just disappear,” said Marie, 42, a teacher from Venezuela, who arrived at the border on la Bestia a few days earlier.
If anything, the dangers increase in Ciudad Juárez. Some migrants are kidnapped in the dunes of Samalayuca, a few miles from the city centre, an area which is effectively controlled by the cartels.
Then there is the border itself: a motorway, then a no man’s land of a few hundred feet, then the Rio Grande, low in the summer heat, which divides Mexico and the United States. Migrants sleep in the thickets of trees which line the riverbed, waiting to cross. The ground is scattered with their belongings: water bottles, dusty clothes with jagged cuts from the concertina wire, a pram. The best spots for crossing are far away, reachable only by car or several days’ walk.
This is the domain of the coyotes.
“One of them pulled up in front of me and took out his gun,” said Juliet, 24, from Colombia. “I just ran. One of the [border police] from Mexico had told me they can’t help us by the border because it’s gringo territory. They said just to run, so I did.”
As we walked along the border, a coyote — brown teeth grinning — came up to us and asked whether we wanted to cross.
He told us to go to a petrol station by the border. Migrants we spoke to said that the cartels worked the parking lot there.
In one morning, on one short stretch of the border, we saw at least 20 people trying to cross. A family of five succeeded, dashing under the concertina wire and up on the other side, clothes torn. Minutes later, uniformed US officers came to them. They would be registered — and if the family claimed asylum, under federal and international laws, they would be permitted to stay in the US until their cases are heard. However highly contested legislation in Texas allows migrants to be arrested on arrival. Some are deported almost immediately.
Yet in this lawless place, many more don’t make it over the border.
“We’ve been walking for so long,” Paola said, tears catching in her throat. Her one-year-old daughter, Anna, was strapped to her back. Vera and her seven-year-old daughter Licette stood next to them, hand in hand, their faces beaded with sweat in the punishing sun. They were caught between the wire and the gangs.
“We can’t move far,” Paola said. “They’re watching us.” Then they were gone: walking down the riverbank, further into the desert.
Additional reporting: Natalia Meneses Alis
