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 onshore for about a half-mile, hiding as best he could in the thick brush and cane, taking photos with his phone as he went. The photos, I knew, were not just for texting up the chain of command: The sophistication of the cartels includes facial-recognition databases now, and we are in them.
As these things went, it was a quiet day. Sometimes the cartel controlling Reynosa and its environs — it’s Zetas or Golfo or Noreste depending on when you go, where you go, and who is killing whom most expeditiously — will direct the migrants to erupt from their squalid bankside 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
