Photos: Finding safety across the Rio Grande

A concrete channel defines the course of the Rio Grande. In the foreground, the Bridge of the Americas carries trans-border traffic between El Paso on the left and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on the right.
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The towering steel border fence defines the southern boundary of the little neighborhood of Chihuahuita in El Paso. The peaceful, well-kept enclave is in stark contrast to the violence-plagued city of Ciudad Juarez that’s out of sight on the other side of the barrier.
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Now in exile in an El Paso neighborhood, Ricardo Chavez Aldana sits on the car he fixed so his young nephew could drive to a party when he lived in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. That same night the boy was killed in a drug-cartel ambush at the party. Chavez was an investigative reporter for a Mexican radio station.
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Now in exile in El Paso, former Mexican TV photographer Alejandro Hernandez shows where cartel thugs split his head open with a piece of lumber. While videotaping the aftermath of a mass murder, he was thrown in a car trunk by a mob of gunmen and held for five days in a blood-splattered room without food or water. After he was released, he fled to El Paso with his wife and two children.
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Mexican exile Emilio Gutierrez clears brush on an almond ranch near El Paso. Gutierrez was a reporter for the newspaper El Diario de Chihuahua when he received a death threat for writing stories about corrupt Ciudad Juarez police and drug cartel leaders.
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While holding bags of beef he bargained for in a Las Cruces, N.M., supermarket, Emilio Gutierrez pauses at the El Diario newsrack. He was a reporter for the paper before fleeing Mexico with little more than his life. The single father makes fresh burritos and peddles them to support his teenage son.
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In an El Paso park, Mexican exile Alejandro Hernandez leans on an iron monument that marks the old U.S./Mexico border before the course of the Rio Grande River was moved in the 1960s. The former Mexican videographer was kidnapped and beaten by drug cartel thugs. He fled to El Paso, where he’s seeking political asylum.
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People relax in the Annunciation House shelter for migrants and exiles in El Paso, a few yards across the border from the drug-war embattled city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Brenda Ramirez was sheltered here after her 7-year-old son was shot and killed in Juarez while riding in a car with his father.
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The name of 7-year-old Raul Xazziel Ramirez-Ramirez is etched in the black granite of a victims’ memorial in El Paso. The boy was killed while riding with his father in a car in Ciudad Juarez. He lived in El Paso and attended school in Juarez. His mother, Brenda Ramirez, is now seeking asylum in El Paso.
See full story  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)