Journey to Fulfill a Modest Dream Came to Tragic End in Fatal Fall

People who cross the border illegally from Mexico don’t carry much.

This is what Guadalupe Cisneros Ramirez has to remember her brother’s life and death by: a Mexican identification card, a birth certificate, scribbled addresses of friends and family, and 33,000 pesos--about $11.

Her 20-year-old brother, Hugo Cisneros Ramirez, had been married a month ago in his hometown in the state of Michoacan, in a civil ceremony. He and his young wife wanted a big church wedding as well. So he decided to return to Salinas, Calif., to work until December in a restaurant where he had worked before, and save some money.

That modest dream made it as far as northern San Diego County, where Cisneros died Sunday night in a fall from a cliff near the beach as he ran from Border Patrol agents. Just to the east of the place he died is the San Onofre Border Patrol checkpoint on busy Interstate 5. Cisneros, like many illegal immigrants, had just braved speeding cars in an attempt to circumvent the checkpoint.

The incident has been blamed on a typically unscrupulous smuggler, unsafe tactics by the Border Patrol and recklessness by Cisneros and his companions, two of whom were seriously injured.

In his sister’s view, the Border Patrol should get most of the blame.

“I don’t think it was a necessary death,” she said. “I’m not going to sit around with my arms folded. I’m going to do something about it.”

Whatever the truth, Cisneros’ life was less complicated than the politics of his death, according to his sister. She saw him for the last time Sunday in Tijuana.

“He was happy,” she said of her younger brother, one of six brothers and sisters, whose wife is pregnant. “He was fine.”

He arrived at the dusty, manic Tijuana bus station, a route followed by thousands heading north every day. Guadalupe, 28, a legal U.S. resident who lives with relatives in Los Angeles, had arranged to meet him and help arrange his passage north.

Brother and sister quickly hooked up with one of the endless supply of “coyotes” who patrol downtown Tijuana. She agreed to pay $300 for the ride to Los Angeles, $250 to be paid on arrival. They said good-by after four hours, expecting to see each other by the next night.

Cisneros had crossed the border once before to work in Salinas, so the prospect did not scare him, his sister said. He had been working in the fields in Michoacan, where he felt restless, she said.

On Monday, she came to San Diego County to claim her brother’s body. While here, she went to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla to talk briefly with one of the men who had joined Cisneros on the journey from Tijuana. He said Cisneros was talkative and friendly as they rode north in the smuggler’s stolen pickup truck.

“He said my brother was really excited and was talking the whole time about Salinas,” she said.

That’s the image she retains now when she remembers the phone call she got from the coroner’s office early Monday morning.

The investigator said he had dialed one of the numbers he found on a scrap of paper belonging to the deceased--a scrap of Hugo Cisneros’ life and Guadalupe Cisneros’ grief.