The Collision of Cartels, Rock Climbing, and Mining in Northern Mexico

In northern Mexico, a few miles outside the city of Monterrey, a massive limestone spire known as El Diente begs to be climbed. Rising from a lush, forested river bottom, the bare-rock monolith stands like a mini Meru between the cliffs and crags of the valley walls. If a formation like this existed in the U.S., every rock climber in the country would almost certainly flock to it—but in Mexico, mining interests, cartel activity, and dodgy political agendas have stood in the way. Joel Heriberto Guadarrama Garcia, a dirtbag climber turned Robin Hood-esque land activist, is on the verge of opening a path there anyway.

"To me, the area has the potential to be one the continent's premier sport destinations with its unique, large-featured tufa formations," said Mark Grundon, a climbing guide who splits his time between the Yosemite Valley and the Monterrey area. "Anyone bolting something always thinks it's the greatest, so I am for sure biased, but many people have seen it and been like 'holy shit.'"

Climbers know well the region around Monterrey; some think it boasts the highest concentration of quality limestone in the world. To the south of the city is the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain chain, which contains several world-class crags, including El Diente. Beneath those lofty peaks, however, stretches a city mired in violence, decadence, and cupidity, where nearly half of its 3 million residents live in poverty while an infinitesimal percentage enjoys wealth on an appalling scale.

From the top of Cerro de la Campana, a small hill on the south side of town, you can see the juxtaposition in stark relief. On one side sits the suburb of San Pedro Garza García, one of the richest municipalities in all of Latin America. Garish luxury apartment buildings, mansions, and Ferrari dealerships festoon the hills, interspersed with Hearst-like estates whose verdant lawns look wholly out of place amid the surrounding desert.

On the other side lie the seemingly endless tracts of hillside slums, cemented and sepulchral, of Monterrey's impoverished Independencia neighborhood, a notorious battleground between the Zetas and Gulf cartels. Over the past several years, Independencia has endured student kidnappings, the seizure of police outposts and the murder of police officers, and a steady stream of dumped cadavers, often bearing signs of torture. Cartel violence in Monterrey came to a head earlier this year during a prison riot that left 49 inmates dead and 13 injured.

To drive a mere 15 minutes outside Monterrey, however, is to be transported to another world. The lush hills around El Diente recall the jungles of Southeast Asia. The 1,300-foot tooth of the monolith is painted with streaks of black and orange, and waterfalls cascade over the bare rocks.

"As soon as I saw the place I knew that I could spend the rest of my life climbing there," Joel Heriberto Guadarrama Garcia said. "It was an exit from Babylon; my daily escape from the grind, from the matrix most of us live in."

Joel first saw El Diente in 2012. A climbing junkie with a degree in environmental engineering, he had made several climbing trips to the area previously but had never visited the crag—the land was privately owned and completely locked off to the public. When he finally stumbled on it, he immediately saw the potential not only for a personal sanctuary but also a global climbing destination.

After that day, Joel took on the mission of opening El Diente to the public. To him, the area is the climbing world's Lost City of Z, and he thinks everyone should be able to enjoy it.

"I believe in freedom and public spaces," he said. "Not the kind of freedom that is only enjoyed by the rich and the privileged."

Opening El Diente would require untangling nebulous boundaries of land ownership that stretches back for over a century. Thanks to its proximity to Monterrey and the gold, silver, and lead deposits of the Sierra Madres, the area has attracted attention from more than just climbers. In 1902, under the autocratic reign of Porfirio Diáz, the government seized 1,977 acres of what had been communally owned land from local residents and sold pieces of it to an assortment of international mining companies from the U.S., Britain, Denmark, and Germany.

A local company called Minas del Diente (the El Diente Mines), owned by the Villarreal family, bought land there in 1961; when mining operations ceased in 1970, they turned to real estate, seeing potential for a glittery housing development. To realize the project, it enlisted the help of one of the most corrupt and politically entrenched families in Monterrey: the family Medina de la Cruz.

The Medina family came to power in 2003 when one of its members became the legal advisor to the governor of the state of Nuevo Leon, of which Monterrey is the capital. In 2009, his son became the governor, a position he held until last year. During that time, the Medina family acquired 12 real estate companies in the area, and it had the area around El Diente in its sights.

Since 2012, Joel spoke several times with Natalie Kane Zambrano, a representative of Minas del Diente, and her uncle Eduardo Alverde Villarreal, who now heads the company. Joel was hoping to negotiate a deal that would establish a right-of-way to the crag and access to the rock, but he made little progress with either. So he turned to what government maps he could get his hands on to get a better idea of property lines and land-use regulations in the area.

After poring over topographical surveys and meeting with the National Commission on Water (CONAGUA), Joel discovered that the canyon containing El Diente was a prominent drainage of Cumbres National Park, a 434,000-acre parcel of karstified mountains and valleys southwest of Monterrey that was established in 1877. Both the river and El Diente lie clearly within the federally owned watershed, and therefore outside the scope of private ownership—a condition that predated the 1961 land seizure by more than 100 years.

In 2014 Joel founded the Sierra Madre Mountain Club, a civil association, to ensure the continuation of his work, lest he suspiciously disappear. (The Medina family was known to work with the ultra-violent Zetas cartel to launder money, and Joel feared the repercussions of opposing the shady coalition.) Joel then filed a lawsuit against Minas del Diente and Eduardo Villarreal for illegally barring public access to El Diente. That brought about little change, however. Illegal land ownership is about as common in Mexico as crystal meth is on the streets of Fresno, and as long as the Medina mafia remained in power, opening the area remained elusive.

Finally, last October Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, an independent candidate nicknamed El Bronco, was elected governor of Nuevo León by voters frustrated with corruption and violence. He began rolling out what he has called a "second Mexican revolution." His ousting of the Medinas removed the old guards of El Diente. Now Joel, backed by a municipal court-approved document—which under the new administration has magically become valid—has effectively thrown open the doors of El Diente.

Even though cartel-related violence and kidnappings remain a concern for travelers, a second bonanza has begun at El Diente. But rather than dynamite and bulldozers, it brings bolts, daisy chains, skyhooks, and hangars to set up climbing routes that enthusiasts from around the world could someday enjoy.

"The climbing is everything you have imagined and a little more," Joel said. "The routes are slightly overhanging to super-overhanging, vertical, slab, big wall, tons of multi-pitch potential, four big caves with full on roofs, big walls with roofs, waterfalls, and dihedrals. There is everything."

There are currently about 30 established routes on El Diente; Joel sees the potential for several hundred more. As the climbing season unfolds in Mexico and the swell of expat climbers arrives, new routes go up nearly every day, thanks in large part to a handful of motivated locals.

But the mountain is not fully open as of yet. At the mouth of the valley, a ramshackle fence blocks the road leading to El Diente. The town of Monterrey is supposed to remove the fence but the order has yet to been given. Recently, the Villarreal family threatened to call the police on trespassing climbers. One member of the family, who is also a climber, threatened to remove all the bolts of the established routes on El Diente if the trespassing didn't stop.

Gareth Leah, a British-American climber who spends the winter near Monterrey, bolted a new route up El Diente's face a few weeks ago. He thinks times are changing and that the Villarreal claims will soon be nothing more than rhetoric. When that happens, he says, El Diente will likely rise to prominence within the country's array of climbing destinations.

"This is going to be the place to climb in Mexico," he says.