Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone

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       CHAPTER FOUR

       CUARENTA

      Miguel Treviño Morales was born in 1973, seven years after José. Like José, he was just a kid when Kiko led the family expedition north for Dallas. Like José, he idolized trailblazing Kiko. Like José, he dropped out of school after eighth grade and came to Dallas as a teen, staying with his mom in one of the small brick houses bought by Kiko.

      Miguel learned English and worked odd jobs, cutting lawns and sweeping chimneys, taxing work for a scrawny teenager whose family called him “Miguelito.” As he approached manhood in the early nineties, though, Miguel could hardly be described as the baby brother. He was still a raily five foot eight, and his black mustache worked hard to announce itself, but he carried himself with an edge. He could throw back his head and squint his eyes to send a vague but unmistakable message: Don’t fuck with this. Even at the baptism of José’s baby daughter, Alexandra, eighteen-year-old Miguel’s glare overpowered the pastels in his shirt and the chubbiness of his niece’s cheeks.

      Miguel talked openly about wanting to lift his family out of poverty, finishing the job Kiko started. In 1992, when Miguel was nineteen, a door creaked open in that pursuit. He married a young American woman named Ana, in a ceremony in Laredo, and they had a baby. They moved in together, into one of the houses Kiko had bought in Dallas, and Miguel’s wife filed a “Petition for Alien Relative,” the first hurdle on the way to securing Miguel a green card.

      Along with that petition, the government required Miguel to submit to a medical and psychological examination, which found him to be in relatively good health. He tested positive for marijuana, which he admitted to smoking occasionally, and he said he’d been drinking since he was seventeen, though never heavily. He’d never been violent, and though the doctor found that he exhibited some antisocial behavior, he showed no signs of being harmful to other people or himself. His wife’s petition was approved, putting him on the path to citizenship.

      Then Kiko got indicted. It’s unknown what, if any, role Miguel played in his big brother’s smuggling racket, though it’s likely he played some small one, especially in the absence of more legitimate work opportunities. Around the same time, the cops tried to pull Miguel over in an unregistered Cadillac. Police records don’t say whose car it was or where he was going, and Miguel apparently didn’t want to discuss it. He blew a stop sign and ignored the wailing pleas of their sirens for a few blocks before turning down a dead end and surrendering. He pleaded guilty to evading arrest, and they cut him free. Not long after, as Kiko’s trial approached, Miguel crossed back into Mexico, basically for good.

      He loved his native Mexico enough to get the words Hecho en Mexico—“Made in Mexico”—tattooed onto his back. But he also saw his homeland as a country that rewarded only the powerful and left poor and broken families like his for dead. He saw the United States as the country that stood by and did nothing about it.

      In Mexico, he returned to the barrios of Nuevo Laredo, where the job market offered opportunities that didn’t require the backbreaking servitude demanded by his homeland or his brothers’ new home across the border. He found work as a gofer for Los Tejas, a gang of local smugglers.

      Los Tejas was part of a tradition that went back generations: smuggling illicit product over the Rio Grande. During prohibition, smugglers loaded boats with cases of whiskey and tequila and floated them across under moonlit skies. In the 1960s, American demand for Acapulco Gold was so high, and regulation so lax, that Mexicans were throwing it across the river to hankering buyers. Cocaine and meth and heroin have floated across. And people—wading, boating, swimming, and trudging, hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants were making the trip every year as Miguel was coming of age in the 1990s, when the United States’ Mexican-born population grew from about four million to about nine million.

      As business boomed for Los Tejas, its bosses accumulated cars that needed washing and cash that needed retrieving or delivering. As a gofer, Miguel performed these sorts of tasks well enough that he graduated to driver and bodyguard, making sure the boss got where he needed to go safely. No doubt he could see himself in the boss’s seat one day. He just needed a chance to take it.

      Back then, most Mexican border towns were controlled by the so-called drug cartels. The term was birthed by Pablo Escobar’s famous Colombian cocaine mafia, the Medellín Cartel. It wasn’t precisely what an economist would label a “cartel,” since it wasn’t collusion that kept cocaine prices so high but the toxic mix of American demand and American prohibition. But the name “cartel” stuck and became synonymous with the gangs that ruled Mexico’s underworld.

      The cartel label wasn’t the only thing Colombia’s cocaine producers shared with Mexico’s smugglers. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Escobar and company had come to rely on Mexican traffickers to ferry their cocaine into the United States. For the Colombians, it meant slightly less in profits, since they’d have to pay the Mexicans a piso, or a tax, for smuggling the cocaine into the States. But it also meant less risk. For Mexican traffickers, it meant an inroad into a new market. Cocoa plants require tropical conditions, which limited Mexican growers to cultivating marijuana and heroin. Partnering with the Colombians offered a way into the lucrative cocaine and crack-cocaine business.

      The arrangement became known as the “Mexican Trampoline.” By the 1990s, the Colombians were moving billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine through Mexico every year—more than 90 percent of all the coke snorted, shot, and smoked in the States. The two thousand miles of border between Mexico and the United States were becoming more valuable to Mexican criminals every year.

      Each region had its dominant player in the cocaine market. Two hundred miles southeast of Nuevo Laredo, the Gulf Cartel leveraged its geography to import and export Colombian cocaine by air, land, and sea. To the northwest of Nuevo Laredo, where Ciudad Juárez bled into El Paso, Texas, the Juárez Cartel ruled. Farther west, the Arellano-Félix Organization moved product from Tijuana into San Diego and up California’s own narcotics superhighway, Interstate 5.

      Looming over all of them was the Sinaloa cartel, the richest and most powerful gang in Mexico. Based in the poppy-draped hills of Sinaloa state and nestled against the Gulf of California, the Sinaloa cartel was helmed by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as “El Chapo.” His main operational advantage was experience. Sinaloans had been cultivating their lush native soil for opiates for decades, and exporting those opiates across the U.S. border since Chinese immigrants pioneered the trade in the early 1900s. His innovation was to turn the old trade into an empire, effectively controlling the smaller cartels in Mexico’s western half. El Chapo was also believed to have the support of the Mexican government, all the way to the halls of Los Pinos, the presidential palace.

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