Читать книгу Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel - Joe Tone, Joe Tone - Страница 12

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.

As Miguel Treviño rose through the ranks, no cartel controlled his hometown. Instead, a series of small, family-run gangs, including Los Tejas, moved drugs across the river. They’d done it this way for decades, dividing up Nuevo Laredo’s streets under the guidance of an independent drug lord nicknamed “El Chacho.” Each group paid El Chacho sixty grand or so a month. In exchange, El Chacho kept the peace among the groups and with the neighboring cartels.

As Kiko had intuited, though, NAFTA changed all that. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of trucks crossing north through Los Dos Laredos nearly doubled, from about 68,000 a month to 133,000, each offering an opportunity for traffickers to conceal drugs flowing north. As a result, the city became more porous, more lucrative, and more attractive to every cartel. It was only a matter of time before they came for Nuevo Laredo.

The Gulf Cartel was the city’s most natural suitor. It already controlled Matamoros, another major port of entry from Tamaulipas to Texas. And it had a new boss who longed to control Miguel’s hometown.

His name was Osiel Cárdenas Guillén. He’d risen to the Gulf’s helm after arranging the murder of his co-leader. The killing earned Cárdenas a nickname, “El Mata Amigos,” or “the Friend Killer.” It also earned him control of a business that was believed to be clearing a billion dollars a year, if not more.

Before Cárdenas advanced on Nuevo Laredo, he approached his bodyguard and confidant, a former elite soldier who’d deserted the Mexican military to serve as his personal protector. Cárdenas wanted more soldiers like him.

“I want the best men,” Cárdenas said. “The best armed men that there are.”

“They are only in the army,” his mercenary said.

“I want them.”

They started recruiting. It wasn’t hard. Mexico’s Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales del Alto Mando was a special-ops unit trained in guerrilla tactics: sniping, breaching, mountain climbing, survival. Some of its men had been trained by American Special Forces at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and at the controversial School for the Americas, where the United States Army trained Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics. Cárdenas worked them slowly. First he brokered peace by sending food, women, and cash. Then he offered them jobs, including pay raises, better working conditions, and a chance to win for once. They defected by the dozens.

Under Cárdenas’s command, the defectors created an elite unit of mercenaries whose job was to protect and expand the Gulf’s interests. They imported strict military principles and practices, preached discipline and loyalty, and vowed never to leave a compatriot on the battlefield, dead or alive. They even honored their military roots in their name. Colloquially, they became known across Mexico as La Compañía, or “the Company.” Officially, they needed something slicker. In the federal police, Cárdenas’s bodyguard had used the radio call sign Z-1. Since he was a “Z,” they would all be “Z”s. They called themselves Los Zetas.

One of the Zetas’ first orders of business was to take over Nuevo Laredo. Cárdenas sent his most trusted men, including Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, or “the Executioner,” and a gangster they called “El Winnie Pooh.” They showed up in convoys and informed Los Tejas and the town’s other incumbent smugglers that they would work for the Gulf or be vanquished from the city.

As it turned out, Los Tejas’ leaders weren’t interested in subcontracting for the Gulf and the Zetas. But Miguel was. He helped the Zetas track down and kill his Tejas boss. He worked for the Zetas now.

Miguel teamed up with another freelance smuggler from his neighborhood—Iván Velázquez Caballero, nicknamed “El Talibán”—to make sure Nuevo Laredo fell under the command of the Zetas. They dressed in fatigues and roamed their hometown in caravans, recruiting young men who could help the Zetas eradicate the remaining holdouts and discourage other cartels’ aspirations.

Now in his late twenties, Miguel no longer drank or did drugs. He preferred to be outdoors. His brother Fito was a hunting guide on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, and Miguel spent many mornings hunting whitetail deer. But he was always working. On one hunting trip, he befriended a visitor from Dallas, offering him shooting tips and inviting him out to meals. Soon Miguel was plying the young man with thirty-five kilos of Gulf Cartel coke a week, to be smuggled into Texas.

They found other recruits in the clubs clustered near the border. Señor Frog’s was the more tourist-friendly chain bar, with a dress code management said kept the “riffraff” away. The gangsters preferred a club called 57th Street, which blasted hip-hop and was considered a safer place to conduct business. And there was always Boys Town, the walled-off strip of cantinas and brothels where young prostitutes offered cheap fucks on creaky mattresses.

These were the places frequented by the boys Miguel and Talibán hoped to recruit. Boys like them—young Mexicans and Tejanos who might exist on both sides of the border but didn’t feel wanted or needed on either. Teenagers who’d dropped out or been kicked out of school. Guys who needed jobs and weren’t troubled when the job description included a possible prison sentence or death.

Miguel and Talibán also made sure the local cops and journalists fell in line. They made the traditional offer, ¿Plata o plomo? (“Silver or lead?”): You take the bribe or you take the bullet. The prices across Tamaulipas ranged from a few hundred bucks a week for a street cop or reporter to a couple grand for a local police chief.

Many took the bribe, but the town didn’t fall easily to Miguel and Los Zetas. Not all of Nuevo Laredo’s independent smugglers were on board with the hostile takeover; nor did every cop, civic leader, and businessman accept their bribes. A turf war broke out, and violence rocked Nuevo Laredo. Bodies were discovered buried in backyards and on ranches. A state police commander and his lieutenant were gunned down in broad daylight.

Mexico fought back, too. In 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was vanquished from the presidency after seventy years of rule. The election of Vicente Fox, a Coca-Cola executive and member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), led Mexico into a new era. It also undercut the government’s existing relationship with the cartels, with whom they could occasionally forge compromises and understandings. Without one-party rule, cooperation fizzled. Fox flooded the disputed territories with troops, aiming to take down top drug bosses.

In 2003, troops swooped into Gulf Cartel territory and captured the Zetas’ founder, Osiel Cárdenas, leaving Nuevo Laredo up for grabs. To the west and east, every other key city—the “plazas,” as the cartels called their crucial smuggling outposts—was controlled by Mexico’s most powerful criminal gangs. Now those gangs saw a chance to take Nuevo Laredo. None more so than El Chapo’s Sinaloa gang.

In the weeks after Cárdenas was captured, El Chapo called a summit with a loose network of gangsters who controlled smuggling from Juárez to Tijuana. These were generational smugglers playing under the old rules, which respected history and geography and traditional power. They divided up territories, leaving the Juárez natives to control Juárez, the Baja families to run Tijuana, and so on. They honored whoever was next in line, paid off whoever needed paying off, and killed only when necessary, though “necessary” was loosely defined.

To take on the Zetas, El Chapo dispatched his own native of Los Dos Laredos, a former Texas high-school football player named Edgar Valdez Villarreal. His nickname, “La Barbie,” had been coined by a Texas football coach enamored of his light-blue eyes and pale skin. But La Barbie had fallen into Laredo’s street gangs and fled across the river when American law enforcement caught on, and he’d been a faithful drug warrior ever since. He’d earned his stripes as a cartel assassin, and now he was expected to build an army of sicarios to take on the Zetas.

A war broke out. Miguel and La Barbie were its colonels, two formerly impoverished street kids fighting for control of their hometowns. La Barbie recruited gang members from El Salvador’s powerful criminal gang, MS-13, and showed up in Nuevo Laredo with a message for the Zetas: Retreat or face the wrath of Los Negros, which is what Barbie had dubbed his own mercenary unit. The name translated to “the Black Ones.”

As the Zetas battled Los Negros, Miguel revealed himself to be a charismatic leader but also happy—desperate even—to mix it up in firefights. The specific roots of Miguel’s bloodlust are hard to pinpoint. People who have fought and done business alongside him take it for granted now, as if his thirst for violence is among his immutable traits, like his chocolate skin or night-sky hair. But there was no known violence in his childhood; his de facto patriarch, Kiko, wasn’t believed to spill any blood during his short-lived criminal career.

It appeared that Miguel was driven by a combustible combination of resentment, ambition, and cynicism, a man seizing at power that was once, and would soon be, laughably out of grasp. He didn’t expect to live into his forties, and he behaved that way as he and the Zetas seized Nuevo Laredo. He and the Zetas murdered four cops associated with El Chacho, then killed El Chacho, dumping his body in the town square clad in women’s underwear. Later, he ordered the Nuevo Laredo police, whom the Zetas now basically controlled, to round up any smuggler who had resisted the Gulf’s takeover. There were thirty-four such holdouts crammed into the house by the time Miguel arrived dressed in black fatigue pants and black boots, a makeshift uniform designed to evoke the power of a Special Forces unit. He picked one out and brought him forward, then asked the assembled men whether anyone knew the location of the heart. No one answered, so Miguel offered a visual anatomy lesson, plunging his knife into the man’s chest and watching him die.

As the battle for Nuevo Laredo raged, the Zetas continued recruiting ex-soldiers, growing in power as the arm of the Gulf Cartel. Each was assigned a call number based on seniority: the first to defect was Z-1; the second, Z-2; and so on. Technically, only soldiers could be Zetas. But Miguel exhibited such savagery that he was bequeathed a call number, despite never having served a day in the military. By then he was the fortieth so-called Zeta, Z-40, but everyone just called him Cuarenta. “Forty.”

Throughout the 2000s, Forty accumulated enough power within the Zetas, and enough enemies outside of it, that he could have gotten away with hiding out on his ranches all day while his killers fought his war. But he remained a grunt. He dressed modestly and ready for battle, in fatigues and T-shirts, with knives, assault rifles, and grenades on his hips. He was still among the first out of the truck when the bullets started flying.

He continued roaming the streets of Nuevo Laredo, enticing poor teenagers to join up. But there was a problem: they couldn’t fight. Though the Zetas now included hundreds of members, most had no military training at all. So Forty improvised.

He traveled to Guatemala to recruit former Special Forces, known as Kaibiles, to train his young recruits. He shipped them to a camp in the mountains near Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, where they slept side by side on cots. In grueling training sessions, former Special Forces from Mexico and the Kaibiles taught them to wage war. They crawled and breached and ran, stripped guns and shot all manner of weapons. They learned the art of urban warfare, practicing bursting through doors and clearing houses.

Forty himself taught them to kill. He tied up some enemy he’d captured and offered his recruit the choice of a sledgehammer or a machete. The ones who didn’t start swinging were relegated to duty as halcones—“hawks,” or lookouts. The ones who did became Forty’s sicarios, and they helped the Zetas grow their brand, which was defined by headline-grabbing violence. From decapitations to swinging corpses to bodies burned in oil drums, Zeta-style killings would come to define Mexico’s drug war.

It was a blood binge fueled by several factors, starting with the Zetas’ background as paramilitary soldiers. Smuggling had long been a family business in Mexico, governed by unwritten rules like the ones that governed the American mob wars. But the Zetas weren’t a party to that social contract. They were mercenaries, with all the training of an elite killing squad but none of the duty to protect.

There were other factors at play, too. Scholars believe the Zetas’ penchant for beheadings was influenced by the Kaibiles, who favored the practice. It’s believed the Zetas’ desire to videotape the beheadings, and to use social media to disseminate them, was inspired by Al-Qaeda.

There may have been religious influences, too. Though Forty and most other traffickers practiced Catholicism, some Zetas worshipped at the feet of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a folkloric goddess whose graces are sought by some impoverished Mexicans. Shrines to her stand tall in stash houses and prison cells across Mexico. Some other Zetas practiced Santería, an Afro-Caribbean faith that borrows from Catholicism. One early Zeta named Mamito considered himself a brujo of this faith, someone to whom the burden of violence fell directly from the hands of God.

Or maybe the extreme violence was a simple business calculation. Forty and the Zetas were disrupters, a small upstart seeking power in a system tightly guarded by dynastic, politically influential families. They’d come to fuck things up.

If fighting off La Barbie and the Mexican government wasn’t enough, the Zetas soon discovered a new enemy: its patrones at the Gulf Cartel. In 2007, four years after he was captured, Osiel Cárdenas, the Zetas’ founder, was extradited to Texas, where he faced charges that would land most drug dealers in prison for life. But Cárdenas agreed to plead guilty and forfeit fifty million dollars in assets. In exchange, the inventor of an elite killing squad would spend just twenty-five years in prison.

Though his agreement was shrouded in secrecy, it was easy for the Zetas to deduce how Cárdenas had landed such a sweet deal. He’d agreed to snitch. Feeling betrayed, Forty and the Zetas started to splinter off from the Gulf Cartel, a division that would alter the criminal landscape and increase bloodshed across Mexico.

It was the rise of the paramilitaries. As the Zetas helped the Gulf expand, and Barbie’s Los Negros fought for Sinaloa, rival cartels responded the way rival businesses do: they chased the trend. The Juárez Cartel recruited former police officers for its enforcement wing, La Linea. Artistas Asesinos, a Juárez street gang, went to work there as enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel.

These new groups weren’t generational smugglers, inheriting traditions from their poppy-farming fathers and grandfathers. They were embittered warriors who had opted out of Mexico’s rule of law. Human smuggling, gun-running, oil thievery—all crime was now on the table. All violence in its pursuit was an acceptable cost of doing business. Paramilitary tactics became the norm.

Local politicians and business owners, once in contract with community-oriented, moblike smuggling enterprises, decried the new tactics, putting even more pressure on the Mexican government to respond. It did. Capos kept falling. Leadership shifted. New factions and alliances formed. The paramilitary groups, the best equipped to seize power, seized it. The Zetas seized the most.

Vicente Fox’s strategy—using military force to aggressively target cartel leaders—was clearly hopeless. Yet in 2006, his successor, Felipe Calderón, doubled down, declaring “war” on the cartels. He found a willing partner in the Bush administration, which agreed to send billions of dollars in aid, to be spent on training, military helicopters, and surveillance planes.

In accepting the Americans’ aid, Calderón was accepting the American strategy of attacking the source of supply (the farmers in Colombia, the traffickers in Mexico, the dealers in the States) rather than the source of demand (American users and drug prohibition laws). It was plainly Sisyphean, if Sisyphus had lugged his boulder by Black Hawk. Economists far and wide argued that spending money on treatment and education in the United States would have a greater impact on the flow of drugs. Even more impactful would be decriminalization. Reducing the risk involved in making and selling drugs would, economists believed, reduce prices, decrease the value of the shipping channels, and decrease the blood spilled defending them.

But the economists’ notion is hopelessly rooted in basic respect for black and brown bodies. The Nixon campaign, searching for answers in 1968, had figured out that the nation’s fascination with getting high was not an addressable issue but a political opportunity. Demonize weed, demonize the hippie; criminalize heroin, criminalize black people.

The politicians contrived evil. Capitalism took it from there. Industries sprang forth from a racist campaign strategy, including militarized counternarcotics forces and a profiteering private prison system. Across the United States and Latin America, curtains fell on new theaters of war, with a bonus for the white warmongers in the directors’ chairs: most of the bodies piling up were black and brown.

Things would change one day. White people would fall victim to heroin addiction, and white politicians would discover how much money there was in weed. Until then, send in the choppers. In the years after Calderón’s declaration of war, the murder rate across Mexico doubled. Forty ordered hundreds of those murders, and committed scores himself. He told the people around him he had trouble sleeping if a day passed without someone dying by his hands.

In his early years with the Zetas, Forty occasionally snuck up to Dallas, where his brother José and other family still lived. He laid no bricks. He was a different dude than the thin-mustached Miguelito who used to live there, joyriding in Cadillacs and looking up to his weed-slinging brother. He was thicker now and prone to wearing tight black shirts that showed off his huskier build. He was the patriarch now, a boss in every way.

He frequented the city’s grittier strip clubs and a Latin hip-hop joint called DMX Club, apparently in search of workers for the Zetas’ fulfillment operation in Dallas. How much time, if any, Miguel and José spent together during those trips is unknown. They weren’t known to be the closest of brothers. Miguel was tight with his younger brothers back in Mexico. José was close to Rodolfo, his fellow stateside construction worker, who, like José, had tried to shun the smuggling business.

As Forty rose in the ranks, he couldn’t get to Dallas anymore. He was under indictment in Mexico and Texas for drug trafficking, and federal agents across the American Southwest were beginning to obsess about his whereabouts. They perked up every time an intercepted phone call included mention of a “Miguel,” “Mike,” or “MT,” and they had snitches lined up to tip them off if he sneaked into the States. If the brothers were going to see each other, José would have to come to Miguel.