Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone
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.
NUEVO LAREDO, TAMAULIPAS
April 2009
The crowd formed early for the Futurity Nuevo Laredo, the town’s big annual race for promising two-year-old quarter horses. The race typically drew about two thousand people, but there was an early buzz and a swelling crowd at this year’s event, which marked a new era: it was the first big race at the town’s new track.
Fans settled into the shiny bleachers that flanked the track, shaded by sweeping steel overhangs. Others found tables inside the air-conditioned restaurant that was perched at the top of the grandstand, protected from the elements by tinted glass. When all those seats filled up, people stacked themselves four or five deep near the sturdy new rail, relying on their collective canopy of wide-brimmed cowboy hats for shade.
The trainers on the backside had no such worries, prepping their horses in covered stalls built from brick and painted a pristine white. And all across the track, from the shit shovelers in the stalls to the cops roaming the concourse, people whispered gratitude for the track’s benefactor and foreman, Forty. He loved horse racing so much that he’d built his hometown a new track, using farm equipment bought with drug proceeds in the United States and shipped back across the border. Pretty soon his most prized colt would burst from the track’s new starting gate.
Like José, Forty talked longingly about the family’s upbringing on the ranches of Tamaulipas, and about his family’s collective passion for days spent under the beating sun, among roaming cattle and sensible horses. If their father’s departure had cost the Treviños a romantic countryside life, Forty seemed hell-bent on re-creating it.
And he’d found a man who could help him do it. His name was Mario “Poncho” Cuellar. An experienced trafficker in his forties, Poncho had been on hiatus from the cocaine-smuggling