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

       CHAPTER THREE

       FOLLOW KIKO

      PIEDRAS NEGRAS, COAHUILA, MEXICO

      Summer 2008

      I’m here, where are you, are you coming? José was standing outside a gas station one summer evening, talking—and hoping—into his phone. He was in Piedras Negras, a snaking two-hour drive north of Laredo’s Bridge One, where he would soon find himself emptying his pocket trash for a rotating cast of badge-wielding Americans. This was a different crossing point on a different day, but José could expect the same riverside indignities whenever he decided to cross back into Texas, probably in a day or two. For now, though, there was a party to attend.

      It was a family affair, thrown by his little brother in rural Coahuila, a Mexican border state about a seven-hour drive from José’s house outside Dallas. Leaving the United States didn’t come with the same harassment, since the Mexican authorities didn’t scrutinize José’s entries as the American ones did. Still, crossing into Mexico could be treacherous for José and people like him.

      It was a travel experience unique to the friends, families, and associates of Mexico’s most-wanted criminals. Some American defense lawyers make the trip when they’re invited to off-the-radar meetings, traveling to undisclosed locations to update drug lords on the status of various cases against them, their families, and their organizations. The actor Sean Penn took the trip and made it famous with his 2015 visit to El Chapo—the long, blind journey into the remote Mexican countryside, no cellphones allowed.

      José made the trip only occasionally, usually for family gatherings or parties like this one. For baptisms, Mother’s Day, and other occasions—tonight was a nephew’s birthday—his brother Miguel liked to throw the doors open at one of his ranches and invite in people he loved and trusted. He sent out for beer and made sure it was cold, sent out for cabrito and made sure it was perfectly smoked. With a busy family life in Dallas, José didn’t get there often. This time, he made the trek.

      After crossing, José found his way to a gas station near the border, where one of his brother’s workers was supposed to pick him up and deliver him to the party. But visiting an extraordinarily wanted criminal is never that simple. José waited there for hours, while his little brother’s men surveilled the gas station to ensure that they didn’t catch a tail—that a Mexican soldier or cop, with an American agent as backup, wasn’t lying in wait, hoping José would lead them to his brother. José kept calling back to the party, calling and calling. I’m here, where are you, are you coming, but they didn’t come for hours.

      Eventually, after the sun ducked behind Coahuila’s scrubby landscape, a pickup pulled up, and his brother’s guys drove José down a long road that snaked away from Piedras Negras and into the more remote countryside of Coahuila state, transitioning along the way from pavement to dirt and slipping through thickets of mesquite trees. Even five hundred miles from Dallas, it must have felt like home.

      José had every reason to love life out there, in the countryside south of the river, surrounded by rolling hills, towers of hay, and roving bands of livestock. Some of the images he and his brothers clung to from their childhood were of them standing amid horses and cattle and whitetail deer in the open space of Tamaulipas.

      There were centuries of tradition in ranching this territory. It was here that, in the 1600s and 1700s, Spanish missionaries established ranchos and missions on both sides of the river. When they couldn’t find enough Spaniards to staff them, they turned to the Indians they’d managed to convert. This introduction to horsemanship would backfire in later decades, when Mexican and American soldiers encountered more and more Comanches who were lethal on horseback.

      It was also here, in the mid-1800s, that Richard King, a United States Army steamboat captain, recruited Mexican vaqueros, cowboys, to staff his King Ranch in newly established Texas. A century and a half later, the 825,000-acre Texas ranch is so famous that its name graces a line of Ford pickups. It’s also credited with the proliferation of the quarter-horse breed.

      And it was here, across those same centuries, that Spanish, Mexican, and even some Anglo ranchers developed the heavily Spanish, Catholic culture, known as Tejano, that would come to define the region long after more aggressive Anglo settlers arrived to dispossess the Mexicans of their land and power.

      By the time José Treviño Morales was born, in 1966, these borders were settled. Ranching still ruled. His father worked as a vaquero on ranch land south of Nuevo Laredo, where he taught José and his brothers to care for cattle and the sensible cow ponies that roamed their home state of Tamaulipas. But sometime before José hit high school, his dad left the family. It’s unclear whether he abandoned them, migrated in search of work, or disappeared under some other circumstances. Whatever the reason, he was gone, and so was the rancho lifestyle José and his brothers knew. There was nothing for the remaining Treviño clan in the countryside, so they moved into urban Nuevo Laredo and tried to survive.

      The economics of that state of Mexico had long been fraught. Cities in the southeast were positioned along the Gulf of Mexico and offered jobs at the ports and in the oil industry. In the West sat Ciudad Victoria, the state capital. But the state’s northern tip, where José grew up, was an economic fault line, always shifting and occasionally rupturing.

      During World War II, as the American agriculture industry struggled to find cheap labor, the United States and Mexico developed the Bracero Program, which invited Mexican laborers to cross legally into the United States to work farming jobs left unfilled by soldiers. The program offered a minimum wage, temporary housing, and health benefits, and it drew hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers every year, especially from borderland cities like Nuevo Laredo.

      It also upended the culture of migration between the two countries. By the mid-1960s, the United States had issued more than four million work visas to Mexican farmworkers. Then, under pressure from American labor groups, the United States suspended the Bracero Program. But the migratory spigot wasn’t so easy to turn off. With Mexican families now accustomed to work-driven migration, and with fifty thousand American farms now accustomed to a steady flow of cheap labor, workers stayed, and workers kept coming—papers or not. Together with new visa limitations and waning Mexican farm jobs, the end of the Bracero Program sparked the influx of undocumented Mexican immigrants to the United States, which helped double the country’s Mexican-born population every decade through the 2000s. Instead of a hub for seasonal migrant workers, Nuevo Laredo became a key passageway for undocumented immigrants.

      A year after the Bracero Program’s demise, the Mexican government launched the Border Industrialization Program, designed to absorb the suddenly idle labor force along the border. The program allowed American and other foreign manufacturers to build maquiladoras, factories, in Mexico and import materials tax-free. Hundreds of new factories created thousands of low-skill, low-wage factory jobs assembling electronics, toys, and other Black Friday grist. But manufacturers, in Mexico and across the globe, targeted women for the jobs, banking that their inexperience