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