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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 in the workforce, combined with old-fashioned sexism, would keep wages low. Eight out of ten maquiladora jobs were filled by young women.

That didn’t help the Treviño boys. The Treviño boys—all the Tamaulipas boys—needed jobs. José and his brothers washed cars and worked as gardeners, doing whatever they could to bring in money. But it wasn’t enough. If they didn’t want to smuggle drugs, the best place to find work was north of the river.

José’s big brother Kiko—short for Juan Francisco—went first, in 1978. He had shaggy black hair and a jawline that cast a shadow on his long, muscular neck, which was often exposed by a gaping shirt collar. Kiko was the oldest of the thirteen Treviño children, and he was smooth, able to talk himself up without stumbling into braggadocio. He was savvy, too, not just dreaming of a better way but figuring out a plan. He served as the de facto patriarch after their dad left, and he modeled manhood for his six younger brothers, marrying a local girl and raising a border-zigzagging family in the tradition of Los Dos Laredos.

Kiko’s in-laws were bricklayers in Dallas, so Kiko decided to try laying bricks in Dallas. It was a good time, and a good place to start a career in construction. Thanks to an oil boom, Texas’s population was growing twice as fast as the country’s, as workers and moneymen came to cash in. By 1980, one hundred thousand people were arriving in the Dallas–Fort Worth area every year.

Some of the new Texans were Mexicans and Mexican-Americans like Kiko and his family, but many were middle-class and wealthy white Americans. They needed houses, and schools, and strip malls. They needed Mexicans to build them.

Kiko had never laid a brick, but he learned to do it by watching his in-laws work the trowel. José came a few years later, when he was fifteen, bailing on high school. By the mid-1980s, Kiko had his own company, Treviño Masonry, and a crew of thirty-two fellow Mexicans building three houses at a time. He and José got their work visas, and got their Social Security numbers, and got their tax bills, and paid their tax bills. They banked enough money to buy a few shoebox houses in the working-class neighborhoods southeast of downtown Dallas. After laying bricks all day, they spent their nights remodeling those houses for their families. More work as bricklayers would mean more houses to buy and remodel, and more houses would allow more of their kin to move north. Their sisters had already made their way, and Mom was spending a lot of time in Dallas, too.

By the early 1990s, José was pulling in $43,500 a year, a decent wage for a no-diploma son of Tamaulipas. Kiko was doing well, too. But Kiko craved more, and he saw it in the arrival of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

It was well known that NAFTA would open the floodgates all along the United States’ two-thousand-mile southern border, increasing imports from $40 billion to almost $300 billion over the next two decades. Laredo would benefit especially from its place at the southern tip of U.S. Interstate 35, a thumping artery that stretched north from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and beyond. Once NAFTA passed, Interstate 35 would be clogged with thousands of eighteen-wheelers, carrying goods through Texas and into the Midwest.

In 1992, the year before lawmakers passed NAFTA, Kiko bought a 1958 tractor-trailer and returned to the Mexican side of the border. He started moving loads of raw materials from Nuevo Laredo to the maquiladoras of interior Mexico. But he wasn’t just preparing for NAFTA’s promised impact on U.S.-Mexican trade; he was also betting on the effect both governments refused to acknowledge: the increased flow of drugs across those same borders.

By truck, train, car, and foot, traffic across the border was expected to skyrocket when the law took effect on January 1, 1994. Every vessel that crossed offered an opportunity to satisfy America’s unquenchable thirst for illegal narcotics—cocaine, from the wilds of Colombia but shipped through Mexico; heroin, from the poppy fields of Sinaloa; and weed, from whatever patch of land industrious growers could find. Kiko started using his new truck to transport marijuana.

Not much is known about Kiko’s previous history as a smuggler, if he had any. But he had come up during a golden age of pot smuggling, after America developed its taste for weed but before its government declared war on it. If you grew up poor in Nuevo Laredo, the business, and the connections, came easily whenever you decided you wanted in.

Kiko wanted in. He bought weed from suppliers in Mexico and smuggled it across the river into Laredo, presumably tucked away in his new tractor-trailer. Then he hired couriers and paid them a few thousand bucks a load to transport it to Dallas.

In previous eras, shipping narcotics north on Interstate 35 was the easy part: keep the speed limit and stay inside the lines and no one would bother you. But in the 1970s, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that Border Patrol agents at checkpoints within the country’s borders could stop and question motorists regardless of whether they suspected wrongdoing. Now, at checkpoints like the Laredo North station, located thirty miles north of the border on Interstate 35, agents could stop and question any motorist. And they could pull cars and trucks into hard secondary with only the slightest hint of probable cause.

Kiko’s drivers moved a few hundred pounds of weed at a time. Usually they concealed it amid construction materials in a trailer. Other times, they used a ranch just off the highway to avoid the checkpoint altogether. They paid a few hundred bucks per trip to enter the ranch on one side of the checkpoint and exit on the other.

Kiko was hardly a kingpin. Other Texas smugglers around that time imported ten times what he did. But he made enough to expand his trucking company. He moved back to Nuevo Laredo, sleeping in a small living space behind his office while his wife and kids stayed back in Dallas. He had nine employees, including a bookkeeper, messengers, and drivers who delivered paper, aluminum, and other raw materials to factories across Mexico.

Between legitimate shipping and marijuana smuggling, Kiko was making enough to keep expanding the Treviño clan’s nest in Dallas. He bought new trucks for his shipping business, a new pickup for himself, and a motorcycle for his son.

José, now in his mid-twenties, stuck to bricklaying. He met a woman named Zulema, an American citizen eight years his junior. She had dark-chocolate eyes and wavy black hair, and her round cheeks gave shape to a determined face. She shared José’s Mexican heritage, privilege-free upbringing, and bottomless work ethic. She was just seventeen when they married, around the time Kiko pivoted into smuggling. She gave birth to their first child, Alexandra, a couple of months later.

José became a naturalized citizen and kept working the trowel for whatever contractor would take him. He rose before the sun and put in long days, building homes and schools and stores in and around Dallas. He wanted nothing to do with smuggling. If he lived with some festering indignation over his family’s economic abandonment—by his father, by his fatherland, by his adopted homeland—he never expressed it to the people around him. Instead, he was building a life the way he stacked bricks in the morning shade: slowly and dutifully, actively rejecting the smuggling heritage of his hometown.

But occasionally, big brother Kiko called in a favor.

José likely longed to say no. But he was lugging that word of rejection uphill. He possessed a deep sense of what social scientists call “familism,” a commitment to family over self. Social scientists routinely pin that quality on immigrants, especially Mexican ones, citing a cocktail of factors: religion, large family size, and economic necessity. And maybe immigrants do rely more heavily on family, as a tool against marginalization, using flexibility and fluidity as antidotes to systematically limited opportunity. But also, it’s just what some families do: They stick the hell together. They say yes.

The Treviño brothers’ early years in Dallas would have tantalized those familism-obsessed social scientists. The siblings found each other work, built each other homes, shared cars, and cared for each other’s kids. This unflagging devotion to family may or may not dissipate in future generations, but José’s generation was the first. If big brother asked, José said yes.

Whenever Kiko’s drug couriers arrived in Dallas with the weed, they would hole up at the La Quinta, the Travelers, or some other access-road dump, waiting for one of Kiko’s workers to pick up the delivery. Before they returned to Laredo, they wanted their few-thousand-dollar delivery fee. A few times, they beeped José to collect it. He got the cash from Kiko and delivered it to the motels.

Kiko’s enterprise didn’t last long. Late in 1993, before NAFTA even took effect, Kiko’s couriers tried to pass through the Laredo North checkpoint at three-thirty in the morning. A drug-sniffing dog named Wondo perked up, leapt onto the tires, sniffed, leapt back down, and sat up straight. The agents knew what that meant, so they opened the trailer, and the dog started jumping like, Let me in. He was an old dog, so for him to be jumping, that meant something.

The agents waved the truck into secondary. The trailer was stuffed with Saltillo tile, destined for the kitchen of some Spanish-style McMansion. The agents hoisted themselves in and clinked their way to the back, following Wondo. That’s where they found the duffel bags, stuffed with 280 pounds of cellophane-wrapped marijuana.

Kiko went to trial in 1995. José wasn’t indicted, but his name did come up a couple of times. That probably explained why José wasn’t in the courtroom to see Kiko sentenced to twenty years—two decades in a Colorado federal prison for moving a drug that, by the time he got out, would be legal in the state where he served his time.

With Kiko in prison, the Treviños kept grinding. Zulema earned a high-school diploma online and slogged through the best work she could find. She made $6 an hour working food service at a middle school; $6.50 as a McDonald’s crew member; and, now, $500 a week working full-time for a temp agency.

José found a steady masonry gig with a residential contractor in the suburbs, and he stuck it out there for six long years. In 2007, he landed a full-time job with a contractor who did brickwork on some of the city’s most prestigious projects: the new basketball arena at Southern Methodist University; the new campus of Booker T. Washington High School, one of the country’s best performing-arts schools; and the new Cowboys Stadium, a monument to American excess fans dubbed “the Death Star.”

José surely knew he worked harder than his paychecks suggested. The incomes of immigrants were systematically stubborn, especially in Texas, where so-called right-to-work laws suppressed union organizing and wages. Texas bricklayers made less than those in most every other state, and 50 or 60 percent less than those in Illinois, California, and New York.

José did manage the occasional pay bump, and he was up to $20 an hour by 2009, from $16.50 when he’d started his previous job. He could load up on hours, too. He’d clocked 240 hours of overtime in his first full year at his new job, including 28 overtime hours one week when the average temperature was 104 degrees.

Still, it was hard to do any more than survive. That’s why they were stuck on their stubby street in Balch Springs, one of the inner-ring suburbs southeast of Dallas. Seventy-five percent of the suburb was black or Hispanic. Almost a quarter were immigrants. Half of the people there spoke something other than English at home. A quarter lived in poverty. The rest lived where the Treviños did, just above it, with the city’s median household income barely scraping forty grand.

If this was the American Dream, it was a sweaty, stressful version of it, land of the free but also of the overdraft fee. The Treviños kept a savings account, but it had never held more than $100. Their checking account had topped out in recent years at $8,692, and that was after a $4,900 tax refund. Most months it hovered around a couple grand. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to take the kids back-to-school shopping at American Eagle and Limited Too; to dine on whatever they could afford at Carnival, the Latin-food grocery chain; to load up at Walmart; to make small donations to the March of Dimes; and to pay for Alex’s braces. And, soon, to help Alex pay for college.

She was their biggest investment, really, the asset they nurtured in hopes that it would pay off for future Treviños. In this and other ways, José and his brothers seemed rooted by the same qualities. They were strivers, willing to bust their butts for what they felt they deserved, and willing to take risks to accelerate their return on investment, which was sluggish by design and decree. They just assessed that risk differently. Kiko had tried to complement his legal shipping business with illegal shipping. His other brothers, the ones José was visiting at the ranch, had written off their own futures in pursuit of riches that paid out sooner and bigger.

José was playing a longer game. If he stayed the course, his American Dream would be deferred to his daughter and her siblings. José may never experience the payoff, but perhaps one day he could see it in her round, beaming face. He made sure to pay the orthodontia bill.

Despite the relentlessness of this life, and despite the travel ordeal, José managed to get to Piedras Negras for the party at Miguel’s ranch. There were four or five structures on the property, including stables for the horses and a sprawling house, and outside a cook grilled meat and veggies. José found his way under the palapa and sipped from his beer.

A man named Poncho approached. Poncho was one of Miguel’s guys, known for his skills as a logistics manager, overseeing the exportation of vast quantities of cocaine into the United States, and the importation of millions of dollars back into Mexico.

José told Poncho about his life. How he’d grown up like this, in the country, among the animals. How he worked as a bricklayer—“like a regular person” were the words that would stick with Poncho. They sat there for hours, drinking and talking.

From the palapa, José could surely see that his brother had managed to remake their old life on this ranch. A couple of calls and Poncho could cut José into all this, no sweat. But José told Poncho no, that he “didn’t want to have anything to do with what was crooked.” The code of familism seemed to have found its limit. So they just sat and drank beers while the sun set on the ranch of the man they called “Cuarenta.”