The numbers are staggering — as many as 120,000 people killed, tens of thousands disappeared, billions of dollars in illicit trade generated each year — but they can only tell you so much. To fully grapple with the violence that has washed over Mexico in the last decade, and understand how the U.S. is implicated in that tragedy, requires going beyond the statistics. Behind every death, every disappearance, and every black-market deal is a human story. For nearly two decades, Melissa del Bosque, an award-winning investigative reporter with the Texas Observer, has made it her mission to bring those stories to light. In her new book, “Bloodlines: The True Story of a Drug Cartel, the FBI, and the Battle for a Horse-Racing Dynasty,” del Bosque delves into one of the most fascinating drug war cases in recent memory, detailing how key members of the Zetas cartel were brought down after a sprawling, multi-year federal investigation revealed the organization had laundered millions of dollars into the high-stakes — often shady — world of quarter horse racing.

Built on three years of reporting, “Bloodlines” tells multiple stories at once. The main character, Scott Lawson, is an FBI agent who, as a rookie, took on a hardship post in the border city of Laredo, Texas, in 2009. Following up on a tip regarding an unusual horse purchase at an Oklahoma auction, Lawson soon learns the record-setting buy is linked to Miguel Treviño, the head of the Zetas cartel, via Treviño’s U.S.-based brother, José. An outsider to the region, Lawson turns to agent Alma Perez, a Mexican-American woman who grew up with family on both sides of the Rio Grande, for help (Alma Perez is pseudonym granted to the agent, who still has family in Mexico). Capitalizing on her extraordinary access, del Bosque follows the two agents over multiple years as their investigation burrows deeper into the inner workings of the Zetas, the organization’s remarkable penetration of the horse-racing industry, and culminating in José Treviño’s conviction in Austin, Texas, courtroom along with several senior Zetas figures. The city of Laredo, and its sister city on the Mexican side of the border, Nuevo Laredo, are the backdrop of “Bloodlines,” and with good reason. The Treviño brothers have deep ties to “los dos Laredos.” Not only that, the land port separating the two communities is the busiest in the country, making it prime real estate for organized crime and allowing the Zetas to evolve from the paramilitary wing of the Gulf Cartel into one of the most diversified and feared criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere. “The Zetas were a multibillion-dollar, transnational business just like General Motors or ExxonMobil,” del Bosque writes. “And there was no more lucrative and coveted territory for moving merchandise than their hometown.” Reminiscent of a border version of “The Wire,” the acclaimed HBO show depicting the Baltimore drug trade, Bloodlines is perhaps most revelatory in its depiction of the U.S. agencies and offices ostensibly arrayed to oppose groups like the Zetas. Del Bosque takes readers inside a six-story building in Laredo that serves as both a home to the country’s top law enforcement agencies and as a frontline in bureaucratic drug-war infighting. The least respected agents in the building, del Bosque notes, belong to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, wing. The FBI, she adds, is “somewhere in the middle” of the pecking order, sharing a floor with HSI. At the top of the border-enforcement food chain is the Drug Enforcement Administration, occupying the building’s top two floors and described by some of the building’s occupants as the “cowboys of the DOJ.” Throughout her book, del Bosque details turf wars between U.S. agencies, particularly those involving the DEA, routinely jeopardizing the overlapping investigations and interests of the nation’s massive, multi-pronged border security apparatus. “There was no more competitive environment than the border, where state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies were all vying for the same targets,” del Bosque writes. “There was only so much government money to go around, and arresting a high-level cartel operative would mean a promotion and more funding from Washington.” With its rich characters, competing agendas, and inherently dramatic storyline, “Bloodlines” reads like a movie, and so it comes as little to surprise that it will be one — Universal Pictures optioned the book, with Channing Tatum slated to star as Scott Lawson. In an interview with The Intercept, del Bosque described her motivations for telling the story, her thoughts on the drug war, and her (half-serious) creation of a new journalistic genre. You have reported on all sorts of dynamic stories from the border. When and how did you decide to tell this story as a book? In writing about the border and Mexico for so long, my frustration is that most people in the U.S. don’t really pay that much attention to what’s happening — the violence, the drug war violence in Mexico. So increasingly I’ve been focusing on narratives and just telling really compelling stories that will pull people in to learn more about what’s happening, even if they’re not normally interested in something like that. With this case, because it took place both in the United States and in Mexico, and involved racetracks all over the southwest and in California, I thought this is a way to really hook people into a story that they might not normally want to read about the drug war and what’s going on in Mexico. And I was sort of hooked on this detective story, and then getting to tell the larger story about how the violence came about in Mexico and the synthesis between organized crime and the cartels, and then the story of the Zetas, which was really a game changer for the violence in Mexico. They started at the beginning of the century and they were the first paramilitary cartel. And so they brought this whole new level of violence and paramilitary training to the conflict. The violence really took off once the Zetas got firmly entrenched in northern Mexico, in Veracruz and those areas. And so we had the trial in Austin in 2013, and it lasted almost a month, and it was pretty fascinating because it was the first time that we got to hear founding members of the cartel actually testify publicly, and then we have the brother of one of the leaders of the cartel also on trial. And then we have this wealthy business owner from Veracruz, Poncho Colorado, who’s been funneling the Zetas money through his business to buy horses. So, it’s kind of all of the ingredients of the conflict and what’s happening in Mexico present in that case.



Relatives leave flowers to commemorate victims of the Zetas drug cartel in Monterrey, Mexico, on Aug. 25, 2012. Fifty-two people died on August 25, 2011, when members of the cartel doused the Casino Royale with gasoline and set it ablaze. Photo: AFP/Getty Images



And so you were going to court during the trial and filing stories at the time? Yeah, I covered the sentencing phase of the trial. And then there was a retrial for Poncho Colorado, so I went to that, and then there was a bribery trial, too, because his business partner and his eldest son came up to Austin — his business partner came to testify about how upstanding their business was and that there had never been anything untoward or any kind of dirty money coming through it. They had been going out to the jail and communicating with Poncho Colorado on the phone there, and law enforcement was listening to all of their conversations and found out that they wanted to bribe the judge for $1.2 million. And so the FBI set up a sting, and they were actually arrested at the courthouse while we were all there. They were going to put a golf bag full of money into the trunk of the judge’s car. So the case just kept going on and on and on. It had a lot of twists and turns. English language accounts of the border, the drug war, and Mexico often rely on a certain set of themes and sometimes cliches — cycles of violence, depravity, etc. — that can give a one-dimensional view of that deeply complex region of the world. In the acknowledgements at the end of your book, you write about growing up near the border and what Mexico means to you, and you seem to acknowledge the danger of those pitfalls. What did you do to avoid recreating those simplistic narratives? That’s a good question. I guess I’m always trying to tell the human story, and I think what happens when you often see stories about the drug war or the border is that people often become kind of cartoon characters and you can’t connect with them on a human level. But we’re all just human beings, and money affects everybody, white or brown, in Mexico or the United States. You see these guys at the racetracks, these Anglo horse owners who are just taking the money, not asking any questions, and you see the same thing happening in Mexico. There are many common denominators, so I guess I look for that — the commonality in all of us. Because I’m not really interested in stereotypes, I try to stay away from that, and also these body count types of stories. This book is based around a crime, but it’s more of a psychological detective story, because the investigators are also going through their own journeys as they’re unraveling the investigation. I was especially excited to learn that Scott Lawson’s partner was a Latina from Laredo who had family on both sides of the border. That, to me, was great, because then I could tell a much richer story.



Photo: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/GettyImages