Read Online This Love Is Not for Cowards by Robert Andrew Powell - Free Book Online

ride, but, aside from the painfully bright sun, it turned out to be not so bad. “The ride back is always easier,” advised Mike, the El Kartel capo. “Everybody’s tired, nobody has any money left, and the drugs are all gone.”
    On that trip back, the bus stopped in Chihuahua city at Carnitas el Entronque, a roadside vendor of deep-fried everything. Pig, cow, chicken, and who knows what else bubbled in giant vats of brown oil. Tripe—cow intestines—bobbed to the top of the vats, poked back into the oil by wooden paddles the size of boat oars. When the flesh crackled with crispness, workers used giant metal tongs to pull the meats from the vats. These body parts were served still oozing hot oil. No quiero, gracias. No way, Jose. While El Kartel ate, I checked out Chihuahua. The capital is a lot cleaner than Juárez. It’s more modern, too. Expensive cars—BMW, Audi, Acura—sparkle in lots lining the highway. Dealership signs battle American chain restaurants for attention. The city looks so gringo that smugglers paid to slip Guatemalans across the U.S. border have been caught dropping them off in the capital and telling them they’d made it to Texas. On the northern edge of town, a series of banners advertise new houses built by Grupo Yvasa, the Ibarra family construction company.
    Francisco Ibarra’s father moved to Juárez in the 1950s. He was a young man from the coastal state of Sonora, the owner of nothing more than an engineering degree and a hunger to earn his fortune. Juárez was much smaller back then, a frontier, a place where a hustler could try just about anything. (Which it still is. “Juárez is the second world,” Francisco tells me. “It’s not settled, it’s not the first world like El Paso or Mexico City. There are more opportunities.”) His father started out selling bread by the side of the road. He saved up enough money to open a food stand, Tacos El Campeón, which remains in the family. He tapped gold when he ventured into construction. His Grupo Yvasa homes are not luxurious accommodations. I spent New Year’s Eve in an Yvasa house located in a dirt-road subdivision maybe seven miles from the Indios’ practice facility. The house, listed as a two-bedroom with a front yard, looked more like a subdivided studio apartment. A kitchen stove and sink shared a living room with enough space for a couch and a portable television but too small to add even a table. Winter air rushed through gaps between the walls and the ceiling; I’ve built snow forts that were more substantial. Yet that house and countless houses just like it sold as fast as they could be built. The North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1994, moved Mexico from an agrarian peasant economy to a system dependent upon manufacturing. Jobs harvesting the fields of Michoacán transferred to the maquiladoras along the Texas border. Migrants in search of factory work, hardly wealthy, needed somewhere to live. The poorest squatted in tar-paper shantytowns up in the hills. Those with some means—the house where I partied on New Year’s Eve is rented by a nurse from Puebla—moved into the kinds of homes Yvasa slapped together in one subdivision after another. As their business grew, the Ibarras began winning lucrative government contracts to lay highways, pump water, and build still more houses on choice city land.
    When Francisco Ibarra was young, his father pushed him to study engineering. Francisco earned a degree, but construction never made his heart thump—not the way a mere sport, soccer, always has. Rather than join Grupo Yvasa, Francisco volunteered with the Cobras, back then the city’s new professional team. He broadcast their games over airwaves he rented on a local AM station. Francisco stayed in radio even after the Cobras quickly folded. Grupo Yvasa’s fattening bank accounts allowed him to buy a station outright.