A Mexican drug gang infiltrates an alcoholism-riddled Wyoming Indian reservation to sell a new addiction

Michael Riley:

Natasha Washakie has lived the depths of addiction to methamphetamine and come back up.

She's seen friends trade sex for meth. She's seen one get her own children hooked on the drug, which among its side effects suppresses the appetite.

"We used to joke that she kept her whole family high so she wouldn't have to feed them," said the 28-year-old Northern Arapaho woman, who has been clean for 15 months after a three-year addiction.

Washakie knows the drug, almost unheard of here before 2000, is slowly destroying this west-central Wyoming reservation.

She also knows where it comes from: a Mexican drug gang that arrived here more than four years ago hoping to shift the alcohol addiction of many tribal members to meth.

"Honestly, I think that was the best business decision they ever made," she said sadly.

Authorities could hardly argue.

According to information gathered during an investigation that has so far led to more than 17 arrests, that gang is the Sinaloan Cowboys, an organization with a sophisticated structure and a Fortune 500 business plan: When you're a drug cartel looking to expand, go where the addicts are.

Over a period of more than four years, the gang funneled nearly 100 pounds of meth with a value of over $6.5 million into and around the reservation.

At least three gang members were dispatched from a Utah-based cell to reservation towns. They rented houses and met girlfriends. Using American Indian women, they gained entree to the reservation and established a network of more than a dozen dealers, many of them American Indians, officials said.

"They identified the reservation as an addict-rich environment, a population that for years had been addicted to alcohol," said Robert Murray, an assistant U.S. attorney in Cheyenne, who said that information on the gang's plan to infiltrate the reservation had been garnered from multiple sources and that the investigation was ongoing.

A plan born of deep cynicism, it was also a phenomenal success. In a matter of five years, tribal leaders say, meth went from a marginal drug to a virtual torrent on this 2.2 million-acre reservation.

"It's an epidemic, and I don't think we've reached the peak," said Mark Russler, executive director of Fremont Counseling Services, which treats addicts.

Russler said that the proportion of meth addicts at two facilities in Lander and Riverton - the region's largest - jumped from 5 percent or 6 percent of clients in 1999 to more than 25 percent.

From 2003 to 2004 - a year tribal police say saw the worst increase in meth use - criminal charges for drug possession on the Wind River reservation increased 353 percent. In 2004, assaults quadrupled thefts nearly doubled, and child neglect increased by 85 percent from the previous year.

Authorities say arrests and several convictions, including the sentencing of one of the cell leaders to life in prison in July, have slowed the advance of the drug here. Many tribe members say they've seen little effect.

"There are so many people using, you can see them just walking around the store" here, said Georgia C'Hair, a reservation treatment counselor and former meth addict. "Their skin is ashen. Those repetitive movements and jerks. It's what addicts call tweaking."

Investigators say the Sinaloan Cowboys' success here offers a frightening picture of meth's rapid rise in Indian Country, providing a snapshot of how the stimulant has grown to rival alcohol as the drug of choice on reservations throughout the West.

Experts say that about half of addictions on reservations still are to alcohol.

But meth has moved so quickly that it has left tribal governments across the region reeling. Struggling to catch up, some leaders even have ceded fiercely protected tribal sovereignty in exchange for help.

Two major busts on the Wind River reservation in the past two years were the result of an unprecedented law enforcement coalition that included the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, local tribal police and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Sprawling across a rolling prairie at the foot of the Wind River Mountains, the reservation appears the last place that would attract Mexican drug gangs that flourish in the immigrant barrios of America's major cities.

Rural, even remote, the reservation is home to 6,400 American Indians split mostly between two tribes, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho. Apart from Riverton, which is largely white, the reservation's few small towns are destitute collections of mostly sagging homes and rundown trailers.

A 1998 tribal study found that 38 percent of American Indian adults on the reservation were unemployed and that 57 percent lived in poverty.

But from the perspective of gang members, the reservation had an important plus: Jurisdictional barriers normally prevent state and local police from operating on tribal lands. And despite the apparent poverty of Indian Country, many tribal members receive monthly checks from mineral royalties or other tribal income.

Members of the Mexican gang discovered that alcohol sales on other reservations spiked after members received their checks, sources told investigators, and they believed they could tap into that cash.

"It was natural to try to transfer that addiction from alcohol to meth," Murray said.

The gang's tentacles reach across a vast swath of territory from California and the Northwest through much of the Rocky Mountains, investigators say. Authorities describe the Sinaloan Cowboys as a street gang that distributes drugs for the Sinaloan cartel, one of Mexico's most brutal drug-trafficking organizations.

While the gang is active in several cities, investigators say reservations seem to hold a special attraction. As early as the mid-'90s, members of the same Ogden-based cell were dealing on reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska, Murray said.

The gang arrived in central Wyoming in the 1990s, first distributing meth to mostly white customers in Lander and Riverton. But sometime in 2001, investigators say, they set their sights on the Wind River, with cell members moving onto the reservation permanently, either with girlfriends or in a rented trailer.

It was a tried-and-true tactic for the gang: One of the cell members - Marcelino Rocha - already had several children with an Indian woman near a Nebraska reservation, where the gang distributed meth in the late 1990s.

Overseen by the cell's leaders - brothers Julio and Martin Sagaste-Cruz - the gang smuggled a pure form of meth made in "superlabs" on the Mexican border.

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