The night is warm and hazy from the refinery stacks on one side of the border, from street dust and smoke on the other side. A low sky glows dull orange. The stocky man sits on the bricks of the empty hearth in the mostly empty house. His thick arms cradle a baby, and another child bounces around him like a wood sprite, irrepressible after sneaking half a bag of Hershey’s kisses while waiting for the man to get home. This child had called every few minutes on his cell phone during the hours we drove around the city. He gently scolds the kid now and puts the bag of chocolate away.
He took a circuitous route to the tract-house neighborhood, somewhere in the city. I am certain I could not get there again on my own. He will not be at this house for long anyway, or he would never have taken me there. He needed a ride back tonight because his borrowed car broke down. As we drove, he told me that his wife and children had crossed the border some time ago without legal papers, that it was another miracle of the Lord. The house is large, the window blinds bent and broken, a few pieces of cheap, castoff furniture in each room. Except for a table in the kitchen, a strong rough table that he crafted himself with leftover wood from a recent remodeling job.
On the old computer in the kitchen, he shows off some photographs of his recent handiwork—remodeled houses in neighborhoods like this one. He often leaves a house on an hour’s notice and carries nothing with him but his family. His jobs must be arranged through others with the papers and the tools and the connections. He has the strong arms, skills, and hardworking attitude of an expert craftsman, and nothing else. I noticed on occasion during interviews that he would get a call from a former or prospective employer in his new survival world of odd construction jobs. His voice would instantly change from that of “the authority” to that of the submissive worker: “Yes, sir. Yes, chief. Of course, I’m here at your service.... What are your orders, sir?” The very same voice he used as he reenacted other jobs you will read about in this book.
Several days of recordings, about ten hours of sound, went into this book. Other than these introductory pages and a few footnotes, the words in the book are the sicario’s words. Several other interviews were recorded in notebooks—he talked, I translated, and Charles Bowden wrote it down.
The first time I met him, the sicario was not happy at the idea of having to trust yet another person. In fact, he had already placed himself at risk by agreeing to talk to Bowden. Standing outside in a parking lot on a blustery day, Bowden introduces me as his bodyguard. I translate: “Dice que soy su guardaespalda.” For a split second the man’s eyes darken as he considers the possibility, knowing from experience that killers come in all sizes and the one that gets you is the person you overlook, but then the joke kicks in. Here we are—three men totaling at least 600 pounds between them and me at four-foot-eleven and about 100 pounds. The sicario’s usually blank face breaks into a grin, and he laughs out loud, probably convinced by now that we are all crazy and certain that we have to be crazy to be there at all. Later, we learn that there were other crazy people at key moments in his journey, and now I believe he is convinced that we are part of a fraternity of holy fools that God has placed on his path. He believes that God has a purpose for his life, that part of this purpose is fulfilled by telling his story, and that Bowden and I are tools to make it happen.
We go to a motel for the interview. While the room is being rented, he takes me aside and asks me to tell Bowden that he will not be able to talk today, that he has important bills due and needs money up front. Nevertheless, without any money changing hands, we go into the room and sit at the small wooden table while he talks for four hours. He looks at Bowden’s notebook and tells him not to write anything down. Bowden writes for four hours. He takes a small notebook and green pen from me and diagrams parts of the story. At the end of the interview, I reach across the table to take the pages. He laughs and then tears the sheets into tiny bits and pockets them.
Months later, we meet to arrange the details for the filming. This is done as we drive around the city for several hours in another person’s car. The sicario does not like to meet and talk in cafés or other public places. Before he has agreed to talk to Charles Bowden, he has researched him on the Internet, and he comes to the interview with a sheaf of downloaded pages about Bowden’s books and a photograph taken in the writer’s backyard. He has not met the filmmaker at this point, but he has searched the Web for information about Gianfranco Rosi also, and he brings some of those printouts with him when we meet to talk about the project.
He states his conditions: the film can never show his face, and his voice will have to be altered before the film can be shown. There are powerful people on both sides of the border looking for him. The price on his head is high. There are people he will speak of who are still alive. There are those who will never forget the face or the voice of the man who tortured them.
And so arrangements are made for the days and hours of the filming. Deciding on the place that will suit the subject and the filmmaker is more of a challenge. I think the sicario intended from the beginning to take us to room 164, but he wants us to make the choice. We spend an afternoon driving around the city visiting motels and apartments he has access to. Finally, he and Rosi agree on room 164. For the next two days, the sicario sits in the room where he once performed another job. But this time, for the camera, he talks for hours, his head shrouded in a black fishnet veil, and he draws pictures and diagrams with a thick brown pen in a large leather-bound sketchbook. The veil is the filmmaker’s idea and is intended just to hide the man’s face and also allow him to breathe, but it turns out to be a stroke of genius. With his head covered, the sicario enters a state of grace, as if talking to another person inside of himself. His words and emotions flow into story with hardly any need for questions. Later, I learn that Rosi’s nine-year-old daughter saw a drawing of the sicario under the veil and told her father: he looks like an ancient killer. This drawing will become the poster for the documentary film El Sicario, Room 164.
On the day of this visit to the sicario’s house, I have come with a digital voice recorder and a list of questions to help clear up some details, a few names, important dates, things recorded earlier that were unclear. We drive around the city for several hours, his hands controlling the recorder while I try to make notes. He remains fuzzy on the dates, explaining that when he found God he erased his disco duro, his hard drive. There are things he does not want to remember. But when his head is wrapped in the black veil, he inhabits that state of grace, and like a man hypnotized, he is able to relive his experiences and tell his story in a way that he cannot do face to face, in the light of day, in response to a list of questions.
He doesn’t like the questions I ask, especially if they are written down and communicated in any way other than a faceto-face conversation. He knows that nothing he does is safe from notice, that people watch, that any carelessness could reveal his presence, and that he is running out of places to hide. So I drive to the meeting and later will transcribe another several hours of his answers. He shows me some printouts from the Internet that he says will illustrate some of his answers. But then he tells me that these explanations of “narco-messages” are “pure fantasy”—garbage posted online by fake sicarios. He wants to be sure I know the difference, that his voice is the authentic one. Then he answers the questions, and those words are here in this book.
When I first listen to the recordings made during the filming, they are so clear, and the voice so plain and alive, that I decide to write directly into English without first transcribing into Spanish text. It is the most careful listening I’ve ever done, and it is necessary so that the English text will have the sense, rhythm, and character of the Spanish speaker telling his compelling life story for the first time. As editors, we have made only minimal changes from the spoken words to the order in which the story is presented in this book. The first day is a chronological recounting of his life. On the second day, the sicario reflects on what that story means. He analyzes how his life fits into the system that he became a part of, that he managed to survive, and that he abandoned.
By the end of the second day, I start calling him “Professor.” His treatise on the narco-trafficking system and its role in Mexican life and society is spoken in language so cogent and precise that I feel that I have attended a college lecture. Even better, there is nothing hypothetical in his presentation. He has lived his life as an integral component of the system he describes. It might be more accurate for me to call him “Ingeniero,” Engineer. With his words and diagrams, he constructs and then deconstructs for us the functioning of the Mexican government, the political economy of the drug business, and the technical details of its deadly system of control in which he was an enforcer for more than twenty years.
At one interview, I show him how to use a database containing more than thirty years of newspaper articles from the state of Chihuahua. He instantly figures out the system and begins to use it to find documentation for events that he knows about firsthand. One of the articles he finds is of a time when he procured the prostitutes and liquor for a party at a hotel. The party got out of hand, and the desk clerk was threatened by men brandishing guns. The sicario ended up under arrest, and the name he was using at that time was published in the newspaper even though he carried the badge of a federal policeman. His superiors told him later that the article had been removed from all of the newspaper archives. He laughs as he recalls the incident. On more than one occasion, his job was the procurement of women for parties, and his wife had always scolded him for this. I do not know if the name that was published was his real name.
He now searches the database regularly to try to keep track of a world he has left behind, but a world that still interests him. And he wants to explain that world to us as best he can. He considers it his duty that we get the story right. He knows that the Chihuahua press accounts reveal only a partial version of events he experienced, but he knows that these are links that can help to confirm the truth of the stories that he tells.
He brings more printed articles from the database to another interview—Chihuahua newspaper coverage of a massacre at a Juárez restaurant in August 1997 when six people were shot to death. Until the first drug rehabilitation center massacre in 2008, where nine people were killed,1 this incident had been the largest mass killing in the city since the time of the Mexican revolution. The sicario’s interest in the 1997 incident is focused on high officials at the time in the state of Chihuahua and their public pronouncements about the case. His personal knowledge of the people killed, the accused killers, and their relationships to people currently running the cartels and those in high state and federal government offices enables him to analyze and explain another nexus in the Mexican system of narco-power and government corruption. He remembers a photograph published at the time. The person in this photograph was a cartel figure who now has a high position in the government of the state of Chihuahua. He also reveals that a person mentioned in the articles as a witness to the 1997 crime was never apprehended and that he now lives on the U.S. side of the border. This man betrayed the major target in that killing. And the cartel contract on the man was $5 million, a prize he had tried to collect during his career as a sicario. A tale of hunter and hunted.
On this night, he tells us that his wife sometimes asks him what he will do if those hunting him try to kidnap his children. He replies, “Don’t ask me that.” He tells us that his ideas of justice are more in tune with the Old Testament “ojo por ojo, diente por diente,” an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, at least in terms of his responsibility as a Mexican man with a family to protect. He will kill to protect his family. But he has told his wife that he will not allow himself to be taken alive—he knows what happens to those who are taken. Suicide is not an option for him, but he would figure out a way to engineer his own murder by those who come for him. As he talks, it is clear that his efforts to leave the drug world and the killing world behind are still a work in progress. He absorbs media accounts past and present and fills in the missing and misreported facts that he knows from his long experience. He has left the drug world, but it has not left him.
A former partner still lives in Mexico. He receives messages that his old boss is looking for him. Perhaps the boss wants to talk to him about going back to work for the cartel. Reporting for this job interview could bring him either a lot of money or certain death. Such are his professional prospects.
At another interview, there is an old upright piano in the room where we meet. “Oh,” he sighs, “I took piano lessons when I was a child. A teacher in Juárez had set up a school to teach kids who could only pay a little money. My mother enrolled me in the school, and it had a room full of old pianos like this one. I remember trying to learn my notes ... do, re, mi. . . . I would hit the wrong key, and the teacher would rap me on the knuckles with a ruler.... He did it several times, and I finally got mad and I hit him back. Oh, he kicked me out of the school. My mother was so embarrassed. I was ten years old.”
I imagine the life this man might have lived had he been born in a country where opportunities exist for a person from a working-class background with sharp intelligence, technical knowledge, analytical abilities, and a restless mind always seeking new information. He could have been an accountant, an engineer, or an architect (as his mother imagined). Or he might have chosen a career in academia or high-level law enforcement. Certainly the FBI, DEA, or CIA could have made good use of someone with his abilities. In a society possessing even the rudiments of a merit-based system, he would have been a successful man.
As this book shows, the sicario is not a fictional character, but a talented and intelligent man whose life choices were forged by the social and economic realities of his time and place. This does not excuse his decision to become a part of a murderous criminal enterprise, but in his own words, he explains his choices. And he lives every day with the consequences of those choices.
The sicario’s account takes us inside the world of narco-trafficking and police enforcement. But there are elements of the story that require some background understanding for readers not familiar with Mexico or the intricacies of the drug trade. In the following paragraphs, I explain some important points.
THE PLAZA
Crime and government meet in the Mexican concept of the “plaza.” In Mexico, the word takes on a specific sense apart from—but extending—its normal meaning of a town or city center or square. Historically, the Mexican state has allowed criminal organizations to exist while at the same time maintaining control over them by designating a liaison to supervise their activities and take a cut of their income for the state. Whoever controlled the plaza kept crime orderly and profitable for the state. There have always been variations of this concept in the United States as well. Cops take bribes to overlook backroom gambling, houses of prostitution, and bars that run past closing time. In Mexico, the relationship is much closer, and it has become more significant in recent decades. It is common knowledge that the police are corrupt and often commit crimes. With the rise of the modern drug business in the 1980s, the money earned by drug merchants skyrocketed, and the interest of the state grew in proportion to this new source of wealth. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimates that for at least twenty years illicit drugs have earned Mexico from $30 billion to $50 billion a year. Today income from the drug trade is second only to oil in earning Mexico foreign currency—or perhaps drug income exceeds oil income, since no one really knows how much money is made in the drug business. Globally, the illegal drug industry dwarfs the auto industry.
This kind of money fosters murder. The sicario was often assigned to kill people who operated in Juárez but failed to pay for their use of the plaza. The huge profits from the booming drug industry also changed the balance of power between the government and the criminal enterprises. Until the 1980s, criminals normally approached the police and made a financial arrangement so that they could carry on their commerce. But with the billions tumbling in from cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, the criminals began to dictate the terms—the infamous “plata o plomo,” silver or lead. The police could either take the money offered to do the bidding of the crime syndicate, or be killed.
The sicario’s job duties included delivering quantities of money from the Juárez cartel to officials in several Chihuahua state administrations during the 1990s. These payments were made to arrange the control of the plaza. He then watched as these officials rose to higher and higher positions of power in the Mexican government. When he talks about this from the place where he now hides from fellow sicarios seeking to collect the contract on his own life, his anger is palpable. He knows the corrupting power of the money that he helped to earn and distribute. And he knows that the power of many Mexican officials is paid for with the blood of hundreds of Mexicans like himself. He knows this because he has been both executioner and target.
It is difficult to exaggerate the amount of money involved in these transactions. By the mid-1990s, the banks in El Paso, Texas, across the river from Juárez, were booking deposits that exceeded the cash flow of the legitimate economy by $700 million a year. In news accounts from 1996, “U.S. authorities estimate[d] that $3.5 billion in drug profits are laundered locally through El Paso.”2 In 2007 more than $205 million was discovered stored in a single house in Mexico City belonging to Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese businessman involved in the importation of chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Ye Gon later claimed that much of the money belonged to the ruling political party, the PAN, and that he was being forced to safeguard the money to be used by politicians as a slush fund.3
By the turn of the twenty-first century, the narco-trafficking organizations had begun to take over more and more control of legitimate society, and this change is now the face of Mexico. The sicario has lived through this evolution. In the years before he left the organization he worked for, he and his colleagues were handling shipments of drugs worth $30 million to $40 million. Such sums of money create temptation to steal, and part of the sicario’s work was to kill people who attempted to cheat the boss.4
THE CARTELS
In the legitimate world, the word “cartel” refers to a group of businesses seeking to control a market. The antitrust laws in the United States were originally created to break cartels. The Mexican drug organizations have never been able to completely control the market and have always had to contend with smaller operators who try to compete. When discovered, these small-time capitalists are murdered. Movers and shakers in American business corporations are accustomed to working hard, making lots of money, and, at the end of their useful economic lives, they are fired or they retire with a golden parachute. Cartel executives at the same point in their careers are often executed.
A second reality is that drug cartels in Mexico are somewhat fluid. From the late 1980s to the present, several groups of various origins and shifting territories have dominated the drug business in Mexico: Sinaloa, Juárez, Gulf, Tijuana, Beltran-Leyva, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana. Sometimes disparate groups or subgroups of one or another of the major cartels band together on certain deals and then drift apart, or a fragment of one group will strike out on its own. There is constant friction between groups, and in the business of drugs friction produces murder.
The Juárez cartel first bloomed in the mid-1980s when cocaine shipments from South America began to stream through Mexico. The cartel had two key assets: arrangements with cocaine producers in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia and control of the crossing into El Paso. By the late 1990s, the U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey estimated, fifteen tons of cocaine were being warehoused in Juárez at any given moment. As the Juárez cartel gained strength and territory during the 1990s, DEA officials estimated that the Juárez plaza generated cash surpluses in El Paso of $50 million to $70 million each month—money that circulated through the real estate and luxury goods markets on the U.S. side of the border.5
The key architect of this industry in Juárez was Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who controlled the plaza from May 1993 until his death in July 1997. Carrillo had arranged to have his predecessor, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, murdered so that he could take over the job. At the height of his power, Amado Carrillo was practically untouchable. He traveled all over Mexico with a bodyguard detail composed of several dozen federal police officers. Carrillo was the first cartel boss who tried to create a structure that would foster cooperation among the various narco-trafficking organizations and thus allow the business to grow and flourish with fewer costly and bloody cartel wars. Amado Carrillo was also able to forge alliances between the drug-trafficking organizations and the highest levels of the Mexican government. When Amado Carrillo died in 1997, Peter Lupsha, a longtime scholar of organized crime and money laundering in Latin America, said: “In Colombia, the drug capos are threatening the state from the outside. In Mexico, they’re part of the state.”6
Carrillo’s brother Vicente took over after Amado’s death in a Mexican hospital in 1997, where he underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance. Don Vicente Carrillo continues to run the organization today. By all accounts, he keeps a much lower profile than his brother did, which perhaps has contributed to his unprecedented longevity at the helm of the Juárez cartel. The sicario met Vicente Carrillo when he was about fifteen years old, and his entire career was interwoven with this major narco-trafficking organization. As a young man, the sicario worked as part of a security detail for the men at the highest levels in the cartel, and he describes how he and his coworkers were required to maintain complete devotion to these bosses. From his account, one learns of the power of the cartel, and also of the constant tension and instability created by rival groups seeking to take over the plaza or by those within the cartel seeking to cheat the organization. The sicario never felt secure, always slept with loaded guns by his bed, and expected to be killed at any time. He saw fellow cartel workers rise and fall, and he was often ordered to execute people he had worked with.
As he tells his story, we realize that the sicario was never sure exactly who he was working for and seldom received orders from people much higher in the organization than himself. He describes in some detail the cartel’s cell structure, a form of organization that kept information strictly compartmentalized and controlled. But during the last years of his tenure with the Juárez cartel—2006 to 2007—this level of control began to break down, and the sicario was no longer sure who gave the orders.
It was also during this period that a larger struggle began to take place, one usually described as the attempt by “la gente nueva,” the new people, associated with the Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, to take control of the Juárez plaza. In December 2006, President Calderón announced that the Mexican military would be called on to fight against the drug cartels, even though there is ample evidence that the army had been in league with traffickers going back several decades.7 A new period of hyperviolence would begin in Mexico, and by 2008 Ciudad Juárez had become the bloody epicenter of this conflict.
PRESIDENT CALDERÓN’S WAR
On December 1, 2006, Felipe Calderón assumed the presidency of Mexico after barely winning the elections and enduring a period of challenges by his opposition in the congress. Stolen elections in Mexico are a national tradition, and many citizens see Calderón as an illegitimate ruler. Shortly after taking office, Calderón posed in military uniform—something taboo in Mexico since the revolution. His move to deploy 45,000 soldiers to fight the drug cartels was interpreted by many as a tactic to give a boost to his contested and very weak presidency—a bold move to prove that he possessed “la mano dura,” the hard hand.
The presence of the military on the streets greatly increased the level of violence in many areas of Mexico. Many Mexicans began to notice that the Sinaloa cartel, headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, seemed relatively untouched by the military campaign. People began to suspect that the army was fighting, not against the cartels, but on the side of one, with the goal of consolidating control over a larger share of the huge profits generated by the drug business and especially by the Juárez plaza. Edgardo Buscaglia, a lawyer and organized crime expert in Mexico City, analyzed public security statistics and determined that “only 941 of the 53,174 people arrested for organized crime in the past six years were associated with Sinaloa.”8 National Public Radio also examined official arrest data from the Mexican federal attorney general’s office dating from the beginning of Calderón’s term through May 2010. This investigation showed that only 12 percent of 2,600 federal defendants accused of being cartel operatives were associated with the Sinaloa organization.9 A former Juárez police commander seeking asylum in the United States said, speaking anonymously to a Canadian journalist, that several smuggling gangs in the city split from the Juárez cartel in 2007 and joined forces with the Sinaloa organization, which was in the process of trying to take over this lucrative plaza. These shifting alliances spawned a great deal of the killing that exploded in the city in early 2008.10 There is off-the-record speculation from people in the DEA that nothing bad will happen to El Chapo while President Calderón is in office. And as is often the case in Mexico, rumor becomes fact, suspicion substitutes for thought, and both rumor and suspicion may sometimes be closer to the truth than public facts.
Verifiable facts about the relationship between Calderón’s government, the military, and the cartels are difficult to come by, but there is no doubt that Ciudad Juárez is ground zero in the slaughter being generated across Mexico. After four years of sporadic and vague official releases on the carnage in its drug wars, in January 2011 the Mexican government issued a new report (accompanied by data sets) stating that 34,612 homicides linked to narco-trafficking have occurred since Calderón took office in December 2006 and that the numbers have increased each year at ever higher rates.11 As posted by Johanna Tuckman in a report in The Guardian, Juárez has been the most violent city since 2008 despite the military presence there. The Guardian also makes the important caveat that “the figures released do not specify how many of those killed are presumed to be related to the cartels, how many belonged to the security forces, or how many were innocent civilians dragged into the horror.”12
Larger estimates ranging up to nearly 50,000 dead were reported in early 2011 in different Mexican media.13 This is out of a total population of 112,468,855.14 Between one-fifth and onequarter of all of Mexico’s dead have been killed in Juárez, a city of between 1.2 and 1.3 million people.
At the time when the sicario engineered his escape from the system in 2007, Juárez was in the middle of a record-breaking year of murder that ended with a reported toll of 307 homicides. Murders increased fivefold in 2008, for a total of 1,623 victims. Also in 2008, 45 bodies came out of the ground during excavations at several death houses, but these deaths have never been officially assigned to the murder numbers for any year, since there is no official information about when these murders occurred. In 2009 there were 2,754 homicides in the city, and 2010 ended with 3,111 murder victims, as reported in El Diario de Juárez—an average of 8.5 murders per day. October 2010 set a record of 359 homicides in one month. The murder rate in Juárez is now estimated to be the highest of any city in the world, more than 250 per 100,000 people, a rate that increased 800 percent between 2007 and 2010. As of February 21, 2011, another 384 people had died, bringing the total number of Juárez victims in the four years of Calderon’s war to more than 8,000.15
It makes no sense to attribute all of this killing to a cartel war. If this is a war, then who are the combatants? Since early 2008, more than 8,000 soldiers and federal police have patrolled the Juárez streets. The newspapers seldom report on the number of soldiers killed, and the Mexican military does not normally release information on casualties. During all of 2008 and 2009, Juárez newspapers only reported three soldiers killed in the city. A government report in August 2010 revealed that a total of 191 military personnel and 2,076 federal, state, and municipal police in all of Mexico had been killed since Calderón launched his war,16 and the total number of dead reported in August was 28,000. In the January 2011 report, the government numbers do not specify which ones of the dead were members of the military or other security forces.
The most salient information to be gleaned from these government releases is that they probably report a minimum number of the deaths that have occurred. We also know that when President Calderón or other government spokesmen say that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, it is also the case that fewer than 5 percent of the crimes have been investigated.17 And by reading the daily accounts of murders in the Juárez newspapers, one sees that the overwhelming majority of the victims are ordinary people and that most of them are poor: children, teenagers, old people, small-business proprietors who refused to pay extortion demands, mechanics, bus drivers, a woman selling burritos from a cart on the street, a clown juggling at an intersection, boys selling newspapers, gum, and perhaps nickel bags of cocaine or heroin on a street corner, an increasing number of young women who are taking jobs in the drug business, and dozens of people who have been slaughtered inside drug rehabilitation clinics. Social workers have estimated that there are between 150,000 and 200,000 addicts just in the city of Juárez. At one point in his story, the sicario speaks to the increasing numbers of poor people using and dealing drugs in Juárez and the devastating impact of this growing small-time domestic retail market.
People call many of the victims “malandros,” bad guys, riffraff, human garbage. Sometimes they use the phrase “limpieza social,” social cleansing, to describe these killings. The truth is that fewer than 5 percent of homicides in Mexico will ever be investigated or solved.18 But what is increasingly clear is that if this is a war, it is being waged, at least in part, by powerful forces of the Mexican government against poor and marginalized sectors of the Mexican people.
In October 2010, a potential bombshell hit the Mexican press when a national newspaper, El Universal, published an article entitled “Social Cleansing, Not Drug War.” According to the article, “legislators say the state permits the existence of death squads. . . . Due to massive numbers of executions, the Senate of the Republic asks for reports on the existence of death squads.”19 The article details the efforts of a few Mexican senators from an opposition party to force the internal intelligence branch of the government (CISEN) to release a report that contained evidence of the existence of paramilitary death squads implicated in many of the killings. Spokesmen for civic organizations that monitor human rights in the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, Nuevo Leon, and Baja California spoke of deaths and disappearances that have never been reported: “The silence is terrible. No account is given of what actually happens and if it were possible to reveal these ‘black operations’ we would see that there are not 28,000 dead as the government says, but rather, more than 40,000.” The article alleges that deserters from the army and police—many who had been dismissed for corruption—make up these squads of killers and “operate dressed in official uniforms, driving patrol cars, and with weapons, badges and keys just like the forces of the state.” A human rights lawyer in Baja California said that the extermination squads have been named “black commandos.” “We cannot just talk about groups of thugs, gunmen, sicarios and drug trafficking activities; these accusations imply the full participation of the state.”
The article was ignored by the international media, and there was practically no follow-up in the Mexican press. Yet its revelations read like a chapter from the sicario’s story.
VICTOR MANUEL OROPEZA
On July 3, 1991, Juárez dentist and newspaper columnist Victor Manuel Oropeza was stabbed to death in his office. The murder has never been solved, despite forensic evidence and eyewitnesses who reported seeing four men enter and leave Oropeza’s office on the evening of the killing. Dr. Oropeza was a prominent member of Juárez society, and his murder generated considerable media coverage—more than four hundred articles in Chihuahua newspapers alone in the eighteen years since the killing, as well as mention in the international press. Several suspects were arrested and held for some months, but they were freed owing to the fact that they were tortured into confessing and later questioning revealed that they had no knowledge of the actual circumstances of the crime. Some of the state police officials who took charge of the investigation were individuals whom Dr. Oropeza had written about in the months and weeks preceding his murder, accusing them of involvement in drug trafficking in Juárez. According to some press accounts, the officers responsible for the investigation were suspects in the killing.20
Over the years, in addition to several botched investigations by the Chihuahua state prosecutor and the Mexican attorney general, Oropeza’s murder has been the subject of inquiries by the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, the Inter American Press Association, and the Organization of American States.
The sicario’s interest in the case is detailed in his story. The murder occurred early in his career in the Chihuahua state police, and he was part of a team that provided protection for the hit men. Because of his job at the time, he knows that the allegations made by Oropeza in his columns were true. He also identifies the murder as one of the first successful attempts by drug cartel operatives to silence anyone who drew attention to the expanding and increasingly systemic links between the criminal organizations, the police, and the Mexican state. It is worth noting that on January 2, 1992, El Norte de Ciudad Juárez published a roundup of “one of the most violent years in the history of Juárez”: in 1991, the year that included the killing of Oropeza, there were a total of 134 murders in the city.21
The person the sicario identifies as the mastermind of the murder, El Cora de Sinaloa, does not appear in any press account that I could find, but this is not surprising.22 Mexican newspapers seldom report any news that is not sanctioned by both narco-trafficking groups and the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists consistently ranks Mexico as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. According to Reporters Without Borders, at least sixty-seven Mexican journalists have been killed since 2000, while another eleven have gone missing. Those who threaten, kidnap, and kill journalists are almost never punished for their crimes.23
GENERAL REBOLLO
Mexican Army general Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo was appointed by President Ernesto Zedillo in December 1996 to be Mexico’s top anti-narcotics officer or “drug czar.” At the time of his appointment, he was in charge of the military region that included Guadalajara, and he had a clean reputation according to U.S. officials from DEA and other agencies. In retrospect, however, it was evident that he had focused most of his enforcement efforts on drug cartel activities in Tijuana and consistently ignored Juárez. Suspicions were aroused when General Rebollo rented an apartment in Mexico City that appeared to be far too luxurious for his military salary. Investigations found that the apartment actually belonged to Amado Carrillo.24
At the time, Rebollo had access to all of Mexico’s classified drug enforcement information, police records, and informants, and it is assumed that he passed this information on to Amado Carrillo. His arrest in February 1997 on charges of bribery, perverting the course of justice, facilitating the transportation of cocaine, and directly aiding Amado Carrillo proved extremely embarrassing to the United States, since just a few weeks before, he had been welcomed to Washington by the U.S. drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, who praised his honesty, integrity, and skills in pursuing drug traffickers. During that visit, the DEA shared sensitive intelligence with General Rebollo, probably endangering the lives of informants in Mexico. As frequently happens with high profile arrests in Mexico, the conviction may not match the publicized charges. In the case of General Rebollo, the DEA reported in 1998 that he was convicted and sentenced to thirteen years and nine months in jail for unauthorized use of firearms.25 Rebollo was the model for the character of General Salazar in the 2001 Oscar-winning movie Traffic.26
The sicario uses the case of General Rebollo to illustrate the long-standing relationships between the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations and the military, although he believes that this case was unusual at the time. He noted a change at high-level gatherings during his tenure with the cartel: military officers began to show up regularly at fiestas in rural areas in Chihuahua where he had helped to provide women and other entertainments. He estimates that this change took place sometime in 2003.
JOSE LUIS SANTIAGO VASCONCELOS AND JUAN CAMILO MOURIÑO
Several times in his story, the sicario mentions the significance of the work that Señor Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos did from his position as an assistant prosecutor in the federal attorney general’s office in Mexico. According to the sicario, Vasconcelos played a major role in bringing clandestine burials to light, as well as in other actions that served to damage narco-trafficking organizations, before his death in a plane crash in Mexico City on November 4, 2008. An obituary in The Guardian noted that Vasconcelos “came face to face with some of the most infamous of Mexico’s trafficking barons.” Vasconcelos pursued the extraditions of several major cartel figures to the United States, and he made many enemies among Mexican politicians through his investigations of money laundering. His life was threatened numerous times, but he “retained a reputation for being above corruption.”27 The powerful secretary of Gobernación (Interior), Juan Camilo Mouriño, was also killed in the plane crash. Before his death, Vasconcelos had been moved to a less prominent job that took him out of the front lines of the drug war. Though the Calderón government denied that the deaths of these two men had any connection to their roles as prominent fighters of organized crime, most Mexicans, including the sicario, believe that both Mouriño and Vasconcelos were targeted for challenging the power of the drug traffickers.
Although they never met, the sicario indicates that he had considered seeking help from Vasconcelos during the period when he was attempting to escape from his life as a cartel enforcer. The sicario’s career was marked at its beginning and its end by his encounters with two men he perceived as making real and honest efforts to expose the crimes of the Mexican state: the crusading journalist Oropeza and the vigilant government crimefighter Vasconcelos. He bookends his own story with the object lessons represented by these two individuals.
Just after midnight on January 31, 2010, a commando of armed and hooded men drove several trucks into the Villas del Salvárcar neighborhood in Juárez, blocked off the street, and machinegunned several dozen people, most of them teenagers attending a dance party at a small house. Sixteen people died. Government officials, including President Calderón, immediately accused the victims of being gangsters killed by rival gangsters—allegations that were challenged by the mothers of the victims, who as it turned out were mostly athletes and honor students. A few days later, several men who were identified as working for La Linea—enforcers for the Juárez cartel—were arrested and confessed to participating in the massacre, though it seems that they attacked this party by mistake. As usual when the government claims it is solving a crime, those who confessed in front of the media looked to have been severely beaten shortly before they faced the cameras. Asked to comment on this event, the sicario says:
Everything is all stirred up and like the saying, “from the turbulent river, the fishermen profit.” It doesn’t matter that they do not know where to find Number 10 [the man said to have ordered the operation], and the people, what do they have except this? Who knows how many more lies this arrested person is going to tell? The pressure is very strong right now because so many innocent people died. There is no longer any respect for anyone. No one is coordinating anything. It just gets worse and worse. But in the end, the police chiefs continue to collect money from whoever comes, not taking into account the damage that they are causing. These people who were arrested are not well-known people. They seem to lack any expertise, and they do not use professional techniques. They are just imitators. I hope that they get them all quickly before they cause more damage.
The sicario is adamant that despite the explosion of violence and killing that has taken place since his flight across the border several years ago, the flow of drugs continues as before. He says that he knows the deputy of the Carrillo Fuentes organization, who is now in charge of getting drug shipments over the border into the United States. Searching aerial photos on Google Earth, he can identify the drug bodegas (warehouses) that are used on both sides of the line and see that the eighteen-wheeler traffic to and from these facilities continues unimpeded. And the thousands of people killed on the streets in the past three years just don’t matter to the drug-trafficking organizations because these are not the people who generate the money. He thinks that the atmosphere of unrestrained violence acts as a smokescreen for the real business and that the money flow is now better than ever.
In October 2010, a series of videos appeared online featuring the brother of a former Chihuahua attorney general stating that both he and his sister worked in the upper echelons of the Juárez cartel and that his sister ordered and/or facilitated many of the high-profile killings of police, journalists, politicians, and political activists in Chihuahua in recent years. In the video, the man sits handcuffed, surrounded by men wearing black masks and camouflage and pointing automatic rifles at his head and body. His sister is indignant and claims that the kidnapping and video are the work of state police officers whom she fired for corruption, but she also says that the video appears to have been filmed in a room in the state police headquarters in Juárez; she knows this because she recognizes the painted walls as part of a renovation project she presided over. A few days later, her brother’s body turns up half buried on a ranch in a rural area of the state, and the family refuses to claim him until DNA tests prove his identity.28
A friend in Juárez who works in a media outlet writes that “there are days when I simply can’t handle the anxiety that something new and very very bad will happen and then, I confess to you, I pray and ask God to take care of all of my family and all those I love. And then . . . that video.... Could there be a better demonstration of the total decomposition of the Mexican political system?”
A month later, twenty more bodies, including three women and at least one man buried with U.S. identity documents, came out of the ground near the tiny border town of Palomas, Chihuahua. The bodies were taken to the morgue in Juárez, and the government issued an invitation to those with missing relatives to help identify the bodies. These dead could not be counted as the victims of a certain month or year, because no information was released about when they might have been buried. One family from New Mexico went to the morgue in Juárez to identify their missing loved one. When they left the facility, they said that the Mexican Army was involved in his disappearance because a GPS signal located his cell phone at the military headquarters near Palomas.29
It is a rare person who can tell a clear and true life story. It is even rarer to encounter a person who has lived within the drug world who has such facility with words and the clarity of mind to tell his story. Most participants in this system do not talk about it. No one inside of the system could talk about it and live. The few who leave have a much better chance of survival if they maintain silence.
Charles Bowden learned of the sicario through a confidential source who had provided him with a hiding place after his escape from the cartel. Another confidential source who had worked in the police and for the cartel knew the sicario’s past, and this person also vouched for his experience. The sicario is not telling his story to accrue accolades or glory—he insists that neither his face nor his voice nor his name can be made known. His words contain no exaggeration or bragging. He never admits to knowing more than he has actually experienced. When he speaks of things he has only heard of, or when he speculates, he takes care to qualify these statements as such. Having never been charged with a crime, he has no reason to bargain with any law enforcement agency. Thus, when we are asked why the sicario has chosen to tell this story, we believe his own explanation: that he speaks from the sense of duty that comes from his conversion to Christianity. He believes that God gave him new life and that he must use it to tell others in the drug world that salvation is possible. He wants to atone for some of his deeds by explaining how the Mexican system really works.
In a recent conversation, the sicario said to us:
I thought long and hard before I talked to Chuck [Bowden], and now he has become my accomplice. I asked God, “Why should I trust him?” I needed to make someone else part of this so that I could be at peace. I asked God to give me a sign, and He did, and I decided that I would trust Chuck with the story of the things that I had done. In the beginning I did not trust him, but I knew where he lived, so that if anything happened to my family, I could find him. It was hard later on to realize I would have to trust another person, the translator, but in order to tell the story the right way, I needed Molly also. I talked to an adviser in my church, but other Christians already know that God can save a sicario. I want the people of the world and especially other sinners to know.
During this conversation, the sicario also said that being able to talk about his life with us has given him a sense of relief. “These are not things that I can talk about with my wife.” He has thrown a little of the dirt our way. He has involved us, he has wrapped us up in these stories. Through talking to us, he has found a way to share a part of the burden, to not be so alone with his past.30 Regardless of his motivation, it is the sicario’s ability with words that opens the window into an unknown world.
You may ask, “Why should I believe that God’s salvation is available to a man who has committed such crimes?” I answer that this is his belief, which he is able to explain clearly and completely. He believes that he has been saved by God’s grace and that he is alive because God’s purpose for him is to lead others away from such a life. He has much to atone for, and he is a mere baby in terms of learning to live a Christian life. He begins from nothing and possesses nothing at the end. He believes that the only source of forgiveness is the grace and power of God. And although the sicario knows that God has the power to forgive, he is never absolutely certain that he can be forgiven because of the terrible things that he has done.
On one occasion, the sicario took Gianfranco Rosi and me to a youth service at a giant church near the border. A converted warehouse on the outskirts of the city, the place was originally built to accommodate eighteen-wheelers loading and unloading the goods of free trade. Hundreds of evaporative coolers churn on the metal roof and blast the space with slightly chilled air. The huge windowless room is now outfitted with several thousand folding chairs, and on this summer afternoon the parking lot fills with cars from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Michigan, Tennessee, South Carolina, Chihuahua, Sonora, and other Mexican states.
The church is hosting a youth festival, and the sicario is running the lights and sound for a Christian rock concert. Outside the sun bakes blinding white on acres of concrete and corrugated metal, but inside near total darkness precedes the opening chords of the rock band and then an explosion of color and sound. He raises his arms in praise, singing along to the words projected onto a giant screen over the stage. He wanted Gianfranco to film him at his job here and to see this work that he contributes to the church that he credits for his salvation.
I believe in his conversion and in his commitment to Christianity for another important reason: it is a liability for him to be a Christian. His beliefs now forbid him to kill, yet the people looking for him will kill him on sight, and they will not hesitate to kidnap his family as a way to get to him. His beliefs compel him to tell his story in an effort to save others in the life, and thus he takes much greater risks than if he maintained silence. His beliefs compel him to try to atone for his sins, and he does this through work in his church. As I watched him that afternoon at the concert, I realized that he spends a lot of time here and that he has many friends. And yet every person he knows and every hour he spends in large gatherings and public places puts him at risk. Every word that he spoke to us in those rooms and all of the words recorded in these pages place him in greater danger.
During the two years we have been working on this project, the sicario has had to curtail some of his public activities, including going to church. As the violence escalates in Juárez, increasing numbers of people have come to live on the U.S. side of the border, including some with ties to criminal organizations. It is only a matter of time before someone recognizes him, and every appearance he makes in public puts him and his family at greater risk. Because of his former jobs, he knows that he is only one mistake away from being the captive rather than the captor. He must hide from the criminals in the world he once inhabited—people just like himself—and his life on this side must remain invisible to any official entity of government, else he will be deported to a certain death.
On this evening we drive to the sicario’s temporary home. My guide and our host indulge in a bit of gallows humor as we get out of the car, a little something to remind me of the other houses in the story of his life that we are writing: “Ay! Molly, now we are going to kidnap you.” And I moan and they laugh. This truly is a fraternity of holy fools. The sicario carries in his head a rich geography of safe houses and death houses in Mexico where he has kidnapped, tortured, killed, and buried people. He has also held people on the U.S. side of the border and then delivered them to their deaths in Juárez.
We go inside and meet the sicario’s family. Someone brings me a glass of tap water, and I get to hold the baby for a few minutes. The baby was another character in the drama of the motel room where the sicario told the story: the arrangements were carefully planned to allow him to get to his wife’s side in a matter of minutes should he get a call.
He once called distraught because the baby could be born at any time and the hospital required a special newborn infant seat for his car or he would not be allowed to drive the baby home and at the moment he did not have the money to buy it. I procured the infant seat from a big-box store and delivered it to him the next day. Later, I saw the baby’s picture, along with a photograph of a bleak highway, dark clouds and a faint rainbow arching over it. And he had written these words:
Children are an inheritance from The Lord.
The fruits of the womb are our reward.
Whenever our meetings end, whether in a motel room or driving around the city, there is a prayer. This night, it is past ten, and we gather in a circle in the bare room with the computer, a broken table, and an empty refrigerator. The mother holds the baby. I put one arm around her on my right, the other around the man on my left, and the man to his left spreads his large arms over the little group and leads the prayer. The baby squirms and cries a little, and I rub its fuzzy head.
My guide on this night is a mentor to the sicario, one of the men who counseled him at the beginning of his Christian journey. He is a man whom I trust with my life. He drives me back to my car, very slowly across the entire length of the city. Tonight his usually jovial nature seems darker and sadder than I have known before. We talk about the two cities and the two countries, these lives and their struggles on the line. When I get to my car to continue my drive home, I think of calling and asking him to pray for us all. But I know he will have done that already.