THE LIFE, 1
A routine day....
Well, let’s say you get up in a hotel in Torreón. It’s 6:00 A.M. Eat a quick breakfast, American-style, like they give you for free in the hotel. Wait for the people you are working for to get up since you are always dependent on their orders. Take turns at guard. When the boss gets up, go with him to eat lunch, wherever he wants to go.
Then patrol the city. Look out for new people in town, new vehicles. Be sure that there are no new people who might be working for another cartel. There are informants at the checkpoints outside of town to let you know if there are new people moving in. These informants let us know, and we go to investigate, see what they are up to. The narcos operate just like a federal or state agency. Things are coordinated. Whatever they earn, they spend.
In the evening, go to a good restaurant to eat, and then get some girls for the boss. Check to make sure the girls are happy, that everybody is satisfied with the hotel.
From there go to a safe house. You want to know what these places are like? So, here we are. We feel safe, more or less, but you are never sure whether something has happened in this place before. The less you know the better. You go from safe house to safe house. Was someone killed there? Are bodies buried here? There are very few people who know which places have been used as cemeteries. Not all of these places are used to kill people or bury people.
Fear? It’s not really fear, but the main thing is that you just forget about it. Under the influence of drugs and alcohol, you really are not afraid. You can always sense nervousness and fear, you can smell fear in another person, and if you do, if a person hesitates or shows fear or nervousness, you have to get rid of him, because he could cause the whole operation to fail.
Once you do something, forget about it! There are executions that take place in a matter of seconds. You have to do the work as if it comes natural to you. Take care of the job, hide the vehicles, change clothes, go to a fine restaurant, natural. If you cannot, you cannot do the work, and you are likely to become one of the statistics, one of the many who are executed.
The drugs help a lot. They especially help when you need to stay awake for a long time. But even the drugs have their limit. Sometimes it is good to get high, to get in the right state of mind to do certain work, but it is better not to be high on drugs all the time. No one wants to be guarded by someone who is always doing drugs.
When you are living the wild life, la vida loca, when you have money, liquor, women and sex, cars ... you can enjoy yourself on a yacht. You have houses and apartments. They don’t belong to you, but you can use them whenever you want. Because they facilitate the work.
You do not just become addicted to the money, the sex, the liquor and the drugs, but you get to the point where you really like all of this stuff. There are times, during the nights when you can really sleep well . . . but those nights are few. Really, you don’t often get the sleep that you need to take care of yourself or to maintain your personal integrity. But sometimes, when you do sleep, you realize that in the same group of three or more people this one is capable of pulling out a knife and killing another, and you realize that if that is the case he might be capable of killing you too. This is just to say that you always have to watch out for yourself.
The horrible thing is when you are dreaming. You have very realistic dreams. I would dream that I was running through the streets, jumping over cars. Oh, I would dream that I was out there and did not have my weapon and they were chasing me. And the dreams were so real that I would wake up and the gun was on the pillow and I would have my weapon in my hand and I would be aiming it.
I was very violent. The dreams are not things that could never happen, they are not fantastic dreams, but very realistic. The fear that I had that kept me from sleeping in my house with my family, the reason I would go someplace to sleep by myself—and this is a very real fear and it happened to the majority of people in this situation—it was because the least little noise would cause you to react violently. If your wife comes to the bedroom, if she touches you, your head is full of such terrible things from this world that it is about to explode. And you can react and cause her harm.
One time my wife tried to help me when I was dreaming. She felt how I was sweating and calling out in my sleep ... Ah, ah, ah. She saw I was having a nightmare and tried to wake me up, but when she touched me—ARRRGGH—my reaction was to grab her by the throat, but I didn’t wake up in time and my hands were on her throat, I was strangling her, I was strangling my own wife!
And from that moment, that very moment, I realized that something very bad was happening to me. I was no longer any good. There was a line that I had respected between the work I did—as a guard, as an instructor, as an executioner—but this work no longer stayed on one side of the line. Now it had passed over into my life at home. I could no longer control my instinct to be violent and aggressive. I could no longer tell the difference between this world and that of my own family. You even start to think that your own family is against you and you can do harm to your own family.
When I saw the fear in her face, and to have my own wife paralyzed and defenseless in my own hands, unable to move ...
He pauses, sobs and gasps for breath, and then resumes telling the story.
. . . It caused me to stop sleeping at my house for a long time. It is difficult to sleep with someone when you are so deep into this element. It is hard to share this with anyone.
This is not an excuse to say, “Just find an easy woman to sleep with. . . .” Really, you know that if you are capable of doing this in your own home, you know it could happen with another person also. And I do not have any doubt that at times when there is a crime and people go into motel rooms and find someone strangled, that it was caused by this stress that people are living with and the person did not realize it in time and someone was killed.
It is an instinct that gets out of control—your actions no longer belong to you. I’m not saying it is an animal instinct, rather, it is a logical reaction. If you attack me, I’m not going to wait for you to hit me again. I had been trained, and my job was to be the person who always wins. Even if someone attacks me first, as long as the attack is not successful the first time, I’m not going to allow the person to attack me twice or even touch me a second time. I am going to eliminate him. I cannot wait, because I will never leave an enemy alive to strike me again.
THE SYSTEM, 1
During the time that we were being trained as elements inside of the academy, they make a selection. In each class, they select five men who have the best averages. And these police-in-training have the opportunity to travel to Tucson, Arizona, to an FBI training center. It is a short training session, three days. The first day they teach about the hidden serial numbers for tracking stolen vehicles. They show us how vehicles not only have serial numbers in the usual places but also hidden numbers located on different parts of the vehicle, such as the motor or the chassis, and also vehicles that are coming out with serial numbers on the windows. This is the first day.
On the second day, they gave us more training in the techniques of arrests and follow-up investigations. They showed us a little more of their technology, how to locate people using their fingerprints. The system that they have is very large, and they can detect one person in the world by his fingerprints because of the huge database that they have.
The third day is very relaxing and nice. After breakfast, they take us for a time to a firing range and give us a tour of the facilities, but only a part of it. They don’t show us the whole installation—the different laboratories, dormitories, firing ranges. In comparison to an academy in Mexico where we are studying, these facilities are really something. When you get to a training facility of the FBI, you are surprised at how big the installation is. It is like a whole city.
In the afternoon, after lunch, this is the last day, and they take us to relax, maybe to a bar, for those who want to drink a beer or something. We talk and tell stories and get to know each other. Usually there is one of our instructors from the academy and three or four FBI agents with us the whole time. There are always people guarding us even though we are invited guests. We always have a guide, a minder, they never leave us on our own. That’s just the way they do it. It is part of the training and military-type instruction that they give us.
What they don’t ever seem to know is that among the five elements receiving this training, it is very possible that two or three or at a minimum one of them is already receiving money from banks in the United States, money that comes from the narco-trafficking organizations. And the narcos are paying for this police cadet to get this beneficial training from the FBI.
After these three days are over, we return to the academy in a bus to resume our normal instruction.
All of the time that we are in the academy—six months—we are learning about laws, forms of arrest, how to follow up investigations. But that’s not all. The school is also a base for learning about corruption, starting with the process of buying off the guards at the entrance gates so that we can escape the academy and have some time to relax. Even better when one is getting payment from the outside.
Many times some of us compared this kind of lockup to being in prison. There isn’t much difference because in the prisons in Mexico, if you have enough money, you can pay and have a night out to have fun. You pay off a couple of guards, go out and have fun, and come back the next day. In the academy, it’s the same, except that here you aren’t detained for a crime, rather, you are in the academy to receive training to fight crime. The government never knows—well, they know, but they never fully acknowledge—that of one hundred elements training in the academy, about sixty of them will be fighting against the other forty because those sixty are being paid for and trained by the mafia, by the narco-trafficking organizations.
It isn’t that they are not teaching morale or principles. We all salute the flag and stuff. But the vision of the person is nothing more than just being there. I am sure that of the one hundred elements that are admitted to the police academy, ninety of them go in with the idea that when you are in the police, you can make money. In the police, there is money thanks to corruption. There are ways to get bribes, la mordida, there are ways to make money dealing in stolen goods, trabajar chueco. In the police, there are always lots of ways to make money.
The salary of a policeman or an investigator is nothing. Every two weeks while I was in the academy, I would get half of the salary of an active-duty policeman. Their salary then was 300 pesos, so I would get 150 pesos while in training. That was nothing compared to the $1,000 they sent me from outside so that I would be well taken care of. The narcos invest a lot of money in their people, who will be well trained to work for them and wage the war from the inside for the cartels.
THE LIFE, 2
It is like being an addict. The addict needs to have his shot every day. When the day comes and the addict refuses his shot, he is no longer any use to the criminal organization because he is no longer going to be a consumer. He is no longer going to do what he had to do before to get his shot. When an addict reforms, he goes through a struggle. But when he reforms, he starts to believe in his principles, in his own personality and character, and he begins to see his way of life from a different point of view. And he begins to realize the things he has done. He begins to dream and to hallucinate and to see the filthy things that he did under the influence of the drugs. Things that he had forgotten. And he realizes that he has committed many errors.
This makes the other people lose trust in those who have been able to overcome their addiction. Why? Not because they cannot trust the person, but because now they themselves are seen as lesser people, as weaker people, than those who have been able to overcome their addiction. They then have to constantly fight to maintain their place of confidence and their position in the organization. The highest bosses almost never use drugs. They might get high sometimes, but they are not regular users. It is not permitted.
It serves them to have the drug users working below them because it helps them to be able to do the work. I read an article that said something I think is true.... How can you kill a person and not have awareness of what you are doing? Well, it is like being drunk. A person under the influence of drugs has a different awareness of things. A person uses drugs to speed things up. But once a person stops using, he has a different awareness, and it is not so easy to do certain things. Of course not. It might cause the person to be afraid and hesitate, and then the team would go after him, try to get rid of him. It is a dangerous situation.
Now, for me, to stop using alcohol and drugs was never a problem. I stopped using various times for long periods. But it was a big problem for my bosses, it was a problem of trust. So what did I have to do at times? I would see that they were nervous about me.
The time comes—I’ve told you before and I will tell you again—when God needs something from you, and in this moment you are in God’s hands. It is through the Hand of God that you do what you do, it is not due to fear or nervousness or the influence of drugs. You are in danger and God is cleansing you, He is shaking you down, He is controlling what happens to you, and He is using the dangerous situation to make you understand what you must do.
It was during these times that I moved around a lot. Jumping from place to place, I became aware of the Hand of God, and how He would not leave me alone. And how was this possible for me, since I had by this time lost all the money I had? Both the narcos and the authorities were looking for me. How could I travel from place to place unless the Lord was watching over me and keeping me safe? How could I get across borders? With God, I could go anywhere. These are what you call miracles! And when miracles happen, you take notice.
These things were happening against my will because God was washing me clean. You see? God was taking away all of the vices and all of the evil things that I had lived. The drugs and alcohol I had left behind before, but things changed so much in me that my bosses lost confidence in me, and they sent people to hunt me down and kill me. ...
What happened? God called me, He took me out of there. He watched over me and put people in my path to guide me to Him. And I broke down in the presence of the Spirit of God. And I thank Him for allowing me to live. This is the only Lord, my God, that I respect and serve now. There is no other power greater than the power of God.
And now the narcos have more reasons to worry about me. Many of them are atheists or they worship Santa Muerter or some other cult. And now they fear me because I’m not just some crazy guy that stopped doing drugs. Now I am a crazy guy who is protected by the power of God. For God there are no borders. I am a living example of what God can do. He has taken me from place to place. I have a global passport, gracias a Dios, thanks be to God.
Throughout all of this that I have told you, the reality is that you are not really working as a policeman or an agent. All you really are is a puppet, un monigote. You are manipulated and controlled, your actions are controlled for the convenience of the boss, El Patron. And you rise according to how well you perform your job. And as you learn to perform your job better, you begin to earn a higher salary. And these salaries are fat and juicy. And one thing that you learn right away is that this money is easy come and easy go.
You can have a lot of weapons, uniforms, and cash stored and guarded in a warehouse, but in one moment, if you fall out of favor with the boss, he can take it all away from you. And the only one who gains is the boss. He can take away your life, and he can take away your family.
These numbers are very important, very representative.
He points back to the drawings he made of the houses used for clandestine burials.
One hundred persons. Can you imagine one hundred people buried in a cemetery, but they are piled one on top of another? Can you imagine trying to identify, trying to recognize those people? Can you imagine in a one-hundred-twenty-square-meter lot, ten meters by twenty meters, that there are fifty people buried in a common grave? Can you imagine how it is possible that when a clandestine cemetery comes to light and the news media are notified and they arrive to cover the story, that armed men show up to intimidate them, and they tell the reporters: “Get out of here right now or this is where you will end up too.”
Who has the power? Try to imagine who has the power in this kind of government. When all of the open spaces, the back roads, and the streets are guarded and patrolled by the Army. So, who is allowing all of the drugs to pass? Who is able to do this? If anyone unauthorized tries to pass drugs through, they are eliminated.
Well, those who have been trained with them for years, from a policeman with a career, from the street cop to the soldier—all of them have been trained for years to work under the command of the narcos. And the narco is a cartel. And it is a cartel that is fighting using the same police that the government has provided. Fighting for the plaza, to control territory.
And the only person who never realizes that he is dying is the puppet, el monigote, the person they have hanging here. For trying to be faithful, this person who has made just one mistake, they are going to chase him down and burn him to death in a barrel of boiling water, and they will make him suffer until he begs for mercy, until he begs for a bullet. And the people there will laugh at him.
You know what I want to tell you? I want to serve as an example for the rest. I can be an example, but I am only one of many. You could find ten more just like me.
THE SYSTEM, 2
In the Mexican justice system . . . here, I’m going to show you.
He begins to draw another schematic....
This is the presidency, and these are the states. And each state has a governor. But I can assure you. . . . That is, I cannot tell you for certain that the president is mixed up in everything, but I can assure you that the people just below him, in his administration, many of them are bought and paid for by the narco-trafficking organizations.
And so these safe houses exist all over Mexico. And I can tell you that in terms of the border—Nogales, Tijuana, Juárez, and even small towns like Ojinaga—there are houses where the federal judicial power and the government leaders and those in the Secretariat of Gobernación [Interior],s which is the strong arm of the Presidency of the Republic, where they know that people are buried. Not one or two or three or four . . . but more than three hundred, maybe four hundred people. I can’t tell you exactly who they are or what their names are. That is difficult. One cannot know everything. But in the day-to-day work that we did, I can tell you that of the forty, fifty, maybe even one hundred people who were kidnapped, that there are no more than five or six left alive. The rest of them will never be found. And these government people have knowledge of all of these safe houses.
And I can tell you, for example, of this house where thirtyeight people are buried, or of another one where maybe eighty people are buried. There are police squad cars guarding these houses, parked at strategic places on the nearby streets. Because they are being paid to protect these places so that these bodies never see the light of day.
In places where they have discovered bodies in different cities, this has happened because the FBI or the DEA has pressured the Mexican government to uncover these places. But the reality is that they know that there are informants for the DEA or the FBI buried there. There are people who had worked as informants, and they ended up buried in these places.t
I can tell you one important bit of information: These informants of the DEA, it is no longer a good idea to bury them, because they now wear a chip, a computer tracking chip, that was not used before. And now all of the DEA informants in Mexico have these chips, and even though they are buried, the problem is that they can be located quickly using a GPS satellite system, and that system is global.u
The narco-traffickers know this. In the past they would use a scanner to try to determine if a person was wearing a chip, but they are really small and are usually implanted in the neck or in the hand. But now they do not always know where they are implanted. And so some of these informants who were wearing chips ended up buried, and because of this, some of the graves have been located and excavated. But I can also tell you that some people in the DEA who were also working for the narcos informed them that these chips were giving precise locations as to where these people had been buried.
These are some of the reasons that I can say with confidence that the government is aware of all of this, that they know these things. The government knows that there are many people who are being instructed and trained and managed by the government for many years and that these people are then being used by the narcos. The government knows what is happening. The reason that this has not been stopped is because this system is convenient for them. There are several things about it that suit their interests.
One of these is that a certain amount of instability is advantageous to them because it enables them to keep on stealing. When really big things happen in the country, what do they do? For instance, when a guerrilla war broke out in Chiapas, the narcos took advantage of this. When there is a guerrilla war in the southern part of the country, it becomes easier to traffic drugs here in the north of Mexico. And as the trafficking increased, the cartels just grew and grew and grew. And these people in Mexico City, the generals down there in those mansions where they live? It is the same police who work for them, the same police themselves who are moving the drugs. Maybe not always in the same vehicles, but in any case, they provide the escorts for the drugs so that everything passes safely.
The government of the United States tries to be sure that its image is clean. But at the international bridges there are elements that, I can assure you, will charge, for example, $50,000 to let a Suburban pass, loaded to the gills, packed with everything it can carry, and they will not search it. And there have been investigations that have affected Mexico, and there have been global news stories in which the United States says that the narcos have not infiltrated their organizations. Well, they have, but in the United States they at least make an effort to stop this corruption. But in Mexico they don’t even try. What they do in Mexico is to give the advantage to the narcos. The government assigns forces to them, and they train and assist all of the elements that then go on to work directly for the narco-trafficking organizations.
These are logistics and things that you have to understand. What does the government do? They pay the police a small salary, but the police understand that this little salary is nothing compared to what they will earn from the narcos. You have to take into account that of all the training academies in Mexico, the most prestigious are those of the Mexican Army. And you must understand how the army’s reputation was tarnished when General Rebollo was arrested and sentenced by a military court and continues to be imprisoned for having very close links with the Lord of the Skies, Amado Carrillo.v
When General Rebollo was arrested, he left very very powerful people in charge. He was the chief of intelligence in Mexico and of the army. He was the chief of the army when the president gave him this high position and power, and at the same time General Rebollo was an intimate compadre of the most powerful narco-trafficker in the country.
So what can you expect? If the highest destructive force in your country, the most powerful institution in the country—the Mexican Army—is mixed up in the narco-trafficking, what is a simple citizen supposed to do? Do you think a citizen is going to have confidence in the municipal police? The rural police? The investigative police? Or a policeman of the people who rides a bicycle and instead of a pistol carries a little wooden club? What is the citizen to do when the army arrives along with several narcos armed with AK-47s, with FAL [Fusil Automatique Léger, a light automatic rifle made in Belgium] or with assault rifles, or a semi-automatic machine gun, with Uzis or with weapons that can be under water and still fire? And now they are even using Barretts, weapons that can penetrate an armored vehicle. What is the population supposed to think? What can a policeman expect when a narco asks the question: “What do you want? Silver or lead? Plata o plomo?” Either you take the money we offer and join us, or you die. What do you do? What do you do when the whole country is invaded, infiltrated completely?
President Calderón has a very serious problem. There are informants for the narco organizations inside of his government, and he is not going to be able to clean this up. There are people there who have been corrupted for years. Calderón has not understood how other governments have dealt with this. He is favoring one cartel, and the other is going to wage war. Calderón is not going to be able to resolve this situation in one presidential term. Ojala! God willing! Things may get better. But it has to be cleaned up from inside the presidency.
It used to be that the army was respected in Mexico. But now putting the army in the streets puts them in the position of the police. And police are not respected. No one respects the police because everyone considers them just like they do the narcos. The army is degraded now that they are in the streets. The army is not set up to do investigations or to fight the narco-traffickers. They are not facing a guerrilla. A lot of the weapons that the narcos themselves are using come from the army. Along the borders there is a lot of trafficking in weapons. And the weapons pass through customs, but in reality all of the border crossings are under the control of the army, and so the weapons could not get into the hands of the narcos without the army knowing about it.
Before, the army was very highly respected in Mexico. The people used to be thrilled to see a military parade, to see the weapons that only the military would have. But that was before, not now. Now, when there are searches and confiscations, they capture weapons in the hands of the narcos that are much more powerful than those used by the army.
For a long time, the army did not show up except for parades or when there was some kind of disaster in the country, like a flood or epidemic, and the federal government would call in the army to do relief work. But later, there were infiltrations by very high-level people. For example, it was known that the Lord of the Skies had people who had infiltrated the military, people who had gotten very close to the top. The military had always been very cautious. Not the whole army, but elements of the army began.... It is really a shame that the institution has been so corrupted, it is a shame what is happening now. Many people joined the army because they really wanted to serve the country, but they have ended up in the streets. They have been corrupted, and they are now serving the narcos. Sometimes they do not even know which side they are working for.
Before, the army would never have been in the streets, except for some very secret operations when they were called in to assist the federal police. These were very secret, very special operations. But the army would never have been called in to guard a plaza or to get mixed up in violence between cartels. The army existed to protect the sovereignty of the country. But now? Are they protecting the sovereignty? No, now they are just another instrument. They have ruined the vision of the military from what it was before. Even though the army had been involved before—after all, it was proven that General Rebollo worked for the Juárez cartel. But these things were known and not talked about, not written about in the press. But now the army is called in to get involved in the fight between the Juárez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel.
I am not going to tell you that there are no good people. There are good people in the very upper echelons of the government, from the president’s own sphere, who have tried to do things right, who have tried to make it so that things function in a proper way. But these people have been destroyed. There are people who have fallen very recently. For example, Mr. Vasconcelos. w His airplane crashed, but it was not a crash caused by human error, as reported in the media. And with him, the secretary of Gobernación [Interior] was also killed. And he was an intimate friend of the current president of Mexico.
What I am telling you is plain to see. It was an airplane crash, and it happened because Vasconcelos and this secretary of Gobernación were working to break these links with the narco-traffickers, people that were following this line. And in the trajectory of Vasconcelos, you can understand this by looking at what he did.
He talks very fast, he is pounding his pen onto the paper.... His voice breaks with emotion. He is angry.
So what happened? Vasconcelos was one of the public prosecutors who was involved in the largest number of excavations of bodies in the safe houses all over the country. He had the strength and the courage to talk to the FBI and the DEA. And state by state, he went to people he could trust and dug up the bodies, dug up the bodies, dug up the bodies ... sacó cuerpos enterrados, sacó cuerpos enterrados, sacó cuerpos enterrados.
I haven’t followed too carefully the policies of President Calderón, but I have noticed that he has changed tactics for handling the situation. He has tried to purge, to purify, the high ranks of his government. Calderón has said, “I have my right arm and my left, and I’m going to purge my right arm.” But when we look at the people that he has purged, what it looks like is that he is removing the people who work for one cartel simply to replace them with those who are part of another cartel. This is what it looks like to people—that he is receiving payment from one cartel to get rid of those in his government who are associated with another cartel.
Many times, not even the president of the Republic can keep track of everything that is going on. So he has various leaders who work for him as the secretaries of the various government ministries and departments. For example, as I’ve mentioned to you, his secretary of Interior [Juan Camilo Mouriño] was assassinated. Well, he was killed in a plane crash, and they say that turbulence caused it. Illogical! When someone starts to do a good job, it gets noticed, and so there are repercussions.
It is most likely that the target was not the secretary, but it was Señor Vasconcelos who was traveling with him. You go and check into who he was and what he did. See how much trouble he caused inside of the attorney general’s office, even though he did not have a high post there. He was just a middle-level investigator, but he accomplished more than many other investigators with more power than he had. Just take a look at how many little bodies came crawling out of the ground because of the efforts of Señor Vasconcelos!
This situation did not in any way benefit Mexico. So what did this mean? It meant that at the highest spheres of government, there were people mixed up in the narco-business. And if everyone was involved, there came a moment when a group of high-level agents in various states had to flee because of the discovery of bodies in bunkers that they maintained for the purpose of burying people. There are really good people who try to make a difference. Unfortunately, with the corruption coming from the top, it is very hard to clean this up.
There are strategies on the part of the government—for example, they send elements of the Mexican Army to Pakistan and Spain to receive instruction in how to combat terrorism. But some of these are elements that will in turn use the military and counterterrorism instruction they receive to train the narco-trafficking groups to counter actions that the government might try to use against them.
Now I want to talk about a very powerful group in Mexico known as the Zetas. Remember, as it is said, it takes a Zeta to kill a Zeta. And a Zeta is trained to kill sixteen men without using a single weapon, he is trained to kill with his bare hands. He has the power and the training and capability to do this.x
When you have access to and control over this kind of information, you realize that the barriers have been crossed, the lines have been erased. You realize that Mexico is no longer just a place for drugs from other places to cross over into the United States. Rather, Mexico is now a producer of drugs. And it intends to displace other producers. And at the same time as the United States reinforces its borders, the introduction of drugs into the United States is decreasing. So the narcos now are trying to addict the children in the schools in Mexico. They are now working to hook people who work in the maquiladoras [factories]. And they are recruiting women to distribute drugs.
And so what is happening is the explosion of drug use in Mexico. Mexico has now passed from being an exporter and transporter of drugs and is now a consumer country. Now you can see people begging in the streets, people selling gum at intersections, people passed out in the streets, people robbing old women to get money to supply their drug habits. And where will all these people go when they try to reform themselves? All of the people begging in the streets are completely rejected by society. There is no place for them, except for these shelters, these Christian shelters.
And these people when they leave the shelters and end up in prison [CERESO, Centro de Readaptación Social (Center for Social Rehabilitation)] because they have committed robberies, and they are declared mentally ill, the only thing left is to send them back to a shelter. Because the government which instructed and trained people in their schools and academies, the government that trained elements who are then handed over to work for the narcos, they then end up in charge of all these people who are thrown away because they are no longer capable of productive work.
What is it that is not convenient for the government? Why doesn’t the government do anything to stop this?
Because the government is involved in the billions of dollars that are made in this business.
The government does not want a solution. What are they saying now about the government of Mexico? That the government is taking action, using the army to resolve this problematic situation. But the situation is that the power of the narco-trafficking organizations has overtaken the power of the government. The narcos will not allow the government to control them.
The president of Mexico says, “I am in control. I will control this using my army.” But the degree of corruption is so high that it cannot be brought under control. What has happened is that it is now the narcos who are controlling the president.
You can point to other parts of this situation. There was an attempt on the life of Governor Reyes Baeza of Chihuahua. They killed one of the governor’s bodyguards.y Of course, this was not reported as it actually happened. Do you think that only the bodyguard was killed? So what really happened? The governor gave thanks for the work his faithful bodyguard did to defend him because he knew that it was only because of this honest man doing his job that he was saved.
But there were serious errors, serious mistakes committed. From all that I have told you and from what I know from my experience, you have to realize that when people are sent to take out a particular objective, that is what they must do and there cannot be any errors. I can tell you that those who carried out this attack on the governor of Chihuahua and failed to do it properly, I know that these people are no longer alive. They have been killed because they failed to do their job and they cannot be left alive. They died for failing to do a good job.
And what about that job that was done years ago that I told you about, the murder of the newspaper columnist, Dr. Oropeza? Why, after the passage of so many years, have they not been able to solve this case? People have written hundreds of articles about this case. People claim to know who did it.
I know who did it.
The order came from “El Cora.” El Cora assigned a team of five people to do the job. Of these people, in this moment, I know that one is in prison for other minor crimes, and he was directly involved in this murder. And there is another person also. There are two of the five who committed this crime who are alive. Why hasn’t anyone done anything? Why do the Mexican authorities try to blame scapegoats who are detained in prisons in the United States? Why bother with bringing them here to charge them with this crime when they know who really did it? When there are two people here in prison and many people know it. Why doesn’t anyone talk to them? Why doesn’t anyone ask them what really happened? Why does another one go free? It is not just that this journalist got involved with the narcos.z When you review the articles that he wrote, you will realize that he was one of the first journalists who spoke out about the corruption and the links between the Mexican government and the narcos. And that is why he was killed. He was a great man.
It is a disgrace that the good men and the good journalists are the ones who fall. Here in the border, there have been a lot who have fallen. Every day there are more. It is not that there are not honest people. It is not that there are not honest journalists who write the truth and who have the courage to do it. There are, but they have to hide. They have to write anonymously.
People will say: “Why are you afraid if you are a journalist? Why don’t you speak openly and use the power of what you write? Why don’t you write the truth? You are a journalist. You should show your face and stand by what you write.” But those who have shown their faces have ended up dead, and their families have ended up in the street. Their families have ended up with nothing. The government has nothing but shame. They know that these journalists have been killed. The government does nothing to help them, and their families are left with nothing.
The crime against Dr. Oropeza dates back to the years when the buildup in the power of the narco-trafficking organizations was just beginning. It was when the narcos started to contract specialized teams to carry out executions. This was the beginning of a “boom.” It was a time when it did not matter what social class you came from or who you were. The fact was, even if you were a journalist or some other important person in the society, your position would not protect you. If you did anything to attack any narco-trafficker, they were going to retaliate against you, and it did not matter to them how far things went. This was at the time when the narcos were saying, “I can go anywhere and I can do anything.”
And way back then, if the authorities were not able to solve such a simple crime like the murder of Oropeza, what can you expect now? This boom was something that was heard worldwide. This homicide case was dealt with all the way up to the United Nations, and yet it still could not be solved. Nothing was ever done to punish those responsible. If that is what happens with such an important case, what can a common ordinary citizen expect in these times of threats and the wave of violence that is happening today? The case of Dr. Oropeza was just a taste of what was to come. We see what is happening now.
People say, “Okay, the violence is growing and growing. These crimes are never going to end.” But it is not happening by chance—it is being controlled. What happened back then was not an experiment. Rather, it was a warning. The narcos were sending out a warning to the government and to the people: that they were in control and that they could do anything. They were capable, and they had people who were very well trained, and it was the government itself that provided the people and the training to carry out any kind of job. And above all, they provided the resources to do the work, thanks to the money generated by the narco-traffickers.
That is what the murder of Dr. Oropeza meant.
Now about Vasconcelos. ... He was a person who was very well respected right up until the moment of his death. He was respected even inside the cartels. When he began an investigation, it became a priority even to the cartels. They moved aside and gave him the space to work and to investigate. He was an upright person, very straight. He did not get mixed up in problems. And Vasconcelos is talked about because at a given moment, inside of the current government of Calderón, if they were able to have confidence in anyone, it was in him. He was supportive, respected, very well organized in his thoughts and in his words. Men like him no longer exist inside the government.
Unfortunately, what happened to him that day in the private airplane he was traveling in together with the secretary of the Interior [Gobernación], well, the government says that it was an accident caused by negligence on the part of the pilots. I have known a lot of pilots ... and despite the government’s investigations, I can practically assure you that this was not an accident.
Vasconcelos carried out a lot of investigations. The majority of them were done in close cooperation with the United States. He was doing his job for the government of Mexico, but his actions indicated that he was also an important link with United States law enforcement, and he was carrying out orders based on the information provided by the United States. For example, in one of the cases he investigated, some bodies were dug up from a house. The information came from DEA in the United States, and so something had to be done about it. If the information got into his hands, he would investigate, he would act. There was a sense of security that if Vasconcelos said he would do something, he would follow through on it. This was a certainty. He was not like many other high commanders of the police or other high-level law enforcement officials in Mexico—stuck between a rock and a hard place [entre la espada y la pared ].
And up to now there has not been another person like him. We are talking about a person who took action. He could have been blocked perhaps, but once certain information was released, his investigations could no longer be covered up. Once the reports got into his hands, it was something real, and he could not be stopped. He followed through on all of the cases he investigated. He would not give up on a case even when he was ordered to. He always followed through. He was an honorable person, a person with a clear idea of where he was going and what he was doing. And he could be trusted. Now there are no public servants like him. If in some given moment the Mexican government had been willing and able to provide him with real security, listened to his advice, and adopted some of his investigative methods, it is possible that Mexico would not now be experiencing such high levels of violence.
But what was the government going to do with a person who had this kind of knowledge? They could place him in a very high position in the government so that he would be able to direct all of the police forces under Calderón. For example, he could have been put into a position similar to that held many years earlier by Commander Ruvalcaba,aa who served as a link with United States law enforcement. He was a key person. I have no doubt that in the same manner, even after Vasconcelos was transferred from the attorney general to the department of Interior [Gobernación ], he continued acting as an important link with the U.S. He could have followed through with his investigations. But—and this is talked about a lot—what the government did instead was to degrade his position and lower his rank. And they put him directly into the line of fire. They took away the protection that he had.
He was a humble man, dedicated to his work and to his family. I would like to have met him, but I never had the chance. I heard him talked about a lot, and everyone always spoke well of him. Once, when we were in Monterrey, he was going to be there carrying out an investigation. And we were asked to leave the plaza so that he would be able to do what he needed to do. It was never possible for the narcos to make an arrangement with him. That is, it was better for us, the cartel operatives at the time, to just withdraw from the plaza, let him do what he was going to do, and then leave. After that, we could return and carry on with our work. I am sure that the narco bosses at the time knew what kind of investigation he was working on, because there were various infiltrators. There were people from the PGR [Procuraduria General de la República, the federal attorney general] or from military intelligence inside the cartels, just as the cartels had people bought and paid for inside the government.
But there was no way for the narcos to get to Vasconcelos. He was a respectable person. Perhaps he had his weaknesses, but as far as I know, he was never corrupted. He was a person of confidence. In fact, many of the narco bosses in Mexico wanted to work with him because they knew he was a man who kept his word. But this is something that Calderón did not understand how to use to his advantage.
So, it was one of those things.... Perhaps Calderón made a mistake. Certainly, from my perspective, my personal opinion is that the action taken was a mistake. Vasconcelos could have done more. He could have shown the way, opened things up through his investigations. Based on the real facts obtained through his investigations, many more people could have been arrested and put in prison. And without so much violence and bloodshed. Much of the work that Vasconcelos was doing was based on information from the United States. But he did not do things halfway. He built good cases, and when he made an arrest, you could be sure that the subject would stay locked up. Today in Mexico, people are being arrested, but due to the lack of a functioning legal system, they are getting out in one or two years. The legal system can’t keep them locked up. So what are they going to do then? They get out and go looking for the people they had problems with to settle the score. That results in even more bloodshed.
So, in terms of what happened with Dr. Oropeza, this signaled the beginning of the boom back in those years. The narcos wanted everyone to realize just what they were capable of. And now, with what happened to Vasconcelos, you realize that the narcos are still in control. “We do what we want. We go where we want.” And if anyone challenges their power or tries to be equal to them, that person will realize that the narcos can handle it and they are capable of winning.
THE LIFE, 3
I depend directly on God . . . God is with me. While I was waiting outside just now, I read this:
Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the
Lord is kept safe. (Temer a los hombres resulta una trampa,
pero el que confía en el Señor sale bien librado.)
PROVERBS 29:25
So I do not need to fear men, I need to trust in God. But I realize and I am eternally grateful for this confidence—that I am immensely privileged to be able to trust in God.
These men, Oropeza and Vasconcelos, in their time, each served their own god. For instance, Oropeza’s god was doing his job as a journalist. And what did it get him? Death. For Vasconcelos, I think his god was to serve the government, to be subject to the government, and to carry out the orders he was given. And what did that get him? Death.
I serve the Lord, and I will follow Him on the same road.
But these men, despite the power of their words and their actions, they were brought down. Who is it that cannot be brought down?
It is a vision. No one is exempt. We are all just passing through this world. The only sure thing is that if we are born, we will also die. But there are very few lucky enough to die in their beds, asleep, without feeling a thing—to die happy. And to have lived a life that was good for their children, their grandchildren, and everyone else. God is good, and if we are lucky, we are allowed to have children and then grandchildren and we are able to enjoy them and be with them and we can say, “Thank you, God.”
And be satisfied with our lives.
In the environment that I moved in, I never thought that I would live to see my children and grandchildren. Never never never. At any moment I could die in a hail of bullets. You carry out your job in fractions of a second, and you must be coldblooded to do it. In the moment you must act without thinking. You must be full of malice and wickedness to do this work. And you must know what you are doing. But you never ever have time to think about having children and grandchildren.
You never have time to think about it. The future is always uncertain. Now, yes, thanks to God, I can make plans. In my past life, I never thought, “What shall we do for Christmas?” You have everything, but only in the moment. And you must enjoy it in the moment. Whatever you have, goes, goes, goes. You never expect to have a future.
Well, maybe only if you are a very high-ranking person. But even then, you have to know how to administer your resources and how to protect your loved ones.
I used to think ... I remember once I told you: You never want to be either the head or the tail. Both get cut off. So you want to be the belly in order to be safe. But now I feel differently. Now I want to be the head, the point of the lance. Because we are the people of God. We are here because God is taking care of us. Our past is past. And people need to see us like we are now. I no longer want to be in the middle where things are easy and safe . . . that is the past. Now I want to be the head, the point of the lance. Oropeza and Vasconcelos also were both at the head, they were points of the lance. They were pioneers. One in journalism and the other in the police. And look at what happened to them.
There are others who have passed through these stages of the vicious circle and who want to do something. As I have drawn these charts for you, of ninety people, ninety elements who graduate from any class in an academy, fifty of them are involved with the narco-trafficking organizations. Whether they are in the ministerial police, the preventive police, the judicial police, the federal police, or elements of the army. I have reviewed for you how this works, how from the very beginning the narcos send remittances to these elements, investing in these people from the very beginning. The narcos realize that by paying these people early on, they are forming them, maintaining them, just like parents take care of their children. They will end up being much more faithful to the narcos than to the government or to the army because since they were children they have been maintained and taken care of by the narcos.
It is a family. We can say, like in any family, not everyone is involved. Maybe one person is, but not the whole family. But from that one person, the disintegration of the entire family begins. The disintegration of the family begins with divorce and causes many problems. The children are taken care of not by a couple but by the mother or the father alone.
The government has no desire to resolve this problem, this situation. The government does not try to stop the situation. The government acts in the way that the narcos tell them to act. The government conducts training, and the narcos defend themselves using the same government corporations.
This wall that the United States is building on the border with Mexico? This wall is impressive, and built into this wall are gates that will allow armored trucks to pass through. What does this tell us? It tells us that in any moment, if the narco-trafficking organizations actually take control in Mexico, the United States will have its border well protected.
And speaking of people who are kidnapped, los levantados, even if they have protection, they will always, always have to pay the price. For every ten people who are kidnapped, if two of them remain alive, it is because those two had a good relationship with those in power, the narcos.
Remember that I showed you how a long time ago the narcos already had cell phones that we called “bricks”? The narcos were the only ones at the time who had the money to acquire this equipment. Before any police had them, the narcos had them, and they worked with American phone lines. No one else had the resources to pay for them.
How is it possible to say, for example, when they have recovered some $200 million from a mansion in Mexico City, that the narcos do not have a huge amount of money stored away? How could $200 million be handled on the street? How could such huge amounts of money and drugs be moved around the country? How? That’s an easy question. You do it with the help of the authority. And who has authority now? It belongs to the narco-trafficking organizations. It is a disgrace.
The government has already tried to take back some control from the cartels and has tried to begin in the prisons. And what has happened? There have been uprisings, not just in a few but in many prisons all over the country. Cynically, the narcos come and take people out of the prisons as if they were just going into their own houses, and they take out twenty or thirty people right under the noses of the government. It is all arranged.ab
THE SYSTEM, 3
To be a sicario during that time became a real profession. But like I told you, it isn’t like that any longer. Now you can look on the Internet and find a sicario. You can find someone advertising: “You want to kill someone? I’m a sicario. I will do it for you for $5,000.”
And you are supposed to believe that for $5,000 you can get somebody killed just because you don’t like him? This started to happen a lot and then what? You would see cars all shot up like a pincushion. You would see people who are not even connected to narco-trafficking but who might be fighting over a stall in a flea market. In Mexico they might use bus drivers. But this is not the work of a sicario. This is the work of imitators.
The sicario knows his job. He knows exactly when to strike, he knows his objective. And the sicario would never, never advertise or publicize his work. He is someone who is always among the people. He has relationships with the people. He could be playing baseball with his kids or he could be attending a meeting in the town council at city hall. He knows how to behave, he knows how to dress. He knows how to conduct himself, he knows how to talk. He is well educated. This is what the narco-trafficking organizations know, and this is what they are willing to pay for by cultivating people in many places and for years, to ensure that their work is properly carried out.
When this stuff started happening on the Internet, not only did the source of money for killing people start to diminish, but also, you started to see something else. They created “a line,” La Linea, and it has been operating now for years. And this “line” says: “All of you people, you are going to stop killing people.” So what did “the line” do? They said, “So if you want to be imitators, you will be eliminated.” And they began to eliminate a lot of people. And that began to create the problem that Mexico is living through right now, thanks to these imitators.
The narcos pay the investigative organizations. And the personnel of these organizations are the main eyes and ears of the narco-trafficking organizations. The government is in charge of training these people in the academies all over the Republic of Mexico, and they are then delivered to the narco-trafficking organizations, already trained and instructed in military tactics and ready for the battle. There are many different kinds of academies for specialized training, and many of those who are trained will go straight to work for the narcos. I will tell you that of fifty elements trained in the academies, at least fifteen are already mixed up with the narcos and another fifteen are just about to be corrupted. Because the police are so badly paid, what they would get in two weeks the narcos will pay in one day. It’s that simple.
So what’s happening? The narcos are empowered by this, and they have their eyes and ears everywhere. And the pressure on the Mexican government and the assistance received from the United States and other countries to do away with the narco-trafficking groups will never make any headway without the loyalty among the high government leaders.
The cartels no longer have the same control over the academies that they had in the past. Why? Because the people no longer want to join the police forces. The people no longer have any confidence, and they are afraid to join the police. They are afraid that if they join the police, they will face this choice: “Do you want us to pay you with gold? Or lead?” This is a nine-millimeter bullet.
He draws the bullet.
You either take the money, or we kill you.
So what did they start to do? They began to bring people from other countries, such as maras [marasalvatruchas—gangsters from Central America]. They start to bring people from gangs in the United States. But there is one thing I can assure you: All of these people they are bringing in? They all have to be trained and instructed by sicarios who have learned it from the ground up. It is not very simple to let loose a group of one hundred or two hundred gangsters and expect that you can use them to control a city. That is very difficult, very difficult.
What you have to do, and what the narco-trafficking organizations are doing, is taking small groups of five or ten into the sierra to receive military training, and then letting them loose, here and there in the cities a few at a time. And then, little by little, they are killing and getting killed. How do they get to the cities? In planes and also in buses and trucks, overland.
So when you have these elements well trained and instructed, here he is:
He draws the sicario as he learns his craft.
When he has passed through all of these little steps and tests—he goes through primary school, he learns to crawl, to walk, he begins to trot, to run, he can almost fly, now he has learned to fly—at this stage, when he is fully trained, you cannot ask him to do the same kind of work he did when he was barely crawling. That is really hard. Now he is trained to kill, to execute, and to do it well. He can no longer do the work of a beginner.
Remember that orders are carried out, not discussed. Unfortunately, sometimes there are errors in our plans. And the only one who can make a mistake is the boss. And since he is the boss, if he makes a mistake he can order the job to be done again. But if the sicario makes a mistake, no matter how big he is or how good he is at the job, he will also fall. That will be the end of him.
I mention that back in 1991—the year of Oropeza’s murder—newspapers called it the bloodiest year in the city’s history. A total of 134 people were murdered in 1991 in Juárez.
Wow! And now, in just one month, more than three hundred people are murdered.ac Back in those days, it was rare to see an executed person on the street. Back then, there was some kind of respect. Now there is no respect. Respect is gone. But you have to consider that back then, in addition to counting the people who are murdered in the open, you also have to count the reports of disappeared persons. And there were many people disappeared that some years later come to light when clandestine burials are discovered. And many disappeared who were never counted.
I have seen foolish executions carried out by children. There is no longer any respect. Some kid will say, “I like this girl, but she is with you. ... But I want her, she should be with me. . . .” And that can be enough for a murder . . . executions carried out by kids of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old.... Education must begin at home, but now the media, the TV news, the newspapers report all of this. Sure, it is better to have the information than to have it hidden like it was before, when only the privileged would have information. But this information must be handled very carefully.
What is the message that is being given out to the young kids now? In the media and on the Internet, the message sent out more than any other is “sicario, sicario, sicario, sicario, sicario, sicario” . . . so what happens is that every child wants to be a sicario. To be a sicario is a big deal. It comes out in the news that you can earn a lot of money, and it is easy for them since they are kids. So what do they have, really? Maybe in the moment, a little happiness and money. But they are completely destroying their lives. They don’t realize it. But it is not a profession to be a sicario. At some time in the past, maybe there was some kind of professionalization, but now this idea of being a sicario is a game, a temptation, like when a child cries for something and you give him a popsicle just to make him happy in the moment.
It was very different back in the time of the operation against Dr. Oropeza. Plans were made. Very well-trained people were contracted, and every aspect of the job was checked out. Now there is such audacity. The level of corruption among the authorities is so high. Back then, there were many corrupt officials also, but not so many as now.
And what about Señor Vasconcelos? Maybe it was an accident after all, and the plane crashed. But what if it was an assassination? It was very well done if that is the case, if those pilots were part of the plot. Because these people who were killed were very important to the president—these men were very close to him. Mouriño was a man he trusted, they say one of his closest friends, like a member of his family. I think that the president of Mexico must be very careful of who he places in these high positions. It is as if they are his family and he must depend on them for his peace and his security. No one, not even a minor narco boss, will allow his family to be touched. But this president is careless, and he has allowed these things to happen to those closest to him, like his secretary of Interior [Gobernación], and so he seems weak and things will keep on happening to him. This man was like a member of the president’s family and so Calderón realizes that he has been hit and that they will continue to attack him. He makes agreements. Or he allows others to make agreements with some narcos and not with others.
This government is very vulnerable. The narcos will continue to be on the attack. The government has some successes, but only up to a point. The successes have mostly been due to the experiments that the DEA is carrying out now in Mexico, and the president is doing what the DEA orders. I think that the United States law enforcement needs to take advantage of the Calderón government, because he will allow them to do whatever investigation they want. Many other governments will not allow them to go so far. Another government will not allow the same cooperation and the availability of their military to work with the United States. The United States needs to take advantage of this situation.
Sadly, some good men become casualties in this system. Many years ago, Oropeza was a man who published his articles in a newspaper here on the border, and many people read them. His articles were strong, clear, and concise. His punches really hit home. No one ever knew where he got the information that he published, but it was always strong and clear. And for being a strong, clear, and concise journalist, he was killed. In the same way, Señor Vasconcelos, for being a good policeman—clear, honest, and concise—he was killed also.
THE LIFE, 4
So what are you left with? What can you do? You try to keep yourself in the middle, you try to maintain a balance. And you know what? Sometimes this balance is right there for us, and it passes us by and we don’t even know it.
That is what happened to me. I saw these signs, these big, luminous messages. I would see them along the way to the places I was sleeping, the places I was staying. I did not understand what these signs meant at this time in my life. It was when I had stopped drinking, smoking, and using drugs.
At this time, I was sleeping in different places. I was not sleeping at home because I did not trust myself. I was afraid I might do something to harm my family. What were these signs, these announcements? It was something I had seen in all of my dreams, and it was like a mixed-up reprise, a revoltura, of all the things I had done in my life.
And so I started to gather together money that I had put away here and there in various bank accounts, hidden in different places so that I would be okay. And I sent money to my house so that my family would be okay. But it isn’t good enough just to send money home. Money doesn’t raise children. The father figure in the home is what is needed to raise your children. Money does not raise children.
He bangs on the tablet as he says this. And he begins a kind of dialogue with himself....
In these moments you don’t realize—when you are trying to clean up your act—when you keep seeing these signs....
“So, hey, what is going on with you?”
“They are following me.”
“You are a professional. You know that they are going to kill you, but it is not the right moment because you haven’t done anything yet. And you have not made any mistakes.”
What you did was to quit your bad habits—you quit drinking, smoking, and taking drugs, and sometimes fooling around with women. When you leave these things behind, it’s strange, because it changes your attitude. But what is really strange is that everywhere you look you start to see all these little signs. And I’m not going to tell you that these are signs that say, “You have to come to this church,” or, “You have to join this religion. . . .”
No, these are little signs that say:
CALL IF YOU NEED HELP. HE IS WAITING FOR YOU.
And you run into these signs everywhere. And you can see them everywhere. You can even see them from your house.
When fear arrives at your own home, when you fear for your own family, when you have to sleep in other houses so that you will not hurt your own family.... This fear becomes not cowardice, cobardia, rather, it becomes courage and fortitude, passion and rage, coraje.ad First, it is triangulated courage, three-sided courage. And then a circle that encloses you.
And then you realize that, yes, there is hope and, yes, there is salvation. And that this salvation cannot be controlled by a man. A man whose only accomplishment, whose only achievement, is to have power and money. And he has so much, he possesses such abundance, that he always wants more. And more. And more.
And it does not matter to him that in acquiring such power and money that one or two or three die. ... But it is never only one or two or three. No, it is 100 or 200 or 300 people.... It doesn’t even matter to him if it is 4,500 people whose lives are on his conscience. All that matters to him is that he can say: “I am in control, I am the one who gives the orders, yo soy el que manda.”
But every day there are these little signs that distract you and guide you day after day. And you realize now that the only thing your bosses are offering you is $500 or $1,000 so that you will keep watch over some stupid little car all day. Or that you are just “the Eyes” watching to see if someone passes by, and you have to wait around all day for nothing. When you know that, instead of being the Eyes, you could be earning $5,000 to execute somebody. You could be getting paid $25,000, $75,000. There are people with prices on their heads worth up to $5 million. People who are on the run and people they are looking for.
And now you realize that to everyone—to the organization, to the bosses—what you really are is nothing.
You realize that you are completely alone in the world. All you have is a weapon in each hand. But if you end up out in the cold with nothing, you are not going to find anyone, there will be no one who will be close to you or who will protect you. You are alone. There is no one. Except, if you have one, your family may be there with you.
And the only One who will be looking after your family is The Lord, El Señor. It will not be anyone who calls himself “Master,” or someone who dares to call himself “Boss,” “Patron,” “Number One,” or “Bad Ass” [Fregon].
None of these can compare with the One who through all of the filth that you have been living all of this time has been guarding and taking care of your family. And He is waiting to tell you that there is hope. And there is hope to get you out of this. And that if you accept Him, He will accept you. And that nothing, none of this, will ever affect you in your life anymore.
You must take precautions. You must be very careful. You must be jealous. Not jealous of your wife, but jealous of your actions. Because this Lord who is the Ruler of everything, is jealous of His children, and He loves them, and He protects all of His children.
When you encounter Him and He gives you peace and He reunites you with the half of what you have lost—your family and the person you really are—and they are united in the Holy Trinity and they are with the Lord, you know what? This peace and tranquility that you live in this moment begins to grow, and you become a new man. And this new man is not afraid of any other man. He fears only God.
And to the man who calls himself “Patron,”
To the man who calls himself “The Boss,”
To the man who calls himself “Number One,”
To the man who calls himself “Master” ...
What are they masters of?
Masters of shit!
When God called me, He made me roll around in all of this filth. He took away the very last cent that I had made from all of this.
He flips back again through the notebook of his life.
He took away my clothes.
He took away my thoughts.
He took away everything.
He shook me down.
And you know what?
He left me with nothing but my own skin, naked, together with my family.
And from there, we can begin a new life in Him.