The documentary film El Sicario, Room 164, directed by Gianfranco Rosi, was shown on French and German television in late November 2010. The film has won numerous awards since its premiere in Venice. The sicario expressed his feelings with these words:
May God bless you.
How grateful I am for this news about the documentary. It seems to me that it is having a good premiere and exposure in the media, and above all it shows us a part of the realism that many of us wish to forget, because of the violence that Mexico is living through. Thanks for giving to all a little bit of realism, and we keep hoping that the government of Mexico will one day really put things right and not continue to join forces with these people.
Saludos and be well this Thanksgiving.
May Jesus Christ fill you with blessings.
Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can’t shoot them anymore....
—BOB DYLAN, “KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR”
a
Later I asked him to explain el chaca, and this is what he wrote:
EL SIGNIFICADO DE ESTA PALABRA EN EL AMBITO DE GRUPOS DE CARTELES SE
LES DENOMINA CHACAS O CHACALOSOS A LOS
JEFES
PATRONES
QUIEN MANDA
QUIEN ORDENA
EL QUE ESTA A CARGO
(In the cartel world, el chaca or los chacalosos are words to describe
the bosses,
the patrones,
those who command,
those who give the orders,
those who are in charge.)
b
More than a year after the initial interview, the sicario told us in a casual conversation that a U.S. official who worked in a border agency at the time (probably in the late 1980s) had helped get his border-crossing card back after this incident when he was caught at the bridge. Years later, the sicario said, he lost the card again during a cocaine-snorting party on the U.S. side of the border. The same official intervened again, the implication being that the drug traffickers the sicario worked for at the time had connections inside U.S. agencies.
c
From the early 1990s until after the death of Amado Carrillo in 1997, the cartel forbade the sale of nearly all illegal drugs in the city of Juárez. This was part of an arrangement between the Juárez cartel and the government. This control broke down after Carrillo’s death. The domestic drug market is now an important part of the business in Juárez and all over Mexico.
d
People who worked for the narco-trafficking organizations would carry out these tasks whether they were on or off police duty. In another interview, the sicario described paying off dispatchers with a few hundred pesos to avoid interruption while partying or while engaged in criminal activities.
e
The sicario is referring to the current climate of extreme violence that began in January 2008.
f
Leader of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera is reputed to be one of the richest men not only in Mexico but in the world. He is said to be currently battling Vicente Carrillo Fuentes for control of the Juárez plaza. See M. J. Stephey, “Joaquin Guzman Loera: Billionaire Drug Lord,” Time, March 13, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1884982,00.html.
g
Vicente Carrillo Fuentes is allegedly the leader of a large and violent drug-trafficking organization known as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization. This group is allegedly responsible for the importation of numerous tons of cocaine and marijuana from Mexico into the United States over the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso border annually. See http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cei/vicente-carrillo-fuentes/view.
h
The sicario is referring to the chaos unleashed by the murder of Oropeza and the subsequent struggles for control of the Juárez plaza.
i
These people were police commanders in different units.
j
The sicario does not explain or name the groups that were fighting for control of the plaza at this particular time. We believe that these were struggles internal to the Juárez cartel. The point he is making is that the orders to kill would sometimes be carried out against people you had been working with in the recent past and that people at his level carried out orders without asking questions.
k
Room 164, the same motel room the sicario had chosen as the place to tell his story.
l
The sicario mentions the woman he was married to at this time, early in his career. Later in his story, they become separated. He currently lives with his second wife.
m
As of November 21, 2010, the website (http://www.regioblogs.com/2008/06/07/senales-del-narco-y-su-interpretacion) was no longer available.
n
He is not certain but estimates this date as sometime in August 2003 because he remembers that it coincided with the birth of one of his children.
o
The sicario indicated that these young men were not street gangsters, but were from middle-class families and had begun to talk too much about their criminal activities in Juárez bars and discos. They had to be eliminated because they were seen as a threat to the arrangement between the government and the cartel.
p
It was Amado Carrillo, head of the Juárez cartel between 1993 and 1997, who forbade the sale of cocaine in Juárez. Since his death, drugs have become more available and no cartel leaders or government officials have been able to completely control the domestic drug market.
q
He is referring here to the name given to Amado Carrillo, the former head of the Juárez cartel, who was known as El Señor de los Cielos (Lord of the Skies), and to other powerful figures in the narco-trafficking organizations. In English, of course, we call these people druglords.
r
La Santa Muerte (Saint Death), or La Santisima (Most Holy Death), is a sacred figure venerated by many in Mexico, especially in areas where criminal gangs are most prevalent. See Steven Gray, “Santa Muerte: The New God in Town,” Time, October 16, 2007.
s
This is the cabinet-level government department in charge of internal security.
t
The sicario is referring here to discoveries of narcofosas, clandestine mass graves, in several houses in Juárez in 2004 and 2008. Other narcofosas come to light periodically, not only in Juárez but in other Mexican cities and rural areas.
u
It is common now for the wealthy in Mexico to have tracking chips implanted as an anti-kidnapping measure. The U.S. DEA will not provide any information on its procedures for confidential informants, but in December 2010 one of the U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks revealed that more than sixty FBI or DEA contacts had been targeted and murdered in Mexico by narco-trafficking groups. See http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/01/09MEXICO193.html. This information appeared in many national and international news media.
v
General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo was Mexico’s top anti-narcotics officer under President Zedillo. He was arrested in February 1997 and charged with working with drug trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Rebollo had access to all of Mexico’s classified drug enforcement information, police records, and informants, which authorities believe he made accessible to Carrillo. See “Family Tree” at the PBS Frontline website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mexico/family/genrebollo.html. For more on the career of General Rebollo, see the introduction to this book.
w
On José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos and Juan Camilo Mouriño, see the introduction to this book.
x
The Zetas are a paramilitary criminal organization in Mexico. The original Zetas were highly trained members of a Mexican Army special forces unit who deserted to go to work for the Gulf cartel. Members of this unit received training from the U.S. School of the Americas and may also have incorporated Guatemalan special forces trained by the CIA. The Zetas now operate as an independent drug-trafficking organization in different regions of Mexico and include corrupt former federal, state, and local police officers.
y
The following account is from Diana Washington Valdez, “Chihuahua Governor’s Bodyguard Slain,” El Paso Times, December 23, 2009: Mexican authorities are investigating Sunday’s slaying of one of Chihuahua Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza Terrazas’ bodyguards and death threats against Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz.The governor called a news conference near midnight Sunday to provide some details about the attack in Chihuahua City that killed one of his guards, Alejandro Chaparro Coronel, and wounded two others. He said one of the armed men who allegedly killed Chaparro also was taken to a hospital with injuries.The Chihuahua governor, who drove his own vehicle with the bodyguards behind him, said he did not know whether the attack was against him or stemmed from a traffic-related dispute between his guards and the armed suspects.“We cannot speculate and will comment only about what we know,” the governor said.The Juarez mayor increased his security after he and his family received death threats following Friday’s resignation of ex-Juarez police chief Roberto Orduna Cruz, city spokesman Sergio Belmonte said.
z
The sicario is referring to the common assumption that if a journalist is killed it is because he has been corrupted by one criminal group or another. The police, the general public, and even fellow journalists in Mexico will make this assumption and spin any investigation into the murder in the direction of establishing the “dirty” connections of the person who has been killed.
aa
Commander José Refugio Ruvalcaba was a high-level officer in the Chihuahua state police. He also served as an informant for the DEA for at least seven years, providing information about the Juárez cartel to his contacts in the U.S. agency. In November 1994, he and two of his sons were killed, their bodies left inside a car parked midway on one of the international bridges between Juárez and El Paso. See Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 41–42.
ab
For example, the case came to light of a prison warden in the state of Durango who ran a group of killers from inside the prison who were released at night to carry out executions, including the spectacular massacre of seventeen people at a party outside the city of Torreón on July 18, 2010, more than a year after the sicario mentioned the role of the prisons in the work of the criminal organizations. Rory Carroll gave this account in The Guardian (“Mexico’s Drugs War: In the City of Death,” September 16, 2010): It was just another massacre in a country plagued by violence. But this time it was carried out by prison inmates—who’d been let out specially. “Who let them out?” barked the voice. “The director,” replied the doomed man. The video ends minutes later with a shot to the head. A tortured confession would hardly be credible except that in this case it was true. The attorney general confirmed the story. Forensic results showed the massacre victims were shot with R-15 rifles—standard issue for prison guards. Federal authorities swooped on the prison and detained the guards. The director, a stout, formidable blonde named Margarita Rojas Rodriguez, who had recently been named “woman of the year 2010” by the state governor, was also arrested. “Disbelief. I just couldn’t believe it. I had never heard of something like this,” says Eduardo Olmos, Torreón’s mayor.
ac
A record was set in October 2010 when a total of 359 people were victims of homicide in Juárez.
ad
Coraje means all of these things in Spanish—courage and fortitude as well as passion and rage. It is usually spoken to mean one or the other, not both. But in this case, I believe the sicario intended all of these meanings.