MAN

I had gotten two big breaks. So now—after all of my family had rejected me in that meeting organized by my oldest sister, when they told me that I was the worst and that it was my fault that my mother was sick and that no one was going to provide any money for me—after all that, I said, “No problem ... I’ll take care of everything.”

I immediately left the university because I didn’t have the money to keep studying. I was able to fulfill all of the entrance requirements [with help from some of the powerful people I had been working for], and I enrolled in the police academy and began the training course. I learned to march and then to march some more, how to form up, line up, and stand at attention, how to straighten up and follow orders.

They even taught us how to keep a schedule. If you get up at five forty-five in the morning, by five fifty you have to be showered and finished up in the bathroom and dressed. Once you were lined up in the ranks to salute the flag in the morning, you could not stop and say, “Oh, wait, I have to go to the bathroom.” You had to be ready, ready for some tough training.

This training lasted six months. During these six months, one of the tasks I was given [by my mentors in the narco-trafficking organization] was to recruit other people. One of the reasons I advanced rapidly in the police is that people on the U.S. side of the border paid a certain amount of money—that came from the United States—for those who were enrolled in the police training course. In the academy as a cadet, you were paid about half of the salary of an officer who had completed the course and who was now on duty in the police force. But for me, this money was nothing. The money sent to me each month from the American side, from El Paso, now that was real good money. So I had what I needed. They sent me money, drugs, and women.

So what did we do? During the night there were guards there in the academy to keep us in. There are rooms and basketball courts and shooting ranges. A fence and cars parked outside and the guards. We would corrupt the guards with a hundred dollars and a gram of cocaine, just buy them off so they would let us leave the academy at night. We would go out at about 7:00 P.M. and return at five thirty in the morning. Why at five thirty? Because at five forty-five the morning whistle would sound and we would have to get up, and at five fifty we would have to be all lined up for roll call and to salute the flag.

And why were all these cadets recruited? At the time, I didn’t completely understand what was going on. For me at this time, things were really good. I was happy. I had money, cars, drugs. They sent me girls and paid for hotel rooms. On Saturdays we were free to leave at noon and had to be back Monday morning by five thirty at the latest. I was unusual in that I never got arrested or got into any trouble. I was very careful about my schedule. There were schedules for everything: showers, meals, exercise, classes. We took classes in marksmanship, how to make arrests, how to pursue suspects, drug detection, car theft investigation, criminal psychology....

But what was really going on? Why were they teaching me all of this when I was being paid from outside? People connected to the narco-traffickers were paying for me and for others who, sooner or later, would be recruited to work for them. The government officially paid about one hundred and fifty pesos per month, and that was nothing. But these people on the outside were paying us one thousand dollars per month! They knew that when we left the academy we were going to go to work for them. No one was ever going to pay us as much as they, the narco-traffickers, were paying. We were being trained.

Sadly, desgraciadamente, all of the law enforcement academies in Mexico—the different police forces, the investigative police, the military police, and the army—have been used by the narco-trafficking organizations as training grounds for their future employees. Thus, all of those who pass through the academies can easily be recruited by the narcos. Everything taught in these academies—how to use weapons, how to drive a car, how to conduct surveillance, how to read license plates, how to recognize faces, how to pursue people in urban car chases without losing them—all of these were skills that the narco-trafficking organizations were willing to pay a lot of money for. But because the narcos were able to use the official law enforcement academies, they did not have to work very hard to train their operatives. They could just take advantage of the training provided by the government and then recruit cadets like us to do their work.

On Saturdays we would go out.... I remember that they would come for me on a red Harley Indian motorcycle and in a car. I would bring four or five cadets along for the ride. “Let’s go.” We would go to El Paso. The first place we would go was to a downtown store called Starr Western Wear. We would stock up on really good blue jeans, western shirts, big fancy belt buckles. At this time the style was to wear very flashy clothes, to shine, to show we had money and power. Back then, the judicial police were really into fancy boots. The municipal police wore uniforms, but when they went out on the town they would also wear cowboy boots.

After the shopping, we would usually go to an apartment. Not to hotels. We tended to make a lot of noise and did not want to cause scandals in a hotel. A few times we went to a house with a pool. When we arrived, the cartel patrons who were paying our way would say to us, “Here are some girls. They will stay with you until you leave on Sunday night. Choose whichever ones you want.”

They would leave us envelopes with money, a rock of cocaine, marijuana, psychotropic pills. They left us everything we could want to have a good time. They wanted us to be contented and happy with them. Always, always, always, they made us feel that we were important to them. They never asked us for much in return at this time. They always wanted to make us happy: with money, drugs, and women. If you needed economic help, they would say, “Here you go. ...” Everything was available to us. Then we would return to the academy for more training when the weekend was over.

At the end of our training in the academy, we graduated. On graduation day, a selection process takes place. There are about two hundred men in the graduating class. Two hundred for the whole state of Chihuahua, which is a very large state. Our class of cadets were being trained to police the cities of Juárez, Villa Ahumada, Chihuahua City, Parral, Camargo, Delicias, Ojinaga, and also the state border posts with Durango and Sonora. Of these two hundred graduates, fifty are already on the payroll of the narco-trafficking organizations. So there are one hundred and fifty men who will be assigned to all of the posts around the state. But of those other fifty who are working for the narcos, twenty-five stay in Juárez, five in Chihuahua City, five in Parral, five in Ojinaga. They are distributed in such a way that when the offer comes to them to pass drugs into Chihuahua from Durango, Sonora, or Coahuila, there are people already on the job at the ports of entry into the state who are committed to working for the narco-trafficking organizations so that the drugs will be able to circulate easily.

Many, many, many times, official police vehicles are used to transport drugs. There were other occasions when it was just a matter of hiding the drugs in a trailer which then passes on through with the blessing of the police. But at this time there was a very important rule in effect: The drugs were never opened in Juárez, ever.

When the tractor-trailer trucks arrived, they would be taken to warehouses to be unloaded. The walls inside the trailer would be broken down. The drugs would be separated out from the other cargo in the trailer, which would then leave. These trailers were used mostly for marijuana and cocaine. Heroin was almost never transported in these trailers. It would come in from Parral or from the countryside in cars. All the fruit that was hauled in these refrigerator trucks—bananas, papayas, other kinds of perishables, sometimes forty tons or more in the various trailers—would be unloaded and given away to the people in poor barrios. We would take it in trucks and deliver it to the people. Meanwhile, others who were part of the narco-trafficking organization would be opening the compartments in the trailers and unloading the drugs, putting them in other vehicles, and then this merchandise would be taken to safe houses.

How many safe houses are there? A lot. So many that one person might only know about eight or ten of them. For instance, I might have personal knowledge of ten houses in Juárez, but I will only know those eight or ten houses. And for example, “El Dos,” Number 2, another person, will have another set of safe houses that he is in charge of.

The narco-trafficking organizations are very careful. Each operative only knows certain houses. And the bosses know exactly how many houses each operative knows. The bosses let you know only what they want you to know. Because the day that you try to defraud the organization, they will know who is doing it by where things happen, because they know that you can only expose the houses that you know about.

When dealing with marijuana.... It is incredibly blatant, the way they transport it. They barely make any effort to hide it. They hitch a flatbed trailer to a pickup truck with a tow-bar. The trailer is stacked with boxes of marijuana, and these trucks will travel all over the city as if they were hauling boxes of any other material. We are not talking about one, two, three, or four ... no, we are talking about thirty, forty, or fifty tons of marijuana that will have to be transported, stored, and guarded.

In the recruitment that they carry out in the academy, of the fifty graduates who are actually on the payroll of the narco-trafficking organizations, each has their function in the operation. Some are assigned to guard the safe houses. Others are assigned to keep those guys under surveillance. Another group is assigned to kidnap people who owe money or who have gone to work for another gang or rival group. Others specialize in executing people. And another group is assigned to bury the people who have been executed. All of the functions are separated into these different groups with different assignments.

Why is it arranged this way? This is what I learned, and there’s a really good saying that describes it: “Never mix up Christmas with New Year’s.” For example, if you are assigned to kidnap someone, then you deliver the victim to another person, “El Dos” [Number 2], who delivers him to “El Tres” [Number 3], who will deliver him to the person who executes him, who then delivers him to the person who buries the body. It would seem like a simple kind of triangulation—that the people who do the kidnapping, interrogating, killing, and burying would be able to figure it all out—but that’s not the way the narco-traffickers operate. What they want from this system of exchange in all these functions is to obscure the knowledge of where all of these bodies are buried.

It takes a number of years working for the organization before the director of the cell has enough confidence in you and enough wisdom to say, “Here’s what you must do. You kidnap the guy and deliver him to this one and that one, and you wait here until he is buried and that’s it.”

While he is speaking, he makes a drawing
of the operation he is describing.

So, for example, here is a street. Here a park, and over here, this is an auditorium. The person who is going to be kidnapped will be watched for three or four days beforehand. For this, two people will be used who are called ojos, “the Eyes.” They will keep watch on the person’s house for several days from different vantage points. They will see exactly when the person comes and goes, where he goes, who he goes out to eat with, and so forth.... They will follow his routine, wherever he goes, for a whole week or longer.

These Eyes will be supported by two cars. And these are not private cars, but police cruisers. When an ordinary citizen goes somewhere and sees an official patrol car following him, with its sirens and insignia, the person will never suspect for a moment that he will be kidnapped or disappeared. Because, of course, the police are there to serve the community and protect the community. The police are not there to kidnap people. What this person never suspects is that members of the police force are recruited from their time in the academy, bought and paid for by the narco-traffickers, to carry out specific jobs in the criminal organizations.^d

There are two methods used in these operations. After a week of surveillance, noting where the target goes and all of the routes he takes, a team is designated. This team is composed of five vehicles that are stationed at various points around the person’s house. The Eyes keep doing their job. On the day that the act will take place, first of all the police are notified to get all of the patrol cars out of this sector. And this notice is not given to the patrolling officers in those cars, but to the director of the police. For instance, someone will call the director and tell him, “We don’t want any police in the area for a certain time period.” Or they tell the director to call a meeting of police personnel for a certain time, say, ten to ten forty-five. The message will be: “We don’t want any police on the street.... We are going to work.”

The target leaves his house. There are one or two police cars that look identical, but these are not really police cars, and they go to work. They follow the objective, and they stop him. There are times when the target will not stop. Sometimes, if the guy is a real plebe malandro, just a very bad dude, and he knows he owes money to the boss and that it is not going to go well for him, he will probably not stop for the patrol car. That’s why there are five cars stationed around him, like this.

He draws the plan out in a notebook—one, two, three, four, five cars as little blocks, like a football coach diagramming a special play.

The Eyes follow behind. Of all these cars, only one will be used to kill the guy or kidnap him. If the patrol car is not able to get him to stop, the other cars will block his way even if they have to cause a crash in the street. The problem here is how the boss wants the target: alive or dead? If the boss wants him dead, that’s easy.

The Eyes move, the second car moves out, the one that stops him stays behind, one closes him off from the front. You never have to worry about crossfire. One car pulls up from the side, shoots him, and that’s it. Everyone retreats. In less than three minutes, all five cars are six or seven blocks away guarded in safe houses that are nearby. You just walk away from the scene and get picked up by another vehicle and go to eat at a restaurant nearby, calm and tranquil, as if it were nothing.

Since all the police patrols had been called into a meeting, it takes the police an hour or more to get to the scene. So for more than an hour, the scene of the crime is open to people walking all around, checking out what happened, and messing up the evidence left behind. And there are always some clever folks hanging around who pick the pockets and steal the wallets of the onlookers. This is all part of our strategy.

But there are some cases when the person is wanted alive. And this requires a different strategy.

You have to watch the target very carefully from the time he leaves his house and wait for a suitable place to stop him and force him to get out of the car. When he gets out of his car, you have to immediately get him into your car. Physically, you sense that it is not fear exactly, but adrenaline that rises up in you. It’s human nature.... And being human, you know that it is not enough to just say to the guy, “Hey, come with me.” And expect him to obey.

He isn’t going to come. So you get there, and you are going to have to grab him, beat him, handcuff him, and put him in your car by force. But this car is not traveling alone. There are three more cars ahead and another two behind. If an actual police patrol car dares to intervene along the route, one of these cars may have to ram it, and if they still don’t get the message, then you may have to shoot up the police car.

That’s why these days^e the police have been so persecuted and criticized. If they had been given the word back at the time they were in the police academy, that they were being trained to serve a certain person or organization, well, when the time comes and they receive orders from that person who is a boss at some level in the drug-trafficking organization, they know that they have to carry these orders out or they will be killed. This is what is happening now. It is one thing to just tell them to get out of the way. But if they get the order, they have no choice except to “get the fuck out of the way!”

Up until a few years ago, the narcos respected the lives of women and children. But starting sometime in 2008, it seems that this practice of respecting the lives of women and children has been forgotten. Why? Because the narcos started to recruit women to work as debt collectors for them. And those women try to protect themselves by using their children as shields. And so the agreement no longer functions. There is no longer any plan. Before, if a targeted person left his house with a child, as soon as it was known that a child was present, the mission would be aborted. The killing would take place another day when the guy was alone. But now, such agreements have all been terminated.

Where would kidnapped people be taken? Let’s say you pick up a person. Take him out of his car, put him in another car. Always, always, the safe house would be no more than five blocks—that is the very farthest that it would be—from the scene of the kidnapping. The car will pull into the closed garage of the safe house, the person will be taken out of the car, and the interrogation will begin. And often, after an interrogation, the person will still be alive. Depending on what they owe and on what they have, they may remain alive for fifteen minutes, or they may be kept for six months or any amount of time in between. Imagine: six months kidnapped, held in a closet, and given one meal per day.

During all this time, we are working with the family of the kidnapped person, forcing them, extorting them, to hand over all of his property—cattle, ranches, other real estate, jewelry, yachts—whatever they have. Everything that they have. When we plan the kidnapping of a person who owes money, we already have an exact list of his property and what we are going to take away from him. And we send the family a video, after a month or two months or three months, to let them know that their loved one is alive, so they will have confidence that he will be returned to them.

But once everything has been taken away from him and his family, he will be killed right there. It is what they call a carne asada, a barbecue. There are people who work in the department called “refrigeration” or “cold meats.” These are people in charge of killing, cutting up, and burying the body. People are not always buried in the same place where they are killed. This is very difficult. What happens is that the people are executed, and then they are taken in vehicles to the places that in recent years have been called narco-fosas, or narco-graves. I think that here in the border region, that ... well, let’s say that if there are one hundred of these narco-fosas, maybe only five or six of these places have been discovered.

Many stolen vehicles are kept at the safe houses. If the garage will hold ten cars, then that’s how many will be kept there. These cars are used to transport executed people and to transport drugs. All of these cars are stolen. When we do a job, these cars will often get wrecked and have to be disposed of.

All of the people working within these organizations have received training in the use of tactical security equipment in the academy—military boots and uniforms, military berets, masks, gloves. They have all been trained to use AK-47s, the guns known as cuerno de chivo, or goat’s horns, and also AR-15 rifles. The crews also use Gals [an Israeli weapon], Barretts [powerful weapons designed to penetrate armored vehicles], and other rifles that are only issued to the military.

One brings all of this training from the academy. The narcos have already bought and paid for many other people just like me to get this training from the time we enter the police academy. The narcos are simply harvesting the crops that they have planted. And just like me, once the person is determined to no longer be useful to the organization, he will be killed.

The time comes when these teams are so well trained . . . here, let me explain it a little better. A team or a cell is composed of fifty elements. Of these fifty elements, twenty of them are assigned to guard and transport the drugs. Twenty are dedicated to kidnapping and executing people. And ten are assigned to provide personal security for the person who is in command of the cell.

How many cells are working in the city? In recent years, there have been around . . . well, let’s say, for instance, you are talking about the really big guys.... For example, “El Chapo”^f might have five cells working in Ciudad Juárez in this manner. Don Vicente,^gsince he is the head of the plaza, he might have twenty cells working here. And other groups, not members of either of these big cartels, might have a few cells operating here also. Between all of these cells, there is—or there was—an operating agreement. The problem intensified when the personnel of the various cells began to fight among themselves.

One of the most important things that I experienced as a part of this was ...

He draws a diagram of the cell structure he was part of at that time.

... Let’s say there were four cells. I was participating in one of these cells, and the cell communicated very well with those here in number four, for example. So that the ten elements of this one and the other one worked hand in hand and could ask for help from each other. But these other ten guys in a different cell were behaving really badly: They were drinking too much, raping women, abusing people, opening up and selling drugs retail, and that was not permitted. So what happened?

It is not as if we had any say-so in this, rather, the orders came from above. They called a meeting together of the cell that was causing trouble. When these people arrived at the meeting they were disarmed, captured, handcuffed, and they were all executed. But it is a really serious problem to transport ten dead men. They will not fit in just any ordinary vehicle. So they used a closed van, escorted by ministerial and municipal police, to take the ten bodies to the place where they would be buried.

But the dead are not always buried.

I remember a very well known and much talked about case. The order, the direct order, came from a guy who was known as “El Cora.” The order was to kill a doctor, Victor Manuel Oropeza. This doctor was also a columnist who wrote for a newspaper in Juárez. The question was: Who was going to do this job? It was going to be difficult to murder someone who was important and who was a renowned journalist in Juárez.

For this reason, none of the cells that were operating at this time in the city wanted to get mixed up in this case. There was, however, a group of five people under the direction of El Cora who dedicated themselves exclusively to executing people in the street. This group took on the order. They made a plan, carried it out, and executed the doctor in his office.

But as is well known, and it has been publicized many times, things did not turn out well. They should have made the murder look like it was the result of a robbery. But because they were not very well prepared, they forgot to take his wallet. They took some money, but then they dropped it and left it there at the scene.

This case was very important. It was a turning point, a key moment, when El Cora came from Sinaloa to Chihuahua to execute people. After this incident that drew so much bad publicity, El Cora and his group began to be stripped of their power. And these were persons of confidence. The murder of the doctor ultimately opened the way for “El Señor de los Cielos,” “The Lord of the Skies” [Amado Carrillo, who became the head of the Juárez cartel], to take control of the Juárez plaza.

A little more about El Cora—this was the nickname of a person, “El Cora de Sinaloa.” Before the time of El Señor de los Cielos, El Cora commanded a group, together with an army lieutenant, that executed people for the cartel. He moved around all over Sinaloa, Durango, Torreón [a city in the state of Coahuila], Chihuahua, and Sonora. As I understand it, he worked well in all of those states. He was not military, but he had ranking military officers working with him. It was a specialized and professional group that conducted executions. They would arrive at a plaza, carry out their orders to execute someone, and leave. This was their exclusive job—they were specialists. It was not their habit to leave bodies in the street or kill families or carry out gun battles in the streets. At that time [in the late 1980s and early 1990s], El Cora was a person of intelligence. He was aware of the situation. He did not touch women or children. If he was ordered to kill someone, he would do the job and the person would never be heard from again, he would be disappeared, buried.

But at the time of the botched-up murder of Dr. Oropeza, all of the power that El Cora had was being taken away. He could no longer control things here on the border. As different cells began to accumulate more power, each cell began to take on the job of passing drugs into the United States separately. After this, the different groups started looking for easier ways to get drugs into the United States, and this caused new problems. A lot of drug shipments began to be lost. And so a rivalry developed among these five different groups, and they began to fight over the control of the plaza.

In another interview not recorded on tape, the sicario revealed more about this incident. It was important to him because it happened near the beginning of his career in the state police, and El Cora’s men had provided some of his training. Because of the prominence of the victim and the publicity at the time, the government mounted an investigation into the murder that led nowhere. In his last columns, Dr. Oropeza had traced the involvement of some police officials with the drug-trafficking organization in the city. The same police officials responsible for investigating the murder were the most likely suspects in the crime. This was covered in both the Mexican and international press at the time, but the sicario knows the details—because he had been called upon to help shelter a comrade in the state police who was one of those involved in the murder.

That’s when the team—let’s call it the tactical team—that I belonged to began to act. Why do I call it a tactical team? Because it was a team that had knowledge of weapons. We had the skill and dexterity to move all over the city. We knew how to act like police, because we were the police. We knew the schedules of each and every one of the targets because we were constantly investigating them. We had safe houses with machines to gather and record cell-phone calls, including the text messages sent via cell phones—these were all captured and registered.

Every cell had a predetermined number. This one began 229, another 221, 223, 224. . . . And we did not buy the cell phones that we used, they were given to us by the bosses. One was for communicating with family. One was for work. Another was for when the boss needed to talk to us. At my level, at this time, I would have up to eight cell phones. I needed to have direct communication with public security—municipal police, state judicial police, federal judicial police, ministerial police who came from other states, and the special police.

When this problem started,^h when they sent the tactical group in to control what was getting out of control, they put together a team that included a sergeant from public security and about forty people. We added another fifty people. It was now a team of ninety men, trained by the military. They knew how to use weapons, defense techniques, how to drive vehicles in chases, how to capture phone calls. They knew systems of interrogation, and they had safe houses all over the city. It was a team of ninety trained men, with the objective of destroying five or six people.ⁱ They proved very difficult to get rid of.

This team stayed together for some time, and it was responsible for taking out several high-level commanders of public security. We removed commanders of the state judicial police. At that time, this team was very very good. I remember once they sent a commander from the federal preventive police to Juárez. He drove an armored Jeep Cherokee. The problem was that this person did not want to come to an agreement with the narco-trafficking organizations. And so, to make him understand how strong this team was, to convince him that his armored Jeep would not function as his security bubble, this vehicle was stolen from outside of the official installations, taken to a park, and burned. Up until this time, this commander had not thought of himself as vulnerable. He thought he was untouchable. But now he understood that there was a really strong organization, that it was very well established, that it had effective strategies, and that its members were corrupt. Therefore, he would need to agree to what he was being asked to do.

After all of this time, after we had managed to arrange things with these first elements of the federal preventive police who had arrived in the state of Chihuahua, what happened next? The narco-trafficking organizations began to control the plaza again, reestablishing some order from the disorder that had occurred. But because now these people—these ninety elements that had been put together—were controlling alcohol, drugs, and other products that were consumed, this group began to be cleaned up. First they formed a group of thirty, and then a group of only fifteen. Of the original ninety, we were reduced to thirty and then to fifteen. What happened to all of the others? I never knew.^j

It was very easy for me at this time to be working in Juárez, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, or Durango. All we had to do was arrive at an airport, get on a plane, and go. It was not a problem. Arms and cash were also transported by private planes. In the airport, everything was arranged such that the private flights—small Cessnas—were taken care of in all of the airports by elements of the army. The commercial flights were taken care of by the federal preventive police, and everything was arranged for us. What could not be brought onto the commercial flight due to metal detectors—weapons, or some small amount of drugs, or more than $10,000 or $100,000 cash—was put into a briefcase and delivered to us once we were on the plane.

So, where is this going? This group of fifteen had to travel to Sinaloa, Sonora, Durango, and Chihuahua, where a pact was in force not to touch certain people. This was a pact that had been made with the governor. But we would travel to these states to find people who owed money, and our job was to execute them. When our group was sent, it was not to see if the job would or could be done. Once this group was sent to do a job, it would be completed or else. We knew what we had to do. One of the obligations of this group was that if one of its members was killed or injured, he could not be left behind. In this elite group, the fifteen of us who remained, if one of us fell while carrying out a job, he would have to be recovered and brought out. No one could be left behind.

Unfortunately, I realized . . . it was probably due to the drugs I was taking, from the way I was living ... I had the feeling that I was untouchable. If anyone looked at me the wrong way, I would confront them: “Hey, what do you want?” And I would just take out my pistol and shoot.... But I never had total confidence that if one day I were injured, I never knew for sure that one of my team would take me out with them. I figured it was more likely that they would just take me away and kill me, so as not to leave any loose ends. Looking back now at what has happened to this team of fifteen, I think eight are still alive. Of these eight, I think there are five now working in a team. Of the other three, I don’t know. I do not know what happened to them.

How did I get to the point where I no longer felt any scruples for the people that I killed? I had come to a point in my career and in my life when I was getting paid so much money. This moment comes when they tell you, “We are going to give you $5,000 per month as a salary.” But there are some people who are very heavy, very important, and they have a lot of security around them. So then the boss comes back and says, “Let’s make a deal. Get rid of this person and we will pay you $45,000. Get your team together and take care of it.”

Good.

At some point, when you have all the training, the skills, and the experience, you can do these jobs with no more than four people. But when you are working with a team of only four, none of them can have any fear. If even one of the team is afraid, then the job will fail. When someone is afraid, nerves fail, and the job cannot be carried out. On more than two occasions, we had to cancel a job because of one person who lost his nerve and could not be counted on.

What did we do to be sure, to prepare for the job? First of all, we hardly slept and we took a lot of drugs. We would go for several whole days drinking and taking drugs. Suddenly we get a call. “The person that you are looking for is eating in a certain restaurant.” Okay.

So we go, the four of us in two cars, with a third car following in case something goes wrong. One person gets out, another guards the door, and the others look out for the police and for the getaway. What do we want to do with the guy now? This determines what our options are. The first option: confront him and execute him.

He bangs five times on the table, as if to make the sound of gunshots.

That is one option. Another possibility is that we will have to interrogate him, in which case we need to take him alive. And if we were ordered to take him alive, we would have to take him alive. And there was yet another option: grab him, beat him up, torture him, but not kill him.

The most difficult thing to understand—and one of the most difficult orders to carry out—is that sometimes, when you are in a safe house with a person who is really beaten up and the grave is already dug, then you get the call not to kill him. “Don’t let him die.”

I remember that on some occasions it happened that they sent us to kidnap someone. Not to execute him, but just to pick him up and to kill him later. So what did we do? We picked the guy up, brought him to a secure location, and then began the work of executing him. When all of a sudden the phone rings. “Wait, wait, it’s the boss. . . .”

“Yes, sir. What are your orders, sir? Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir. ... Yes, yes, yes, sir.”

“Stop! Stop!”

The order on this occasion was to revive the person when he was already at the point of death, right on the edge, just seconds away from asphyxiation. We had to revive him, shake him.

“Revive him.”

“It’s not possible. Sir, we need a doctor, we cannot get him up, the work was very advanced, sir. Yes, sir.”

For the narcos, there are no limits.

In just a few minutes a doctor arrived—not an ambulance, of course, but a qualified doctor. The doctor revived the person and left him there with us in stable condition. And we took charge again.

Five, ten, fifteen, even thirty days can go by, and it is no problem, because our job was just to keep the person alive. That is what we were there for—to watch over and guard him, to keep him alive until we received another call.

When this happens, it is a liberation, for us as well as for him.

“Yes, sir, what are your orders? We are here, sir, waiting. No, no, he is fine. He’s eating. What is he eating? Ha! No, no, he is okay . . . gaining strength. Ah, ah. Okay, sir, as you wish.”

This time, our friend was not so lucky. It could be that his family had already paid. It could be that to keep him alive was just to be safe, for insurance, or perhaps he was needed alive for a time, to talk to the family.... But the work and the order that followed after the call was: Do away with him. Finish him off.

Now, after he had already been saved once at the point of being strangled to death, this time there was no turning back. This time there was no second call. This time we had to pull the string, and pull it hard.

The sicario begins to describe the ways of torturing people to get information, and he draws in the notebook as he speaks.

Now, there are various ways of killing these people. And none of them are very agreeable. The easiest is just to shoot them. But almost none of the bosses wants them to die quickly or easily. So what do you do? Suffocate them, make them suffer, take out their fingernails one by one, put needles under their fingernails. There are techniques to make them talk.

Here is the body, for example. You soak the clothes with water and then connect ten-caliber cables from the body to the electrical outlet so that it will withstand the voltage from the electricity . . . these cables are attached to their big toes. And you connect this to the electrical power. After two applications of this for ten seconds each, the person will tell you whatever you want, whatever you want. There were some who were very strong who could withstand this. So, for them, there is another technique.

The person is lying down completely naked. We cover the body with a sheet, sprinkle gasoline or alcohol onto the sheet, and when it is soaked, light it with a match. As the fuel burns, it removes up to three layers of skin from their bodies. Their backs would be left completely raw. We might use a liter of alcohol on them. The suffering is enormous.

And there are other forms of interrogation, things that you cannot imagine.

Sometimes there were people who we would have to care for as long as six months. There were mistakes, and we would get orders to heal these people before we could let them go back to their families. Six or eight months might have passed, and their families had had no knowledge of them. They might be allowed to live, but they could never, never, never see the faces of any of those in the group that had kidnapped them. If they even once saw even one of our faces, they would immediately be killed. No one in this life after such suffering would be able to forget the faces of those who caused it and not try to get revenge. And these are not people without money or power. These are usually people with money, and they would have the means to seek revenge.

Now, a couple of things about following orders. In military school there is a saying: That there are always just two soups, noodle soup or “fuck-you” soup, sopa de fideo o sopa de jodeo. And they’ve always just run out of noodle soup. There is nothing left but the fuck-you soup. And that is what you get.

And the other: Orders are to be obeyed, not discussed. An order would never be discussed. We were there to solve problems for the people we worked for. They trained us to act. They did not ask us our opinions about what to do or not to do with a person. They just gave us orders, and our job was to carry them out. Not one of us—man or woman—would ever be allowed to give our opinions and we could never yield, we could never give in.

I can tell you that several years ago we brought a guy to this very room. A group of three of us was sent to kidnap an individual who owed money. He had been gambling on horse races and dog races, and he was spending money that was not his. And once it was found out that he had not paid and was losing money, they sent our group to get him.

We were friendly, went to his house, knocked on the door, and picked him up. He came out voluntarily, and we told him he had to come with us. We needed to talk to him. And by chance or destiny, we ended up in this very room with him.^k Everything was fine when we got here. We sat down to talk a little. When he realized what was going on, that our mission, our assignment, was to get the money from him, he tried to force his way out. So it was necessary to hit him a few times, tie him up, put on handcuffs, gag him so that he could not scream, and he had to stay locked up in the bathroom, in the bathtub, for a few hours.

And we relaxed, watched TV, we ordered some hamburgers and pizza. After a time, I talked to him in the bathroom.

“Here is the situation. You don’t have a problem. The problem is the money that you owe. If you pay the money—we know you have the money, some properties, so pay up—then you can go free.”

He gave me a sign that he was okay, that he understood. So I said to him, “Look, if you behave, I’ll take the gag off. I need for you to talk to your family, tell them to get the money together and pay the money that you spent that did not belong to you and deliver all of the money that you can.”

When he made a sign that he understood, I went back out and relaxed a little watching TV. One of the group left. For a while I was with the guy alone. I let him out of the bathroom and let him sit on the bed. I moved the handcuffs from behind his back to in front. I sat him down on the bed, and we were talking a little.

“You feel relaxed now?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to talk to your family and tell them to deliver the money that you spent that wasn’t yours?”

“Yes.”

Then the first time when I gave him the phone ... I sensed that he was getting ready to say something bad. To tell them that he was kidnapped. So I grabbed the phone and hit him and did not let him talk again for a half hour or more. I called another one of the guys and told him that he needed a little therapy—physical therapy.

So we took him into the bathroom and gave him some physical therapy in the bathtub, forcing his head under one, two, three times in the bathtub full of water. He was gasping for breath.

I said, “So, are you okay now? You know we are not kidding, right? Do the right thing and you will be fine.”

He did not want to talk to the other guys, so they left and he talked to me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing, just talk to your family and ask them to get the money that you spent that did not belong to you and deliver the money. Correct?”

In this moment I could tell he had some confidence in me because I had not treated him as badly as the other guys. And aside from this, we are trained to control these kinds of situations. I took off the handcuffs and gave him the phone.

“Here, call. Tell them to get the money together and tell them that they will get another call telling them where they need to deliver it.”

That evening, about six or seven, he made the other call, very calm, and then I let him sleep in the bed for an hour or so. Later that night we put the handcuffs back on and put him back in the bathtub. We had to threaten him a little.

The next day he was okay, pretty calm. He liked Italian food, so we let him order some to be delivered. He had more confidence in us. The next day they delivered half of the money that he owed. Another day went by to give them time to deliver more of the money. By that time, he was calm and walking around the room, watching TV, resting on the bed. His hands were cuffed, but in front. He trusted me, and he said, “Look, I’m sorry for what I did. I was wrong to spend the money. I was drinking a lot and losing at the races.... But everything is going to come out okay, right, as long as they keep paying?”

I told him, if it wasn’t okay, he would not be walking around. “You would not even be here like this. You would not even be here.”

And he said to me, “I promise, I’ll never remember you, what you look like.”

And I told him not to worry, that he was paying and it was okay. On the third day, in the morning they delivered another part of the money. And before ten thirty that morning—he was lying down on the bed—we got a call that we needed to deliver him to the other side of the border. And so that is what we did. He went out without handcuffs, got in the backseat of the car. He asked where we were taking him. I said everything was okay, the boss just wants to talk to you. There’s no problem, you paid, but you have to go and see the boss.

He left in confidence, and I never knew anything more about him. We never heard anything about him again. Here in this room, I realized that he had confidence in me, he opened up and confessed all of his errors and pleaded with me. “You are right, I was wrong, spending this money that was not mine. I should not have done what I did, but nothing like this will happen again. It was the first time I ever did anything like that in all the years I’ve worked for this person.”

He made one mistake, and it would cost him his life.

But in this moment, even though we knew he had paid, we could not commit the error of saying, “Okay, you paid, now go free.” We had nothing to do with making those kinds of decisions. No somos ni juez, ni parte. We are not judge, nor party in this case.

For some time, six to eight months or more, I was working inside the police, kidnapping people and then handing them over to other people. The advantage of being a policeman while also working for the narco-trafficking organizations is that you can play both sides. Supposedly, you are working to protect people and society, but at the same time, you are getting paid a lot of money to do jobs required by the narco-traffickers, to deliver people to them.

During this time, they gave us a lot of drugs and alcohol for free. It was difficult to get drugs in Juárez. We had to cross over to El Paso to get drugs because at this time it was not allowed to open up packages and use drugs that were passing through Juárez. This arrangement lasted for some time. We would get calls. We were always drinking. In the official police squad car, we would always carry a cooler in the trunk with beer, liquor, soda, and mineral water for mixing drinks, stuff to eat. We never did any work investigating robberies or anything like that. Since we were chosen by the heads of the cartel, they paid off the municipal police not to bother us. We always had to be available if the narcos needed us for a job. We could not be busy doing regular police work on the street. There were maybe seven hundred or nine hundred police agents who were not mixed up directly with the narcos, and they had to do all of the regular police work required for the society.

I remember one time when we got a call ... at that time there were not many cell phones. They were really big things, we called them “bricks,” the really early kinds of cell phones. I can tell you that I tried out some of the first ones that were used in Juárez that had American numbers. So we get a call on the cell phone that there is this guy at a mall and that we have to go and pick him up and turn him over. So why do we get the call?

Well, back at that time, they would put people to the test. There was a certain time period (a kind of probation) at the beginning of your career with them. It’s not like the military or the police career, but ninety days, and of those, maybe thirty days shut up in a house, another thirty days of some other kind of training, and another thirty days to learn the techniques of kidnapping people. This time they called us, and so we go out to the mall.

He draws a diagram of the operation.

Here is the parking lot where we waited for the people to come out. They give us the description of the people we are looking for. Okay. So we get into our squad car. I can tell you that I was always really high. If this happened on a Friday, we would have been drinking, doing drugs, and partying since Monday. And we would hardly have slept one day in all of that time. For us, working was a party. We would do drugs and go to a hotel with some girls and go out with them. They didn’t call on us to do many jobs at that time.

But this time when they called us, things took a different turn. In the police, there are codes, numbers, and letters.... You could say X-2, X-Z, Z-2, X-1. . . . These are codes we use so we don’t have to talk so much on the radio. So after we picked up these people and were driving around with them, this giant cell phone—the “brick”—rings, and the only thing we hear is an order using a number that they were using at this time.

He writes the number 39 in the notebook.

And hearing this number—this code—we knew this was an order that meant that the person needed to die immediately. I never doubted at the moment I got the order, I never doubted, I just pulled the trigger. I could not even think. I did not know the person, it was not a family member. For me, it was nobody. I simply obeyed an order. We received a call, we picked up a person, we carried him around for a while, we got the call with the order, and we carried out the order . . . immediately.

I did not fully realize what I had done until two or three days later when I was finally sober. I realized how easy it was that the drugs and the world that I was in were controlling and manipulating me. I was no longer myself. I was no longer the young person who had had a strong desire to serve my society. I was no longer the man who wanted to get married and have a family. I was a person who was nothing but the things that I was commanded to do.

I followed orders.

I realized at this moment that I never doubted that I would carry out any order that I was given. Even though it was for such a terrible career as this that I had to put my life on the line.

He draws a rectangle bisected by a diagonal line and the words “AUTHORITY/NARCO.”

On several occasions, there were confrontations. Thank goodness we came out okay. Not because there were a lot of us, but because we knew how to do our job very well. We knew the techniques, we knew the weak points of the person that we were going to kidnap or execute. As I told you before, we always studied our adversaries. Nothing was done quickly or casually. We did not just see the target and make the hit. You have to see and study ahead of time how to do it, how to handle the moment when you confront the target. You have to know what you will do when you come face to face with your adversary.

Times have changed. Nowadays, the technique is to kill on sight, at the moment of confrontation: “Wherever I find you, I kill you.” But this is because there are no more real codes, no more rules in the business. Before, the different cartels that were working in the country respected the codes and arrangements that had been established. Now, there are no codes, they are all lost. Now it is just: You owe me, you pay me.

I remember really well when the Mexicles and the Aztecas—two enemy gangs—were fighting for power in the CERESO [Centro de Readaptación Social (Center for Social Rehabilitation), the state prison]. Then there was a problem, and they contacted us.

“Look, we have a problem because they can’t come to an agreement, and it is affecting the sale of drugs inside and outside the country.”

So it was necessary to kidnap the leaders of the Aztecas and the Mexicles on the outside. This was during the time that I was active. And they were forced to meet, and they were questioned about their problems and about why their people were not behaving and working as they should. Finally they came to an agreement to achieve equality and peace inside of the CERESO prison.

A lot of the work—the majority of it—that the cartel manages is done from inside of the prisons. Many of the executions are ordered from inside of the prisons. Why? Because the prisons in Mexico have become manufacturing centers and packing houses for drugs to be shipped to many places in the United States.

He reflects back again on the test he was given at the beginning of his career, when he did his first killing at the age of just eighteen.

Back then, that time we picked up the guy and killed him in the car ... what can I say? This was a trial by fire, this order to pick up this guy and kill him. And it was so simple to carry out that order and just kill the guy. So he’s dead, now what do we do? Get rid of the body. Throw him out. We are driving around in an official police squad car, wondering: How can we just toss out a dead body? So we call and ask. “Where do you want us to dump the body?”

And the answer came: “That is your problem, not mine. What do you think we pay you for?”

So then you realize that you need to start looking for places to dump a dead body.... It really isn’t that hard. I was feeling so bad, all drugged up and drunk, that the only thing we could figure to do—I remember it really clearly—was to toss him in the sewer, so we passed over an open manhole and dumped him in.

From that moment, my life changed in relation to the position that I had in the organization. When you cease to have any doubt and do not hesitate to carry out an order and you just get it done, a real clean job, people start to notice and you realize that their eyes are on you. “Hey, you see what he did?” After two or three days, you start to hear them talking. “You know what? He did it and he didn’t feel anything.”

Well, shit, how could you feel anything with all the drugs you are taking? But when you sober up there is nothing left for you except to keep doing the jobs. You cannot look back. Anything else and you’ll end up like the dead guy. And that is what I did. It is what formed my hard character. This is when I began to realize that the man who had dreamed of having a family, the boy who had been my mother’s pride and joy. . . . She always said, “He gets really good grades, he is going to be somebody, he can be anything he wants, a doctor, an engineer, or an architect, because he is ambitious. ...”

This is when I realized that I was completely bad in my character, in my person, because I was never going to be able to become anything more than I had already become. What this meant was that I was a person who had become un monigote, a puppet manipulated by the strings of those who gave me the orders. I no longer had my own life. Your life does not belong to you anymore once you reach this stage in the organization. You depend completely on the person who gives you orders.

For many years, the work went on, and I worked twenty-four hours per day, three hundred sixty-five days per year. I was never able to turn off my radio or my cell phone. The day that it was turned off, it meant you were dead or that they wanted you dead. If you did not have a really good excuse to not answer your radio or telephone, it was because you no longer wanted to know anything, and if it got to that point, well, you could not go on living much longer under those circumstances.

My intention was to serve. For a long time, I would say: For me, Number 1 was the boss, “El Patron.” Number 2 was El Patron. And Number 3 was El Patron. I lived to serve and to defend a person—El Patron. I did whatever the boss told me to do. Any little thing he desired, I would provide it. I could never say, “No, you cannot have it,” or, “No, there is none.” Anything he wanted, he would have. Anything he wanted to possess, he would possess—cars, women, jewelry. There was never any problem with money for buying cars or jewelry.

But there are many women who are not for sale. Yet, when the boss wanted a woman, it was your job to try to persuade them. Many times . . . an infinity of times . . . I never had any remorse about the things I told them to try to convince them: “A certain person wants to get to know you and go out with you. If you agree to come with us, you will stay for a week in the best hotel on the best beach, and you will have a very pleasant week. If you want money, fine. But you will do whatever is asked of you and afterward are going to forget about the person for the rest of your life. And if you agree, everything will be fine.”

Many, many women fell for this and went along with it, and they are alive. But many others believed that they could outsmart us, and I never saw them again. I’m not saying that we murdered all of these women. Even though there were a lot of women, including very young women, who were killed. No, what happened was, there were a lot of very ambitious women, and they wanted to become wives of the bosses at the moment. But the boss already had something like forty “wives.” He had women living in every state of Mexico. He certainly didn’t need any more wives.

Let’s go back and consider the case of Don Amado [Carrillo] and his forty or forty-two wives. He got married whenever he wanted. I mean, they are lovers, not really wives. They would get married, but with false judges. These people (the narco-bosses) would not marry easy women or prostitutes. There are a lot of women that they use just to have fun, and they pay them. But they would look for beautiful women, and in this city ... they would especially look for those from families with real money. This is one way that rich businessmen get mixed up in narco-trafficking. The daughters of the big empresarios—businessmen, entrepreneurs—in Mexico marry narco-bosses as a way to double their fortunes. But without realizing it, they have committed an error. The narcos are using the businesses of their wives to launder their money. But look at what happens? There are many businesses that are failing. And they will continue to fail.

The women marry them, but they are false marriages. They will say, “Look, take me to a judge and marry me.” The narcos have the power to have a fake judge appointed, or they can simply buy a marriage certificate from a real judge. If the woman wants a marriage certificate, they will give it to her, just like they can provide fake driver’s licenses or other kinds of identification documents like voting credentials or military cards. They are all false and for sale. It is a game they play, these illusions that they live under.

If the narcos want something, they will get it, one way or another. Why? Because if they don’t get it for the good they will get it for the bad. And as far as the women are concerned, there is a saying: “If I want you, I will have you, for better or worse. If I can’t have you one way, I’ll have you another way. And if I can’t have you, no one will have you, that will be the end of you, and there you will be buried. Simple.”

So let me repeat what I told you before. There are two soups. Noodle soup or fuck-you soup. And the noodle soup is all gone. So you get used to it, make yourself comfortable, or you get fucked over. That’s the truth.

And so, for these women, there is no way out. You get to know a narco, and he wants you, you will get used to it and enjoy the life because you have no choice. Jewelry, houses, bodyguards. ... “No one else dare look at you because you belong to me. You are my ‘queen.’ Marry me this minute because I want you and I will have you.”

And then he sets you up in a house, and there you stay for two or three years. And you cannot leave. It is a golden prison. This is the truth. These women live in a golden prison. With bodyguards. And they cannot leave until the boss comes and until they are given permission to see him. He may come to town and not even come to the house because in the same city he has four or five other “wives,” and he runs out of time, because he has to see all these other adventurous women and have his pleasure with all of them.

When there were problems with people, the bosses had us to fix things, to keep people under control. There came a moment when there were just five of us that were trusted, and we operated as if we were a team of ten or twenty. At that time, these five people were enough to control the whole plaza. In the sense that we were very well trained and we always had eyes and ears wherever they were needed. They were paid to give us any information that we wanted. And they were not just paid with money. If we needed information at that time, we would get it. And when these were orders from the boss, he would get the information. Many people at this time tried to leave the organization, many people began to have regrets and wanted to get out of the business.

Back then, agents like us who worked for police corporations were receiving a certain quantity of money to get rid of a person—$2,000 or $3,000, it depended on the person’s rank. After that, we started to get a lot more money depending on how hard it was to kill the target or how important he was. We described it using the old saying: Dependiendo del sapo la pedrada, The stone you throw depends upon the size of the toad. We started getting up to $25,000 for the execution of a person. This is apart from and in addition to our salaries. In order to be able to work freely, it was not enough to just say, “Yes, I’ll do the job.” These jobs were not assigned casually.

He sketches the organization chart of the corporation.

It begins with the head of the corporation, below him are the group bosses, and below them, the agents. And at all levels, those who are involved receive monthly salaries, a certain quota every month. And for people who had been recruited, like me, since before I was even in the police academy, and who received a salary to attend the academy, it was not difficult. Those of us who had been involved since that time were the most trusted. When there was an operation, even some of the group bosses were under our orders. As agents, we would sometimes give the orders to some of the bosses. It shouldn’t have been that way, but at the time, those were the orders coming from above. The bosses could not be given all of the information. Sometimes the only thing they did was act as a smokescreen for us to do our job.

There were times when many people made mistakes and tried to traffic independently, passing trailers full of drugs at the army roadblock south of Juárez that was called “Precos” at that time, but I’m not sure what it is called now. They would try to pass a trailer by saying, “This merchandise belongs to the cartel and it is protected.” But the soldiers that were there would just ask a few questions and then let it pass.

Coming into the city of Juárez there was a glorieta, a traffic circle. I’m not sure if it is still there. Just past this intersection was a place to review the plates and details of the trucks and trailers passing. People working for us would separate out the loads. Okay. “You say that this trailer belongs to the cartel. Who do you work for?”

“I work for so-and-so.” This one or the other.

So the load would be taken to a warehouse for security along with the trailer, the driver, and usually a truck with three or four guys behind and a car with two other guys. But when this happened—when people thought they could outsmart the cartel by passing these drugs—the cartel that did not own these drugs would just confiscate them. They would take all of the cargo and kidnap all of the guys carrying it—maybe six or seven people altogether—who would then end up buried in seven more graves in one of the many clandestine cemeteries in this city.

I cannot tell you exactly how many people have been buried in this fashion. It is impossible to say. Personally, I cannot say exactly, for instance, that I was present at one hundred executions and that these people are buried in a certain place. No, no, it is not possible to say for sure. There could have been thousands more such executions. The cartel has a lot of safe houses and many people under their command. There are places that have been discovered where thirty, thirty-six, forty, and in another place ten or more bodies are buried—these are all in safe houses.

But this is nothing compared to those safe houses that are properties belonging to rich people that have been rented by the cartel. The people owning these houses have no idea that there might be up to thirty, forty, or fifty people buried on these properties. The graves are not small, they are deep and very large. The odor of the decomposing bodies is very fetid. It is necessary to put lime and other chemicals on the bodies, remove all of their clothing and other belongings so that the bodies will not leave any traces, so that they cannot be located or identified.

As long as the victims were men, killing them was no problem for me. In most cases, they were executed because they were stealing or they owed money and were not paying. When this happens and it is a man, there was no problem. The problem that I had—and it was a serious problem that began to convince me that I had to change my life—was when they began to kidnap women. When women began to work for the cartel, and I started to realize what was going on....

In reality, not I, nor my close friends, nor my wife, realized many things.^l But the heads of the cartel have eyes and ears everywhere. And they would know when a woman was going around with someone or talking too much. And they would just give us the address in this street in this neighborhood, this is her car, license tags, here is her description.... “Okay, go pick her up.”

You would wait for her outside of her house, put her in the car, and take her to a safe house.

It is very ugly to see a woman tortured. It is very ugly to see the outrages that are done to them because the people doing this have no scruples. It is not the same thing as dealing with a man who knows he has been stealing, who owes money, and who has tried to disappear without paying what he owes. It is not the same to see a woman suffer until she begs for mercy, to see her violated, raped not by one but by five or six or seven men ... and then to make her suffer until she loses consciousness.

He draws the line.

And finally.... Oh, it is terrible to strangle them, at times like this it is better to just shoot them. To strangle a person, it is so horrible, to feel how they suffer, to see how they lose all hope. It is to feel how their life slips away from them little by little. It is to see that the person has a line and the moment comes when they are on the line, when they are dying, and all of the strength they are exerting to get free starts to dissipate and their body is ceasing to function, their life is slipping away. But no, then you can loosen the hold on them a little, and they gain a little strength and start to revive a little. It is necessary to make it last a long time so that the asphyxiation is slow and induces much suffering.

After this, you start to learn the ways that the cartels leave messages according to how they leave the bodies of the people they have killed. The orders are like this. Throw the body face up. This is a message. Throw the body face down. This is another message. Cut a finger off and put it in the mouth. Message. Cut a finger off and put it in the anus. Message. Take out the eyes. Cut out the tongue. These are situations that without being a doctor or medic. . . .

Translator’s note: I had made a mistake by writing to ask him to explain these messages. He insisted that we meet and he would tell me in person. When we met that day he brought a printout from a website: “Señales del narco y su interpretación” (“Narco-Signs and Their Interpretation”).^m He told me that this was pura fantasia (pure fantasy) ... and explained.

About the messages left by the narcos, the fact is, to kidnap someone and kill them sends a very clear message: That the person is directly damaging the interests of the narcos. For example, when the person is given the tiro de gracia [coup de grâce], this is to secure the objective. It is not enough just to shoot the person because he could remain alive, and if he survives he could identify those who shot him.

About torture—it is not always for the purpose of getting information. There are people who torture because of spite, anger, because the person owes them something, because the person might have gone out with their girlfriend. . . . That’s how the narcos operate—whatever they want they take.

When a person is found encobijado, killed and left in the open wrapped in a blanket—it is not necessary that the person is someone important or respected. Even cholos [young street gangsters ] sometimes show up as encobijados—there are a lot of imitators out there. The message is not a real one.

When they cut off a finger and insert it in the mouth or ear or anus ... it is because they need to send some kind of message, but this doesn’t happen very often, and the person who does it had better know how to cut off the parts without making a bloody mess. Now, it is very difficult to know how to kill the person, to wait until the circulation of blood stops, and then to cut off the different parts of the body. . . .

To know what the messages mean, you also have to look at where the bodies are left, where they are thrown.... Will they be seen by the people who are intended to see them?

Nowadays, the narcos don’t have to work very hard to let people know what they want them to know. If the narcos hang a sign on a bridge, it is like broadcasting it on that TV show Todo Mexico se entere [All Mexico Finds Out].

The press is so corrupt. They know that if they don’t publish these sensational signs, then the news won’t sell. They are happy when the narcos put these signs up because it sells newspapers like you can’t imagine. And so the narcos don’t have to go to very much trouble to get their messages out. The newspapers do the work for them.

A person might have his hands cut off because he was involved in things he should not have been involved in. Or he took things that did not belong to him.

But really, what can people on the outside understand about these things when the messages are intended for those inside the narco business? A lot of people see these things, and so they think they know what is going on. Ah, they cut off his hands! What does it mean? It is something between them, the narcos. People should not even pay attention to these messages. I think the press is doing harm by sensationalizing and publicizing such things.

There are other ways of leaving messages. It doesn’t serve the interests of the narcos if, after they have kidnapped and killed someone, the body is found. The fact is, bodies have been dug up in many cities in Mexico, and I can tell you that these bodies should show a certain level of decomposition when they are found. But without a little more investigation and professional work, to find out if the body is face up or face down, or if there is lime or not, or salt or sugar or some other chemical used on the body....

Why? Because to bury the body face down or face up—that sends a real message, and you can give something like that a certain importance. For example, if the body is buried face down, it is because the narcos never wanted that body to come to light. So when the body is found, it means that someone informed. And if someone informs, they will be found out because the narcos have ways of knowing who it was that provided the information.

You receive your orders and you carry them out. Once you know that the person is asphyxiated and dead, you can cut off any part of the body without a problem, and it will not bleed very much. The blood ceases to circulate. I remember well once when a person made a mistake and began to beat up one of the enfermos, the sick ones. We sometimes called our victims our “patients.” He kicked the guy in the face and tore his head open and got reprimanded for doing this. “Why are you scolding me? He’s going to die anyway,” and he kept yelling and beating on the guy.

And so they provided a very logical explanation. “If you kick the guy in the head before he is dead, you’ll have to pick up the carpet and clean up everything because it will make such a disgusting bloody mess. First kill the person. Then cut off anything you want.”

This is not something you learn in the academy. This is not something you learn in military school. This kind of thing you must learn in life.

There comes a moment when the smallest thing annoys you so much, not because you are so good, but because your mind is so messed up from drugs and drinking that you do not feel any scruples for what you do. The moment comes, and you might be driving down the street in your car, and you pass another car and “Hey, you? Why are you looking at me like that?” Okay, and so you just take out a gun and shoot without knowing who the person is and for nothing except that the person has looked at you the wrong way. These incidents happened a lot at one time, until a higher-ranking person in the organization prohibited this kind of thing in order to stop so many unjustified killings.

At one time, an arrangement was made that violent deaths would not be allowed to take place in the city of Chihuahua, the state capital, that this city was protected by an agreement. But killings continued to take place in Parral, Delicias, Camargo, Juárez, Durango, Torreón. So anyone in Chihuahua who was a target would have to be picked up from the city and taken to another place to be killed—from Chihuahua to Torreón or Durango or from Chihuahua to Juárez or to some other city. This is not just a simple transfer—get in the car and let’s go. There are certain logistics that we would have to follow using back roads to avoid encountering soldiers and military roadblocks.

When I left my training the first thing that I was told was: There is an arrangement with public security. There is an arrangement with both the state and federal judicial police. There is an arrangement with the federal preventive police. All of these corporations have been “fixed” or corrupted. But there is no arrangement with the army. If you have a problem and the army detains you, you will have to arrange that on your own. We can save you from all of the other agencies, but there is no arrangement with the army. At that time, the army was not corrupted.

With the passing of time, I’m talking about four or five years, a moment came when, during the fiestas that we had on the ranches, we had really great bands playing for our parties. Bands as famous as Los Tigres del Norte, Los Tucanes. ... And at the very best tables, there were military leaders sitting, right there in the front row. What had never, ever been arranged before, had now been taken care of. Someone, a very powerful person, had come along, and this person had made the arrangements with the army. And it was because of this new arrangement that the narcos began to work with the military.ⁿ

This new situation brought about many changes to the ideology of the sicario and to the way the work was carried out. Now it was no longer easy to compete with those people who tried to imitate the work. There were those who sold very small quantities of drugs, and they would go around bragging, “I’m a narco, and if you owe me or steal $50 worth of drugs from me, I’m going to kill you.” This is ridiculous. No one in the cartel would kill for $50. These were imitators. And what the rise of these imitators meant was that the city started getting more corrupted and out of control. It meant that no one could trust anyone, and that no one was going to be respected. And so an attempt was made to try to clean up this situation—that was when contact was made with the leaders of the prison gangs—and this conversation took place not just in Mexico but also in the United States.

In the following passage, the sicario describes a large operation involving all of the different police corporations, the military, and the Juárez cartel operatives working together to regain control over the city.

One year, the moment arrived and the order came down that in thirty days exactly, no one, absolutely no one, would be allowed to sell a single packet of cocaine. Not even a tiny amount could be sold in Juárez. No one would be able to do it. Why? There was an announcement that something like three thousand kilos of cocaine had been lost. But the small-time sellers who were causing problems for the cartel that was in control of the plaza did not pay attention to this order because they had never really understood the power of the organization and they thought that they could disobey the orders of the cartel. So what happened? The people who had stolen these drugs and who were selling it on their own were identified and executed. We are talking about a massive execution of about seventy people.

Somewhat earlier, there had been another problem, this time with car thieves. No one was in control over what they were doing. It developed into a real problem, and the police themselves asked for help from the cartel to dismantle these gangs of car thieves. So there was another massive cleanup of a group of some forty-five young punks^o who were dealing in stolen cars.

When these people were rounded up, the operation was not carried out by just one group. You could never say that it was done only by sicarios working for the cartel. The operation also included elements of the municipal police and the state and federal judicial police working with the cartel. We are talking about some eight hundred elements working together to get rid of this group of seventy dealers and the other group of forty-five car thieves who were causing a lot of trouble.

And these bodies are now buried in various colonias and houses throughout the city. And these are bodies that are never going to see the light of day. Or in the case that someday these bodies are found, they will never be identified. If it is difficult to recognize five bodies buried in a common grave, how do you ever think that it will be possible to identify seventy people in a mass grave when they have been put into the ground many years ago completely naked?

Not all of these people died immediately. Among those who were kidnapped, there were a dozen or more of them who were held and given the chance to live for several days before being killed. Why? Because they knew people inside the cartel and they had earned a special privilege. Because they were people who were working in some capacity as informants for the cartel. And others were informants for the police. And not just for the police in Mexico, but some of them had crossed over to the United States to give information to the police agencies there about what was going on in Mexico.

These people received a very special treatment. I remember one time when we heated up two-hundred-liter tubs of water. The people were tied up at the shoulders, their bodies suspended over the tub using a winch, and they were lowered little by little into the boiling water. When they fainted, they were taken out of the water and there was a doctor there who revived them. And then parts of their bodies were cut off—parts that were completely burned, cooked. And they would revive and react once again, and they were lowered again into the water little by little until they finally died. These deaths are not the work of a sicario. This is the work of sick people. Sick people. People who enjoy seeing the suffering of another.