the sicario - harper's magazine · sicario goes back to roman palestine, where a jewish sect,...

44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MAY 2009

I am ready for thestory of all the deadmen who last saw his face.

As I drank coffeeand tried to framequestions in mymind, a crime re-porter in Juárez wascut down beside hiseight-year-old daugh-ter as they sat in hiscar letting it warmup. This morning as Idrove down here, aToyota passed mewith a bumper stick-er that read, with aheart symbol, I LOVELOVE. This morning I tried to remem-ber how I got to this rendezvous.

I was in a distant city and a mantold me of the killer and how he hadhidden him. He said at first he fearedhim, but he was so useful. He wouldclean everything and cook all the timeand get on his hands and knees andpolish his shoes. I took him on as a fa-vor, he explained.

I said, “I want him. I want to puthim on paper.”

And so I came.The man I wait for insists, “You

don’t know me. No one can forgiveme for what I did.”

He has pride in his hard work.The good killers make a very tightpattern through the driver’s door.They do not spray rounds every-where in the vehicle, no, they makea tight pattern right through thedoor and into the driver’s chest. Thereporter who died received just sucha pattern, ten rounds from a 9mmand not a single bullet came near hiseight-year-old daughter.

I wait. I admire craftsmanship.The first call comes at 9:00 and says

to expect the next call at 10:05. So Idrive fifty miles and wait. The call at

10:05 says to waituntil 11:30. The callat 11:30 does notcome, and so I waitand wait. Next dooris a game store fre-quented by menseeking power overa virtual world. In-side the coffee shop,it is all calculatedcalm and everything is clean.

I am in the safecountry. I will notname the city, but itis far from Juárez andit is down by theriver. At noon, the

next call comes. We meet in a parking lot, our cars

conjoined like cops with driver nextto driver. I hand over some pho-tographs. He quickly glances at themand then tells me to go to a pizzaparlor. There he says we must find aquiet place because he talks veryloudly. I rent a motel room withhim. None of this can be arrangedahead of time because that would al-low me to set him up.

He glances at the photographs,images never printed in newspapers.He stabs his finger at a guy standingover a half-exposed body in a graveand says, “This picture can get you killed.”

THE SICARIOA Juárez hit man speaks

By Charles Bowden

E S S A Y

Illustrations by Danijel Zezelj

Charles Bowden lives in Tucson, Arizona.His most recent book is Some of the DeadAre Still Breathing: Living in the Future.

Bowden Final2 3/25/09 12:58 PM Page 44

I show him the photograph of thewoman. She is lovely in her whiteclothes and perfect makeup. Bloodtrickles from her mouth, and theearly-morning light caresses her face.The photograph has a history in mylife. Once I placed it in a magazineand the editor there had to field acall from a terrified man, her broth-er, who asked, “Are you trying to getme killed, to get my family killed?” Iremember the editor calling me upand asking me what I thought theguy meant. I answered, “Exactlywhat he said.”

Now the man looks at her andtells me she was the girlfriend of thehead of the sicarios in Juárez, andthe guys in charge of the cartelthought she talked too much. Notthat she’d ever given up a load oranything, it was simply the fact thatshe talked too much. So they toldher boyfriend to kill her and he did.Or he would die.

This is ancient ground. The termsicario goes back to Roman Palestine,where a Jewish sect, the Sicarii, usedconcealed daggers (sicae) in their mur-ders of Romans and their supporters.

He leans forward. “Amado andVicente”—the two brothers who havesuccessively headed the Juárez cartel—“could kill you if they even thoughtyou were talking,” he says.

These photographs can get youkilled. Words can get you killed. Andall this will happen and you will dieand the sentence will never have asubject, simply an object falling deadto the ground.

I feel myself falling down intosome kind of well, some dark placethat hums beneath the workadaycity, and in this place there is a hard-er reality and absolute facts. I havebeen living, I think, in a kind of fan-tasy world of laws and theories andlogical events. Now I am in a countrywhere people are murdered on awhim and a beautiful woman is foundin the dirt with blood trickling fromher mouth and then she is wrappedwith explanations that have no actu-al connection to what happened.

I have spent years getting to thismoment. The killers, well, I havebeen around them before. Once Ipartied with two hundred armedkillers in a Mexican hotel for five

days. But they were not interested in talking about theirmurders. He is.

We will never see him coming. Heis of average height, he dresses like aworkman with sturdy boots and a knitcap. If he stood next to you in a check-out line, you would be unable to de-scribe him five minutes later. Nothingabout him draws attention. Nothing.

He has very thick fingers and largehands. His face is expressionless. Hisvoice is loud but flat.

He lives beneath notice. That ispart of how he kills.

He says, “Juárez is a cemetery. I havedug the graves for 250 bodies.”

I nod because I know what he means.The dead, the 250 corpses, are details,people he disappeared and put in holesin death houses. The city is studdedwith these secret tombs. Just today theauthorities discovered a skeleton. Fromthe rotted clothing, the experts peg thebones to be those of a twenty-five-year-old man. He is one of a legion of deadhidden in Juárez.

That is why I am here. I have spenttwenty years now waiting for this mo-ment and trying to avoid being buriedin some hole. At that party long agowith the two hundred gunmen, a Mex-ican federal cop wanted to kill me. Hewas stopped by the host, and so I con-tinued on with my tattered life. But Ihave come to this room so that I canbring out my dead, the thousands whohave been cut down on my watch. Ihave published two books on theslaughter of the city, reporting therefrom 1995, when murder in Juárez ranat two to three hundred a year, until2008, when 1,607 people were killed.And that is only the official tally—noone really keeps track of those who aretaken and never heard from again. Iam a prisoner of all this killing.

We sit with a translator at a roundwooden table, drapes closed.

He says, “Everything I say stays inthis room.”

I nod and continue making notes.That is how it begins: nothing is to

leave the room, even though I am mak-ing notes and he knows I will publishwhat he says because I tell him that.We are entering a place neither of usknows. I can never repeat what he tellsme even though I tell him I will re-

peat it. Nothing must leave the roomeven though he watches me write hiswords down in a black notebook. I donot even know his name, nor can Iverify the particulars of what he tellsme. But this killer has come to me witha pedigree, established through thehands that delivered him to me: a manwho once used him, a former cartelmember and leading state policemanwho now has produced him as a favor.

He tells me to feel the tricep on hisright arm. It hangs down like a tire.Now, he says, feel my left arm. Thereis nothing there.

He stands, puts a chokehold on me.He can snap my neck like a twig.

Then he sits down again.I ask him how much he would

charge to kill me.He gives me a cool appraisal and

says, “At the most, $5,000, proba-bly less. You are powerless and youhave no connections to power. Noone would come after me if

I killed you.”We are ready to begin.

I ask him how he became a killer.He smiles and says, “My arm grew.”He takes a sheet of paper, draws five

vertical lines, and writes in the spacesin black ink: CHILDHOOD, POLICE,NARCO, GOD. The four phases of hislife. Then he scratches out what hehas written until there is nothing butsolid ink on the page.

He cannot leave tracks. He cannotquite give up the habits of a lifetime.

I reach for the paper but he snatch-es it back. And laughs. I think at bothof us.

“When I believed in the Lord,” hesays, “I ran from the dead.”

“I had a normal childhood,” heinsists. He will not tolerate the easyexplanation that he is the productof abuse.

“We were very poor, very needy,”he continues. “We came to the bor-der from the south to survive. Mypeople went into the maquilas. Iwent to a university. I didn’t have afather who treated me badly. My fa-ther worked, a working man. Hestarted at the maquila at 6:00 P.M.and worked until 6:00 A.M., six daysa week. The rest of the time he wassleeping. My mother had to be bothfather and mother. She cleaned

ESSAY 45


houses in El Paso three days a week.There were twelve children to feed.”

He pauses here to see if I under-stand. He will not be a victim, not ofpoverty, not of parents. He became akiller because it was a way to live, notbecause of trauma. His eyes are clearand intelligent. And cold.

“Once,” he says, “my father took meand three of my brothers to the cir-cus. We brought our own chilis andcookies so we did not have to spend

money. That was the happiest day ofmy life. And the only time I wentsomewhere with my father.”

But now we turn to the time heworked for the devil.

He is in high school when thestate police recruit him and hisfriends. They get $50 to drive carsacross the bridge to El Paso, wherethey park them and walk away.They never know what is in thecars, nor do they ever ask. After the

delivery, they are taken to a motelwhere cocaine and women are al-ways available.

He drops out of the university be-cause he has no money. And thenthe police dip into his set of friendswho have been moving drugs forthem to El Paso. And send them tothe police academy. In his own case,because he is only seventeen, themayor of Juárez has to intervene toget him into the academy.

“We were paid about a hundred andfifty pesos a month as cadets,” he says,“but we got a bonus of $1,000 a monththat came from El Paso. Every day,liquor and drugs came to the acade-my for parties. Each weekend, webribed the guards and went to El Paso.I was sent to the FBI school in theUnited States and taught how to detectdrugs, guns, and stolen vehicles. Thetraining was very good.”

After graduation, no one in the var-

ious departments really wanted himbecause he was too young, but U.S.law enforcement insisted he be givena command position. And so he was.

“I commanded eight people,” hecontinues. “Two were honest andgood. The other six were into drugsand kidnapping.”

Two units of the State Police inJuárez specialized in kidnapping, andhis was one such unit. The official as-signment of both units was to stop

kidnapping. In reality, one unit wouldkidnap the person and then hand thevictim over to the other unit to bekilled, a procedure less time-consuming than guarding the victimuntil the ransom was paid. Sometimesthey would feign discovering the bodya few days after the abduction.

That was the orderly Juárez heonce knew. Then in July 1997,Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the head ofthe Juárez cartel, died. This was an



“earthquake.” Order broke down.The payments to the State Policefrom an account in the UnitedStates ended. And each unit had tofend for itself.

“I have no real idea how and whenI became a sicario,” he says. “At first,I picked up people and handed themover to killers. And then my arm be-gan to grow because I strangled people.I could earn $20,000 a killing.”

Before Carrillo’s death, cocaine wasnot easy for him to get in Juárez be-cause “if you cut open a kilo, you died.”So he and his crew would cross thebridge to El Paso and score. He is bynow running a crew of kidnappers andkillers, he is working for a cartel thatstores tons of cocaine in Juárez ware-houses, and he must enter the UnitedStates to get his drugs.

That changed after Carrillo’s death.Soon he was deep into cocaine, am-phetamines, and liquor and would stayup for a week. He also acquired hisskill set: strangulation, killing with aknife, killing with a gun, car-to-carbarrages, torture, kidnapping, and sim-ply disappearing people and buryingthem in holes.

He mentions the case of VictorManuel Oropeza, a doctor who wrotea column for the newspaper. He linkedthe police and the drug world. He wasknifed to death in his office in 1991.

“The people who killed himtaught me. Sicarios are not born, theyare made.”

He became a new man ina new world.

In the eyes of the U.S. govern-ment, the Mexican drug industry isvery organized, its cartels structuredlike corporations, perhaps with peri-odic meetings. But on the groundwith the sicario, there is no structure.He kills all over Mexico, he workswith various groups, but he neverknows how things are linked, henever meets the people in charge,and he never asks any questions.And so he visits the various outpostsof this underground empire, but doesso without any map and with no di-rectory of the management. He is ina cell and can betray only the hand-ful of people in his cell. He willnever even be certain which cartelorganization pays him.

He tells me of a leader—a deputy ofVicente Carrillo Fuentes, the currenthead of the Juárez cartel—“a man fullof hate, a man who even hates his ownfamily. He would cut up a baby in frontof the father in order to make the fa-ther talk.”

He says the man is a beast. He isdrifting now, going back in time to aplace he has left, the killing groundwhere he would slaughter and thendrop five grand in a single evening.He remembers when outsiders wouldtry to move into Juárez and com-mandeer the plaza, the crossing. Fora while, the organization killed themand hung them upside down. Then,for a spell, they offered Colombianneckties, the throat cut, tongue dan-gling through the slit. There was aspate of necklacing, the burned bodyfound with a charred stub where thehead had been, the metal cords ofthe tire simply blackened hoops em-bracing the corpse.

He has lived like a god and beenthe destroyer of worlds. The room isstill, so very still, the television ablank eye, the walls sedated withbeige, the exhaust fan purring. Hisarms at rest on the wood table,everything solid and calm.

But his face is fear. Not fear of mebut of something neither of us can de-fine, a death machine with no appar-ent driver. There is no headquartersfor him to avoid, no boss to keep an eyepeeled for. He has been green-lighted,and now anyone who knows of thecontract can kill him on sight and col-lect the money. The name of his killeris legion.

He can hide, but that only buys alittle time, and he is allowed onlyone serious mistake and then he isdead. His hunters can be patient.He is like a winning lottery ticket,and one day they will collect. Thedeath machine careens through thestreets, guns at the ready, alwaysrolling, no real route, randomlyprowling and looking for freshblood. The day comes and goes, andten die. Or more. No one can reallykeep count any longer, and besides,some of the bodies simply vanishand cannot be tallied.

He stares at me.He says, “I want to talk about God.”I say, “We’ll get to that.”

He is the killer and he does notknow who is in charge. Just as he usu-ally did not know the reason for themurders he committed. He will die.

Someone will kill him. No one will really notice.

No place is safe, he knows thatfact. A family in the States owedsome money on a deal, so a fourteen-year-old son and his friend weresnatched and taken back over. Theman killed them with a broken bot-tle, then drank a glass of theirblood. He knows things like that.Because of what he has done. Heknows that crossing the bridge iseasy because he has crossed it somany times. He knows all thesearches and all the security claimsat the border are a joke because hehas moved with his weapons backand forth. He knows that every-thing has been penetrated, thatnothing can be trusted, not eventhe solid feel of the wooden table.

The rough edge of burning woodfires at those shacks of the poor, theacrid smell of burned powder flowingfrom a spent brass cartridge, an old cop-per kettle with oil boiling and freshpork swirling into the crispness of car-nitas, the caravan of cars passing in thenight, windows tinted, and then theentire procession turns and comes byagain and you look but do not starebecause if they pause, however briefly,they will take you with them to thedeath that waits, the holes being dugeach morning in the brown dirt of theCampo Santo, the graves a guess anda promise gaping up like hungrymouths for the kills of the morningand afternoon and evening, and fourpeople sit outside their house at nightand the cars come by, the bullets bark,two die soon after the barrage, and theother two are scooped up by familywho drive them from hospital to hos-pital through the dark houses becauseno healers will take them in. Thekillers have a way of following theirprey into the emergency rooms in or-der to finish the work.

His arms are on the wooden table asJuárez wafts across our faces, and we donot speak of this fact.

I cannot explain the draw of thecity that gives death but makes every-one feel life. Nor can he. So we do

ESSAY 47

Bowden Final2 3/25/09 12:58 PM 7

not speak but simply note this factwith our silence. We are both tryingto return to some person we imaginewe once were, the person before thekillings, before the torture, before thefear. He wants to live without thepower of life and death, and wondersif he can endure being without themoney. I want to obliterate memory,to be in a world where I do not knowof sicarios and think of dinner and notof fresh corpses decorating the calles.We have followed different paths andwound up in the same plaza, and nowwe sit and talk and wonder how wewill ever get home.

I crossed the river about twentyyears ago—I can’t be exact about thedate because I am still not sure whatcrossing really means except thatyou never come back. I just know Icrossed and now I stumble on somedistant shore. It is like killing. I askhim, “Tell me about your firstkilling,” and he says he can’t remem-ber, and I know that he is not tellingthe truth and I know that he is notlying. Sometimes you cannot reachit. You open that drawer, and yourhand is paralyzed and you cannotreach it. It is right in front of you butstill you cannot reach it, and so yousay you don’t remember.

He has a green pen, a notebook. Hehas printouts from the Internet, main-ly things about me. He has spent tenhours researching me, he says. Like somany pilgrims, he is in the market fora witness who can understand his life.He has decided I will suffice. He is atease now. Before, his body was hunchedover, shoulders looming, those trainedand talented hands. He wore a skullcapthat hid his hair and he seldom smiled.

Now he is a different person, a manwho laughs, his body almost fluid, hiseyes no longer dead black coals butbeaming and dancing as he speaks.

“We are not monsters,” he explains.“We have education, we have feelings.I would leave torturing someone, gohome and have dinner with my fami-ly, and then return. You shut off partsof your mind. It is a kind of work, youfollow orders.”

For some time, his past life has beendead to him, something he shut off.But now it is back. He thinks God hassent me to convey his lessons to others.Like all of us, he wants his life to have

meaning, and I am to write it downand send it out into the world. Ofcourse, he must be careful. When heleft the life two years ago, the organi-zation put a $250,000 contract on hislife. He does not know what the con-tract currently is, but it is unlikely to belower. At the moment, God is pro-tecting him and his family, he knowsthis, but still he must be careful.

“I don’t do bad things anymore,” hesays, “but I can’t stop being careful. Itis a habit I have. That’s how I ensuresecurity for myself. They killed metwice, you know.”

And he lifts his shirt to show metwo groupings of bullet holes in hisbelly from separate times when he tookrounds from an AK-47.

“I was in a coma for a while,” hecontinues. “I weighed 290 pounds whenI went into the hospital, a narco hos-pital, and I shrank to 120 pounds.”

It was all a mistake. The organiza-tion believed he had leaked informa-tion on the killing of a newspapercolumnist, but it turned out the actu-al informant had been the guy paid totap phones. So he was killed and “theyapologized to me and paid for amonth’s vacation in Mazatlán withwomen, drugs, and liquor. I was abouttwenty-four then.”

He sips his coffee. He isready to begin.

He notes that when I asked himearlier about his first killing, he said hecouldn’t really remember because heused so much cocaine and drank somuch alcohol back then. That was alie. He remembers quite well.

“The first person I killed, well, wewere state policemen doing a patrol,” hesays. “They called my partner on his cellphone and told him the person we werelooking for was in a mall. So we wentand got him and put him in the car.”

Two guys get in the car, identify thetarget, and leave. They are people pay-ing for the murder.

He and his partner use the policecode for a homicide: when the num-ber 39 is spoken, it means to kill the person.

The guy they have picked up haslost ten kilos of cocaine, drugs that be-long to the other two men.

His partner drives, and he gets inback with the victim.

The target says that he gave thedrugs to someone else. At that mo-ment his partner says, “Thirty-nine,”and so he instantly kills him.

“It was like automatic,” he explains.They drive around for hours with

the body and they drink. Finally,they go to an industrial park, pry offa manhole, and throw the body inthe sewer. For his work, he gets anounce of coke, a bottle of whiskey,and $1,000.

“They told me I had passed the test.I was eighteen.”

He checks into a hotel and does co-caine and drinks for four days.

“The state police didn’t care if youwere drunk. If you really wanted to beleft alone, you gave the dispatcher ahundred pesos and then they wouldnot call you at all.”

After this baptism, he moves intokidnapping and enters a new world.Soon he is traveling all over Mexico.He is working for the police, but when-ever an assignment comes up he sim-ply gets leave.

A few of the kidnappings he partic-ipates in are merely snatches for ran-som. But hundreds of others have adifferent goal.

“They would say, ‘Take this guy. Helost 200 kilos of marijuana and didn’tpay.’ I would pick him up in my policecar, I would drop him off at a safehouse. A few hours later, I would geta call that said there is a dead body toget rid of.

“This was at the start of my ca-reer, after I passed my test. Forabout three years I traveled all overMexico. Once I even went to Quin-tana Roo. I always had an officialpolice car. Sometimes we usedplanes, but usually we drove. Wegot through military checkpoints byshowing an official document thatsaid we were transporting a prison-er. The document would have afake case number.”

He becomes a tour guide to an al-ternate Mexico, a place where citizensare transported from safe house to safehouse without any records left forcourts and agencies. When he arrivessomeplace, the person has already beenkidnapped. He simply picks him upfor shipment.

Controlling them was easy becausethey were terrified.



“When they saw that it was an of-ficial car and when I said, ‘Don’tworry, everything will be fine. You’llbe back with your family. If youdon’t cooperate, we’ll drug you andput you in the trunk and I can’tguarantee then that you’ll see theend of the journey.’”

The drive is fueled by coke. Heand his partner always dress well for

such work—they get five or six newsuits from the organization every fewmonths. They are seldom home butseem to live in various safe housesand are supplied with food and

drugs. But no women.This is all business.

They hardly ever do police work;they are working full-time for narcos.This is his real home for almosttwenty years, a second Mexico thatdoes not exist officially and that co-exists seamlessly with the govern-ment. In his many transports ofhuman beings to bondage, torture,and death, he is never interferedwith by the authorities. He is part ofthe government, the state policeman

with eight men under his command.But his key employer is the organiza-tion, which he assumes is the Juárezcartel, but he never asks since ques-tions can be fatal. They give him asalary, a house, a car. And standing.

He estimates that 85 percent ofthe police worked for the organiza-tion. But, even on a clear day, hecould barely glimpse the cartel that

employed him. He is in a cell, andabove him is a boss, and above thatboss is a region of power he nevervisits or knows. He also estimatesthat out of every hundred human be-ings he transports maybe two make itback to their former lives. The restdie. Slowly, very slowly.

In each safe house, there would beanywhere from five to fifteen kidnapvictims. They wore blindfolds all thetime, and if their blindfolds slippedthey were killed. At times, they wouldbe put in a chair facing a television,their eyes would be briefly uncovered,and they would watch videos of theirchildren going to school, their wivesshopping, the family at church. Theywould see the world they had left be-

hind, and they would know this worldwould vanish, be destroyed, if theydid not come through with the mon-ey. The neighbors never complainedabout the safe houses. They would seeall the police cars parked in front andremain silent.

They might owe a million, butwhen the work was finished theywould pay everything, their entire

fortunes, and maybe,just maybe, the wifewould be left with ahouse and a car.People would beheld for up to twoyears. They werebeaten after theywere fed, and so theylearned to associatefood with pain.Once in a greatwhile, the orderwould come down torelease a prisoner.They would be tak-en to a park blind-folded, told to countto fifty before theyopened their eyes.Even at this momentof freedom, theywould weep becausethey no longer be-lieved it possible forthem to be releasedand still expected tobe murdered.

“Sometimes,” hesays, “prisoners whohad been held for

months would be allowed to removethe blindfolds so they could clean thesafe house. After a while, they began tothink they were part of the organiza-tion, and they identified with the guardswho beat them. They would even makeup songs about their experiences as pris-oners, and they would tell us of all thefine things they would make sure wegot when they were released. Some-times after beating them badly, wewould send their families videos of themand they would be pleading, saying,‘Give them everything.’ And then theorder would come down and they wouldbe killed.”

Payment to the organization wouldalways be made in a different city fromwhere the prisoner was held. Every-

ESSAY 49


thing in the organization was com-partmentalized. Often he would stayin a safe house for weeks and neverspeak to a prisoner or know who theywere. It did not matter. They wereproducts and he was a worker follow-ing orders. No matter how much thefamily paid, the prisoner almost al-ways died. When the family had beensucked dry of money, the prisoner hadno value. And besides, he could betraythe organization. So death was logicaland inevitable.

He pauses in his account. Hewants it understood that he is nowsimilar to the prisoners he torturedand killed. He is outside the organi-zation, he is a threat to the organiza-tion, and “everyone who is no longerof use to the boss dies.”

He is now the floating man remem-bering when he was firmly anchored in his world.

Iwant it understood,” he says, “thatI had feelings when I was in the torturehouses and people would be lying intheir vomit and blood. I was not per-mitted to help them.”

He is calm as he says this. He alter-nates between asserting his humanityand explaining how he maintained aprofessional demeanor while he kid-napped, tortured, and killed people.He says he is feared now because he be-lieves in God. Then he says he couldmake a good grouping on the targetwith his AK-47 at 800 yards. He wouldpractice at military bases and policeacademies. He could get in using hispolice badge.

The work, he insists, is not for am-ateurs. Take torture—you must knowjust how far to go. Even if you intendto kill the person in the end, you mustproceed carefully in order to get thenecessary information.

“They are so afraid,” he explains,“they are usually cooperative. Some-times when they realize what is goingto happen to them, they become ag-gressive. Then you take their shoesaway, soak their clothes, and put a hotwire to each foot for fifteen seconds.Then they understand that you are incharge and that you are going to getthe information. You can’t beat themtoo much because then they becomeinsensitive to pain. I have seen peoplebeaten so badly that you could pull

out their fingernails with pliers andthey wouldn’t feel it.

“You handcuff them behind theirbacks, sit them in a chair facing ahundred-watt bulb, and you askthem questions about their jobs,number and age of children, allthings you have researched andknow the answer to. Every time theylie, you give them a jolt from anelectric cattle prod. Once they real-ize they can’t lie, you start askingthem the real questions—how manyloads have they moved to the U.S.,who do they work for, and if they arenot paying your boss, well, why?

“They will try by this point to an-swer everything. Then we beat themand let them rest. We show themthose videos of their family. At thispoint, they will give up anything weask for and even more. Now youhave the advantage, and you use thisnew information to hit warehousesand steal loads, to round up otherpeople they work with, and then youvideo their families and begin theprocess again. You know the familieswill not likely go to the police be-cause they know the guy is in a badbusiness. But if they do tell the po-lice, we instantly know because wework with the police. We’re part ofthe anti-kidnapping unit. Sometimesthe people kidnapped are killed in-stantly because, after we take theirjewelry and cars, they are worthless.Such goods are divided up withinthe unit, among five to eight people.The hardest thing is when you killthem because then you must dig ahole to bury them. There are twomistakes most people make. Theydon’t pay whoever controls theplaza, the city. Or they dreamed ofbeing bigger than the boss.”

But none of this really matters be-cause he never asks why people arekidnapped, nor who they really are.They are simply product and he is sim-ply a worker. Their screams are simplythe background noise to the task athand. Just as calming them or trans-

porting them is simply partof the job.

There is a second category of kid-napping, one he finds almost embar-rassing. Someone’s wife is having anaffair with her personal trainer, so you

pick up the trainer and kill him. Or aguy has a hot woman and some otherguy wants her, so you kill the boyfriendto get the woman for him.

“I received my orders,” he says,“and I had to kill them. The bossesdidn’t know what the limits were. Ifthey want a woman, they get her. Ifthey want a car, they get it. Theyhave no limits.”

He resents people who like to kill.They are not professional. Real sicar-ios kill for money. But there are peoplewho kill for fun.

“People will say, ‘I haven’t killedanyone for a week.’ So they’ll go outand kill someone. This kind of persondoes not belong in organized crime.They’re crazy. If you discover such aperson in your unit, you kill him. Thepeople you really want to recruit arepolice or ex-police—trained killers.”

All this is a sore point for him.The slaughter now going on inJuárez offends him because too manyof the killings are done by amateurs,by kids imitating sicarios. He is ap-palled by the number of bullets usedin a single execution. It shows a lackof training and skill. In a real hit, theburst goes right where the lock is onthe door because such rounds willpenetrate the driver’s torso with akilling shot. Twice he was stymiedby armored vehicles, but the solutionis a burst of full-jacketed rounds in atight pattern—this will gougethrough the armor. A hit shouldtake no more than a minute. Evenhis hardest jobs against armored carstook under three minutes.

A real sicario, he notes, does notkill women or children. Unless thewomen are informants for the DEA orthe FBI.

Here, he must show me. A properexecution requires planning. First,the Eyes study the target for days,usually at least a week. His scheduleat home is noted, when he gets up,when he leaves for work, when hecomes home, everything about hisroutines in his domestic life isrecorded by the Eyes. Then theMind takes over. He studies theman’s habits in the city itself: hisday at work, where he lunches,where he drinks, how often he visitshis mistress and where she lives andwhat her habits are. Between the


“

Bowden Final2CX2 3/30/09 6:41 PM Page 50

Eyes and the Mind a portrait is pos-sible. Now there is a meeting of thecrew, which is six to eight people.There will be two police cars withofficers and two other cars withsicarios. A street will be selected forthe hit, one that can easily beblocked off. Timing will be carefullyworked out, and the hit will takeplace within a half dozen blocks of asafe house—an easy matter sincethere are so many in the city.

He picks up a pen and starts drawing.The lead car will be police. Then willcome a car full of sicarios. Then thecar driven by the target. This is fol-lowed by another car of sicarios. Andthen, bringing up the rear, another po-lice car.

During the execution, the Eyes willwatch and the Mind will man the radios.

When the target enters the blockselected for the murder, the lead po-lice car will pivot and block the street,the first sicario will slow, the secondcar of sicarios behind the target willpull up beside him and shoot him,the final police car will block the endof the street.

All this should take less than thirtyseconds. One man will get out and givea coup de grâce to the bullet-riddledvictim. Then all will disperse.

The car with the killers will go tothe safe house and leave their vehiclein a garage. It will be taken to a garageowned by the organization, repainted,and then sold on one of the organiza-tion’s lots. The killers themselves willpick up a clean car at the safe house,and often they return to the scene ofthe murder to see that everything hasgone well.

He sketches this with exactness,each rectangle neatly drawn to delin-eate a car, and the target’s car is filledin and blooms on the page with greenink. Arrows indicate how each vehicle

will move. It is like an equa-tion on a chalkboard.He leans back from his toil and on

his face is almost the look of a job welldone. This is how a real sicario per-forms his work. In the ideal hit, no tar-get is left alive. Should any in the groupbe injured, they go to one of the orga-nization’s hospitals—“If you can buy agovernor, you can buy a hospital.”

“I never knew the names of the

people I was involved with,” he con-tinues. “There was a person whodirected our group and he kneweverything. But if your job is to exe-cute people, that is all you do. Youdon’t know the reasons or names. Iwould be in a safe house with thekidnapped for a month and neverspeak to them. Then, if I was told tokill them, I would. We would takethem to the place where they wouldbe killed, take off their clothes. Wewould kill them exactly the way wewere ordered—a bullet to the neck,acid on the bodies. There would becases where you would be killingsomeone, strangling them, and theywould stop breathing, and youwould get a call—‘Don’t killthem’—and so you would have toknow how to resuscitate them or wewould be killed because the bossnever makes a mistake.”

Everything is contained and sealed.For a while they used crazy kids to stealcars for the work, but the kids, aboutforty of them, got too arrogant, talkingand selling drugs in the nightclubs.This violated an agreement with thegovernor of Chihuahua to keep thecity quiet. So one night around tenyears ago, fifty police, and one hun-dred and fifty guys from the organiza-tion who were to ensure the job wasdone, rounded up all the kids onAvenida Juárez. They were not tor-tured. They were killed with a singlehead shot and buried in one hole.

“No.” He smiles at me. “I will nottell you where that hole is.”

He has trouble remembering somethings.

“I would get up in the morning anddo a line,” he explains, “then have aglass of whiskey. Then I would go tolunch. I would never sleep more thana few hours, little naps. It is hard tosleep during a time of war. Even if myeyes were closed, I was alert. I sleptwith a loaded AK-47 on one side, a.38 on the other. The safeties were al-ways off.

Do I know of the death houses, heasks. “It would take a book to do thedeath houses. After all, I know wheresix hundred bodies are buried in safehouses in Juárez. There is one deathhouse they have never revealed that Iknow has fifty-six bodies. Just as thereis a rancho where the officials say they

ESSAY 51

FPOUNIVMINN0094/C

AD TK


UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESSAvailable at better bookstores or to order

call 800-621-2736 | www.upress.umn.edu

From childhood in suburbia, to activism with the American Indian Movement, and fi nally the Smithsonian, Paul Chaat Smith’s journey has been an enlightening one. In Every-thing You Know about Indians Is Wrong, a sweeping work of memoir and commentary, Smith illustrates with dry wit and brutal honesty the deeply disputed role of American Indians in the United States.

$21.95 HARDCOVER 208 PAGES

“Paul Chaat Smith pulls no punches and delivers not a few body blows.” —Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator, Museum of Arts and Design

HA051__07TN0.indd 1 3/30/09 6:51:08 PM

found two bodies but I know that ran-cho has thirty-two corpses. If the po-lice really investigated they would findbodies. But obviously, you cannot trustthe police.”

He especially wants to know what Iknow about the two death houses un-covered last winter. I say one had ninebodies, the other thirty-six.

No, no, he insists, the second onehad thirty-eight, two of them women.

He carefully draws me the layout ofthis second death house. One of thewomen, he notes, was killed for speak-ing too much. The other was a mistake.These do happen, though the bossesnever admit to it.

But he keeps returning to the deathhouse with the thirty-eight bodies. Ithas memories for him.

I remember standing on the quietdirt street as the authorities made ashow of digging up the dead. Half amile away was a hospital where somemachine-gunned people were takenthat spring, but the killers followedand killed them in the emergencyroom. Shot their kinfolk in the wait-ing room also.

“The narcos,” he wants me to un-derstand, “have informants in the DEAand the FBI. They work until they areuseless. Then they are killed.”

As for those who inform to the FBIand DEA, they “die ugly.”

He explains.“They were brought handcuffed be-

hind the back to the death housewhere they found thirty-six bodies,”he rolls on. “A T-shirt was soaked withgasoline and put on their backs, lit,and then after a while pulled from theirbacks. The skin came off with it. Bothmen made sounds like cattle beingkilled. They were injected with a drugso they would not lose consciousness.Then they put alcohol on their testi-cles and lit them. They jumped sohigh—they were handcuffed and stillI never saw people jump so high.”

We are slipping now, all themasks have fallen to the floor. Theveteran, the professional sicario, iswalking me through a key assign-ment he completed.

“Their backs were like leather anddid not bleed. They put plastic bagson their heads to smother them andthen revived them with alcohol un-der their noses.

“All they ever said to us was, ‘Wewill see you in hell.’

“This went on for three days. Theysmelled terrible because of the burns.They brought in a doctor to keep re-viving them. They wanted them tolive one more day. After a while theydefecated blood. They shoved broom-sticks up their asses.

“The second day a person came andtold them, ‘I warned you this was go-ing to happen.’

“They said, ‘Kill us.’ “The guys lived three days. The doc-

tor kept injecting them to keep themalive and he had to work hard. Even-tually they died of the torture.

“They never asked God for help.They just kept saying, ‘We will see youin hell.’

“I buried them with their faces downand poured on a whole lot of lime.”

He is excited. It is all back.He can feel the shovel in his hand.

He is calm now. He is revisitingthis evil time, he says, simply for mybenefit. He takes his various drawings—how to do a hit, where some peoplewere buried in a death house—looks atthe green schematics he has created,and then slowly tears them into littlesquares until the torn heap can neverbe reconstructed.

Until late 2006, he worked allover Mexico for different groups,and the various organizations gener-ally got along. There were smallmoments, such as when others triedto take over Juárez and it was neces-sary to necklace them. But his lifein the main was calm. So calm hedid not need to know who he reallyworked for.

“I received orders from two people.They ran me. I never knew which car-tel I worked for. Now there is VicenteCarrillo against Chapo Guzmán”—that is, Joaquin Guzmán Loera, head ofMexico’s largest cartel. “But I nevermet any bosses, so when the war start-ed around 2006, I did not know whichone I did the killing for. And orderscould cross from one group to anoth-er. I am living in a cell and I simplytake orders. In thirty minutes in Juárez,sixty well-trained and heavily armedmen can assemble in thirty cars andcirculate as a show of force.

“Then, at my level, we began to getorders to kill each other.”

He is kidnapped but let go after anhour. This unsettles him, and he beginsto think about escaping his life. Butthat is not a simple matter, since if youleave you are murdered. As the war es-calates, he begins to distance himselffrom people he knows and works with.He tries to fade away. By this time, athird of the people he knows have beenkilled—“they were seen as useless andthen killed.”

He doesn’t know the boss, he is stillnot even sure who his boss is. He drinksat home. The streets are too dangerous.New people arrive and he does notknow them. He is not safe.

So he flees.He confides in a friend. Who be-

trays him.He pauses at this point. He knows

he is guilty of a fatal error. He has vi-olated a fundamental rule: you can bebetrayed only by someone you trust. Soyou survive by trusting no one. Still,there is this shred of humanity in allof us, and in the end we feel the needto trust someone, to call someonefriend, to share feelings with others.And this need is fatal. It is the veryneed he has exploited for years, theneed he used when he put people inthe police car and told them theywould be all right if they cooperated,would be back with their families in notime if they were calm. And by God,they did trust him and rode acrossMexico, went through checkpointsand said nothing, never told a singlesoul they had been kidnapped. Theywould trust him as they were torturedin the safe houses. They would helpmop the floors, clean up the vomitand blood. They would compose songs.They would trust him right up to thatinstant when he strangled them.

So his friend gives him up. He istaken at 10:00 P.M., and this time he isheld until 3:00 A.M.

But something has changed withinhim. And some things have notchanged. Four men take him to a safehouse. They remove all of his clothingbut his shorts. They take pool balls intheir hands and beat him.

But he can tell they are amateurs.They do not even handcuff him, andthis is disturbing to him. He is the cap-tive of third-raters. As they beat him,



he prays and prays and prays. He alsolaughs because he is appalled by theirincompetence. They have not boundhim and their blows do not disablehim. He sizes them up and in his mindplans how he will kill them, one, two,three, four, just like that.

And at the same moment, he ispraying to God to help him so that hewill not kill them, so that he can stophis life of murder. As he sits in theroom, sipping coffee and recalling thismoment, his face comes alive. He ispassionate now. He is approaching thevery moment of his salvation. Somepeople pretend to accept Christ, hesays, but at that moment he could feeltotal acceptance fill his body. He couldfeel peace.

They point rifles at him. He can-not stop laughing.

“I was afraid,” he explains. “I realizedI would have to kill them all.”

Two of the armed men left. Oneother guy went to the bathroom. Helooks at the remaining captor.

“The guy says, ‘I don’t have a prob-lem with you. Once, you told me to becareful or they would kill me. You didme a favor.’

“So, I am praying to God, help me!I don’t want to kill these people. AndI know I can do it rapidly.

“The guy turns his back on me andsays, ‘Get out, go.’

He opens the door and runs without his shoes or clothes.His face is stern now. He has

come to the place, the very momentthat has permitted him to recountthe kidnappings, the tortures, thekillings. He is selling and what he isselling is God. He is believing, andwhat he believes based on his ownlife is that anyone can be redeemed.And that it is possible to leave theorganization and survive.

His thoughts are a jumble as hespeaks. He is telling of his salvation,and yet he feels the tug of hiskillings. He feels the pride in beingfeared. Back at the beginning, whenhe first started with the state police,that was when Oropeza, the doctorand newspaper columnist, waskilled. And Oropeza’s killers, henow recalls, were his mentors, histeachers. He remembers that afterthe murder, the state government

announced a big investigation to getthe killers. And one of them, a fel-low cop, stayed at his own policestation until the noise quieted andthe charade ended.

He is excited now; he is living inhis past.

“The only reason I am here is Godsaved me. I repented. After all theseyears I am talking to you. I am havingto relive things that are dead to me. Idon’t want to be part of this life. I don’twant to know the news. You must writethis so that other sicarios know it ispossible to leave. They must know Godcan help them. They are not monsters.They have been trained like specialforces in the Army. But they never re-alize they have been trained to servethe devil.

“Imagine being nineteen and beingable to call up a plane. I liked the pow-er. I never realized until God talked tome that I could get out. Still, whenGod frees me, I remain a wolf. I can’tbecome a lamb. I remain a terrible per-son, but now I have God on my side.

He stares at me as I write in a black notebook.

His body seems to loom over the table.

This is the point in all stories whereeveryone discovers who they really are.

He says, “I have now relivedsomething I should never haveopened up. Are you the medium toreach others? I prayed to God askingwhat I should do. And you are theanswer. You are going to write thisstory because God has a purpose inyou writing this story.

“God has given you this mission.“No one will understand this story

except those who have been in thelife. And God will tell you how towrite this story.”

Then we embrace and pray. I canfeel his hand on my shoulder probing,seeking the power of the Lord in me.

I have my work to do now.And so we go our separate ways. In the parking lot he moves with

ease, in a state of grace. The sunblazes, the sky aches blue. Life feelsgood. His eyes relax and he laughs.And then I see him memorize my li-cense plate in a quick and practicedglance. He has told me he is bathedin the blood of the lamb, but his eyesremain those of the wolf. ■

ESSAY 53

FPODAEDALUS

0174/C

AD TK


She’s secretly posing as a pinup girl. He’s renting a room

above her camera shop.Together they create...

A divine love story”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

A coy andsexy tale”

—BOOKLIST

An intriguingatmospheric

peek into the American graphic-artworld in the 1940s…

Expertly crafted”—PEOPLE

From the author ofTHE LAKE, THE RIVER & THE OTHER LAKE

A divine love story”

SteveAmick

By

Pantheonbooks.comPantheonbooks.com

“

“

“

A coy andsexy tale”

An intriguingatmospheric

peek

“

““

HA053__07TN0.indd 1 3/30/09 6:51:21 PM

the sicario - harper's magazine · sicario goes back to roman palestine, where a jewish sect,...

Documents