El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

by Charles Bowden

  We go to a motel for the interview. While the room is being rented, he takes me aside and asks me to tell Bowden that he will not be able to talk today, that he has important bills due and needs money up front. Nevertheless, without any money changing hands, we go into the room and sit at the small wooden table while he talks for four hours. He looks at Bowden’s notebook and tells him not to write anything down. Bowden writes for four hours. He takes a small notebook and green pen from me and diagrams parts of the story. At the end of the interview, I reach across the table to take the pages. He laughs and then tears the sheets into tiny bits and pockets them.

  Months later, we meet to arrange the details for the filming. This is done as we drive around the city for several hours in another person’s car. The sicario does not like to meet and talk in cafés or other public places. Before he has agreed to talk to Charles Bowden, he has researched him on the Internet, and he comes to the interview with a sheaf of downloaded pages about Bowden’s books and a photograph taken in the writer’s backyard. He has not met the filmmaker at this point, but he has searched the Web for information about Gianfranco Rosi also, and he brings some of those printouts with him when we meet to talk about the project.

  He states his conditions: the film can never show his face, and his voice will have to be altered before the film can be shown. There are powerful people on both sides of the border looking for him. The price on his head is high. There are people he will speak of who are still alive. There are those who will never forget the face or the voice of the man who tortured them.

  And so arrangements are made for the days and hours of the filming. Deciding on the place that will suit the subject and the filmmaker is more of a challenge. I think the sicario intended from the beginning to take us to room 164, but he wants us to make the choice. We spend an afternoon driving around the city visiting motels and apartments he has access to. Finally, he and Rosi agree on room 164. For the next two days, the sicario sits in the room where he once performed another job. But this time, for the camera, he talks for hours, his head shrouded in a black fishnet veil, and he draws pictures and diagrams with a thick brown pen in a large leather-bound sketchbook. The veil is the filmmaker’s idea and is intended just to hide the man’s face and also allow him to breathe, but it turns out to be a stroke of genius. With his head covered, the sicario enters a state of grace, as if talking to another person inside of himself. His words and emotions flow into story with hardly any need for questions. Later, I learn that Rosi’s nine-year-old daughter saw a drawing of the sicario under the veil and told her father: he looks like an ancient killer. This drawing will become the poster for the documentary film El Sicario, Room 164.

  On the day of this visit to the sicario’s house, I have come with a digital voice recorder and a list of questions to help clear up some details, a few names, important dates, things recorded earlier that were unclear. We drive around the city for several hours, his hands controlling the recorder while I try to make notes. He remains fuzzy on the dates, explaining that when he found God he erased his disco duro, his hard drive. There are things he does not want to remember. But when his head is wrapped in the black veil, he inhabits that state of grace, and like a man hypnotized, he is able to relive his experiences and tell his story in a way that he cannot do face to face, in the light of day, in response to a list of questions.

  He doesn’t like the questions I ask, especially if they are written down and communicated in any way other than a faceto-face conversation. He knows that nothing he does is safe from notice, that people watch, that any carelessness could reveal his presence, and that he is running out of places to hide. So I drive to the meeting and later will transcribe another several hours of his answers. He shows me some printouts from the Internet that he says will illustrate some of his answers. But then he tells me that these explanations of “narco-messages” are “pure fantasy”—garbage posted online by fake sicarios. He wants to be sure I know the difference, that his voice is the authentic one. Then he answers the questions, and those words are here in this book.

  When I first listen to the recordings made during the filming, they are so clear, and the voice so plain and alive, that I decide to write directly into English without first transcribing into Spanish text. It is the most careful listening I’ve ever done, and it is necessary so that the English text will have the sense, rhythm, and character of the Spanish speaker telling his compelling life story for the first time. As editors, we have made only minimal changes from the spoken words to the order in which the story is presented in this book. The first day is a chronological recounting of his life. On the second day, the sicario reflects on what that story means. He analyzes how his life fits into the system that he became a part of, that he managed to survive, and that he abandoned.

  By the end of the second day, I start calling him “Professor.” His treatise on the narco-trafficking system and its role in Mexican life and society is spoken in language so cogent and precise that I feel that I have attended a college lecture. Even better, there is nothing hypothetical in his presentation. He has lived his life as an integral component of the system he describes. It might be more accurate for me to call him “Ingeniero,” Engineer. With his words and diagrams, he constructs and then deconstructs for us the functioning of the Mexican government, the political economy of the drug business, and the technical details of its deadly system of control in which he was an enforcer for more than twenty years.

  At one interview, I show him how to use a database containing more than thirty years of newspaper articles from the state of Chihuahua. He instantly figures out the system and begins to use it to find documentation for events that he knows about firsthand. One of the articles he finds is of a time when he procured the prostitutes and liquor for a party at a hotel. The party got out of hand, and the desk clerk was threatened by men brandishing guns. The sicario ended up under arrest, and the name he was using at that time was published in the newspaper even though he carried the badge of a federal policeman. His superiors told him later that the article had been removed from all of the newspaper archives. He laughs as he recalls the incident. On more than one occasion, his job was the procurement of women for parties, and his wife had always scolded him for this. I do not know if the name that was published was his real name.

  He now searches the database regularly to try to keep track of a world he has left behind, but a world that still interests him. And he wants to explain that world to us as best he can. He considers it his duty that we get the story right. He knows that the Chihuahua press accounts reveal only a partial version of events he experienced, but he knows that these are links that can help to confirm the truth of the stories that he tells.

  He brings more printed articles from the database to another interview—Chihuahua newspaper coverage of a massacre at a Juárez restaurant in August 1997 when six people were shot to death. Until the first drug rehabilitation center massacre in 2008, where nine people were killed,1 this incident had been the largest mass killing in the city since the time of the Mexican revolution. The sicario’s interest in the 1997 incident is focused on high officials at the time in the state of Chihuahua and their public pronouncements about the case. His personal knowledge of the people killed, the accused killers, and their relationships to people currently running the cartels and those in high state and federal government offices enables him to analyze and explain another nexus in the Mexican system of narco-power and government corruption. He remembers a photograph published at the time. The person in this photograph was a cartel figure who now has a high position in the government of the state of Chihuahua. He also reveals that a person mentioned in the articles as a witness to the 1997 crime was never apprehended and that he now lives on the U.S. side of the border. This man betrayed the major target in that killing. And the cartel contract on the man was $5 million, a prize he had tried to collect during his career as a sicario. A tale of hunter and hunted.

  On this night, he
tells us that his wife sometimes asks him what he will do if those hunting him try to kidnap his children. He replies, “Don’t ask me that.” He tells us that his ideas of justice are more in tune with the Old Testament “ojo por ojo, diente por diente,” an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, at least in terms of his responsibility as a Mexican man with a family to protect. He will kill to protect his family. But he has told his wife that he will not allow himself to be taken alive—he knows what happens to those who are taken. Suicide is not an option for him, but he would figure out a way to engineer his own murder by those who come for him. As he talks, it is clear that his efforts to leave the drug world and the killing world behind are still a work in progress. He absorbs media accounts past and present and fills in the missing and misreported facts that he knows from his long experience. He has left the drug world, but it has not left him.

  A former partner still lives in Mexico. He receives messages that his old boss is looking for him. Perhaps the boss wants to talk to him about going back to work for the cartel. Reporting for this job interview could bring him either a lot of money or certain death. Such are his professional prospects.

  At another interview, there is an old upright piano in the room where we meet. “Oh,” he sighs, “I took piano lessons when I was a child. A teacher in Juárez had set up a school to teach kids who could only pay a little money. My mother enrolled me in the school, and it had a room full of old pianos like this one. I remember trying to learn my notes ... do, re, mi. . . . I would hit the wrong key, and the teacher would rap me on the knuckles with a ruler.... He did it several times, and I finally got mad and I hit him back. Oh, he kicked me out of the school. My mother was so embarrassed. I was ten years old.”

  I imagine the life this man might have lived had he been born in a country where opportunities exist for a person from a working-class background with sharp intelligence, technical knowledge, analytical abilities, and a restless mind always seeking new information. He could have been an accountant, an engineer, or an architect (as his mother imagined). Or he might have chosen a career in academia or high-level law enforcement. Certainly the FBI, DEA, or CIA could have made good use of someone with his abilities. In a society possessing even the rudiments of a merit-based system, he would have been a successful man.

  As this book shows, the sicario is not a fictional character, but a talented and intelligent man whose life choices were forged by the social and economic realities of his time and place. This does not excuse his decision to become a part of a murderous criminal enterprise, but in his own words, he explains his choices. And he lives every day with the consequences of those choices.

  The sicario’s account takes us inside the world of narco-trafficking and police enforcement. But there are elements of the story that require some background understanding for readers not familiar with Mexico or the intricacies of the drug trade. In the following paragraphs, I explain some important points.

  THE PLAZA

  Crime and government meet in the Mexican concept of the “plaza.” In Mexico, the word takes on a specific sense apart from—but extending—its normal meaning of a town or city center or square. Historically, the Mexican state has allowed criminal organizations to exist while at the same time maintaining control over them by designating a liaison to supervise their activities and take a cut of their income for the state. Whoever controlled the plaza kept crime orderly and profitable for the state. There have always been variations of this concept in the United States as well. Cops take bribes to overlook backroom gambling, houses of prostitution, and bars that run past closing time. In Mexico, the relationship is much closer, and it has become more significant in recent decades. It is common knowledge that the police are corrupt and often commit crimes. With the rise of the modern drug business in the 1980s, the money earned by drug merchants skyrocketed, and the interest of the state grew in proportion to this new source of wealth. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimates that for at least twenty years illicit drugs have earned Mexico from $30 billion to $50 billion a year. Today income from the drug trade is second only to oil in earning Mexico foreign currency—or perhaps drug income exceeds oil income, since no one really knows how much money is made in the drug business. Globally, the illegal drug industry dwarfs the auto industry.

  This kind of money fosters murder. The sicario was often assigned to kill people who operated in Juárez but failed to pay for their use of the plaza. The huge profits from the booming drug industry also changed the balance of power between the government and the criminal enterprises. Until the 1980s, criminals normally approached the police and made a financial arrangement so that they could carry on their commerce. But with the billions tumbling in from cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, the criminals began to dictate the terms—the infamous “plata o plomo,” silver or lead. The police could either take the money offered to do the bidding of the crime syndicate, or be killed.

  The sicario’s job duties included delivering quantities of money from the Juárez cartel to officials in several Chihuahua state administrations during the 1990s. These payments were made to arrange the control of the plaza. He then watched as these officials rose to higher and higher positions of power in the Mexican government. When he talks about this from the place where he now hides from fellow sicarios seeking to collect the contract on his own life, his anger is palpable. He knows the corrupting power of the money that he helped to earn and distribute. And he knows that the power of many Mexican officials is paid for with the blood of hundreds of Mexicans like himself. He knows this because he has been both executioner and target.

  It is difficult to exaggerate the amount of money involved in these transactions. By the mid-1990s, the banks in El Paso, Texas, across the river from Juárez, were booking deposits that exceeded the cash flow of the legitimate economy by $700 million a year. In news accounts from 1996, “U.S. authorities estimate[d] that $3.5 billion in drug profits are laundered locally through El Paso.”2 In 2007 more than $205 million was discovered stored in a single house in Mexico City belonging to Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese businessman involved in the importation of chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. Ye Gon later claimed that much of the money belonged to the ruling political party, the PAN, and that he was being forced to safeguard the money to be used by politicians as a slush fund.3

  By the turn of the twenty-first century, the narco-trafficking organizations had begun to take over more and more control of legitimate society, and this change is now the face of Mexico. The sicario has lived through this evolution. In the years before he left the organization he worked for, he and his colleagues were handling shipments of drugs worth $30 million to $40 million. Such sums of money create temptation to steal, and part of the sicario’s work was to kill people who attempted to cheat the boss.4

  THE CARTELS

  In the legitimate world, the word “cartel” refers to a group of businesses seeking to control a market. The antitrust laws in the United States were originally created to break cartels. The Mexican drug organizations have never been able to completely control the market and have always had to contend with smaller operators who try to compete. When discovered, these small-time capitalists are murdered. Movers and shakers in American business corporations are accustomed to working hard, making lots of money, and, at the end of their useful economic lives, they are fired or they retire with a golden parachute. Cartel executives at the same point in their careers are often executed.

  A second reality is that drug cartels in Mexico are somewhat fluid. From the late 1980s to the present, several groups of various origins and shifting territories have dominated the drug business in Mexico: Sinaloa, Juárez, Gulf, Tijuana, Beltran-Leyva, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana. Sometimes disparate groups or subgroups of one or another of the major cartels band together on certain deals and then drift apart, or a fragment of one group will strike out on its own. There is constant friction between groups, and in the business of drugs friction
produces murder.

  The Juárez cartel first bloomed in the mid-1980s when cocaine shipments from South America began to stream through Mexico. The cartel had two key assets: arrangements with cocaine producers in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia and control of the crossing into El Paso. By the late 1990s, the U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey estimated, fifteen tons of cocaine were being warehoused in Juárez at any given moment. As the Juárez cartel gained strength and territory during the 1990s, DEA officials estimated that the Juárez plaza generated cash surpluses in El Paso of $50 million to $70 million each month—money that circulated through the real estate and luxury goods markets on the U.S. side of the border.5

  The key architect of this industry in Juárez was Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who controlled the plaza from May 1993 until his death in July 1997. Carrillo had arranged to have his predecessor, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, murdered so that he could take over the job. At the height of his power, Amado Carrillo was practically untouchable. He traveled all over Mexico with a bodyguard detail composed of several dozen federal police officers. Carrillo was the first cartel boss who tried to create a structure that would foster cooperation among the various narco-trafficking organizations and thus allow the business to grow and flourish with fewer costly and bloody cartel wars. Amado Carrillo was also able to forge alliances between the drug-trafficking organizations and the highest levels of the Mexican government. When Amado Carrillo died in 1997, Peter Lupsha, a longtime scholar of organized crime and money laundering in Latin America, said: “In Colombia, the drug capos are threatening the state from the outside. In Mexico, they’re part of the state.”6