El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin
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Carrillo’s brother Vicente took over after Amado’s death in a Mexican hospital in 1997, where he underwent plastic surgery to change his appearance. Don Vicente Carrillo continues to run the organization today. By all accounts, he keeps a much lower profile than his brother did, which perhaps has contributed to his unprecedented longevity at the helm of the Juárez cartel. The sicario met Vicente Carrillo when he was about fifteen years old, and his entire career was interwoven with this major narco-trafficking organization. As a young man, the sicario worked as part of a security detail for the men at the highest levels in the cartel, and he describes how he and his coworkers were required to maintain complete devotion to these bosses. From his account, one learns of the power of the cartel, and also of the constant tension and instability created by rival groups seeking to take over the plaza or by those within the cartel seeking to cheat the organization. The sicario never felt secure, always slept with loaded guns by his bed, and expected to be killed at any time. He saw fellow cartel workers rise and fall, and he was often ordered to execute people he had worked with.
As he tells his story, we realize that the sicario was never sure exactly who he was working for and seldom received orders from people much higher in the organization than himself. He describes in some detail the cartel’s cell structure, a form of organization that kept information strictly compartmentalized and controlled. But during the last years of his tenure with the Juárez cartel—2006 to 2007—this level of control began to break down, and the sicario was no longer sure who gave the orders.
It was also during this period that a larger struggle began to take place, one usually described as the attempt by “la gente nueva,” the new people, associated with the Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, to take control of the Juárez plaza. In December 2006, President Calderón announced that the Mexican military would be called on to fight against the drug cartels, even though there is ample evidence that the army had been in league with traffickers going back several decades.7 A new period of hyperviolence would begin in Mexico, and by 2008 Ciudad Juárez had become the bloody epicenter of this conflict.
PRESIDENT CALDERÓN’S WAR
On December 1, 2006, Felipe Calderón assumed the presidency of Mexico after barely winning the elections and enduring a period of challenges by his opposition in the congress. Stolen elections in Mexico are a national tradition, and many citizens see Calderón as an illegitimate ruler. Shortly after taking office, Calderón posed in military uniform—something taboo in Mexico since the revolution. His move to deploy 45,000 soldiers to fight the drug cartels was interpreted by many as a tactic to give a boost to his contested and very weak presidency—a bold move to prove that he possessed “la mano dura,” the hard hand.
The presence of the military on the streets greatly increased the level of violence in many areas of Mexico. Many Mexicans began to notice that the Sinaloa cartel, headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, seemed relatively untouched by the military campaign. People began to suspect that the army was fighting, not against the cartels, but on the side of one, with the goal of consolidating control over a larger share of the huge profits generated by the drug business and especially by the Juárez plaza. Edgardo Buscaglia, a lawyer and organized crime expert in Mexico City, analyzed public security statistics and determined that “only 941 of the 53,174 people arrested for organized crime in the past six years were associated with Sinaloa.”8 National Public Radio also examined official arrest data from the Mexican federal attorney general’s office dating from the beginning of Calderón’s term through May 2010. This investigation showed that only 12 percent of 2,600 federal defendants accused of being cartel operatives were associated with the Sinaloa organization.9 A former Juárez police commander seeking asylum in the United States said, speaking anonymously to a Canadian journalist, that several smuggling gangs in the city split from the Juárez cartel in 2007 and joined forces with the Sinaloa organization, which was in the process of trying to take over this lucrative plaza. These shifting alliances spawned a great deal of the killing that exploded in the city in early 2008.10 There is off-the-record speculation from people in the DEA that nothing bad will happen to El Chapo while President Calderón is in office. And as is often the case in Mexico, rumor becomes fact, suspicion substitutes for thought, and both rumor and suspicion may sometimes be closer to the truth than public facts.
Verifiable facts about the relationship between Calderón’s government, the military, and the cartels are difficult to come by, but there is no doubt that Ciudad Juárez is ground zero in the slaughter being generated across Mexico. After four years of sporadic and vague official releases on the carnage in its drug wars, in January 2011 the Mexican government issued a new report (accompanied by data sets) stating that 34,612 homicides linked to narco-trafficking have occurred since Calderón took office in December 2006 and that the numbers have increased each year at ever higher rates.11 As posted by Johanna Tuckman in a report in The Guardian, Juárez has been the most violent city since 2008 despite the military presence there. The Guardian also makes the important caveat that “the figures released do not specify how many of those killed are presumed to be related to the cartels, how many belonged to the security forces, or how many were innocent civilians dragged into the horror.”12
Larger estimates ranging up to nearly 50,000 dead were reported in early 2011 in different Mexican media.13 This is out of a total population of 112,468,855.14 Between one-fifth and onequarter of all of Mexico’s dead have been killed in Juárez, a city of between 1.2 and 1.3 million people.
At the time when the sicario engineered his escape from the system in 2007, Juárez was in the middle of a record-breaking year of murder that ended with a reported toll of 307 homicides. Murders increased fivefold in 2008, for a total of 1,623 victims. Also in 2008, 45 bodies came out of the ground during excavations at several death houses, but these deaths have never been officially assigned to the murder numbers for any year, since there is no official information about when these murders occurred. In 2009 there were 2,754 homicides in the city, and 2010 ended with 3,111 murder victims, as reported in El Diario de Juárez—an average of 8.5 murders per day. October 2010 set a record of 359 homicides in one month. The murder rate in Juárez is now estimated to be the highest of any city in the world, more than 250 per 100,000 people, a rate that increased 800 percent between 2007 and 2010. As of February 21, 2011, another 384 people had died, bringing the total number of Juárez victims in the four years of Calderon’s war to more than 8,000.15
It makes no sense to attribute all of this killing to a cartel war. If this is a war, then who are the combatants? Since early 2008, more than 8,000 soldiers and federal police have patrolled the Juárez streets. The newspapers seldom report on the number of soldiers killed, and the Mexican military does not normally release information on casualties. During all of 2008 and 2009, Juárez newspapers only reported three soldiers killed in the city. A government report in August 2010 revealed that a total of 191 military personnel and 2,076 federal, state, and municipal police in all of Mexico had been killed since Calderón launched his war,16 and the total number of dead reported in August was 28,000. In the January 2011 report, the government numbers do not specify which ones of the dead were members of the military or other security forces.
The most salient information to be gleaned from these government releases is that they probably report a minimum number of the deaths that have occurred. We also know that when President Calderón or other government spokesmen say that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, it is also the case that fewer than 5 percent of the crimes have been investigated.17 And by reading the daily accounts of murders in the Juárez newspapers, one sees that the overwhelming majority of the victims are ordinary people and that most of them are poor: children, teenagers, old people, small-business proprietors who refused to pay extortion demands, mechanics, bus drivers, a woman selling burritos from a cart on the street, a clown juggling at an
intersection, boys selling newspapers, gum, and perhaps nickel bags of cocaine or heroin on a street corner, an increasing number of young women who are taking jobs in the drug business, and dozens of people who have been slaughtered inside drug rehabilitation clinics. Social workers have estimated that there are between 150,000 and 200,000 addicts just in the city of Juárez. At one point in his story, the sicario speaks to the increasing numbers of poor people using and dealing drugs in Juárez and the devastating impact of this growing small-time domestic retail market.
People call many of the victims “malandros,” bad guys, riffraff, human garbage. Sometimes they use the phrase “limpieza social,” social cleansing, to describe these killings. The truth is that fewer than 5 percent of homicides in Mexico will ever be investigated or solved.18 But what is increasingly clear is that if this is a war, it is being waged, at least in part, by powerful forces of the Mexican government against poor and marginalized sectors of the Mexican people.
In October 2010, a potential bombshell hit the Mexican press when a national newspaper, El Universal, published an article entitled “Social Cleansing, Not Drug War.” According to the article, “legislators say the state permits the existence of death squads. . . . Due to massive numbers of executions, the Senate of the Republic asks for reports on the existence of death squads.”19 The article details the efforts of a few Mexican senators from an opposition party to force the internal intelligence branch of the government (CISEN) to release a report that contained evidence of the existence of paramilitary death squads implicated in many of the killings. Spokesmen for civic organizations that monitor human rights in the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, Nuevo Leon, and Baja California spoke of deaths and disappearances that have never been reported: “The silence is terrible. No account is given of what actually happens and if it were possible to reveal these ‘black operations’ we would see that there are not 28,000 dead as the government says, but rather, more than 40,000.” The article alleges that deserters from the army and police—many who had been dismissed for corruption—make up these squads of killers and “operate dressed in official uniforms, driving patrol cars, and with weapons, badges and keys just like the forces of the state.” A human rights lawyer in Baja California said that the extermination squads have been named “black commandos.” “We cannot just talk about groups of thugs, gunmen, sicarios and drug trafficking activities; these accusations imply the full participation of the state.”
The article was ignored by the international media, and there was practically no follow-up in the Mexican press. Yet its revelations read like a chapter from the sicario’s story.
VICTOR MANUEL OROPEZA
On July 3, 1991, Juárez dentist and newspaper columnist Victor Manuel Oropeza was stabbed to death in his office. The murder has never been solved, despite forensic evidence and eyewitnesses who reported seeing four men enter and leave Oropeza’s office on the evening of the killing. Dr. Oropeza was a prominent member of Juárez society, and his murder generated considerable media coverage—more than four hundred articles in Chihuahua newspapers alone in the eighteen years since the killing, as well as mention in the international press. Several suspects were arrested and held for some months, but they were freed owing to the fact that they were tortured into confessing and later questioning revealed that they had no knowledge of the actual circumstances of the crime. Some of the state police officials who took charge of the investigation were individuals whom Dr. Oropeza had written about in the months and weeks preceding his murder, accusing them of involvement in drug trafficking in Juárez. According to some press accounts, the officers responsible for the investigation were suspects in the killing.20
Over the years, in addition to several botched investigations by the Chihuahua state prosecutor and the Mexican attorney general, Oropeza’s murder has been the subject of inquiries by the Mexican National Human Rights Commission, the Inter American Press Association, and the Organization of American States.
The sicario’s interest in the case is detailed in his story. The murder occurred early in his career in the Chihuahua state police, and he was part of a team that provided protection for the hit men. Because of his job at the time, he knows that the allegations made by Oropeza in his columns were true. He also identifies the murder as one of the first successful attempts by drug cartel operatives to silence anyone who drew attention to the expanding and increasingly systemic links between the criminal organizations, the police, and the Mexican state. It is worth noting that on January 2, 1992, El Norte de Ciudad Juárez published a roundup of “one of the most violent years in the history of Juárez”: in 1991, the year that included the killing of Oropeza, there were a total of 134 murders in the city.21
The person the sicario identifies as the mastermind of the murder, El Cora de Sinaloa, does not appear in any press account that I could find, but this is not surprising.22 Mexican newspapers seldom report any news that is not sanctioned by both narco-trafficking groups and the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists consistently ranks Mexico as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. According to Reporters Without Borders, at least sixty-seven Mexican journalists have been killed since 2000, while another eleven have gone missing. Those who threaten, kidnap, and kill journalists are almost never punished for their crimes.23
GENERAL REBOLLO
Mexican Army general Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo was appointed by President Ernesto Zedillo in December 1996 to be Mexico’s top anti-narcotics officer or “drug czar.” At the time of his appointment, he was in charge of the military region that included Guadalajara, and he had a clean reputation according to U.S. officials from DEA and other agencies. In retrospect, however, it was evident that he had focused most of his enforcement efforts on drug cartel activities in Tijuana and consistently ignored Juárez. Suspicions were aroused when General Rebollo rented an apartment in Mexico City that appeared to be far too luxurious for his military salary. Investigations found that the apartment actually belonged to Amado Carrillo.24
At the time, Rebollo had access to all of Mexico’s classified drug enforcement information, police records, and informants, and it is assumed that he passed this information on to Amado Carrillo. His arrest in February 1997 on charges of bribery, perverting the course of justice, facilitating the transportation of cocaine, and directly aiding Amado Carrillo proved extremely embarrassing to the United States, since just a few weeks before, he had been welcomed to Washington by the U.S. drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, who praised his honesty, integrity, and skills in pursuing drug traffickers. During that visit, the DEA shared sensitive intelligence with General Rebollo, probably endangering the lives of informants in Mexico. As frequently happens with high profile arrests in Mexico, the conviction may not match the publicized charges. In the case of General Rebollo, the DEA reported in 1998 that he was convicted and sentenced to thirteen years and nine months in jail for unauthorized use of firearms.25 Rebollo was the model for the character of General Salazar in the 2001 Oscar-winning movie Traffic.26
The sicario uses the case of General Rebollo to illustrate the long-standing relationships between the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations and the military, although he believes that this case was unusual at the time. He noted a change at high-level gatherings during his tenure with the cartel: military officers began to show up regularly at fiestas in rural areas in Chihuahua where he had helped to provide women and other entertainments. He estimates that this change took place sometime in 2003.
JOSE LUIS SANTIAGO VASCONCELOS AND JUAN CAMILO MOURIÑO
Several times in his story, the sicario mentions the significance of the work that Señor Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos did from his position as an assistant prosecutor in the federal attorney general’s office in Mexico. According to the sicario, Vasconcelos played a major role in bringing clandestine burials to light, as well as in other actions that served to damage narco-trafficking organizations, bef
ore his death in a plane crash in Mexico City on November 4, 2008. An obituary in The Guardian noted that Vasconcelos “came face to face with some of the most infamous of Mexico’s trafficking barons.” Vasconcelos pursued the extraditions of several major cartel figures to the United States, and he made many enemies among Mexican politicians through his investigations of money laundering. His life was threatened numerous times, but he “retained a reputation for being above corruption.”27 The powerful secretary of Gobernación (Interior), Juan Camilo Mouriño, was also killed in the plane crash. Before his death, Vasconcelos had been moved to a less prominent job that took him out of the front lines of the drug war. Though the Calderón government denied that the deaths of these two men had any connection to their roles as prominent fighters of organized crime, most Mexicans, including the sicario, believe that both Mouriño and Vasconcelos were targeted for challenging the power of the drug traffickers.
Although they never met, the sicario indicates that he had considered seeking help from Vasconcelos during the period when he was attempting to escape from his life as a cartel enforcer. The sicario’s career was marked at its beginning and its end by his encounters with two men he perceived as making real and honest efforts to expose the crimes of the Mexican state: the crusading journalist Oropeza and the vigilant government crimefighter Vasconcelos. He bookends his own story with the object lessons represented by these two individuals.