El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

by Charles Bowden

  “Come on over here. Lie down, make yourself comfortable. Would you like a beer?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Ha! Are you crazy? You think I’m going to give you a beer? As if. I’m going to give you a glass of water. Here, you want a glass of water?”

  “Yes.”

  “Water is all you are going to get. You want another egg?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all you are gonna get to eat.

  “Okay, now lie down. If you want to get up, you have to let us know. The way to let us know is like this, quietly and calmly: ‘Sir, may I get up now?’ You ask, and then you wait for my order, to give you permission. If you insist on making noise and getting up again so abruptly, the boys are gonna put you back in the water!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay.”

  He managed to get through that day.

  At night: “Get up, please. You are going to be able to rest again in your bed. Stay there. Do not make any noise. They have not called, it seems everything is all right. We are going to wait some more.”

  The other guys start to ask: “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing, they haven’t called.”

  “Why don’t you find out? Are we going to have to pay another day in this hotel or what?”

  “Okay. Give me the phone, I’ll call.”

  “Sir—what shall we do? What are the orders? ... Okay, we will wait another day.”

  The next morning we are sitting here, very early, about seven forty-five in the morning, I remember. Just a few minutes before eight. The phone rings, and it is the boss’s telephone number.

  “Yes, what are the orders? Yes, sir. Everything is fine. He is here, he is all right. No, no, no. Everything is okay. Where do you want him? ... Immediately. Yes, sir. In just a little while. We are close to the bridge. Very close. Okay.”

  So I tell the other guys: “We are going to let him go. We are going to let him bathe and dress and change and get straightened up. We have to deliver him to the other side. We have to take him over there.”

  So I told him: “Now everything is okay. Get ready. I’m going to take off the handcuffs. What size shoes do you need? Size nine? Okay.”

  I tell the guys, “So go get him some pants and a new sweatshirt. Get a razor. Some tennis shoes, size nine. Make sure to bring him that razor too.”

  “We are going to let you go now. And we want you to look good and feel good. So take a shower and clean yourself up.”

  They brought the pants, shoes—size nine, the razor. And the guy bathed really quickly, shaved, dressed, and straightened himself up.

  The guy was really happy. He didn’t look bad, no swelling. The thing with the water was nothing really. The beating he got wasn’t so bad.

  “Let’s go.”

  We let him feel safe. What did we do? We put him in the backseat of the car. I got in on his right side, he sat in the middle, and another guy on the left side and another guy driving. And we crossed the bridge, and we delivered him to some coworkers there. And from that moment, I never knew anything more about him. And that never mattered to me. It never interested me.

  Once the package was delivered, I never tried to find out what happened. That was not my job. My job was done when the package was delivered. You see, once I delivered the package, that was the end of it. That is what I did, and like I told you, I always did a good job. If something bad happened after that, it was because of some mistake the man had made.

  And he would have to pay.

  CHILD

  He sits in room 164 and he says, “These are the four stages of my

  life: My childhood, my adolescence, where I formed myself . . . then

  I grew into a man, and finally, my salvation in Christ.”

  He draws the four stages in a black notebook:

  CHILD / TEENAGER / MAN / CHILD OF GOD

  “We can begin with my childhood . . . ”.

  And with the word childhood, the voice goes soft. Perhaps

  it is the black net veil over his face. He speaks inside of

  himself, to himself. A sigh—Oh—marks a memory that

  comes sometimes with a smile and often with a sob.

  He speaks for two days.

  He never stumbles.

  He knows the way home.

  These are the four stages of my life: My childhood, my adolescence, where I formed myself . . . then I grew into a man, and finally, my salvation in Christ. We can begin with my childhood.

  As a little kid, I was a common, ordinary child. My parents didn’t have the resources to send us to a good school. We were a large family, a lot of kids. We lived in really small rooms, all of us kids sleeping together on the floor. Thanks to the work that my father and mother did, we never, ever lacked for food. One way or another, by asking for help and through hard work, my parents always found the way to give us the food we needed.

  There’s an experience I had that I remember well. I was in primary school, maybe third or fourth grade, and this older kid beat up my brother. My brother was older than me. He was in sixth grade at the time. It made me so mad that I started looking for revenge. I waited for this kid outside the school, and I beat him up. This was not a good idea. Yeah, I hit him a few times all right, but he hit me back pretty bad. This caused a lot of bitterness inside of me. And I was traumatized that I was not able to defend myself.

  The school called my parents. My mother, like any good mother, went as summoned to see the director of the school. And he told her what had happened. And she accepted it and kept it to herself and only scolded me a little because, well, because she understood that I had been defending my older brother.

  Oh, my older brother got so angry with me that he stopped talking to me for months because it made things go really bad for him in school ... kids saying that he wasn’t able to defend himself, that I, his little brother, had to defend him. And so the other kids started treating him like he was a nobody. And even though my mother was called in to see the school director, she never really punished me. She felt proud that I had defended my brother, even though he was older than me.

  Back in my childhood, when we had the chance, we would go out to play basketball. I remember we had to play a fast game because the basketball we had was damaged. It had a tiny hole in it and leaked air. It cost us a peso to fill it up, but it would only last about a half hour. And my friends and I would go out onto the court. This was the half hour we had for our game. It was a good time, even if it only lasted thirty minutes. It was fun to be out there on the court, entertaining ourselves, tossing around that old basketball.

  And when I think of those thirty minutes when we could play with the basketball ... when I look back on it now, I realize it is like watching the time pass, and it makes me think about how I grew up. I reflect back on my life, and it was a life lived fast in a very fast world. Those thirty minutes were so short and went by so quickly, just as I feel that I grew up too quickly and my life has passed by too fast. Instead of thinking carefully and following through on the decision to become a professional, to go to the university, to finish a degree, to advance step by step . . . I made decisions on the spot, thirty-minute decisions, just like that thirty-minute ball game. When I left the university and turned my back on a real career, I made that decision in thirty minutes, and after that I always looked for the fastest way to get the things that I wanted—money, drugs, power. Fast, easy things.

  Some years went by. I continued my education. I always got good grades in school. And I won some scholarships and halfscholarships, and this served me well, but I kept having this resentment inside of me from this feeling of powerlessness, that I could not have a car. Because at the next higher level after primary school, I could see the kids with their cars, how they could go out, go to the movies, have fun. ...

  All of this time I was living through, growing up, I kept thinking and having the idea that I could be somebody. Somebody big, somebody with power. Somebody who could say so
mething and make it happen. Somebody with no limits. A person who could say, “I want that.” And have it. A person who could have a craving for something to eat, and have it. I wanted to be the man who could wish for a really big house, and have it.

  I was very young, but I had these big desires. They were not really good desires, but they were big and they were real. I wanted to have all of this quickly, and I was always looking for the fastest and easiest way to get what I wanted.

  Oh, when I think back on my parents, I remember that all they did was work, work, and more work. There was not much of a relationship between my parents and their children. I didn’t know anything about going to the theater or the movies because my parents just did not have the money for us to learn about those things.

  The only time—and I remember it well, and will always carry this memory with me—we did something together was when a circus came to town and somehow my parents found a way to take me and two of my younger brothers to the circus. But they told us there was one condition: Once we were there, we could not ask for anything else because there was only enough money for the tickets to get in. So, because of this situation, and knowing that we would get hungry while the show was on and ask for food or treats, my mother prepared some food to take along.

  She got some Galletas Marias—cookies that were very common in Mexico—and some mole sauce, and she made us sandwiches with the mole and the cookies. So that once we were there and enjoying the circus, my father would have just enough money to buy two sodas that we could all share. But I remember that the mole spilled and the cookies got smashed and stuck to the paper napkins they were wrapped in, but it didn’t matter to us. It didn’t matter to us at all....The voice breaks. He tells the rest of the story

  through tears, the joy of that moment and the sadness

  of his only memory of an outing with his father.

  On that day my brothers and I were really happy, happier than we had ever been. We had never ever been taken out anywhere with my father before, and had never known what it was to go out to the circus. We never knew what it was to have fun. We had always envied other kids for the things they had that we didn’t have. But in this moment we felt so proud to enjoy eating those cookies and mole, even though we had to eat the paper napkins too. I thanked my father over and over for this fun that he gave us, for the sacrifice that he made. It might have cost him a week or more of food for the family to take us to the circus, but it made me the happiest kid in the world.

  And for years after that day, whenever my brothers and I see each other, even when we haven’t been together for a long time, this is the first thing we talk about and remember.

  “You remember when we went to the circus?”

  “Remember how we ate those cookies with mole?”

  “Remember how our dad had to get a few cents more to buy those two sodas?”

  “Remember how happy we were?”

  In that moment we didn’t need or want anything else. And I learned who my father was. From my point of view, I had always felt that it was unfair that the only thing my father did was work, work, and work some more. All he ever wanted to do was teach us how to work.

  “Get to work and make some cement, make some blocks, so we can build some more rooms on the house,” he’d say.

  I wanted to have fun, but for my father, having fun was putting us to work. That day that he took us to the circus, I don’t know if he got a little extra money or what. But for my whole life, I will thank him for this. It was a moment that marked our childhood and brought us together as brothers.

  My younger brothers and I were always fighting over things. If one of us got some new socks, the others had to wait until the older ones outgrew the socks so the littler ones could use them. Once I got to wear something, the younger ones had to wait. The littlest had to wait so long that everything was worn out by the time it got to him. And it was the same with underwear, pants, all of our clothes. It was like a staircase. Our parents would buy stuff for the older ones and then it got passed down to all the others.

  Oh, but that day we went to the circus was fascinating. On that day the three of us were equal. We all ate the same thing. We all had fun. And for years and years we all remember it as the best thing that ever happened to us in our childhood. It is something that I feel is so much mine, something that belongs to me. And when my brothers and I meet now and talk about it, we all start to cry, because not one of us ever had any idea where my father got the money to buy those circus tickets.

  I often think about Sundays. On Sunday, everybody in the colonia, neighborhood, would run out to buy their snow cones or popsicles or candy because everybody would get a little money to spend on Sundays. I didn’t know what Sunday was all about, just that since it was Sunday, we had to go to Mass and leave an offering for the poor. In our family we never knew anything about getting money to spend on Sunday until one time I remember when my father got a little better job and my mother also had started to work cleaning houses. And after that they were able to give us five or ten cents to spend.

  Oh, wow! That was really something! Ten cents to spend on Sunday!

  “Let’s all go to the store to buy candy.”

  So five of us brothers and sisters would get together and buy one big bag of candy. Or we would buy a big pack of popcorn and divide it up and count out the pieces of popcorn so we could make it last four days. We would count it out so that we each had twenty pieces of popcorn every day. And on the day we would borrow or rent a TV (we didn’t have a TV, so we would pay a peso to go and watch TV at a neighbor’s house) we would bring our own popcorn.

  Every Monday we would gather together and watch a really famous program in Mexico, El Chavo del Ocho. And each of us would bring their twenty pieces of popcorn. This was just on Monday, that’s when the program was on.

  TEENAGER

  I kept growing ... I changed schools. I developed other interests. Some of the other kids now had cars, but I always had to take the bus. To go from the house to the school, I had to pay, and sometimes I had to walk ’cause I didn’t have money for the bus, and it could be hard to ask for a ride. But at this time, the city of Juárez was still pretty friendly. There were not many bad feelings among the people, it was easy to ask for a lift, and people would often give rides to school kids with their backpacks.

  At high school I made some new friends, but I had an itch. I kept wanting to better myself, to get more things, to be more, to have more things like the other kids had. But for me and my parents, it was hard. And so some of us chose an easier path.

  When we were in secondary school, a person invited us to a party, and he showed us how nice things could be. He made us see that we could drink and have fun, and what’s more, that we could have money and maybe even a car.

  So I asked this guy, “Okay, how? What do I have to do?”

  And he says, “Nothing, just drive this car to your school and deliver it to me in the morning. When you leave school in the afternoon, you will drive it over to El Paso and deliver it to me there.”

  “And then?”

  “After that, I’ll give you another car, you can use it all week, I’ll fill it up with gas for you. And on the weekend you give it back to me, and then you take it to El Paso for me, and then I’ll loan you another car and I’ll pay you.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No, that’s not all. Here you’ve got a house that you can use. There will be girls who can help you out and serve your needs. You’ll like it. You can even live here if you like.”

  Ah, at this time, there were four of us guys who said, sure, yeah. My mother missed me a lot ’cause I hardly ever went home. I didn’t even know how to drive, but in one day someone taught me to drive a car. I didn’t have a license, but in half an hour someone got a license for me.

  Oh, I remember one of the things that happened at that time. I was crossing over to the United States, and I was driving a big car with Colorado plates. And I got stopped on the bridge.
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  The immigration guys asked me who the car belonged to, and I said, “A friend.”

  “And why are you driving it?”

  “Because they loaned it to me.”

  “Do you have a license?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have money?”

  “Of course.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I’m a student.”

  “And why do you have money?”

  “Because I work.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Oh, I clean motel rooms.”

  “Where?”

  “In Mexico.”

  “Okay.”

  They took my passport and put it in front of the window and told me to go into a cubicle. When I stood up, they told me to sit down by an iron bar. So I sat down, and a person came with a little dog and opened the trunk of the car, and the dog started to go crazy, barking. When this happened, wow, before I could even turn around, there were like six people surrounding me and on top of me already.

  I said, “Hey, what’s going on? Far as I know, I’m not carrying anything.”

  “Okay.”

  They put me in a little room with bunk beds in it, just one door and one window and a glass I couldn’t see through. Maybe they could see me. I don’t know. I couldn’t see them.

  The guy says to me, “You are gonna have to take off all your clothes, put all your things here. We are going to search you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s possible that you are carrying drugs in the car.”

  “No, that’s not true.”

  “Good. We are going to search you. Take off your clothes.”

  So they took off all my clothes. Took everything out of my wallet. They looked at every piece of paper I was carrying. For three hours they asked me about every bit of information in my wallet.