El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

by Charles Bowden

  “Who is this number for? Who is this person that you know?”

  I was carrying a bunch of cards with American phone numbers, and they asked me about every one of those phone numbers. Suddenly I see the guy with the dog come into the office. I’m not sure what they were saying in English.

  But the guy told me, “Okay, put your things away.”

  “Okay.”

  They had already let me put on my clothes, and so I put all my stuff away. And they put a paper in front of me. “Here, take this.”

  “Well, what’s this for?” I asked.

  They said, “So, look here. You have to sign and say that we did not treat you badly, that we were just doing our job. That we never did anything bad to you. And we are going to let you go and you won’t have any problems.”

  “Well, tell me what happened then. Why all this trouble?”

  And he said, “Look, we have a dog that detected that you were carrying drugs in the car. So when we put your car up on a ramp and looked under it, we saw that the screws on the gas tank had been moved around. Did you work on this car, change those screws around?”

  “No.” I told them that the car was borrowed, that I never worked on it. “I’m not a mechanic. I’m just a student who works. I came over to have some fun.”

  I remember real well that time, that I had just enough money to buy a pizza. For us to buy a pizza at Peter Piper Pizza in El Paso was a big deal—lo maximo! There wasn’t any such thing as Peter Piper Pizza in Mexico then. If we went over there to buy pizza, it meant we had some real money!

  “Okay, well, I’m not going to sign,” I said. “I want to talk to my lawyer.”

  Oh, man, they really got angry with me when I said that. They made some bad faces at me and said they were not going to give me back my border-crossing card, my mica.

  Well, when they said that, I realized that without the mica I would not be able to use the cars or get the fifty dollars every week. I wouldn’t be able to give rides to girls. Lots of things I wouldn’t be able to do. But then they ended up giving it back to me anyway.b

  Of all the many things that I did, the one that I always enjoyed the best was, when I got the fifty dollars, I would take out twenty dollars and put it aside for my mother. She would go out to buy things for the family every two weeks when she got paid, and so I would say to her, “Here, take this twenty dollars.”

  She was always so happy and would ask me where I got the money. “Working!” I would tell her that I got it going to El Paso to do yard work.

  My mother was really happy. She never knew what I was actually doing to get the money. I never knew what the drugs were that I carried. I knew the cars I drove over the bridge were loaded, but I didn’t know with what, or how much exactly, or where the drugs were hidden. When they told me that stuff about the gas tank, I figured that’s where the drugs were, but I never really knew. So during those three years, me and three other guys lived off of this, and that’s how we got through secondary school.

  It was a happy time. I did not depend on my parents. I would give them money when I could. I bought my own clothes, my own Converse tennis shoes. Man, I remember the time I bought some Reeboks. Wow! They cost eighty dollars. I was the only one in my school with Reeboks. I bought them at JCPenney’s. The other kids were jealous, and they would tease me and step on my shoes, just to piss me off. It made me really mad.

  Some of my other friends were less ostentatious. They had done this for a longer time. I only did it every two weeks or so. It was rare that I did it every week. Some of them did it three times per week. My parents were more conservative, and I didn’t have permission to spend too much time away from home. I couldn’t get away from the house as much.

  I studied hard, earned really good grades, and I was automatically accepted into preparatory school. It wasn’t the best school in Juárez, but it was a pretty good school. Once in prep school, you have to have your car, a good body, play American football, go to the gym a lot, and have some money to spend. That was the way to get girlfriends. I could usually have one or two girlfriends, no problem. While at prep school, I quit working for those people for a while because I got a scholarship and had to spend all my time studying and playing sports. The scholarship paid me just a small sum of money.

  So what I did was use the little bit of money that I had saved from the three years I had been working and bought an old car. I also started working in another, legal business. But in this business, I ran into a kind of vicious circle. I always found that there were some really good people, some others who were more or less good, and then there were the bad people. The bad people liked to hang out in the bars and cantinas and take drugs. At that time I found myself right here in the middle. But unfortunately, desgraciadamente , I made the choice to get in with the bad people.He illustrates the vicious circle in a drawing.

  I started to help them out some. And I started using drugs. We didn’t use marijuana much. And it was hard to get cocaine at this time. If we wanted cocaine, we would have to send someone to El Paso, Texas, to get it and bring it back to Juárez. At that time, if anyone had cocaine, it meant they had a lot of money.c

  Back then in Juárez, not many drugs were for sale. I know that Juárez is and always was a bridge to pass drugs into the U.S., but at that time the drugs weren’t sold here in Juárez. It was forbidden to open the shipments of cocaine in Juárez. The drugs arrived here and were passed into the United States, but in Juárez they were not for sale. A little marijuana, yes, but not cocaine. And heroin had been around for a long time. In the past I had never liked marijuana or heroin. Once in secondary school, I smoked marijuana a little, but it made me sick and I vomited for two days. It was later, in prep school, and gradually when I got involved with the bad people and went to a lot of parties, that I started to use cocaine.

  So what happened? In this time period, a gram of cocaine cost $120. You had to get $120 to get a gram of cocaine. That would be thirty dollars each for the four of us. You had to work to get that, but it wasn’t much, it was never enough. Our consumption between the four of us was a lot more than a gram. Now, you are talking about un ocho. This was twenty-eight grams of cocaine. That’s what we would have to buy to supply us for several days of partying.

  We would still get good grades in school. Being young, we were in really good shape. We could run, our bodies responded. Being drugged (on cocaine) I think made it easier to withstand getting injured playing American football and other sports. I guess I could have had a heart attack or something, but thank goodness that never happened.

  A lot of times I went to school really high or really drunk. We would drink all night and in the morning put on our uniforms and go to school. My parents never realized what was going on. My father had a night-shift job. He worked all night and would get home at six o’clock in the morning and sleep till six o’clock at night. So he never knew what I did all day. Much less what I did all night.

  So what happened then? My mother was out working cleaning houses. When she was doing this, she would work Monday to Friday away from home and would only come back to our house on Saturday and Sunday. She worked like this so that we would have plenty to eat and be able to pay for our schooling.

  Oh, school for me was never a problem. You know, I think that if I had just kept studying, I could have been a good engineer or architect or doctor or something. I got good grades without even trying. I never remember studying for a test. I would take a few classes, read the book for an hour before the test, and then show up for the exam, and I never got a score of 7 (or lower). I would always get an 8 or 9 or 9.8 or an 8, but never a 7 or a bad grade.

  Sometimes if I didn’t know the material on the test, it wouldn’t matter because I always had some money. I would sit next to some other kid who knew the stuff who would fill out the exam but leave the name blank. Then he would give me his test all filled out, and I’d put my name on it, turn it in, and give him the money. And my blank exam. It was easy for me because I
never had any trouble getting money.

  So I didn’t have any problems. But it was while I was in prep school that we got to know another kind of people. These people made a proposition to us to sell drugs in the school. Oh, I couldn’t do very well at this, because I was on two teams—American football and basketball. I didn’t have much time, and since I had scholarships to play sports, I got paid a little bit from that. But what these people did was pay me for access to my lockers. I had two lockers with keys, and in one of them I would store some drugs for them and put my stuff in the other one. But I always had to be very careful and keep watch so that no one opened the locker with the drugs. We had to get into the school sometimes at night to get the drugs from the lockers to sell to those who wanted them.

  For me it was really emotional. It wasn’t hard for me. Everything at this time was full of emotion for me. To be sixteen years old and to be able to live like this! To have money and to be able to invite any girl I wanted to go out to eat in nice restaurants with me. And I always had enough that I could invite two friends to go along. I could tell the mariachis to play any song I wanted to hear. “Hey, babe! Play ‘La Muchacha Alegre,’ play ‘El Rey.’ How much? Here, let me pay you.”

  There weren’t many kids who had the money to do this. And we were just imitating the people who really had the money to live this kind of life. We never realized that this money that we were spending so fast could have done us a lot of good tomorrow, if we had saved some for the future. This money—oh, we really spent it badly—but it was such a happy time for us. But then, sometimes after a few days, we wouldn’t have any money left, not even enough to buy gas. And so I would ask those who were paying us for a loan. And they would say, “Okay, sure, how much do you need?”

  “Well, this much.”

  “Okay. But to get the loan, you will have to make a run to El Paso.”

  I know it was an abuse they were committing, that they were taking advantage of us. When I started doing it, they would only pay me fifty dollars to cross a car. I never knew what was in that car that I was crossing or how much. So I would ask them for more money. “Look, I need at least a hundred dollars.”

  And then one day they said, “We are not going to give you one hundred dollars, we are going to give you a thousand dollars. But the car is already parked near the bridge. The person who was going to do it got very nervous, and now he is too afraid to cross it. You want the thousand dollars?”

  “Hell, yeah, of course I want it.”

  So I went to get the car, got in, and I crossed it. And while I was crossing, I remember very well, two cars followed me all the way to the apartments where I was supposed to deliver it in El Paso. I went to the place where I was told to leave the car, got out, put the keys where I had been told, went into the apartment where my contact was, and collected an envelope with one thousand dollars. And that was the last time I ever saw those people.

  I later found out that the person who had chickened out on this job was the same man who had recruited me for this work back when I was in secondary school. And he had become afraid because the same thing that had happened to me at the bridge that one time (being stopped and searched) had happened to him twice in a row. He thought it wasn’t safe anymore, that people were being checked, and that the cars we used had been identified.

  This didn’t matter very much to me. I needed money. I did not give all of it to my mother for the household for sure. I spent a lot of it on myself and having fun. What I really liked was being the most famous kid in the school. To be the one who would go to the cafeteria with six or seven friends and all of our girlfriends too, and I would tell them to get whatever they wanted and I would pick up the tab. I liked it because when I played sports, I’d have a whole lot of fans. They would all know that after the game I’d buy them a lot of beers or invite them all to a bar on me. It felt really good.

  It was about this time—when I was sixteen—when I got into my first dance hall. I remember that the guy at the door said, “You are a minor. I can’t let you go in.” But I handed him a fifty-dollar bill, and he said, “Okay, no problem. ...” And so I went into my first dance hall. I didn’t know how to dance, but I knew how to drink a lot, and I got along real well with all the waiters.

  It was splendid! I would drink two or three pitchers of beer, maybe twenty-five dollars worth, and then I’d leave a thirty-dollar tip, more than the cost of the drinks I bought. And the waiters would really like that. I would sometimes bring a group of friends, and they would treat me really special. “Ah, señor, come in, come in. We have a table ready for you.” That was the best time of all. I learned the power of having money, that with money I could do anything. The saying at the time was, “With money, you can make the dog dance. Without money you dance like a dog.”

  But life got a little worse for us. My mother got sick, and her health soon got so bad she couldn’t work anymore. She kept getting sicker. And I made my decision to go to the university and leave all of my vices behind. And that is how it was. Part of what was happening with my mother was because.... Well, all mothers have a way of knowing what is going on with each one of their children. They might not say anything, but they sense it. My mother knew I was the black sheep of the family. She was always worrying about me. I noticed that when all my brothers and sisters did things wrong, she would scold them and correct them, but the only things she ever said to me were: “Be careful.” “Behave yourself.” “Try to do the right thing.” “Trust in God to take care of you.” “Do the right thing.”

  She always seemed very concerned about me. Whenever I wasn’t going to come home for a few days, I would call from a pay phone (there weren’t any cell phones then) to a neighbor’s house to tell my mother that I was going to spend the night with friends, not to worry, that I was going to school, but just not coming home for a few days.

  I found out later that my mother would cry a lot when this happened. She didn’t know what I was doing or if I was okay, or where I was. She worried so much about me that one day we held a family meeting. My oldest sister called the meeting, and she was going to do the talking. We were all there at the table, about thirteen of us—we were a big family—we all found our places there at this big table.He draws the round table and sketches in all the family members.

  My oldest half-sister (she was the daughter of my mother but had a different father) had called the meeting of the family. And all of my brothers and sisters ganged up on me and told me that it was my fault that my mother was sick. They said things like:

  “My mother is sick because of you.”

  “My mother is sick because you don’t come home.”

  “My mother is sick because she knows what you are up to.”

  “My mother is sick because of you drinking and doing drugs. ...”

  The last to speak was the eldest, my half-sister. She said, “You all have always thought of me as the oldest, but as separate from this family. You know, I only have a mother. She is my mother. Your father is not my father. I just have my mother, and I love her very much, and I want to protect her and enjoy her. And I can tell you this. If you want to keep on like you are, it would be better for you to just disappear from this family and we’ll say you are dead. I have no other family except my mother. You either have to straighten up and behave yourself or we are going to send you to join the army.”

  Oooooh. I laughed at that. Ha!

  So I said, “Yeah, right. You think you are going to send me to the army. As if! Don’t you worry about me. I am going to fix everything.”

  It took me two days. I was in my fourth semester at the university when this happened. In two days, thanks to recommendations from some friends and acquaintances [people he had met from his drug-smuggling activities], I arranged to get started on my career in the police. There were several requirements to joining the police that you had to fulfill. First, you had to be of majority age of eighteen. Second, you had to have a draft card, and to get that you had to be of age. Third,
almost always, you had to be married. Fourth, you had to pass a drug test, and fifth, a physical exam. I was not of majority age, nor did I have my draft card. I could not pass the drug test. I wasn’t married. The only thing I could pass of all these requirements was the physical examination.

  When I had my interview with the head of the academy, he said, “There are just two problems that will keep you out of the academy. But since you come with very good recommendations, this is not going to be a problem. But you have to do me a favor. You need to stop using drugs. Not being married is not going to be a problem. You don’t have your draft card, but I’m going to send you to the military headquarters, and you will talk to a specific person there, and he will give you the card that you need.”

  I said, “No. I don’t have to, because the person who sent me here to you said that you were going to accept me without any papers. You want me to call him and tell him that you are asking for this?”

  Then he said, “Okay, never mind, get out of here. Go and report to so-and-so. Bring a couple of changes of clothes, shorts, tennis shoes.”

  And that is how I began my career in the police academy.

  MAN

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

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