El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

by Charles Bowden

  The women marry them, but they are false marriages. They will say, “Look, take me to a judge and marry me.” The narcos have the power to have a fake judge appointed, or they can simply buy a marriage certificate from a real judge. If the woman wants a marriage certificate, they will give it to her, just like they can provide fake driver’s licenses or other kinds of identification documents like voting credentials or military cards. They are all false and for sale. It is a game they play, these illusions that they live under.

  If the narcos want something, they will get it, one way or another. Why? Because if they don’t get it for the good they will get it for the bad. And as far as the women are concerned, there is a saying: “If I want you, I will have you, for better or worse. If I can’t have you one way, I’ll have you another way. And if I can’t have you, no one will have you, that will be the end of you, and there you will be buried. Simple.”

  So let me repeat what I told you before. There are two soups. Noodle soup or fuck-you soup. And the noodle soup is all gone. So you get used to it, make yourself comfortable, or you get fucked over. That’s the truth.

  And so, for these women, there is no way out. You get to know a narco, and he wants you, you will get used to it and enjoy the life because you have no choice. Jewelry, houses, bodyguards. ... “No one else dare look at you because you belong to me. You are my ‘queen.’ Marry me this minute because I want you and I will have you.”

  And then he sets you up in a house, and there you stay for two or three years. And you cannot leave. It is a golden prison. This is the truth. These women live in a golden prison. With bodyguards. And they cannot leave until the boss comes and until they are given permission to see him. He may come to town and not even come to the house because in the same city he has four or five other “wives,” and he runs out of time, because he has to see all these other adventurous women and have his pleasure with all of them.

  When there were problems with people, the bosses had us to fix things, to keep people under control. There came a moment when there were just five of us that were trusted, and we operated as if we were a team of ten or twenty. At that time, these five people were enough to control the whole plaza. In the sense that we were very well trained and we always had eyes and ears wherever they were needed. They were paid to give us any information that we wanted. And they were not just paid with money. If we needed information at that time, we would get it. And when these were orders from the boss, he would get the information. Many people at this time tried to leave the organization, many people began to have regrets and wanted to get out of the business.

  Back then, agents like us who worked for police corporations were receiving a certain quantity of money to get rid of a person—$2,000 or $3,000, it depended on the person’s rank. After that, we started to get a lot more money depending on how hard it was to kill the target or how important he was. We described it using the old saying: Dependiendo del sapo la pedrada, The stone you throw depends upon the size of the toad. We started getting up to $25,000 for the execution of a person. This is apart from and in addition to our salaries. In order to be able to work freely, it was not enough to just say, “Yes, I’ll do the job.” These jobs were not assigned casually.

  He sketches the organization chart of the corporation.

  It begins with the head of the corporation, below him are the group bosses, and below them, the agents. And at all levels, those who are involved receive monthly salaries, a certain quota every month. And for people who had been recruited, like me, since before I was even in the police academy, and who received a salary to attend the academy, it was not difficult. Those of us who had been involved since that time were the most trusted. When there was an operation, even some of the group bosses were under our orders. As agents, we would sometimes give the orders to some of the bosses. It shouldn’t have been that way, but at the time, those were the orders coming from above. The bosses could not be given all of the information. Sometimes the only thing they did was act as a smokescreen for us to do our job.

  There were times when many people made mistakes and tried to traffic independently, passing trailers full of drugs at the army roadblock south of Juárez that was called “Precos” at that time, but I’m not sure what it is called now. They would try to pass a trailer by saying, “This merchandise belongs to the cartel and it is protected.” But the soldiers that were there would just ask a few questions and then let it pass.

  Coming into the city of Juárez there was a glorieta, a traffic circle. I’m not sure if it is still there. Just past this intersection was a place to review the plates and details of the trucks and trailers passing. People working for us would separate out the loads. Okay. “You say that this trailer belongs to the cartel. Who do you work for?”

  “I work for so-and-so.” This one or the other.

  So the load would be taken to a warehouse for security along with the trailer, the driver, and usually a truck with three or four guys behind and a car with two other guys. But when this happened—when people thought they could outsmart the cartel by passing these drugs—the cartel that did not own these drugs would just confiscate them. They would take all of the cargo and kidnap all of the guys carrying it—maybe six or seven people altogether—who would then end up buried in seven more graves in one of the many clandestine cemeteries in this city.

  I cannot tell you exactly how many people have been buried in this fashion. It is impossible to say. Personally, I cannot say exactly, for instance, that I was present at one hundred executions and that these people are buried in a certain place. No, no, it is not possible to say for sure. There could have been thousands more such executions. The cartel has a lot of safe houses and many people under their command. There are places that have been discovered where thirty, thirty-six, forty, and in another place ten or more bodies are buried—these are all in safe houses.

  But this is nothing compared to those safe houses that are properties belonging to rich people that have been rented by the cartel. The people owning these houses have no idea that there might be up to thirty, forty, or fifty people buried on these properties. The graves are not small, they are deep and very large. The odor of the decomposing bodies is very fetid. It is necessary to put lime and other chemicals on the bodies, remove all of their clothing and other belongings so that the bodies will not leave any traces, so that they cannot be located or identified.

  As long as the victims were men, killing them was no problem for me. In most cases, they were executed because they were stealing or they owed money and were not paying. When this happens and it is a man, there was no problem. The problem that I had—and it was a serious problem that began to convince me that I had to change my life—was when they began to kidnap women. When women began to work for the cartel, and I started to realize what was going on....

  In reality, not I, nor my close friends, nor my wife, realized many things.l But the heads of the cartel have eyes and ears everywhere. And they would know when a woman was going around with someone or talking too much. And they would just give us the address in this street in this neighborhood, this is her car, license tags, here is her description.... “Okay, go pick her up.”

  You would wait for her outside of her house, put her in the car, and take her to a safe house.

  It is very ugly to see a woman tortured. It is very ugly to see the outrages that are done to them because the people doing this have no scruples. It is not the same thing as dealing with a man who knows he has been stealing, who owes money, and who has tried to disappear without paying what he owes. It is not the same to see a woman suffer until she begs for mercy, to see her violated, raped not by one but by five or six or seven men ... and then to make her suffer until she loses consciousness.

  He draws the line.

  And finally.... Oh, it is terrible to strangle them, at times like this it is better to just shoot them. To strangle a person, it is so horrible, to feel how they suffer, to see how they lose all hope. It is to feel
how their life slips away from them little by little. It is to see that the person has a line and the moment comes when they are on the line, when they are dying, and all of the strength they are exerting to get free starts to dissipate and their body is ceasing to function, their life is slipping away. But no, then you can loosen the hold on them a little, and they gain a little strength and start to revive a little. It is necessary to make it last a long time so that the asphyxiation is slow and induces much suffering.

  After this, you start to learn the ways that the cartels leave messages according to how they leave the bodies of the people they have killed. The orders are like this. Throw the body face up. This is a message. Throw the body face down. This is another message. Cut a finger off and put it in the mouth. Message. Cut a finger off and put it in the anus. Message. Take out the eyes. Cut out the tongue. These are situations that without being a doctor or medic. . . .

  Translator’s note: I had made a mistake by writing to ask him to explain these messages. He insisted that we meet and he would tell me in person. When we met that day he brought a printout from a website: “Señales del narco y su interpretación” (“Narco-Signs and Their Interpretation”).m He told me that this was pura fantasia (pure fantasy) ... and explained.

  About the messages left by the narcos, the fact is, to kidnap someone and kill them sends a very clear message: That the person is directly damaging the interests of the narcos. For example, when the person is given the tiro de gracia [coup de grâce], this is to secure the objective. It is not enough just to shoot the person because he could remain alive, and if he survives he could identify those who shot him.

  About torture—it is not always for the purpose of getting information. There are people who torture because of spite, anger, because the person owes them something, because the person might have gone out with their girlfriend. . . . That’s how the narcos operate—whatever they want they take.

  When a person is found encobijado, killed and left in the open wrapped in a blanket—it is not necessary that the person is someone important or respected. Even cholos [young street gangsters ] sometimes show up as encobijados—there are a lot of imitators out there. The message is not a real one.

  When they cut off a finger and insert it in the mouth or ear or anus ... it is because they need to send some kind of message, but this doesn’t happen very often, and the person who does it had better know how to cut off the parts without making a bloody mess. Now, it is very difficult to know how to kill the person, to wait until the circulation of blood stops, and then to cut off the different parts of the body. . . .

  To know what the messages mean, you also have to look at where the bodies are left, where they are thrown.... Will they be seen by the people who are intended to see them?

  Nowadays, the narcos don’t have to work very hard to let people know what they want them to know. If the narcos hang a sign on a bridge, it is like broadcasting it on that TV show Todo Mexico se entere [All Mexico Finds Out].

  The press is so corrupt. They know that if they don’t publish these sensational signs, then the news won’t sell. They are happy when the narcos put these signs up because it sells newspapers like you can’t imagine. And so the narcos don’t have to go to very much trouble to get their messages out. The newspapers do the work for them.

  A person might have his hands cut off because he was involved in things he should not have been involved in. Or he took things that did not belong to him.

  But really, what can people on the outside understand about these things when the messages are intended for those inside the narco business? A lot of people see these things, and so they think they know what is going on. Ah, they cut off his hands! What does it mean? It is something between them, the narcos. People should not even pay attention to these messages. I think the press is doing harm by sensationalizing and publicizing such things.

  There are other ways of leaving messages. It doesn’t serve the interests of the narcos if, after they have kidnapped and killed someone, the body is found. The fact is, bodies have been dug up in many cities in Mexico, and I can tell you that these bodies should show a certain level of decomposition when they are found. But without a little more investigation and professional work, to find out if the body is face up or face down, or if there is lime or not, or salt or sugar or some other chemical used on the body....

  Why? Because to bury the body face down or face up—that sends a real message, and you can give something like that a certain importance. For example, if the body is buried face down, it is because the narcos never wanted that body to come to light. So when the body is found, it means that someone informed. And if someone informs, they will be found out because the narcos have ways of knowing who it was that provided the information.

  You receive your orders and you carry them out. Once you know that the person is asphyxiated and dead, you can cut off any part of the body without a problem, and it will not bleed very much. The blood ceases to circulate. I remember well once when a person made a mistake and began to beat up one of the enfermos, the sick ones. We sometimes called our victims our “patients.” He kicked the guy in the face and tore his head open and got reprimanded for doing this. “Why are you scolding me? He’s going to die anyway,” and he kept yelling and beating on the guy.

  And so they provided a very logical explanation. “If you kick the guy in the head before he is dead, you’ll have to pick up the carpet and clean up everything because it will make such a disgusting bloody mess. First kill the person. Then cut off anything you want.”

  This is not something you learn in the academy. This is not something you learn in military school. This kind of thing you must learn in life.

  There comes a moment when the smallest thing annoys you so much, not because you are so good, but because your mind is so messed up from drugs and drinking that you do not feel any scruples for what you do. The moment comes, and you might be driving down the street in your car, and you pass another car and “Hey, you? Why are you looking at me like that?” Okay, and so you just take out a gun and shoot without knowing who the person is and for nothing except that the person has looked at you the wrong way. These incidents happened a lot at one time, until a higher-ranking person in the organization prohibited this kind of thing in order to stop so many unjustified killings.

  At one time, an arrangement was made that violent deaths would not be allowed to take place in the city of Chihuahua, the state capital, that this city was protected by an agreement. But killings continued to take place in Parral, Delicias, Camargo, Juárez, Durango, Torreón. So anyone in Chihuahua who was a target would have to be picked up from the city and taken to another place to be killed—from Chihuahua to Torreón or Durango or from Chihuahua to Juárez or to some other city. This is not just a simple transfer—get in the car and let’s go. There are certain logistics that we would have to follow using back roads to avoid encountering soldiers and military roadblocks.

  When I left my training the first thing that I was told was: There is an arrangement with public security. There is an arrangement with both the state and federal judicial police. There is an arrangement with the federal preventive police. All of these corporations have been “fixed” or corrupted. But there is no arrangement with the army. If you have a problem and the army detains you, you will have to arrange that on your own. We can save you from all of the other agencies, but there is no arrangement with the army. At that time, the army was not corrupted.

  With the passing of time, I’m talking about four or five years, a moment came when, during the fiestas that we had on the ranches, we had really great bands playing for our parties. Bands as famous as Los Tigres del Norte, Los Tucanes. ... And at the very best tables, there were military leaders sitting, right there in the front row. What had never, ever been arranged before, had now been taken care of. Someone, a very powerful person, had come along, and this person had made the arrangements with the army. And it was because of this new arrangement that the n
arcos began to work with the military.n

  This new situation brought about many changes to the ideology of the sicario and to the way the work was carried out. Now it was no longer easy to compete with those people who tried to imitate the work. There were those who sold very small quantities of drugs, and they would go around bragging, “I’m a narco, and if you owe me or steal $50 worth of drugs from me, I’m going to kill you.” This is ridiculous. No one in the cartel would kill for $50. These were imitators. And what the rise of these imitators meant was that the city started getting more corrupted and out of control. It meant that no one could trust anyone, and that no one was going to be respected. And so an attempt was made to try to clean up this situation—that was when contact was made with the leaders of the prison gangs—and this conversation took place not just in Mexico but also in the United States.

  In the following passage, the sicario describes a large operation involving all of the different police corporations, the military, and the Juárez cartel operatives working together to regain control over the city.