This is the place he lives, a terrain where the simplest things can kill him. He always studies his rearview mirror. He never turns his back on anyone. Nor does he ever relax. Or trust.
He glances at the photographs, images never printed in newspapers. He stabs his finger at a guy standing over a half-exposed body in a grave and says, “This picture can get you killed.” And then he tells me the man in the photograph is Number Two, the strong right arm of the boss.
I show him the photograph of the woman. She is lovely in her white clothes and perfect makeup. Blood trickles from her mouth, and the early morning light caresses her face. The photograph has a history in my life. Once, I placed it in a magazine, and the editor there got a call from a terrified man, the woman’s brother, who asked, Are you trying to get me killed, to get my family killed? I remember the editor calling me up and asking me what I thought the guy meant. I answered, “Exactly what he said.”
The next time the photograph came into play was at a bar in San Antonio, where I was having a beer with a DEA agent. He told me he knew her, that he’d been watching a stash house in El Paso when she came by. A few hours later, they took down the stash house, and the next day, her body was found in Juárez. He figured they thought she’d snitched off the stash house. But she had not. Her visit was a coincidence and had nothing to do with the case.
Now, he looks at her and tells me she was the girlfriend of the head of the sicarios in Juárez, and the guys in charge of the cartel thought she talked too much. Not that she’d ever given up a load or anything, it was simply the fact that she talked too much. So they told her boyfriend to kill her, and he did. Or he would die.
This is ancient ground. The term sicario goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Celotas, used concealed daggers to murder (si carii meaning a dagger carrier) the Romans or their supporters.
Silence is my old friend here, a thing that feels like a hand at the throat choking off all sound. It is not the silence of the grave or the silence of the church, but the speechlessness of terror. Words barely form in the mind. And after a while, even thoughts lose shape and float like ghosts. Things are explained, but the sentences have no subject, only a hint of a verb, and after a while, even the object is a muddled thing. Two men are found dead, showing signs of torture never clearly stated, spent brass around the bodies. Elements are killing people in the city. The authorities express outrage at mayhem and disorder. All this is a form of the silence. Juárez is a place where a declarative sentence may be an act of suicide.
He leans forward and says of the cartel leaders, “Amado and Vicente could kill you if they even thought you were talking.”
Yes. Shortly before our talk, a woman—the daughter of that lawyer who posted the sign against dumping bodies or garbage—stands in front of the hotel owned by her family. She is cut down. Federal police are sleeping in a hotel. The building is strafed. But no one fires the bullets, they simply fly, tear through flesh, and eventually, the gunfire dies away and is absorbed by silence.
This photograph can get you killed. Words can get you killed. And all this will happen and yet you will die and the sentence will never have a subject, simply an object falling dead to the ground.
Sitting with the sicario, I feel myself falling down into some kind of well, some dark place that hums beneath the workaday city, and in this place, there is a harder reality and absolute facts. I have been living, I think, in a kind of fantasy world of laws and theories and logical events. Now I am in a country where people are murdered on a whim, a beautiful woman is found in the dirt with blood trickling from her mouth, and then she is wrapped with explanations that have no actual connection to what happened.
I have spent years getting to this moment. The killers, well, I have been around them before. Once, I partied with two hundred armed killers in a Mexican hotel for five days. But they were not interested in talking about their murders. He is.
What does he look like?
Just like you. Or me.
You will never see him coming. He is of average height, he dresses like a workman with sturdy boots and a knit cap. If he stood next to you in a checkout line, you would be unable to describe him five minutes later. Nothing about him draws attention to him. Nothing.
He has very thick fingers and large hands. His face is expressionless. His voice is loud but flat.
He lives beneath notice. That is part of how he kills.
He says, “Juárez is a cemetery. I have dug the graves for two hundred and fifty bodies.”
The dead, the two hundred fifty corpses, are details, people he disappeared and put in holes in death houses. The city is studded with these secret tombs. Just today, the authorities discovered a skeleton. From the rotted clothing, forensic experts peg the bones to be those of a twenty-five-year-old man. He is one of a legion of dead hidden in Juárez.
That is why I am here. I have spent twenty years now waiting for this moment and trying to avoid being buried in some hole. At that party long ago with the two hundred gunmen, a Mexican federal cop wanted to kill me. The host stopped him, and so I continued on with my tattered life. But I have come to this room so that I can bring out my dead, the thousands who have been cut down on my watch.
We sit at a round wooden table, drapes closed.
He says, “Everything I say stays in this room.”
I nod and continue making notes.
That is how it begins: Nothing is to leave the room, even though I am making notes, and he knows I will publish what he says because I tell him that. We are entering a place neither of us knows, a place where the secrets are dragged into the light of day, and yet, neither of us admits this, because it means death. I can never repeat what he tells me even though I tell him I will repeat it. Nothing must leave the room even though he watches me write his words down on sheets of paper.
I lean back and say, “No one will ever know your name or where we are meeting. I will never know your name. When we finish, I will not know how to find you again. But you will always know how to find me. I want the story of your life because you and the others like you are phantoms. I am not here to solve crimes. I am here to explain how the world works. When I publish what you tell me, no one will know your name. They will only know my name, and I will be unable to give you up, because I will not have any way to trace you.”
He nods.
He tells me to feel the triceps on his right arm. It hangs down like a tire. Now, he says, feel my left arm. There is nothing there.
He stands, puts a chokehold on me. He can snap my neck like a twig.
Then he sits down again.
I ask him how much he would charge to kill me.
He gives me a cool appraisal and says, “At most, five thousand dollars, probably less. You are powerless and you have no connections to power. No one would come after me if I killed you.”
We are ready to begin.
I ask him how he became a killer.
He smiles, and says, “My arm grew.”
I feel calm. I realize the lies will finally stop. Of the thousands of executions that I have noted in Juárez, there has never been a single arrest, much less a conviction. Instead, the city copes by floating theories about cartel wars or military actions or police actions or gang actions. At the moment, murder is the leading cause of death in Juárez, outstripping the old leader, diabetes. I have listened to endless explanations of the slaughter. Now I have made it to the killing ground.
Information has all but ceased because of people such as him. Reporters are now being issued bulletproof vests, and articles appear without bylines. One editor of a media Web site was on his way to the funeral of the reporter gunned down in front of his daughter. His cell phone rang and a voice said, “You are next.” He immediately fled to United States with his family and left behind his house, car, office, and life. Reporters zeroing in on killings get those warnings from their police radios, “If you get close, the same thing will happen to you.” A press photographer runs into
a caravan of armed men, but chokes because he knows a single snap of his camera would mean death. Another photographer comes upon armed men, and he cannot tell if they are police or sicarios. He snaps shots through his windshield, then puts the memory card in his sock so that if he is killed, there will be a record. He lives, and no, they were not police. Or the press pulls into a gas station, and men are there with long guns and pistols. Six men have just been executed, but the commandos at the gas station seem unworried and unhurried.
The man sitting across the table from me has helped to create such a world.
He takes a sheet of paper, draws five vertical lines and writes in the spaces in green ink: Childhood, Police, Narco, God. The four phases of his life. Then scratches out what he has written until there is nothing but solid ink on the page.
He cannot leave tracks. He cannot quite give up the habits of a lifetime. I reach for the paper, but he snatches it back. And laughs. I think at both of us.
“When I believed in the Lord,” he says, “I ran from the dead.”
But now we turn to the time he worked for the devil.
“I had a normal childhood,” he insists. He will not tolerate the easy explanation that he is the product of abuse.
“We were very poor, very needy,” he continues. “We came to the border from the south to survive. My people went into the maquilas. I went to a university. I didn’t have a father who treated me badly. My father worked, a working man. He started at the maquila at 6 P.M. and worked until 6 A.M., six days a week. The rest of the time he was sleeping. My mother had to be both father and mother. She cleaned houses in El Paso three days a week. There were twelve children to feed.”
He pauses here to see if I understand. He will not be a victim, not of poverty, not of parents. He became a killer because it was a way to live, not because of trauma. His eyes are clear and intelligent. And cold.
“Once,” he says, “my father took me and three of my brothers to the circus. We brought our own chilis and cookies so we did not have to spend money. That was the happiest day of my life. And the only time I went somewhere with my father.”
His life breaks into two pieces. There is a kind of childhood with no money, not much food, parents always working, and a crowded, small house. He is in high school, aged either fifteen or sixteen, and the state police recruit him and his friends. They get fifty dollars to drive cars across the bridge to El Paso, where they park them and then walk away. They never know what is in the cars, nor do they ever ask. After the delivery, they are taken to a motel where cocaine and women are always available.
He drops out of the university because he has no money. And then the police dip into his set of friends who have been moving drugs for them to El Paso. And send them to the police academy. In his own case, because he is only seventeen, the mayor of Juárez has to intervene to get him into the academy.
“We were paid about a hundred and fifty pesos a month as cadets,” he says, “but we got a bonus of a thousand dollars a month that came from El Paso. Every day, liquor and drugs came to the academy for parties. Each weekend, we bribed the guards and went to El Paso. I was sent to the FBI school in the United States and taught how to detect drugs, guns, and stolen vehicles. The training was very good.”
After graduation, no one in the various departments really wanted him, because he was too young, but U.S. law enforcement insisted he be given a command position. And so he was.
“I commanded eight people,” he continues. “Two were honest and good. The other six were into drugs and kidnapping.”
Two units of the state police in Juárez specialized in kidnapping, and his was one such unit. One group would take the person and then hand the victim over to the other group to be killed, a procedure less time-consuming than guarding the victim until the ransom was paid. Sometimes, they would feign discovering the body a few days after the abduction.
That was the orderly Juárez he once knew. Then in July 1997, Amado Carrillo died. This was in his eyes an “earthquake.” Order broke down. The payments to the state police from an account in the United States ended. And each unit had to fend for itself.
“I have no real idea how and when I became a sicario,” he says. “At first, I picked up people and handed them over to killers. And then my arm began to grow because I strangled people. I could earn twenty thousand dollars a killing.”
Before Carrillo’s death, cocaine was not easy for him to get in Juárez, because “if you cut open a kilo, you died.” So he and his crew would cross the bridge to El Paso and score. He is by now running a crew of kidnappers and killers, he is working for a cartel that stores tons of cocaine in Juárez warehouses, and he must enter the United States to get his drugs.
That changed after Carrillo’s death. Soon he was deep into cocaine, amphetamines, and liquor and would stay up for a week. He also acquired his skill set: strangulation, killing with a knife, killing with a gun, car-to-car barrages, torture, kidnapping, and simply disappearing people and burying them in holes.
He mentions the case of Victor Manuel Oropeza, a doctor who wrote a column for the newspaper. He linked the police and the drug world. He was knifed to death in his office in 1991.
“The people who killed him, taught me. Sicarios are not born, they are made.”
He became a new man in a new world.
He mentions a cartel leader in Juárez, “a man full of hate, a man who even hates his own family. He would cut up a baby in front of the father in order to make the father talk.”
He says the man is a beast.
His eyes now are very dark, blank eyes, and behind them, I can sense he has returned to the murders, the tortures, all those things that seem so distant from this motel room where the exhaust fan roars and the colors are soft, sedating, and bland.
He is drifting now, going back in time to a place he has left, the killing ground when he would slaughter and then drop five grand on a single evening. He remembers when outsiders would try to move into Juárez and commandeer the plaza, the crossing. For a while, the organization killed them and hung them upside down. Then, for a spell, they offered Colombian neckties—throat cut, the tongue dangling through the slit. There was a spate of necklacing—the burned body found with a charred stub where the head had been, the metal cords of the tire simply blackened hoops embracing the corpse.
He has lived like a god and been the destroyer of worlds. I look down at the thick fingers on his large hands—“my arm grew”—and I can hear the last gasps of the people he has strangled. The room is still, so very still, the television a blank eye, the walls sedated with beige, the exhaust fan purring. His arms at rest on the wood table, everything solid and calm.
And fear. Not fear of me but of something neither of us can define, a death machine with no apparent driver. There is no headquarters for him to avoid, no boss to keep an eye peeled for. He has been green-lighted, and now anyone who knows of the contract can kill him on sight and collect the money. The name of his killer is legion.
He can hide, but that only buys a little time, and time just keeps rolling on and on. One serious mistake, and he is dead. His hunters can be patient. He is like a winning lottery ticket and one day they will collect. The death machine careens out on the streets, guns at ready, always rolling, no real route, randomly prowling and looking for fresh blood. The day comes and goes and ten die. Or more. No one can really keep count any longer, and besides, some of the bodies simply vanish and cannot be tallied.
He stares at me.
He says, “I want to talk about God.”
I say, “We’ll get to that.”
He is the killer, and he does not know who is in charge. Just as he sometimes did not know the reason for the murders he committed. He will die. Someone will kill him. No one will really notice.
No place is safe, he knows that fact. A family in the States owed some money on a deal, so a fourteen-year-old son and his friend were snatched and taken back over. The kidnapper killed them with a broken bottle, t
hen drank a glass of their blood. The man talking to me knows things like this because of what he has done. He knows crossing the bridge is easy because he has crossed it so many times. He knows all the searches and all the security claims at the border are a joke, because he has moved with his weapons back and forth. He knows everything has been penetrated, that nothing can be trusted, not even the solid feel of the wooden table.
The rough edge of burning wood fires at those shacks of the poor, the acrid smell of burned powder flowing from a spent brass cartridge, an old copper kettle with oil boiling and fresh pork swirling into the crispness of carnitas, the caravan of cars passing in the night, windows tinted, then the entire procession turns and comes by again, and you look but still do not stare because if they pause, however briefly, they will take you with them to the death that waits, the holes being dug each morning in the brown dirt of the Campo Santo, the graves a guess and a promise gaping up like hungry mouths for the kills of the morning and afternoon and evening, and four people sit outside their house at night and the cars come by, the bullets bark, two die soon after the barrage and the other two are scooped up by family who drive them from hospital to hospital through the dark houses because no healers will take them in, because the killers have a way of following their prey into the emergency rooms in order to finish the work.
His arms are on the solid wooden table as Juárez wafts across our faces and we do not speak of this fact, we simply inhale life and death and smell the fear of betrayal rising on the wind.
I cannot explain the draw of the city that gives death but makes everyone feel life. Nor can he. So we do not speak but simply note this fact with our silence. We are both trying to return to some person we imagine that we once were, the person before the killings, before the tortures, before the fear. He wants to live without the power of life and death and wonders if he can endure being without the money. I want to obliterate memory, to be in a world where I do not know of sicarios, where I do not think of fresh corpses decorating the calles. We have followed the different paths and wound up in the same plaza, and now we sit and talk and wonder how we will ever get home.
Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields Page 15
