El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

by Charles Bowden

  They even taught us how to keep a schedule. If you get up at five forty-five in the morning, by five fifty you have to be showered and finished up in the bathroom and dressed. Once you were lined up in the ranks to salute the flag in the morning, you could not stop and say, “Oh, wait, I have to go to the bathroom.” You had to be ready, ready for some tough training.

  This training lasted six months. During these six months, one of the tasks I was given [by my mentors in the narco-trafficking organization] was to recruit other people. One of the reasons I advanced rapidly in the police is that people on the U.S. side of the border paid a certain amount of money—that came from the United States—for those who were enrolled in the police training course. In the academy as a cadet, you were paid about half of the salary of an officer who had completed the course and who was now on duty in the police force. But for me, this money was nothing. The money sent to me each month from the American side, from El Paso, now that was real good money. So I had what I needed. They sent me money, drugs, and women.

  So what did we do? During the night there were guards there in the academy to keep us in. There are rooms and basketball courts and shooting ranges. A fence and cars parked outside and the guards. We would corrupt the guards with a hundred dollars and a gram of cocaine, just buy them off so they would let us leave the academy at night. We would go out at about 7:00 P.M. and return at five thirty in the morning. Why at five thirty? Because at five forty-five the morning whistle would sound and we would have to get up, and at five fifty we would have to be all lined up for roll call and to salute the flag.

  And why were all these cadets recruited? At the time, I didn’t completely understand what was going on. For me at this time, things were really good. I was happy. I had money, cars, drugs. They sent me girls and paid for hotel rooms. On Saturdays we were free to leave at noon and had to be back Monday morning by five thirty at the latest. I was unusual in that I never got arrested or got into any trouble. I was very careful about my schedule. There were schedules for everything: showers, meals, exercise, classes. We took classes in marksmanship, how to make arrests, how to pursue suspects, drug detection, car theft investigation, criminal psychology....

  But what was really going on? Why were they teaching me all of this when I was being paid from outside? People connected to the narco-traffickers were paying for me and for others who, sooner or later, would be recruited to work for them. The government officially paid about one hundred and fifty pesos per month, and that was nothing. But these people on the outside were paying us one thousand dollars per month! They knew that when we left the academy we were going to go to work for them. No one was ever going to pay us as much as they, the narco-traffickers, were paying. We were being trained.

  Sadly, desgraciadamente, all of the law enforcement academies in Mexico—the different police forces, the investigative police, the military police, and the army—have been used by the narco-trafficking organizations as training grounds for their future employees. Thus, all of those who pass through the academies can easily be recruited by the narcos. Everything taught in these academies—how to use weapons, how to drive a car, how to conduct surveillance, how to read license plates, how to recognize faces, how to pursue people in urban car chases without losing them—all of these were skills that the narco-trafficking organizations were willing to pay a lot of money for. But because the narcos were able to use the official law enforcement academies, they did not have to work very hard to train their operatives. They could just take advantage of the training provided by the government and then recruit cadets like us to do their work.

  On Saturdays we would go out.... I remember that they would come for me on a red Harley Indian motorcycle and in a car. I would bring four or five cadets along for the ride. “Let’s go.” We would go to El Paso. The first place we would go was to a downtown store called Starr Western Wear. We would stock up on really good blue jeans, western shirts, big fancy belt buckles. At this time the style was to wear very flashy clothes, to shine, to show we had money and power. Back then, the judicial police were really into fancy boots. The municipal police wore uniforms, but when they went out on the town they would also wear cowboy boots.

  After the shopping, we would usually go to an apartment. Not to hotels. We tended to make a lot of noise and did not want to cause scandals in a hotel. A few times we went to a house with a pool. When we arrived, the cartel patrons who were paying our way would say to us, “Here are some girls. They will stay with you until you leave on Sunday night. Choose whichever ones you want.”

  They would leave us envelopes with money, a rock of cocaine, marijuana, psychotropic pills. They left us everything we could want to have a good time. They wanted us to be contented and happy with them. Always, always, always, they made us feel that we were important to them. They never asked us for much in return at this time. They always wanted to make us happy: with money, drugs, and women. If you needed economic help, they would say, “Here you go. ...” Everything was available to us. Then we would return to the academy for more training when the weekend was over.

  At the end of our training in the academy, we graduated. On graduation day, a selection process takes place. There are about two hundred men in the graduating class. Two hundred for the whole state of Chihuahua, which is a very large state. Our class of cadets were being trained to police the cities of Juárez, Villa Ahumada, Chihuahua City, Parral, Camargo, Delicias, Ojinaga, and also the state border posts with Durango and Sonora. Of these two hundred graduates, fifty are already on the payroll of the narco-trafficking organizations. So there are one hundred and fifty men who will be assigned to all of the posts around the state. But of those other fifty who are working for the narcos, twenty-five stay in Juárez, five in Chihuahua City, five in Parral, five in Ojinaga. They are distributed in such a way that when the offer comes to them to pass drugs into Chihuahua from Durango, Sonora, or Coahuila, there are people already on the job at the ports of entry into the state who are committed to working for the narco-trafficking organizations so that the drugs will be able to circulate easily.

  Many, many, many times, official police vehicles are used to transport drugs. There were other occasions when it was just a matter of hiding the drugs in a trailer which then passes on through with the blessing of the police. But at this time there was a very important rule in effect: The drugs were never opened in Juárez, ever.

  When the tractor-trailer trucks arrived, they would be taken to warehouses to be unloaded. The walls inside the trailer would be broken down. The drugs would be separated out from the other cargo in the trailer, which would then leave. These trailers were used mostly for marijuana and cocaine. Heroin was almost never transported in these trailers. It would come in from Parral or from the countryside in cars. All the fruit that was hauled in these refrigerator trucks—bananas, papayas, other kinds of perishables, sometimes forty tons or more in the various trailers—would be unloaded and given away to the people in poor barrios. We would take it in trucks and deliver it to the people. Meanwhile, others who were part of the narco-trafficking organization would be opening the compartments in the trailers and unloading the drugs, putting them in other vehicles, and then this merchandise would be taken to safe houses.

  How many safe houses are there? A lot. So many that one person might only know about eight or ten of them. For instance, I might have personal knowledge of ten houses in Juárez, but I will only know those eight or ten houses. And for example, “El Dos,” Number 2, another person, will have another set of safe houses that he is in charge of.

  The narco-trafficking organizations are very careful. Each operative only knows certain houses. And the bosses know exactly how many houses each operative knows. The bosses let you know only what they want you to know. Because the day that you try to defraud the organization, they will know who is doing it by where things happen, because they know that you can only expose the houses that you know about.

  When dealing with marijuana.
... It is incredibly blatant, the way they transport it. They barely make any effort to hide it. They hitch a flatbed trailer to a pickup truck with a tow-bar. The trailer is stacked with boxes of marijuana, and these trucks will travel all over the city as if they were hauling boxes of any other material. We are not talking about one, two, three, or four ... no, we are talking about thirty, forty, or fifty tons of marijuana that will have to be transported, stored, and guarded.

  In the recruitment that they carry out in the academy, of the fifty graduates who are actually on the payroll of the narco-trafficking organizations, each has their function in the operation. Some are assigned to guard the safe houses. Others are assigned to keep those guys under surveillance. Another group is assigned to kidnap people who owe money or who have gone to work for another gang or rival group. Others specialize in executing people. And another group is assigned to bury the people who have been executed. All of the functions are separated into these different groups with different assignments.

  Why is it arranged this way? This is what I learned, and there’s a really good saying that describes it: “Never mix up Christmas with New Year’s.” For example, if you are assigned to kidnap someone, then you deliver the victim to another person, “El Dos” [Number 2], who delivers him to “El Tres” [Number 3], who will deliver him to the person who executes him, who then delivers him to the person who buries the body. It would seem like a simple kind of triangulation—that the people who do the kidnapping, interrogating, killing, and burying would be able to figure it all out—but that’s not the way the narco-traffickers operate. What they want from this system of exchange in all these functions is to obscure the knowledge of where all of these bodies are buried.

  It takes a number of years working for the organization before the director of the cell has enough confidence in you and enough wisdom to say, “Here’s what you must do. You kidnap the guy and deliver him to this one and that one, and you wait here until he is buried and that’s it.”While he is speaking, he makes a drawing

  of the operation he is describing.

  So, for example, here is a street. Here a park, and over here, this is an auditorium. The person who is going to be kidnapped will be watched for three or four days beforehand. For this, two people will be used who are called ojos, “the Eyes.” They will keep watch on the person’s house for several days from different vantage points. They will see exactly when the person comes and goes, where he goes, who he goes out to eat with, and so forth.... They will follow his routine, wherever he goes, for a whole week or longer.

  These Eyes will be supported by two cars. And these are not private cars, but police cruisers. When an ordinary citizen goes somewhere and sees an official patrol car following him, with its sirens and insignia, the person will never suspect for a moment that he will be kidnapped or disappeared. Because, of course, the police are there to serve the community and protect the community. The police are not there to kidnap people. What this person never suspects is that members of the police force are recruited from their time in the academy, bought and paid for by the narco-traffickers, to carry out specific jobs in the criminal organizations.d

  There are two methods used in these operations. After a week of surveillance, noting where the target goes and all of the routes he takes, a team is designated. This team is composed of five vehicles that are stationed at various points around the person’s house. The Eyes keep doing their job. On the day that the act will take place, first of all the police are notified to get all of the patrol cars out of this sector. And this notice is not given to the patrolling officers in those cars, but to the director of the police. For instance, someone will call the director and tell him, “We don’t want any police in the area for a certain time period.” Or they tell the director to call a meeting of police personnel for a certain time, say, ten to ten forty-five. The message will be: “We don’t want any police on the street.... We are going to work.”

  The target leaves his house. There are one or two police cars that look identical, but these are not really police cars, and they go to work. They follow the objective, and they stop him. There are times when the target will not stop. Sometimes, if the guy is a real plebe malandro, just a very bad dude, and he knows he owes money to the boss and that it is not going to go well for him, he will probably not stop for the patrol car. That’s why there are five cars stationed around him, like this.

  He draws the plan out in a notebook—one, two, three, four, five cars as little blocks, like a football coach diagramming a special play.

  The Eyes follow behind. Of all these cars, only one will be used to kill the guy or kidnap him. If the patrol car is not able to get him to stop, the other cars will block his way even if they have to cause a crash in the street. The problem here is how the boss wants the target: alive or dead? If the boss wants him dead, that’s easy.

  The Eyes move, the second car moves out, the one that stops him stays behind, one closes him off from the front. You never have to worry about crossfire. One car pulls up from the side, shoots him, and that’s it. Everyone retreats. In less than three minutes, all five cars are six or seven blocks away guarded in safe houses that are nearby. You just walk away from the scene and get picked up by another vehicle and go to eat at a restaurant nearby, calm and tranquil, as if it were nothing.

  Since all the police patrols had been called into a meeting, it takes the police an hour or more to get to the scene. So for more than an hour, the scene of the crime is open to people walking all around, checking out what happened, and messing up the evidence left behind. And there are always some clever folks hanging around who pick the pockets and steal the wallets of the onlookers. This is all part of our strategy.

  But there are some cases when the person is wanted alive. And this requires a different strategy.

  You have to watch the target very carefully from the time he leaves his house and wait for a suitable place to stop him and force him to get out of the car. When he gets out of his car, you have to immediately get him into your car. Physically, you sense that it is not fear exactly, but adrenaline that rises up in you. It’s human nature.... And being human, you know that it is not enough to just say to the guy, “Hey, come with me.” And expect him to obey.

  He isn’t going to come. So you get there, and you are going to have to grab him, beat him, handcuff him, and put him in your car by force. But this car is not traveling alone. There are three more cars ahead and another two behind. If an actual police patrol car dares to intervene along the route, one of these cars may have to ram it, and if they still don’t get the message, then you may have to shoot up the police car.

  That’s why these dayse the police have been so persecuted and criticized. If they had been given the word back at the time they were in the police academy, that they were being trained to serve a certain person or organization, well, when the time comes and they receive orders from that person who is a boss at some level in the drug-trafficking organization, they know that they have to carry these orders out or they will be killed. This is what is happening now. It is one thing to just tell them to get out of the way. But if they get the order, they have no choice except to “get the fuck out of the way!”

  Up until a few years ago, the narcos respected the lives of women and children. But starting sometime in 2008, it seems that this practice of respecting the lives of women and children has been forgotten. Why? Because the narcos started to recruit women to work as debt collectors for them. And those women try to protect themselves by using their children as shields. And so the agreement no longer functions. There is no longer any plan. Before, if a targeted person left his house with a child, as soon as it was known that a child was present, the mission would be aborted. The killing would take place another day when the guy was alone. But now, such agreements have all been terminated.

  Where would kidnapped people be taken? Let’s say you pick up a person. Take him out of his car, put him in another car. Always, always, the safe house
would be no more than five blocks—that is the very farthest that it would be—from the scene of the kidnapping. The car will pull into the closed garage of the safe house, the person will be taken out of the car, and the interrogation will begin. And often, after an interrogation, the person will still be alive. Depending on what they owe and on what they have, they may remain alive for fifteen minutes, or they may be kept for six months or any amount of time in between. Imagine: six months kidnapped, held in a closet, and given one meal per day.

  During all this time, we are working with the family of the kidnapped person, forcing them, extorting them, to hand over all of his property—cattle, ranches, other real estate, jewelry, yachts—whatever they have. Everything that they have. When we plan the kidnapping of a person who owes money, we already have an exact list of his property and what we are going to take away from him. And we send the family a video, after a month or two months or three months, to let them know that their loved one is alive, so they will have confidence that he will be returned to them.

  But once everything has been taken away from him and his family, he will be killed right there. It is what they call a carne asada, a barbecue. There are people who work in the department called “refrigeration” or “cold meats.” These are people in charge of killing, cutting up, and burying the body. People are not always buried in the same place where they are killed. This is very difficult. What happens is that the people are executed, and then they are taken in vehicles to the places that in recent years have been called narco-fosas, or narco-graves. I think that here in the border region, that ... well, let’s say that if there are one hundred of these narco-fosas, maybe only five or six of these places have been discovered.