El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

by Charles Bowden

  Sometimes there were people who we would have to care for as long as six months. There were mistakes, and we would get orders to heal these people before we could let them go back to their families. Six or eight months might have passed, and their families had had no knowledge of them. They might be allowed to live, but they could never, never, never see the faces of any of those in the group that had kidnapped them. If they even once saw even one of our faces, they would immediately be killed. No one in this life after such suffering would be able to forget the faces of those who caused it and not try to get revenge. And these are not people without money or power. These are usually people with money, and they would have the means to seek revenge.

  Now, a couple of things about following orders. In military school there is a saying: That there are always just two soups, noodle soup or “fuck-you” soup, sopa de fideo o sopa de jodeo. And they’ve always just run out of noodle soup. There is nothing left but the fuck-you soup. And that is what you get.

  And the other: Orders are to be obeyed, not discussed. An order would never be discussed. We were there to solve problems for the people we worked for. They trained us to act. They did not ask us our opinions about what to do or not to do with a person. They just gave us orders, and our job was to carry them out. Not one of us—man or woman—would ever be allowed to give our opinions and we could never yield, we could never give in.

  I can tell you that several years ago we brought a guy to this very room. A group of three of us was sent to kidnap an individual who owed money. He had been gambling on horse races and dog races, and he was spending money that was not his. And once it was found out that he had not paid and was losing money, they sent our group to get him.

  We were friendly, went to his house, knocked on the door, and picked him up. He came out voluntarily, and we told him he had to come with us. We needed to talk to him. And by chance or destiny, we ended up in this very room with him.k Everything was fine when we got here. We sat down to talk a little. When he realized what was going on, that our mission, our assignment, was to get the money from him, he tried to force his way out. So it was necessary to hit him a few times, tie him up, put on handcuffs, gag him so that he could not scream, and he had to stay locked up in the bathroom, in the bathtub, for a few hours.

  And we relaxed, watched TV, we ordered some hamburgers and pizza. After a time, I talked to him in the bathroom.

  “Here is the situation. You don’t have a problem. The problem is the money that you owe. If you pay the money—we know you have the money, some properties, so pay up—then you can go free.”

  He gave me a sign that he was okay, that he understood. So I said to him, “Look, if you behave, I’ll take the gag off. I need for you to talk to your family, tell them to get the money together and pay the money that you spent that did not belong to you and deliver all of the money that you can.”

  When he made a sign that he understood, I went back out and relaxed a little watching TV. One of the group left. For a while I was with the guy alone. I let him out of the bathroom and let him sit on the bed. I moved the handcuffs from behind his back to in front. I sat him down on the bed, and we were talking a little.

  “You feel relaxed now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ready to talk to your family and tell them to deliver the money that you spent that wasn’t yours?”

  “Yes.”

  Then the first time when I gave him the phone ... I sensed that he was getting ready to say something bad. To tell them that he was kidnapped. So I grabbed the phone and hit him and did not let him talk again for a half hour or more. I called another one of the guys and told him that he needed a little therapy—physical therapy.

  So we took him into the bathroom and gave him some physical therapy in the bathtub, forcing his head under one, two, three times in the bathtub full of water. He was gasping for breath.

  I said, “So, are you okay now? You know we are not kidding, right? Do the right thing and you will be fine.”

  He did not want to talk to the other guys, so they left and he talked to me. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing, just talk to your family and ask them to get the money that you spent that did not belong to you and deliver the money. Correct?”

  In this moment I could tell he had some confidence in me because I had not treated him as badly as the other guys. And aside from this, we are trained to control these kinds of situations. I took off the handcuffs and gave him the phone.

  “Here, call. Tell them to get the money together and tell them that they will get another call telling them where they need to deliver it.”

  That evening, about six or seven, he made the other call, very calm, and then I let him sleep in the bed for an hour or so. Later that night we put the handcuffs back on and put him back in the bathtub. We had to threaten him a little.

  The next day he was okay, pretty calm. He liked Italian food, so we let him order some to be delivered. He had more confidence in us. The next day they delivered half of the money that he owed. Another day went by to give them time to deliver more of the money. By that time, he was calm and walking around the room, watching TV, resting on the bed. His hands were cuffed, but in front. He trusted me, and he said, “Look, I’m sorry for what I did. I was wrong to spend the money. I was drinking a lot and losing at the races.... But everything is going to come out okay, right, as long as they keep paying?”

  I told him, if it wasn’t okay, he would not be walking around. “You would not even be here like this. You would not even be here.”

  And he said to me, “I promise, I’ll never remember you, what you look like.”

  And I told him not to worry, that he was paying and it was okay. On the third day, in the morning they delivered another part of the money. And before ten thirty that morning—he was lying down on the bed—we got a call that we needed to deliver him to the other side of the border. And so that is what we did. He went out without handcuffs, got in the backseat of the car. He asked where we were taking him. I said everything was okay, the boss just wants to talk to you. There’s no problem, you paid, but you have to go and see the boss.

  He left in confidence, and I never knew anything more about him. We never heard anything about him again. Here in this room, I realized that he had confidence in me, he opened up and confessed all of his errors and pleaded with me. “You are right, I was wrong, spending this money that was not mine. I should not have done what I did, but nothing like this will happen again. It was the first time I ever did anything like that in all the years I’ve worked for this person.”

  He made one mistake, and it would cost him his life.

  But in this moment, even though we knew he had paid, we could not commit the error of saying, “Okay, you paid, now go free.” We had nothing to do with making those kinds of decisions. No somos ni juez, ni parte. We are not judge, nor party in this case.

  For some time, six to eight months or more, I was working inside the police, kidnapping people and then handing them over to other people. The advantage of being a policeman while also working for the narco-trafficking organizations is that you can play both sides. Supposedly, you are working to protect people and society, but at the same time, you are getting paid a lot of money to do jobs required by the narco-traffickers, to deliver people to them.

  During this time, they gave us a lot of drugs and alcohol for free. It was difficult to get drugs in Juárez. We had to cross over to El Paso to get drugs because at this time it was not allowed to open up packages and use drugs that were passing through Juárez. This arrangement lasted for some time. We would get calls. We were always drinking. In the official police squad car, we would always carry a cooler in the trunk with beer, liquor, soda, and mineral water for mixing drinks, stuff to eat. We never did any work investigating robberies or anything like that. Since we were chosen by the heads of the cartel, they paid off the municipal police not to bother us. We always had to be available if the narcos neede
d us for a job. We could not be busy doing regular police work on the street. There were maybe seven hundred or nine hundred police agents who were not mixed up directly with the narcos, and they had to do all of the regular police work required for the society.

  I remember one time when we got a call ... at that time there were not many cell phones. They were really big things, we called them “bricks,” the really early kinds of cell phones. I can tell you that I tried out some of the first ones that were used in Juárez that had American numbers. So we get a call on the cell phone that there is this guy at a mall and that we have to go and pick him up and turn him over. So why do we get the call?

  Well, back at that time, they would put people to the test. There was a certain time period (a kind of probation) at the beginning of your career with them. It’s not like the military or the police career, but ninety days, and of those, maybe thirty days shut up in a house, another thirty days of some other kind of training, and another thirty days to learn the techniques of kidnapping people. This time they called us, and so we go out to the mall.He draws a diagram of the operation.

  Here is the parking lot where we waited for the people to come out. They give us the description of the people we are looking for. Okay. So we get into our squad car. I can tell you that I was always really high. If this happened on a Friday, we would have been drinking, doing drugs, and partying since Monday. And we would hardly have slept one day in all of that time. For us, working was a party. We would do drugs and go to a hotel with some girls and go out with them. They didn’t call on us to do many jobs at that time.

  But this time when they called us, things took a different turn. In the police, there are codes, numbers, and letters.... You could say X-2, X-Z, Z-2, X-1. . . . These are codes we use so we don’t have to talk so much on the radio. So after we picked up these people and were driving around with them, this giant cell phone—the “brick”—rings, and the only thing we hear is an order using a number that they were using at this time.He writes the number 39 in the notebook.

  And hearing this number—this code—we knew this was an order that meant that the person needed to die immediately. I never doubted at the moment I got the order, I never doubted, I just pulled the trigger. I could not even think. I did not know the person, it was not a family member. For me, it was nobody. I simply obeyed an order. We received a call, we picked up a person, we carried him around for a while, we got the call with the order, and we carried out the order . . . immediately.

  I did not fully realize what I had done until two or three days later when I was finally sober. I realized how easy it was that the drugs and the world that I was in were controlling and manipulating me. I was no longer myself. I was no longer the young person who had had a strong desire to serve my society. I was no longer the man who wanted to get married and have a family. I was a person who was nothing but the things that I was commanded to do.

  I followed orders.

  I realized at this moment that I never doubted that I would carry out any order that I was given. Even though it was for such a terrible career as this that I had to put my life on the line.He draws a rectangle bisected by a diagonal line and the words “AUTHORITY/NARCO.”

  On several occasions, there were confrontations. Thank goodness we came out okay. Not because there were a lot of us, but because we knew how to do our job very well. We knew the techniques, we knew the weak points of the person that we were going to kidnap or execute. As I told you before, we always studied our adversaries. Nothing was done quickly or casually. We did not just see the target and make the hit. You have to see and study ahead of time how to do it, how to handle the moment when you confront the target. You have to know what you will do when you come face to face with your adversary.

  Times have changed. Nowadays, the technique is to kill on sight, at the moment of confrontation: “Wherever I find you, I kill you.” But this is because there are no more real codes, no more rules in the business. Before, the different cartels that were working in the country respected the codes and arrangements that had been established. Now, there are no codes, they are all lost. Now it is just: You owe me, you pay me.

  I remember really well when the Mexicles and the Aztecas—two enemy gangs—were fighting for power in the CERESO [Centro de Readaptación Social (Center for Social Rehabilitation), the state prison]. Then there was a problem, and they contacted us.

  “Look, we have a problem because they can’t come to an agreement, and it is affecting the sale of drugs inside and outside the country.”

  So it was necessary to kidnap the leaders of the Aztecas and the Mexicles on the outside. This was during the time that I was active. And they were forced to meet, and they were questioned about their problems and about why their people were not behaving and working as they should. Finally they came to an agreement to achieve equality and peace inside of the CERESO prison.

  A lot of the work—the majority of it—that the cartel manages is done from inside of the prisons. Many of the executions are ordered from inside of the prisons. Why? Because the prisons in Mexico have become manufacturing centers and packing houses for drugs to be shipped to many places in the United States.

  He reflects back again on the test he was given at the beginning of his career, when he did his first killing at the age of just eighteen.

  Back then, that time we picked up the guy and killed him in the car ... what can I say? This was a trial by fire, this order to pick up this guy and kill him. And it was so simple to carry out that order and just kill the guy. So he’s dead, now what do we do? Get rid of the body. Throw him out. We are driving around in an official police squad car, wondering: How can we just toss out a dead body? So we call and ask. “Where do you want us to dump the body?”

  And the answer came: “That is your problem, not mine. What do you think we pay you for?”

  So then you realize that you need to start looking for places to dump a dead body.... It really isn’t that hard. I was feeling so bad, all drugged up and drunk, that the only thing we could figure to do—I remember it really clearly—was to toss him in the sewer, so we passed over an open manhole and dumped him in.

  From that moment, my life changed in relation to the position that I had in the organization. When you cease to have any doubt and do not hesitate to carry out an order and you just get it done, a real clean job, people start to notice and you realize that their eyes are on you. “Hey, you see what he did?” After two or three days, you start to hear them talking. “You know what? He did it and he didn’t feel anything.”

  Well, shit, how could you feel anything with all the drugs you are taking? But when you sober up there is nothing left for you except to keep doing the jobs. You cannot look back. Anything else and you’ll end up like the dead guy. And that is what I did. It is what formed my hard character. This is when I began to realize that the man who had dreamed of having a family, the boy who had been my mother’s pride and joy. . . . She always said, “He gets really good grades, he is going to be somebody, he can be anything he wants, a doctor, an engineer, or an architect, because he is ambitious. ...”

  This is when I realized that I was completely bad in my character, in my person, because I was never going to be able to become anything more than I had already become. What this meant was that I was a person who had become un monigote, a puppet manipulated by the strings of those who gave me the orders. I no longer had my own life. Your life does not belong to you anymore once you reach this stage in the organization. You depend completely on the person who gives you orders.

  For many years, the work went on, and I worked twenty-four hours per day, three hundred sixty-five days per year. I was never able to turn off my radio or my cell phone. The day that it was turned off, it meant you were dead or that they wanted you dead. If you did not have a really good excuse to not answer your radio or telephone, it was because you no longer wanted to know anything, and if it got to that point, well, you could not go on living much longer under t
hose circumstances.

  My intention was to serve. For a long time, I would say: For me, Number 1 was the boss, “El Patron.” Number 2 was El Patron. And Number 3 was El Patron. I lived to serve and to defend a person—El Patron. I did whatever the boss told me to do. Any little thing he desired, I would provide it. I could never say, “No, you cannot have it,” or, “No, there is none.” Anything he wanted, he would have. Anything he wanted to possess, he would possess—cars, women, jewelry. There was never any problem with money for buying cars or jewelry.

  But there are many women who are not for sale. Yet, when the boss wanted a woman, it was your job to try to persuade them. Many times . . . an infinity of times . . . I never had any remorse about the things I told them to try to convince them: “A certain person wants to get to know you and go out with you. If you agree to come with us, you will stay for a week in the best hotel on the best beach, and you will have a very pleasant week. If you want money, fine. But you will do whatever is asked of you and afterward are going to forget about the person for the rest of your life. And if you agree, everything will be fine.”

  Many, many women fell for this and went along with it, and they are alive. But many others believed that they could outsmart us, and I never saw them again. I’m not saying that we murdered all of these women. Even though there were a lot of women, including very young women, who were killed. No, what happened was, there were a lot of very ambitious women, and they wanted to become wives of the bosses at the moment. But the boss already had something like forty “wives.” He had women living in every state of Mexico. He certainly didn’t need any more wives.

  Let’s go back and consider the case of Don Amado [Carrillo] and his forty or forty-two wives. He got married whenever he wanted. I mean, they are lovers, not really wives. They would get married, but with false judges. These people (the narco-bosses) would not marry easy women or prostitutes. There are a lot of women that they use just to have fun, and they pay them. But they would look for beautiful women, and in this city ... they would especially look for those from families with real money. This is one way that rich businessmen get mixed up in narco-trafficking. The daughters of the big empresarios—businessmen, entrepreneurs—in Mexico marry narco-bosses as a way to double their fortunes. But without realizing it, they have committed an error. The narcos are using the businesses of their wives to launder their money. But look at what happens? There are many businesses that are failing. And they will continue to fail.