El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

by Charles Bowden

  It’s a mistake when they send someone like me to do a beginner’s job. It is difficult because once you have passed through all these stages of the vicious circle, you are no longer able to do just a little part of a job. It might be possible for me to do such a job if I were under the influence of the right drug or something that would calm me down, but that was not the situation for me at this time.

  And it was at this critical time in my life that every day, every single day, I would see this sign along the road to my house.

  IF YOU NEED HELP, DIAL THIS NUMBER. HE WILL HELP YOU.

  Always, always, always along my way, I would be confronted by this message.

  Some time went by, and I made an error. My bosses asked me to go to another city to get some money from a guy who owed the organization. I was just sent to collect. This was another humiliating, simple job for a person like me. When I got the money, I made a deposit, but I kept some of the money for myself. This money was not mine. I stole it. And I went back to la vida loca for a week, doing drugs and drinking. When my boss found out that I had kept some of the money that I was supposed to have deposited, he was very very upset and angry with me. The organization lost the trust that they had had in me before.

  And then, while I am in this other city, I run onto that same advertisement again, but in a different form. I see this sign:

  CHRIST LOVES YOU.

  But I say, for me, there is no Christ.

  So what happens? My bosses send people from my own team, my own group, to find me. But I was alert. I realized that people were looking for me, so I would move around every three hours or so. Since I was not a beginner, I knew that the people they had sent were not that trustworthy, not people of the highest confidence. These were people I had trained myself, and some of them owed me favors. I could ask them, “So what do you want with me? Just ask. Don’t cause more problems for yourselves.”

  They keep following me. For a week I keep running here and there. But after a few more days I decide that I must confront them—the worst they can do is kill me. And I knew by this time that if I did not go to the meeting as ordered, these people would go after my family. So I find a telephone and make the call.

  “Where do you want to meet me?”

  “Meet me right here.”

  So I get a bus. I did not have a car by this time. I go to the place I was told to meet in this other city.

  He gives a long sigh. His voice reflects this moment when he became the hunted rather than the hunter.

  The trip . . . was long. For me, it seemed eternal. I was now the target. I knew I was headed for a troublesome situation, with someone very difficult. But I was not afraid. I knew I could manage it. My heart told me that I would be able to manage the situation but that there would be problems. I felt something, but it was not fear. It’s not that I didn’t know what it was to be afraid. But I was not afraid. I knew that the worst thing that could happen is that they would kill me.

  When I get to the meeting place, no one is waiting for me. I call again. They tell me to wait. Suddenly, two vehicles arrive out of nowhere. I am told to get in one of them. I get in and I am immediately kidnapped. Yes, I fell right into a trap. They kidnap me. Along the route I see several cars. One behind the car I am in, but no car at all in front. For almost the whole way there is a police car following behind us. It would not have cost me anything to open the car door. Since they didn’t know very well how to do the job, they did not handcuff me. I got into the car voluntarily. I could have said something obscene to the driver of the police car, yelled out something and caused a distraction so that they would have had to stop us. But I knew that if I had made such a move to escape, they knew where to find my family and this would have put them in great danger.

  We were en route to a safe house for nearly forty minutes—something that should not be done. From where they picked me up it should have taken no more than seven minutes to get to where they were going. They kneel me down on the floor and begin to beat me up. I felt so much anger, rage, and powerlessness in this moment. I looked at them, and I said to myself, “Lord, dear God. Why don’t I just do something to get rid of them?”

  There are not many of them, just five guys, and one of them stops watching me and goes into the bathroom. I could just do away with them right here. I am trained to do this. And I started crying from rage. And they started laughing at me. “Hey, man, we thought you were more of a man than this.”

  He chuckles a little bit wryly, remembering.

  And when I’m lying there on the floor and this one guy says to me, “Hey, I thought you were more of a man,” and I tell him, “You know why I am crying? Because I am afraid I will kill you. I’m crying because I am afraid that I could make mincemeat out of you all. I could tear you up with my bare hands.”

  And then another person comes in, and he gives me a telephone.

  “Yes,” I answer to the voice on the phone. And the voice answers, “You have thirty seconds to get yourself out of there.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I never want to see you again.” I knew who it was that I was talking to. They take the telephone away from me, and then this same person gives the order to the others not to let me leave.

  God is great. God is powerful. This other guy who had gone into the bathroom, I knew who he was. A few months ago my bosses had sent me after him. “Go, find him. He owes about $40,000. Tell him to pay up. If he doesn’t give you the money, get rid of him.”

  When I had found him, about a month before all this happened, I grabbed the guy like I was ordered, and I said to him, “I need you to pay up. I know you have enough money. Pay what you owe. It isn’t much. If you don’t have it here, go get it. When you have the money, call me, pay up, and you won’t have any more problems.” I gave him the phone number. And I let him go. But I never saw him again until the day of my kidnapping.

  By this time I was naked. I don’t know where they got these guys who were supposed to be guarding me. One of them went in the kitchen, another one went out to the patio, another changed rooms, one went outside to talk on the telephone. And this one that I knew, the guy who had been in the bathroom, he comes in and he tells me, “Look, I don’t have anything against you. And I don’t have anything to thank you for. But you know what? I’m not one of them, and I don’t take orders from them. So if you want to leave, here is the door.” I looked around. None of the others were there. Just him. He had a gun. I just kept looking at him. Then I stood up, naked, opened the door, and I ran.

  Just before I got to the entrance gate of the neighborhood—it was a private subdivision with a guard at the gate—a car pulls up to me with this same guy driving. Since I was naked, I was hiding under another car. And he says to me, “Come on out. The guards at the gate have orders not to let you leave. They are coming after you.” And I said to myself: Why? I am going to have to do what I don’t want to do.

  At this moment, he is still afraid that he will have to kill again.

  So I said to him, “What do I do?”

  And he said, “Get in the car.”

  This person, who for some reason at the right moment was sent by God to give me an order that I could trust ... this guy took me out in his car. When he dropped me off in a safe place, I went to free my wife and my daughter from the place where they were staying. I jumped over the wall in back because I knew that the people who had taken me would be watching the house. I took my wife and my daughter out of the house and we fled. I only had time to take a T-shirt and one pair of pants, that’s all. I took them out and we fled. Later, the house was ransacked. They took weapons, drugs, and the cash I had there. I only had enough time to save my family.

  After all of this happened, I hid for a few more days in that city, and I always remembered the sign and the telephone number. I asked myself: Why? Why? Why?

  I had to leave, and I had to leave my family. I sent my family to one place while I went somewhere else. Nothing was safe now, my destiny was uncertain
, we could not stay together. I did not want them to find me and take me along with my family. This was a very real danger. If they kidnapped me and my family was with me, we would all have to die alone, all of us. I thought it better to be separated. We began to run from state to state, city to city, completely separated. We never saw each other. We had no money, we had nothing, and yet, little by little, we were getting out of this prison, this life that we had been living until then. We could not get back together.

  I had to travel alone, and I went to see a person who, on at least four or maybe even six occasions, I had been sent by my bosses to find and execute. But first, I had been ordered to collect more than $1.5 million that he owed. I had never been able to find this person to complete the job.

  When I arrived in the other city, I got the telephone directory, and the first thing I saw was an advertisement for his company.

  The person he is going to see is a man he knew who had worked for the cartel but had since become a Christian and left the criminal organization. He went to this person to ask him for help.

  So I called his business and managed to make an appointment to see him. But when this man heard my name, instead of hiding or running away, what he said was, “Tell him to come right now and I will see him.” That is what I did. I went there, and he received me. I know that he knew that I was the person who had been looking for him to kill him. But I had never found him until this moment.

  It surprised me even more when I saw him. I went to his office, and he was very calm, as if nothing were going to happen. He gave me his hand and said, “What can I do for you?” He told me that he had been waiting for me, that something had spoken to him and told him I was coming, that I had a problem and that he had to wait for me. He then listened to me for a few minutes, and he was very attentive to what I told him. And the most ridiculous thing that could possibly happen to me is that he immediately starts talking to me about God. He talks about God and the love that He has for me. He says, “God has been looking for you for a long time. He has put signs and messages for you to see so that you will come to Him. He has already paid for your sins. You do not have to worry.”

  And I said, “That is impossible. They [the men from the criminal organization who had kidnapped him] are looking for me. I escaped. I ran away. They are out there looking for me. I’ve done this and this. I owe this. I have done all of these terrible things. ...”

  He said, “Don’t worry. God is going to cleanse you. He has already washed away your sins. The fact that you are here with me, the fact that I am spending time with you. . . .”

  And I tell him, “Look, you know what? I need a safe place to hide. Where is that?”

  And he said, “I’m going to tell you something. No one here is going to capture you alive. Because those who know you, they know where you are coming from, they know who you are and why you are here. The only person who could possibly save you would be a crazy person.”

  And he said, “You know what? I am going to invite you to come with me. There is someone you need to meet.” And he took me to a crazy person, un loco. And it was this crazy person who gave me asylum for weeks, months. But he was not just any loco. He was a person who had a whole lot of other locos around him, and they all loved him. And I began to feel the love and affection of these people who had really gone over the wall. People who had gone completely crazy and were now nothing but idiots. They had completely lost their minds. Some of them were people who had done things in their lives and repented, but God had not given them the opportunity to leave in time, like He had given me. God had given me the chance to escape in time from this vicious circle.

  When the other person brought me to this loco, he said to me, “He is the only person who can help you out of this, the only one who can give you a hand. I cannot help you in any other way.” He did not have any safe houses. What he did have was money—he was okay financially—and could have put me up in a hotel or a house, but that would not have been safe for me. I needed something very secure, and he said to me, “What could be more secure than to stay with this crazy person?” When I got there with this loco, he talked to me about God also.

  It surprised me that after one, two, three nights went by ... he had such patience with me. And he finally asked me, “You want to talk?” And we sat face to face in two big chairs. And I talked and talked and talked. I wasn’t sleepy at all. I felt terror, desperation, desolation. I asked about my family. What is going to happen to my family? And this person said to me that if I were there with him, if God had brought me there, it was because He had rescued me. Because God had already paid for all of my sins and I had to repent and accept Him. And in this moment all I could say was: “No. I’m here because I am lucky. They will be coming after me.”

  And then he says, “Let me have my way. Since I took you in, go along with me. I’m offering this to you.” And he takes me again, takes me by the hand.

  And he takes me to this really big place—a church or religious sect or something. It is huge. We sit in one of the rows of chairs. I turn around, and again I realize the immensity, how many men there are there. What could it be that brings thousands of men here, what is it? This was a big surprise for me. A huge number of men, crying and screaming and dancing. I know now that this was a praise service, that they were praying and praising God. But at the time I had never seen anything like it, and it made me laugh. I thought to myself, “All these faggots, crying over a song? Ugh. They are really fucked up.” They were all on their feet, and it wasn’t ten or twenty or thirty. It was more like 4,500 men, calling out to a God that I did not know. Crying and praising Him, telling God that they loved Him. “Ugh,” I said to myself. “I’m not going to get out of this alive.”

  And I went back to the house where this person had given me shelter. So he asked me, “What did you think?”

  “Well, they cry, they sing, they dance around,” I said. “But what are they going to do if someone comes into that church looking for me? What are they going to do? They are no shelter against an AK-47. One blast from an AK-47 can go through fifteen bodies lined up just like that! Just one barrage from an AK. Phroom! Takes them all out. What are they gonna do? So what if there are five thousand or ten thousand. What are they going to do?”

  And he answered: “Them? Nothing. It is God, the Lord, who will save you. God has some reason for you being here. He wants you for something.”

  The next day he had to go to the church again, and so I said, “I want to go too. I want to go see how all these faggots cry.”

  And he chuckles as he remembers this.

  My surprise was, as soon as I got there . . . I don’t know what I felt. I really can’t explain this feeling. I just started to cry.

  He starts to cry now as he tells the story. Tears wash over his voice.

  I did not hear the preaching, I did not hear anything. From the time I got there and the praise group started to play their first chord, I fell to crying. I cried as I had never cried, more than I ever remember crying in my childhood. I cried from nine or ten o’clock in the morning, I don’t know. I cried for five or six hours without stopping. Kneeling down, falling down on the floor. And asking God to forgive me for all that I had done.

  And I heard the people crying for me, and I felt their hands touching me. I reached out to them. And in my mind I began to see all of this.

  He flips back through the pages of the notebook where he has sketched his story.

  All of this that I had lived for years, in the matter of minutes or hours, it all flashed through my mind, and it was being erased from me. All of this that I had done. “Look, I did this, and this and this!”

  And each time someone came close to me and touched me, I could feel the warmth of them touching me, burning away my past sins. They said, “You are free. You are free.”

  And I remembered, “No, I did this and this and this. ...” They cried and they prayed. I saw myself as a child, my whole life was passing before my eyes so quickly ... from t
he time I was very young, my adolescence, all of my life was passing in front of me. I saw many good things passing before me. I remembered my parents, my childhood, I remembered happy moments, I remembered the circus, I remembered my mother when she was still alive, I remembered having fun with my brothers, I remembered everything I had forgotten, I remembered each moment that I had left behind in order to go to serve a person who was not worth anything. All of these memories came to me and filled my heart with joy.

  And I said, “What is this?” This is all good, this is what it is to be good, this is setting me free from this yoke, this burden, that I have been carrying on my back all this time. All of the years under the yoke of the cartels, under the yoke of these people who held me down with their foot on my neck, giving orders, giving orders. It was from all of this that I was being liberated.

  These were very beautiful moments, moments in which my passion overflowed. I did not know yet at this moment that He was crying, that God Himself was crying out to me, but I realized that something extraordinary was happening. The next day they said to me, “If anyone wants to come forward to receive the Lord, come.” It was automatic. I did not need to say, “Yes, I want to.” I just stood up and walked toward the front. I got there, and I said a few small prayers, I said just a few little words—“Yes, I love Him, I want it, because I am feeling it, I want to belong to this family, I want to belong to Him”—because He had just given me something that no one had ever given me before, the joy of remembering how beautiful life is, how beautiful it is to be free, how beautiful it is to be with my brothers and sisters, with my family, with pleasure to be with them . . . with the family that I already knew that I had.