My emotion was so great, I said to Him, “No one, no one in this world, no one on this earth can do anything to me that my Lord Jesus Christ does not want to happen to me. From today, I am reborn in Him.” I felt that each time I accepted the guilt for each of the things that I had done and that each time someone touched me, I felt that I was burning and I felt forgiveness. And from this moment I felt free from each and every one of the terrible things that I had done. Free from the errors that I had committed. I put myself in the hands of God. I asked the Lord for His forgiveness, and I accepted Him in my heart.
And in the same way I have asked God, for all of this time, for all of the people who are there, people in the criminal life, who involuntarily believe . . . to tell them, to any individual who feels grand, who dares to call himself “Lord,” “Señor” . . . I want to tell him that the Lord is in Heaven and that He is the only One capable of miracles, that He is the only One capable of causing the rain, lightning, thunder . . . that He is the only One capable of resurrecting us and bringing us back into the world pure in spirit and to show us His beauty and love . . . that He has always been with us, but that it is we who have not given Him the opportunity to show us His love.
Those who call themselves “Señor”q are more cowardly than any other. They live in the shadows, they hide in darkness, believing that they are helping poor people in the Sierra, people who are alone and poor with nothing but the crops that they produce.
And these people feel content and feel that they are gods. There are those who call themselves “Master.” But the only Master is in Heaven. There are those who call themselves “Master,” “Boss,” “Señor.” But they are not worthy to speak in this manner. The only Lord that I know, the only Lord who allows me to be here, is my Lord Jesus Christ.
And to all who are able to hear this message, and who find themselves or who have gone through a situation like that that I have experienced, I tell you to call upon the Lord Jesus Christ and ask Him to help you. The Lord is for all. He is not just for one, He is for all. And he gives us salvation and eternal life. After this I can tell you, just as you see these blank pages, I know that if my life should end today I am happy. I am so happy because I know that I will go to Heaven and live with my Lord Jesus Christ. I will be with Him because he died for me. Through His wounds and His suffering, I have been forgiven and cleansed. He paid for me and for my sins. I have repented, and I am no longer afraid to die. My fears are finished. My family needs security, and my Lord will provide this security for my family. And our Lord Jesus Christ is the only One worthy of being called Lord.
He pauses for a long time.
Never be afraid. Never be afraid of anyone. No one is stronger through size or wisdom than our Lord Jesus Christ. No matter how tall or short or wide, there is no one stronger than Him. I know that there are many people who are fed up with having to live under the yoke of the boss, the cacique. I know that there are people who wrongly try to live for money and power. But there is no solution except to speak to the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, who is our Lord Jesus Christ. No one in this world can reach or hope to be even a grain of sand in His hand compared to what He wants for us.
Be aware, repent, and live a life in Him.
God is good, and God loves us. God wants us to be with Him.
And God forgives.
Thank you, God, for the life that You have given me.
Thank you, Lord, for the family that You have given me.
Thank you, Father, for allowing me to be here to share this with others who may also be able to be with You.
I only want to tell You that you exist, that you are good and kind.
And if You have accepted me, if You have forgiven me, then anyone, everyone, can be forgiven.
Amen.
THE SYSTEM AND THE LIFE
THE LIFE, 1
A routine day....
Well, let’s say you get up in a hotel in Torreón. It’s 6:00 A.M. Eat a quick breakfast, American-style, like they give you for free in the hotel. Wait for the people you are working for to get up since you are always dependent on their orders. Take turns at guard. When the boss gets up, go with him to eat lunch, wherever he wants to go.
Then patrol the city. Look out for new people in town, new vehicles. Be sure that there are no new people who might be working for another cartel. There are informants at the checkpoints outside of town to let you know if there are new people moving in. These informants let us know, and we go to investigate, see what they are up to. The narcos operate just like a federal or state agency. Things are coordinated. Whatever they earn, they spend.
In the evening, go to a good restaurant to eat, and then get some girls for the boss. Check to make sure the girls are happy, that everybody is satisfied with the hotel.
From there go to a safe house. You want to know what these places are like? So, here we are. We feel safe, more or less, but you are never sure whether something has happened in this place before. The less you know the better. You go from safe house to safe house. Was someone killed there? Are bodies buried here? There are very few people who know which places have been used as cemeteries. Not all of these places are used to kill people or bury people.
Fear? It’s not really fear, but the main thing is that you just forget about it. Under the influence of drugs and alcohol, you really are not afraid. You can always sense nervousness and fear, you can smell fear in another person, and if you do, if a person hesitates or shows fear or nervousness, you have to get rid of him, because he could cause the whole operation to fail.
Once you do something, forget about it! There are executions that take place in a matter of seconds. You have to do the work as if it comes natural to you. Take care of the job, hide the vehicles, change clothes, go to a fine restaurant, natural. If you cannot, you cannot do the work, and you are likely to become one of the statistics, one of the many who are executed.
The drugs help a lot. They especially help when you need to stay awake for a long time. But even the drugs have their limit. Sometimes it is good to get high, to get in the right state of mind to do certain work, but it is better not to be high on drugs all the time. No one wants to be guarded by someone who is always doing drugs.
When you are living the wild life, la vida loca, when you have money, liquor, women and sex, cars ... you can enjoy yourself on a yacht. You have houses and apartments. They don’t belong to you, but you can use them whenever you want. Because they facilitate the work.
You do not just become addicted to the money, the sex, the liquor and the drugs, but you get to the point where you really like all of this stuff. There are times, during the nights when you can really sleep well . . . but those nights are few. Really, you don’t often get the sleep that you need to take care of yourself or to maintain your personal integrity. But sometimes, when you do sleep, you realize that in the same group of three or more people this one is capable of pulling out a knife and killing another, and you realize that if that is the case he might be capable of killing you too. This is just to say that you always have to watch out for yourself.
The horrible thing is when you are dreaming. You have very realistic dreams. I would dream that I was running through the streets, jumping over cars. Oh, I would dream that I was out there and did not have my weapon and they were chasing me. And the dreams were so real that I would wake up and the gun was on the pillow and I would have my weapon in my hand and I would be aiming it.
I was very violent. The dreams are not things that could never happen, they are not fantastic dreams, but very realistic. The fear that I had that kept me from sleeping in my house with my family, the reason I would go someplace to sleep by myself—and this is a very real fear and it happened to the majority of people in this situation—it was because the least little noise would cause you to react violently. If your wife comes to the bedroom, if she touches you, your head is full of such terrible things from this world that it is about to explode. And you can react and cause her harm
.
One time my wife tried to help me when I was dreaming. She felt how I was sweating and calling out in my sleep ... Ah, ah, ah. She saw I was having a nightmare and tried to wake me up, but when she touched me—ARRRGGH—my reaction was to grab her by the throat, but I didn’t wake up in time and my hands were on her throat, I was strangling her, I was strangling my own wife!
And from that moment, that very moment, I realized that something very bad was happening to me. I was no longer any good. There was a line that I had respected between the work I did—as a guard, as an instructor, as an executioner—but this work no longer stayed on one side of the line. Now it had passed over into my life at home. I could no longer control my instinct to be violent and aggressive. I could no longer tell the difference between this world and that of my own family. You even start to think that your own family is against you and you can do harm to your own family.
When I saw the fear in her face, and to have my own wife paralyzed and defenseless in my own hands, unable to move ...
He pauses, sobs and gasps for breath, and then resumes telling the story.
. . . It caused me to stop sleeping at my house for a long time. It is difficult to sleep with someone when you are so deep into this element. It is hard to share this with anyone.
This is not an excuse to say, “Just find an easy woman to sleep with. . . .” Really, you know that if you are capable of doing this in your own home, you know it could happen with another person also. And I do not have any doubt that at times when there is a crime and people go into motel rooms and find someone strangled, that it was caused by this stress that people are living with and the person did not realize it in time and someone was killed.
It is an instinct that gets out of control—your actions no longer belong to you. I’m not saying it is an animal instinct, rather, it is a logical reaction. If you attack me, I’m not going to wait for you to hit me again. I had been trained, and my job was to be the person who always wins. Even if someone attacks me first, as long as the attack is not successful the first time, I’m not going to allow the person to attack me twice or even touch me a second time. I am going to eliminate him. I cannot wait, because I will never leave an enemy alive to strike me again.
THE SYSTEM, 1
During the time that we were being trained as elements inside of the academy, they make a selection. In each class, they select five men who have the best averages. And these police-in-training have the opportunity to travel to Tucson, Arizona, to an FBI training center. It is a short training session, three days. The first day they teach about the hidden serial numbers for tracking stolen vehicles. They show us how vehicles not only have serial numbers in the usual places but also hidden numbers located on different parts of the vehicle, such as the motor or the chassis, and also vehicles that are coming out with serial numbers on the windows. This is the first day.
On the second day, they gave us more training in the techniques of arrests and follow-up investigations. They showed us a little more of their technology, how to locate people using their fingerprints. The system that they have is very large, and they can detect one person in the world by his fingerprints because of the huge database that they have.
The third day is very relaxing and nice. After breakfast, they take us for a time to a firing range and give us a tour of the facilities, but only a part of it. They don’t show us the whole installation—the different laboratories, dormitories, firing ranges. In comparison to an academy in Mexico where we are studying, these facilities are really something. When you get to a training facility of the FBI, you are surprised at how big the installation is. It is like a whole city.
In the afternoon, after lunch, this is the last day, and they take us to relax, maybe to a bar, for those who want to drink a beer or something. We talk and tell stories and get to know each other. Usually there is one of our instructors from the academy and three or four FBI agents with us the whole time. There are always people guarding us even though we are invited guests. We always have a guide, a minder, they never leave us on our own. That’s just the way they do it. It is part of the training and military-type instruction that they give us.
What they don’t ever seem to know is that among the five elements receiving this training, it is very possible that two or three or at a minimum one of them is already receiving money from banks in the United States, money that comes from the narco-trafficking organizations. And the narcos are paying for this police cadet to get this beneficial training from the FBI.
After these three days are over, we return to the academy in a bus to resume our normal instruction.
All of the time that we are in the academy—six months—we are learning about laws, forms of arrest, how to follow up investigations. But that’s not all. The school is also a base for learning about corruption, starting with the process of buying off the guards at the entrance gates so that we can escape the academy and have some time to relax. Even better when one is getting payment from the outside.
Many times some of us compared this kind of lockup to being in prison. There isn’t much difference because in the prisons in Mexico, if you have enough money, you can pay and have a night out to have fun. You pay off a couple of guards, go out and have fun, and come back the next day. In the academy, it’s the same, except that here you aren’t detained for a crime, rather, you are in the academy to receive training to fight crime. The government never knows—well, they know, but they never fully acknowledge—that of one hundred elements training in the academy, about sixty of them will be fighting against the other forty because those sixty are being paid for and trained by the mafia, by the narco-trafficking organizations.
It isn’t that they are not teaching morale or principles. We all salute the flag and stuff. But the vision of the person is nothing more than just being there. I am sure that of the one hundred elements that are admitted to the police academy, ninety of them go in with the idea that when you are in the police, you can make money. In the police, there is money thanks to corruption. There are ways to get bribes, la mordida, there are ways to make money dealing in stolen goods, trabajar chueco. In the police, there are always lots of ways to make money.
The salary of a policeman or an investigator is nothing. Every two weeks while I was in the academy, I would get half of the salary of an active-duty policeman. Their salary then was 300 pesos, so I would get 150 pesos while in training. That was nothing compared to the $1,000 they sent me from outside so that I would be well taken care of. The narcos invest a lot of money in their people, who will be well trained to work for them and wage the war from the inside for the cartels.
THE LIFE, 2
It is like being an addict. The addict needs to have his shot every day. When the day comes and the addict refuses his shot, he is no longer any use to the criminal organization because he is no longer going to be a consumer. He is no longer going to do what he had to do before to get his shot. When an addict reforms, he goes through a struggle. But when he reforms, he starts to believe in his principles, in his own personality and character, and he begins to see his way of life from a different point of view. And he begins to realize the things he has done. He begins to dream and to hallucinate and to see the filthy things that he did under the influence of the drugs. Things that he had forgotten. And he realizes that he has committed many errors.
This makes the other people lose trust in those who have been able to overcome their addiction. Why? Not because they cannot trust the person, but because now they themselves are seen as lesser people, as weaker people, than those who have been able to overcome their addiction. They then have to constantly fight to maintain their place of confidence and their position in the organization. The highest bosses almost never use drugs. They might get high sometimes, but they are not regular users. It is not permitted.
It serves them to have the drug users working below them because it helps them to be able to do the work. I read an article that said something I think is true....
How can you kill a person and not have awareness of what you are doing? Well, it is like being drunk. A person under the influence of drugs has a different awareness of things. A person uses drugs to speed things up. But once a person stops using, he has a different awareness, and it is not so easy to do certain things. Of course not. It might cause the person to be afraid and hesitate, and then the team would go after him, try to get rid of him. It is a dangerous situation.
Now, for me, to stop using alcohol and drugs was never a problem. I stopped using various times for long periods. But it was a big problem for my bosses, it was a problem of trust. So what did I have to do at times? I would see that they were nervous about me.
The time comes—I’ve told you before and I will tell you again—when God needs something from you, and in this moment you are in God’s hands. It is through the Hand of God that you do what you do, it is not due to fear or nervousness or the influence of drugs. You are in danger and God is cleansing you, He is shaking you down, He is controlling what happens to you, and He is using the dangerous situation to make you understand what you must do.
It was during these times that I moved around a lot. Jumping from place to place, I became aware of the Hand of God, and how He would not leave me alone. And how was this possible for me, since I had by this time lost all the money I had? Both the narcos and the authorities were looking for me. How could I travel from place to place unless the Lord was watching over me and keeping me safe? How could I get across borders? With God, I could go anywhere. These are what you call miracles! And when miracles happen, you take notice.
These things were happening against my will because God was washing me clean. You see? God was taking away all of the vices and all of the evil things that I had lived. The drugs and alcohol I had left behind before, but things changed so much in me that my bosses lost confidence in me, and they sent people to hunt me down and kill me. ...
El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin Page 14