What happened? God called me, He took me out of there. He watched over me and put people in my path to guide me to Him. And I broke down in the presence of the Spirit of God. And I thank Him for allowing me to live. This is the only Lord, my God, that I respect and serve now. There is no other power greater than the power of God.
And now the narcos have more reasons to worry about me. Many of them are atheists or they worship Santa Muerter or some other cult. And now they fear me because I’m not just some crazy guy that stopped doing drugs. Now I am a crazy guy who is protected by the power of God. For God there are no borders. I am a living example of what God can do. He has taken me from place to place. I have a global passport, gracias a Dios, thanks be to God.
Throughout all of this that I have told you, the reality is that you are not really working as a policeman or an agent. All you really are is a puppet, un monigote. You are manipulated and controlled, your actions are controlled for the convenience of the boss, El Patron. And you rise according to how well you perform your job. And as you learn to perform your job better, you begin to earn a higher salary. And these salaries are fat and juicy. And one thing that you learn right away is that this money is easy come and easy go.
You can have a lot of weapons, uniforms, and cash stored and guarded in a warehouse, but in one moment, if you fall out of favor with the boss, he can take it all away from you. And the only one who gains is the boss. He can take away your life, and he can take away your family.
These numbers are very important, very representative.He points back to the drawings he made of the houses used for clandestine burials.
One hundred persons. Can you imagine one hundred people buried in a cemetery, but they are piled one on top of another? Can you imagine trying to identify, trying to recognize those people? Can you imagine in a one-hundred-twenty-square-meter lot, ten meters by twenty meters, that there are fifty people buried in a common grave? Can you imagine how it is possible that when a clandestine cemetery comes to light and the news media are notified and they arrive to cover the story, that armed men show up to intimidate them, and they tell the reporters: “Get out of here right now or this is where you will end up too.”
Who has the power? Try to imagine who has the power in this kind of government. When all of the open spaces, the back roads, and the streets are guarded and patrolled by the Army. So, who is allowing all of the drugs to pass? Who is able to do this? If anyone unauthorized tries to pass drugs through, they are eliminated.
Well, those who have been trained with them for years, from a policeman with a career, from the street cop to the soldier—all of them have been trained for years to work under the command of the narcos. And the narco is a cartel. And it is a cartel that is fighting using the same police that the government has provided. Fighting for the plaza, to control territory.
And the only person who never realizes that he is dying is the puppet, el monigote, the person they have hanging here. For trying to be faithful, this person who has made just one mistake, they are going to chase him down and burn him to death in a barrel of boiling water, and they will make him suffer until he begs for mercy, until he begs for a bullet. And the people there will laugh at him.
You know what I want to tell you? I want to serve as an example for the rest. I can be an example, but I am only one of many. You could find ten more just like me.
THE SYSTEM, 2
In the Mexican justice system . . . here, I’m going to show you.
He begins to draw another schematic....
This is the presidency, and these are the states. And each state has a governor. But I can assure you. . . . That is, I cannot tell you for certain that the president is mixed up in everything, but I can assure you that the people just below him, in his administration, many of them are bought and paid for by the narco-trafficking organizations.
And so these safe houses exist all over Mexico. And I can tell you that in terms of the border—Nogales, Tijuana, Juárez, and even small towns like Ojinaga—there are houses where the federal judicial power and the government leaders and those in the Secretariat of Gobernación [Interior],s which is the strong arm of the Presidency of the Republic, where they know that people are buried. Not one or two or three or four . . . but more than three hundred, maybe four hundred people. I can’t tell you exactly who they are or what their names are. That is difficult. One cannot know everything. But in the day-to-day work that we did, I can tell you that of the forty, fifty, maybe even one hundred people who were kidnapped, that there are no more than five or six left alive. The rest of them will never be found. And these government people have knowledge of all of these safe houses.
And I can tell you, for example, of this house where thirtyeight people are buried, or of another one where maybe eighty people are buried. There are police squad cars guarding these houses, parked at strategic places on the nearby streets. Because they are being paid to protect these places so that these bodies never see the light of day.
In places where they have discovered bodies in different cities, this has happened because the FBI or the DEA has pressured the Mexican government to uncover these places. But the reality is that they know that there are informants for the DEA or the FBI buried there. There are people who had worked as informants, and they ended up buried in these places.t
I can tell you one important bit of information: These informants of the DEA, it is no longer a good idea to bury them, because they now wear a chip, a computer tracking chip, that was not used before. And now all of the DEA informants in Mexico have these chips, and even though they are buried, the problem is that they can be located quickly using a GPS satellite system, and that system is global.u
The narco-traffickers know this. In the past they would use a scanner to try to determine if a person was wearing a chip, but they are really small and are usually implanted in the neck or in the hand. But now they do not always know where they are implanted. And so some of these informants who were wearing chips ended up buried, and because of this, some of the graves have been located and excavated. But I can also tell you that some people in the DEA who were also working for the narcos informed them that these chips were giving precise locations as to where these people had been buried.
These are some of the reasons that I can say with confidence that the government is aware of all of this, that they know these things. The government knows that there are many people who are being instructed and trained and managed by the government for many years and that these people are then being used by the narcos. The government knows what is happening. The reason that this has not been stopped is because this system is convenient for them. There are several things about it that suit their interests.
One of these is that a certain amount of instability is advantageous to them because it enables them to keep on stealing. When really big things happen in the country, what do they do? For instance, when a guerrilla war broke out in Chiapas, the narcos took advantage of this. When there is a guerrilla war in the southern part of the country, it becomes easier to traffic drugs here in the north of Mexico. And as the trafficking increased, the cartels just grew and grew and grew. And these people in Mexico City, the generals down there in those mansions where they live? It is the same police who work for them, the same police themselves who are moving the drugs. Maybe not always in the same vehicles, but in any case, they provide the escorts for the drugs so that everything passes safely.
The government of the United States tries to be sure that its image is clean. But at the international bridges there are elements that, I can assure you, will charge, for example, $50,000 to let a Suburban pass, loaded to the gills, packed with everything it can carry, and they will not search it. And there have been investigations that have affected Mexico, and there have been global news stories in which the United States says that the narcos have not infiltrated their organizations. Well, they have, but in the United States they at least make an effort to stop this corruption. But in Mexico the
y don’t even try. What they do in Mexico is to give the advantage to the narcos. The government assigns forces to them, and they train and assist all of the elements that then go on to work directly for the narco-trafficking organizations.
These are logistics and things that you have to understand. What does the government do? They pay the police a small salary, but the police understand that this little salary is nothing compared to what they will earn from the narcos. You have to take into account that of all the training academies in Mexico, the most prestigious are those of the Mexican Army. And you must understand how the army’s reputation was tarnished when General Rebollo was arrested and sentenced by a military court and continues to be imprisoned for having very close links with the Lord of the Skies, Amado Carrillo.v
When General Rebollo was arrested, he left very very powerful people in charge. He was the chief of intelligence in Mexico and of the army. He was the chief of the army when the president gave him this high position and power, and at the same time General Rebollo was an intimate compadre of the most powerful narco-trafficker in the country.
So what can you expect? If the highest destructive force in your country, the most powerful institution in the country—the Mexican Army—is mixed up in the narco-trafficking, what is a simple citizen supposed to do? Do you think a citizen is going to have confidence in the municipal police? The rural police? The investigative police? Or a policeman of the people who rides a bicycle and instead of a pistol carries a little wooden club? What is the citizen to do when the army arrives along with several narcos armed with AK-47s, with FAL [Fusil Automatique Léger, a light automatic rifle made in Belgium] or with assault rifles, or a semi-automatic machine gun, with Uzis or with weapons that can be under water and still fire? And now they are even using Barretts, weapons that can penetrate an armored vehicle. What is the population supposed to think? What can a policeman expect when a narco asks the question: “What do you want? Silver or lead? Plata o plomo?” Either you take the money we offer and join us, or you die. What do you do? What do you do when the whole country is invaded, infiltrated completely?
President Calderón has a very serious problem. There are informants for the narco organizations inside of his government, and he is not going to be able to clean this up. There are people there who have been corrupted for years. Calderón has not understood how other governments have dealt with this. He is favoring one cartel, and the other is going to wage war. Calderón is not going to be able to resolve this situation in one presidential term. Ojala! God willing! Things may get better. But it has to be cleaned up from inside the presidency.
It used to be that the army was respected in Mexico. But now putting the army in the streets puts them in the position of the police. And police are not respected. No one respects the police because everyone considers them just like they do the narcos. The army is degraded now that they are in the streets. The army is not set up to do investigations or to fight the narco-traffickers. They are not facing a guerrilla. A lot of the weapons that the narcos themselves are using come from the army. Along the borders there is a lot of trafficking in weapons. And the weapons pass through customs, but in reality all of the border crossings are under the control of the army, and so the weapons could not get into the hands of the narcos without the army knowing about it.
Before, the army was very highly respected in Mexico. The people used to be thrilled to see a military parade, to see the weapons that only the military would have. But that was before, not now. Now, when there are searches and confiscations, they capture weapons in the hands of the narcos that are much more powerful than those used by the army.
For a long time, the army did not show up except for parades or when there was some kind of disaster in the country, like a flood or epidemic, and the federal government would call in the army to do relief work. But later, there were infiltrations by very high-level people. For example, it was known that the Lord of the Skies had people who had infiltrated the military, people who had gotten very close to the top. The military had always been very cautious. Not the whole army, but elements of the army began.... It is really a shame that the institution has been so corrupted, it is a shame what is happening now. Many people joined the army because they really wanted to serve the country, but they have ended up in the streets. They have been corrupted, and they are now serving the narcos. Sometimes they do not even know which side they are working for.
Before, the army would never have been in the streets, except for some very secret operations when they were called in to assist the federal police. These were very secret, very special operations. But the army would never have been called in to guard a plaza or to get mixed up in violence between cartels. The army existed to protect the sovereignty of the country. But now? Are they protecting the sovereignty? No, now they are just another instrument. They have ruined the vision of the military from what it was before. Even though the army had been involved before—after all, it was proven that General Rebollo worked for the Juárez cartel. But these things were known and not talked about, not written about in the press. But now the army is called in to get involved in the fight between the Juárez cartel and the Sinaloa cartel.
I am not going to tell you that there are no good people. There are good people in the very upper echelons of the government, from the president’s own sphere, who have tried to do things right, who have tried to make it so that things function in a proper way. But these people have been destroyed. There are people who have fallen very recently. For example, Mr. Vasconcelos. w His airplane crashed, but it was not a crash caused by human error, as reported in the media. And with him, the secretary of Gobernación [Interior] was also killed. And he was an intimate friend of the current president of Mexico.
What I am telling you is plain to see. It was an airplane crash, and it happened because Vasconcelos and this secretary of Gobernación were working to break these links with the narco-traffickers, people that were following this line. And in the trajectory of Vasconcelos, you can understand this by looking at what he did.
He talks very fast, he is pounding his pen onto the paper.... His voice breaks with emotion. He is angry.
So what happened? Vasconcelos was one of the public prosecutors who was involved in the largest number of excavations of bodies in the safe houses all over the country. He had the strength and the courage to talk to the FBI and the DEA. And state by state, he went to people he could trust and dug up the bodies, dug up the bodies, dug up the bodies ... sacó cuerpos enterrados, sacó cuerpos enterrados, sacó cuerpos enterrados.
I haven’t followed too carefully the policies of President Calderón, but I have noticed that he has changed tactics for handling the situation. He has tried to purge, to purify, the high ranks of his government. Calderón has said, “I have my right arm and my left, and I’m going to purge my right arm.” But when we look at the people that he has purged, what it looks like is that he is removing the people who work for one cartel simply to replace them with those who are part of another cartel. This is what it looks like to people—that he is receiving payment from one cartel to get rid of those in his government who are associated with another cartel.
Many times, not even the president of the Republic can keep track of everything that is going on. So he has various leaders who work for him as the secretaries of the various government ministries and departments. For example, as I’ve mentioned to you, his secretary of Interior [Juan Camilo Mouriño] was assassinated. Well, he was killed in a plane crash, and they say that turbulence caused it. Illogical! When someone starts to do a good job, it gets noticed, and so there are repercussions.
It is most likely that the target was not the secretary, but it was Señor Vasconcelos who was traveling with him. You go and check into who he was and what he did. See how much trouble he caused inside of the attorney general’s office, even though he did not have a high post there. He was just a middle-level investigator, but he accomplished more than many other investigators wi
th more power than he had. Just take a look at how many little bodies came crawling out of the ground because of the efforts of Señor Vasconcelos!
This situation did not in any way benefit Mexico. So what did this mean? It meant that at the highest spheres of government, there were people mixed up in the narco-business. And if everyone was involved, there came a moment when a group of high-level agents in various states had to flee because of the discovery of bodies in bunkers that they maintained for the purpose of burying people. There are really good people who try to make a difference. Unfortunately, with the corruption coming from the top, it is very hard to clean this up.
There are strategies on the part of the government—for example, they send elements of the Mexican Army to Pakistan and Spain to receive instruction in how to combat terrorism. But some of these are elements that will in turn use the military and counterterrorism instruction they receive to train the narco-trafficking groups to counter actions that the government might try to use against them.
Now I want to talk about a very powerful group in Mexico known as the Zetas. Remember, as it is said, it takes a Zeta to kill a Zeta. And a Zeta is trained to kill sixteen men without using a single weapon, he is trained to kill with his bare hands. He has the power and the training and capability to do this.x
When you have access to and control over this kind of information, you realize that the barriers have been crossed, the lines have been erased. You realize that Mexico is no longer just a place for drugs from other places to cross over into the United States. Rather, Mexico is now a producer of drugs. And it intends to displace other producers. And at the same time as the United States reinforces its borders, the introduction of drugs into the United States is decreasing. So the narcos now are trying to addict the children in the schools in Mexico. They are now working to hook people who work in the maquiladoras [factories]. And they are recruiting women to distribute drugs.
El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin Page 15