He flips back again through the notebook of his life.
He took away my clothes.
He took away my thoughts.
He took away everything.
He shook me down.
And you know what?
He left me with nothing but my own skin, naked, together with my family.
And from there, we can begin a new life in Him.
POSTSCRIPT
AUTOEXILIO (SELF)EXILE)
THE SICARIO
April 2010
For a long time I have watched with sadness that the reality of Mexico and Mexicans is to endure all of the errors committed on a continuing basis by the political leaders of this country. I wonder what would have become of me and my family if in some moment of desperation I had decided not to abandon Mexico and the small amount of money and property that I had there. Let me tell you:
A certain commander told me back in those years, “Trust us. We are the only ones who can defend you with your declaration. We will clarify some cases, and you are a witness, and if you do not do it, we will be able to arrest you and accuse you of complicity.”
Disgracefully, desgraciadamente, I trusted him, and less than four hours later the woman who at that time was my partner was injured, she was raped and gasoline was poured on her, and though she survived, she was left in this condition as a very clear message to me. At that time, I decided to hide in a distant state in Mexico and cut all connections to friends and family and to forget them. At that time, I then began to work honestly, day after day, until I was able to save a small amount of money that gave me the solvency I needed to be able to move on, to get ahead.
I did not have much, but the little that I had was enough to live well. I met a beautiful person, and after some time passed, we decided to get married, and in order to do this legally, I had to give precise information about my date of birth and address to the justice of the peace [civil registry] where we got married. They found me in less than three days, and sadly, disgracefully, this is when I realized the extent to which the Mexican government was infiltrated by the dirty business of trade in weapons and drugs. That is when I realized that they had a video of my face, that they could find me and identify me even when I had only given general information to the civil registry so that I could get married. But that was enough for them to find me. Could it be that the criminals have better operational systems than the government? Or that the operational systems of the country are at the disposal of the narcos who are working for them?
I made the decision then to approach a certain person and tell him what was happening to me. To do this, I had to move again with all of my family. Now it was not just my life that was in danger, but also the life of the woman I had just married.
I told this person that I had decided to ask for help, and he gave me some good advice. I tried at that moment to seek protection from the federal government, but unfortunately, things were even worse than in the first instance. The federal authorities had given themselves the job of ransacking houses and detaining people linked to narco-trafficking and smuggling. These people were being bought off, and not satisfied with that, they gave the criminals my description and told them that it was me who had given the authorities the necessary information for their arrest and detention. I should mention that I had not turned over any information on any of these people. But they were detained, and the merchandise that they were trafficking in was confiscated, their money was taken, and later they were set free, and of course they then began an infernal hunt for me and my family.
This caused panic, not only in my immediate family but also among other relatives, because by this time they were already keeping us under surveillance—the homes of some of our close relatives were being watched.
Again, I decided that I would confide in someone, and that person was Señor Vasconcelos, but I never had the opportunity to meet with him. He was assassinated along with the secretary of Gobernación [Interior]. Perhaps, if I had had this chance, it would have changed my life. I do not know. But what I do know is that since that moment I have been fleeing from Mexico, and I have no desire to return for any reason.
Disgracefully, everything in that country is evil. There is so much corruption that it can have no end, no matter how much help Mexico gets from other countries. This stuff about the president of the Republic is pure farce. Looking on from my vantage point, I am so disillusioned. He is just a puppet manipulated by his ministers. Unfortunately, there is no need for him to commit himself to any Mexican, since he is already completely committed only to his own interests, just like many former presidents, and he is just the tip of the iceberg.
A very good friend of mine who has also left the country and is living in self-imposed exile from Mexico looked back in sadness at the fact that he had worked for a certain government official of Juárez.
My friend told me the following, and I have his authorization to record it here. This is his story:
That day I was in the foyer of the official’s office waiting to see him, when about eight men arrived. It looked like they were armed, and only one of them was carrying a briefcase. They asked to speak with the official, but his personal secretary did not let them in to see him. So then one of them made a phone call, and just after that, the official came out of his office to receive him personally, and he reprimanded his secretary for having obstructed this person’s access to his office. This person handed over the briefcase to the official. And after that I saw the man in his office, standing right next to his chair. But what happened to the secretary? He was scolded and punished so much that he decided to quit his job. At this moment, to the surprise of everyone there and to the surprise of the official’s personal secretary, we found out that the person who the secretary had tried to deny access to speak to the government official was the narco-trafficker in charge of the plaza of Ciudad Juárez and of the state of Chihuahua.
Imagine how many of these corrupt politicians there are out there! Now they are cloning themselves.... I hope that the citizens of that city that has been so beaten, defeated, terrorized by narco-trafficking will not commit the same error again!
My friend, like myself, we now see all of this with great sadness, and we can never again speak with any of the Mexican authorities. Now they are all mixed up in narco-trafficking, those that are not are murdered, like Señor Vasconcelos and the secretary of Gobernación [Mouriño] were murdered. I think that he was an intimate friend of President Felipe Calderón. The secretary paid very dearly for this friendship.
The sicario made the following comment in response to recent elections in the state of Chihuahua and the subsequent murder of a Juárez official:
God bless you. ...
Disgracefully, the people of Juárez decided to vote again for a kangaroo, to not call him what he really is, a rat who walks on two legs—a person who is not far removed from the intrigue and dirty dealings of the underworld of the city. And in part he is the protector along with another group of people who shelter under his wing. They think they are beyond reach of the law, they think they are vaccinated and immune, but the truth is, it isn’t like that.... Soon we’ll all be living in the crazy house.... Two or three losses have struck his team already before he takes power, but this is nothing except to remind him who is paying him and that he had better obey. This seems to be what’s happening, and again with this election, there will follow another three years of robbery with complete impunity.... The criminals will be reorganizing themselves inside the police, all in secret, just like before he manipulated the police in Juárez. . . . And in addition to all this, what has been happening will not end because every day there are more and more payments arriving from people who are defending the little they have left, which was once their patrimony but has been stripped from them in their towns and villages.
BENEDICTION
The documentary film El Sicario, Room 164, directed by Gianfranco Rosi, was shown on French and German television in late November 2010. The
film has won numerous awards since its premiere in Venice. The sicario expressed his feelings with these words:
May God bless you.
How grateful I am for this news about the documentary. It seems to me that it is having a good premiere and exposure in the media, and above all it shows us a part of the realism that many of us wish to forget, because of the violence that Mexico is living through. Thanks for giving to all a little bit of realism, and we keep hoping that the government of Mexico will one day really put things right and not continue to join forces with these people.
Saludos and be well this Thanksgiving.
May Jesus Christ fill you with blessings.
Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can’t shoot them anymore....
—BOB DYLAN, “KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR”
a Later I asked him to explain el chaca, and this is what he wrote:EL SIGNIFICADO DE ESTA PALABRA EN EL AMBITO DE GRUPOS DE CARTELES SE
LES DENOMINA CHACAS O CHACALOSOS A LOS
JEFES
PATRONES
QUIEN MANDA
QUIEN ORDENA
EL QUE ESTA A CARGO
(In the cartel world, el chaca or los chacalosos are words to describe
the bosses,
the patrones,
those who command,
those who give the orders,
those who are in charge.)
b More than a year after the initial interview, the sicario told us in a casual conversation that a U.S. official who worked in a border agency at the time (probably in the late 1980s) had helped get his border-crossing card back after this incident when he was caught at the bridge. Years later, the sicario said, he lost the card again during a cocaine-snorting party on the U.S. side of the border. The same official intervened again, the implication being that the drug traffickers the sicario worked for at the time had connections inside U.S. agencies.
c From the early 1990s until after the death of Amado Carrillo in 1997, the cartel forbade the sale of nearly all illegal drugs in the city of Juárez. This was part of an arrangement between the Juárez cartel and the government. This control broke down after Carrillo’s death. The domestic drug market is now an important part of the business in Juárez and all over Mexico.
d People who worked for the narco-trafficking organizations would carry out these tasks whether they were on or off police duty. In another interview, the sicario described paying off dispatchers with a few hundred pesos to avoid interruption while partying or while engaged in criminal activities.
e The sicario is referring to the current climate of extreme violence that began in January 2008.
f Leader of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera is reputed to be one of the richest men not only in Mexico but in the world. He is said to be currently battling Vicente Carrillo Fuentes for control of the Juárez plaza. See M. J. Stephey, “Joaquin Guzman Loera: Billionaire Drug Lord,” Time, March 13, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1884982,00.html.
g Vicente Carrillo Fuentes is allegedly the leader of a large and violent drug-trafficking organization known as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization. This group is allegedly responsible for the importation of numerous tons of cocaine and marijuana from Mexico into the United States over the Ciudad Juárez–El Paso border annually. See http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cei/vicente-carrillo-fuentes/view.
h The sicario is referring to the chaos unleashed by the murder of Oropeza and the subsequent struggles for control of the Juárez plaza.
i These people were police commanders in different units.
j The sicario does not explain or name the groups that were fighting for control of the plaza at this particular time. We believe that these were struggles internal to the Juárez cartel. The point he is making is that the orders to kill would sometimes be carried out against people you had been working with in the recent past and that people at his level carried out orders without asking questions.
k Room 164, the same motel room the sicario had chosen as the place to tell his story.
l The sicario mentions the woman he was married to at this time, early in his career. Later in his story, they become separated. He currently lives with his second wife.
m As of November 21, 2010, the website (http://www.regioblogs.com/2008/06/07/senales-del-narco-y-su-interpretacion) was no longer available.
n He is not certain but estimates this date as sometime in August 2003 because he remembers that it coincided with the birth of one of his children.
o The sicario indicated that these young men were not street gangsters, but were from middle-class families and had begun to talk too much about their criminal activities in Juárez bars and discos. They had to be eliminated because they were seen as a threat to the arrangement between the government and the cartel.
p It was Amado Carrillo, head of the Juárez cartel between 1993 and 1997, who forbade the sale of cocaine in Juárez. Since his death, drugs have become more available and no cartel leaders or government officials have been able to completely control the domestic drug market.
q He is referring here to the name given to Amado Carrillo, the former head of the Juárez cartel, who was known as El Señor de los Cielos (Lord of the Skies), and to other powerful figures in the narco-trafficking organizations. In English, of course, we call these people druglords.
r La Santa Muerte (Saint Death), or La Santisima (Most Holy Death), is a sacred figure venerated by many in Mexico, especially in areas where criminal gangs are most prevalent. See Steven Gray, “Santa Muerte: The New God in Town,” Time, October 16, 2007.
s This is the cabinet-level government department in charge of internal security.
t The sicario is referring here to discoveries of narcofosas, clandestine mass graves, in several houses in Juárez in 2004 and 2008. Other narcofosas come to light periodically, not only in Juárez but in other Mexican cities and rural areas.
u It is common now for the wealthy in Mexico to have tracking chips implanted as an anti-kidnapping measure. The U.S. DEA will not provide any information on its procedures for confidential informants, but in December 2010 one of the U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks revealed that more than sixty FBI or DEA contacts had been targeted and murdered in Mexico by narco-trafficking groups. See http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/01/09MEXICO193.html. This information appeared in many national and international news media.
v General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo was Mexico’s top anti-narcotics officer under President Zedillo. He was arrested in February 1997 and charged with working with drug trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Rebollo had access to all of Mexico’s classified drug enforcement information, police records, and informants, which authorities believe he made accessible to Carrillo. See “Family Tree” at the PBS Frontline website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mexico/family/genrebollo.html. For more on the career of General Rebollo, see the introduction to this book.
w On José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos and Juan Camilo Mouriño, see the introduction to this book.
x The Zetas are a paramilitary criminal organization in Mexico. The original Zetas were highly trained members of a Mexican Army special forces unit who deserted to go to work for the Gulf cartel. Members of this unit received training from the U.S. School of the Americas and may also have incorporated Guatemalan special forces trained by the CIA. The Zetas now operate as an independent drug-trafficking organization in different regions of Mexico and include corrupt former federal, state, and local police officers.
y The following account is from Diana Washington Valdez, “Chihuahua Governor’s Bodyguard Slain,” El Paso Times, December 23, 2009: Mexican authorities are investigating Sunday’s slaying of one of Chihuahua Gov. Jose Reyes Baeza Terrazas’ bodyguards and death threats against Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz.The governor called a news conference near midnight Sunday to provide some details about the attack in Chihuahua City that killed one of his guards, Alejandro Chaparro Coronel, and wound
ed two others. He said one of the armed men who allegedly killed Chaparro also was taken to a hospital with injuries.The Chihuahua governor, who drove his own vehicle with the bodyguards behind him, said he did not know whether the attack was against him or stemmed from a traffic-related dispute between his guards and the armed suspects.“We cannot speculate and will comment only about what we know,” the governor said.The Juarez mayor increased his security after he and his family received death threats following Friday’s resignation of ex-Juarez police chief Roberto Orduna Cruz, city spokesman Sergio Belmonte said.
z The sicario is referring to the common assumption that if a journalist is killed it is because he has been corrupted by one criminal group or another. The police, the general public, and even fellow journalists in Mexico will make this assumption and spin any investigation into the murder in the direction of establishing the “dirty” connections of the person who has been killed.
El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin Page 18