aa Commander José Refugio Ruvalcaba was a high-level officer in the Chihuahua state police. He also served as an informant for the DEA for at least seven years, providing information about the Juárez cartel to his contacts in the U.S. agency. In November 1994, he and two of his sons were killed, their bodies left inside a car parked midway on one of the international bridges between Juárez and El Paso. See Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 41–42.
ab For example, the case came to light of a prison warden in the state of Durango who ran a group of killers from inside the prison who were released at night to carry out executions, including the spectacular massacre of seventeen people at a party outside the city of Torreón on July 18, 2010, more than a year after the sicario mentioned the role of the prisons in the work of the criminal organizations. Rory Carroll gave this account in The Guardian (“Mexico’s Drugs War: In the City of Death,” September 16, 2010): It was just another massacre in a country plagued by violence. But this time it was carried out by prison inmates—who’d been let out specially. “Who let them out?” barked the voice. “The director,” replied the doomed man. The video ends minutes later with a shot to the head. A tortured confession would hardly be credible except that in this case it was true. The attorney general confirmed the story. Forensic results showed the massacre victims were shot with R-15 rifles—standard issue for prison guards. Federal authorities swooped on the prison and detained the guards. The director, a stout, formidable blonde named Margarita Rojas Rodriguez, who had recently been named “woman of the year 2010” by the state governor, was also arrested. “Disbelief. I just couldn’t believe it. I had never heard of something like this,” says Eduardo Olmos, Torreón’s mayor.
ac A record was set in October 2010 when a total of 359 people were victims of homicide in Juárez.
ad Coraje means all of these things in Spanish—courage and fortitude as well as passion and rage. It is usually spoken to mean one or the other, not both. But in this case, I believe the sicario intended all of these meanings.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sicario.
El Sicario : the autobiography of a Mexican assassin / [edited and
translated by] Molly Molloy, Charles Bowden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-568-58668-7
Assassins—Mexican-American Border Region—Biography. 3. Drug dealers—Mexican-
American Border Region—Biography. 4. Drug traffic—Mexican-American Border
Region. I. Molloy, Molly. II. Bowden, Charles, 1945–III. Title.
HV6535.M42M496 2011
364.152’4092—dc22
[B]
2011008833
El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin Page 19