by Ioan Grillo
Gustavo stares intensely as he explains the assassination techniques: “We normally hit with one team on a motorcycle and another in a car. The bike has one driver and one shooter. The car blocks the victim in and the bike gets right beside the target. Then the shooter unloads fast and passes the gun into the car, where it is put in a secret compartment.”
Gustavo first learned the art by driving a bike for his mentor, an older sicario. “He taught me how it was done, how you have to keep steady, keep focused, and above all not miss the target. How you shoot in the head and heart to make sure you kill.
“When I did my first hit, I got a little too close and shot too many bullets into the body. Then the blood and guts exploded out all over me. I had to throw away my clothes and wash hard to get it off. That night I had bad dreams. I kept remembering shooting the person and the blood spurting out.”
Gustavo did more hits and the bad dreams stopped. Every few weeks he would be given a new target. Mostly he killed in Medellín, but he was also sent to take out victims in other cities across Colombia such as Bogotá and Cali. Soon he had killed ten, then fifteen, then twenty people. Then he lost count.
I ask him if he thinks about the victims. He shakes his head.
“I keep focused and do my work. Before I go out, I pray to Jesus and clear my mind. I never take drugs or drink before a job as I need my five senses. When I come back, I will relax and smoke a spliff and listen to music.”
Gustavo says he doesn’t know or ask who the victims are. A target is selected and another team will follow the person’s movements to find the best time to strike. Then the sicarios will be called in.
“I get a call saying, ‘There goes the little girl. Take care of her.’ They will give me a photo of the target. And then we will go and hunt.”
Gustavo says it is all about the money for him. He gets a base salary of about $600 a month plus a payment of between $2,000 to $4,000 for each hit he carries out. While such money is a far cry from that of the billionaire traffickers with their diamond-studded mansions and fleets of private planes, it makes him wealthy by the standards of the Medellín slums. Furthermore, with a 22 percent unemployment rate for Colombians under twenty-six years old, it is undoubtedly the best-paid job he could get.6
“Some people murder because they get pleasure out of it, because they actually enjoy killing and get addicted to the blood. But I do it out of need.”
His blood money has taken him and his family out of the ghetto. As well as renting this apartment, Gustavo has bought his family a house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. Teenage arguments he had with his parents are long forgotten, and he now sees them several times a week. His older brother is also in the mafia, but they are paying to put their younger brother through private school in the hope he will find a decent legitimate job.
Besides supporting his family, Gustavo likes to spend his earnings on designer-label clothes and high-tech Japanese motorbikes. He is also a big fan of English Premier League football and pays for cable TV to watch all the matches he can, as well as playing soccer video games on PlayStation 3.
“I support Wigan because they have Colombian striker Hugo Rodallega. I appreciate that Manchester United play good football as well. But I don’t like Arsenal.”
The references to British soccer teams seem a surreal connection from this Colombian hit man to the far-off reality of my homeland. Later, I publish the Gustavo interview in a British newspaper, and a Wigan fan group sticks the story on their Web page. They find it amusing that a Colombian assassin follows their team.
Gustavo tells me he likes romantic salsa music but avoids Medellín nightclubs in case he bumps into rival assassins. He is also a fan of electronic dance music and once went with a cousin in Bogotá to see London DJ Carl Cox.
“Everyone in the club was just drinking water and dancing like crazy. So I asked my cousin what was going on, and she said they were all taking the drug ecstasy. But I didn’t want to take it as I was worried it might be too strong. I heard LSD is crazy as well. I have respect for people who take that, but I don’t know if I want to risk it myself.”
The reference to a British DJ strikes me as another surreal connection with the world that I come from. For Gustavo, being an assassin has given him the means into the consumer lifestyles enjoyed in the rich West: to watch soccer on cable, play video games, wear designer clothes, go to nightclubs; the same pastimes that any student, building worker, or office boy in my own country can enjoy. It also gives him a sense of achievement—to be a somebody in a barrio full of nobodies. It even gives him a status that makes these two dumb European journalists sit in front of him and lap up every word he says.
But whatever benefits it has, there is no easy way out of the mafia for Gustavo. Being a cartel hit man does not come with a retirement plan.
“The bosses don’t let you leave because you know too much. When people try and get out, they can kill them. The only way is to just disappear without saying anything.”
He claims he is not scared of prison and already did one short stint for being caught with a stolen car. His boss (commander) looked after him, sending him food, and he had conjugal visits from girlfriends every week. He also took his high school exams behind bars and passed with decent grades. I ask if there is any other job he would like to do with his qualifications. “I would like to be a police detective investigating murders,” he says with a straight face. “But I can’t because of my criminal record.”
I ask him about his future, about the idea of marriage or children. He has several girlfriends but says he doesn’t want to tie the knot yet.
“I might make a commitment when the time comes. The girls in Medellín love gangsters. They look for boyfriends in the mafia as they know they have money to spend.”
Does he feel remorse about the people he has murdered? I ask. How can he square what he does with his Catholicism? “I know it is bad,” he says. “But I do it out of need. I do it to support my family.”
He also knows that his work may well lead to his own murder. But he tries to keep any fear tucked deep inside.
“I need to keep strong and focused. I can’t spend all my time worrying if they are going to kill me or not. Everyone dies in the end.”
Colombian assassins gained fame the world over, especially in Mexico. As Mexicans worked with their partners to move the white lady north, they also studied the notorious Colombian killing machine. The respect for Colombian hit men can be heard in many Sinaloan ballads, such as one called “De Oficio Pistolero,” or “pistol-slinger by trade.” “They are the Colombian mafiosi, they do not forgive mistakes,” the song begins.7
Mexican assassins emulated many of the Colombian techniques and also began to call themselves sicarios. Like their partners, the capos recruited young men from the slums. They also used cars to block in their victims. However, while Colombians used motorcycles, Mexicans ambushed from Jeeps and SUVs. And while Colombians used pistols, Mexicans blasted with their beloved “goat horn” rifles.
As the Mexican Drug War escalated, the AK-47 ambushers began to spray with crazy amounts of bullets. Murder victims were often found with up to fifty caps inside them, while another three hundred spent bullets lay on the concrete. Such overkill helps ensure a hit. It also drastically raises the risk of hurting civilians. I began rolling up to an increasing number of murder scenes where bullets had struck bystanders: a businesswoman driving behind a target in her VW Beetle; the man making tacos on the side of the road; the mother walking along with her baby in a buggy. The Mexican press started calling them victims of “lost bullets.” The civilian death toll hit the hundreds.
But sicarios always got their targets. And they almost always drove away unmolested. I was astounded how Mexican assassins could carry out simultaneous hits in three parts of Culiacán or Ciudad Juárez amid hundreds of police and soldiers and then disappear into thin air. And I was amazed how effective the gangsters were at kidnapping victims from their homes, workplaces,
or restaurants—and dumping their bodies in public places later. Why do people give themselves up to a criminal commando they must suspect is going torture and kill them? Why don’t they run for their lives?
Back in the prison in Ciudad Juárez, I ask these questions of Gonzalo, the cartel killer who orchestrated many of these kidnappings and assassinations. The thirty-eight-year-old operative sits on his bed in a wing of the prison run by evangelical Christians telling me about his brutal life in the mafia. His face shows little emotion as he recalls some of the techniques for sending people to their doom.
“We have all the points covered. We work like the police in the United States, you understand? In every job we have points. If someone tries to get away, there will be a point that will respond. To do a kidnapping, you have to think about it for a long time. You have to do it well, because if you mess up one time, that could be it for you.”
He also elaborates how gangsters employ a large network of spies. And how, in many cases, victims are turned in by their own relatives.
“A lot of women move in this environment as well as kids, sixteen to eighteen years old. They can be very important points, watching things. A lot of the times, family members themselves will be involved in the jobs—brothers, uncles, cousins. And then it is easier as they know everything about the person, how they move. Sometimes they arrange to meet the person in some place. And then we turn up.”
Finally, Gonzalo discusses the gangsters’ biggest aid: support from police. Local officers working with the mafia will actually block off areas so sicarios can carry out a hit, then go in afterward once the commando is safely driving away. Furthermore, gangsters will often use codes to give to police officers that stop them to identify they are “protected.” Such practices may seem terrifying revelations. But they have even been confirmed by many of the government’s own publicized interrogations of thugs.
Prison itself does not even stop some killers. In Durango state penitentiary, it was uncovered that inmates would actually leave the jail at night, carry out murders, then return to their cells—all with the complicity of prison guards. They even traveled in prison vehicles and used the guards’ guns.8 In other cases, inmates have broken out en masse to join back with their cartel armies. In Zacatecas state prison, a convoy of Jeeps and SUVs pulled up, supported by a helicopter, and busted fifty-three convicts out. In Reynosa, eighty-five inmates simply put up ladders and poured over the wall before dawn. Even Hollywood movies would not tolerate such a simple escape scene.
Gonzalo himself says his old comrades have offered to get him out of jail. But he is not interested.
“My people, my friends, said to me, ‘Let’s sort this out. There are ways to get you out of there.’ But I decided it was better to stay here, to look for peace and tranquillity, to leave the other man behind.
“I know Christ now. I know that he exists, that he is with us. I am not scared. If I am killed, amen. I am ready for whatever comes. For whatever.”
The veteran killer finally wants to be out of the game. A new generation of sicarios are replacing the old, the dead, and the imprisoned. And while Gonzalo murdered and tortured to become a rich man, the young bloods take life for peanuts.
Five miles south of the Juárez jail where I talk to Gonzalo is the so-called Juárez School of Improvement—home to thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds. The name is a little ironic, as it is a penitentiary rather than a school and keeps dangerous criminals briefly off the streets rather than leading them to higher education. To drive home this point, the front of the “schoolhouse” is defended by soldiers with machine guns mounted on sandbags, and a series of cages mark the entrance. Behind the bars are dozens of “students” who aspire to be the next generation of drug lords.
Inside it is bare and ordered. In a dining area of stone tables, I find José Antonio, a cheery seventeen-year-old in baggy pants and a loose shirt. José Antonio stands just five feet six and has chocolate-colored skin, earning the classic nickname of the short and brown, fríjol, or “bean.” He has a mop of black, curly hair and bad acne, like many seventeen-year-olds you might see banging their heads at alternative-rock concerts in Seattle or Manchester. But despite his harmless demeanor, he has seen more firefights and murders than many soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fríjol came of age in a war zone. When the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel began their paramilitary fighting on the Texas border, he was just twelve years old—and in that year he joined a street gang in his Juárez slum. When Felipe Calderón declared war on drug cartels, Fríjol was fourteen—and already had his hand in armed robberies, drug dealing, and regular gun battles with rival gangs. At sixteen, police nabbed Fríjol for possession of a small arsenal of weapons—including two automatic rifles and an Uzi—and as an accessory to a drug-related murder.
The mass recruitment of Juárez gangbangers by drug cartels is one of the key causes of the bloodbath in the city. It produced a new generation of young, sanguine sicarios only loosely controlled by the crime bosses. It put the young people of entire neighborhoods into the line of fire—on their street corners, soccer fields, or house parties. High-school-age kids from Juárez would take part in—and be victims of—massacres that shocked the world.
Fríjol is typical of the Juárez young lured into the ranks of the mafia. His parents hailed from a country village in Veracruz state but joined the wave of immigrants that flocked to work in Juárez assembly plants in the 1990s. They sweated on different production lines making Japanese televisions, American cosmetics, and mannequins for American stores, for an average of $6 a day. It was a step up from growing corn in their village, but it was also a radical change in their lives. Fríjol’s parents still celebrated peasant folk days and macho country values. But he grew up in a sprawling city of 1.3 million9 where he could tune in to American TV channels and see the skyscrapers of El Paso over the river. Contraband goods and guns flooded south, and drugs went north. He was in between markets and in between worlds.
They lived in a huge slum that stretches up a mountain on the west side of Juarez. It is known as Bible Hill because higher up the slope is a message etched into the earth that says CIUDAD JUÁREZ: THE BIBLE IS THE TRUTH. READ IT. Americans can see the message—and the slum—from the comfort of El Paso. The neighborhoods on the hill are physically better than many in Latin America. It is not a shantytown. The homes are made of drab, unpainted cinder blocks. Almost everybody has water and electricity. But Bible Hill’s slums are among the most violent barrios on the continent.
While Fríjol’s parents slaved for long days in the factories, he was left for hours at home alone. He soon found company on the street, in the community of teenagers hanging on the corner. They played soccer, laughed, shared stories, and looked after each other. And merely that—no elaborate initiation ceremony—made him part of a Juárez street gang. These gangs are known as barrios, the very word for “neighborhood.” His barrio was called the Calaberas, or skulls, and had a hundred members, all from a few blocks on the hill.
“The gang becomes like your home, your family. It is a place where you find friendship and people to talk to. It is where you feel part of something. And you know the gang will back you up if you are in trouble.”
The Calaberas were allied with a barrio to the south called El Silencio but bitter enemies of a barrio to the west called Chema 13. This shifting system of gang alliances spread like a confused spiderweb down the mountainside. Each territory bore the mark of its resident gang spray-painted on walls. Fights between rival barrios were common, often leading to deaths. For gang members, it was dangerous to wander into enemy territory. Most of the kids stayed safely within the few blocks of their territory and their people.
These barrios had been in Juárez for decades. New generations filled the ranks while veterans grew out of them. They had always fought—with sticks, stones, knives, and guns. There had always been deaths. I wrote a story on the Juárez barrios in 2004. In that year, police told me that about eig
hty murders were attributed to this street warfare. That is still a shocking number. But it was nothing compared to the blood that would flow in the streets at the end of the decade. The radical change happened when the barrios were swept up into the wider drug-cartel war.
Fríjol learned to use guns in the Calaberas. Arms moved around Juárez streets freely, and every barrio had its arsenal stashed round the homes of a few members. They would practice shooting in parks or up the mountain, then blood themselves in battles against enemy gangs. Then as the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels began to fight for the city, the mafias went to gangbangers for fresh cannon fodder.
“Men with connections started looking at who knew how to shoot. There was a guy who had been in the barrio a few years before and he was now working with the big people. And he started offering jobs to the youngsters. The first jobs were just as lookouts or guarding tienditas [little drug shops]. Then they started paying people to do the big jobs. They started paying people to kill.”
I ask how much the mafia pays to carry out murders. Fríjol tells me without stopping for a moment. One thousand pesos. That is about $85. The figure seems so ludicrous that I check it out in several other interviews up in the barrios with former and active gang members. They all say the same thing. One thousand pesos to carry out a killing. The price of a human life in Juárez is just $85.
To traffic drugs is no huge step to the dark side. All kinds of people over the world move narcotics and don’t feel they’ve crossed a red line. But to take a human life. That is a hard crime. I can at least comprehend assassins killing to jump from poverty to riches. But for someone to take a life for just $85—enough to eat some tacos and buy a few beers over the week—shows a terrifying degradation in society.