The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (34 page)

“They are so afraid,” he explains, “they are usually cooperative. Sometimes when they realize what is going to happen to them, they become aggressive. Then you take their shoes away, soak their clothes, and put a hot wire to each foot for fifteen seconds. Then they understand that you are in charge and that you are going to get the information. You can’t beat them too much because then they become insensitive to pain. I have seen people beaten so badly that you could pull out their fingernails with pliers and they wouldn’t feel it.

“You handcuff them behind their backs, sit them in a chair facing a hundred-watt bulb, and you ask them questions about their jobs, number and age of children, all things you have re-searched and know the answer to. Every time they lie, you give them a jolt from an electric cattle prod. Once they realize they can’t lie, you start asking them the real questions—how many loads have they moved to the U.S., who do they work for, and if they are not paying your boss, well, why?

“They will try by this point to answer everything. Then we beat them and let them rest. We show them those videos of their family. At this point, they will give up anything we ask for and even more. Now you have the advantage, and you use this new information to hit warehouses and steal loads, to round up other people they work with, and then you video their families and begin the process again. You know the families will not likely go to the police because they know the guy is in a bad business. But if they do tell the police, we instantly know because we work with the police. We’re part of the anti-kidnapping unit. Sometimes the people kidnapped are killed instantly because, after we take their jewelry and cars, they are worthless. Such goods are divided up within the unit, among five to eight people. The hardest thing is when you kill them because then you must dig a hole to bury them. There are two mistakes most people make. They don’t pay whoever controls the plaza, the city. Or they dreamed of being bigger than the boss.”

But none of this really matters because he never asks why people are kidnapped, nor who they really are. They are simply product and he is simply a worker. Their screams are simply the background noise to the task at hand. Just as calming them or transporting them is simply part of the job.

T
HERE IS A SECOND CATEGORY OF KIDNAPPING
, one he finds almost embarrassing. Someone’s wife is having an affair with her personal trainer, so you pick up the trainer and kill him. Or a guy has a hot woman and some other guy wants her, so you kill the boyfriend to get the woman for him.

“I received my orders,” he says, “and I had to kill them. The bosses didn’t know what the limits were. If they want a woman, they get her. If they want a car, they get it. They have no limits.”

He resents people who like to kill. They are not professional. Real
sicarios
kill for money. But there are people who kill for fun.

“People will say, ‘I haven’t killed anyone for a week.’ So they’ll go out and kill someone. This kind of person does not belong in organized crime. They’re crazy. If you discover such a person in your unit, you kill him. The people you really want to recruit are police or ex-police—trained killers.”

All this is a sore point for him. The slaughter now going on in Juárez offends him because too many of the killings are done by amateurs, by kids imitating
sicarios
. He is appalled by the number of bullets used in a single execution. It shows a lack of training and skill. In a real hit, the burst goes right where the lock is on the door because such rounds will penetrate the driver’s torso with a killing shot. Twice he was stymied by armored vehicles, but the solution is a burst of full-jacketed rounds in a tight pattern—this will gouge through the armor. A hit should take no more than a minute. Even his hardest jobs against armored cars took under three minutes.

A real
sicario,
he notes, does not kill women or children. Unless the women are informants for the DEA or the FBI.

Here, he must show me. A proper execution requires planning. First, the Eyes study the target for days, usually at least a week. His schedule at home is noted, when he gets up, when he leaves for work, when he comes home, everything about his routines in his domestic life is recorded by the Eyes. Then the Mind takes over. He studies the man’s habits in the city itself: his day at work, where he lunches, where he drinks, how often he visits his mistress and where she lives and what her habits are. Between the Eyes and the Mind a portrait is possible. Now there is a meeting of the crew, which is six to eight people. There will be two police cars with officers and two other cars with
sicarios
. A street will be selected for the hit, one that can easily be blocked off. Timing will be carefully worked out, and the hit will take place within a half dozen blocks of a safe house—an easy matter since there are so many in the city.

He picks up a pen and starts drawing. The lead car will be police. Then will come a car full of
sicarios
. Then the car driven by the target. This is followed by another car of
sicarios
. And then, bringing up the rear, another police car.

During the execution, the Eyes will watch and the Mind will man the radios.

When the target enters the block selected for the murder, the lead police car will pivot and block the street, the first
sicario
will slow, the second car of
sicarios
behind the target will pull up beside him and shoot him, the final police car will block the end of the street.

All this should take less than thirty seconds. One man will get out and give a coup de grâce to the bullet-riddled victim. Then all will disperse.

The car with the killers will go to the safe house and leave their vehicle in a garage. It will be taken to a garage owned by the organization, repainted, and then sold on one of the organization’s lots. The killers themselves will pick up a clean car at the safe house, and often they return to the scene of the murder to see that everything has gone well.

He sketches this with exactness, each rectangle neatly drawn to delineate a car, and the target’s car is filled in and blooms on the page with green ink. Arrows indicate how each vehicle will move. It is like an equation on a chalkboard.

H
E LEANS BACK FROM HIS TOIL
and on his face is almost the look of a job well done. This is how a real
sicario
performs his work. In the ideal hit, no target is left alive. Should any in the group be injured, they go to one of the organization’s hospitals—“If you can buy a governor, you can buy a hospital.”

“I never knew the names of the people I was involved with,” he continues. “There was a person who directed our group and he knew everything. But if your job is to execute people, that is all you do. You don’t know the reasons or names. I would be in a safe house with the kidnapped for a month and never speak to them. Then, if I was told to kill them, I would. We would take them to the place where they would be killed, take off their clothes. We would kill them exactly the way we were ordered—a bullet to the neck, acid on the bodies. There would be cases where you would be killing someone, strangling them, and they would stop breathing, and you would get a call—‘Don’t kill them’—and so you would have to know how to resuscitate them or we would be killed because the boss never makes a mistake.”

Everything is contained and sealed. For a while they used crazy kids to steal cars for the work, but the kids, about forty of them, got too arrogant, talking and selling drugs in the nightclubs. This violated an agreement with the governor of Chihuahua to keep the city quiet. So one night around ten years ago, fifty police, and one hundred and fifty guys from the organization who were to ensure the job was done, rounded up all the kids on Avenida Juárez. They were not tortured. They were killed with a single head shot and buried in one hole.

“No.” He smiles at me. “I will not tell you where that hole is.”

He has trouble remembering some things.

“I would get up in the morning and do a line,” he explains, “then have a glass of whiskey. Then I would go to lunch. I would never sleep more than a few hours, little naps. It is hard to sleep during a time of war. Even if my eyes were closed, I was alert. I slept with a loaded AK-47 on one side, a .38 on the other. The safeties were always off.”

Do I know of the death houses, he asks. “It would take a book to do the death houses. After all, I know where six hundred bodies are buried in safe houses in Juárez. There is one death house they have never revealed that I know has fifty-six bodies. Just as there is a rancho where the officials say they found two bodies but I know that rancho has thirty-two corpses. If the police really investigated they would find bodies. But obviously, you cannot trust the police.”

He especially wants to know what I know about the two death houses uncovered last winter. I say one had nine bodies, the other thirty-six.

No, no, he insists, the second one had thirty-eight, two of them women.

He carefully draws me the layout of this second death house. One of the women, he notes, was killed for speaking too much. The other was a mistake. These do happen, though the bosses never admit to it.

But he keeps returning to the death house with the thirty-eight bodies. It has memories for him.

I remember standing on the quiet dirt street as the authorities made a show of digging up the dead. Half a mile away was a hospital where some machine-gunned people were taken that spring, but the killers followed and killed them in the emergency room. Shot their kinfolk in the waiting room also.

“The narcos,” he wants me to understand, “have informants in the DEA and the FBI. They work until they are useless. Then they are killed.”

As for those who inform
to
the FBI and DEA, they “die ugly.”

He explains.

“They were brought handcuffed behind the back to the death house where they found thirty-six bodies,” he rolls on. “A T-shirt was soaked with gasoline and put on their backs, lit, and then after a while pulled from their backs. The skin came off with it. Both men made sounds like cattle being killed. They were injected with a drug so they would not lose consciousness. Then they put alcohol on their testicles and lit them. They jumped so high—they were handcuffed and still I never saw people jump so high.”

We are slipping now, all the masks have fallen to the floor. The veteran, the professional
sicario
, is walking me through a key assignment he completed.

“Their backs were like leather and did not bleed. They put plastic bags on their heads to smother them and then revived them with alcohol under their noses.

“All they ever said to us was, ‘We will see you in hell.’

“This went on for three days. They smelled terrible because of the burns. They brought in a doctor to keep reviving them. They wanted them to live one more day. After a while they defecated blood. They shoved broomsticks up their asses.

“The second day a person came and told them, ‘I warned you this was going to happen.’

“They said, ‘Kill us.’

“The guys lived three days. The doctor kept injecting them to keep them alive and he had to work hard. Eventually they died of the torture.

“They never asked God for help. They just kept saying, ‘We will see you in hell.’

“I buried them with their faces down and poured on a whole lot of lime.”

He is excited. It is all back.

He can feel the shovel in his hand.

H
E IS CALM NOW.
He is revisiting this evil time, he says, simply for my benefit. He takes his various drawings—how to do a hit, where some people were buried in a death house—looks at the green schematics he has created, and then slowly tears them into little squares until the torn heap can never be reconstructed.

Until late 2006, he worked all over Mexico for different groups, and the various organizations generally got along. There were small moments, such as when others tried to take over Juárez and it was necessary to necklace them. But his life in the main was calm. So calm he did not need to know who he really worked for.

“I received orders from two people. They ran me. I never knew which cartel I worked for. Now there is Vicente Carrillo against Chapo Guzmán”—that is, Joaquin Guzmán Loera, head of Mexico’s largest cartel.

“But I never met any bosses, so when the war started around 2006, I did not know which one I did the killing for. And orders could cross from one group to another. I am living in a cell and I simply take orders. In thirty minutes in Juárez, sixty well-trained and heavily armed men can assemble in thirty cars and circulate as a show of force.

“Then, at my level, we began to get orders to kill each other.”

He is kidnapped but let go after an hour. This unsettles him, and he begins to think about escaping his life. But that is not a simple matter, since if you leave you are murdered. As the war escalates, he begins to distance himself from people he knows and works with. He tries to fade away. By this time, a third of the people he knows have been killed—“they were seen as useless and then killed.”

He doesn’t know the boss, he is still not even sure who his boss is. He drinks at home. The streets are too dangerous. New people arrive and he does not know them. He is not safe.

So he flees.

He confides in a friend. Who betrays him.

He pauses at this point. He knows he is guilty of a fatal error. He has violated a fundamental rule: you can be betrayed only by someone you trust. So you survive by trusting no one. Still, there is this shred of humanity in all of us, and in the end we feel the need to trust someone, to call someone friend, to share feelings with others. And this need is fatal. It is the very need he has exploited for years, the need he used when he put people in the police car and told them they would be all right if they cooperated, would be back with their families in no time if they were calm. And by God, they did trust him and rode across Mexico, went through checkpoints and said nothing, never told a single soul they had been kidnapped. They would trust him as they were tortured in the safe houses. They would help mop the floors, clean up the vomit and blood. They would compose songs. They would trust him right up to that instant when he strangled them.