Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (29 page)

“We are not monsters,” he explains. “We have education, we have feelings. I would leave torturing someone, go home, and have dinner with my family, and then return. You shut off parts of your mind. It is a kind of work, you follow orders.”

For some time, his past life has been dead to him, something he shut off. But now it is back. He thinks God has sent me to convey his lessons to others. Like all of us, he wants his life to have meaning, and I am to write it down and send it out into the world. Of course, he must be careful. When he left the life two years ago, the organization put a contract on his life of $250,000. He does not know what the contract currently is, but it is unlikely to be lower. At the moment, God is protecting him and his, he knows this, but still, he must be careful.

Just the other day, a man and a woman from El Paso went to Juárez for the funeral of the woman’s sister who had been murdered the previous week. They both worked in the El Paso hospital where gunshot patients from Juárez are often brought for their own security. At about noon, two cars cut the couple off from the procession. Twenty rounds were pumped into the front seat, killing the man and the woman. Two people riding in the backseat were left unharmed. As so often happens, no one really saw anything, and so the killers in their two cars rode away as if they were invisible.

Such incidents can never be far from his mind. He is almost a scholar of such actions, since for about twenty years he performed them.

“I don’t do bad things anymore,” he says, “but I can’t stop being careful. It is a habit I have. That’s how I ensure security for myself. They killed me twice, you know.”

And he lifts his shirt to show me two groupings of bullet holes in his belly from when he took blasts from an AK-47.

“I was in a coma for a while,” he continues. “I weighed two hundred ninety pounds when I went into the hospital, a narco-hospital, and I shrunk to a hundred twenty pounds.”

It was all a mistake. The organization believed he had leaked information on the killing of a newspaper columnist, but it turned out the actual informant had been the guy paid to tap phones. So they killed that guy and “apologized to me and paid for a month’s vacation in Mazatlán with women, drugs, and liquor. I was about twenty-four then.”

He sips his coffee. He is ready to begin.

He notes that when I asked him earlier about his first killing, he said he couldn’t really remember because he used so much cocaine and drank so much alcohol. That was a lie. He remembers quite well.

“The first person I killed, well, we were state policemen doing a patrol,” he begins. “They called my partner on his cell phone and told him the person we were looking for was in a mall. So we went and got him and put him in the car.”

Two other guys get in the car, identify the target, and then leave. They are the people paying for the murder.

He and his partner have a code: When the number thirty-nine is spoken, it means to kill the person.

The guy they have picked up has lost ten kilos of cocaine, drugs that belong to the other two men.

His partner drives, and he gets in back with the victim.

The target says that he gave the drugs to his partner, and at that moment, his partner says, “Thirty-nine,” and so he instantly kills him.

“It was like automatic,” he explains.

They drive around for hours with the body, and they drink. Finally, they go to an industrial park, pry off a manhole cover, and throw the body in the sewer. For his work, he gets an ounce of coke, a bottle of whiskey, and a thousand dollars.

“They told me I had passed the test. I was eighteen.”

He checks into a hotel and does cocaine and drinks for four days.

“The state police didn’t care if you were drunk. If you really wanted to be left alone, you gave the dispatcher a hundred pesos and then they would not call you at all.”

After this baptism, he moves into kidnapping and enters a new world. Soon he is traveling all the country, he has a pilot and plane assigned to him. He is nineteen and on top of the world. He is working for the police, but whenever an assignment comes up, he gets leave.

A few of the kidnappings he participates in are simply snatches for ransom. But hundreds of others have a different goal.

“They would say, ‘Take this guy, he lost two hundred kilos of marijuana and didn’t pay.’ I would pick him up in my police car, I would drop him off at a safe house. A few hours later, I would get a call that said there is a dead body to get rid of.

“This was at the start of my career, after I passed my test. For about three years, I traveled all over Mexico. Once, I even went to Quintana Roo. I always had an official police car. Sometimes we used planes, but usually we drove. We got through military checkpoints by showing an official document that said we were transporting a prisoner. The document would have a fake case number.”

He becomes a tour guide to an alternative Mexico, a place where citizens are transported from safe house to safe house without any records left for courts and agencies. When he arrives someplace, the person has already been kidnapped. He simply picks him up for shipment.

Controlling them was simple because they were terrified.

“When they saw that it was an official car and when I said, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine. You’ll be back with your family. If you don’t cooperate, we’ll drug you and put you in the trunk, and I can’t guarantee then that you’ll see the end of the journey.’”

The drive is fueled by cocaine. He and his partner always dress well for such work—they get five or six new suits from the organization every few months. They are seldom home but seem to live in various safe houses and are supplied with food and drugs. But no women. This is all business. They hardly ever do police work, they are busy working full time for narcos.

This business looks almost normal on the surface—snatch under the guise of police work and then collect money owed to the organization. But the real product is vanishing people. Hardly anyone who is taken ever returns to the world.

This is his real home for almost twenty years, a second Mexico that officially does not exist and that operates seamlessly with the government. In his many transports of human beings to bondage, torture, and death, the authorities never interfere with this work. He is part of the government, the official state policeman with eight men under his command. But his real employer is the organization. They give him a salary, a house, a car. And standing.

He estimates that 85 percent of the police work for the organization even though on a clear day he could barely glimpse the cartel that employed him. He is in a cell, and above him is a boss, and above that boss is a region of power he never visits or knows. He also estimates that out of every hundred human beings he transports, maybe two make it back to their former lives. The rest die. Slowly, very slowly.

In each safe house, there would be anywhere from five to fifteen kidnap victims. They wore blindfolds all the time, and if their blindfold slipped, they were killed. At times, they would be put in a chair facing a television, their eyes would be briefly uncovered, and they would watch videos of their children going to school, their wife shopping, the family at church. They would see the world they had left behind, and they would know this world would vanish, be destroyed if they did not come up with the money. The neighbors never complained about the safe houses. They would see police cars parked in front and remain silent.

And the money. They might owe a million, but when the work was finished, they would pay everything, their entire fortunes, and maybe, just maybe, the wife would be left with a house and a car. People would be held for up to two years. They were beaten after they were fed, and so they learned to associate food with pain. Once in a great while, the order would come down to release a prisoner. They would be taken to a park blindfolded, told to count to fifty before they opened their eyes. Even at this moment of freedom, they would weep because they no longer believed it possible for them to be released, and they still expected to be murdered.

The prisoners memorized the individual footsteps of their keepers and knew when a hard beating was coming.

“Sometimes,” he notes, “prisoners who had been held for months would be allowed to remove the blindfolds so they could clean the safe house. After a while, they began to think they were part of the organization, and they identified with the guards who beat them. They would even make up songs about their experiences as prisoners, and they would tell us of all the fine things they would make sure we got when they were released. Sometimes, after beating them badly, we would send their families videos of them, and they would be pleading, saying, ‘Give them everything.’ And then the order would come down, and they would be killed.”

Payment to the organization would always be made in a different city from where the prisoner was held in a safe house. Everything in the organization was compartmentalized. Often, he would stay in a safe house for weeks and never speak to a prisoner or know who they were. It did not matter. They were a product, and he was a worker following orders. No matter how much the family paid, the prisoner almost always died. When the family had been sucked dry of money, the prisoner had no value. And besides, he could betray the organization. So death was logical and inevitable.

He pauses in his account. He wants it understood that he is now similar to the prisoners he tortured and killed. He is outside the organization, he is a threat to the organization, and “everyone who is no longer of use to the boss, dies.”

He is now the floating man remembering when he was firmly anchored in his world.

“I want it understood,” he says, “that I had feelings when I was in the torture houses and people would be lying in their vomit and blood. I was not permitted to help them.”

He is calm as he says this. He alternates between asserting his humanity and explaining how he maintained a professional calm while he kidnapped, tortured, and killed people. He says he is feared now because he believes in God. Then he says he could make a good grouping on the target with his AK-47 at eight hundred yards. He would practice at military bases and police academies. He could get in using his police badge.

The work, he insists, is not for amateurs. Take torture—you must know just how far to go. Even if you intend to kill the person in the end, you must proceed carefully in order to get the necessary information.

“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 ages of children, all things you have researched 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 United States, who do they work for, and if they are not paying your boss, well, why not?

“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 immediately because, after we take their jewelry and cars, they are worthless. Such goods are divided up within the unit, between five and eight people. The hardest thing is when you kill them, because then you must dig a hole to bury them. Most people make two mistakes. 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, or who they really are. They are the product, and he is a worker. Their screams are background noise to the task at hand. Just as calming them or transporting them is just part of the job. He is not living in evil, he is living beyond evil and beyond good.

He has dug two hundred fifty graves. He knows where at least six hundred corpses are hidden in Ciudad Juárez alone.

There 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 also 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 them. 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 has watched the disintegration of a professional culture he gave his life to, all in the last two years or so, when this new wave of violence began. 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 trunk with a killing shot. The pattern should be very tight. 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.