![]() “It was join them or be killed,” the sicario recalled. He wanted him to help set up drug operations across southern Morelos state. ![]() The Rojos leader, Santiago Mazari Hernández, known on the street as El Carrete, sent an emissary to recruit the sicario. Murder became a form of messaging, a spectacle of sadism - bodies hanging from bridges, chopped in pieces, deposited in public plazas, each grisly crime scene a warning, a way of saying the cartel’s violence knew no limits.Īs the drug market churned, with new players rising and falling, training camps became academies for the industry’s enforcers. Violence had reached record highs as the military took to the streets to combat organized crime and the cartels battled one another for supremacy. It was 2012, and Mexico’s war on drugs was in its sixth year. After that first killing, the cartel leader offered him a slot in the sicario training camp. He worked his way up, from a small-time lookout for Guerreros Unidos to robbery and drug sales. “That’s when I chose to live day by day,” he said. With growing resentment, he watched the humiliation and low pay of day labor, while local gangsters made big money, enjoying a respect that bordered on fear. His mother began working from dusk until dawn for a few dollars a day. Then his father lost his job, plunging the family toward financial ruin. For a while, he thought about making a life of such work, however mundane and underpaid. Some days, he followed his father to work, joining him on his rounds for the local water company. He was on the path now, brutal and immutable, to becoming a professional killer. When word spread, and the glow of admiration came from friends and others, his guilt subsided. They hadn’t expected him to actually kill anyone. He later discovered that the two men were innocent, part of a game his bosses were playing. “I blocked myself, my own emotions, and told myself it was someone else doing it,” he said. Then, as if someone else was controlling his movements, he pulled a small knife from his pocket and, without any warning, slit the throat of the young man closest to him.Īs the blood spewed, he recalled, he buried his fear, determined to prove he was merciless, the essence of a sicario. He took off toward them, wondering if his bosses were right, that he couldn’t take a life. His fellow gangsters pointed down the street at two young men - a pair of unwitting targets. They didn’t know what he was capable of, he said. His program, explicitly authorized by law or not, was a chance to do what hundreds of other officers could only dream of: pinpoint and lock up the assassins driving the country’s homicide crisis. Capella felt, Mexico was practically issuing licenses to kill. Fewer than 5 percent of those cases were ever solved. Even as violence soared across Mexico, it was down in southern Morelos.Ĭountrywide, nearly 100 people were being killed every day, often in horrible ways that stretched the bounds of human imagination. Together, their testimony led to 100 convictions and helped cut homicides, kidnappings and extortion in the state, at least for a time, officials said. Through early 2019, the sicario proved so valuable that the police erected an even bigger wildcat program around him, recruiting more than a dozen cartel henchmen and housing them in a small, worn-down building attached to the local prison. “I didn’t want to spend my whole life in prison.” “There was nothing to think about,” the sicario recalled. Just a gentleman’s agreement, those involved called it. No legislation authorizing a witness protection program in the state.
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