Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [64]
Now, he looks at her and tells me she was the girlfriend of the head of the sicarios in Juárez, and the guys in charge of the cartel thought she talked too much. Not that she’d ever given up a load or anything, it was simply the fact that she talked too much. So they told her boyfriend to kill her, and he did. Or he would die.
This is ancient ground. The term sicario goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Celotas, used concealed daggers to murder (si carii meaning a dagger carrier) the Romans or their supporters.
Silence is my old friend here, a thing that feels like a hand at the throat choking off all sound. It is not the silence of the grave or the silence of the church, but the speechlessness of terror. Words barely form in the mind. And after a while, even thoughts lose shape and float like ghosts. Things are explained, but the sentences have no subject, only a hint of a verb, and after a while, even the object is a muddled thing. Two men are found dead, showing signs of torture never clearly stated, spent brass around the bodies. Elements are killing people in the city. The authorities express outrage at mayhem and disorder. All this is a form of the silence. Juárez is a place where a declarative sentence may be an act of suicide.
He leans forward and says of the cartel leaders, “Amado and Vicente could kill you if they even thought you were talking.”
Yes. Shortly before our talk, a woman—the daughter of that lawyer who posted the sign against dumping bodies or garbage—stands in front of the hotel owned by her family. She is cut down. Federal police are sleeping in a hotel. The building is strafed. But no one fires the bullets, they simply fly, tear through flesh, and eventually, the gunfire dies away and is absorbed by silence.
This photograph can get you killed. Words can get you killed. And all this will happen and yet you will die and the sentence will never have a subject, simply an object falling dead to the ground.
Sitting with the sicario, I feel myself falling down into some kind of well, some dark place that hums beneath the workaday city, and in this place, there is a harder reality and absolute facts. I have been living, I think, in a kind of fantasy world of laws and theories and logical events. Now I am in a country where people are murdered on a whim, a beautiful woman is found in the dirt with blood trickling from her mouth, and then she is wrapped with explanations that have no actual connection to what happened.
I have spent years getting to this moment. The killers, well, I have been around them before. Once, I partied with two hundred armed killers in a Mexican hotel for five days. But they were not interested in talking about their murders. He is.
What does he look like?
Just like you. Or me.
You will never see him coming. He is of average height, he dresses like a workman with sturdy boots and a knit cap. If he stood next to you in a checkout line, you would be unable to describe him five minutes later. Nothing about him draws attention to him. Nothing.
He has very thick fingers and large hands. His face is expressionless. His voice is loud but flat.
He lives beneath notice. That is part of how he kills.
He says, “Juárez is a cemetery. I have dug the graves for two hundred and fifty bodies.”
The dead, the two hundred fifty corpses, are details, people he disappeared and put in holes in death houses. The city is studded with these secret tombs. Just today, the authorities discovered a skeleton. From the rotted clothing, forensic experts peg the bones to be those of a twenty-five-year-old man. He is one of a legion of dead hidden in Juárez.
That is why I am here. I have spent twenty years now waiting for this moment and trying