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“When I believed in the Lord,” he says, “I ran from the dead.”

But now we turn to the time he worked for the devil.

“I had a normal childhood,” he insists. He will not tolerate the easy explanation that he is the product of abuse.

“We were very poor, very needy,” he continues. “We came to the border from the south to survive. My people went into the maquilas. I went to a university. I didn’t have a father who treated me badly. My father worked, a working man. He started at the maquila at 6 P.M. and worked until 6 A.M., six days a week. The rest of the time he was sleeping. My mother had to be both father and mother. She cleaned houses in El Paso three days a week. There were twelve children to feed.”

He pauses here to see if I understand. He will not be a victim, not of poverty, not of parents. He became a killer because it was a way to live, not because of trauma. His eyes are clear and intelligent. And cold.

“Once,” he says, “my father took me and three of my brothers to the circus. We brought our own chilis and cookies so we did not have to spend money. That was the happiest day of my life. And the only time I went somewhere with my father.”

His life breaks into two pieces. There is a kind of childhood with no money, not much food, parents always working, and a crowded, small house. He is in high school, aged either fifteen or sixteen, and the state police recruit him and his friends. They get fifty dollars to drive cars across the bridge to El Paso, where they park them and then walk away. They never know what is in the cars, nor do they ever ask. After the delivery, they are taken to a motel where cocaine and women are always available.

He drops out of the university because he has no money. And then the police dip into his set of friends who have been moving drugs for them to El Paso. And send them to the police academy. In his own case, because he is only seventeen, the mayor of Juárez has to intervene to get him into the academy.

“We were paid about a hundred and fifty pesos a month as cadets,” he says, “but we got a bonus of a thousand dollars a month that came from El Paso. Every day, liquor and drugs came to the academy for parties. Each weekend, we bribed the guards and went to El Paso. I was sent to the FBI school in the United States and taught how to detect drugs, guns, and stolen vehicles. The training was very good.”

After graduation, no one in the various departments really wanted him, because he was too young, but U.S. law enforcement insisted he be given a command position. And so he was.

“I commanded eight people,” he continues. “Two were honest and good. The other six were into drugs and kidnapping.”

Two units of the state police in Juárez specialized in kidnapping, and his was one such unit. One group would take the person and then hand the victim over to the other group to be killed, a procedure less time-consuming than guarding the victim until the ransom was paid. Sometimes, they would feign discovering the body a few days after the abduction.

That was the orderly Juárez he once knew. Then in July 1997, Amado Carrillo died. This was in his eyes an “earthquake.” Order broke down. The payments to the state police from an account in the United States ended. And each unit had to fend for itself.

“I have no real idea how and when I became a sicario,” he says. “At first, I picked up people and handed them over to killers. And then my arm began to grow because I strangled people. I could earn twenty thousand dollars a killing.”

Before Carrillo’s death, cocaine was not easy for him to get in Juárez, because “if you cut open a kilo, you died.” So he and his crew would cross the bridge to El Paso and score. He is by now running a crew of kidnappers and killers, he is working for a cartel that stores tons of cocaine in Juárez warehouses, and he must enter the United States to get his drugs.

That changed after Carrillo’s death. Soon he was deep into cocaine, amphetamines, and liquor and would stay up for a week. He also acquired his skill set: strangulation,