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“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