Murder City_ Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields - Charles Bowden [91]
A real sicario, he notes, does not kill women or children. Well, unless the women are informants for the DEA or the FBI. And of course, anyone who informs to the Mexican police is immediately reported to the organization.
Here, he must show me. A proper execution requires planning. First, the Eyes study the target for days, usually at least a week. His schedule at home is noted, when he gets up, when he leaves for work, when he comes home, every thing about his routines in his domestic life is recorded by the Eyes. Then the Mind takes over. He studies the man’s habits in the city itself. His day at work, where he lunches, where he drinks, how often he visits his mistress, where she lives, and what her habits are. Between the Eyes and the Mind, a portrait is possible. Now there is a meeting of the crew, which entails six to eight people. There will be two police cars with officers, and two other cars with sicarios. A street will be selected for the hit, one that can easily be blocked off. Time will be carefully worked out, and the hit will take place within a half dozen blocks of a safe house—an easy matter since there are so many in the city.
He picks up a pen and starts drawing. The lead car will be police. Then will come a car full of sicarios. Then the car driven by the target. This is followed by another car of sicarios. And then, bringing up the rear, another police car.
During the execution, the Eyes will watch and the Mind will man the radios.
When the target enters the block selected for the murder, the lead police car will pivot and block the street, the first sicario car will slow, the second car of sicarios behind the target will pull up beside him and kill him, and the final police car will block the end of the street.
All this should take less than thirty seconds. One man will get out and give a coup de grâce to the bullet-riddled victim. Then all will disperse.
The car with the killers will go to the safe house no more than six blocks away and will pull into a garage. It will be taken to another garage owned by the organization, repainted, and then sold on one of the organization’s lots. The killers themselves will pick up a clean car at the safe house, and often they return to the scene of the murder to see that everything has gone well.
He sketches this with exactness, each rectangle neatly drawn to delineate a car, and the target’s car is filled in and blooms on the page with green ink. Arrows indicate how each vehicle will move. It is like an equation on a chalkboard.
He leans back from his toil, the look of pride in craftsmanship on his face. This is how a real sicario performs his work. No one is left behind alive. If anyone in the group should be injured, he goes to one of the organization’s hospitals—“If you can buy a governor, you can buy a hospital.”
“I never knew the names of the people I was involved with,” he continues. “There was a person who directed our group, and he knew everything. But if your job is to execute people, that is all you do. You don’t know the reasons or names. I would be in a safe house with the kidnapped for a month and never speak to them. Then, if the order came to kill them, I would. We would take them to the place where they would be killed, take off their clothes. We would kill them exactly the way we were ordered—a bullet to the neck, acid on the bodies. There were cases where you would be killing someone, strangling them, and they would stop breathing, and you would get a call—‘don’t kill them’—and so you would have to know how to resuscitate them, or you would be killed because the boss never makes a mistake.”
Everything is contained and sealed. In the 1990s, they used crazy kids to steal cars for the work, but the kids, about forty of them, got too arrogant and started bragging in the nightclubs and selling drugs. This violated an agreement with