EL SICARIO: ROOM 164
In 2009 Charles Bowden wrote a story for Harper’s Magazine chronicling the first hand account of a “sicario”, a contract killer working for Mexican drug cartels. The term “sicario” goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Sicarii, used concealed daggers (sicae) in their murders of the Romans.
Excerpt:
We meet in a parking lot, our cars conjoined like cops with driver next to driver. I hand over some photographs. He quickly glances at them and then tells me to go to a pizza parlor. There he says we must find a quiet place because he talks very loudly. I rent a motel room with him. None of this can be arranged ahead of time because that would allow me to set him up.
He glances at the photographs, images never printed in newspapers. He stabs his finger at a guy standing over a half-exposed body in a grave and says, “This picture can get you killed.”
I show him the photograph of the woman. She is lovely in her white clothes and perfect makeup. Blood trickles from her mouth, and the early-morning light caresses her face. The photograph has a history in my life. Once I placed it in a magazine and the editor there had to field a call from a terrified man, her brother, who asked, “Are you trying to get me killed, to get my family killed?” I remember the editor calling me up and asking me what I thought the guy meant. I answered, “Exactly what he said.”
Now the man 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.
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