He Was One of Mexico’s Deadliest Assassins. Then He Turned on His Cartel.
“They took away everything left in me that was human and made me a monster,” said the hit man.
The former assassin in a jail that serves as part of a makeshift witness protection program.Credit…Alexandra Garcia/The New York Times
By Azam Ahmed and Paulina Villegas
Published Dec. 14, 2019Updated Feb. 28, 2020
JOJUTLA, Mexico — The recruits filed into a clearing, where a group of trainers with the stern bearing of drill sergeants stood in a tight row, hiding something.
“How many of you have killed someone before?” one of the instructors asked. A few hands shot up.
The trainers separated, revealing a naked corpse face up in the grass. One thrust a machete into the nearest man’s hand.
“Dismember that body,” he ordered.
The recruit froze. The instructor waited, then walked up behind the terrified recruit and fired a bullet into his head, killing him. Next, he passed the blade to a lanky teenager while the others watched, dumbfounded.
The teenager didn’t hesitate. Offered the chance to prove that he could be an assassin — a sicario — he seized it, he said. A chance at money, power and what he craved most, respect. To be feared in a place where fear was currency.
“I wanted to be a psychopath, to kill without mercy and be the most feared sicario in the world,” he said, describing the scene.
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Like the other recruits, he had been sent by a drug cartel known as Guerreros Unidos to a training camp in the mountains. He envisioned field exercises, morning runs, target practice. Now, standing over the body, he was just trying to suppress an urge to vomit.
He closed his eyes and struck blindly. To survive, he needed to stay the course. The training would do the rest, purging him of fear and empathy.
“They took away everything left in me that was human and made me a monster,” he said.
Within a few years, he became one of the deadliest assassins in the Mexican state of Morelos, an instrument of the cartels tearing the nation apart. By 2017, at only 22 years old, he had taken part in more than 100 murders, he said. The authorities have confirmed nearly two dozen of them in Morelos alone.
When the police caught him that year, he could have faced more than 200 years in prison. But instead of prosecuting him, the authorities saw an opportunity, a chance to pick apart the cartel from the inside. They made him the centerpiece of an off-the-books police operation that dismantled the cartel in southern Morelos, resulting in the arrest and conviction of dozens of its operatives.
For investigators, he was a gold mine, a complete reference book on the state’s murder industry. For the sicario, the government was a lifeline.