Inside the mind of a Mexican Sicario..

“They took away everything left in me that was human and made me a monster,”

In this blog I’ll take you into the mind of a Mexican Cartel Sicario.

He starts to tell his story from the beginning…

It started in 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.

I didn’t hesitate. This Offered the chance to prove that I could be an assassin — a sicario — I seized it, he said. A chance at money, power and what he craved most, respect. To be feared in a place where fear was the 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.

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, I became one of the deadliest assassins in the Mexican state of Morelos, an instrument of the cartels. By 2017, at only 22 years old, he said he had taken part in more than 100 murders, he said often in horrible ways that stretched the bounds of human imagination. Fewer than 5 percent of those cases were ever solved. The authorities have confirmed nearly two dozen of them in Morelos alone.

The Making of a Sicario

The cartel bosses huddled in a small group, taunting him. Sure, he could rob, even fight, his fellow gangsters teased him. But he couldn’t kill, they said. He didn’t have the heart.

They snickered, pushing to see how far he would go. He knew it was a test.

He was 17 and working for Guerreros Unidos, a cartel that operated across several states and smuggled heroin to the United States. Right away, he distinguished himself as smart and naturally violent. A prospect in their world.

He snapped back. They didn’t know what he was capable of, he said. In truth, he didn’t either.

His fellow gangsters pointed down the street at two young men — a pair of unwitting targets. He took off toward them, wondering if his bosses were right, that he couldn’t take a life. Then, as if someone else was controlling his movements, he pulled a small knife from his pocket and, without any warning, slit the throat of the young man closest to him.

As the blood spewed, he recalled, he buried his fear, determined to prove he was merciless, the essence of a sicario.

“I blocked myself, my own emotions, and told myself it was someone else doing it,” he said.

He later discovered that the two men were innocent, part of a game his bosses were playing. They hadn’t expected him to actually kill anyone.

When word spread, and the glow of admiration came from friends and others, his guilt subsided. No one would question him again. He was on the path now, brutal and immutable, to becoming a professional killer.

“They liked this,” he recalled. “This opened up a career for me.”

The sicario said his childhood was normal, even good. His parents were together. They taught him to care for others.

“I was taught values, principles,” he said.

Tall and slender, with a round face and hooded eyes, he moved with the economy of an athlete, which he was. He once hoped to play professional soccer, but he skipped school to hang out with a small gang, smoking pot and getting into fights. Eventually, he dropped out.

Some days, he followed his father to work, joining him on his rounds for the local water company. For a while, he thought about making a life of such work, however mundane and underpaid.

Then his father lost his job, plunging the family toward financial ruin. His mother began working from dusk until dawn for a few dollars a day. With growing resentment, he watched the humiliation and low pay of day labor, while local gangsters made big money, enjoying a respect that bordered on fear.

“That’s when I chose to live day by day,” he said. “I became a criminal.”

He worked his way up, from a small-time lookout for Guerreros Unidos to robbery and drug sales. The leaders noticed his ambition. After that first killing, the cartel leader offered him a slot in the sicario training camp.

It was 2012, and Mexico’s war on drugs was in its sixth year. Violence had reached record highs as the military took to the streets to combat organized crime and the cartels battled one another for supremacy.

Murder became a form of messaging, a spectacle of sadism — bodies hanging from bridges, chopped in pieces, deposited in public plazas, each grisly crime scene a warning, a way of saying the cartel’s violence knew no limits.

For six months, he lived in austerity with dozens of other men in the mountains of southern Mexico, he said, through terror, starvation and cold. Everywhere the specter of death.

They hunted and killed rival cartel members, and were killed themselves, often by their own trainers who disposed of them for disobeying orders or showing hesitation, he said. Trainees who ran afoul of the instructors were strung up from trees and used for target practice.

Knowing he might die for failing to follow orders — whether killing a farmer, cutting up a body or torturing a friend — was all the incentive he needed to do the unthinkable.

The Murder Business

In a year, he had transformed into a skilled assassin — battle-tested and not yet 20 years old.

After the training camp, he was sent to Acapulco, he said, to fight other cartels for the lucrative drug market in tourist districts.

A year or so later, he returned, but to a very different Morelos. His old boss had been gunned down and his old cartel, Guerreros Unidos, was nearly vanquished there, swallowed up by its one-time allies, Los Rojos.

The sicario no longer had a champion, or any allegiance at all.

Some of his old comrades had switched sides, which happened in cartel warfare, the winners subsuming the losers.

The Rojos leader, Santiago Mazari Hernández, known on the street as El Carrete, sent an emissary to recruit the sicario. He wanted him to help set up drug operations across southern Morelos state. The past was the past, he said.

“It was join them or be killed,” the sicario recalled.

They began selling drugs in Jojutla, then spread to Tlaltizapan, Tlaquiltenango, Zacatepec, fighting off other groups in the small towns across southern Morelos.

As their business expanded, so did their influence, especially on local government. They had local officials everywhere on the payroll, the sicario said, to prevent surprises like arrests or seizures.

Expanding operations meant cleaning out the competition, not just other cartels, but also local criminals — thieves, rapists, small-time drug dealers and snitches. Anyone who drew police scrutiny.

Murder was rarely for sport, the sicario said. He studied his victims at length, investigating the complaints against them. Once confirmed, he warned them to stop, mostly to keep them from drawing too much attention from the authorities. If they didn’t, he planned the killings meticulously, carrying them out only with approval from above.

“For me to kill someone, I had to have permission,” he explained. “Why do I want to kill that person? Not because I just don’t like them. That’s not how it works.” they had to be a reason.

Of all the people the sicario killed in his five-year run, only a few haunted him, he said. One in particular.

It was during a routine operation, he recalled, when his bosses sent him to eliminate a group of local kidnappers. After he arrived, he said, he found a college student with them. The sicario said he knew instantly the student was innocent: the look of terror on his face, his body language, even his clothes. They were all wrong.

Following protocol, the sicario tied everyone up and called his boss. He wanted to let the young man go. He was unaffiliated. There was no need to kill him. But the boss said no. Any witness was a liability.

As the boy begged for his life, the sicario said he looked away and told him he was sorry before slitting his throat.

“That student still haunts me,” he said, weeping. “I see his face, that kid begging me for his life. I will never forget his eyes. He was the only one who ever looked at me that way.”

He received a promotion, which brought higher pay, more responsibilities and the envy of others. He still worked for El Carrete, who ran Los Rojos cartel, but he was consumed by paranoia, and for good reason. he then was recruited and still works from the CJNG The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación) or CJNG formerly known as Los Mata Zetas and Los Torcidos.

Thanks for reading H4ckerrogue.