author: Charles Bowden

name: Steev

average rating: 3.76

book published: 2011

rating: 5

read at: 2012/07/11

date added: 2012/07/11

shelves: crime, border

review:
This book falls into the category recently invented by the Wonkette blog: "Things You Never Knew About Mexico But Now That I Know It Can I Unknow It?" or something like that.

"El Sicario" is the story of a Mexican guy who was involved with the narcotrafficking cartels in Juarez for years, and then got out, just barely, and because he's still wanted by his old bosses he agreed to tell his story for a filmmaker and the editors of this book only if it was done without his real name, with a hood over his head and his voice altered.

A lot of his life story is not things we haven't heard about before in countless news stories and cops-and-robbers shows and films. The graphic, merciless violence and torture. The fact that no mistakes or questioning of any kind is tolerated from the minions of the drug lords. The general idea that the cartels are immensely powerful. Yes, all of these things are things we've heard something about. But the depth and the level of detail here is new. The precise descriptions of certain types of torture, certain ways of kidnapping or executing victims, are impressive. Most eye-opening is the idea that the foot soldiers of the narcos are so good at what they do because they were literally trained by the government, at police academies. The cartels pay people to sign up to be cops and go through the training and embark on a fake career as a police officer, but the whole time they are actually on the other team, working for the cartels as executioners, enforcers, body-hiders, couriers, and more. They even go to FBI and DEA training courses in the U.S. as part of their police academy schooling, and become experts at the use of weapons, surveillance techniques, etc.

It's a truly staggering idea in a staggering book and drive home even further even a previous conception of how massively fucked Mexico is. The one topic that I wish this assassin had brought up in the book was where is all the money coming from that makes these cartels so powerful and created this situation? The answer: drug users in the U.S. We've ruined this other country and turned it into a horrible battleground, simply for our recreational pleasure.