When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
– Martin Niemoller, 1946
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He looks ordinary. Nothing in his appearance signals what he has been and what he has done. I think we often use words like “evil” and “monster” in order to not admit that people like the sicario are normal and just like you or me. Somehow, even given this fact, they manage to kidnap people, torture them, kill them, cut them up, and bury them when the rest of us cannot imagine doing such things….
……I believe he is going to be part of our future. Killers like him are multiplying. The global economy has brought ruin for many, and he is a pioneer of a new type of person: the human who kills and expects to be killed and has little hope or complaint. He does not fit our beliefs or ideas. But he exists, and so do the others who are following in this path.
– El Sicario, page ix
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There, but for the grace of God, go I.
– Attributed to John Bradford
I heard this interview on CBC Radio last Saturday on my drive in to Doors Open Ottawa and grabbed a copy of the book on my way home. Then I spent the rest of the week with a giant lump in my stomach as I read my way through its devastating contents.
The book is a transcript of the interviews that formed the basis for a documentary film El Sicario: Room 164 by Gianfranco Rosi, and which grew out of an article by Charles Bowden for Harper’s. Bowden conducted the interviews with Molly Molloy as translator.
El Sicario, a state police comandante and contract killer for a Mexican drug cartel, tells of his early life of grinding poverty and the lure of abundant money offered for his progressively brutal work with the cartel. He candidly details his work and lifestyle of killing, constant partying, women, booze, drugs and the relentless string of sleepless days and nights caused by the extreme work, physical excesses and grinding schedule. Unbelievably, he does much of his work, and his inevitable fleeing, with a wife, and then a child, in tow.
But what is most disturbing is that his behaviour was not stand alone, it was not isolated and separated out from what we would consider ‘real life.’ He was a highly intelligent young man with scholarships and a society with limited outlets for that intelligence. As all mothers wish a good life for their children, his mother hoped he would become an architect, an engineer or a doctor. He dropped out of university in his fourth term and was concurrently recruited into the police academy while being paid ten times his government salary by a cartel. This, he states, is common practice; about twenty-five percent of all recruits find themselves in a similar position. “Plata o plomo”, silver or lead, is the expression for the lack of real choice when the cartel comes knocking. Take the bribe or end up in a hole. He describes the deep corruption that took root at all levels of government, and eventually absorbed the army, the silencing of journalists and well-known, established public figures, soaring murder rates and, ultimately, social implosion. Every taboo had been upended. His narrative highlights the interconnection of all parts of the self with the greater community. The nasty, cancerous bits can’t be amputated from the body when they have become the body.
I think the value in reading this book is in asking yourself whether you believe this can happen in Canada to the same degree as it happened/is happening in Mexico (one of our Free Trade partners, in case we forget). Through that lens, the importance of government transparency, strong social supports, effective policy, national control and stewardship of our natural resources, the economic strengthening of our communities and youth, meaningful citizen engagement, and other areas of private and public influence are magnified ten thousand fold. It makes all the small stuff we sweat on a personal and community level laughably, foolishly, devastatingly surreal.