cover image El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin

Edited by Molly Molloy and Charles Bowden. Nation, $15.99 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-56858-658-8

A participant in Mexico's orgy of drug violence bares his soul in this rambling confessional, expanded from a Harper's Magazine piece and film documentary. The anonymous author, a former hit man for the Juarez drug cartel who cops to hundreds of murders, details the vida loca of an archetypal narco-traficante: the meticulous procedures for kidnapping, torturing, murdering, dismembering, and burying victims; the drugs and hookers that make the routine bearable; the abject servility to cartel bosses whose word is law, even if it means executing close colleagues. The author's most startling claims concern the collusion of Mexico's security agencies and military with the cartels; he himself was one of many Chihuahuan state police officers who worked for the cartels with police officials' blessing. Unfortunately, El Sicario's narrative is a disjointed transcript of an interview with Bowden (Murder City), a veteran in writing about the Mexican drug trade, and research librarian Molloy. The text, padded out with the author's illegible stick-figure diagrams, is repetitive and wanders off into vague, hearsay conspiracy theories or effusions on his born-again Christianity. The book's eyewitness v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9 style makes for a colorful story, but lacks shape and perspective. (June)