Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (67 page)

22
Arizona Department of Corrections Inspector General’s Report into the death of Marcia Powell.

23
Arizona Department of Corrections Inspector General’s Office Administrative Investigations memorandum, September 6, 2009, interview with Correctional Officer Evan Hazelton.

24
Testimony of Correctional Officer Electra Allen to the Inspector General for the official investigation, September 2, 2009. See also letter from Donna Leone Hamm of Middle Ground Prison Reform to Richard Romley, Acting Country Attorney of Maricopa County, May 14, 2010. Also letter by the same to Kathleen Ingley of the Arizona Republic, September 24, 2009.

25
Arizona Department of Corrections, memorandum to Division Director John Hallahan, September 6, 2009.

26
Arizona Department of Corrections Inspector General’s Office Administrative Investigations memorandum, September 1, 2009.

27
This is a quote from the witness statements that accompany the publication of the official investigation. The names of the prisoners who were witnesses are all redacted, but their original written statements were published. The witnesses repeatedly stress that they are frightened to give a statement but they believe it is morally the right thing to do.

28
Letter from Arizona Department of Corrections Inspector General Frigo, June 1, 2009, to Warden T. Schroeder. See also http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2010/09/marcia_powells_death_unavenged.php, accessed April 2, 2013.

29
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2009-10-01/news/arizona-s-shameless-about-the-human-cage-death-of-marcia-powell-and-you-might-not-want-to-worship-pot-like-the-church-of-cognizance-but-why-the-heck-can-t-you-just-smoke-it/, accessed April 2, 2013.

30
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2009/05/marcia_powell_update_the_guard.php, accessed April 2, 2013.

31
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2009-10-01/news/arizona-s-shameless-about-the-human-cage-death-of-marcia-powell-and-you-might-not-want-to-worship-pot-like-the-church-of-cognizance-but-why-the-heck-can-t-you-just-smoke-it/.

32
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2010/09/marcia_powells_death_unavenged.php, accessed April 2, 2013.

33
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2010/09/marcia_powells_death_unavenged.php, accessed April 2, 2013. http://dmcantor.com/blog/2010/09/07/arizona-prison-guards-not-charged-in-marcia-powell-death, accessed April 2, 2013. http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2009-10-01/news/arizona-s-shameless-about-the-human-cage-death-of-marcia-powell-and-you-might-not-want-to-worship-pot-like-the-church-of-cognizance-but-why-the-heck-can-t-you-just-smoke-it/, accessed April 2, 2013.

34
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/2/it_happened_here_first_exporting_americas, accessed April 2, 2013.

35
The State of Arizona vs. Marcia Joanne Powell
, case no. CR9611017—Presentence Investigation.

36
See “Teenager Suspected in Missouri Triple Slaying,” Associated Press, March 28, 2004, accessed via LexisNexis February 29, 2013.

37
The
State of Arizona vs. Marcia Joanne Powell
, case no. CR9611017—Presentence Investigation.

Chapter 9: Bart Simpson and the Angel of Juárez

1
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10681249, accessed December 6, 2013.

2
I was also accompanied on this part of my trip by the filmmaker Rachel Siefert.

3
He had last stood over a corpse in this way a few months before, he told me.

4
http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/02/world/americas/mexico-drug-war-fast-facts/, accessed December 6, 2013.

5
http://www.ice.gov/doclib/cornerstone/pdf/cps-study.pdf, accessed December 6, 2013, via CNN report named above.

6
Nicholson,
Billie Holiday
, 208.

7
Juan does not support legalization; he believes the drug war will be ended by the Christianization of society and moral warnings. “I am sure in my heart some of the hit men will see my message.”

8
Guards came in and out throughout the interview—about two hours in, a female guard sat down and listened for most of the rest of the time.

9
In this book, wherever I’ve written about living persons and summarized facts about their internal lives, if they form a big part of the book, I’ve read or sent the material I have written to them to make sure I’d gotten everything right. Rosalio is one of only two exceptions to this. (The other is President Jose Mujica, who had a country to run so didn’t have time to read my work).

About the raw facts of his life with the Zetas, with a few exceptions that are explained in the text, Rosalio has always told a fairly consistent story about his life. But, as you will see, when it comes to how he explains why he did what he did, his story has changed radically over time. He initially said he chose to be a Zeta; later he said he was forced to become one.

It became clear in our long conversation that he wants every journalist who talks to him to present this second narrative—that he was kidnapped and forced to be a hit man—as the truth, and to dismiss the earlier narrative as false. As I spoke to him, I found that Rosalio is very angry with every journalist who has ever written about him, because they haven’t done this. For example, he said of the journalist Rusty Fleming, who interviewed him and later wrote about it: “The majority of what he said is bullshit.” When I asked Rosalio for specifics about what Fleming got wrong, he said he had Fleming’s article in his cell and said: “None of that is true.“ But then he conceded: “It is similar to what happened, but in his own words . . . Yeah, that was true.”

It soon became clear to me that the root of Rosalio’s anger with journalists is that they will not vindicate his new narrative, which he wants them to present exclusively in his words and without any skepticism. He told me all journalists have distorted him because “they always tend to switch things around and instead of looking like a victim, I look like the villain. It’s not fair. That’s the only thing I ask of you. Don’t put me in a position like that. You don’t know what I went through.” He said later: “It’s not right of him, trying to say a story in his own way. It’s not right.” He said later that journalists “use the same theory but put it in their own words.” He said to me: “I don’t want you to turn this into your own words and do like everyone else.”

I asked him if he thinks the whole interview should consist only of his own words and nothing else, and he said: “Yeah.” I did not agree to this condition, and I told him explicitly that, “I can’t just use your words.”

So it became clear to me later that my normal fact-checking process—the one I went through with, for example, Chino Hardin and Leigh Maddox, where I asked them to go through it and say sentence by sentence if what I had written was totally accurate—wouldn’t make sense with Rosalio. The only write-up of his story that he would agree was accurate would be one that entirely exculpated him, and I do not think it would be factual or reasonable to present the story he is offering now as the full truth. (Indeed, his story slipped and changed during our interview, as is clear in the text.)

The claim that he never enjoyed the violence he carried out is flatly contradicted, for example, by the wiretap evidence gathered by the police, which is quoted in this chapter.

This left me with a dilemma: Is his story reliable enough to include in the book, and if it is, how should I tell it? There is no doubt he did indeed serve with the Zetas—he is in prison for it, and the wiretaps provide explicit evidence. And crucially, as you will see, when it comes to the actual actions he carried out, he has been broadly consistent. It is his account of his motives and rationale that have changed—not, with the exception of how he got started, his account of the facts themselves. I am also inclined to believe he is telling the truth about the facts because the part of the story he has told consistently is the most unflattering part of the story: the raw facts of it show him to have been a serial killer, and he confirms those facts. I came to the conclusion that if a person is consistently over years describing a story in which he committed massive crimes, and there is a large body of legal evidence to show they occurred, then I believe it is legitimate to relay his story.

However, this interview is written up in a different way from the other interviews, to reflect the higher degree of ambiguity about some points. First, I did not send this account to Rosalio. I am sure he would react the same way he reacted to Rusty Fleming’s: he will say it is wrong because it doesn’t present him purely as a victim, but—as with Fleming—he will not be able to name any specific errors, since I have only relayed what he told me in our recorded four-hour conversation, and the evidence from other reliable sources. Second, where he has told different stories at different times about some events, I have explained this in the text, to allow the reader to reach her or his own conclusion. I included this endnote to be as transparent as possible about how I came to the conclusions in this book.

10
An account of the Zeta training camps that matches with Rosalio’s descriptions can be found in George W. Grayson,
The Executioner’s Men
, 46–48.

11
Grillo,
El Narco
, 105.

12
Grayson,
Executioner’s Men
, 181.

13
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2010/10/20101019212440609775.html, accessed October 5, 2012.

14
Grillo,
El Narco
, 96.

15
Sergio Rodriguez,
The Femicide Machine
, 62.

16
Gibler,
To Die in Mexico
, 59; Grayson,
Executioner’s Men
, 46–47.

17
“Mexican cartels lure American teens as killers,”
New York Times
, June 23, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23killers.html?pagewanted=all, accessed October 5, 2012.

18
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/war-stories/2009/08/20/day-i-met-cartel-assassin, accessed October 5, 2012.

19
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-03-12/justice/cartel.teens_1_drug-cartels-los-zetas-mexican-gulf-cartel?_s=PM:CRIME, accessed October 5, 2012.

20
“Mexican cartels lure American teens as killers.”

21
Grayson,
Executioner’s Men
, 179.

22
Ibid., 180–81.

23
“Mexican drug cartels recruit US teenagers as ‘expendables,’ ”
Digital Journal
, October 18, 2011. See also Grayson,
Executioner’s Men
, 36.

24
Howard Campbell,
Drug War Zone
, 29.

25
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-03-12/justice/cartel.teens_1_drug-cartels-los-zetas-mexican-gulf-cartel?_s=PM:CRIME.

26
Grayson,
Executioner’s Men
, 91–92.

27
Grillo,
El Narco
, 254.

28
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/war-stories/2009/08/20/day-i-met-cartel-assassin, accessed October 5, 2012.

29
“Mexican cartels lure American teens as killers.”

30
Luke Dittrich, “Four Days on Mexico Border Control,”
Esquire
, June 8, 2009.

31
Grayson,
Executioner’s Men
, 183.

32
Ibid., 36, 181.

33
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2010/10/20101019212440609775.html, accessed October 5, 2012.

34
Ibid.

35
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/6962500/Murder-victim-has-face-stitched-on-football.html, accessed October 8, 2012. Grillo,
El Narco
, 6.

36
Rothstein,
Now I’ll Tell
, 119.

37
This is corroborated by most accounts. See for example chapter 4 of Grayson,
Executioner’s Men
, 67–82, where he refers to the Zetas as having “dual sovereignty” and forming a “shadow government.”

38
Bowden,
Murder City
, 45.

39
This is explained most clearly in “Young Guns.”

40
As referenced before, this is a concept coined by Charles Bowden: see Bowden,
Murder City
, 18.