Sicario is the story told in his own words of a Mexican man who worked for a major Cartel in the nineties before finding god and fleeing, aware that his life would be in constant jeopardy. The writers Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy met with the man along with filmmaker, Gianfranco Rosi, who recorded the interviews and later released a documentary. To those with a passing knowledge of the Mexican cartel world, which is also, as the book makes clear, the Mexican political world, the book’s material will be depressingly familiar. The account goes a long way towards confirming the way in which the police, military and political structures are effectively owned by the Cartels, each of which is a shark in shark filled waters, constantly in danger of being attacked itself.
Bowden writes an introduction to the book which gives a description of the man, commenting on his very ordinariness, his invisibility. This introduction suggests how easy it is for elements of this narco-terror to assimilate into society. It also provokes the frightening thought that these people, this violence, might already by present in your society or mine. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The book also brought back memories of the insidious suggestion of the infiltration of this violence into daily life which we encountered in Michoacan. Both from the exaggerated police presence and also from the anecdotal evidence which constantly came our way, even though we were only there for ten days.
Ps: this is the other side of the coin to Don Winslow’s Power of the Dog, the more downbeat, working version of that writer’s more glamorised account of similar territory.
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