Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

by Johann Hari

the past, he had seen people get shot by rival gangs and then put out to pasture, allowed out of the life. So he said that in a moment of desperation, he decided, at the age of sixteen, to shoot himself. He pulled up his trouser leg and showed me the wound. It was large and angry. Some of the nerves were destroyed: he can’t feel much there. After pulling the trigger, he said, he shot himself with Novocain and cleaned the wound up, with the skills he had learned at the training camp. “I was missing a big old chunk of meat so I had somebody help me close it and I sewed it up the best I could. I cleaned it, took some antibiotics.” On the first day, he didn’t feel much. “But the second day—” He sucked his teeth. It didn’t work. “They made me sew my bullet wound up and nurse myself,” he said. Not long after, they sent him on another job, to the nightclub in Monterrey. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill anymore. He had had enough. “I was tired of that lifestyle,” he says. “I wanted to be left alone.” That, he says, is the reason they turned on him.