Los Valencia

There is a special flower that blooms in massive quantities every year in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and some lonely parts of our own southern Mexico. A "perfect" flower by biological terms, it's small, yellow, smells like summer, and heralds a very busy harvest season to come. It heralds deft hands drying and grinding the leaves of the bush it grows on, before their date with a kerosene bath. A trip on a boat or on a plane, wrapped in plastic, and maybe even snug in a very desperate man's lower intestines. Finally, an exchange of American dollars for a taste of invincibility.

The flowers turn into berries, which are sadly of no interest to anyone of interest. The berries are, however, a deep shade of red, and yes—you guessed it—most of all, the humble coca flower heralds blood.

The swelling of the narco armies with tens of thousands of low-paid recruits explains the scale of the bloodshed here. The police are almost as brutal as us now; almost as stubborn and sick in the head, and of course we must outdo them. We're no more kind to each other. Turf wars, hunting, and killing each other over patches of dry rainforest, like spear-wielding savages. But what can you do? The coca must grow somewhere. And besides, the greatest way to improve your business has always been to consume your rivals, by any means necessary. There are no mom and pop cocaine labs—at least not for long. There's too much American money at stake. In this business, the little man died in the womb, hunted to extinction.

For a while, we did the hunting. We grew fat and wealthy, developed expensive tastes. Have you ever had caviar out of a grilled zebra's ass? Me neither. But it was on the table. Really.

With the Mexican government financing bounties on the heads of all the big narcos (millions of peso-wrapped American dollars, if you know what I mean), the coca business has come down to a lot of macro-management. Ipso facto, the top sicarios these days are real Renaissance men, skilled in every little thing besides the important work they do with guns and blades. There isn't really need for an "explosives guy" anymore. With your YouTube and your Yahoo, we are all explosives guys. We are all amateur chemists. We are all cartographers, mapping the monsoon forests for future operations. Like the others, I'm a Juan of all trades, and my patron uses me for things other than a quick kill. There are many other things. Like slow kills.

My boss, he is a very serious man. The white powder makes it so. He’s like Pacino in the movie; he likes tasting the merchandise. He says to me, inside every brave man is a coward waiting to be found. So I cut, and I break, and I burn, because I am looking for that coward. My job, what the boss wants from me, is to make absolutely certain that this poor bastard's last words are the truth.