In the early morning, as he performed his ritual, turning himself under the stars so that they seemed to be slowly wheeling above him rather than he beneath them, Riordan heard a rhythmic throbbing in the distance. The pounding of rotor blades grew louder, and it was close to deafening as the helicopters flew directly over San Patricio. He could see their navigation lights but not how many there were, or if they were military, though he assumed they were—they had come in from the west, probably taking off from the air force base near Hermosillo. He further assumed that their destination was the heroin refinery; two days ago, right after he and Lisette had returned from the Sierra Madre, he had called Inspector Bonham on the burner phone, reported what they’d seen, and relayed the results of his time and distance calculations.
His assumptions were correct, but he didn’t know that until the next afternoon, when the Hermosillo newspapers were delivered. “ARMED FORCES DEAL THE BROTHERHOOD A BLOW,” read a front-page headline. The raid was the lead story on TV, with video clips showing troops torching the poppy fields and the refinery, stacking morphine and heroin bricks (an estimated value, said the reporter, of more than $3 million) alongside a cache of captured weapons, and several handcuffed narcos, none of whom Riordan recognized as he watched in the rectory parlor with Father Hugo and the Old Priest. He hoped the two thugs on the ATV were among them.
Only Bonham and Valencia knew of his role in the raid. During the phone call, after he’d presented his information, Bonham ordered him not to tell anyone they had spoken. Not now, not ever.
“How about your girlfriend? Did you mention that you were going to call me?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, and no, I didn’t say a thing to her.”
“And you’re not going to,” Bonham repeated, with a sternness that was a little frightening. “The fewer people who know, the better. It’s for your own good. The narcos know you two were up there. After we hit them, they might do some simple arithmetic and finger you or her or both of you. And don’t think for one second your Roman collar or your gringo passport will save you. I’ll bet you didn’t consider that, did you?”
Riordan was silent.
Bonham promised to “throw out some smoke” by telling the media that the crew of a military reconnaissance plane had located a heroin factory while on a routine patrol.
“You did a damn good job. Even Valencia was impressed,” he said. “Don’t worry—I take care of my assets.”
The praise did not warm Riordan particularly; nor did the assurance. Asset. Is that what I am? An asset? he wondered. Then another question: What have I gotten myself into?
He answered it on the day following the raid, when he ran into Lisette and she remarked, “What a coincidence, right where we’d been last Tuesday. It was a coincidence, wasn’t it Tim?” she asked. What troubled him more than his lie was the ease and sincerity with which he told it. He seemed to have a capacity for dissimulation he’d been unaware of. What if the Brotherhood didn’t buy the cover story and did the simple arithmetic? He was ready—at least he thought he was—to suffer the consequences, but he couldn’t live with himself if anything happened to her. That possibility chipped at his resolve to keep the truth from her. Someone had to strike back at the wolves. Why not him? Emotion without action is sentimentality, and words could be action. He’d known something, he’d said something. But in exiting one house of silence, he’d entered another—the one where informants dwelled. That’s what he’d gotten himself into.
* * *
At the hour when last light drew the Sierra’s ravines and ridges into sharp relief, he crossed the plaza and walked half a block down Avenida Juárez to the Hotel Alameda. Riordan dined there now and then to mingle socially with his parishioners—and to get away from the cloistered, hothouse atmosphere of the rectory. The Alameda dated back to the 1940s, when San Patricio began to be known as a destination for adventurous travelers on the Mission Trail. It would take a foolhardy tourist to visit San Patricio today. Not one of the hotel’s ten rooms had been occupied for the past decade. But the bar and restaurant, grandly called the “Salón Alameda,” were still in operation, catering to a local clientele. Riordan loved its Bogie-and-Bacall ambience: ceiling fans, white and black hexagonal floor tiles, a mahogany bar, faux-marble tables.
The place was depressingly empty this evening. The sole occupants, aside from a customer at the bar, were the bartender and a waiter wearing a starched white jacket. Riordan took a small table against a wall decorated with movie posters plugging Mexican and American films from a bygone time, the names of the actors and actresses no longer remembered, with the possible exceptions of a sultry Gina Lollobrigida swooning in Burt Lancaster’s arms.
The waiter, rather ceremoniously, said that the hotel was pleased to see Padre Tim in its dining room once again. Riordan couldn’t help it—the respect in the man’s voice sent a tickle of pride through him.
“I know you like to read these when you eat,” the waiter added, handing him copies of El Diario de Juárez and the Hermosillo paper, El Imparcial.
He ordered a Herradura on the rocks and, without looking at the menu, a bowl of menudo.
“Is that all? You look thinner than last time you were here.”
“I am trying to fast.”
“We have cabrilla tonight. Excellent cabrilla. Broiled.”
“I promised God I would fast.”
“This cabrilla is fresh, Padre Tim. It was shipped here today from Guaymas.”
“You are the voice of the devil. Well, I suppose I can return to fasting tomorrow.”
“Yes. Better to fast tomorrow, when the cabrilla will be stale and dry.”
The news of the day required a stiff drink, and Riordan waited until the tequila arrived to read the papers. El Diario carried a front-page story about an attack on a drug rehabilitation clinic in Juárez, which had recently acquired an unenviable distinction: it was the deadliest city in the world, including Baghdad. Gunmen wearing “police-style” uniforms had stormed the clinic while the director was holding a prayer meeting, killing him and nine patients, some of whom were believed to belong to a drug gang called the Artist Assassins. No one was willing to say whether the killers were policemen or gang rivals disguised as policemen. A photograph showed a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe chipped by bullets, the wall behind it spattered with blood.
The waiter brought the menudo, steaming in a blue bowl. Tripe soup seemed fitting for his reading fare. EVITA CONTRERAS HABLAR SOBRE NARCOMENSAJES, read a headline in El Imparcial. “Contreras Avoids Speaking About Narco Messages.” Octavio Contreras had been the losing candidate for mayor of Hermosillo in this year’s elections. The messages about which he refused comment had been printed on bedsheets hung in several places throughout the city. They accused him of being an atheist, a front man for Carrasco’s old Sonora Cartel, and a thief. They concluded ominously, if obscurely, Ahora llega nuestro turno, “Now comes our turn.” And they were signed, “La Fraternidad.”
No comment. No comment. Avoids speaking about … Riordan thought. The house of silence. The broiled fish arrived whole on a platter, its flame-whitened eyes staring through a crust of spices and bread crumbs. From out of nowhere, the melody to “The Sound of Silence” started to play in his memory. He separated the meat from the bones and began to eat. He could not get the tune out of his head—an earworm, burrowing a channel into his brain. He had finished only half his meal when he felt something moving through him, a kind of pressure as words flowed into the channel, a swift tide of words that burst the banks and flooded his mind. He asked the waiter for a pen and some paper place mats. The waiter frowned, quizzically.
“To write on,” Riordan explained.
The requested items were brought. He turned a mat over to its plain side and began to write. He made no attempt to organize his thoughts, jotting them down as they came to him. He scribbled in a rush, compulsively, feeling like an overwrought coffeehouse poet. But he stayed within his theme: it was time for everyone in the parish to abandon their houses of silence. In fragmented sentences, he tried to express his contempt for the narcos and their savagery—and his disapproval of those in the parish who had shut their eyes, their ears, their minds and mouths to the scourge that was all around them. He had only a vague idea, at first, of his purpose in writing; but when he’d filled two mats with his near-illegible scrawl, it came to him that he was composing a rough draft, a very rough draft, of Sunday’s homily. It would be like none he’d given before.
He wrote on, in a physical as well as a mental heat, breaking out in a sweat, until the waiter interrupted him.
“Pardon me, Padre. Jamie wishes to buy you a drink.”
“What? Who?”
The waiter gestured at the customer at the bar, who swung around on the stool to face him. It was Jamie García, the man who had left the message with Domingo asking to speak with Riordan. How long ago was it now? Two weeks at least, maybe three.
“Another Herradura. On the rocks.”
It was delivered shortly. He rolled the chilled glass across his forehead to cool the fever in his brain, then raised it in thanks to García.
“Padre Tim, can I join you for a moment?” the man called from across the room.
Riordan motioned to him, and he came over and sat down, looking as if he could crush the table with his bare hands. García was six feet tall, with an engine block of a torso and fingers as thick and brown as cigars.
“You don’t mind? I see that you’re busy.”
“I don’t mind at all. I should have called you days ago.”
García wanted to have a word with Riordan about his middle son, Danielo, who had been keeping odd hours, coming home at dawn, sleeping in till noon, driving off to who knew where in his brand-new truck. Danielo claimed to have a job at the copper mine, working a night shift, which may have accounted for those strange hours; but he was never dirty, and he could not possibly afford such a fine truck on a miner’s wages. Jamie was worried that his son was using drugs or, worse, had become involved with “those people.” (That was how nearly everyone referred to La Fraternidad, as if too fearful to utter its name.)
“Would you talk to him, Padre Tim? He’s only twenty-one. He’s young enough to straighten out if he’s doing something he should not be doing.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“Sure. And not only once. But I can say nothing to him without making a big fight.”
Riordan felt for the man. He knew that García had been a fairly prosperous apple grower whose small orchard in the Santa Teresa valley produced enough fruit for sale as far away as Mexico City, with some left over for export. NAFTA ruined him, along with a million other small farmers in Mexico. American apples, more aesthetic than the Mexican variety, tumbled into the country by the trainload, while those grown in the country fell into the grasp of agribusiness giants. García couldn’t compete, sold out to one of the big firms for half of what his orchard was worth, and had been scraping by as a seasonal field hand ever since.
Yes, Riordan said, he would speak to Danielo, but only if Danny came to him.
“I thank you,” García said, enveloping Riordan’s hand in his.
* * *
He never expected to see Danielo, and so he was caught off balance when García’s son showed up the next afternoon at the parish office, breaking Riordan’s concentration—he was working on his sermon, revising, polishing, imposing order and clarity on the semicoherent sentences.
Danielo was built like Jamie, and an inch taller; his body communicated irresistible leverage. He was got up like a well-off young ranchero in a beaverskin Stetson, a suede jacket over a white shirt, starched Levi’s with a crease that could slice butter, quilled boots polished to a high gloss.
“My father wants me to see you. I respect him, so here I am,” he said, smirking, hooking his thumbs into his tooled leather belt.
“That isn’t what I heard,” Riordan said, annoyed by Danielo’s cocksure manner.
“What did you hear? From who?”
“From him. That every time he tries to talk to you there’s an argument.”
“I promise not to argue with you,” he said.
Surrendering all hope of resuming work, Riordan invited him to have a seat.
“Not here,” Danielo said. “I don’t want to talk here.”
“Where would you find suitable?” asked Riordan, unable to keep a caustic note out of his voice.
“Would it be all right if we rode around in my truck?” Danielo said, now with more civility.
“Your truck … Where…?”
“Just ride around.”
Something to hide, Riordan thought.
“All right, but no more than half an hour.”
It was a flame-red Chevy Silverado with a ton of chrome, and Danielo, like any twenty-one-year-old, was proud of it. They cruised through the pueblo for a while, Danny bragging about the Chevy: the big engine, the extended crew cab, the radio with Bose speakers, the GPS—
“I don’t think your father expects me to talk cars with you,” Riordan said to end the monologue.
“Okay. I guess you should start, Padre, because I’m not sure what he wants me and you to talk about.”
“He’s worried that you might be using drugs.”
“Then this will be a short talk. I don’t do drugs. Never use product—that’s what I’ve been told.”
Riordan recognized that phrase, the professional narco’s rule of thumb.
“It’s ‘product’ to you. So you’re selling the stuff?”
“I don’t sell drugs,” Danielo answered, sounding rather pleased.
“Another thing on your father’s mind is where you got the money for a truck like this. I’m not interrogating you, but do you mind telling me?”
“I don’t sell drugs,” he repeated, driving along slowly, casually resting the wrist of one hand on the wheel. “But maybe you’re getting warm.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Danielo shrugged.
“A truck like this must cost two hundred thousand pesos—”
“Tres,” Danielo said smugly.
“Trescientos mil! On a miner’s salary?”
“I’m not a miner, Padre Tim. I’ll show you.”
At a traffic circle, Danielo turned down a street that soon became the dirt road leading out of town toward the copper mine. After a mile or so, he stopped on a rise overlooking a huge wound in the earth from which pale dust rose in tendrils, like steam from a volcanic crater.
“What are we doing out here?” Riordan asked.
Danielo replied with his own question: “Do you know who owns that?”
“A Canadian company, Reliance Resources.”
“They’re part owners. I don’t work for them. I don’t work in the mine. I work for the partners.”
“I see. And who are these partners and what do you do for them?”
“Anything you say to a priest is a secret, is that right?”
“Anything said in confession, yes.”
Danielo switched the engine off and put the parking brake on and turned toward Riordan.
“Okay, then. I want to make a confession.”
“Confessions are on Friday afternoons at four. If you came to church now and then, you would know that.”
Too sharp, Riordan chided himself.
“Sure. But I’d like to confess now, here,” said Danielo. “I’d like to go to Communion tomorrow. My father, you know, he goes every Sunday, and he wants all of us to go with him because it’s almost Christmas. I think that’s why he wanted me to talk to you.”
His manner and tone had passed rather quickly—too quickly, it seemed—from cocky and flippant to earnest and reasonable.
“If you’re not sincere about it, it won’t be valid,” Riordan said.
“Didn’t I say I was?”
This would be another first for Riordan: hearing a confession in a pickup truck. He had an inkling that Danielo might be manipulating him, but there was no way to refuse him. He removed his purple stole from his pocket and draped it over his neck to make things look proper. They went through the ritual right there in the Chevy Silverado, Danielo admitting that he’d missed Mass for at least a year of Sundays, that he’d had premarital sex—he couldn’t recall how many times, but a lot—that he’d fought with his father, dishonoring him, oh, it must have been on three or four occasions, but swearing, all the while looking into Riordan’s eyes with a straightforward expression, that he’d never killed anyone, never touched a bale of mota or a brick of heroin.
“Danny, you don’t have to confess to what you did not do,” Riordan said, thinking that Danielo was angling to be excused from some as yet unconfessed trespasses. “Is there anything else?” he inquired.
“Like what?”
“Like what you do for these people you call ‘the partners.’”
Shifting his gaze from Riordan’s face, Danielo looked thoughtfully out the windshield.
“I … you know … I hurt a couple of people for them. Not real bad. I beat them up a little. They hired me because of my size and because I do some boxing.”
“So did I when I was young—boxed, that is. Go on. Why did you beat them up?’
“The rule is this: If somebody screws up, like steals or something, they get a warning first. The second time, they get beat up. The third time … you know.”
“I know, sure. But you swore to me that you’ve never killed anybody.”
“I swear it a second time.”
“You’re forcing me to pull things out of you. Are you sorry for what you did? Do you still beat people up for these partners?”
“No!” Danielo replied. “I’ve been promoted. I’m like an executive who keeps the accounts settled. The mine owes the partners so much per ton of ore per week.”
“Who are the partners? The Brotherhood?”
“The partners are the partners. All I do for them is check up on production and make sure the mine doesn’t cheat. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”
“Then let me help you see. It’s called extortion,” Riordan said, pouring judgment into the word. “Extortion would fall under the Seventh Commandment. Every week, you’re stealing.”
“That’s what you call it,” Danielo said, turning sullen.
“A mine foreman was murdered a while back for refusing to pay.”
“I wasn’t involved in that. How many times do I have to tell you that I never did anything like that?”
“Some other people have had to pay cuota. Do you collect from them, too?”
“The mine, that’s all I do. It brings in a lot of money.”
At a meeting last year of the diocesan priests, the assembled clerics had discussed what they should do, what they could do about the narcos. You must try to change their interior life, the bishop advised. You must try to change their values. Think of Christ entering the house of Zacchaeus. Appropriate in this case, Riordan thought. Zacchaeus had been a tax collector, and in a sense, so was Danielo. But the bishop’s counsel seemed abstract and even silly now, as he sat in the shiny Silverado beside the young criminal. How was he to change Danielo García’s values?
He said, “You know that to belong to a mafia is a sin. Anyone mixed up with those people cannot go to Communion.”
“I do what I do because I have to,” Danielo said, a plea in his voice expressing, if not contrition, then something like regret. “Come by our house. New furniture. I bought it. A new TV. I bought it. We don’t have to eat beans and rice every day because we can afford chicken, pork, steak. I’m not going to be like my father, picking fruit for pesos.”
I could hear the same argument from some punk dealer on the South Side of Chicago, Riordan thought.
“You must get out,” he said. “If you care at all about your soul, you’ve got to find a way out.”
Danielo’s lips curled in scorn. “You don’t quit those people—you know that.”
“This truck, the TV, the steaks—maybe that’s what you don’t want to quit.”
“I would if I could. I’m telling you the truth, Padre Tim.”
“You had better be. God knows the truth of what’s in your heart, and if sincere contrition isn’t in your heart … The best way for you to show that it is is to change your life. I cannot absolve you if you aren’t sorry for what you’ve done and you don’t pledge to change your life.”
Which Danielo did. Riordan did not believe one word of it, if for no other reason than Danielo was right: you did not quit “those people,” because to quit them was to hand yourself a death sentence. He couldn’t demand that a twenty-one-year-old kid sacrifice his life. There was in the end no choice but to take him at his word.
But when he returned to the rectory, he was troubled by the thought that he’d immersed himself in a charade, a simulacrum of a sacrament. He felt like taking a shower in the hottest water he could stand.
* * *
His sermon on that Sunday in Advent did not express the usual anodyne sentiments about the joy of the Christmas season—all Christians awaiting, anticipation in their hearts, the birth of their Savior. He mounted the pulpit and, for five or six seconds, said nothing as he swept his eyes over the congregation. This was long enough to provoke some uneasiness, people clearing their throats, squirming in the pews. Good. Discomfort was the effect he wanted to achieve. His dramatic silence was followed by a dramatic gesture: he unfurled the visual aid he’d created the previous night out of an old bedsheet and draped it over the front of the pulpit. Printed on it in red block letters were the names of the eleven men slain by narcos in the parish in the past year alone. And still he did not speak, allowing another few seconds to pass before he startled everyone by uttering a single word in a full-throated voice:
“SILENCE!”
After an interval during which the parishioners froze in their seats and lifted their gazes to his face, he began:
“Octavio Mirales … Roberto Sánchez … Miguel Patiño…” He read the rest of the names down to the last.
“What you have just heard are the sounds that silence makes,” he said. “The names of our dead, young men torn from life by the criminals in our midst. This will be the topic of my sermon for today, silence and the sounds it makes.” Looking over the pews, he saw that he had everyone’s attention. No fidgeting or nodding off or wandering gazes—the typical responses to his homilies. “There are other sounds, the mourning of their mothers, their wives, their children … the grief that will shriek forever in the hearts of their fathers and brothers and sisters. What is silenced is the sound of gunfire, of a man’s screams as he is tortured before he is murdered, and this, too—of young women brutally kidnapped and raped.” He avoided making eye contact with Cristina Herrera, so as not to call attention to her. “It is the sound of our police officers telling the victim of a rape that she should consider herself fortunate not to have been killed.” His glance fell on a municipal police sergeant, Rigoberto Ochoa. “And it is the sound of witnesses to all these abominations … SAYING NOTHING!”
Riordan paused and again scanned the congregation for several long seconds.“Most of you fear even to speak the name of the wolf pack that menaces us. I myself was reluctant to say it out loud—but no longer.… THE BROTHERHOOD! I will name them, too, the pack’s leaders: Ernesto Salazar. Enrique Mora. Rubén Levya! They are the wolves who savage us with abductions, murder, extortions.” Now he noticed movements in the pews, parishioners turning their heads right and left, as if expecting armed thugs to burst into the church at any moment, but he rolled on, praising the brave men who had volunteered for the citizens’ militia, scathing those who thought the narcos were the true valientes, exhorting everyone to abandon the house of silence and speak out. “If you know something, then say it. Report it to the authorities. I know that because of what happened here last month, many of you think the army and the Federal Police are as much your enemy as the Brotherhood—but we must give them a vote of confidence that they will have the resolve and the intention to deliver us from this evil. They cannot carry out their duties if we do not carry out ours, if we do not STAND UP AND SPEAK OUT!”
Pausing once more, he looked from face to face and found Danielo García looking back at him with an obdurate tilt to his chin. “I want to remind you of another duty you have as Catholics,” he said, in the rhythms of a hellfire tent revivalist. “Some of you have fallen into criminal activities, some of you have colluded with the narcos, and so you have contributed to this culture of violence and death.… You are in a state of sin if you belong to the Brotherhood. To any narco gang. You know who you are.”
He gave his parishioners a final, measured look before stepping down to the altar. Many people were staring at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses; no priest had ever spoken to them as he had.
He felt light, relieved of a burden, as he led them through the Nicene Creed and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—Deliver us, O Lord, from every evil, for Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, now and forever—and through the consecrating of the hosts and wine, arriving at the high point of the Mass, Communion.
Cuerpo de Cristo, he murmured. Sangre de Cristo, murmured the lay assistant beside him, proffering the chalice. Mouths opened at the Communion rail; the tips of tongues darted out. Like baby birds in a nest, he thought. Others took the host in cupped hands. Cuerpo de Cristo—Father Hugo was giving Communion at the rail on the right side of the center aisle. Sangre de Cristo, said Father Hugo’s assistant, wiping the chalice’s rim with a cloth before presenting it to the next communicant. Body of Christ. Blood of Christ. Intoned over and over. It seemed that everyone at Mass this Sunday had a spotless soul.
With the rail emptied, those waiting in line behind stepped up and knelt, hands folded. César and Marta Díaz, César’s sister-in-law, Lupita. Was she still cursing God? Domingo and Delores Quiroga. He hesitated as he approached the next two: the Very Pious Señora Herrera and her daughter. Body of Christ, he whispered to the señora and sidestepped to Cristina, who, as her mother returned to their pew, bowed her head and crossed her arms over her chest. This gesture meant that she was in mortal sin but was asking for his blessing. Had she gone through with it? He blessed her, drawing the sign of the cross on her forehead with his thumb. The García family was at the end of the rail: Jaime and his wife, his three sons, Danielo the last. Riordan placed the host on his upturned palms. Cuerpo de Cristo.
Following the recessional, he took his customary place at the front door to greet his parishioners. Two or three mumbled congratulations for the sermon. César was more effusive, clapping him on the back. “You let us have it, Padre Tim, and good for you.” But most people merely nodded to him or shook his hand and went on their way; and some steered clear of him, as if he carried a contagion.
As he went back into the church, he caught a movement in a corner of the vestibule. A figure stepped out of the shadows and stood still, hands crossed over his groin. It was Danielo.
Riordan’s throat clutched. Danielo’s face seemed to have undergone a transformation: it looked as hard, cold, and immobile as the marble face of some cruel Roman emperor, and the eyes meeting Riordan’s were lifeless. It was probably the look Danielo put on when making his weekly collection, Riordan realized. But he couldn’t permit himself to be intimidated by a twenty-one-year-old thug.
“What do you want, Danny?” he said brusquely.
Danielo stuck out his tongue. The white glob on it looked like a wad of gum. He spat the Communion host at Riordan’s feet, turned, and walked outside, leaving Riordan so shocked that he could not move.
YouTube COMMUNIQUÉ #2
VIDEO: Women in bright pastel dresses that hang like scalloped draperies are lined up in front of a cave that’s been converted into a house, the entrance modified and framed to form a door, the front faced with mortared river rocks. Some of the women carry dirt-smudged children in cloth sacks slúng from their backs, papoose-style; others hold toddlers by the hand. The children can be heard coughing and wheezing.
AUDIO (VOICE-OVER): Brothers and sisters! Good day once again from the comandancia of the Brotherhood in the Sierra Madre. It is I, the Butterfly, who spreads his beautiful wings and flies to you wherever you are to bring you news. In my last communiqué, I promised justice, and it is news of justice I bring you. Two kinds of justice.
Our Lord and Savior commands us to care for the poor and the sick. It is a command which we of the Brotherhood take seriously. This was the scene recently in the aldea of San Miguel, inhabited by the Tarahumara people …
VIDEO: Two men in sun-bleached denim jackets seated behind a table made of planks laid across sawhorses. Small boxes of medication are spread on the table. CLOSE on a box. The label reads: Virazone. WIDE on the women as they step up one by one to the table, the two men handing tablets to each.
AUDIO (VOICE-OVER): These children were suffering from infections in their lungs, from bronchitis and even pneumonia. When we of the Brotherhood learned about this, we immediately dispatched a medical team to be of assistance. Our team obtained this medicine and dispensed it to the sick children of San Miguel. This is social justice, brothers and sisters. Perhaps our government could stop sending soldiers to terrorize the people and instead send medical teams to heal them when they are sick.
And now for another kind of justice, a stern but necessary justice. In my previous message, I told you about the murders of two innocent young men in the pueblo of San Patricio. They were murdered last month by soldiers while peaceably protesting against the military’s oppression. Only last week, these same soldiers came to the aldea of Mesa Verde to spread more of their terror and oppression, but the Brotherhood was there to intercept them …
VIDEO: In a meadow, four soldiers wearing combat uniforms sit gagged, blindfolded, and bound by ropes to white plastic chairs. The gags and blindfolds appear to wrap around bare poles behind the chairs, as if to hold the soldiers’ heads upright. A placard hangs from the neck of each, with his last name and the word asesino printed beneath it and, beneath that, the Brotherhood’s logo. A burst of automatic weapons fire comes from offscreen. The soldiers twitch and jump from the bullets’ impact, but they are trussed so tightly to the chairs that they don’t fall. The camera lingers on them as the narration resumes.
AUDIO (VOICE-OVER): I, the Butterfly, send this video postcard to the families of the army’s victims, so you will know that a just vengeance now is yours. As I said last time, we keep our promises.
FADE TO BLACK.