It's Alive!

It’s alive was the first thing that came to my mind when I seen Juan Ortega one of Mexico’s most violent drug cartel leaders happily walking across the street from me while I was on vacation in Acapulco, Mexico. The classic line from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

My heart began to beat so fast that I thought it would burst. Not from fear of the dead, but from making a mistake after a kill to actually see if the victim was truly dead.

I’m an experience assassin sniper working for the D.E.A. (Drug Enforcement Agency) for over 25 years.

The target was a well known Drug Cartel leader and murderer. The deaths of nine women and children has thrust into focus a small religious community and their long history in a remote corner of northern Mexico. Amid the scrubby foothills of Sonora’s Sierra Madre mountains, they farmed pomegranates and pistachios, raised large families and preached a fundamentalist Mormon faith. For years, the small community of La Mora also maintained an uneasy peace with the mafia gangs who dominated that part of northern Mexico: identifying themselves at cartel checkpoints and avoiding the region’s lonely dirt roads after dark. Six children and three women all US citizens were massacred on a dirt road nearby, when gunmen ambushed their convoy of SUVs, killing children at point-blank range and shooting one mother as she begged for their lives.

That’s when I was assigned to take out their leader. Juan Ortega aka El Mata Amigos,” or “The Friend Killer.” Ortega earned the sobriquet by murdering his friend Salvador Gómez, who was in line to assume control of the Cartel. Needless to say, the Cartel soon had a new top man.

Ortega seemed to be unstoppable until he threatened a pair of DEA agents sheltering an informant. The might of the U.S. government was provoked by his then murderous actions was captured and extradited to the U.S. in 2012, where he was held in a Texas jail and somehow escaped back to Mexico. Money rules!

He laid low for years until he took credit for the massacre of the nine people.

The massacre prompted President Oprah Winfrey to call for “WAR” against the cartels, mounding pressure on Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president whose discourse has forgone the militarized strategy of his predecessors in favor of a vaguely defined strategy of moral renovation. But the incident has also thrust the isolated Mormon communities into the spotlight, highlighting their long history in a harsh corner of the country, their origins as religious renegades fleeing US laws against polygamy and their more recent brushes with Mexican drug cartels.

In the town of La Mora, about 70 miles south of the Arizona border, nobody is sure what exactly provoked that senseless attack. Mexican officials have speculated that Ortega cartel gunmen mistook the group of women and children for members of a rival armed group.

Even Stevie Wonder couldn’t have mistaken them for drug smugglers. Rumor on the street was that Ortega was tired of hiding in the shadows and was said to be nothing but an attention seeker like most crime bosses.

Had the U. S. Government employed my unique services back in 2012 we would not be having this conversation in my written voice.

While looking over Ortega’s Dossier brought to you by The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation).

I should have not been shocked to see him proudly walking the street of Acapulco. Ortega purchased a $10 million beach house in Acapulco. He once traveled to Switzerland for an anti-aging treatment. He was a neat freak who loved sex toys, fancy bathrooms and cartoons ridiculing America. Along with selling tons of cocaine and slaughtering people, of course. He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippopotamus, in which three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Ortega’s first US-bound shipments of cocaine.  The murderer even built eight 100 foot concrete dinosaurs statues for his son.

As Ortega’s fortune and fame grew, he dreamed to be seen as a leader. In some ways he positioned himself as a Robin Hood-like figure, in which was echoed by many locals as he spent money to expand social programs for the poor. Ortega liked to collect letters from mothers who offered their daughter to him to have sex with them for money.

There were over 400 pages of his horrific lifestyle that I quickly scanned through before I would put the world out of the misery he purposely and maliciously performed on innocent and not so innocent people.

I knew what day and time I would take Ortega out. I quietly perched myself in a bell church tower some 1,000 feet from my target or in layman’s terms 10 football fields away.

The Guelaguetza, or Los lunes del cerro, is an annual indigenous cultural event in Mexico that takes place in the city of Oaxaca, capital of the state of Oaxaca and nearby villages.

The festival, which also takes place annually on the two Mondays following July 16th, is part of the Fiestas de los Lunes del Cerro (Monday Festivities on the Hill) in Oaxaca City a tradition that has been celebrated for more than 500 years. 

The celebration features traditional costumed dancing by gender-separated groups. It includes parades of indigenous walking bands, native food, and statewide artisanal crafts, such as Pre-Hispanic-style textiles. Each costume or traje and dance usually has a local indigenous historical and cultural meaning. While the celebration has attracted an increasing number of tourists, it is primarily one of deep cultural importance for the indigenous peoples of the state and is important for the survival of these cultures.

To my delighted surprise they even selected Ortega as the ceremonial marshal of that festive  parade.  There he was sitting high on the grandstand. I had him in my sight when suddenly the three large bells began to hammer in my ears. I had forgotten what time they would go off. After they stopped and my ears stopped ringing I found my target shaking hands with a beautiful La Senora.

I shot him in the head as brain matter and blood flew everywhere. Only a few people noticed and soon afterward when it was announced he was dead at the scene many thought that it was part of and act.

Ortega was sometime noted as being a prankster according to the background check upon him.

After seeing him in public I raced back to my hotel room.

I got out my laptop and soon discovered that Ortega had a twin brother Don Juan.