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El Sicario, Room 164

Crime & Punishment • 1h 20m

Directed by Gianfranco Rosi and Charles Bowden • Documentary • 2011 • 84 minutes

The term sicario goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Sicarii, used concealed daggers (sicae) in their murders of Romans and their supporters. In modern language, a sicario is a professional killer or a hit man.

In an anonymous motel room on the U.S./Mexico border, a Ciudad Juarez hitman speaks. He has killed hundreds of people and is an expert in torture and kidnapping. He was simultaneously on the payroll of the Mexican drug cartels and a commander of the Chihuahua State Police. There is currently a $250,000 contract on his life and he lives as a fugitive, though he has never been charged with a crime in any country. With his face obscured by a black mesh hood, he tells his story to the camera inside the very motel room he once used to hold and torture kidnapped victims. Aided only by a magic marker and notepad, which he uses to illustrate and diagram his words, the sicario describes, in astounding detail, his life of crime, murder, abduction and torture.

Tags
americas, area studies, biography, charles bowden, ciudad juarez, crime, crime and criminals, criminal justice, criminals, criminology, cultural and ethnic studies, documentary, drug, drug dealers, drug trade, drugs, dvd, el sicario, expository, film, history, hit-man, hitman, icarus films, juarez, kidnapping, killers, latin american studies, latino and hispanic studies, law and legal studies, mexican, mexico, murder, narco trafficers, ovid, ovid_ca, psychology and mental health, room 164, s_0029, s_0057, s_0058, s_0172, s_0260, s_0370, s_0638, sicario, social psychology, the, title_defgh, title_e, torture, true crime, video, violence, world regions

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