Rosalio Reta, who is currently serving a 70-year prison sentence in a Texas prison for the murders of 30 people he committed as a teenage hit man for Miguel ángel Treviño Morales - the leader for the Zetas drug cartel who was captured by the Mexican marines on Monday in the border state of Tamaulipas - spoke prior to Treviño Morales' arrest to the Center for Investigative Reporting in a video which the CIR released on Tuesday for the first time. In it, Reta says he witnessed the Zeta leader force two brothers to decide who would kill the other and save one's own life. Watch the CIR video below.
"I've seen one time Miguel Trevino was torturing somebody," Reta says in the video. "It was two brothers. He made one brother kill the other one. He told them, 'Look, only one of you is going to live. So you have to kill him, or you kill him. So decide.' I already knew he was going to kill both of them, but he just wanted to torture these people, not physically but mentally. Mess them up in the head to where one of them had to kill one another. They had to decide who's going to die, who's going to go home."
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Reta turned himself in to authorities after other Zeta members tried to kill him for carrying out unsanctioned hits in Mexico and shortly after his friend and partner Gabriel Cardona, who is serving 80 years for his murder-for-hire jobs, was arrested in 2006. Both he and Cardona are natives of Laredo, Texas, and began crossing the border into Mexico at age 13 to be trained by the Zetas as hit men. In a videotaped confession at the time he turned himself in, he told police he felt a thrill every time he killed, according to the New York Times. "I like what I do," he said then. "I don't deny it."
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In the years that have elapsed since then, he appears to have had a change of heart.
"It gets to a point where I can't even stand myself," Reta told CIR. "It's eating me inside little by little, and there's nothing I can do or say to justify my actions."
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Of the 27,700 homicides committed in Mexico over the past year, only 523 of those cases have seen those responsible prosecuted. As such, 98.2 percent of murder cases have gone unsolved, according to Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).
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