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Marcia Powell
Rosalio Reta is a former Zeta Cartel hitman whom Hari visits at the Texas prison where he is currently serving a 70-year sentence for several murders. Reta grew up in Laredo, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, and joined the Zetas at just 13 years old, after meeting its second-in-command, Miguel Treviño. For several years, Treviño paid Reta huge sums of money to murder the cartel’s rivals. But when Treviño turned against him, Reta escaped across the border and turned himself in to the U.S. authorities. This makes him one of very few people to have made it out of the Zeta Cartel alive. While there are conflicting stories about whether Reta joined the Zetas willingly and why Treviño turned against him, Reta’s story demonstrates how the drug war encourages senseless, escalating violence by rewarding the most sadistic criminals with money, wealth, and power.
Rosalio Reta Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Rosalio Reta or refer to Rosalio Reta . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 8 Quotes
Harry Anslinger employed Joe Arpaio in 1957 to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and he rose through the bureau over decades. Since 1993, he has been the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. He was eighty when I met him, and about to be elected to his sixth consecutive term. His Stetson, his shining yellow lawmaker’s badge, and his sneer have become national symbols of a particular kind of funhouse-mirror Americana, and his hefty chunk of Arizona, home to nearly four million people, is now Harry Anslinger’s last great laboratory. Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his “concentration camp,” and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were “lepers” who needed to be “quarantined,” and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.
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Rosalio Reta Character Timeline in Chasing the Scream
The timeline below shows where the character Rosalio Reta appears in Chasing the Scream. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9: Bart Simpson and the Angel of Juárez
...drug war. Three people exemplify its story: “an angel [Juan Manuel Olguín], a killer [Rosalio Reta], and a girl in love [Rubi Fraire].”
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...dangerous. Instead, Hari visits a rural Texas prison to interview a young man named Rosalio Reta. When he was 15, Reta went to a summer camp in Mexico, where he learned...
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Rosalio Reta grew up in Laredo, Texas, a poor city right on the border, across from the...
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Regardless of which story is true, Reta definitely joined the cartel that day, by murdering a man at the ranch. And once...
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Reta lived in constant fear of this violence, including from people on his side. But he...
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Soon, Treviño’s men went after Reta. They attacked him in the woods and slashed him all over his body. According to...
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Regardless of which story is true, Hari concludes, Reta never would have become a sadistic, ruthless killer if it weren’t for the war on...
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Chapter 10: Marisela’s Long March
Rosalio Reta’s story represents the most extreme violence of the drug war, but Hari wants to understand...
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...undermine Mexico’s economy. Hari can only imagine how Rubi Fraire, Juan Manuel Olguín, and Rosalio Reta’s lives would have been if the U.S. let Mexico “choose drug peace instead of drug...
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