Spanish Daggers and Rattlesnake Strikes

Alfonso Camacho controlled Northern Sonora’s human and drug trafficking enterprise, and lived right across the line near Lochiel, Arizona on a 200,000 acre ranch. Close enough to the States to control his enterprise but al lado de la lina, on the other side of the line, where the American Border Security can’t touch him. It was on this ranch that his nido de cascabel was located.

El Nido de Cascabel is literally translated as “rattlesnake nest”. Camacho collected, raised and fed these snakes and kept them in a circular pit, sunk about waist deep in the ground. It was lined with short rock walls and resembled a small, sinister arena of death. 

Mexican lore said that if you were ever bitten by a rattlesnake, you can cure the effects of the venom by shoving the sharp points of the Spanish dagger plant into the skin, near or into the same hole that the snake bit into the skin. 

Alfonso Camacho had a different sick version of this remedy.

Camacho usually started the slow death torture by shoving the sharp spines under each of the fingernails of the traitor or double crosser, then threw him in the pit with the giant hunter snakes. His Sicarios would ring the pit, pushing the victim back into the arena of death, further antagonizing the snakes, until the victim succumbed to the multiple strikes of venom injected into his system, paralyzing the muscles and eventually stopping his heart and rendering the lungs useless.

The thought of that kind of death scared Eaton more than he would admit to himself, and damn sure would never admit to Miles Rians.