Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon

By Julián Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs

Southwest Book Awards, Border Regional Library Association (BRLA)

Uses key words and striking images to explore violence and everyday life in Juárez, Mexico.

Juárez, Mexico, is known for violence. The femicides of the 1990s, and the cartel mayhem that followed, made it one of the world's most dangerous cities. Along with the violence came a new lexicon that traveled from person to person, across rivers and borders—wherever it was needed to explain the horrors taking place. From personal interviews, media accounts, and conversations on the street, Julián Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs have collected the words and slang that make up the brutal language of Juárez, creating a glossary that serves as a linguistic portrait of the city and its violence. Organized alphabetically, the entries consist of Spanish and Spanglish, accompanied by short English definitions. Some also feature a longer narrative drawn from interviews—stories that put the terms in context and provide a personal counterpoint to media reports of the same events. Letters, and many of the entries, are supplemented with Briggs’s evocative illustrations, which are reminiscent of Hans Holbein’s famous Alphabet of Death. Together, the words, drawings, and descriptions in ABCedario de Juárez both document and interpret the everyday violence of this vital border city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781477325032

Book preview

Abecedario de Juárez

AN ILLUSTRATED LEXICON

JULIÁN CARDONA AND ALICE LEORA BRIGGS

Translations by Alice L. Driver

Illustrations by Alice Leora Briggs

Introduction by Howard Campbell

University of Texas Press

Austin

The authors thank Alice L. Driver for generously granting permission to use her translations in the narratives in this text.

Text copyright © 2022 by Julián Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs

Illustrations copyright © 2022 by Alice Leora Briggs

Original translation copyright © 2022 by Alice L. Driver

Introduction copyright © 2022 by Howard Campbell

All rights reserved

First edition, 2021

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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Austin, TX 78713-7819

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cardona, Julián, 1960–2020, author. | Briggs, Alice Leora, 1953–, author, illustrator. | Driver, Alice L., translator.

Title: Abecedario Juárez : an illustrated lexicon / Julián Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs ; with translations by Alice L. Driver ; illustrations by Alice Leora Briggs.

Other titles: Abecedario de Juárez : an illustrated lexicon

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021022956

ISBN 978-1-4773-2407-3 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2502-5 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2503-2 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Violence—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez—Dictionaries. | Violence—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez—Slang—Dictionaries. | Violence—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez—Pictorial works. | Persons—Mexico—Ciudad Juárez—Interviews. | LCGFT: Engravings.

Classification: LCC HN120.C85 C35 2021 | DDC 303.609764/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022956

doi: 10.7560/324073

REMEMBERING JULIÁN

Authors’ Note

THE PEOPLE OF CIUDAD JUÁREZ WHO TELL their stories in these pages are neither composite nor fictional characters. A few gave permission to publish their first and last names. Others are identified by nicknames known only among their friends and families. A small number wanted to remain nameless. They all share memories of their experiences from 2006 through 2012, years when the streets of their city exploded with violence, years when President Felipe Calderón sent ten thousand federal forces into Ciudad Juárez.

A new lexicon that rose out of Ciudad Juárez during this six-year period is the core of our project, an investigation of the language and framework of a primary growth industry in this border city: crime. The following pages reveal that the Mexican State sponsors much of this crime. When not committed by the State, the government’s policy of near impunity condones the crimes of others.

As with any attempt to capture slang, our efforts became history before these pages were bound. Some years after the drug trade’s parallel economy rode into town, it was followed by thousands of soldiers and federal police. President Felipe Calderón implied that the resulting deaths of Juárez citizens were equivalent to an extermination of cockroaches. If ever there was an occasion for speechlessness, this was it. But in this city where Spanish and English collide, the streets exploded with words invented and adjusted to describe a world Juarenses had never seen.

Narratives based on Julián Cardona’s interviews introduce individuals who speak a new dialect and provide firsthand accounts of the staggering collateral damage of business as usual in Juárez. Alice Leora Briggs’s drawings reveal this environment as unique but parallel to many instances of greed, torture, murder, and other abuses that decorate darker corners of human behavior.

Between 2008 and 2010, Briggs created her first renderings of Abecedario de Juárez, a mutable theater of tortures and executions, a pictorial Spanish alphabet in thirty-two panels. This homage to Juárez and Hans Holbein’s Alphabet of Death sharpened her interest in the new vocabulary rising out of Juárez. She started to gather and study narcotraficante, gang, and street slang, as well as to create a visual record of the city. Her work is grounded by time spent in Juárez beginning in 2008.

Cardona, a resident of Ciudad Juárez since early childhood, conducted his initial interview in 2008 with crime victim Pastor Socorro García. She was present when masked gunmen entered a drug treatment clinic, opened fire on a religious service, and killed eight men. Cardona continued to conduct interviews to record the experiences of victims and perpetrators of Juárez crime. He also collected slang terms from the citizens of Juárez, including drug dealers and traffickers, professional killers, kidnappers, crime victims, government officials, reporters, human rights workers, and former police agents.

Examples include an elementary-school boy from a poor barrio who understands the liabilities and assets of his dream career as a professional killer; a preteen who divides and packages drugs for retail sales; a woman who wakes to the news of the day: her dinner guest from the night before is a decapitated corpse displayed on an overpass in the center of Juárez.

Briggs and Cardona worked independently of each other until late 2012, when writer Charles Bowden pointed out that they had been conducting research on different facets of the same project. In retrospect, it is difficult to believe that it took a third party to point this out. An unusually open collaboration grew out of a Las Cruces meeting with Bowden. Cardona shared a number of photographs that Briggs used as reference material for drawings. Briggs and Cardona wrote and rewrote a burgeoning catalog of slang terms and Cardona’s interview-based narratives over a period of ten years.

In 2020 there are some changes in the facade. Procuraduría Federal de la República (Federal Attorney’s Office) is now called Fiscalía General de la República (Attorney General’s Office). The Policia Federal (federal police) was disbanded at midnight on December 31, 2019, and on February 28, 2019, Mexico’s congress approved creation of the Guardia Nacional (National Guard). There are now 100,000 members of the Guardia Nacional deployed throughout the country.¹ Moreover, the first commander of this force, Luis Rodríguez Bucio, and all other commanders of the Guardia Nacional are former members of the armed forces.²

Introduction

HOWARD CAMPBELL

SI ALGO EXISTE, UNO LE DA UN NOMBRE. (IF SOMETHING EXISTS, YOU GIVE IT A NAME.) GABINA BURCIAGA, JUÁREZ ACTIVIST AND GESTALT THERAPIST

JULIÁN CARDONA WAS A JOURNALIST, PHOTOGRAPHER, and writer who was born in Zacatecas but spent most of his life in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Cardona grew up in an impoverished northwestern barrio of Juárez and had an intimate knowledge of the vast city.

Alice Leora Briggs is an artist, writer, and 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, originally from West Texas. Juárez became a focus for her drawings in 2005, and she began to regularly travel to study border society in 2008. Briggs’s inquiries into human frailties have generated thousands of words, drawings, woodcuts, letterpress books, broadsides, and architectural installations. They have been exhibited in major collections in Europe and the United States, and widely disseminated. Her drawings intersect with the colloquial words of Juarenses to describe and to question forces that contributed to the unraveling of this border city during the 2006–2012 administration of President Felipe Calderón.

The two authors’ collaboration has been long and complex. Cardona conducted the interviews and collected the slang expressions, while Briggs created the art, but much writing and research was handled jointly over an eight-year period (2012–2020). Their harmonious collaboration produced this stunning new study of crime and violence in Juárez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world.³

Any new book on Juárez must, from the outset, confront the monumental work of the late great border writer Charles Bowden, with whom Cardona collaborated for nineteen years.⁴ Bowden’s writings about Juárez have profoundly shaped understandings of Juárez in the popular, literary, and academic public of the world. Bowden’s mystical, stream-of-consciousness narratives, in such books as Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future and Murder City, depict Juárez as a city of rape, death, and destruction. Though ostensibly grounded in on-the-spot reporting and ably supported by Cardona’s decades of field experience and vast web of sources, Bowden’s creative nonfiction veered into terrain similar to the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Truman Capote.⁵ Above all, Bowden created lyrical, mythopoetic meditations on death and horror in which aesthetics often triumph over strict fact or academic constraint.⁶

Despite the profundity of Bowden’s insight, his work sometimes takes up too much space in the public understanding of Juárez. There is ample room for other perspectives, especially those of a more seasoned Mexican observer of Juárez, such as Cardona, and an artist and writer such as Briggs. Cardona, who was even better informed than Bowden, regularly produced fresh insights into the evolving Mexican drug violence and published photographs of the urban landscape and people of Juárez for American, British, and Mexican news media, and has for several decades. Cardona organized the seminal Nada que ver (Nothing to See) photo exhibit (1995) in Juárez, which served to provide the photographs for Bowden’s Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future. Additionally, Cardona’s work has been exhibited in important venues and is a part of collections in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

The powerful team of Briggs and Cardona has here assembled a remarkable document that is equal parts street dictionary, ethno-documentary of crime and violence, and artistic representation of brutality and evil.⁷ Briggs’s eclectic technique, involving medieval engraving techniques and the sgraffito method,⁸ produces sharply detailed black-and-white images of hallucinatory intensity. Although Briggs has learned from the great European printmaking masters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Holbein, as well as the death-obsessed Mexican political satirist José Guadalupe Posada, and even the common Mexican lotería card, her Juárez images are distinctive and of the twenty-first century. Briggs collaborated with Charles Bowden for nine years, most significantly in their beautiful, troubling Dreamland: The Way out of Juárez. Bowden himself makes a cameo appearance in the Abecedario images, and portraits of Cardona populate the pages.

TODO LO QUE EXISTE EN UNA SOCIEDAD SE REFLEJA EN SU LENGUAJE. (EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN A SOCIETY IS REFLECTED IN ITS LANGUAGE.) JULIÁN CARDONA

The ingenious alphabet of Mexican criminal argot and Cardona and Briggs’s encyclopedic command of the vocabulary and imagery of corruption and violence shine throughout the book. Additionally, Briggs’s deftly rendered imagery provides graphic insight into this milieu of brutality and suffering, all the while skewering the hypocrisy of the powerful. See, for example, Briggs’s ribald send-up of C for (Felipe) Calderón, the Mexican president who takes the most blame for drug war violence, and the stunning illustration of clavo, a secret hiding place for drugs.⁹

The Abecedario’s construction is reminiscent of Borges’s imaginative etymological categorizations and of the morbidly cynical yet amusing Devil’s Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce. Moreover, there is no getting around the fact that Briggs and Cardona’s conception of crime, brutality, and murder is informed by an ancient Mexican tradition of staring death in the face, and either mocking it in Rabelaisian fashion or simply dancing with the devil.¹⁰ Unlike Anglo-American intellectuals and scholars, for whom a too-intense focus on death is considered to be bad form and a nihilistic pornography of violence, Briggs and Cardona directly confront this Dante-esque lexicon of mayhem and killing employed by the Juárez criminal/corrupt police underworld. The result is a striking dive into that heart of darkness that is the mind of its sicarios, kidnappers, and torturers. Briggs’s soulful illustrations—such as that of the down-and-out street person in basura social or the somnambulant prisoners of montado—pound home the message.

Every oppressive, inhumane, and ruthless social system, whether it be Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, Trump’s America, or Communist China develops its own particular vocabulary of distortion and manipulation, a fact George Orwell understood only too well. As the anthropologist Michael Taussig put it: The space of death is important in the creation of meaning and consciousness, nowhere more so than in societies where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror flourishes. We may think of the space of death as a threshold that allows for illumination as well as extinction.¹¹ However, as extreme as the Juárez language may be, the Abecedario is no postmodern literary exercise designed merely to shock and titillate but a hyperrealistic journalistic tour de force culled from Cardona and Briggs’s decades of street prowling, interviews, and field observations. Indeed, the gritty words and phrases used to describe beating, shooting, abduction, and torture come to us from the victims and the contrite perpetrators themselves who want their stories to be told. The double and triple meanings of this rancorous wordplay reflect the realities of Mexican life today: a modern economy, democracy, and legal system—on the surface—shrouded in the language and practice of obfuscation, improvisation, mistreatment, and lies.

The euphemisms of Juárez criminal and police slang, when examined closely, rather than hide the ugliness of cartel and government violence, tend only to accentuate and make it even more macabre. A few examples suffice: achicharrado as a description of a burned body inevitably evokes images of butchered chunks of meat sizzling in lard; encobijado—to be wrapped in a blanket—that is, to be executed, then rolled in a cheap blanket or bloody sheet before being thrown into a dark alley or an irrigation canal, or dumped in the desert; carne asada—to be killed—brings to mind a diced human being tossed on a fiery grill and later consumed on fresh tortillas with spicy salsa. In other cases the almost bureaucratic blandness, simplicity, and banal beauty of the words cover up a whole universe of addiction, abuse, and pain: blanca for cocaine, negra for heroin, cristal for methamphetamine; "uno o dos"? (Do you want one or two bags or bindles of cocaine or heroin?);¹² un anexo (an annex)—no, it is not some generic office building or storage facility but a horrific drug rehab center, a place more prison than hospital (see Briggs’s dark evocation of such places in la anexada); la cuota for extortion money (if you don’t pay la cuota, you are killed or your business is burned down); "El Cherry" (from el CERESO), the acronym for the Juárez prison full of hardened gang and cartel members, rapists, and drug addicts; Artistas Asesinos—the Artistic Assassins, a notoriously brutal gang whose aesthetic talents seldom transcend stylized tattoos and the gruesome staging of corpses at murder scenes. Most emblematic perhaps is the word jale, from jalar, to pull or colloquially to do a job, which in this context means to kill, as portrayed in starkly revealing fashion by Briggs.

Indeed, the intentions of Briggs and Cardona go far beyond whatever postmodern ironies may be found embedded in the Juárez criminal argot. Nor are they humorists à la Eduardo del Rio a.k.a. Rius, Mexico’s legendary cartoonist/political comedian. The drawings, in particular, are similar to Leon Golub’s radical South African political art. Although an astute reader will decode the black humor that pervades popular criminal speech, the author’s concerns are deadly serious. Dar agua, dar cuello, and dar piso are not just metaphorically potent but refer to acts of extreme cruelty and massacre. Moreover, in addition to discovering the various ways to dismember and dispose of bodies—embolsar, empalar, encajuelar, encobijar¹³—and the other arcane linguistic details of the border criminal world, the reader will also learn from this dictionary/encyclopedia how the blended criminal and government corruption business actually works at the ground level. To wit: I have seen no better description of the inner workings of the extortion racket than Cardona’s interview of Luis Javier Martínez under the headings of derecho de piso and estado paralelo. The language is powerful: derecho de piso is the right to operate in a certain location. In this distorted society, who is it who now grants that right and collects the corresponding fee? The gangsters, of course, tolerated or supported by the corrupt police and the military who always receive their "cuota" or simply take it directly from the pockets and homes of citizens. Little by little, the language of the streets reveals an illicit world that is tightly interwoven with the government and its representatives on the ground: police, soldiers, and politicians.

EL LENGUAJE TE SIRVE PARA CONDICIONAR, PARA OCULTAR, Y PARA DIRIGIR DISCUROS. (LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS TO SHAPE, HIDE, OR DIRECT DISCOURSE.) JULIÁN CARDONA

Here is just a brief sample of how the authors’ investigative work and lexical compilation illustrate other core elements of Juárez drug crime and violence:

Baja collateral/falsos positivos/La Gente Nueva define how innocent (and not so innocent) individuals are captured by gang members, cops, or the military and then tortured, murdered, framed, and scapegoated.

Borrar defines how hit men are hired and sent to kill.

Cero barrio and punto/puntero define how Juárez is divided into smaller and smaller territories with clearly defined and controlled drug-selling spots.

Colgado defines how the murdered are hung from bridges, often along with a narco-banner containing written insults and threats.

Cinta canela defines how torture is conducted (see Briggs’s corresponding depiction of a bound individual juxtaposed with a more common image of canela [cinnamon] in Mexican hot chocolate).

Cuidador/dora/elemento define how the kidnapping business functions (see Cardona’s spellbinding interview with Toby, the leader of a gang of teenage kidnappers, and check out Briggs’s alarming re-creation of the twisted body of a kidnap victim).

Etc.

Ultimately, through Briggs’s and Cardona’s deep and lengthy interviews, and the electrifying drawings that exemplify them, the reader gains a feel for the bizarre magical realism of Mexican criminal slang, as well as the underlying political structures and organizing principles of crime, corruption, and violence in Juárez. Behind the headlines and broad generalizations about cartel wars and corruption lies an amazingly intricate world of customs, slang, and practices whose linguistic manifestations form the content of the book. Thus, the Abecedario’s innovative criminal glossary will have great value for scholars who attempt to dissect the causes, cultural forms, and expressions of urban violence and the drug war. Ultimately, the challenge posed by the Abecedario, however, is not the need for more linguistic deconstruction or semiotic interpretation. Instead, it is time for a rebuilding of Ciudad Juárez and the border society of which it is a part, so that so many thousands of lives are no longer lost in the ongoing war for drugs and the war on people. To that end, Cardona and Briggs’s remarkable lexicon and field studies of crime and violence can help us understand from where the city has come and the obstacles that lie ahead.

REFERENCES

Adame, Ramon. Tecatology: A Treatment Perspective concerning the Chicano Tecato. El Paso, TX: Tierra del Sol, 1975.

Bowden, Charles. Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields. New York: Nation Books, 2010.

Coltharp, Lurline. The Tongue of the Tirilones: A Linguistic Study of a Criminal Argot. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965.

Delgadillo, Willivaldo. Fabular Juárez: Marcos de guerra, memoria y los foros por venir. Ciudad Juárez: Brown Buffalo Press, 2020.

Lomnitz, Claudio. Death and the Idea of Mexico. New York: Zone Books, 2005.

Taussig, Michael. Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3 (1984): 467–497.

abatir: To kill, euphemism used by the Mexican Army.

Fold down criminals in hours of darkness¹⁴ is a strategy that calls to mind countless Juárez kidnappings, executions, and massacres in the dark of night or the gray hours near dawn. Soldiers understand unwritten orders to kill civilians, orders that are delivered by word-of-mouth with vague synonyms.

On July 2, 2015, Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez A.C. (Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center), a Jesuit human rights society based in Mexico, released a document issued earlier by the National Defense Secretariat. This written order to the chief military officer in Tlatlaya stated, "The troops must operate aggressively at night and reduce activity during the day, in order to abatir criminals in hours of darkness."

According to the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (National Human Rights Commission), among the deaths of twenty-two people in Tlatlaya on June 30, 2014, twelve to fifteen were ejecuciones extrajudiciales committed under orders. The Mexican Army claimed that these deaths resulted from an enfrentamiento, but news reports asserted that no confrontation had occurred, that the dead had been executed.

Literal meaning: To bring down; to fold down; to bite the cable.

Related terms: dar piso, ejecución extrajudicial, ejecutar, enfrentamiento

abrir: To open an area for sicarios, a police dispatcher dismisses officers from their sector and orders them to respond to false reports in another district.

Literal meaning: To open.

Related phrase: no te acerques, va a haber baile

abrirse: To give in to torture or a threat of torture; to stop fighting and to start cooperating.

Literal meaning: To open oneself.

Related terms: dedo, hocicón, peinetón, poner dedo, ponlo de pecho, soplón

acartonado: Dessicated corpse, often a homicide victim’s body dumped in the desert, eventually mummified by the sun’s heat; a corpse with skin that resembles cardboard.

Literal meaning: Corpse with a cardboard-like appearance; stiff or reserved person.

Related terms: encobijado, entambado

acelerado: A person who lives the fast life, using or selling drugs.

Literal meaning: Fast one.

Related terms: agua celeste, arponazo, chiva, cristal, cristalazo, lineaz, loquear, morena, mota, narizazo, nieve, Pega Rey, piedra, uñazo

achicharrado/achicharrar: Person burned alive until dead or a corpse that is burned after death/to be burned.

Literal meaning: Meat that has been fried too long/overheated.

Related terms: calcinado, calcinar, chamuscado, chamuscar, incinerado, incinerar, quemado, quemar

acostarse: To die.

Literal meaning: To go to bed.

Related terms: dar cuello, dar piso, quebrar, sembrar, tumbar

acribillado/acribillar: Someone or something riddled with bullets/to shoot many holes into something or someone.

Literal meaning: Someone or something full of holes/to puncture until someone or something resembles a sieve, to molest, to torment.

Related terms: acuchillado, acuchillar, agujerado, agujerar, balaceado, filereado, filerear, rafagueado

acuchillado/acuchillar: Person with single or multiple stab wounds/to stab once, to stab repeatedly.

Literal meaning: Slashed one/to slash.

Related terms: balaceado, fierrazo, filereado, filerear

agua celeste: Transparent liquid solvent that is used as an intoxicating inhalant.

Literal meaning: Holy water.

Related terms: garrazo, gasorbiente, Pega Rey, Resistol 5000

aguaje: Place where heroin and other drugs are sold, primarily to foreigners; in common use until the 1960s.

Neighborhood bouncers maintained peaceful, relatively crime-free zones around aguajes in order to facilitate sales, a practice that continues near contemporary sales locations. The best-known aguaje was located near the intersection of Ignacio Mejía and Plomo Streets, operated by La Nacha (Ignacia Jasso), who launched her business in Colonia Bellavista in the 1920s.

Literal meaning: A reliable watering hole.

Related terms: picadero, punto

agujerado/agujerar: One who is full of holes, possibly knife wounds, most often bullet holes/to shoot full of holes; to stab repeatedly.

Literal meaning: Pierced one/to pierce.

Related terms: acribillado, acuchillado, acuchillar, balaceado, filereado, filerear, rafagueado

Águilas Nocturnas, Los Bélicos: Alternate names for a secret group within the Thirty-Fifth Infantry Battalion based in Casas Grandes.

One member of this group, Colonel Elfego José Luján Ruiz, was convicted of torture, murder, and clandestine burial in January 2016 and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison. When Jesús Alberto Campos Moreno and Jorge Alejandro Yánez were abducted and murdered on October 18, 2009, Luján Ruiz ordered subordinates to bury their bodies in a pit just off the road to Agua Prieta, Sonora, near El Berrendo.¹⁵ Ruiz’s participation is also presumed in the December 29, 2009, disappearances in Benito Juárez of José Ángel Alvarado Herrera, Nitza Paola Alvarado Espinoza, and Rocío Irene Alvarado Reyes, and in the torture and murder of soldiers Mario Alberto Guerrero León and Mario Alberto Peralta Rodríguez. The two men allegedly deserted the Mexican army to join La Línea and reappeared as burned remains in a road near Ascensión.¹⁶

On April 26, 2018, federal prosecutor Mariana Colín Ayala confirmed the existence of this group when questioned by Ruth Fierro Pineda, a representative for alleged victims, during an Inter-American Court of Human Rights public hearing (Alvarado Espinoza et al. versus Mexico).

Literal meaning: Night Eagles or The Hawks.

Related terms: abatir, crimen uniformado, cuestionario de la muerte, desaparición forzada, Directiva para el Combate al Narcotráfico, ejecución extrajudicial, pelotón de la muerte

ahijada/ahijado: Affectionate term for a patient released by the director of a rehabilitation center following successful treatment; the rehabilitated addict may invite visitors to the center, and the director can be confident that these guests are not in the drug business.

Literal meaning: Goddaughter/godson.

Related terms: anexado, anexar, anexo, Cristoterapia, quebrar

ahogado/ahogar: A victim of drowning or suffocation/to drown or to suffocate

Literal meaning: Same.

Related terms: ahorcado, ahorcar, asfixiado, asfixiar, estrangulado, estrangular

ahorcado/ahorcar: A person who dies from hanging, strangulation, or suffocation/To hang, to choke, to suffocate

Literal