After nearly three decades of pulling himself up from the dirt, Jose Vasquez wasn’t surprised how numb he’d become at the sight of violence. From a fatherless home in the favelas of Mexico, he’d ignored his mother’s good intentions and affiliated himself with the local gang. As a kid, he would act as a drop, an innocent child playing on the corner, who would receive and pass on drug deliveries for the local dealer.

It wasn’t much, but he earnt enough to keep his stomach full, knowing his mother couldn’t provide. Watching her health deteriorate before his tenth birthday, he never knew what killed her. Lost in the sea of poverty that made up his town, healthcare wasn’t forthcoming. When he looked back now, he wondered if it had been cancer, but found his empathy missing.

She left him for the streets.

Left him for the only world he would ever know.

When one day, in broad daylight, he was thrown to the floor and beaten until his bones were broken by a rival drug dealer, nobody intervened. Twelve years old and not one person stopped as the boots rained down on him.

With no parents, and clearly no community to protect him, Vasquez knew then and there that the only way to ensure he would outgrow the favela was to push back.

To paint the streets red with blood and to command loyalty from those not smart enough or brave enough to do it themselves. On his sixteenth birthday, he was promoted to a drug runner by the local dealer.

Before his seventeenth birthday, he’d strangled the dealer to death and left his scorched corpse in an abandoned doctors’ surgery five blocks from his home. With his reputation rising within the community, his cousin, Raul, begged him for work, and Vasquez had his first loyal soldier. By the age of twenty, he’d claimed the lives of three rival drug gangs and placed the first blocks into the foundation of his empire. Business boomed, with the cocaine and meth flooding the favelas like a plague and Vasquez watched, willing the despicable residents to rot.

They had turned their back on him when he was a lonely child, watched as he was beaten to the dirt, with no mother or father to protect him.

Just a young boy, trying to survive.

To them, he was as insignificant as a rat, flittering through the heaps of trash that lined the streets. Now all of them were the vermin, trapped in the maze that belonged to him, and he cared little for how many deaths his drugs caused.

Raul proved to be an exceptional right-hand man.

As cruel as Vasquez, Raul was a strapping man with a powerful voice, and he doled out Vasquez’s demands with a venomous growl that terrified their drug runners.