Javier Arcenillas’s Sicarios: Latin American Assassins is a photographic account of contract killing in Guatemala. Published by FotoEvidence in 2011, the book brings the photographer into direct contact with young hired killers and records the bodies left behind. Its focus is not violence as an abstraction, but the proximity of perpetrator, victim, and everyday social life within a system in which murder can be cheaply commissioned.

The conditions described in the publication are stark: commercial rivals could reportedly arrange a killing for less than fifty dollars, while an estimated ninety-five percent of murders went unsolved. Arcenillas approaches this environment at close range. By placing encounters with assassins alongside evidence of their actions, the work connects individual faces to a broader structure of impunity, fear, and economic desperation. The title’s bluntness is matched by a documentary method that asks viewers to confront how normalized such violence has become.

Juan Luis Font contributes the text, giving the photographs a written framework for understanding the Guatemalan setting. Across 112 pages, the hardcover publication draws its force from the relationship between direct witness and contextual explanation. The photographs establish physical and psychological immediacy; the text locates those encounters within a society deeply damaged by murder for hire.

For collectors concerned with socially engaged documentary photography, Sicarios deserves attention for the difficulty and specificity of its access. It preserves a focused account of a clandestine economy through sustained proximity rather than distant observation. As a 2011 first edition from FotoEvidence, it also represents an early publication in the publisher’s program of book-length photographic investigations. Its significance lies above all in the uneasy record it constructs: young men, disposable lives, and a civic order in which violence operates with little prospect of legal consequence.