What Does Alejandro do to Guillermo in Sicario?

Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Sicario’ follows a joint task force, the purpose of which is to find and bring to justice the leaders of the Sonora Cartel, which has been wreaking havoc with its expanding drug operations. The team is led by CIA agent Matt Graver, with Alejandro Gillick, a mysterious figure with a shady past, as the major player in the game. A critical lead in the investigation is a man named Guillermo, who will give them the information they need to flush out the leader of the cartel. Interestingly, the manner in which this information is brought out of him is not shown to the audience. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Alejandro Has a Personal Score to Settle With Guillermo

The reason Guillermo is captured in Mexico and then extradited to the US is because he is the brother of Manuel Díaz, who works directly for the cartel’s leader, Fausto Alarcón, who is the main target. Because Alarcón has remained off the grid so much, there is no way to track him apart from using one of his men to find and infiltrate his home. For this, they need Manuel Diaz, and to get to Diaz, they need Guillermo. Another interesting thing to note here is that Alejandro has a personal connection to the three of them. From his backstory, we know that he was a prosecutor in Mexico, and when he got too close to Alarcón, the cartel boss had his wife and daughter killed.

Their deaths were brutal, as Graver later tells Kate Macer. His wife’s head was cut off, and his daughter was thrown in a vat of acid. There is a good chance that Diaz and Guillermo were involved in this, which is how Guillermo recognizes Alejandro when he walks into the room. Before this, Matt warns him that he has brought “a friend” of Guillermo’s, which proves that this isn’t the first time that the man about to be tortured is crossing paths with the prosecutor-turned-assassin. Moreover, this is reason enough to show that Alejandro will not hesitate to torture Guillermo to brutal extents as apart from getting information, he also has revenge on his mind.

Alejandro Uses a Centuries-Old Torture Technique on Guillermo

When Graver walks into the room, he comments about how Guillermo is being filled up with water. Later, we see Alejandro walk into the room with a jug of water, and the first thought that comes into the viewer’s mind is that waterboarding is about to happen in the scene. But then, Alejandro leaves the jug on the floor and stands weirdly close to Guillermo’s face. His crotch is pretty close to his mouth, and it comes across as a way to assert dominance. Then, the camera pans to the drain in the room, but we don’t see any water running down it. Moreover, the water jug is also clearly not being used. We don’t see the torture happen, but the hints suggest that a form of torture called the water cure (known to have been used since the 15th century) is being done to Guillermo.

In this method, a person is forced to drink an inordinate amount of water within a short span. They are forced to ingest water by having a piece of cloth or even a funnel shoved into their mouth. The main point of this torture is to fill up a person with water so much that their internal organs start to kill them. To prolong the pain, the victim can be beaten up, forced to vomit, and then have the process repeated all over again. Worse, water is not the only thing they can be forced to ingest. The torturer can get creative, and from the way the whole scene is set up in the movie, it looks like urine may have had a part to play in it. It must be noted that before entering the torture room, Alejandro was seen drinking water. His standing close to Guillermo shows that he is not averse to swapping water for urine. It wouldn’t just be more of a torture, but would also be an incredibly humiliating and debasing thing to do.

Considering that Guillermo took part in killing and torturing Alejandro’s wife and daughter, it is not too much of a stretch to assume that he would want to return the favor in one way or another. Whatever Alejandro chooses to do is left to the viewer’s imagination, and this plays pretty well into the film’s intention to present the man as a grey character who is not bound by any moral or ethical lines. Even though his backstory humanizes him and gives us a reason to sympathize with him, his actions present him as a ruthless man who has turned himself over to the dark side to get his revenge. So, instead of showing what he does to Guillermo, the filmmakers leave it up to the audience to draw the lines for him and then decide whether or not he is capable of crossing them.