Teresa Pendarvis

On a visit to Mexico City’s cultural capital in 2000, Theresa Pendarvis saw a new, underground side of Mexico, one that she’d never seen before. Known around the world as Pancho Villa’s main assassin, the 17-year-old had personally killed 16 young men in the US.

Just 15, his secret weapon was also his greatest pride — an assassin who’d lived most of his life hidden in plain sight in the far more prestigious world of Mexico.

This week, the Pendarvis archives will become accessible online, adding a new layer to her world. Pacheco is hard at work reassembling the pieces in her head so that they can continue telling her life story.

Unlike the photos of Pendarvis that have circulated for years, the new image files won’t just be about one woman — they’ll be about America, war, and justice. “I was in a combat zone and saw how the US courts were changing,” Pacheco said in a video interview with Truthout. “This revolution is for peace.”

Jolita Porras (Pancho Villa)

“A killer in love with war: a secret double life in Mexico City,” by Theresa Pendarvis, Truthout, June 28, 2014

Though an American and a Mexican, she spent most of her life locked up in the elite world of Mexico’s elite, Pacheco’s secret life has been the target of many curious and capable observers ever since The Pancho Villa Files returned to a recent edition. Few, however, have as thoroughly examined the man as the girl who ran one of the most infamous US assassination squads in Mexico. Today, she runs a shadowy social security administration office in La Joya, capital of Pachuca, a comarca north of Mexico City, that serves as the base of operations for the town’s five families named Porras, each of which was involved with killing agents of the US War Department.

Though her identity is one of the many secrets of the assassins, not all Pacheco family members agree on who she is or what purpose she serves. Porras also disagrees to the extent that she works on American soil.