It was a typical clear, sunny, windless day in León when we descended upon Gotcha Park at high noon. The imposing Thunderdome stood before us, looking more like a tennis court or batting cage than a death match arena. When suddenly a station wagon pulled up beside us and out poured a family of four, consisting of a father, two teenage daughters and a young boy, it was clear that our prey had arrived. It seemed we would be both the hunters and the hunted.

We were each issued helmets, flak jackets and of course our paintball guns and ammo, and were given a few brief tips on firing and safety. We went over the basic rules of engagement. Rule #1: there are no rules! There were five of us and three of them (as the father abstained from the primordial urge to slay his own young) and we decided to break up into teams of fourversus four. Rule #2: Eight men enter, One man leave!

Commandante Jose Luis, the ten-year-old son and youngest member of the family, had only one request: that he not be on the same team as his two sisters, whom he obviously despised and would enjoy snuffing this day. Jose Luis was also the de-facto captain of our team and devised our basic 2x2 flanking strategy. The rest of us settled into our roles of cat and mouse and hid among the large, yellow, inflated, plastic obstacles. Paint pellets flew past our heads and when one of us was hit in either the torso or the head, we would raise our gun and call ourselves “out”, while our opponents would allow us to leave the arena unharmed, in theory.

Rule #3: Keep shooting your opponent until you run out of ammo! At first the teams were lop-sided and unevenly distributed. But soon we had a few magic combinations that resulted in classic duels that lasted up to 10 minutes — which is long when compared to the seasoned professionals who had brought along their own equipment, officially licensed uniforms and the most state-of-the-art paintball guns any of us had ever seen.

These guys spent more time plotting their next massacre (up to half an hour at times) than they did spraying each other inside the arena. Their matches couldn’t have lasted more than 2 minutes.If you blinked it was over. And they fired (with deadly accuracy, I might add) more ammo in 30 seconds than we wasted blindly in two rounds of extended play.

They were the Central American death squads we all knew and feared. We decided to pass on this match up.The culmination of the day’s events came, however, when it was just two versus two on the field of play...

Diagram of an Assassination

Teammates Dan and Sergio are pinned down behind the side-bunker. They are receiving heavy enemy fire from both the X- and Y-axis (of a 90Ú angle) from their opponents, Ran and Rodney.

Ran has flanked them while Rodney is directly behind their position. Dan returns Ran’s fire, dodges, then counter-fires—completely missing his intended target. Sergio is smart and buries himself deep into his foxhole. Dan can’t see Rodney, but he knows he’s back there. Dan takes a peek at Rodney’s position. The moment Dan exposes himself, Rodney nails him in the arm, bruising Dan’s left bicep, and spinning him around. Dan yelps in pain like an eight-year-old girl and scurries back behind the bunker. Calling himself out, Dan raises his rifle and begins marching towards the nearby exit.

Even though he has technically disqualified himself from competition, Dan still feels cheap potshots whizzing past his head and body, and can hear Ran’s maniacal laughter off in the distance. Rodney, the silent assassin, does not make a sound.What happens next is to be bitterly contested by Dan’s two grinning opponents, each wanting to take credit for the kill. Some claim there were multiple shooters on that day in Gotcha Plaza. Others contend there was merely one lone gunman behind the rubber knoll.

But upon closer inspection of the events, we see that the lone gunman hypothesis can only be upheld by the incorporation of the Magic Pellet Theory:The magic pellet enters the Dan’s back, headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees. It then moves upward in order to leave Dan’s body from the front of his neck -- his neck wound number two -- where it waits 1.6 seconds, turns right and continues into Sergio’s body at the rear of his right armpit -- wound number three.

Then, the bullet heads downward at an angle of 27 degrees, shattering Sergio’s fifth rib and leaving from the right side of his chest -- wounds four and five. The bullet continues downward and then enters Sergio’s right wrist -- wound number six -- shattering the radius bone. It then turns another 180 degrees and burrows itself into Dan’s left nut -- wound number seven -- from which it later falls out and is found in almost “pristine” condition on the ground beneath a picnic bench of Gotcha Park.

Seven wounds, skin, bone. This single pellet explanation is the foundation of the La Jerga Commission’s claim of a lone assassin.

And once you conclude the magic pellet could not create all seven of those wounds, you have to conclude there was a fourth shot and a second rifleman. And if there was a second rifleman, there had to be a conspiracy.

Gotcha Park is a great way to settle old arguments with friends and family of all ages and is located in León, Guanajuato, behind Parque Metropolitano. Tel. 01 (477) 147-3616 NexTel ID 15*45821