Shawn Ryan Show - #46 Ioan Grillo - Cartel Wars & The Fentanyl Crisis

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Cartels, drugs, money, corruption—author and award winning journalist Ioan Grillo has seen it all in his twenty-plus years' of covering Latin America. In this episode, we cover the unprecedented violence that broke out in the city of Culiacán after Mexican authorities recaptured Sinaloa cartel leader Ovidio Guzmán, son of "El Chapo." Grillo breaks down the inner workings of Mexico's most notorious cartels, their recruitment strategies and growing turf wars. We cover the issues with the US / Mexico border and how fentanyl has revolutionized the drug business while wreaking havoc throughout the country. We'll discuss the question—Should cartels be designated as terrorist organizations? The answer isn't as simple as you might think. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://hvmn.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://betterhelp.com/shawn https://mypatriotsupply.com https://blackbuffalo.com https://mudwtr.com/shawn - USE CODE "SHAWNMUD" Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey everybody, this week we have Yoan Grillo on the show, a cartel investigative reporter. He reports on the Cinellua cartel. We cover all kinds of cartel stuff and this one to include the exchange that just went down between the Cinellua cartel and El Chapo's son. The Mexican government gave up El Chapo's son to the Cinellua cartel El Chappos son to the Sinaloa cartel because the Sinaloa cartel overpowered the Mexican government. We talk all about it. Hey guys, thank you all for being here. I love you all. If you haven't noticed, last week we hit one million subscribers and I just want to say thank you to all of you that means the world does i never thought i would have a million people

that want to watch the content on producing but we do so thank you and if you're feeling generous i could always use a uh... i-tunes and spotify review so if you don't mind head over to i and Spotify, leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. And for that exclusive content, sign up for the vigilance elite, Sean Ryan's show newsletter. You won't be

disappointed. All right, love you. Let's get to the show. One last thing I forgot to say, please like, comment, subscribe, and if you get anything out of these shows please share it with your friends let's make this thing go viral. Yo and Grillo welcome to the show man good to be here shillin I've been tracking you for a long time it's really really it's just awesome to have you sitting across from me and with all this stuff going on in Mexico right now we have a And with all this stuff going on in Mexico right now, we have a ton to cover. So award winning investigative journalist produced, directed several documentaries, docky series, you're an author, very well established in the cartel, Mexico space, and yeah, it's just in honor to have you here.

So I'm super excited. Thanks much for the invite yeah great to talk my pleasure. Everybody starts up with a gift. I'm out of boxes so those are the best gummy bears in the world vigilance league gummy bears and they don't they don't even have any THC and I believe it or not But so I can take these on the plane when I fly back to Mexico You can take those on the plane when you go back to Mexico and you won't have to worry about getting arrested But Man tons of stuff going on in Mexico right now. So if you don't mind. I'm just gonna

Get the audience up to date on some of the stuff that's going on and then I figure this is a great place to start. So at 0400 hours in January 5th, 35 miles north of the capital near a rural fishing community called Jesus Maria, security forces claim they had spotted a conoy of around 25 cartel vehicles in which their target, A.K.A.L. Raton. Does that mean the rat, the mouse, the mouse, was believed to be traveling? Defense Secretary Luis Crencio, so, send of all, said cartel gunmen opened fire on troops with half a dozen 50-gallember machine gun trucks

The army responded with UH 60 gunships on the cartel convoy the cartel open fire forcing two aircraft to land with significant damage But somehow Guzman was captured the cartel then closed in on captured. The cartel then closed in on Kool-A-Con International Airport to prevent his transport to Mexico City in a civilian airliner was struck by gunfire, but nobody was heard. In all, 10 military personnel, 19 cartel members were killed in the initial clash. The running shootouts also killed one Kool-A-Con policeman and wounded 17 police officers and 35 military personnel

You know So then let's fast forward a minute and this is I want to ask you your opinion on this on January 9th President Joe Biden arrives in Mexico ahead of bilateral meetings with Mexican president and Jerez Manuá Lopez, a bredor, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Churdo, as well as a joint gathering of the three North American leaders dubbed the three Amigos Summit. The first time Mexico has hosted a US president since 2014. was hosted a US president since 2014. What strikes me a little odd about this is in 2019, they captured El Raton again. And after hundreds of cartel henchmen overwhelmed security

courses in Kool-A-Con, they released them. So do you think, what, one, why would they go after the guy again, knowing that the Cinaloa cartel is obviously going to show some type of military force and take action, knowing what they did last time, which is just release them back to the Cinaloa cartel, that's exactly what they did this time, again, what three years, three years later. Do you think that was a distraction by chance for the, for the three Amigos summit that just happened down there with Biden, Trudeau and the Prime Minister of Mexico? Yeah, so I'm going to lot to unpack and this is a big story in a whole bunch of ways. So in 2019 you had this military anti-narcotics unit. Go for a big deal with man son of El Chapo, on one of four brothers, four of the sons of

El Chapo. He's got a whole bunch of kids but there's four sons known as Los Chapitos who run a faxing of the Sinaloa Cartel which is very big, very effective in trafficking fentanyl to United States crystal meth, you know, big place. So in 2019, you have, based on a US extradition order, a US indictment from New York, you have a military anti-necolect, the CODX unit goes in there into a luxury house in the city of Kulakán, and they make the arrest then around, or they go in there around midday. Now at that point you start to have these reactions from the secarios, the hitmen, or the Cineloac Artel of the brothers, and the military unit is pinned down in the house. So then

you get escalates and you get 700 cartel gunmen against about 350 soldiers. Wow. And they also they they they go into the barracks where the military families are start where the wives and children are and they're like running and they're actually taking fire. They start picking up some officers and we're going to kill them. People are civilians are like terrified, people are stuck inside, schools where they went to pick up their kids, they're like sheltered in the schools, what is stuff's taking place. So then the government at 6 p.m. gave the order to release, or be the ones man, under pressure. Now it was interesting that he took a lot of, obviously a lot of flat foot out. People always cited this as the reason why he's weak or corrupt, or both, President

Lopez de Bredot. And one personal meeting with him, I heard about from a witness there, he said, the thing that he most regretted was most kind of annoyed about in his presidency, he was, in fact, releasing a video-ghost man on that day. So I see this as being like an attempt to kill the demons of what happened in 2019. It's known in Mexico as Alcaldeca Nassil, this whole event. So this time, it was a much more sleekly planned military operation. They didn't get him in Cuyacán,

they got me in this village of Hazus Maria. Now, what you read out was the government's official version. Okay, but there's definitely holes in that. The average on-farm income in the United States was a loss of $1,100. 60% of US port comes from one company, wholly owned by the Chinese. And farmers are more likely to commit suicide than veterans.

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They said that maybe for certain judicial reasons, they didn't have the full judicial clearance for the operation for certain reasons, might be the way. But they went in there, went into this village, Hezuz Mediyah, where he had a house, went in there, took him out, in the early hours of the morning, got him on the plane to Mexico City. Now, when the cartel reacted, and they reacted again, and started blockading the street. But then the military much more prepared. It wasn't 350 soldiers this time. It was three and a half thousand soldiers against them. Say, they, 10 times the amount of soldiers

were ready to react to this. So they outnumbered the cartel, secadeos. That number of dead, 17 cartel, secadeos, cartel, hitmen dead, it might be a lot higher, really, because often the cartel will take away the bodies of those who are killed. They don't want them being taken by the military. They take away their own bodies. So it could be a lot higher. And they got him on a plane to Mexico City and they got him now the timing of the Biden visit.

I mean, I don't think this is hard to believe is a coincidence. When Biden goes down there and Biden is under pressure to ask President of Mexico why are we capturing so much fentanyl on the US-Mexico border? Why is this happening? So now, you know, President Lobster Badoor can say, well, at least we're fighting these guys at least you know we got this guy Billy Ogles man we lost 10 soldiers in this fight so he's got an answer so as soon as you know he knows this president's duty is happening they're like make this capture before then finally enough the village Hesuz Media he had a house there they say that there that the military would like,

looking at this for six months or something, kind of building up this operation. So maybe he was kind of, but funny enough, there's a song called Soil Raton. It was called a Naka Corrido or drug ballad about this guy. And he mentions the name of the village in the song. And he says that's where he grew up. So it's kind of like, as soon as I heard,

like in the morning when I heard like, okay, there's military operation in his media, I was like, I'll be the old man. And right then, that's from the song, you know, it's right away, it was like getting ready, okay. Maybe they've caught this guy now. Wow. Dude, so you don't think this was necessarily a distraction.

You think this was just to give Trudeau and Biden an answer saying, look, this is what we're doing about it. We just did this operation four days before you guys got here. Yeah, I think it's like when you sit down, if you look historically, this happens. When Mexican presidents meet American presidents and

Drago issue comes up Don't give me something to answer. Okay. Why do you think is is is is a capture kill not? Is that not something they do in Mexico? I'm just curious why they wouldn't have had a capture kill mission or just a kill mission knowing What happened you know three years prior to this. So during the presidency of Felipe Calorón, you saw a lot of kills. The Mexican military will go in there, both the Marines and the military. So you see some of the big drug traffickers there. Now some of them would be themselves

be asked for and would gumfire. But it's a guy called Artura Beltran Leva, a very interesting case. If you wanna look up this guy, Artura Beltran Leva, massive drug trafficker. He was shot dead by Mexican Marines. I tell you a crazy story about that. But other ones, Nacho Coronel, huge Traffordgar,

Tony Tormenta, and there was big gun fights. There was one gun fight in Tamolipa State, when they click out Tony Tormenta, six Marines died, 300 grenades thrown in that gun battle. Journalists was killed in the fire. And when Arturo Beltran level was taken down on DEA information, to DEA got the information, gave us the Marines, paid apparently $5 million

for this information. Where they got the house, where it's going to be in Kwanabaka, and Marines went in there, a budget gunfire, a baby was killed, some villains were killed, and across fire, one of the Marines died. And Felipe Calderon, the president, gave him this hero's funeral to the Marine who died.

Afterwards, some gunmen went to the wake of the Marine in his hometown and murdered the mother, the sister, and the aunt, like massacred family members in revenge. So you see sometimes these kill missions, what the stakes can be with these kill missions. You saw afterwards, you saw the Philippe Calderon, you started to see the Pennignetto administration, you saw more captures, less kills, and more captures. So I think it was kind of a strategy to try and dial it down a bit.

Now you still got 10 soldiers being killed in this. But the rules of engagement in Mexico, I think, are very unclear. And you've got a situation where the Mexican government is not declaring we've got an armed conflict here. We've got like an insurgency or an armed conflict for various reasons. You know, it does not good for tourism That's not good. I think cats out of the bag by now But yeah, yeah, even so but like like if you say if you say like I mean this gets into like in an international Legal rounds, but if they start saying we're actually dealing with an insurgency like

You know like Syria or something What rights does that give the people you capture? Does that, you know, what rights does that give, like, certain, they're a specific arm, your name is specific arm group. What does that tell you about foreign investment? So the Mexican government plays a game where they're like a bit like, because I wrote, the subtitle of my first book was Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency. where they're like a bit like, because I wrote, the subtitle of my first book was Inside Mexico's criminal insurgency.

And so I started looking at this, they're acting like a gorilla group. They're shooting down, I mean, it's happened after that, that first book came out, but then they shot down a military helicopter with an RPG 7. They put up 700 gunmen against 150 soldiers. This is acting like an insurgent group, but they're gangsters. You know, I understand what you're saying about, you know, they don't want the family members to be killed,

but to me there's a very simple solution and that's use a special operations surgical team to do the hit and then don't hand out any awards, at least publicly. And then they wouldn't know who to go after. Or they would, I'm sure they would pick somebody, but it wouldn't be, you know, the operational team that made the hit. So, I mean, again, go back to where it,

where Mexican government stands legally. If they say declare we've got an insurgency and soldiers have got the right to go and shoot down the enemy because that's what you can do in an insurgency. You can say we're fighting or war, we're fighting a military war. But Mexican government's not doing that. They're saying we've got a problem of gangsters and criminals. So the government can't legally give a go into shoot, you know, target order. I mean, the soldiers are carrying out a police operation still of arresting a gangster. So if you look, so again, like that's what they, I mean, it's all a mess. And the

situation is a mess. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't do this. I'm just saying like the kind of legal shit show this is. You're okay. That's why they kind of started lying about some of this. Oh, we just ran into this guy in a Jeep convoy because they hadn't really got the whole judicial clearance for exactly for this whole operation. During the Philippic other administration, some of this stuff looked like they had gone in there just to assassinate these guys. They kind of got in there. We're gonna go in there. We're gonna shoot them. All these guys start, you know, to assassinate these guys. They kind of got in there, we're gonna go in there, we're gonna shoot them in. All these guys start, as soon as these guys

start responding with fire, obviously they can go in there and shoot them. But I can't just legally say we're gonna go in there and have an assassination operation of these guys. Now, obviously the Metz goes living a hellish cartel problem. And, you know, would that make a, you know, are you eventually gonna get a government that does that?

You know, you're eventually gonna get government says we're gonna just declare these guys as terrorists or insurgents and just take them out. You know, who knows in the future? Do you think that might happen? Do you think that they are in insurgency and not just street gangs? Right. So I think obviously that beyond street gangs, I think in some ways we don't have like the clear language to describe them. So like, you know, I said criminally insurgency, I made this comparison in my first book. I used to work

gangster warlords and you know, I analyze this, looking at all these different groups around Latin America. They're, yeah, they're clearly beyond criminals and what we can understand as a criminal problem and clearly more comparable to like in surging groups but there are differences between Mexico and say Al Qaeda say the Islamic state and these kind of things. When you go to these territories get the cartels control. It's not like, say, the Islamic State controls a territory and they're interested in things like changing the schools and having Islamic indoctrination. And they're like controlling really the whole territory, no one can come in and out of that territory. In Mexico it's different, even the most cartel areas and not being to the village of Chapagos man, I've been to every state in Mexico over the years and

been to, you know, the countryside in Michoacán, in Tamil, Leipas, in the cities, in Huayde, there's in all these places, and it's seen to be involved over the last 20 years. In the place, even the most cartel places, they still allow the government to operate and do certain things. They still allow schoolteachers to come in, I don't care what the schoolteachers are teaching. They're not interested in indoctrinating people with some new ideology like the Islamic State or the shining path in Peru which is a communist and a Marxist insurgency there. They want the government to provide electricity, they want the government to send garbage trucks to collect garbage but they want to control certain aspects of that territory. So they control security and control the territory in that sense. Now you get what's called

halkonness or like lookouts. Some areas they're really obvious like when you go to that area of chapagos man's village you drive in and you see these guys there, give them a nod, there's guy there with a gun in the radio, you know, give them a nod, you know, these guys are riding around, you know, funny story, I was riding around, this is more than the mild Zambada territory in the South of Coulacan, I've been a lot of time there the last year filming a documentary series, and one time I was stuck in the mud, in a car there was like, stuck in the mud. This kind of minivan drives up behind me, I think, oh, someone can help me out. I'm looking, it's a bunch of guys with AK-47s, Camo gear, a bunch of these cigarros.

It's like, I'm sorry, I'm in your way. That was a good drive past. The guy drives the drive past and he gets stuck as well. Because like, the vehicles are too tightly stuck together. And I'm like, can I, in a laughing, do I actually, I know, play this one out. And the guy, the guy that's got a laughing as well, they're head of these little cruifers to carry,

it's about 23 years old. It's the guy that's got a laughing as well, they're headed this little crew of secarice about 23 years old. It's a guy who's like 1890. And then he said, I still come from England, I'm filming with documentary here, it's a music theme, the local drug ballots. The guy gets on his radio, calls a pickup truck and gets me pulled out of the mud. And it shows a bit is the way they operate in these areas, they're kind of like the local authority, the local police in these areas,

and they're not necessarily going to mess with everybody, but they're kind of parallel. So they're like, they're parallel to the police forces and the local mayor, they'll have the police forces on their payroll, often basically be ordering the local police around, have the local mayor on their payroll, or the local mayor these days, it can be basically a cartel member. So they have control of these areas, but in twined with the government,

and it's not as simple as they like, they are some ways, and you see these times, when they react to a government operation, they'll bring out 700 government to confront the military. But it's a complicated, weird situation. It's like it's a weird 21st century form of hybrid armed conflict, which is quite different from many things we've seen before. Interesting.

So how much, how much of the federal government does the cartel control? It sounds like they have a really good handle on local government. Yeah. You know, and it sounds like, you know, maybe they don't overtly control everything, but it sounds like they're just allowing things to happen.

Like they allow school to have session. They allow people to come in, you know, to work these other government jobs, but they shut down all the, anything that could possibly get in their way. Yeah, so that's a very good question. And again, it gets to a weird complicated level of corruption you have there,

and a way that the cartel power interact with the government in the state in Mexico. So you see these cartels, which are kind of changing and breaking up and moving all the time, but you also have corrupt officials and like corrupt generals who are corrupt generals who can be working for the cartel or they can be making their own money and in a way they're kind of, so you get a struggle between them trying to operate and shake down the cartel as for money.

Okay. As well. Now, if you go back to the Philippic other administration, we say it was very confrontation with drug cartels. The public security secretary, so the top security officials in the country, who was in some ways the public face, the kind of architect of the drug war, he is going to be in trial in the United States on drug trafficking charges, working with a cartel. So from that point of view, you got very high up. Now, presidents themselves, there's accusations

of presidents themselves. Going back to the 90s, the president's brother Rao Salinas accused of running cartel operations. So from that point of view, you got high up. Now, nowadays though, you can see, you know, if there's an accusation particularly after 2019, well, this president, you know, why did he order the release of this drug cartel, guys? That the federal government captured,

but then they captured him. At the same time, they're still, I didn't getting to the fentanyl, and I went to the port of Mancineo, which is the biggest port in Mexico, and it's the port which sits on the Pacific Ocean, where the chemicals come in from China.

They are coming in from China. From China, and from India, with the Chinese chemists are now also running labs in India as well. From China. And from India, with the Chinese chemists are now also running labs in India as well. What are they doing in India? I mean, because, you know, they're the same operations, the same groups

can just go set up a lab in India and it's less controlled in India than China. Although Chinese government isn't, isn't probably cracking down on this stuff. But anyway, talking about this port, so I went to this port to look at this, talk to people who work in the port, people who import stuff, export stuff,

that that port is now run by the Mexican Marines. It's supposedly less corrupt. But the chemicals are still coming through there. And the drive's taking place. So again, so that, I mean, you know, you've got a very questionable, to be very questionable federal apparatus as well. But there's also been this power struggle in Mexico for some years, I think, between the like, people trying to create a federal government that's above the cartels and the cartels literally kind of trying to literally

bossing around federal officials. And you see, now, when you see federal officials assassinated, I remember when the same guy, Bal Tranlava, they ordered, after the guy's brother was taken, was arrested, got called down, was chomo, was arrested, and is now in prison in the United States here, the acting head of the federal police was assassinated in his house in Mexico City, in his home. But was he assassinated for being an honest cop or assassinated because he broke a deal that he'd taken money from his drug cartel? And then with like, you know, you went back on this deal.

That's often the kind of thing. You know, you took some money from us and then you went back on this deal. That's often the kind of thing. You took some money from us, and then you went back on this deal. So we took you out. Damn. Do you know that for a fact with this guy? This thing looks very likely, but in terms of that,

that's a common thing you see by car tells into, like, have these banners out. And a common thing they'll say is like, they'll have an official accused, and they'll say, you took money from us, you know, you took my, and you went back on his deal. That's like a common complaint, an argument they have in those banners.

Man, I don't see how they're gonna get a handle on this. They're so intertwined with every piece of the government in Mexico. I mean, is there anything that's that they're not tapped into? Is there anything? Are they tapped into the president's sea? Are they tapped into the elections? Are they? So I mean, I mean, Mexico is a big and complicated country. So it's a country still of like, you know, trillion dollar economy, 130 million people, 32 states. So you still find states that are not cartel controlled.

And I live in Mexico City. And in Mexico City does not have cartel control in the same way that Shinolua has or the you know, White House has or the Tijuana has. In Mexico City, you have one of the biggest police forces in that in America more than you know more than a hundred thousand officers living Mexico City police force. Okay. They have this huge amount of cameras on the street now. There's the guy who's running the Mexico City police department who survived an attack by the Hellish Goodye generation cartel. Garcia Havuja, Mar Garcia Havuja.

And, and they, you know, I've been covering, I'm following some of the stuff there, and I went to where there was, there was some gangsters in a place called Te Pito, La Unión de Te Pito, and I went down there and checked out, and they had a very constant kind of police operations there. And again, I don't know, you know,

totally of these guys totally honest, but like, they are hitting certain mobs hard But interestingly the murder rate in Mexico City halved between 2018 and 2022 a Mexico City which all the all the awards called the CDMX part Mexico City Which is the kind of federal district, the kind of in a pop, now has a lower murder rate than many US cities,

and even Portland, Oregon. You would mention that last night. Yeah, yeah, Portland, Oregon, because it had a sudden increase in murders in Portland, Oregon. No, so Mexico City, and like you tell me, well, I see it's kind of crazy, like Portland, Oregon, you think it's gonna be real safe.

But definitely, I'm quite substantially lower than some US cities like Houston and Dallas and some of these US cities. Not as low as New York, which is very low. So you get some things, we think, okay, well that's something's working there in Mexico City at least, whatever's, exactly is going on.

And cartels in Mexico City are there, you know, you get arrested, these cartel operatives in Mexico City. They're an operating control to city in the same way that they control Cineloa or Tamolipas or Juarez. In Mexico City, they're kind of there and they're making deals and moving around, but they're not controlling the neighbors. So, let's go see this mix. You've got some states like Yucatan, the state of Yucatan, has a murder rate which is comparable to European countries.

Okay. It's a fairly peaceful area. So you've got this, but then you have got Zacatecas right now. There's a full on war in Zacatecas between the Helisk and New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. And it's this, that's full on crazy stuff. So you got this weird thing, I was down in another one of the other points of the confrontations, the kind of cartel confrontations, is the border of Michoacán and Hellisco. There's a big fight there between the Hellisco New Generation cartel, very violent organization, and a group of local gangsters known as cartels united, called themselves,

one of the groups they're called Los Biagras. Okay, the Agri-Biagras. And that's crazy, that looks more like a weird hybrid warfare. And I went down there and they laid a bunch of landmines, make kind of makeshift landmines, and they'd hit one military carrier there like a jeep, and they'd hit some farmers and killed farmers and stuff. They'd laid, apparently the military had deactivated more than 250 landmines there. Where are they getting the landmines? Where are they getting the RPGs? Yeah, so it's a different, different sources.

So in terms of the weaponry, a lot of the grenades and the RPG 7s come from Central America. Now they come from military stockpiles in Central America. The American government gave the El Salvadoran government a lot of grenades back in the 80s, fighting the wars then against some grillas, left wing grillas, communist grillas in El Salvador.

There were huge stockpiles of grenades, and they started leaking in guys with these criminal black markets. In Honduras you had a bunch of these RPG 7s, broken broken eight launches, stolen from the Honduran military. Now the regular AK-47s or AR-15s they're buying in the United States and the 50 Calth. They generally buy in those and amount they'll pay what they were paying the biggest method is through straw buyers, through paying people with clean records to buy the guns. And they'll pay things like $50 for pistols, straw buyers, $100 for AK-47s or AR-15s and $500 for the 50 cows. And that's a lot of the rates they'll pay here for buying them here.

And that's where the biggest amount of those guns are coming down. Do you think these people that are buying them, the guns, no, were they're growing? I think some of them do, yeah. I think some of them do. I think, I mean, some of them are like, I mean, they're cartel affiliates.

You look at some of these cases. The case of Fast and Furious is obviously an interesting one, which I think a lot of people will be aware of, the case of Fast and Furious going back to from 2009 to 2011, when there was cartel operatives buying, they bought more than 2,000 guns in Arizona, and the ATF was watching them and not acting. What's interesting that case is now very very documented so you've got a lot of files on that

and I looked it out I talked to one of the confidential informants a gun seller in the pre-operation called Wide Receiver, I got from Arizona, before they did the Fast and Furious, and looked heavily at that case, which is a mess. I interviewed the former president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, specifically about that case as well. And that's, you know, it's a very messy case, but you look at that, you know,

you had cartel operatives, they knew. I mean, yeah, one guy went around different gun shops and spent half a million dollars on different guns for the cartels. He knew what to do. Now, there's some cases that people, you know, they can get acquired guns in many places across the country. There was a case of a guy who was an Iraq war veteran who bought 10 AK-47s for the

Sattas Guatal and before one of those guns was used in by the mob who shot and killed an American agent in Mexico. Jaime Zapata. It was, they bought 10 and they were remaining in AK-47s. I went to the factory, Cousier factory in Romania, when it was made, trace this whole process there. But they went into a pawn shop and he was paid $600 for the 10 guns.

So 600 bucks. One of those guns was used to kill an American agent $600 for the 10 guns. So 600 bucks. One of those guns was used to kill an American agent for ICE, Jaime Sepata, who was shot dead in 2011. And his colleague is partner there, Victor Avila, survived that shooting. He's now a very active speaker about these issues. And about my worries, yeah, Victor Avila, yeah.

What did anything happen to the Warvert, issues and about my worries. Yeah, Victor Avali. Yeah. Did anything happen to the warvert, the Barth of the AKs? Probation. Probation. That's it. Probation, yeah. Because the crime of that was lying on the form. Now if you look at some of the interesting politics around this stuff, if you were to

declare cartels terrorist groups, which some people want to do in the United States, and there's an argument for this, but if you were to declare the cartels terrorist groups, that crime would have gone from relying on the form to acquiring material for terrorist organization, that could have gone from probation to 25 years. But obviously, certain people in the gun industry that don't want that as well, because then if you run a gun store and you sell gun to a straw purchaser, could you suddenly be caught up in that thing as well? The other thing about the Clare and Cartel's terrorist groups,

and there's certainly an argument for these tactics about declaring cartels as terrorist groups. And there's certainly an argument for this, now for these tactics they're using to declare them as terrorist organizations, was then if the people are applying for asylum in the United States and saying, I'm fleeing this cartel, they threaten me. And then they're declared by the US government as terrorist organization that would increase their case

in going according the United States. That makes a lot of sense. But they make it hitting very hard and certain ways in the United States groups. Yeah. What do you think they should do? Do you think they should label on the terrorist group? Like in the United States,

I've been covering this stuff for 21 years, in the United States. I've been covering this stuff for 21 years or 22 years I've been in Mexico now. And I used to have some easy houses but it's tough and say this is what we do, three things. Right now, I don't see easy solutions to this. I would say, I don't know if labeling, I mean, there's different aspects.

If you label them terrorist, if the United States labeled these group terrorist organizations, but still, if the United States could go in there with drone strikes or in a military raid, it's still not gonna solve this because these groups are so powerful and so many people. So you've basically got, there's kind of three things that I look at, where they do or not,

and I'm not saying it's an outrageous thing to do to name them as terrorist groups. But it's three things that I look at, it's kind of a solution to this, it's kind of a long term. So one of them is, you have to build up some lower enforcement which works in Mexico. This episode is brought to you by J.C. Penny. A good time starts with a great wardrobe and a great wardrobe starts at J.C. Penny. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and J4R. With clothing

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Feel better. Visit rebelcremery.com to find a store near you. Now, when you're dealing with cartels at this heavily armed, it's extremely hard, but it's gotta be, I mean, it's the any other way you've gotta have law enforcement bodies, and like, you know, like trying to push this back,

and some of this is like, what are you doing in Mexico City? I'm trying to say we've got a lot of home murder right in these areas. We can't allow armed groups to operate. We can't allow completed impunity. So We can't allow combating impunity. So some is about building some body of law enforcement. Now they have to maybe, you know, like say,

well, we've got to accept that we're dealing with heavily armed groups and you've got to have a certain role of engagement for that. But you need some law enforcement in Mexico. The second thing, and I believe this does really work. I've spent a lot of time interviewing cartel members over the last 22 years. A lot of the hitmen, some of the higher ups.

If you look at the hitmen, then they are from recruited into the cartels when they're about 12 years old. There's different stories in a, you fight a bunch of different stories, basically typical stories. You have some of these neighborhoods saying Huides, Tamolipas, the kids will be on the block and the cartels will approach them and recruit them 12 years old, 13 years old, and start off like, okay,

you're gonna be a lookout for us. And we're going to pay you 30 bucks a week. And we're going to give you a radio or a cell phone and you're going to send a message every time whatever comes past. And you hear these guys, how connoisseurs, you hear these guys signal the way they're talking. I want to tell you what's with the police in Monterey and we were listening into the house on his and they were talking about us. We were listening into them spying on us. You know, you've dumped any of that stuff.

But, no, so these kids, the 12 years old, they get recruiters to look out to start taking money from the car cell and they start getting trained to become hitmen. Some of them will carry out murders 14, 15 years old. There was one guy who was a police officer who was also working with cartels and he was describing how he would get the kids

to cart the bodies to start making them lose their fear but come brutal. Interviewed another guy for the Barry Rastecca, which is a faction of the Hualis Cartel, who described how he looked for the kids. You want to find kids who are like, got some hate in their heart. I don't want kids who are like, got nice families. It's kind of the opposite of the, you know, I'm not sure if they're actually

military recruitment, but like these guys are like, looking how do we, they need constant recruitment. We want to find guys who are messed up and you interview somebody's, scatios, you know, one guy I talked to who was abandoned as a kid. His parents, you know, left him with nothing and he was like, I got hate for the world. So like for me to cartel, give me something and I don't, I want to hurt other people. I don't care. I want something for myself. But then you get kids in carrying out multiple murders.

So now once you get somebody who's 18, they carry out multiple murders, they cut up bodies, they've done the captations, they can't do much for that. But you do need help and strategies to reach some of these kids before they get recruited by the cartel. Very specific focused programs. I mean not just throwing money out there But like very specific focus was in the neighborhoods where the kids are being recruited And you know one guy I was talking to is like yeah, we know on the block who the kids are gonna be recruited by the cartel We know who the ten kids are

You know that it's just waiting for it to happen. Why's the government doing nothing? To try and do that. So that's nothing. I mean, it's kind waiting for it to happen. What's the government doing nothing? To try and do that. So that's nothing. I mean, it's kind of crime prevention or like changing this. So you're talking about implementing some kind of an educational service for kids and these in the state's territories.

Yeah, I mean, more focused. I mean, it's like about like say, look very strategically. Where's the high recruitment for these cartels? And then who specifically are the kids and they're like say, look very strategically, where's the high recruitment for these cartels? And then who specifically are the kids? And they're like saying, talking to the parents, your kid's gonna be in a cartel the next day. We can offer something, keep them in school, like offer something to try and improve, learn to trade, learn something to have a living,

just thinking, you know, your kids are going to be dead, can well be dead. I mean, how many of these kids have parents who are generational cartel members though? This isn't a new problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've been down there for 22 years. If somebody got recruited at 12, they could have. I mean, it's the sad thing. Like, remember I was covering the staff in 2004 when it kind of started escalating, turf order, and the kids there were not even born who are now hitmen. There's a grave yard in Sinaloa, called the Omaia Cemetery.

Amazing. If you're going to get a chance to go down there, it's one of the most surreal, crazy graveyards in the world. Massive, mass aleum, so that he's big traffickers. But there's loads of graves of hitmen. And you see loads of graves of kids, 18, 19, 2021. And you see some of my young fathers, and you'll see like on like, father's day,

I mean, when I was in there, father's day, when I'm always big balloons and blankets and everything like, but also like sometimes the mothers will go down there and they're out of photographs. You know, how many of these kids are gonna die? No, young, I mean, think about it. In Mexico, it's been over the last 10 years,

more than 300,000 bodies. You know, and it's going on 20 years, half a million. It's like, you know, there's a lot of these people in the diet. So, so how can you reach and try and stop, say like the new generation? I mean, yeah, you say like some of the, like, my generation cartel members, but then you talk to some of the, even the cartel members. One of the work, what things that I approach, when I, when I meet a lot of these guys and you give a picture, I wanna talk to you. And I often say, we're like, and this is partly journalistic spill

or you're trying to meet somebody and you wanna get, I talk to them. But I say this from my heart, I know you don't necessarily want this for your kids. You don't want your kids to live a life you like. You have the glamour of seeing Narcos TV series and beautiful women and these big mansions, but most of them are not living like that.

The bosses, but most of them, they're living violent, brutal lives and they're going to be dead or in prison. They're going to be committing murders. You talk to them like, how do you feel about it? These guys, one guy interviewed him in prison and said, I'll whites. And the prison and said, I'll whites. Whereas in fact, also they did a raid on it,

this January as well, and they bust out a bunch of guys and killed 10 guards. One of my craziest prisons in the world, is in there some years back and they have, they're basically these wings which are segregated by cartel groups. So they have the Hwattis cartel, which has the Bader Ars Tekke, one part

and they have the Tinalar cartel, which has these groups called Luz Machicles and the artist of Sassins and R-Part. And they have this weird evangelical Christian part. And I was in there, and the, the time of the prison director, and it was open, and he let me keep him going back and forth in there, spend the time, and been teasing in his prison. And they have these weird evangelical

ceremonies in the prison, they were like, guys, and getting rid of their demons and stuff. It was kind of crazy scenes. And I talked to one guy who was quite a heavy cartel guy, who'd been ahead of assassins and pretty brutal stuff. And I was there, he was me and a cameraman, we were narrowing the cell, we started talking to him. And he started kind of going on this full on confession, how he'd decapitated people, they'd still alive and stuff, and all this kind of stuff.

And we were there, and the prison guy was there, and he said to the guy, you know you're saying it's on camera, you know, what the implications, they can see your face here. And they're like, you can't show my face. Oh, okay, we'll black out, and it's, oh, my voice is also like, people look, we won't know my voice, because I don't love phone calls and people gonna hear my voice and stuff phone calls threatening people and stuff.

And then we said like we're not gonna show the video by using material the written material on what he said. But it's not a nice story. These guys not nothing, a lot of them don't have nice life, not like a nice and a happy ending. These guys got like I hacked all these people up, I got all this, it's not like a nice and a happy ending. This guy's got like, I have to all these people up. I've got all this, it's not necessarily ending nice for these guys. So there is ways to reach them. So I think that's one thing is like, how do you try and approach this? But the third thing is like the drug profits.

Now, it's the economic motive, it's driving this. So we got this Multi-billion dollar industry the United Nations few years ago is to say it was worth $300 billion globally Drug trade There's a the Rand has a started there. They estimate the US illegal drug markets $150 billion 150 billion dollars. Yeah, wow Okay, you see these you talked to drug traffickers. You know, they buy okay, we're doing that to cocaine. Good cocaine. $2,000 in Mexico. $20,000 at a board of $30,000, $40,000, New York, $100,000, break it up.

You can suddenly make it worth $200,000, $200,000. This profit's going so fast. So this is what drug traffickers are doing. You can put money in, you're taking money out. You're making huge, huge, returns on your investments. That's why I like, I mean, you can put money in, you're taking money out, you're making huge, huge returns on your investments. So that's why I like, I mean, you see anybody, people wanna be, we're in a cap to this world, people wanna make money.

You know what, the kind of business we are in, media. Not a lot of bucks in this, you know, we're struggling to make a buck out of this. Imagine that, you know, I'm gonna put in, I'm gonna put in $100,000 to this, and I'm gonna take away half a million in a couple of months. Or more. So this is like why, like this is so much money with this and anyone can do it so like then people fight and the most violent people take over. Now at the same time, it's still not an easy solution. You say, I can, I do believe that legalized marijuana,

it was legalized marijuana. I think at this point, but now we've got fentanyl. Fentanyl is the profits are even bigger than cocaine, because fentanyl, you've got these tiny little chemical, chemical stuff, it's extremely potent, less bulk. You don't have to worry about the whole harvesting process of like ground coca leaves and cropspring, labs in China. The Mexican cartels want to even create their own precursors, so maybe even some point China could be outside the

equation, but right now China's part of this. And you've got Americans dying now. I mean, this is horrific numbers, 107,000 overdose deaths in 2021 in the United States, about 70,000 involved fentanyl. Nothing, 30,000 involved crystal meth. I mean, they're using this weapons now too. I'm seeing over and over again, it's becoming more and more common. You know, we're seeing police officers go down from fentanyl exposure. Before we get into the fentanyl crisis, I want to rewind and I do want to say,

I think that the educational program that you're speaking of, is that just your idea or is somebody looking at maybe implementing that? Because that could really work. In my initial thought was, there's no way that's going to work because there's going to be multi-generational carto members. But then when you talk about how their life is, one of the questions I ask a lot of the

special operations guys that I interview on here is, would you want your kid to have the life that you had doing what you know now? And I don't know the exact number, but it's got to be 90%. Why? No, I don't want my kid to have to live through that. Well, that's like, you know, working on special operations with a government, salary, and people continue to hear, let alone being, you know know a cartel figure. I mean I said there's different people and some of them are unrepentant, some of them have made it work for them. There's traffickers who've made this stuff work for them, have ended up stashing their assets and making deals with the government and and and they end up being kind of clean with it.

But a lot of people that they don't their kids. And it's bizarre. I've been with gang members, cartel members, on one side they killed 27 people. And the other side they're talking about, they go to their parents evening at their kids school. And they're like, they kind of, somebody's people, it's a weird bizarre word. You get into them like a lot of them, they kind of struggle on what I'm gonna, get a normal life out of this stuff. They kind of live through this area of brutal violence.

I think, yeah, a lot of, very good part. I think a lot of the kind of special forces military people You cannot you can sit down and put out sitting around with these guys and can't understand and share a beer Have a cup of coffee because you both had you know, you've seen extreme violence You know what it's like you seem bent their bodies. You know it like okay, how do I process killing this guy? How do I deal with that now Some of these these scenarios, I think they simply say, well, I'm taking orders. And they are, it's killing machines. You were recruited in, it's like, well, I've got orders to go and kill these guys. So I'm

doing. But if you look at like, why does the real severe violence come about like, why, you know, you know, in our question, what, why do they leave the worst atrocity, or one of the worst atrocities in Mexico, which I've covered, was 49 bodies, dumped on a road, all decapitated, all with their hands cut off, and their feet cut off, dumped on a road.

I got a call in the Sunday morning, it's 22, I've got a call, I saw something's happening up in Monterey, I jumped on a plane and flew out there. When I got out there, they'd taken the bodies and put them in the morgue. So I went in the morgue and the smell of 49 bodies, that they couldn't identify, they had no heads, no hands and no feet, just 49 lumps of meat. And it's like, why, what do they do that? What are they doing, stuff? I actually recently got it met one of the guys

in the cartel in prison in the United States who was involved in that cartel and gave me a bit of an explanation for what they were doing with that there. One of the things you see is you have combatants, people with structures, irregular armed organizations, and they told the control terrorist, talking about the boss, you got to control territory. So how do we control territory? We use terror. So in essence, they are using terror or terrorists, but the same way the military groups have done this forever. How do we control this territory?

We've got many people scared of us. I mean, it makes sense. It's brutal as it is. It does make a hell of a lot of sense. And when you're recruiting kids that are 12, 13 years old, I mean, by the time, I mean, they have to be desensitized like that. Yeah, so they're training up these kids.

Now, I tell you a horror story of, on that same investigation, same time I went up there. So I was in the morg, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, to one woman, so I would try to find if our loved ones who have disappeared are among these victims. She wanted to be a DNA test. And as one woman I talked to was a school teacher and she described how her son was dragged out of their home on one evening, 18-year-old son, philosophy student.

What happened was she was sitting there, she had her two sons there, one 18-year-old, one 15-year-old. And son of the door, bang, 15 guys come in with guns. Because once you get these armed groups, they can start ravaging, attacking the the local population storming the house start grabbing stuff and then they say to her which your son is the oldest and she's like can't even answer can't even speak how to answer that and the elder son Raced his hand and said I'm the eldest you know, you're not gonna take my little brother

They took him She got a phone call the next day Can give us this amount of money will give you a sum back She got the money, you know, what can you really do is a parent at that moment? called the money wherever she could relatives We're not handed it in Phone up no response.

That was it, her son was gone. She was wandering around these events, these morgues trying to find him. Other mothers I've talked to, same, very similar stories who eventually found and identified the borders of their kids after like three years. One of them, in Varakruz, and I talked to her when she was looking for a kid who was taken away by our managed guy who worked at Customs, 24 years old. And eventually she identified his body. Eventually she identified his body.

They, she was, and she, she become with a group of mothers searching for, you know, you've just got thousands of disappearances that have come out and it's convict. So she was searching for his, you know, for him with these various mothers, they were a lot marching. And a guy pulled up in a car and said, um, check out this place, and he had like a hand-drawn map. He might find some borders here. So they went there to, first they said to the government, oh, we got this information of a government like, whatever. So they went there themselves and started digging up in this field and started finding bones, skulls, what is it? Turned out to be the biggest

mass grave in Mexico in the modern time, 297. 297 remains. I mean, and this is like, but I mean 297 skulls, I mean, this is a mess because it's like, it's even hard, it's like bones, five years old, eight years old, one year old, two year old remains. They started pulling them out eventually after several years her son was identified in this mask grave. Why they were pulling them out? So you started getting that smell again,

that smell of kind of, you know, bodies being pulled out. Right in front of it was a housing area. Attempts at middle-class homes, the kind of, you know, kiddies, bikes, basketball hoops, and the families, things like, we're getting this stinker that's coming into our housing. And that's how bizarre messed up this conflict is.

You know, that makes me just re-think the... What are they trying to achieve by storing people's houses and just pulling their kids out and killing, telling them that they're gonna take a ransom for it and killing them? So I think what happens a lot, I mean, in every case, it's got different stories.

But in that case, what you can have it, I mean, like, you've got brutal soldiers, you can relate to this being a soldier. Imagine the most kind of brutal soldiers, but so you haven't gone through like good recruitment, they've kind of recruited the kind of meanest, hateful people they can find from the streets. But in a sense, they're victims and victimizers to an extent. But yeah, still, they're like, you know, victims and victimizers to an extent.

But yeah, still, you know, hateful, brutal people, train them up, make them bloody, and tell you, you guys gotta control these territories, give them guns, make them commit terror. Then once you've got an armed group out there to commit commit terror, okay. We want some money.

It's just gonna rate a house. It's gonna rate a store. It's gonna steal a car. Do we like? Rate someone's house, steal some stuff. Okay's just gonna rate a house. It's gonna rate a store. It's gonna steal a car. Do we like it? Rate someone's house, steal some stuff. Okay, we'll take the sign and get it to power ransom. Kill him anyway. Maybe we killed him already.

Maybe we beat the crap out of his kid and killed him already. Or maybe we recruit these people and you get people you know, people who recruit him forced to do stuff, you know, recruit him for some, put themselves, give these people where we recruit, give him a gun and do some stuff, or hack up bodies or do this or do that. It's brutal. It's kind of one of the crazy things about this is this, I mean, that kind of level of almost like medieval kind of warfare, kind of medieval morality in this stuff.

And in some ways, you can't look at medieval stuff the way this cartels operate. It's like, filthy. You know, you've got like one powerful drug boss and then a guy is below who's like swearing, fealty to him and a guy below swearing to him. But that's happening. At the same time, you got like swearing, fealty's here, and a guy below swearing, fealty's here, but that's happening. At the same time, you got like, say,

a trillion dollar economy. You've got a Mexican city, you can sit in a Starbucks, and sit there in your laptop, and you can go to a trendy bar, you can go to Cancun, and go to some beautiful beaches. And that's happening as well at the same time. So it's kind of weird how this kind of normality is around this very harsh conflict. This episode is brought to you by Dr. Teals.

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if they're going into residents, yank at them out and forcing them to go, yeah, bodies up or, or become a sacario hip man, or whatever, even if it's just a look out, what is there even an option to say no? Yeah, so that's the thing. So, so like, yeah, what you asked before about, like, is it my idea, like, I mean think if you've met plenty of social workers out there in Mexico and other places in Jamaica, in El Salvador and different places around the place, in Huarez, there was a woman, and a bunch of times, and I never,

I still find her up for a very, very real smart woman. She used to work in a factory herself in the city and she was doing social work stuff like this And she was you know, she was she taught me a lot of this stuff This is what's happening here For a time they were getting money for a time when what is I be quiet It's become the most murderous city in the world around 2010 11 and Then you know you would get some of the US money going to these programs. USA would start going to some of these social work programs and stuff.

And it helped, it helped get the violence down for a while. But it kind of peed us out this stuff. And the Mexican government, you know, they have, you know, the problem is, you know, it's corruption, you get the Mexican government, you know, some of the top level, I will give out money for crime prevention. Then you get like middlemen who are not really good players, just stealing money. And then you get people like distracted and doing stuff like these really bad prevention products, rather than getting to the really good people who are, and there are good people there who are

on the ground who know and I like say it's kind of, you got to reach these kids young. I do have more difficult question. I mean, you mean, I think we can all of us can probably agree that trying to steer 12-year-old kids away from this lifestyle is a good thing. More difficult is what you do with a kid who are 18 who have committed multiple murders already. I mean, you know, there's not much help. I mean, you can you create, you know, but how can you find anywhere anywhere from out of these cartels? Is it only prison or death for these guys? And they're committing a bunch of horrible crimes. So, you know, can you have kind of any armistice,

any kind of peace deal? And this, you know, like, you know, disarmament, disbanding these forces, you know, maybe you can't. They can't try it a bit in some places. And how many, well in Colombia, they've kind of done that a bit in some places. And how many, how many, how many Colombia they've kind of done that a bit more, slightly with the guerrilla group in Colombia. They're like, okay, we can try and disarm them

and track, track a program to try and demobilize. You know, I just, I reached out to somebody I'm trying to get on the show. Actually, his name's Rick Doblin. He's, he runs Maps, which a psychedelic nonprofit out of Canada. They do a ton of research. And he said, he's actually in Iceland right now doing a some type of a convention, big meeting with police officers and actually the person, I'm going to butcher this, but he's in charge

of the prison system in Iceland. And they're thinking about implementing some type of a psychedelic program. It sounds like me, possibly, with MDMA. In doing this therapy for people coming out of the prison systems, hoping that it's going to help them transition back into, a normal life and increase the probability that they will not commit the same type of crime again. Do you think there's any possibility

of that happening down there? Well, so what are the problems there is like, if it's your family who had a kid in a butchered, you know, you don't want to know forgiveness for these people. That's true. I mean, some of the, there was a case of, I mean, sometimes they actually use, one of those they use young kids as well to commit murder

is because young kids in the mental congestive system, in some states they can only get five years in prison. Okay. In some states they can only get five years in prison. Okay. So there's kids who commit, I mean it was a case where he was out of ponchies a few years ago. He was actually a US citizen. Really?

He might be back in the United States. But he was, he was going back a few years and he was, there was videos of him where they had guys hanging up and he was part of a crew and he was like a little mascot with a crew like beating and torturing these guys. And then when the military caught him and there was journalists around there, when the military caught him and I know one of the guys who was there and he asked him this, they put the cameras up. And this guy's got three sons and was kind of knew how to talk to him. And was like, kind of stern, you know, what are you done? I was like, to capitate four people.

It's like 14 year old kids said that. I had it on camera, it was on TV. It was on camera, it was kind of a big scandal. And the guy did five years or so, he's out, released, probably up in the United States now. You know, the cases with people older and they can give them longer sentences, but it's like how much, you know, you know,

if you're the mother who some was dragged away and murdered, you know, you're gonna want them in pretty much you can. There's no death penalty in Mexico. Even a country where you have, you know, you get up 35,000 murders in a year and they're death penalty. That's ironic isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of the time they call the hits executions.

Really? They call them in Spanish. They're like executions. They use the word like a heck of ackleddavos, executed. So it's there, like, from them, it's like, well, from the cartel point of view, we have a kind of process here. We, you know, we made a judgment, the guys got to go, we can execute them. So, you know, yeah, we've got to set the rules.

Yeah, we've got to set the rules. Yeah, but, yeah, I've been on the flip side, so I've been on the one side, you've got, you know, I really do believe in the social programs, particularly say for the younger kids, I mean, 12 years ago, before they'd been recruited. But you've got to have a create law enforcement, you can't have impunity, you can't have, now in Mexico overall, about 90% of murders go unpunished.

Now it's really a bit more than that. Now in Mexico overall, about 90% of murders go unpunished. Now it's really a bit more than that. That figure is like based on saying for every 100 murders, in 10 of those cases, somebody has been sent to prison or given a sentence for those murders. The other 90, nobody has. Sometimes really though they only caught one person, but there's several people involved. Sometimes they call the wrong person. In some states, it's like 98% impunity. So for every

50 murders, only one of those cases has somebody been sentenced to it. Imagine if you're, you know, you can be a hitman, but also you say, regular guy, you want to kill someone, but you think, well, I've got 150 chance of being caught, not exactly at the tarant. So it's like, you've got to have, you've got to fight impunity, but to do that when the situation is so bad, right, like right now, you've got to have pretty hard enforcement and to try and bring things down, kind of set some rules and kind of like push these down from where it's out right now, which is like on the edge, on the cliff, the cliff of the obese. Interesting.

Reminding real quick all the way back to what we talked about declaring that may terrorist organization or some type of insurgency. What would the downfall be? The downside of that. I mean, so we talk about from the US policy point of view, yeah. We can talk about it from any. Oh, from the Mexican. I mean, the next thing they do use sometimes terrorist charges

against them. I'm asking because I feel like the minute that that happens, that they get declared a terrorist organization or an insurgency funding is going to come extremely fast and there's going to be a ton of it. So that's why I don't understand why they don't just... Okay, so like say we look, we look at this, like US says, look at the Cilara Cartel or the Heliskini Generation Cartel, particularly we mentioned, but look at the Cilara Cartel, so say if you declare okay, the Cittinilla Carthel is a terrorist organization. Then it's not like, say with Al Qaeda, you have these kind of certain target members, you're going to target, you're going to find out these networks, and go around and get

them. We're talking about in Sinaloa, this is an organization, or it's a network really more than an organization, with hundreds of thousands of people only involved in this. I mean, this is like, you go to these villages, you go to the town of the city, this is just a huge, huge thing.

So you get brought into so, so, so, so we can just target anybody who's involved. And a lot of people, it's like a lot of the time, it's a loose network in its places, or you know, you've got like a, I say it's kind of medieval in some ways. You have powerful people and people who swear laudities to them and these areas.

You're gonna go in, you know, we're going to go to Mexico with US drones, even if you take out 50 of these guys, 100 of these guys, it's going to keep on coming back. You're kind of drawn into a real swamp there. You know, and you start flying those kind of missions into Mexico. It's not like there's a quick go in there and take it. It's not like there's like a thousand guys you can take out. It forms over. In the country of Mexico, we're talking about millions of people. It's more like, I mean, because these are so sproding organizations. And you know, you say they're involved in a bunch of stuff.

It's not only drugs anymore. Drugs are huge and drugs finance them. I make them so powerful. Because when you make billions and billions from drugs, you buy so many guns, you train so many secarios, you buy so much corruption, protection, you become very, very powerful group, which then allows you to do a bunch of other stuff.

So then, okay, human smuggling into the United States. I was down in Tijuana and I found a human smuggler there. Initially he was like, I went there and I asked about who's this guy here. He's, you know, they call him Poietos, who like chicken herders. And the first one was like, you know, you could be anything. You know, you're a white guy, there's Ukrainians, you know, Russians, there's anybody around, well, they're looking for money all the time.

Now, when they, and I very quickly set up a journalist because I didn't wanna like string me along too much because right, and it's in his eyes, like, changed. But like, he confirmed numbers with me and I confirmed him with a guy who ran an American ice agent who ran a task force looking at these immigrants mugging groups. And he had a lot of sources inside as well, the numbers are pretty much there. Like they're now, the numbers have shot right up. So it's like 12 to 15,000 dollars. Head now going in. More like they would take them on boats around a coast like 18,000 dollars. They got like some other stuff that's we're there. It's a bit cheaper and this thing now of asylum claim

What is it's flipping over the wall to have themselves in like the $500? It's like just jump you over the wall and you had a self into into the border patrol and And try and claim a asylum But anyway people actually smuggling sneaking in the United States You've got millions of people paying for this services. To do the math. I mean, the Mexican Foreign Secretary said they reckon like over 10 billion a year on a human smuggling.

Where are they getting this money? They're smugglers. The migrants paying. What do you think about that? You just said 12 to to $15,000 a head. Yeah, yeah. And these people are coming from nothing, making, I think you threw the number out 300 bucks a month,

to be a lookout for a car. What do they come up with $12,000, $15,000? Yeah, so if you've got, I mean, you might have found members in the United States already. Think about the investment. I mean, you might, you know, even if you're paying, even if you pay $15,000 to get to the United States, how much could you work make here over 10 years? No, I completely understand.

Yeah, I'm saying, where do they get the money? We have physically get the money to. I would say over 50% of the population in the US probably doesn't have $15,000 on the bank account. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, you got, you know, family networks, you know, a lot of time families, you might have a family who's, you know, now Salvador, they're not my living through remittances in not villages in Mexico. You've got these villages, like everything's built through money sent back from the United States.

And so you're building up a family network and you're saving up money and putting the icon. I think that happens. So I haven't got $15,000. I can come up with five. Okay. You pay me off. Then I got something over you, then I can hold one of these guys prisoner until you pay the money back and so forth. So then you get like these things where you get like stashes of, you know, and had a bunch of these and phoenix for a while, these people held up and it was like, it's because people were like,

they didn't have the money, or they pay half up front and half where they were delivered and they couldn't get the family members to pay them to then kind of kidnap any people in the United States. That kind of money. But I was just saying, so you got human smuggling, huge business. Mining, now mining, a lot of gold being mined in Mexico. A lot of foreign companies, particularly Canadian,

going in there for the mining. Card Thales Contrary, Eric's card Thales have now realized there's a big amount of cash in gold mining and they want a piece of that. There's also a lot of lithium mining going on in Mexico, correct? There's lithium, it's not really happening yet, money wise. Okay. There was a massive lithium deposits found in Sonora. The, you know, they initially said, oh, this is the biggest in the world.

It's a bit more complicated. I talked to somebody involved in the mind. It's a bit more complicated. Like lithium everywhere, it's like verified. They were investing a bunch of money before they'd got a real return. And the Mexican government said, oh, we want that.

And they said, well, nationalized lithium like oil. And then the companies will, oh, we can't make any money out of this then. So it's not really happening yet, but there's a lot of lithium in Mexico, a lot of potential there. A gold silver is a lot of money being made out of that right now. And a lot of the companies, I mean, at the end of a day, we'll, we'll settle for, you know, we've got a passup, a percentage of what we make here, to the community, the local community, who's running and

controlling the local community. So that's another industry, and then you've got oil theft, which is, into pipelines and taking out oil. And that's worth building and seeking it. I mean, that's got no idea that was happening. Yeah, yeah, huge. They call it in Spanish, they call it Wachikoleros. Wachikol is stolen oil. I've been a big deal for a lot of years.

So you got, you know, a mess because of huge oil producer and these these groups who are now taking over by cartels, work market sales but there's a tradition of these oil thieves. They're often drill two holes. They're drilling one hole to take out oil and drilling another hole to put in another liquid to try and equalize the pressure. There was one incident that was like a really bad drill, just the oil was spurting out and a bunch of people from the local town came and started filling up all their gas cans and then exploded and it killed like over a hundred people. It's like brutal. But

yeah, I mean huge, I mean an incredible loss for government. And this president has tried to crack down on oil theft but it still goes on. I've been to a place in Sinaloa where they're selling stolen gasoline. And you drive in there. And it's not even that, I mean, it's cheap,

but it's like say, 35, 40% cheaper than there is at the pumps. So it's like say, 35, 40% cheaper than there is at the pumps. So it's cheaper, but it's not like, you know, dirt cheap considering it's stolen gasoline. And I went in there with a guy I work with in Sinaloa, and I went in there, I went in there, I drove in there, and had a bunch of these just big old,

like plastic cans of, or plastic containers of gasoline. And then we're doing this spraying this stuff all the time because it's smelling. And then when he didn't know, and he'd fill up his car, and there's all the cars there, nice cars, different stuff, it'd go in there, paying cash, buy stocked on gasoline. And that's for flying gasoline.

So you've got that business as well. You've got product piracy, you know, pirated goods, truck theft. I mean, it's a huge amount of cargo theft in Mexico. And then markets we sell stolen goods. And yeah, so you've got enormous, there are a lot of verticals. Yeah, yeah, you've got their diversified Organized crime network. She's really what they are now

But drugs are still huge and selling drugs locally and trafficking drugs So yeah, I mean, hey, there's got to be something done about this You know societies shouldn't live with this and you're seeing I think There's a lot of couple years, more of a lean towards harder approaches. Would you like to see them be able to terrorist organization personally? It doesn't upset me a lot what I do is terrorism. I just don't think it's a silver bullet. Okay. I mean, I can see,

you know, you know, I can hear arguments about this from, I can see from certain American law enforcement perspective, you can just say, go after these guys, you don't have to go to, like, like the D.A. when they go after these guys, they've got a lot of paperwork. They build up files on these guys, and it takes them like two years sometimes, like they build up and they've got but all this, now they have these informants sometimes. It's like they build up and they've got, but all this, now they have these informants and his wire taps and all this stuff. And they're building up his paperwork, paperwork, paperwork.

Go before a grand jury and get his indictments, get them out and then get the, you know, they're like years bogged down in this stuff. And then by that time, you know, the guys are already being killed and someone else is like running stuff. So you can see like it's an argument, you know, that, you know, has somebody in May,

it's like we've got to, you know, just change the game now. This is different game now. The terrorists right away, and anybody we can kind of prove any kind of links that is we can just take them out. But still it's like, you know, they're, you know, so there's so many of these people,

it's like, what, you know, you're not gonna go in and take out, you know, like, you're gonna go in and start shooting up villages like in Afghanistan or like, you know, drone strikes like in Afghanistan or whatever. I'm gonna, what reaction would that create from from from the Mexican population? And I have people not even involved. So, so I dose see as a silver bullet. But, you know, I'm not, I don't think it's outrageous. Yeah. Well, let's take a quick break. Yeah.

We'll come back, we'll get into the fentanyl. Yeah, yeah, sure thing. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. Alright, we're back from the break.

That was a fantastic lunch, by the way. So, since we're kind of on the subject of structure of the cartels, how they recruit, I've never really gotten into how prevalent are the cartels outside of Mexico borders. Are they setting up shop here in the US? Are they setting up shop in places like Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, Panama, or they're staying in Mexico. Yeah, so I'm going to hit the United States. I'm going to hit massive.

They operate in the United States very differently than Mexico. So it's like kind of attack and defense. That kind of difference. Okay. But they're all over. I mean, they're pretty much in every, I would say they're probably in every state in the United States. In some way, operating, connecting. So what does that mean? Where is in Mexico? You know, you have, you know, it's in a lot of Culecan, you know, hundreds of of gun men on standby all the time, ready to jump on staff, policing things, policing labs, in a bunch of businesses, ready to kidnap people, shape people down, kill people at will, hear they're very different, or traditionally they have been.

So it has been a few times, if you look over the years, when they started dropping bodies in the United States. So it has been a few times, if you look over the years, when they started dropping borders in the United States. One was over in Texas, when they set us, started killing a bunch of people in South Texas in the 2000s. One was over in California, around the San Diego area, when a break off from the area, and a Felix Cartel started killing a bunch of people.

Group called Las Palillos. from the area on a Phillips cartel started killing a bunch of people. Group called Los Palillos. Both times, law enforcement hit them very hard. So they kinda learned his lesson, okay. In the United States, we can make billions of dollars, but it's certain things we don't wanna do. We don't wanna kill too many people.

Sometimes even they're better off kidnapping somebody in the United States. It might be a Mexican national anyway, or it could be somebody from there driving them into Mexico and committing the murder over there. Really? Yeah. Absolutely. Particularly on the Al Paso Juarez border. You've got this group called the Barrio Azteca who are a cross-border organization working with the Juarez Cartel. Begu out as a prison

gang in Texas, and grew up basically as a paramilitary organization, but they're also very active in Texas. And they kidnapped people, drove into Mexico and killed them in Mexico, dropping in a nabody in Huaytas. Because, you know, think about the investigation. In Huaytas in 2010, there was 3,000 murders,

and our passota was like 12. Wow. So like you're gonna dump it in Huai Rui and it becomes one of 3000, you know, murders not investigated or have it in our Paso where it can be like investigate. So they learned a lesson over the years of, okay, we don't kill people in the same way,

you know, we're not gonna do all these crazy kind of beheadings, but they're all here. And unless they're gonna be killing police officers, like they're doing Mexico every day, in the midst of they can kill police officers if they're not on their payroll. Here in the United States, it's more difficult. Now, I'll give a butt to that.

Historically, that's been the case. With the way law enforcement in the United States is right now, demoralized, losing offices, is that always going to be the case? Yeah, I see where you're talking about the defund the police movement, how that's shaped out. Yeah, what's happening in the United States? I mean, I talked to the officers in the United States, talked to agencies in the United States. They're pretty much demoralized. Not only their police departments and anti-narcotics officers, pretty demoralized to many cases, also a lot of the federal agencies, a lot of these DA agents, there's just a general malaise and a lot of people are fed up

with their organizations in many cases. Now, will they have the same way of hitting these cartels very hard, with the always last, I don't know. I would say cartels are only getting stronger here over the years. Now what does it really mean? How they're operating here? Say if you look at the drive drugs in from Mexico and through the United States and have hubs,

hub cities, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, up in Chicago. These can be Hobbs. They drive a bunch of drugs up there, then they move them round, and they go down the chain to smaller towns. What's happened over the years? You see the change, like first you had the Colombians, trafficking a lot of drugs into the United States, cocaine. Then the Colombians trafficking a lot of drugs into the United States, cocaine. Then the Colombians were paying Mexicans to traffic the drugs themselves. Like so, the Colombians were bringing the cocaine

back in the 1980s, flying it right into Florida. Then that was shut down with the Mamie Task Force, Florida Task, you know, anti-drug task force, Navy ships, all that kind of stuff. They kind of made it more difficult to bring drugs, fly them right over the Caribbean from Colombia into Florida. So the Colombians turn to Mexico, and the Mexican cartels who are already moving

weed and harrowing, and they said, okay, we're gonna pay you to traffic cocaine for us. We give it to you in Colombia, or we give it to you in Panama, some of us into America, and you move that up and deliver it to us in the United States and we sell it. And the Colombians a lot of the time were wholesalers.

The wholesalers in the United States, in a wholesal cocaine in the United States, then it goes down and all different people get involved. And then it started paying the Mexicans, and then the Mexicans said, we were gonna piece of this. So for a while, it was like, we own this cocaine between us 50-50.

Then the Mexicans in the end just started buying the cocaine from the Colombians, just buy off you in Colombia for a couple of thousand bucks a key, and we can move it ourselves and make the profits ourselves. So you had the Mexicans becoming the cartels that will move the cocaine and being the wholesalers. But then you see the night of change. You start seeing and you saw this first with a group called the Familia Medioac Anna

and then with the Heliska New Generation Cartel. You saw a whole other groups of immigrant communities in the 2000s. Medioac Anna and Heliska are particularly large numbers of immigrants across the whole United States. So it was before the Mexicans would bring in to Los Angeles. Micheal Kahn and Helisk are particularly large numbers of immigrants across the whole United States. So what's before the Mexicans are bringing into Los Angeles, you know, bunch of cocaine, bunch of drugs, sell it to people that get these small towns gradually. They start creating networks in these small towns. So suddenly all these places, you know, it's sad to say because the vast majority of Mexicans are very hardworking

migrants in these places. But within and kind of piggybacking off these migrant communities, you've got dealers sending up shots in these shops in these places. So suddenly you've got a spread of networks all over the place, all over the country. all over the country. And then you know you have dealers in you know the Midwest in in in in in small towns in the Midwest with direct lines to the heliscop cartel. Okay. Now still they're like okay they're they're moving drugs so they're with the main activities. Moving drugs around the country distributed them. Still off they'll go right down to kind of kilo level and then the street dealers can be a mixer people. Moving the money and collecting the money,

laundering the money or moving the money back to Mexico and acquiring firearms and taking them to Mexico as well. Some of the key operations of what the cartels are doing here. Now they're not like in Mexico involved in, and the human smuggling and bringing people to the United States and the networks as well because they're not only bringing them into the cross

and the border to the United States, when you pay that money, that'll allow you to go to any city you want. You could be going to your family in Atlanta to work and you're paying your ticket there. So they go very significant operations. Now, what does that mean in the future? I'd be concerned.

Seeing Mexico, seeing how these organized crime and Mexico really tells it apart. I'd be concerned about what it means in the future. I mean, to me, I think the biggest concern would be them intermingling in our politics and infiltrating the police departments, the military, the Border Patrol, DEA, FBI, all of them, Do you think, because I have heard that they are specifically sending guys into the military to get trained, and then come back, come out, and then train the cartels, US military tactics? I don't see why that wouldn't be true. Yeah, so first in terms of infiltrating stuff, you've already got a track record

of certain police officers, certain officials working with the cartels. And it can be different things. I've got one interview I did with a guy who was working for the cartel, an American guy here working for the cartel, who was working for the cartel, an American guy here working for the cartel, who was working for actually a cable company, laying cable, be able to government ID.

And he had a government ID to go back on fourth over the border. Now, he was shifted guns for them, shifted firearms, from the United States to Mexico, using a government ID. And also he then got involved in, he was like driving around laying cables, he had scanners and he was following the Border Patrol and giving all this information to the cartel. And he was, he said, I mean, he was doing it for the money, but also he's kind of doing it for a thrill as well. And he was like surprised how clumsy the Border Patrol, he was, he was said, it was like a clumsy, they're kind of giving away a

lot of stuff. It's very easy for me to locate where it's not, and I'm giving out the cartel, so the cartel knows and operates this stuff. Now, you also got cases of cops in some of the border towns in the US side, and some border patrol agents who have been caught working with the cartels. And there's cases out there. I think it's obviously a far smaller level than Mexico, but it's still out there and it's something to be concerned about. In terms of getting military instruction for the cartels, you see US vets recruited by the cartels. How are they recruiting them? Like how they they getting to them, how they finding them for recruitment. Some of them some of

them some of the cases that I've seen of solid cases have been Mexican Mexican Americans who have been in some cases even deported for any other reasons, even though they've been in the military, they've messed up or something with papers, committed some crime afterwards, and end up being deported, so they're backing out those kind of networks in Mexico and they're like, you know, American military guys. I'm not sure exactly what the outreach would be like exactly who the connections I mean. A lot of, you know, maybe in some of the kind of mercenary security circles, there's definitely like a lot of cartels, a hungry for ex-military people from whatever. So you know, he used to, he used to go, they would actually advertise and they had like,

like actually the hang up blankets writing like, are you military or ex-military? Oh man. In Mexico, we'll hire you. Don't ride to the bus, don't ride the bus to the work. We'll hire you, we're looking, have a better life for you and your children. You get Colombian, some Colombian ex-military,

quite a minor ex-military. When people find out, get away, no, we'll pay for that expertise. Wow. Do you think they're intermingling in our politics yet? I haven't seen that in some of the US politicians, like, yeah, I mean, in Mexico, you know, there's a huge capture of politics by drug cartels.

So we could talk about narcoportaltics, narcoportaltitions. I mean, it would be, I'm not going to say it would be simple, but China is definitely involved in American politics. I don't see why the car tells. I mean, they're obviously intertwined, you know, somewhat. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the way it is in Mexico, so in Mexico, that's also involved the way they're running politics in Mexico. So for a long time it was like the cartel bribes, you know, a mare bribes a police chief to move. Then the cartels get stronger and they start to get more powerful at a local level than mayors and police chiefs.

And they start to say, you have to work for us and we're going to take 10% of your budget. So like 10% of the city budget has to go to the car. So this is a bunch of towns across Mexico. And then you see cases where they start working with the bigger part at a federal level, then they start saying, okay, we'll deliver votes for you. So we'll use our armed groups to be intimidating people to vote for you. And then you have also kind of cutting out the middle man and actually have cartel guys themselves

who are really the politicians. So really they're kind of gangsters who get into politics, I mean, famously, obviously Pablo Escobar, know around for Congreson. So you see that that reach and that power and that influence now at a US level and I haven't seen it it's it's post-winner long term definitely it's time to watch out for And you've got to watch out for this stuff and you can start at like local levels. And then, but it's, yeah, I mean,

I mean, in terms of, so in terms of China, they're working together, but like, to think about strategically about like how you, like how you'd actually start taking over politicians or or bribing or paying money to their campaigns, I mean, it's possible these guys are moving a lot of money. They're obviously buying something, buying a lot of real estate in the United States. I mean, I would think it would actually, you know, now that we're on the subject, I

would think it would be very simple for them to breach into American politics. With the amount of money that they have, the billions and billions, I mean, they gotta have trillions by now, right? Well, to pump that into, if they were to move, whether it's an American or a Latin American running for office, they can pump so much money into a local campaign. they can pump so much money into that, into a local campaign, you know, I would think it would be relatively simple to take it.

Yeah, I guess, I guess like, when they're like running like a, in Mexico, you've got very clear objectives of what you can get from that, from that mayor, from that governor. So you want to control or influence that state so they're going to allow, you know, all kinds of things from, you know, from turning a blind eye on all your drug loads and all your stuff going through to actually the police working for you as hitmen, picking people up, you know, you want somebody picked up, you use the local police, the police working for you is hitmen picking people up you know you want somebody picked up you use the local police the police will look out and they become incorporated with the cartel. I guess like I mean they know they're they've been cases of certainly some of these small towns someone want to watch out for like whether it's like some of the small towns are like on the border where

you start to see people we're on cartel payrolls there. What would your next step be if you were a cartel looking to infiltrate the US where would you start? I would say yeah, I mean some of these small towns where they're moving stuff through, they have operations, well we can see some cases there, some of the towns, little towns where there was police officers, police chiefs, some of these small towns. That gives you operational stuff, operational useful stuff, border patrol officers at lower levels. operational stuff operational useful stuff Board of patrol offices at lower levels

Can you start in an infiltrating higher ups? Moving up the chains there. Yeah, federal agents something that have been you know federal agents taking taking bribes obviously But again, it's still nothing compared to I mean, there's still I guess hard to break The kind of the kind of federal agents in the same way they might have been doing Mexico. Well, that's good. That's what we have back on for us. You know, but, well, let's get into some of the fentanyl stuff you've been talking about. So at the beginning of this interview, you said you went to a port and all the fentanyl was coming in through one of these ports on the

on the Pacific side of the leave you said from China. Yeah, so to talk about, I was just talking about the revolution, I'd say to understand what's happening now. We couldn't look at a revolution that's happening in Mexican drug trafficking the last 15 years but particularly the last five years and it's accelerating the last three years so for a long time we had plant-based drugs being the way that drug traffickers move their product so they, you know, you get farmers in Colombia growing coca leaves

farmers in Mexico Guerrero, Sinolá, Mijocan, ground marijuana, and ground open poppers which they make to heroin. So you've got a chain, you can look at this chain, they're grown out of you and the chain's quite long and quite unvonable but you know the money keeps on coming in and there's always this it's time to do this. So pharmaceuticals revolutionized this. Do you know they didn't have this chain anymore? Now there's a guy, a very interesting guy to look at in this evolution. Chinese guy called Shen Li Yigeng.

What's his name? Shen Li Yigeng. Now Shen Li Yigeng was a guy born in China who moved to Mexico and was a pharmaceutical entrepreneur. The accusation was that he was bringing in at that time the precursors for crystal meth. Setting the precursors to Cinaloa cartel traffickers from the Beltran Lava organization. And that was then being made into crystal meth in Trafford the United States. This grew particularly in 2005,

after in the United States they started clamping down on crystal meth, which bikers have been making and stuff, with a thing called the Combat Methanphetamine Act. So it goes out to Mexico and this guy starts bringing it in instead of the drug hotels and it's a big boom. Now they bust his house in Mexico city. In 2007 and they found in cash $207 million in cash cash. 205 million in dollars, and a couple of million in pesos, euros, Hong Kong dollars, other stuff. The biggest drug cash bust in world history.

You know, like imagine that much cash being found. So kind of crazy thing, they bustled this cash. He then, you know, ran, he was up in Las Vegas where he was bringing money to Vegas. He was going up the Vegas with suitcases for the cash and like gambling in Vegas. Kind of crazy stuff. I was working at the HCA here at a time when it happened. And we actually ended up through a reporter doing an interview with him while he was in the United States, which was kind of crazy interview. We sent people who spoke Spanish, English, and Chinese,

and he spoke all through an accent and had this kind of crazy thing. And made it through his accusations. A bit of a crazy story of entry, but he was eventually actually died to Mexico. Chinese government wouldn't cooperate with a bunch of documents and stuff. They were going to charge him to US. Well, Chinese government cooperated with the Mexico China's government, corporate movement in Mexico,

he's still in prison in Mexico, hasn't been fully sentenced yet. This is going back 15 years, this case, and he's still hasn't been fully sentenced yet. But he was a pioneer. He saw the opportunities. Bringing chemicals, forget about growing weed in the mountains, growing open poppers, growing coca leaves, bringing chemicals, forget about growing weed in the mountains, growing open poppers, growing

coca leaves, bringing chemicals, cooking up in the labs, do it that way. Profits are enormous. The profits can be massive, you've got less links in the chain, you can just make unlimited amounts of this stuff. Okay, fast forward, you start getting the respers for fentanyl. Now, promise with fentanyl as well, you look into this fentanyl, it's not like a one former, there's like, this is like more than 1,000 different

formers, different types of fentanyl, all the different formers around it. Yeah. So first of all, you get fentanyl, again, making it in China. First, there's bringing foot on fentanyl. Then China starts to ban some types so they can switch around and they ban more types

and a pressure from Trump. But it's still coming out of China. And everyone knows a report on this, a congressional report on this, they said, okay, it's still being made in China. And the Chinese chemists are going to India and sending up louds in India and making it there. Now I went to Mancineos,

biggest container port in Mexico. Huge amounts of containers coming in. Some of the problems with this is, first of all, you got this like on a bill of lading and they got like some pharmaceutical coming in from China can say something could be something else You don't know it is what it says and you've got Couple of mean a millions of crates coming through this book Then if they stop and check and stuff they do kind of certain things after stop It's like going through the stuff and then finally then I don't find this stuff as being you know if you know what it's search

So you know what to search. So, you know, there's other ways of avoiding it. They sometimes bring a ship over, they can throw it off the ship. They call it like a word for it. Like a sucker fish, there's kind of fish that would grab onto a bigger fish and take a ride with them. So they have like a set of containers

with them on the big ship and take it out. But the people told me there, people I talk to. So there's intermediaries at the port who will take $40,000 to pass containers through. Intermeasures working with customs authorities, $40,000, you can tell you to go through. How much do you have any idea how much one container of whatever substances are in there to make fentanyl,

how much fentanyl could one container make? I mean, it's gotta be. I mean, that's the thing about fentanyl, if fentanyl is revolutionary in this, because the stuff is just so potent, like a tiny amount of this, because we were strong, so a lot before, years back we had marijuana,

these big old bales of marijuana. You know, shipping container of marijuana is only so much weed. And then we got like cocaine and heroin, which is stronger. And then but now fentanyl and then crystal meth and then fentanyl is like, you know, it's a tiny amount.

So, you know, one container, if you had a whole container packed with fentanyl, that would just be colossal amounts, but it's distributed around different containers of other. But the amounts are coming through now. So you look really, the big changes have been, I mean, this is gradually building up,

and it's building up, and it's very close, the build up of these amount of synthetics coming through Mexico is very closely correlated to the drug overdose deaths in the United States. I mean, look at the numbers. And this, you know, the overdose epidemic in the United States is absolutely nuts. I think, you know, we know about this,

but still, I don't think it's had the political impact that it will have considering the scale of it. When I was first doing this, you know, 2000, I first started covering this stuff. It was about 15,000 overdose deaths in the United States, between legal and legal drugs, 2021, 107,000. So like, eightfold increase, 2,021,107,000 so like eight fold increase You know like really you know really it's it's it's it's Completely spiral about a country. Yeah, and there's no end and so yeah Seven fold increase eight fold increase

Huge increase 150,000 to 170,000. And you can see this is particularly accelerated, particularly really big figures the last couple of years. Right as you've had the increases in the inter-sittance country in Mexico. Now the amount of fentanyl, you suddenly saw a shift, Now the amount of fentanyl, you suddenly saw a shift, so you saw a change from more crystal meth and cocaine and they're both like, uppers, some of the drugs, are more fentanyl than Herron, which is both kind of downers. And then, I mean, the numbers,

again, I mean, people, when people do talk about some of the like, weapons of matterstruction, I can see, you know, you, I mean, people, when people do talk about it, it's like weapons of mass destruction. I can see, you know, you can see a truth to that. Or poison come over the border because it is colossal amounts. A fentanyl come over. And now the authorities like, how much, how much can they move? If so, you know, it's like, you know, it doesn't matter how many, you don't need to worry about how many fields you've got and how many fields are being crops

sprayed. You can just turn the stuff out, turn the stuff out, turn the stuff out. It seems like they've saturated the market now. Or like what, you know, what when you have a hundred and seven thousand dinos, is that kill of addicts and there's less addicts left to die? But, you know, we're in the eye at a storm right now.

I don't know if they are, I don't know if it is just addicts anymore because I mean the fth they're one thing that I don't understand is why Fentanyl why they're putting that in every drug to putting in a marijuana they're putting in cocaine and putting in a meth they're putting in a meth, they're putting it in ecstasy, they're putting it in an MDMA, they're, they're, it's, you know, I hate to say it this way, but you know, it's a kid growing up, kids are gonna experiment, they are, it's just gonna happen, you know. Nowadays, you can't,

you can, there is no experimenting with drugs because you might, you, there's a good possibility, you're gonna overdose because everything seems to be laced with fentanyl because you might, there's a good possibility you're gonna overdose because everything seems to be laced with fentanyl. You know, and so I don't think it's just these badx dying anymore. I think it's first time users, it's people experimenting for the first time with particular drugs.

It's, you know, and like we talked about before too, they're weaponizing it. They're, I'm seeing more and more cops being killed or overdose from fentanyl, you know, being used as a weapon. Yeah, I mean, the, the, the, it's a very good question about a lot. Why they're putting it in cocaine. You know, they put in heroin because people want the heroin, they want the bus.

You know, you talk to people who use fentanyl, you know, one guy who's a guy who's fentanyl described it was kind of the higher looking for, if you're kind of, you know, if you're an opioid addict, if you've got the addiction to that to drive us the higher looking for. I know, and then they put it in heroin, and you know, it's better, more better for them and people are wanting that high.

But then it turns up in cocaine. And then you get cases of people who are kind of calling up cocaine, it's case in New York, case in Texas. People are calling up lines to cocaine. And they're like, you know, musicians, people with money, you know, kind of, you know, Yuppies who are still like, you know, buying some cocaine. And you know, get it and they dive over those, it's fentanyl. It's like, why?

What's the incentive? So I heard like, you know, I asked a lot of people this, what are you doing this? You know, I haven't got a good answer. You know, one theory somebody put out was, you're messing up rivals, you're delivering, delivering messing up rivals, you know, you know, your rivals have got a load there and you're throwing some fentanyl in there cocaine,

kind of feeding them that to mess them up. Possibly, it doesn't really kind of, not really bite that much. Another one is like cross-contamination, that like, you're in a lab, it kind of some messy lab and you got some fentanyl kicking around and you got some cocaine kicking around and you cross contaminate.

You don't know, really buy that. But like hard, yeah, I mean, deliberately poisoning people. You know, who's doing that and why? I don't see the car tells are interested in making money on selling drugs. It doesn't make a lot of, I mean, I asked that question of like, no, would it stop them?

Do they, you know, it is fentanyl bath for their business vessel. You're killing off your user base. I don't think it's just thinking short term, they make big money. But it doesn't seem like they obviously want a base. I don't think you're just thinking short term, they make big money, but it doesn't seem like they obviously want to poison, you know, throw poison out there. So yeah, it's kind of nuts, and we're kind of at a pretty crazy thing. So we start to look at how can you deal with this? How can you deal with the level of fentanyl now? And you're going

to force, I think this might become a hot political issue. If it doesn't change, are people gonna change their practices and like you're gonna force people to say, we're gonna stay away from these kind of pills now, is there gonna be some kind of reaction in the population? Is there, you know, they talk about hard, a much harder punishments and charging,

they started doing this now, charging drug dealers with murder. And, and, and start going back to kind of big incarceration. And maybe if that happens, we'll see if, if that really happens or not, you know that. But, uh, but yeah, I mean, what are the options there for, for actually, for changes? A pretty hard situation right now.

Yeah. I mean, I would think you would start with a border. Yeah, absolutely. And like, I mean, this is, these guys are committing horrific amount of murder, both in Mexico, in terms of people that came with bullets in the United States and people with dying overdoses. And this stuff's horrific but would like how do you the problems with the border is in terms of enforcing and stopping drugs come over the border so like most of the drugs come over the border the high-value drugs

come over in vehicles these to do a lot of walking marijuana you know walking backpacks in marijuana, like right over particularly the Sonora Desert, it was a big area you walk over in marijuana, a lot of that. But now marijuana kind of markets collapsed, this did some marijuana come over, but now it's kind of collapsed because you've legalized marijuana in a bunch of US states. So the amount of marijuana now moving up that was a lot less than before, because they can grow here. But they don't really,

because like walking people over to border with, they call them burros like donkeys. There's this walk over. It's been like two different packs, 25 kilo pack, or like a 50 kilo pack. Like 25 kilo or double, 50 kilo. You walk right over the border with that. And you lose a lot, but you don't care, because you're making money and you know, in its weed.

But the high value drugs go generally in vehicles. There's other different way you've got untunnels, tunnels coming under. Caterpoles, you see the caterpillar there? Like massive like military siege weapons, throw catapults these trucks over the I've never seen that one yet. It's crazy But the big amount of case vehicles so you look at the vehicles crossing and Nobular Edo Laredo border. It's about 10,000 trucks

day crossing. You've got, you know, the quietest, the quietest lines of cars all the time. Now, fencing in a particular, it's like very, very potent, you never smell them out. So, how many cars can you search? You start looking at the staff, I mean, you had this speed, you've had these border agents there for years or customs. And you know, he talked to a customs guy who's good and he's got like a human in, and can spot people, look at him and he's got a good eye for seeing, okay, this guy's nervous, got some. But then you stop a vehicle, now that sometimes, you know,

they call him trap cars, they're met in, in space, they call him clavus, you have secret compart It'd be very good secret compartments sometimes. They're a lot very complicated ways of opening them. So you've got to find a car sometimes you've got to like tear the car apart. Now you tear a car apart it's the one car but not just the fact that you're tearing apart a wrong car it's just like you've got your agents doing that, spending like an hour, two hours messing around with a car, other vehicles are coming through. When you do find, okay, you can bust a load, okay, great.

You bust a load. As long as they're the bust a load, and they'll save the person, okay, you wanna do 20 years, or do we follow you to where you're dropping it off, and they will go and bust them. Kind of classic tactic. But even when they bust a load and they can't bust them, do the paperwork, whatever,

other loads are coming through. Now, I talked to one guy who's in prison in the United States in North Carolina, trafficking cocaine. And he, I said, how much of your cocaine did you lose? Mr. Capri is gone, I thought maybe they lost half of it, they could still make huge amounts of money. He's like, we lost about 20%.

So for every one load that is getting barged, you got four loads coming through. So how much, how much you're going to really stop this stuff? And it's so potent and there's so much money being made, and they're going to afford to lose it. So there's still busting a bunch of this stuff now, but you're really going to stop it. The only way you really would stop it is if you really wanted to kind of just transform the border completely, you've got half a trillion dollars worth of

legitimate trade gain back and forth over the border. Yeah. So it almost seems like it would be in the best interest to just produce it here. Could you say in the United States? Yeah, I mean, I don't know what compounds make fentanyl, but, you know. Yeah, I mean, they might find a way,

but right now, because I mean, there are people who are bringing, you know, some bits into into United States, but right now they're easy, it's easier for them to bring it. I mean, the real big industrial amounts, they can make in Mexico and shift it over here, and that's working for them. Now, I mean, maybe, I mean, if you could have some new technology, where you could kind of have like have something so that like whenever you went went over the border you could detect drugs in a vehicle But it's like practically to try and be able to shut down the border and stop the fentanyl coming across I'm like how come they haven't been on a stock truck coming to the United States for the last 40 years Yeah And unless you want to search every single vehicle

You know like strip down and rip everything in the vehicle which means that nobody can get across and and trade shots down. I guess it's just not that bad yet. You know? That's funny. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's bad. It's terrible. I mean, it's terrible. It's terrible.

No, 107,000 overdose deaths. That is nuts. I mean, that is nuts. You know, it's... I don't know what it's going to take. I don't know what the number is. I don't know, you don't know what it's going to take. I don't know what the number is. I don't know, you know, how bad it's going to be, but it's, it's, they're going to have to do something. Maybe that is shut the border down completely, who knows, but or check every car.

They're going to have to hire a ton of board of virtual agents for that and do a major expansion, but I mean, it just seems like nothing is being done right now. Yeah, nothing. You know, and like it doesn't even seem like it's, it just seems like it's ramping up. Yeah. It's getting more and more and more is coming and more. It's becoming more prevalent in the media

and more and more overdoses are happening over the years and it's just nothing is slowing this down. Yeah, look, I would say this, look, I mean, we're in a critical situation here. I mean, I've been kind of shattering this for years, you know, like, 10 years ago, and I can see, you know, when I first started doing, working on drug artels, you know,

I ride the Mexico in 2000, start reporting in 2001, and then I started reporting in 2004-5, I started reporting on this like turf, what happened on the board of Texas. Not like a young reporter, and then the crazy stuff started happening. This is a pretty kind of crazy story. I interviewed this guy who then became the police chief and they asked him when he became the police chief and said, are you scared? I'm not scared, the corrupt people are scared. And he was shot six hours afterwards.

Damn. And that was kind of in a time it was in a story, it was an interesting story originally. I was working for the Houston Chronicle at the Houston, Texas. And it was like, okay, wow, I'm like, you know, this is interesting. This is, you know, this is a kind of big story. The Texas Newspapers started having a bit of a tough battle about that. And then this spread, I was covering up Cinalore in 2008, 2009. And I remember in 2008, and I was covering this scene of a massacre. And there'd been, I think it's two massacres in this little village.

Bullets are still over there. And the residents of the village were just leaving the village in a convoy of trucks. I was seeing this scene of this convoy of trucks. And it was like, wow, this is like refugees. You know, something big is happening in this country. It's going to tear this country apart. When I wrote, you know, pitched for the first book about this. is like refugees. Something big is happening in this country. It's going to tear this country apart.

When I wrote, you know, pitched for the first book about this, and like, you know, a couple of years later, you know, things are going to go, you know, my overstating list, I'm kind of exaggerating these things, it's just a bunch of gangs. It's not, it is destabilized the country. So you kind of see this stuff creeping up and kind of getting bigger. Now I would say now, and I don't agree. I mean, I don't want to say like say that there's nothing you can do about this stuff. I mean, human beings, we could do stuff. You know, we put men on the moon.

You know, we build, you know, we found, you know, hospitals and, you know, we can create and do amazing things. So how come we can't deal with these problems? How come our politics is broken? Yeah, it's, it's, when I say there's no effort, I mean, it's, we're not gonna declare a materialist organization.

We're not gonna do anything about the border. We're not gonna unleash our border patrol agents. We're gonna put all these stipulations on them and pain them out to be, I don't know, bad people. Yeah, yeah. And nothing is happening. Yeah. Nothing's happening.

Yeah. Doesn't seem like there's any pressure being put on the Mexican government. Yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't, there's a lot of different angles that I feel like they could, they could go with here that, you know, other than just the border, but nobody has done anything. No, I agree. I agree. I think we have to try and come together on work out. Now, I would say it's a really horrible situation and it's not an easy button, we're just going to make this go away. But we have to kind of think about long-term stuff

because we have to think about our children, grandchildren, you know, you know, people who have got like kids now or one what's going to be like when they're 15, 20, you know, I would say you have to, you know, politics is kind of broken, also the government, you have a lot of these different government departments with different agendas. It's like, how do you create a unified policy for dealing with this? How do you look at like, and it is a question, I think, of the United States security, you know, I'm being the neighbor because a lot of these things tie together. Why do people flee Mexico, flee Central America because they're violence?

Why do you suddenly get the Pentagon involved because the Pentagon started seeing very, very heavily armed groups right out of the border? So you've got the different things. I would say you have to look at the law enforcement point of view. You have to look at the kind of crime prevention. Then you have to look at like stopping giving the money. So yeah, looking at the law enforcement point of view, it has to be, yeah, I mean, you've got to take this seriously. I think in terms of how US law enforcement, I think with a lot of people, a lot of skilled people that have come through the DA and stuff, you need to think,

look at it more of like this is organized crime and how this organized crime is a risk to us in the long term. And how we got it on a hit him hard and break him up now before they start doing in the US, what they're doing in Mexico, because in a few years that could come. I would worry about that, not just about the border,

but about how they're building up in cities. We're talking about the guy from MS-13 in Honduras. And he was running, he'd been running a clique up in Maryland and they had these cliques like chapters. What's a clique? A clique is like a chapter of the gap called McCleek or La Clique. So the chaps might have 30 to 100 members in a chapter. But then they have, so what they call sympathizers, or sympathizers, sympathizers, they have sympathizers who are like the periphery members.

And they'd have like 500 sympathizers. And they got a lot of these things like schools up in Maryland. They had a bunch of these like recruited members and sympathizers around booting up there. And then started doing things like shake downs inside the immigrant community. So started doing shake downs, but then they started recruiting people.

These are MS-13s of Salvadoran gang originally. Then they grew up in Honduran and then they suddenly got Dominicans and Cubans. They said they had Chinese members. Chinese immigrants are recruited in these MS-13s. They have Chinese members. Chinese members, these MS-13s clicks up. Was it become growing up in the West Coast, so in the East Coast there.

So, I think, I think hard about like, organized crime. I mean, United States historically thought very hard about organized crime with Rico and his kind of thing, because the people are under the danger of organized crime, what it can mean. And I will concern, I would, that as an alert in terms of the, in terms of that, in terms of like law enforcement. But in terms of reducing the demand, I mean, maybe, you know, it does

have to be very hard, you know, with fentanyl. I mean, I don't know the answer, but maybe it is true, you need very hard sentences for fentanyl dealers at a local level. And but also the work on rehab, why so many people now, like using this stuff, like what's happened to society, there's so many people are now becoming like, you know, hope you've got, you know, opioid problems. I mean, it's a mix of stuff, yeah. You know, you've got to, you know, sometimes there's people who have come, you know, events who come back and been prescribed drugs and then ended up buying stuff

in the black market and buying pills out there. There's some real deep problems there. How can we get like fix and how people's helps? So they don't have this, like wanting this, this amount of drugs. That's a good point. You're saying it's gonna be a tough problem to solve if it ever does get solved, but let's take a quick break.

I want to take a minute to tell you about vigilance elite Patreon. Patron support is what makes this show possible and gives me the ability to bring these one-of-a-kind stories to the public. Go to patreon.com slash vigilance elite and support the Sean Ryan show today. All right we're back from the break and you were just telling me about a gun fight that happened along the...was it the Arizona border? Yeah, yeah, sure. So to get an idea of what this car cell control looks like, and the way they're concluding information on the Mexican side of the border. You can look at this one town on the Mexican side of the Arizona Sonora border and there was a gunfight in 2019 where

a group of cartel hitmen about 60 came into the city from over the over-the-state Mexican state lines in Chihuahua state and came into trying to attack and seize the territory over this town in Mexico. And the local cartel secarios responded and it was this crazy gunfight. I mean, it's impossible to know the true number of dead, but it could well have been over 30

according to witnesses I talked to. So to get a sense though what really happened, I mean the border was shut down the night of this gunfight in this small border town, they shut down the border. But the cartel was very concerned about controlling that information and they had not gone out there, they had been such a severe gunfight. Why? Because they, you go see this small town on the border where they're moving drugs through,

moving people through. And you consider a certain neighborhood with a bunch of cartel houses. Some quite obvious big houses that stand out and they kind of dirt streets and some of these real big houses. They're various houses they use like safe houses or cartel properties.

Now, if there's a big noise about a gunfire in the border with 30 dead and it became a big story and like Fox News and stuff, that creates heat. Okay. So the Mexican government's like, what do we do send the army in? What options do you have? Send in the military.

So the military goes in and it has to bust, break down some doors until you've got some houses to bust. So the cartel is interested in trying to keep things down. So what they did is they tell they can try the local journalists and they tell the local journalists, you're not reporting on this or you're only reporting to dead. We want no information. We're even harassing social media operators in these areas as well. And this is basically hushed up. And you know, we're following this as part of an investigative

series and at the go to this town and try and deal with the car tell members in this town. Who first didn't want us filming there, we're very aggressive and we tried to talk to them. We tried to sit down and talk to his car tell members who were going to film and document this as old now. It's happened now, but still they're very, very controlling of what can be filmed and what can be said in this town. And that shows going to sum with a motivations and why they like on top of journalists, why they're harassing journalists. And you see there's one journalist there in this town who you know we were talking to him and we actually got him to help us introduce us some of his

cartel members. But he was talking to us about it and then he started broke out in tears and said like You know, we can't can't tell the news here We got it's you know then breathing down our necks, you know, we've got the car. They're ordering us what we can't say And you see that with the level of murder of journalists. Yeah in Mexico the last 20 years With more than 150 journalists have been murdered. And it's not for not doing what the cartels they want to have control of the media, especially these small towns in these places, say what they can say, what they can't say. You can't say his name for cartel, you can't say this, you've got to report this massacre,

you shouldn't report this. And then can lead to murders if anything falls out of line. Or if they see as the report is working with a different cartel, or responding to different cartel, that can also put them in danger. Man, they're just controlling every little aspect. It's really, what are some of the,

we had talked a little, I think it was last night actually, dinner we were talking, and we were talking about some of the brutality that these guys are doing. We talked about it a little bit today, getting 12 year olds to cut up bodies. You were talking about a dog yesterday that, hey, the man's general's off.

Do you want, can you, what is the point of this? And what are some of the most horrific things that you've seen or heard these guys doing? Yeah, yeah, sure. Reason of mass as I wanna paint a picture of just how brutal these guys are to the audience. Sure thing, yeah. So I think the kind of public displays of violence.

You saw this escalating and it began, all the way back to 2004. And that year was the de-capitation in Iraq by Al-Sakawi, Al-Gaidi in Iraq. 2004 or five, I think 2004. And that was shown fully on Mexican TV and we were seeing on Mexican news. And they showed that, fully that kind of that video and they were in the Mexican news car saying, I will show you what, and that was an impact.

And that was seen by the cartels. Okay, decapitation. And you start seeing that in Iraq, and you're kind of rising in this kind of terror and violence and decapitation, but using it publicly. Then the first time you start seeing a Mexican was 2006. There was one incident, the first incident where there was some police officers

who shot up some cartel guys in Accapulco and the cartel went and decapitated to these cops, put their heads on the wall. Like you don't, don't fuck with our guys. So the idea is gonna, you're kind of copying and seeing this stuff on TV, from Iraq and stuff and not copying this terror. Then there was a, one of the first splatter videos

was around this time, who was on the first splatter videos back then was on a VHS tape. And a, they interrogate a guy and at the end of the interrogation they shoot the guy in the head. And they sent it by mail but then they did a video with Dr. Macapulco. They sent it by mail to a newspaper in the United States. They're getting reported and stuff,

and it's kind of shown, it's kind of, we're using kind of recording stuff on video, and doing this stuff, kind of copying this kind of terror tactics to try and incite terror in our enemies. Now, these then had in Michoacán, a guy called Nasario Moreno, a mass local, the maddest one. And he, they chopped off five heads, and they rolled him into a disco. And when this came out, I was working again, the New ZZA period of time.

And we got sent a video of this from a local stringer of the five heads just sitting on this disco floor, five to cap the heads. And the TV was like, I'm gonna come and look at this. It's like, wow, it's kind of crazy. It's just like, we're not gonna put it out on the wire. We're not gonna put it out on our wire, meaning the news agency feed that like TV, you know, it's a bit too brutal. Well, one Japanese, funny enough, one Japanese TV company

said, oh, we want particularly that video, we want to have that. And it was this idea of Terran, it started escalating. So then it was like two heads, five heads, then it became 12 heads, then up 14, 18, and got to that episode of 49 bodies. And it became competing for who could be, the baddest cut out of the way of competing was having his violence and having this kind of public displays of violence and stuff on videos.

And you start having this stuff on the internet now Now, initially as journalists, I'll say both as journalists work for international media reporting on this and the local Mexican media, we didn't quite have a handle of this stuff. It's like report it, you know, report it, you know, it's stuff out there, even though it's okay, you're speaking for the cartel. Are you only shown their propaganda by doing this stuff?

They've got a message. Some of them have like a, the cap that heads at a message and all, on a blanket, expressing this stuff. And then you, you know, you see, you start to get like a bit of a kickback of our co, we shouldn't really report on this, we try and, I remember, I remember, but it's kind of sad, I remember one day, at the AP and they say,

well, we no longer report on episodes of just the capitale heads, unless there's a very high number or something special because there's been so many, it's no longer news anymore. So now that it kind of loses that shock value. So nowadays you could hear, there's five capitale heads in Mexico, you know, you're not gonna get it, you're gonna just go, all right, at the time,

the beginning, this was something which was really causing an impact. I would say it kind of reached out public use of violence, reached a peak around that time, around like 2012, was the 49 bodies, maybe around that was the highest number. I said there was a massacre of 72 people, but that was a bit different. That wasn't a public, you know, the 49 bodies, maybe around that was the highest number. There was a massacre of 72 people, but that was a bit different. That wasn't a public, the 49 was,

we're gonna kill 49 people, cut their heads and hands and feet off and dump them in one place. And that was the kind of peak, I think of that of the brutality of that very, very public violence. There's a budget other incidents, I mean, like they cut off a face and so on to a soccer ball and like, you know, just cut up bodies and cars in all kinds of different ways you can imagine. But it kind of reached the peak of public violence, it started kind of lost

its shock value and the press kind of stopped reporting on it so much. So you had less of that public violence. Now one thing I mentioned yesterday, kind of brutal incident, was you have a change and you have violence, then it's a different objective. A kind of policing of local communities, and the cartels, because they're coming like, we're becoming like warlords and imposing a policing on the populations. So they're saying like, okay, you know, they have the cartels out, saying, you know, they're the car

itself saying, no, no one can steal from people's houses. No one can commit rape. People can't kidnap. I said, I went to one crime scene where they killed some alleged kidnappers and they had like a thing saying like, you know, science and a kidnap as you can't do that here. Get to work. It's in a lower style. I mean it's like a traffic drugs work.

Don't kidnap people. So they start because they're kind of the absence of the failure of the rule of law, they're becoming like the rule of law, like the warlords and imposing that. Now what we mentioned last night which is a very brutal video, was somebody's accused of rape in a town in the state of Mexico. And they put a dog on his genitals and put something in it and ate his genitals and put a video of that and put that video out. You can't rape in our territory. Kind of pretty brutal, again, kind of medieval.

Yeah, kind of controlled. Do they kill him? Not as far as we know, I mean, the guy was left, maybe alive, but mutilated. He was not gonna reproduce. Yeah. So. It seems like, I've interviewed a couple of guys about the stuff, started with Doug Calderone

that I moved in to Louise. He actually recommended you. And then now you and it seems to be the common theme that they're just getting more brutal, more ruthless, more graphic, you know, and it seems like they're really trying to, you know, instill that fear into everyone. Local population, the police, US, everybody. Yeah, I mean, I would say like, I mean, in some way say that very, very public displays of violence kind of, it's almost reached the peak and went down. A lot of the videos you've seen more recently have been these big shows of firepower, teaching an escalation with that.

So, first of all, you start off with a guy, you don't have five guys with ski masks and AK-47s going, you know, here we are, you know, with a cocktail. And then you kind of have that, you know, make it bigger and have, you know, 20 guys with metal helmets and then it becomes 50 guys. And it's like a big like film of a convoy of armored vehicles and grenade launches and everything going, ah, and then becomes bigger and bigger. So like an escalation in that show of force becomes like a new thing in terms of the kind of propaganda war. There's also like the carrot as well as the stick. So there's like handing out goods to the population as well for control. So like you have, you have like beginning of COVID, there was like suddenly there were, you know, suddenly it was like in a pandemic lockdown. They went and started handing out packages to people.

I went to one community where they had a handout. And it was a couple hours from Mexico City. And they'd gone to this one village. And they'd just like, you know, budget guards drew up in some pickup trucks and they'd handed out everyone bag of goods. I talked to a family, you know, a couple of families who would receive, you know, some of these bags.

And they were like, oh, they're good stuff. It was like good, you know, it wasn't cheap sugar. It was good, you know, good labels of sugar and eggs and flour and it's kind of thing, from a basically goods. Now, they're gonna give it to that many people considering the whole country and the level of population. But it has an impact because they've videoed that stuff

and they put that out on video as well. They put that out on the airwaves on the internet. And then that creates a kind of reaction, that creates a kind of thing of like saying, well, we're kind of, you know, we're good guys as well. So you have a control that way as well. You're buying support in the population. The same way that kind of politicians do as well.

I'm going to give handouts, stuff in Mexico. It's been a big tradition. And you kind of portraying yourself as good guys in a proper kind of way. How many quartels are there in Mexico estimation? So you have in Mexico, you have, you've had this process of fragmentation to this more and more. So now you could talk about at least a dozen groups, considering car tells, but like from the bigger ones

to some of the smaller ones, and then below that a bunch of different factions and groups, but there's different size and scales. So there's two now the biggest ones, which are really the bigger size and the rest, which is the Cinellar cartel and the Heliskani generation cartel. I know they're both in a big international organizations with very, very big power.

But they own these smaller cartels. Are they like satellites? So within that you have factions of these cartels. So they create like the similar cartel, we'll have an armed faction called La gente Nueva. And there'll be like an armed paramilitary wing which operates in certain areas. Okay. Then you'll have Los Salasades, which will be a certain family with their own people who are operating and working in La Cartel.

And when you say La Cartel, you've got like Los Chabitos, El Mayo, and these different factions within them. Then the Elisca Generation Cartel will take over this place and we'll often take over these smaller kind of towns and take over gangs and create them and make them part of their organization. Then though you've got below the wrong of those two most powerful cartels, you've got a bunch of still big powerful regional forces. So going across the border, you have the golf cartels, which is still a powerful international organization, the golf cartels, renossa, matamoros, you know, South Texas, and then there are people also in the budget

place around Mexico. You go next, you have the Cartel de Nores, they're the northeast cartel. Again a powerful organization, formally they set us. They were, they became now the northeast, they rebranded themselves, the northeast cartel. They got a bunch of things, a bunch of guns, a bunch of different stuff operating around a place. You move across, you've got the quietest cartel, stroke, l'ellinia, operating there. Then you've got more synallocartel territory,

and heliscord new generation cartel fighting, but then you've still got the remnants of the area where I feel like it's the Hwana cartel there. And then further south, you've got some significant organizations, you've got some significant organizations. You've got the Familia del Mexicano, which is still operating in San Erie, you've still got these groups called Los Rojos, Los Cuerveras Unidos, which are quite significant in certain areas. And then you know, sometimes I call some of these groups kind of cartelitos, like

smaller, kind of like operate like cartels but in an area you suddenly have This group called the independent cartel of Acapulco. So they're not international Yeah, they're more like localized, but they're still some of these groups can control several municipalities But because one of the problems with this fragmentation is so if you look at the History of this And you see you had these big efforts to kind of break some of these cartels We mixed motivations from above whatever they were taking out some of these top guys

Artura boat run labor So you had you know he was a break away from the San Loa cartel the boat run labor cartel and he gets killed And you start to fragment and break down, so you start to get like, los goreños, unidos, los rojos, and these breakdowns from now. Then you get these kind of local fights and these little break-offs. So then you had the kind of fragments

of the fragments of the fragments, the kind of break-off of the break-off of the break-off. But then it can be still, but it's kind of fragments of the fragments of the fragments, the kind of break off, the break for the break off. But then it can be still, it's kind of crazy, crazy little organizations. There was a group, there was one guy called El Huero Palayo, with some guy in Guerero State. It was like 20, early 20s, maybe, and he had like hundreds of young,

you know, kids, teenagers and young kids with AK-47s and stuff, kind of following him. And he controlled his kind of smub bit of territory. Some colleagues were driving that his group was burning vehicles, blockading rows as one of their strategies, one of their tactics, well, when they wanted to kind of stop convoying stuff and his journey's only went up there.

And they got stopped. And it was like, a hundred of these kind of young teenagers, you know, these kind of crazy kids basically, as someone with guns and stuff, and they took their cameras, laptops, one of the vehicles, cleaned them out. On one colleague of mine, he said, he had his camera and he had to go,

go, go, go, give me your ID. I go, go, go, give me your wallet. So first of all, you try to try to show his ID and then he was like, and he was like, one, he's gonna see in his case, aren't he? But like, so you get, so it's probably, probably drives violence because then you get this kind of crazy fragmented groups, and then they're like watching roads

and fighting each other and fighting over like dumb, very local shit. I got a question. Yeah. So it sounds like, so you have the big entity. You have the Cinelloa cartel and the new generation cartel. Yeah. And then you have all these basically,

sounds like subsidiary companies of the cartel. Do these subsidiary companies, do they get along or are they rivals to? This sounds very tribal. Yeah, yeah. So you got a bunch of shifting alliances. Do you know what I'm saying? So if you have the Centelo or Cartel here,

and then you have all these subsidiary companies underneath of it, and then subsidiary companies, do these subsidiary companies get along? Do they know, like, hey, we're both under the Centelo umbrella, so we don't conduct violence with each other. We conduct violence with subsidiary companies of the new generation cartel or the Zetas or. Yeah, it's a very good point.

I see that's exactly what you're coming from. And the answer is no, they don't. They can, so you get violence among different localized gangs who are still working for a bigger organisation. And some of these groups are constantly fighting amongst themselves. So there can be rivals within the entity, intracartile fighting. So is efficient and as effective they are, they're still a lot of... Yeah, it's very efficient.

Very efficient and totally. Within the organisation. Yeah, like a lot very efficient season. Yeah, totally. Within the organization. A lot of, yeah, a lot of, and it's for doctors. I mean, they're powerful, they're not all powerful, and they're messy things. You know, it's very messy kind of whirlwind of this kind of world of organized crime, and these figures rising and falling and stuff.

I mean, they're exercising immense power, but at the same time, very unstable. Reason I'm asking is because in Afghanistan, what we found in the earlier days was tribes. We were going, charting intelligence from a tribe, and what we found is they were given bad intel, because so there were so many rivalries going on, you know, for hundreds of years between these different tribes that US would bomb villages or targets or whatever it is, you know, vehicles, because simply because this tribe who had a rivalry with this tribe, which we didn't know, but they're basically saying, hey, this is who you're looking for. They're responsible for X, Y, and Z. But

the only reason they're telling us that is because of the 200-year rivalry that's been going on. And then they just had the US take care of their enemy. I could see that exact problem. Say we did declare the car tells us a terrorist organization. I could, I can see us falling into that trap again where it's not, it's not solid intelligence that we're gathering. We're basically just finishing these guys is, you know.

Yeah, I'm, some of the violence going back, a couple of generations, it was like about feuds. And are you talking to some of the older guys what violence was like in the 60s and 70s? And it was often feuds family against family stuff. Los Angeles, Los Hernandez, these like families in these values and it's like, you know, one're one of them

Rob the woman. It's not classic when they robbed the girl For another family and then they then so they went there and they killed a bunch of the other family because of that And so they went back and it was like a feud going on back on forth between them And somebody's food is still around so then now there these people be coming up part of these cartels and stuff But it's still like you know, hate each other going back for some time. But another kind of weird thing with the violence is, you had, so in that port of Manse Nioh, you got both the Sinaloa cartel

and the Hellish Ginerage, Nioh Ginerage can cut the operating. And they're both the biggest producers of fentanyl, of synthetic drugs. But a guy told me, that actually the CINN-LAR cartel is paying the new generation cartel for passage of its synthetics through

Hylis-Gurus-Cinna-Lar. At a high level, they're working together to smuggle drugs. Even though the same cartels are fighting a full-on war over in Zacatecas, and even though they're lower down guys are fighting over like selling crystal meth at these like little selling points around the area.

And it's kind of hard to get, you know, your head around it, it's like you think about something for a long time, how come, but it's like they're working in kind of weird ways. They can be deducting a warrant one place, and then they can be like some guys because you sit down and do business. Okay, I wanna transport a bunch of ingredients,

bunch of fentanyl to your territory. Okay, it's so much going to cost. And they can make money. I mean, like another weird example of how this stuff goes and I was talking to, I went to see the tribe of El Chapo in New York. And here's the mortenium of Chapo being Beltrain Labour, this guy I mentioned before.

El Chapo Beltrain Labour, the real hard rivalry. And I got to know the lawyers of El Chapo Beltran level, the real hard rivalry. And I looked at another lawyers of El Chapo and I said, how did you get your case? And he said, one of the Beltran level brothers introduced us to El Chapo. Thought these guys are maybe mortal enemies, but they're recommending lawyers to each other. So it's just a weird thing when you try and get into this, like how it's really working at top levels, and how does money being changed hands, and people can still get on and cooperate, so forth even when they kill each other and have wars with each other. I don't understand it at all. It's, you know, when you look at the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. and all of the stuff that these guys control, and then you hear about, I mean,

that sounds like a complete disaster, you know, to be honest with you, but when you, when you see that, it just, it shows you how inefficient the Mexican government is. It shows how inefficient that the US border is. Yeah. And how inefficient the US is at fighting this, even Canada. You know what I mean? You have organizations that are working together who hate each other, who are killing each

other. Nobody seems to get along along and they're still that successful. They're still making, you know, trillions of dollars by human trafficking, fentanyl and dozens of cartels. You know, and it's, it's, I mean, like, in the amount of, it's like making all his money and at the same time, you know, you kill 35,000 murders in a year officially in Mexico And of those we don't know exactly it could be 70% 75% a carter related in some way So that many murders that many of these guys being killed

All the time and yet they keep it keeps on going. So yeah, it's kind of crazy how this comes about and how things have got this messed up. And yeah, I'm gonna say it's got to rethink, it's got to try and kind of figure out, this comes where the time of politics is broken. So it's kind of Australian because politicians are not early solving anything. They're not pragmatic about how do we try and this is a problem. How do we try and deal with it? Now one thing, it's a different country and something that I just went down to report on was in El Salvador with the gang situation.

It might give a sense of how things might be in the future in Latin American countries. So in El Salvador they've had a real problem with gangs for decades, basically since the Civil War of El Salvador, which was 1980 to 1992, after that gang problem, it went from Civil War to gangs, and it was connected. So you have guys coming back from the Civil War who are like veterans and you know either they fought in the guerrillas, they fought in the military and I will do now I will just join the gangs. And you have refugees who joined gangs up in Los Angeles and got deported and went down. So you have this crazy gangs, incredible extortion, crazy murder. They're not powerful, well the Mexican cartels, they don't have this kind of level of control, they're generally these kind of small neighborhood gangs, but they still managed to make most people pay extortion payments and they're still carrying out a horrific

level of murder. Now you've got this president called Nibbukkeli, who I interviewed in 2017, he became president 2019, 2019, he became president. And then he last year, he's accused and I believe the accusation, he first made a truce with the gangs to bring the murder rate down with plausible deniability over that truce. So you kind of had these kind of gangs, we were still operating, but the murder level was down, and they were kind of stood around there, and at the same time, it was moving the military in, and bulging the military and so forth. Then in March 27th, 2021, he declared a state of emergency, following all the kind of breakdown of the truth likely a sudden explosion of violence he ordered a state of emergency and

He sent the military and the police into the neighborhoods and just did mass arrests Between March and now they're arrested 64,000 people in a country of six million. It's about 1% of the population it would be like in the United States in nine months detaining more than 3 million people. 3.3 million people. Imagine that in the United States. And he locked them up, talked to family members. They were like no communication with their sons, husbands,

who were in prison, didn't have the urge to live. Mass incarceration, very, very harsh, there's no way about it, no two words about it, very, very harsh. However, the majority of people supported the gangs have been decimated. Now, can they sustain that? I mean, obviously, there's people crying out, human rights watch, and this international, US Congress,

Congress representatives, human rights disaster there. But it's been, it's decimated the gang structure. So that might be the shape of the way things will go in Latin America, maybe in Mexico in the future, you are seeing a bolstering of the military, like a bigger, bigger bolster military. Now, Mexico is a messed up situation and a car does a social and corruption is so deep, but that might be the way, whether we like it or not, that might be the future we're looking

at. Interesting. More authoritarian governments. Yeah, that is, that's interesting. When going back to the beheadings, you know, they took a thing out of ISIS, you know, playmaker al-Qaeda's or whoever they saw behead. And then it's, you may have sounded like it turned into a competition between, is it, what's the point of the competition? Is it really just? I would say,

Cartel leaders, chest pounding, wanting to be the most ruthless, or is there a point to it other than ego? Or is it just ego? Yeah, and I would say there is. I would say there's a logic to it. So like if you're, if you're cartel, you know, you know, you understand war on conflict, let's just say, you know, Sean Ryan, you're given the job of being a cartel leader controlling a chunk of Mexico, okay, and you've got 50 guys under you in your particular territory, and you've got a rival cartel

who's also trying to compete for that territory, and you've got some million population, and you've got military, and you've got to deal with a bunch of stuff. So you're attacking their people. Now, you've got to send a message out to different people. You've got to send like terror out to anybody who betrays you, or anyone is opposing you,

you know, we're gonna not only kill you, we're gonna, we're gonna not only kill you, we're gonna terrify you. But also you're speaking to the young recruits. Who's the toughest cartel here? Who's gonna win his turf battle? Do you want to join them or join us and look at us? We're on top. No, go ahead. And you're sending a message out to informants

to like the population, like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna stitch on these people. Now, if you look at again in the logical war, you had in Guatemala and Civil War, trying to control like counterinsurgency tactics. How do we control a population? And you know, you had some of this, there was some, I mean, I looked at some of the counterinsurgency manuals in the School of the Americas.

Some of the stuff taught by the United States to officers in these militaries who ended up defecting and joining cartels. It's like how do we control populations to give it a different insertion? So you got, okay, a village, you've got insurgency in a village. So we ended up defecting and joining cartels. It's like how do we control populations to get rid of any surgery? So you got, okay, a village, you've got insurgents in a village. In Guatamalca, going there,

it was like, we've got to make sure none of you in the village will join the grillas. So we're going to behead people. Look at this, hang up, leave bodies, terrorize the population to try and stop them joining the griller force. And those tactics, some of those tactics kind of bled through, kind of led into this weird high-brick conflict that we see today.

Are you seeing them, because you would also say they do kind of humanitarian work or they've handled free stuff, are you seeing this stuff happen simultaneously where they instill fear and try to win over the population with hearts of minds type operations? Yeah, yeah. It's happening simultaneously. Absolutely. How does the civilian population respond to that? It's a mixed back.

You've got like, there's areas of Mexico where these gangs are more deep rooted like the countryside, it's in the lower, where people are basically being considered themselves in a way more kind of bandit type territories for generations who don't really have much respect for the government. In Kulakán, or the government in Mexico City, or Washington, it's all like far away governments for them. They're kind of broken off and the cartels are

like local power people. So for some of these people, especially if you're a young man in these places, it's like, okay, it's like I'm actually responding to the power and the government in there. I'm gonna join that local militia. But then sometimes the cartels were taken over new territories, particularly urban areas, they're going to urban areas and then some of them will, they'll vary, some of them will be more predatory

and go in and be like, okay, we're gonna go through and just like kidnapping, get a list of everyone, who's got mine in this town? And kidnapped, kidnapped, kidnapped, kidnapped, in know, it makes it with all of our pals I'm then you know everyone's gonna hate him But then a rival cartel will come in and say okay, you know, you've been terrorized, but it's these comebacks We're gonna come in and save you And so then you see that this kind of back-on-forth where it is kind of like some of these they're called self defense scores out of the fence us, they then convert into car tells as well,

kind of back and forth over these areas. So yeah, it's been shifting, you've seen about the out the self defense forces, you've seen some images there and you had a bunch of, you know, sometimes we're like legitimate guys, lime farmers who are like, we don't, we don't have a pay shake down to these car tells anymore, and they're kind of rise up. And you know, bunch of us with guards and we don't want to pay shakedowns to these cartels anymore, and they're gonna rise up, and you know, bunch of us with guards, and we're gonna fight the cartels ourselves, and then they kind of rise up,

and it's kind of a nice story, then you realize that some of these guys, who are meant to be the good guys, also. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really traffic, it's so. So, but I mean, if Gareth stands in interesting, comparison, I mean, very, very different,

but I think it's in some ways that kind of 21st century weird hybrid arm conflict and you see elements that you can compare. It is, I do think there's a high probability of that happening. If we ever did declare that a terrorist organization and foreign forces went in there, I could totally see and us fall for that again. Yeah, yeah.

It's, it's, it's, yeah. Well, what's, what are you gonna come up next? I've got a bunch of, I've got a bunch of projects. We've got a trial, you know, very interesting trial of the former, one of the former top officials in Mexico and trial for drug trafficking in the United States. So that would really look at the kind of official corruption we had the trial about Chapo. And that was like building up to the El Chapo trial. It was kind of building up for years to kind of go for the ultimate kingpin.

And then now we're going to go out, they're kind of going off to actually a corrupt official. So that's going to be very interesting to see what comes out of that. I've been looking at a TV series based on one of the biggest US operations on a cartel over decades and kind of breaking it down. I'm kind of getting with some of the biggest US operations on a cartel over decades and kind of breaking it down, kind of getting with some of the players, both in the law enforcement side and in the cartel side and seeing really how that kind of played out. Oh, that would be. Back and forth. When's that coming out? Yeah, we're still building that one up now, like developing the sources and developing that series, but that's something I'm working on hard. You think it'll be out this year? I mean, go willing.

That'd be great if it is, but yeah, yeah. Oh, great. Well, see, it's a big project. It's a big project. It's like a, like basically operation, like a task force, a US task force. Okay. And we're kind of getting in with, you know,

the big players they had and the whole judicial process and protected witnesses and really kind of drilling down on that operation. And still looking at stuff I've been up on the border at all recently, looking at some of the asylum seekers, the smuggling gangs, you know, so we obviously had a lot of back and forth, but it could be a hot political issue over the asylum seekers, which now looks like the Biden administration is now going back to the Trump ideas of like kicking asylum seekers back, because the asylum system is basically collapsing because the numbers.

Interesting. So, basically, what you have with that is you have, I mean, you've seen this increase over the years. So let's see, what it is is you have people arriving at a border and saying, I'm going to claim political asylum in the United States. And more and more people have understood over the years that they can do this. 20 years ago, people didn't really understand

that you could go from a conflict in, you know, from violence in whatever your country, you know, a lot of the time, they can't be quite poor and educated people. Do they just kind of run from that conflict? They're going to just come to the United States and just try and sneak over the border. But they're realising a lot of efforts by things like the UN Refugee Agency, different groups to say you can ask for a political asylum. So people start to realize they can do this and they come and arrive at US border and make an asylum claim. Now I talk to a lot of these people on an individual basis and I'm sympathetic to their life stories.

They've got brutal life stories, you know, many of them. They've been, you know, they've run from violence in Mexico, run from violence in Honduras, our Salvador, Brazil, Jamaica, Venezuela, much of these countries. But because more and more people have been asking the asylum system itself has basically collapsed. You got two million backcases. Wow. Two million. Yeah. Like nine on two million backhand. So a lot of them has really escalated the last couple of years So then you start getting pushing back to like five year waiting list to even see the case So what a lot of what Trump was really doing if you look a lot of what Trump was doing on the board or a lot of the politics was really about trying to stop this

Rising rising aside because it's I'm gonna see which one to do this and was like, and then he get kicked back from the courts. So, he'd say, I want to say you can't... I'm going to kick you out via... I'm going to use a pandemic measure to kick you out. Or I'm going to say you can't apply for something in the United States because you fled Honduras, so what didn't you apply for? So I mean, go out the mile or Mexico.

You are you're playing here? Or you know, trying to make, trying to change President to do this. I didn't have to kind of keep back from the courts and Biden came in was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna roll his back and we're not gonna, we're gonna get rid of all the, what Trumps and the border.

The reality, and I think Biden is very evasive talking about this because Biden doesn't want to offend the base or offend the people who are saying we want asylum claims. But like what the Biden is doing really now is kind of going back to the same Trump measures. Looking for ways just to stop this, without really changing the fundamentals, just looking for way to stop people to plan for asylum, because their numbers are so big. Wow, I had no idea it was that big.

Yeah, and a lot of what the back and forth, I think is about right now, I mean, you've got, you've still got the undocumented migrants coming over, or the undocumented migrants, the legal immigrants, you know, it's about the language, but like, we've still got a lot of people going over who want to just, you know, pace margolars get through the border work, but what's really changed in the real big crisis, I think a lot of this back and forth is about that. It's kind of a complicated issue, I don't think really the, it's come across clearly what that debates about, maybe in a lot of the reports, particularly because the language, like Biden, they don't want

to really explain that, because they don't want it, they don't want it, but they really, I think they understand practically that the US is not going to receive this amount of asylum claims. Wow. What? Yeah. Oh man. What?

What else do you go, Carmen? That's a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. Pretty more stuff. So I've been working a lot on a, on a sub stack on doing a lot of my own stories over the years. I've been working a lot for big meter outlets, time magazine, New York Times. But I've got a lot on doing my own material on this

on a sub stack. I'm going to link your stuff. Yeah, in the description. So appreciate it. It's also being on the newsletter and all the other media that we have. So yeah, I got a bunch more stories in that coming up. I've already done a bunch of stories there on all these fentanyl, migrants, smugglers, asylum, the obi-de-o, Guzmán,

the Sinalar Cartel stuff. I got some more stories coming up. I've got some stories about coming up. I've got some stories about pirates in the Gulf of Mexico. In the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah, I've just done the research on that story. I'm going to write that up. Basically, it's a bunch of, I mean, it's kind of a crazy size. So it's a bunch of oil installations there. There's pirates robbing oil installations. What they'll do is they'll often go onto these oil rigs, oil platforms.

And there'll be like six of these guys, but they're six guys with AK-47s. And they'll steal a bunch of the oxygen gear, which is this like quite high expensive higher-next-gen gear Which are worth you know several thousand dollars each one is kind of a they call him autonomous oxygen equipment And they'll they'll steal like a hundred packs of this

And make away and I talked to one guy who was who was on one of these oil rigs when it happened and they started having of There was a couple of Marines there on the when it happened and they started having of there Was a couple of marines there on the oarig but most of the marines would take 45 minutes to get there from a different place So these guys knew they had like 20 minutes basically So they did it did the robbery got away and they've been doing that a bunch of times. They've always been robbing the fishermen and The Mexican government's basically hushing a lot of this up Because it's kind of bad publicity. So the Mexican oil company as well was kind of, you know, wouldn't let the workers

talk about this. So that's one crazy story. Another one, a big bad a publish, which I was mentioning to you about was about a bunch of healers with psychedelics, IOTNAPA, have been arrested in Mexico. You know, while all these fentanyls coming through, they are arresting these guys with psychedelics, IOTNAPA, IOTNAPA, put them, IOTNAPA, they are arresting them with IOTNAPA, and threatening

them with heart prison time. And looking at that alone with the visitor guy in prison, a healer from Peru in prison with Ayahuasca. What a shame. All this is going on in there. And they're gonna arrest somebody for healing with Ayahuasca, what a shame. But, well, I just wanna say say I really appreciate you coming here. All your links, all your social media, everything will be linked in the description.

And, um, band, thank you for coming out. I hope to see you again. Thanks for taking the time. Great to be here and yeah, great to talk to you and your audience. Great to see this great, uh, great operation and talk about these issues. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you. Cheers. Cheers.

Thank you. The Bullwork Podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties. Real sense of day job is sprinkled on our PTSD. So things are going well, I guess. Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from Inside Washington and around the world. You document in a very compelling way all of the positive things have come out of this, but it also feels like we have this massive hangover. No shouting or grandstanding. Principles over partisanship. The Bullwork Podcast. Wherever you listen.