Shawn Ryan Show - #7 Ed Calderon Drug Cartel / Narcos Expert

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

In this episode of The Shawn Ryan Show, former Navy SEAL/CIA Contractor Shawn Ryan sits down with Ed Calderon. For over a decade Ed Calderon worked in the fields of counter narcotics, organized crime investigation, in the northern-border region of Mexico. He is a considered to be one of the top experts in the operations and tactics of the Mexican Drug Cartels and Narcos. Shawn and Ed discuss everything from Ed's personal experiences fighting cartels face to face and the mental and physical scars it has left behind forever, to why China is involving themselves in cartel operations deep in Mexico to how the Cartels are effectively utilizing American street gangs to push more drugs into the United States. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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give it to you I just a quick word from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Vigilance Elite. That's me. Head over to VigilanceLeat.com, hit the training tab. We have over 100 videos of tactical training and prepping shit too. Where we teach everything from how to politely remove somebody out of your way, you might be creating some issues. Two, if you're just that guy or lady who's looking to get profession with a firearm

and just learn the basics to protect your family, we have that on there. And, flyeradvigilancelead.com, head over to the store, buy yourself a bag of gummy bears and whatever else is in there. Now enjoy the show. Think about this. The largest fastest-growing cartel in Mexico was his new generation cartel, grew

exponentially in influence and power, not just in Mexico, but in the U.S. during the COVID epidemic. One of the biggest money makers outside of drugs is trafficking, human trafficking of all kinds. We live in a country where people are talking about reparations for slavery, when there's actual slavery still in this country. When during training, they would get a dog that they would take care of for a few weeks. They would sleep with it and feed it and all this

type of stuff, name it, and then they would have to kill it and eat it. The Y is China's interest in Mexico so it's becoming so strong. It's here at Killie's Hill as a country. I've seen the law card tell runs a lot of their distribution with some of the local black gangs in place like Chicago. So we use them by proxy.

I was covered in blood, my clothing was covered in blood. And I sneakers, my socks, feelin' my toes. Welcome back to the Sean Ryan show. This is episode 007. To kick things off, I wanna say thank you to all the patrons out there. We have an overwhelming response on Patreon, which is supporting the show and some news with that. We will be taking two volunteers from our tier

three group and I'm going to put them through a mindset challenge. So if you're on tier three, maybe you'll get picked. Two volunteers we were looking at hopefully mid-December. Moving on from that, thank you to everyone who left us an iTunes review. If you can't support us on Patreon, please at least take one moment, go to iTunes, leave us a review. That really helps us with the show. With that being said, hit the like button, leave a comment, and it's time to introduce our next guest, 007.

007 is a Mexican-American immigrant who did it the right way. he immigrated to the United States to evade the Mexican drug cartel. He is considered an expert in the space of narco trafficking and Mexican drug cartels. He's a real world mangeiver. He is TSA's worst fucking nightmare. He's seen it all and been face to face with the cartels and the most real, vivid, dangerous ways possible. Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to present Senior Ed Keldaro.

Well Ed, I am fucking super excited that you're here man. We've been trying to get this going for several months now and finally, finally hit a date that works for both of us. But you are like the current narco expert and Americans, I think everybody, but Americans are completely infatuated and interested in that subject matter. And there's so many shows out and documentaries and it's been like that for a long time and to include myself. So I can't wait to you know dive into some of that stuff and me personally a lot of people don't know this but I lived in Columbia for almost five years and was addicted to cocaine down there.

And kind of immersed myself in that narco culture because I was so, I got more addicted to the rush of being around it than I was the actual drug. And I kind of like to, you know, compare notes to some of the stuff that you've seen and some of the stuff that I've experienced and on a low level and being around that kind of shit. And so anyways, I'm super fucking pumped here, man. I'm excited to be here, man. So yeah. But I always start everything out with a gift. Okay. So First off, I was here if it's ticking, I was dropped a cell phone far away from it.

Right? Yeah. That's what they do. Right? That's how you know what somebody is. Oh, thank you. It's like a, yeah, that's cool. Thank you for that. Yeah, you're welcome. Oh, yeah. So, gummy bears. All of it, all about that right there. Thank you for that. That's pretty heavy. I don't know what that may be. Oh, look at that. Look at that thing right there. Hmm.

I wonder what this fits. It might happen to fit that right there. But I did a ton of research on you and you have this thing for golden guns. Well, I mean, it's I think it's a Mexican. I mean, some for some breeze. I think it's the Aztec and a little bit of the Spaniard mixed into there. The first enhanced interrogation in the American continent was done by the Spaniards burning the feet of mocked Azuma. So he could, so they could, you know, mocked Azuma could admit where the gold was hidden. No, sure. So I think, I think it's probably, it stands back to that gold lust, you know.

That's beautiful. Thank you for that. That is an amazing piece right there. Yeah. Well, That's an amazing piece right there. Yeah. Well, so yeah, that goes to a 50-cal desert eagle, gold plated, and so I figured, you know, the first break we take, I haven't broken that thing in yet. So we'll jut out back and blow some shit up. And, you know, see what she's made of. But have you shot one of those? Yeah, I have. I actually, I found two of those guns

in a water barrel somewhere in Baja that were traced back to the Fathon the Furious debacle way back when. They're very sought after by some of the higher ups on both sides of it. There was an army general that used to be part of the presidential protection detail that would carry around one of those things. No, sure.

Usually the officers in the army in Mexico don't get height requirement, so the guy was pretty short. He carried one of those in a leather holster underneath the jacket, you know? Why? I don't know. He's trying to make up for something probably. Yeah.

Why not? But it's a pretty interesting one. Gold guns have a long history down there. From Chalino Sanchez and his 38 commander, a commando gun to O'Choppo's famous pistol. And had his Ford 100 top 1000 number on there. Yeah. Is it like a status symbol?

It is. That's how you know who's in charge or who's who are the higher ups and some of the cartel parties. See those gold guns floating around. It's kind of more of a scene-to-low on thing. Each of the regions in Mexico have their own thing. I don't know exactly where that comes from, but there's a cult to a forbidden state in scene-to-low. Malverde, hisuse malverde.

It's a guy with a mustache, basically Mexican Robinhood is the clearest way to kind of describe him. Back in the third of the century, he was a famous bandit that would rob the rich people coming in through the town and the loot that he would get from them would be handed out to the townspeople. Eventually, he had pushed his luck too much, and he got shot in the leg. He knew he was almost going to be caught. The government put on a 10 gold coin

reward for his capture. And he told one of his best friends, according to the legend, he told one of his best friends to turn them in and get the money and this person to the townspeople. So he was hung from a tree and the order was not to bury him to leave them there rot. No, should eventually somebody in the town prayed to him because when he was alive, he would help out the townspeople with money and whatever. One of the townspeople prayed to him, said,

you helped me in life, now help me in death, and I'll make sure to bury you. And that was his first miracle. He fell down from the tree and each of the townspeople, instead of burying him, they just put a rock over his body. Eventually, it's a pile of rocks there, which later on turned into his grave, and later on turned into a shrine. So the whole gold thing is kind of related, I think it's probably related to that 10 piece of gold reward that was set up for him. So it's an interesting kind of a probable link to the whole gold fascination, how some

of these things are used to have a set of symbols. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, your number 007, so, yeah. It's a pretty big episode. Nobody reads too much into that though. Yeah, right. But so you consider yourself a non-permissive environment specialist, and you run an Instagram page, So you consider yourself a non-permissive environment specialist and

You run an Instagram page ed's manifesto and you teach courses on you know how to blend in how to survive How to escape and evade and It's it after talking with you a little bit. It seems kind of like a Hodgepodge Classful of of Skills that are seem to be very resourceful and

And I think that this fascinating. I actually wanted to go to your course and Cincinnati Yeah, that was when we were going to try to do this first and I didn't do it. I actually wanted to go to your course in Cincinnati. Yeah. That was when we were going to try to do this first and I didn't do it because I needed to prepare for this. But I do want to go to one of your courses and get that experience. I mean, it's hoodwrap shit. I guess.

I wish I could call it something cool, like field craft or trade craft or something like that. But it's realistically, it's me going and doing a class and recounting the experiences and the conversations of all the people that I've kind of had to meet, talk to, conversely learn from during my whole experience in Mexico working for the government. Interesting thing, actually the Ed's Manifesto tagline came

from an NSW guy that I trained with. No, shit. So I would always have a Moskid notebook that I would write down things in, as far as like class notes. Not a very common thing for Mexicans to do that. So I was in Coronado training with NCIS guys, some of them were former team guys. They were doing a combat medical class for us. So like the first time I saw a tourniquet or the first time I ever trained how to pack a wound was there with some of those guys.

And there's a, what are you writing in the little manifesto was the thing that he kept asking, no, I'm just writing some notes, right? No, I'm just kidding, I'm just fucking with you. So that's where the tagline has manifested, so actually came from. That's cool. I've always made it a point to collect

and take down notes and record. And anything I see of interest, I would always kind of collect from conversations with people that we would today. I never made the mistake of dehumanizing my enemy. I think that's a common mistake that I see a lot of people do. What I mean by dehumanizing the enemy, it's not about celebrating him, it's not about emulating him, it's about learning from him.

So, example, 15-year-old Fernando, 15 year old Fernando, 15 year old Fernando as the guy that just kid distributes cocaine to cocaine and heroin to a lot of the people that travel into one of the sonarrosas or the tolerant zones in Tijuana. That's where all the prostitution takes place. A legal prostitution, a loud prostitution.

We're on them for a while. We finally caught them, you know. Caught them slipping. He was buying a cell phone for his girlfriend. And that's where he got them. Handcuffed them, put them in the car. You got free of the handcuffs, ran. A few of our guys caught them and a few of them

wanted to beat them up. I said calm down, grab them, took them back to the car, zip tied them and handcuffed them this time and asked them how did you get out of those and he proceeded to show me, right? Yeah. Um, we used a small piece of metal from a, uh, street sweeper, street sweeper, bristle. Um, and he would always carry a mat, like a rare magnet or a magnet to pick some of those up and he would always hide him on his person. And then he would grab the handcuff itself and flip it to the side so it looks like it's closed, but it's actually open. There's those two tricks I learned from them, I've been showing across the country

just some high-level people and some low-level people and they were always get amazed by it. And I always say, I learned this from a 15-year-old kid. And T. Mell, I mean, they call it hood rat shit, but all it is is fucking real shit that actually works that people have come up with and you've documented it all and put it into your manifesto. How many different, like roughly in an estimation, or maybe if you do have

an exact number, but how many different types of these skills do you have documented? I mean, I have a lot of VHS tapes of some conversations I have with some of these people. Yeah. I have some a lot of digital recordings of some of the conversations I have with some of these people. I have pictures and the Moleskins related to hoodwrap fortifications on some safe houses to, you know, steel, water, and steel doors meant to negate the use of an angle grinder or of a battering ram, basically the water river rates, the pressure on the steel. And I've got all those notes and pictures and stuff like that, that's like, I have no idea how

much I have, but I don't hoard it. A lot of people hoard that stuff. I shared some of that stuff pretty openly on my social media. And every time I get a chance to train with or go in advice and some capacity, some unit, some group, some group of people, like I got the opportunity to show some of the stuff that I know to some of the secret the Secret Service Academy to some of those guys. Specifically, how to hide things that are non-fair, so non-nagnetic and how to smuggle things through points of security. And it was surprising how some of the simpler things surprised them, how some of those were unknown. But that's kind of the point behind most of the stuff that I do. I want to put this into the hands of people, even the general public itself. People sometimes get afraid when I share something

that to them was secret. An example of this is I shared a picture of zip tie restraint, homemade zip tie restraint with an angle cut in the inside of them. So when they would put them on, the angle cut in the zip tie would stab into your wrists. Now that was pretty unknown to the general public, but it was widely used in Mexico by some of the Russian groups. The reason they made that that way is that a lot of these guys, um, and actually got to see an open laptop and doing some site, uh,

exploitation stuff down in Mexico. And I got to see their browsing history, which was fascinating to me, you know, what, what are these guys looking at? And, uh, YouTube, uh, escape in evasion videos, people escaping from zip ties, doing the classic, uh, bursting, classic bursting method to escape from them. So they decided to put angles in them. So when you try to do that, you would hurt yourself and or basically commit suicide. Now that is a product of evolution. They are evolving. They're changing the way they're doing things.

And we as people that share some of that stuff are better served educating the public about some of these things. So they can see how deep the whole goes and they can counter that preparation that the bad guys have or the counter guys have to what we are gonna plan to do to counteract that and if we find ourselves in a situation like that. That's a small example of it,

but things are evolving out there. People that have a lot of training in Mexico, like some of the people that I used to work with are now working for the cartel. Yeah. Things are shared online and immediately get distributed to every single terrorist network out there in the world. And also, most intelligence services as well, so that stuff gets propagated and shared, and it's a free for all, when it comes to information. Yeah, and then the attack gets evolved, you know, because of that.

But the example of Hong Kong protests are using lasers. All it took was their action. Now they change the way people do things. So, you know, some of those lasers, you can source on places like Alibaba, you know, and you can modify them easily by some of the stuff you see on YouTube. So that's a quantum leap over how they weaponized basically focused light. And it's fascinating to see that how an idea spreads like a virus in a way. The same thing with all the criminal methodology that I'm going to share and expose.

They see something that is, they get horrified and surprised by it. Oh, Ed, why are you showing the criminals this? No. They already know it. I'm showing the people that are lived safely in the confines of whatever community are a part of that have never been exposed to this. I'm sharing this to them so they can see how deep the well is.

So they can keep their kids close so they can put a sign on the well at the well as deep. There's a lot of, it's a lot of the negativity that you get is usually based on the whole, you shouldn't share this openly. Yeah. There are things that you shouldn't share this openly. Yeah. There are things that I don't share openly. And usually things that I've seen that are kind of reserved

or kind of really, I haven't seen that much out there. But once I do, I try and share some of those things so people can see what they are. So you grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, and you started your law enforcement career in 2004. Yeah. And doing my research, it sounded like you were actually you were in med school. You wanted to be a doctor and and it sounded like your law enforcement career was kind of something that you were doing just to get you by while you were in med school. And then you go on to say that it took a very different turn. And uh, yeah. So

9-11, where were you when I, what, what, what did you do after 9-11? I was in a military. Awesome. That was completely beyond the scope of my, I didn't want to do anything, weapons related. I didn't want to serve. I didn't want to do anything like that. 9-11 happened and it turned the economy into, I put the economy along the border region, specifically in the Guana, which lives off the border, right? Border times went longer because of all the new security precautions, and the border was actually closed for the first time in like recent history was during line 11. That affected my family's business and my own ability to

kind of maintain myself. And I couldn't afford to stay in medical school. So I had to look for options. So I'm adding the newspaper that they wanted young, unmarried, no kids, bilingual, young men for government work. I thought it was gonna be community policing or some sort of information analysis type thing and all of a sudden I was going through paramilitary training and getting my

hair shaved off by a bunch of Mexican coffee guys and I don't know what it was in for. There was this open door when we go in there, the academy that I went through was a regional academy. That was basically a refurbished prison. So they made this prison in this hillside, and they discovered after they made it that there's a lot of fog there. So it wasn't an optimal place to put a prison. But a police academy, they can get it over that. So it was not good enough to be a prison, but they turned into police academy, which is fascinating. Yeah. Retreated, they told us at the start, there was this colonel there. So we have two things for you, ban Iverga, which bread and dick.

And guess what? Bread ran out two days ago. So all you're getting is dick, right? They have this open door policy there. You can just walk out if you wanted to, you wanted to quit. And they treated us like human refuse for about two months, two, three months. Basically, while we were going through that, that FBI background checks were being done, polygraph

exams, background, financial checks, they were looking into our families, and a lot of people would get pulled out during the whole process. So just backtracked real quick. So were you, you were already being fed into, like almost in a lead unit of the other police force police force right from day one. Yeah, they were training us up to do something. And I didn't know exactly what that was, but I was getting an idea because of the type of people that were training us. But I thought it was going to be an analysis job, listen to phone calls, maybe translating stuff that I would hear somewhere and an office somewhere and all of a sudden I was getting handed a ballistic vest

block and a G3 rifle. They would give us a badge and then they would tell us, just don't put it on, you'll get you killed if you see this badge. So yeah, it was it was pretty badly organized. The training was very low quality. I remember getting trained how to shoot a Beretta 92 FS pistol, a 99 millimeter Beretta 92 FS pistol. And I shot 20 rounds out of it while going through a training, basic training there. And when I got out, I got a block inside of a case. And I've never seen a clock before, like looking at this thing, like, where's the safety? You know, I was trying to figure this out. It was that type of retard, retarded, low-level

training and, you know, the, you make fun of the guys that get the AK47 shot around them to get them acquainted to combat. I was one of the guys on the ground getting shot with that AK47 around him. Get him acquainted to all it gave me was bad hearing. That's a good way to make death and dumb people. But that was that was what we had. That's what they had to give us, right? Damn. That lasted about a little bit over six months. And then it was off to the races and stepping into the beginnings of what turned into the drug war,

like the major parts of the drug war. fled the beginnings of what turned into the drug war, like the major parts of the drug war. How bad was the, how bad were the cartels at that time? They were pretty bad, but it was, it was the beginning of the modern fractioning which turned into like the worst parts of the drug war. This was right before Felipe Calderon, This was right before Felipe Calderon, the conservative to the right president, basically declared open warfare on the cartels. This was the president before him, was in power, he was starting to push

for some of these policies. And all of a sudden, we had 2006 world around and kicked off. It was like, there was bad stuff and violence happening. But he basically militarized and put all every basically gave a white white card to governors across the country to do whatever they had to do to go after the cartels. So that's when things really got interesting. Um, there was a lot of fractioning going on with high level cartel guys being grabbed and the one cartel turning into two legions just being tested around the country and, and, uh,

kind of the violence, uh, being orchestrated by cartel on cartel and also government on government. So you would run into a town where the state police was on the payroll of one cartel. The local municipal police was on the payroll of the other cartel. And the local military barracks were on the payroll of another cartel. So it was you trust no one like the smoking man and the X man and the X was you to say. That's what it was probably the first lessons that I got was trust no one. Damn. When when Calderon took over in 2006, from the research I did,

it sounded like that was like a fucking switch got flipped. Yeah. And I read that NAYE that they estimate over 250,000 people have been murdered. Those are official numbers. That's probably more. Yeah. Also, they don't count the people that were missing. Yeah. Body disposal turned into an industrial effort in places like Dejwana where the famous do maker was was active So what happened is that the Philippi color basically federalized the efforts against drugs and

You put the military into the fight and you also Took a certain elements of the police forces and embedded them with the military, which was some of the stuff that I did, because we had arresting powers in Dayton and also we knew over here around some of the places where they were operating. So one of the places where I worked was in Baja. And I got to see the Stu maker and actually got to meet him and talk to him. The Stu maker was employed by an elements of the St. Louis cartel.

He used to actually work for the Tijuana, the Ariana Felix cartel, but there was a split that happened and he went over this in the law side. He said that he was trained how to get rid of bodies by Israeli specialists that the cartel was brought in to train them, right? And that was like suspect when I heard it. It sounds like something's kind of made up, but then I saw some elements of actual experience and craft in what he was doing. So he basically made caustic soda to get rid of the

bodies with a lot of stuff you can buy on you can buy it in any hardware store. I didn't didn't then getting a lot of attention because he was he would always dress like an albany like a worker like a construction worker. He would you know make his caustic mixture, put a body in there without any clothing on. He would cut grid patterns on some of the tattoos and the face to get rid of that first. And he would dump that into a sand grater and get some of the solid pieces and put in the next batch. That's a sign of craft somebody showed him that. So it makes me wonder.

The amount of people that he got rid of as far as the bodies go is unknown. There's different estimates out there. I don't know. Like nobody knows. But a whole generation of young people disappear in that city. Yeah. What are some of the estimations? 5,000.

5,000 fucking people. That's one of the numbers I heard. One guy got rid of 5,000 bodies. Yeah, he never murdered anybody though. He said they would just get bodies brought in. In a scene out of Auschwitz, where he was found found there was a room full of shoes and clothing. I was creepy as hell to see. All those shoes and clothing belong to somebody. And they just made that these bodies appear. One time I was working with one of the older guys.

So there's a generation of guys that were on when I went in that didn't go through some of the security protocols that I went through. So some of them were more on the shady side than others. There's no such thing as not being the being in Coppen, Mexico and not being shady somehow. Even I was kind of shady maybe, I don't know. But one of the older guys I was we saw this there's this pedestrian bridge and they had Three bodies hanging from it, right? And I stood there like that's

Horrible That's a horrible cruel thing to do All the older guys said the bodies of gift Should be thankful for it I didn't really I didn't kind of get what he meant. So what do you mean, man, that's horrible. No, I mean, at least the family's going to get a body to bury and cry over. Body's a gift. Yeah. So that in a place where that hanging a body from a bridge is a sign of kindness. Yeah. That's a different kind of hell. That, that, that can put some shit under perspective. Fuck, man. How long, how long after your,

how long into your career, do your law enforcement career until you want to until one did it take for it to become real. I mean, this isn't a fucking game. As soon as I got out, probably the second day on the job, we were kind of spread out in the bar, in the state. in Baja State. And I got to see immediately the the the no fucks given by the cartels. So I remember me and probably eight other guys moving through downtown the Hwana in full kit driving around in some mark vehicles. And getting the order to stop from the lead car that was in front of us, and we put them, we parked the side, and everybody ran out of the cars

and adopted defensive positions. And the convoy probably, I'd say probably somewhere in 15 vehicles just passed right next to us. All of them, a few of them armored, all of them with AK-47s. Some of them had federal police uniforms, some of them have army uniforms. We didn't know who they were. We're getting calls from the 911 servers they have down there from the municipal police that were caught. They were municipal cops, but they clearly weren't. Because we were cops. So we just got in a, you know, Mexican standoff with them.

Didn't nobody shot around, but they just passed by us. We called for support from the local police and nobody showed up. So how many of you guys were there? Probably nine. Nine? What's that? Two cars? That's two cars, Yeah. And they had 15 fucking vehicles. Yeah. So we that's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not not like this.

Fuck man. There's no winning. Not like this. And why do you think there were no shots fired? Why do you think there were no shots fired? Ladies and gentlemen, it wasn't felt right and by us, it didn't have any fear. So they just passed by and they actually went to a local restaurant there and adapted positions around it, had dinner and then went back to your car and left. No support came on our end.

So that's when you realize how fucked you are and how no support, now there's just no backing there. This was before the Fidley Pickahler on the administration. Slowly but surely things change. We started getting more support, started getting more vehicles, more people coming in. We started working directly with the military and directly with some federal operational police forces. Eventually getting fear put into the the opponent, the enemy, the cartel guys. It took them to high. At the start of it, it was just hopeless. It's hopeless. Going through the motions, I think I took about a year into it that a few of my friends

were killed. They used to rent out hotels for us to stay in. And we had this buddy system going on. So if you wanted to go outside, you had to have one of your buddy system, right? But you would have to inform that you were going out. They didn't inform. They went to the store, thought it was easy, so they just cross the street, went to this convening store. And they got picked up by some cartel guys dressed as federal agents, they had the blue uniforms and

everything, with the patches, everything, like down to every detail. And they were, you know, they were taken, the zip dyed, and put into a van. They were found 24 hours later. One of them had his ID screwed to his for it. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's when like paranoia, um, less than a year. That's less than a year. And I, and I, uh, I came out of there in a generation of 32 people. And a lot of them are gone. Uh, but those were the first really close ones to me that I saw. It was just leaving a horrible way. They're all young, you know. Like I knew I knew that I just been to a party with the girl. Then I met the girlfriend of one of them.

I was a thing that told them to get on and don't marry. Don't get girlfriends because you don't want to leave widows. Interesting. Just a perspective. I was a, it was a thing that told them to get on and don't marry, don't get girlfriends, because you don't want to leave widows. Yeah. Interesting. Just a perspective. It's a, it's a thing to be ashamed of or to hide. If your profession is a cop or at least it was back then.

Yeah. So because we're not the, depending on where you were, cops or, you know, despised. Yeah. Um, so what would a typical day look like? What was your mission? Uh, uh, depending on the time of my career, like, uh, some of the part of hard core stuff, I was attached to a, uh, a director, uh, by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Zola for the first part of his administration that's directing us. He's the one that really changed things.

Like he was our, he was the guy, you know, I was equate him to a general mathist type individual. He was a Lieutenant colonel that came out of the war college in Mexico. Career officer went through a bunch of experience and eventually landed in a directorship out of the group that I worked for. He led from the front.

I didn't have any, any specialty training, protecting somebody, but I got assigned to his security detail at the start of his, at the start of his turn as a director. And I went out patrolling with him and Tijuana. I was probably one of the most life-changing altering experiences. There's the Scott, you see the sky, he refused to wear a, a, a, a, a strap on his rifle. So he'd carry his A-R and his hand, you know, like a cowboy. Nice.

He'd walk out of these vehicles and every now and then would stop a high-level cartel guy and he would walk up to him and like, I'm here now. I'm in charge, so you better, you know, better get your shit together. It's been coming after you. He would have these meetings with the whole group and just say, I want villains, I want,

I want to fight fire with fire if you're here for romantic reasons, just get the fuck out of the room. I want bodies not detainees. Do you like work of room? I mean, I think you treated us like dogs, shit. But we felt the support. Yeah. He was very much a villain.

He's got your fucking back. He was very much a villain, but he was our villain. Yeah. That's the feeling we got. Loyalty. For that, we would always see him in the front lines. We did this raid on his compound in Baha, where the guns, drugs, everything was going on.

Stolen vehicles, money, falsifying bills, it was in the same compound we found out there. And they actually had a line in there as well, which is that's an interesting part of the story. But we went there, all of us basically approached it from different sides, and I remember approaching it from the beach and we were kind of walking towards this compound. It had a bunch of bungalows there. Some of the bungalows were actually rented out and some American families were staying.

They're unbeknownst to them. There was all this stuff going on around them. So I remember being very low to the ground and hearing some rounds go off and stuff like that and just being very low, kind of approaching this place and just looking to my side and seeing this, this super hero character in the form of Lieutenant Colonel Lays, oh, I just standing there. And so the rounds are coming from there. Like, you can't make this shit up. We hit this place and you know he was

with us throughout. He didn't hide somewhere, go to the background and he was with us for all of it. You know, it's probably one of the longest days as far as kicking doors and then I had in my life. There's a bunch of bungalows each time we would hit one. There was people and there's weird things and their guns. What I hit all these bungalows at the end of it. There was this weird door, like a steel door with a refrigerator, with a bunch of succulent frozen succulent pigs. I was like, what's going on here?

I remember I had my MP5 with light on it. One of the stream light ones, the first ones, the yellowish light. No, number those. I don't know how we live with that stuff. Turn out that yellowish light, you know, but these really expensive batteries to get down there. Open the steel door and just go in there. And then the corner, like something out of a movie, this furry object just stood and turned around. I could see its lights, his eyes light up. The light was a lion. They had a whole lot of lion in the room. They had a pet lion because cartels. They did one of those.

And you got a fucking MP5. And I didn't mind mine. I'm not one of the last things I thought about was shooting it. Yeah, I just wanted to get out of the room. That was my whole thing. Ran out of the room, closed the door. Sierra, Sierra, Sierra, Sierra, Sierra, Sierra, Sierra. Psych and then we had the whole thing about now, what we do with this line, right? The time of currently is all that wax in, I was like, what's in there? It's a line. Okay.

Don't open the door. Well, all right. Calm, collected guy. I mean, some of the things that we experienced were completely out of this world. I never saw him bat and I. Yeah, that was, that was, I think he was instrumental in and turning the fear on the side of them. Yeah. He had about eight or nine assassination attempts on him during his time working down there. Shit. The last one took the use of his legs. He shot him in the back. He's confined to a wheelchair now, but he's still very much a dangerous person. He's still very much a motivated guy.

He's made a run for office for the mayor of Tijuana a few times. Actually, I've supported him during these runs, even out. Yeah. He's one of those guys that never acknowledged his people. You know, he's like one of those leaders at any small hint of a pat on the back, it's just beyond him. Yeah. But he shared when I was, when I was, I started getting a bit more notoriety. He shared something of mine on his social media. I said, oh, this man, this, this, this, this one of the guys that I used to work with, should listen to him. He's talking about some of the work we then.

And I was like insanely surreal. Yeah. It's acknowledgement of my existence. That felt awesome. That was the beyond awesome. And then I went over there and talked to him, and he humbled me back again. What's your name again?

Yeah. When you guys were doing, when you guys were conducting these raids, like this one that you were just talking about, for example, how many guys are with you, and how many guys were on the cartel side? I mean, usually somewhere in the numbering, in the thirties or fifties on our side,

if it was a high level thing, and somewhere around 50 and 100 on the cartel side, depending on where we were and what we were doing, there were a lot of times where our number, completely unnumbered, we had to basically adopt a defensive position and just wait it out until the cavalry will come in and usually in the form of the army or the Marines, depending on where we were. Okay, so you guys would take a target down and then, and then basically hand it over to a specialized unit. Yeah. So we would find things that were beyond the scope of our

ability to guard or keep or move like a fucking lion. Yeah. Like a lion or like a lot of cocaine or a lot of weed or a lot of guns and a lot of people. And then we call them the military and the military would come in and grab it. And there was back then there was a political thing. So the military, they wanted the, they wanted people to get more confidence in the ability of the military to combat that the military was combating some of this stuff. The thing is that the military was not equipped to combat some of this stuff. They didn't, they weren't, They weren't a viable police force, but they wanted to gain more confidence. So a lot of the jobs that we would get, we would find would say, hey, we found all this stuff, but the military

you know, take it. That was a lot of that going on back then. And there was a lot of corruption as well. And there was a lot of corruption as well. At high levels recently, the head of the National Security Administration or police force in Mexico, under the Caldorund Administration was arrested for cartel ties. So I mean, again, trust no one. Trust no one. So digging back on that, we would sometimes we would go after certain things and they would be called off. So that makes you think. Yeah.

Right. But I was just a cog in the machine, you know, boots on the ground. Yeah. That's all I was. How often were you guys going on rakes? Was it every night? Every night. Twice a night.

Every night. Every night we would get something of interest. And off we went where we get get anonymous reports of armed people somewhere or whatever. And it was basically a race to see who get that, who get their first. Or it was a race to see what we could find first, right? So it was a nightly thing, a bunch of the people that I used to work with were all addicted the same thing, adrenaline. They all wanted to be in it. They all wanted to be, you know, some people were coming off a shift and they were here or something was going on and just flipped that back on.

Yeah. There's something that we said about the people you meet and you relate in with, under some of these conditions, there's a weird bond that happens with people. So we took everything personally that would happen to each of us. So things like having a going off shift and whatever happens on five people would rush in even on their breaks. You know, but it was a nightly thing. We would get specific things that we would go after specific people or we would

Khaladlaibra as they're calling down there with pull the string. We'd find a guy with a cell phone and Cell phone had him with an AK gold AK on it on it and That would lead us to somebody else and that would lead us to a house and that would lead us to somebody else and that would lead us to a house. And that would lead us to water barrels buried with a bunch of guns from fast and the furious in his backyard. And that would lead us to somebody else. And it was sometimes one thing would turn into a couple of three nights of just raiding in the houses once. Was there always shots fired? Sometimes a lot a lot of times. I was in a few big ones.

There's a famous one, the Guppuana. Like people can look this up. There's a lot of footage of that. The Guppuana was basically a castle like a structure house in Tijuana and had a giant dome on top of it, looked like a mosque. There was a report of armed people inside of it. So responding units went there and they started getting fired from on top of that, a couple of structures. So high vantage point, all of the advantages. So they got pinned down. Some of the some of the federal police showed up and then we showed up. We had G3s, back then. So they were pretty good at shooting people from, that were hiding behind bricks.

Yeah. Some of the other guys had ARs and stuff like that. So it was an interesting back and forth in that regard. Back then, all the police units showed up like from the federal to the state, to the local. And finally, the Army showed up with a 50 cow. And that's the same fight. Yeah, how long did this go on?

It probably took probably like four hours, maybe. Four hours. Five hours. And this is the middle of the Wana. There's a, there's a daycare center next to it. Jesus. So we're evacuating some of the kids out of the daycare center. This time, I was protecting a high ranking politician.

So we had access to armoured surveillance, sort of bringing in the armoured surveillance to see if we can evacuate some of these kids. It was a shit show. Everybody was shooting nobody knew who had like some of the people that were showing up. There were cops were wearing civilian clothing, including us. So it was a shit show. Eventually it subsided. And on the ins, I opened up the some of the doors, the army broke in and opened some of the doors to this place

and a fully uniformed, the municipal police officer stepped out. It's like, I jumped the wall from back then, let's go through here. And like, all of us were like that guys, probably part of that. Yeah. So he immediately got bagged. And when they went in, a lot of the, all of the, it was basically a place where they were keeping abducted people that they were ranciting out. And a lot of them got, you know, shot in the head.

And some of the guys that were inside shooting out, put zip ties on and handcuffs and pretended to be abducted. I remember somebody commenting on the fact that the smell gave them away. They would pick them up and they would smell fresh, fresh, you know, not like somebody's been sleeping in the same clothing for months. And also they didn't have any raw rest with the restraints. So they immediately got bagged and tacked to bunch of them with cops. No shit. Yeah. Police radios and says we would use a sat, satellite radios, mantra systems, and they had those there too, apparently cryptic and very secure, but they had them. When you were trying to evacuate,

or when you and your team was trying to evacuate the children out of the daycare, is there like a mutual respect between the police and the cartel on sparing them or will they try to exploit that and then like what a lot of what a lot of like what al Qaeda will do is they will look for targets opportunity that are fucking easy that will make headline news and then try to twist it so that it makes it look like we did it.

I mean, there's pictures online about that firefight. You can see some of the agents basically just two kids on each hand just trying to extract them. Rounds are flying everywhere. Nobody was respecting anything. They were in a fight for their lives or a corner, so you can, that was all they were up to. You can see them trying to snipe specific things like that.

We had the helicopter flying overhead and you could see them trying to hit that thing out of the sky. Yeah, I mean, there is, there is, they do definitely have elements of, you know, hearts and minds going on within how they operate in some of these communities. And in some of the places that we went after them, they were, they were, they were the police element in the community. They were, they were the guys that built the roads. They were the guys that built the church. They were the guys that would pay for the college educations of some of the kids there. They were the guys that built the roads, there were the guys that built the church, there were the guys that would pay for the college educations of some of the kids there, there were the guys that built the school,

they were the guys. I loved them. Yeah, and that's true across Mexico. There's a few places like that in Mexico. I did a class in Cinaloa a few years back at Kuljakan, the center of the scene law, cartel basically. And I was driving through this road, it's a pretty rough road, and all of a sudden turned into a nice road, very well lit, very well maintained. And somebody there told me,

this is the cartel built part of the road. So in a place like that, who is the governor there? Yeah. Cartel guys or some of these communities that they build the build around what they do are pretty insane. Kids rolling into a gas station with a Lamborghini Murcielago wearing sandals, gassing it up and then driving it up to who knows where in the hills.

Yeah. You know, kids just running around with AK-47s and getting a middle of town, guarding somebody that was high level. That's why it called the upside down, things are flipped in some of these places. Yeah. How long were you in that, in that element, where you were doing raids on a nightly basis? That's probably somewhere along, probably nine years.

Nine years? Probably nine years of that. Nine fucking years. Nine years of that. That's like 2,000, what is that? 2,700 something raids. I mean, not that's a fucking horrible. That's a 2000. What is that? 2,700 something rates. I mean, I just just for grades.

Well, that's when we when we talked at last night at dinner, so I talked to you about how's your knees and how's your back? That's usually that's usually what goes. How much mentioned planning goes into one of these rates? Is it like we're fucking going? Yeah, we're going. We're going. We're figuring things out. We got like we're fucking going? Yeah, we're going. We're going, we're figuring things

out. We got a, we got pretty good at figuring out how things were built and how a lot of the, a lot of the housing down there is pretty shitty. I mean, it's a lot of the economic housing is pretty like cut and paste basically. So we would know how things were built. Also, a lot of the shanty towns that we would work in were very flammable. Some of them were built out of cardboard or just tarp. So you wouldn't know what you would get. Sometimes we would hit what apparently was a shanty town type house and then it would end up in a marble floor for story house with doleman pinchers that have pedigrees Dartingly outside of it, you know, yeah, so we would never know we would get There's some some surveillance went into some of the work we did and we're trying to figure things out

We're trying to prepare as best we could for it But we just you know, I remember just experience would would make us gather things in what we would carry. So I remember hitting this house once, a clear door there just went up the door, started banging on it and crow barring it, angle grinder, eventually we ripped that thing off and it was a wall behind it. It was a fake door. It was a fake front door. Shit.

And we were like, slow clap, you know, just, I mean, we had to, you like to applaud that. And there's this secret door tunnel system thing on the back. And they nobody was in there when we got in there. Ingenuity, basically was a back and forth. Ingenuity thing. We would, we would, we would, we would try and always figure out how we get into some place or how we could get out of it also. You would go to some places and it wasn't just that house. It was also the house next door. It was also the house over there. It was also the kids on the bike or there had a smartphone that called you, that called any sort of activity in there.

So we had to do things like cut the water supply, the water means into some of these places that we couldn't flush things. We would have to figure out the ways of hitting everything simultaneously. So we had to spread out. Communication was a big issue. And also imagine going and hitting several houses in the same area at once,

cross-wise a bitch. And there's just the way to kind of figure that out at times. So, or most of these barrios are they, is the entire neighborhood on the payroll? Some of them are, you know, or if they're not on the payroll, they're related to them in some way, like blood related to some of the people working there. So it's in their best interest to call in the a there's a bunch of weird cars here are some people that are not from here moving in with guns, heading your way. And I have to mention their support in the whole fucking community. Sometimes, yeah. So again, it's it was losing battle. Yeah. In a lot of ways. I mean, some of the success, we had the president, Philippic Aldroen recently wrote a kind of a biography on his term.

And he specifically mentions Pa as a victory for him. And it did. It was, you know, we And it did. It was, you know, we'd calm things down in that part of the country. It was one of the only successes that his whole, you know, counter and narcotic drug counter cartel ever to add. But it didn't last. Yeah. It didn't last. Well, that's huge. That was actually my next question. I was going to ask out of over 2700 fucking raids that you've done. If you felt like you've made a dent and you did. But you did. And then it went back. Yeah. So I mean, the raids and then then getting to work in as a bodyguard and an advisor role, advisory role for a governor that worked in Embaha. And then trying, I'm just trying to figure out

all the effort that was put into finding these two large groups of cartels that were fighting for the riches drug route on the planet. That goes right through the Hwana, into the into California. It's one of the richest drug routes for a reason because it feeds the largest drug market in the world, in the form of the US and specifically California. So you would hit somebody high level, send them to prison, and the next day there's two more guys setting up. Or you pacified this area, and all of a sudden, well, there's no competition here. So other forces started moving in discreetly and eventually would reverse back to the same problem. I think the

I think the main problem is a lack of a long term plan. When it came to all of that, all the plans were five six years related to the presidential term that was currently in power. So a presidential term would end and everything that worked, got discarded, everything that didn't work, got discarded, and everybody would start off from square one. An exact simple example of this. Philippic Alderon decided to militarize the police forces. So basically, they turned them into more of a militaristic approach

to fight some of these cartels. The guy that replaced them said, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna do something completely different. So they made a new police force and militarized it, right? Yeah. And then the current administration is a leftist guy, and dress Manuel Lopez Obrador. Very to the left crazy guy, not a very good president. He, the first thing he said, I'm gonna do completely the opposite of what all these people did.

I'm gonna amnesty for the cartels, but also it's novel, also it's policy, which means hugs, not bullets. We're gonna completely do something different. But also, it's no ballastos policy, which means hugs, not bullets. We're going to completely do something different. The first thing he does is he forms a national guard force and he puts a military charge. So, he's like, this is the same thing again, right? So it's a systemic form of amnesia.

Every six years, they forget everything, I just do it all over again. And everybody that was related to whatever efforts that succeeded in the past, get vilified or get persecuted or prosecuted. That's the thing that's happening now. So one of the governors that I work with, a very honorable man, like finding somebody like that in politics in Mexico is a rare thing. But I trust that man with my life and my family if I had to. He's a very stand-up guy. I witness his efforts. He didn't hide. He really believed in what he was doing.

Now he's being persecuted for the cartel ties, which I know for a fact, the bogus. But it's a leftist president now. And he's going, going after all the conservatives to the right administrations, he knows best. That's the thing. He's not addressing the fucking problem. No, not at all. The easiest thing is to blame who was before. Right. So that's how long did it take for, So that's how long did it take for? It sounds like he cleaned up Baja pretty fucking good and made a massive. It was it was the most dangerous.

The Tijuana was on the most dangerous cities in the world list. It was number one. And it ceased to be on that list after some of the efforts that I was involved in and some of the people that like like Lieutenant Colonel Aizola took charge of the local police forces there. He disarmed all of it. He wanted police force and cleaned it up, which was an insane thing to do. It dropped off that list and things pacified. Cartel's cartel members and cartel convoy's ceased to be in the open thing. They would like when I started, you would see these cartel, a fully armed cartel

convoys just in the middle of the day to drive through the city and abduct somebody and just take them and nobody would do anything. He put fear into the equation. That, that, that, that in the open presence stopped. Yeah. Abductions were ransomware or big thing in the city. That kind of lowered and stopped for a while. And things went back to normal. Right. So much back to normal that more that a lot of protests started happening to get the military to go back to their military barracks to get the police to stop being militaristic and to turn into more to more of a community policing force. So again, bad times create bad men, strong men, strong men, good times, and we went into that cycle.

And now we're back again, into the whole Tijuana's on the one of the, but I think it was last year was the most dangerous study on the planet. It was per capita. And then there's a new generation cartel ally ship with the Dijuana cartel that is fighting for control over Tijuana with the Sunilov cartel. And it's back to square one. Yeah. Damn. Seven, eight people die every every night in Tijuana. Damn. Related to the cartel violence. So kind of wrapping up your career. You talk about kind of being recruited by the cartel.

And I kind of wanted to go a little deeper into that. And I would imagine that you were recruited several times or had front, you had already said that you had friends that have been recruited out of the police or maybe the military and into the cartel. I mean, the offer was, it was an offer, you know, it's always, they were always, you would always get intermediaries approaching, you know, like, hey, yeah, and like, this is this is much of money. It takes you for you to work with us, you know, but it was obvious to anybody, you know, as soon as you take an offer like that, you're, you're owned, you're there. If you fuck up, if you're not useful, or if somebody finds out you're working for somebody that they're not a part of, you'll either get arrested, get killed by the rival group that you're working against. Or your career ends, all right? So I got a lot of offers,

a lot of them. Never took any of them. A lot of my friends and a lot of the people that I used to work with did or eventually would put it put into a position where there was no choice. Blata, Bloma, silver or lead, Columbia in turn, but it's popular in Mexico. Another code for it was one finger up and one finger down. What do you want? You want to want to blood the bloma, you know, I want to be on the ground or you want to stay up here in the world of the living. I wasn't greedy. There's a lot of people that went into policing in Mexico that wanted to find a million dollars in bearing a wall

or something or just beyond the payroll of somebody. I remember going to some of the meetings at the office and seeing some new hummers outside and some of the guys owned. It was kind of scratching my head at it, right? A lot of us went through a certification process called Kalea, it's an American certification process. And with that, a lot of confidence,

exams, polygraph testing, all this type of stuff, all of us went through it. A lot of people that kicked out or fired after they went through that process, which to us, to me, you know, I passed, so I stayed on. So I figured out all the people that had passed, stayed on, they were on the up and up. But people can be corrupted, like from one day to another, right? So we're careful about everything, but I felt a bit better that everybody was going through it. Administration ends, somebody come, another administration comes in and landmark case declares everybody was fired based on the polygraph exam or the confidence exams as unconstitutional.

And all of a sudden you have six years worth of people that were kicked out of the job, coming back into the job. They're they're wages being paid forward. And you have people that were suspected of seeing a lower cartel participation in the office now, back at the office. So, so we got it got really bad. And, you know, basically brought into the office, all the work that I was doing ended. I got an offer to work for a single side of it, basically. They told us, hey, remember you're working here. Yeah.

Well, we're going to work against these guys over here only. We want you to come in. Okay, let me think about it. Basically, we want us to work against one side, which means you want us to work for this side. Yeah. I resigned that day. And there was just no getting out of it, squirming out of it or going somewhere else. I didn't have any. All the people that I knew within high-level government were gone because the administration changed. All the people that I knew when the leadership in the office were moved around and I just had no choice. So I went outside, got my resignation, printed out, signed it, handed everything in, in the

Duffel bag, handed it in my MP5, my gun, my badge, everything, radio, got myself into a car called some of my friends, my American friends, actually two of them went down there, kind of helped me out to get out of there. Marines got blessed the United States Marine Corps and they helped me cross the border and family and toe by this point, which was, I was probably the hardest part. I had choices in the U.S. that I didn't have it in Mexico. It wasn't a choice that I took lightly, and it wasn't something that I wanted to do at that point, but I didn't have a choice down there at that point.

Most of my friends didn't have that choice. And a lot of them actually, you know, went out of their job and seek employment elsewhere. Yeah. Do you keep the touch with any of those guys? No. No. It's one of those guys? No. No. It's one of those things where, like,

it's not, doesn't serve anybody's interest to make contact with these people. I mean, there are people that I work with for years. I slept on the same floors, it's in, it out of the same two in a can, is that. Yeah. Went to some of their birthday parties of their kids,

and I see them rolling out there in some luxury vehicles, getting $12,000 paid to them every two weeks. Yeah. salary, and working for some of the most powerful drug organizations in the planet with a lot of government training on their side, a lot of government training on their side.

A lot of American government specialty training on their side. And just basically helping the game. We just went through the most lethal year to be a Mexican in the country's history. The most violent year in our history this past year. And this year is going gonna beat that year probably and it's being fueled by people like me that went into that fight got all these all this experience all these skills and We're basically tossed into the garbage. Yeah as they would

Then flip to you know the whole career path was just non-existent. And that's what's feeling some of this fight as well. You know, some of these people just what else I'm going to do, right? Yeah. None of them had the the opportunities that I had. So I don't blame realistically, I just can't blame. Yeah. Yeah, but a lot of them are out there. Well, I'll tell you what, let's take a quick break and then when we come back, we'll kind of talk about the structure of some of these guys and some like, you know, and then go into that.

There's a lot of people looking for land these days as we continue to lose our freedoms. So we're on our way to look at a piece of property out in the middle of nowhere and this particular piece only sits on an acre and a half I believe 1.5 acres. All right, Ed, we're back from the break. And I want to kind of go into some of the structure of the cartels. And then I got like a Hodgepodge of questions that are just a bunch of random shit. But you kind of talked about how fast they bounce back after the political leaders change with a different strategy and just to kind of put that in perspective.

For the audience, I read something when I was raised, it may have been a documentary, I can't remember, but it was talking about a family that was running basically like just a small family cocaine operation out of Mexico. Sound like maybe five to 10 family members and within a few years that had grown into cartel organization that was over a hundred thousand, uh, with over a hundred thousand members of that cartel. And so just to kind of put that in perspective for the audience on how fucking big that is that Google employs 108,000 people. So within a few years they grew that cartel into basically an

organization as fucking powerful as Google and the only way they could have done that is by the demand, which is one of the first things I wanna ask is how much of that demand is coming to the United States versus Canada versus Europe? Are we the number one consumer? Yeah, I mean, yes. So the US market is what drives most of the growth that some

of these organizations have. Most of it comes to the US. A lot of it actually goes to places like Europe. There's been a recent upsurge in nautical trips between Latin America and two places like Africa that then get unloaded in Africa and then get sent over to Europe. That's one of the routes that it's taken. Canada as well, I mean, it's a growing drug market. Canada has one of the fastest growing drug markets out there right now. So a lot of that is fueling some of these smaller organizations growing, right? Another thing that's fueling them is their ability to also make a living off their environment. Mexico itself is a giant drug market. That's one of the things that a lot of people don't talk about as well.

That's one of the things that a lot of people don't talk about as well. Tijuana is an example of this. And most of the killings are happening between rival cartels in Tijuana, killing off the local sellers of each other's sides. So most of the people that die during the 90 Huanahs, like 7 to 8 or something like that every night, they're in different sales points in the Huanah where they're selling there locally. So that also feeds their organizations.

They also have money within legitimate businesses. From, you know, there's a few tequila companies out there that have been linked to people like El Chappell's family. Okay. So it's legitimate money growing out of some of these, like George Clooney sold his tequila company for about a billion or something like that. So you can imagine some of the money being made legally through some of their influences and some of the properties that can buy with some of the money generated from trafficking drugs into the US.

They sound pretty diversified and I want to get into that in a minute, but you were talking about a lot of the violence in Tijuana is cartel on cartel. And the way I just took what you said is they're killing each other's lowest level. Yeah, guys. The street guys. They're most exposed level, which is their sales points, local sales points. So how are they identifying each guy? Like, you follow, you follow the user is, you follow the user. Yeah, they're pretty easy to spot. You follow the user and there's

a, I'm sorry about the French that I keep saying. I was bad words, but they're the words we used to use when we worked. If you want to find somebody, find where they sleep, work, and fuck. I want to say fuck, I mean, where they partake on their vices. So even we would follow the people that we recognize as users, we'd follow them around and we immediately recognize sales points. So, uh, traditionally, most of the sales points in in in Tijuana, specifically, uh, they're all kind of on the outskirts of the city, like in the eastern part of the city or some of the older, uh, older parts of the city that are on the hillsides,

Tijuana has a river going through it. So that's where most of the downtown more developed parts are. So people want to buy, they go into the hillside and then come back. Okay. So that's where most of the killing is happening. Mostly, you know, again, sales points. And they identify each other because, you know, and grab a junky off the street.

Where are you buying it? Over there. That's not where I'm at, guys. Okay. I guess what I was kind of going towards is, do they have any specific markings for different cartels? Like, no. They've become very good at not doing that. From tattoos, there used to be a big culture

with criminal, Mexican criminal organizations having tattoos or markings of some kind. We would find people that had like spots where they mechanically or chemically removed tattoos and it was like a standing order within some of the organizations. So they're very good at that and detaching themselves from some of these sales points. Okay. The high level distributors will give them to give the loads that are going to be sold in different parts of parts of the city to somebody else that is unattached to the distributor. It's like a waypoint. So we'll give them that and they'll go and hand it over and somebody else will get the money.

So they attach those two points. All communication goes through paper notes and or cell phones that get changed on a daily basis, that type of stuff. Okay. So, but they're very good health bookkeepers. I mean, they're like, if you miss 20 pesos out of your cut over the day, you're gonna get a visit by somebody.

So good. It just seems like killing each other off, cartel versus cartel, the turf war or whatever. It is that's going on, and I'm why they're trying to eliminate each other. Which is said, one organization grew to 100,000, 100,000 person strong cartel within a few years. And one in organizations that fucking big, there's no way I feel like there's no way you could possibly know who's

on your side. It was selling drugs for cartel X and who's selling it for cartel Y. So they divide themselves up into cells, basically. So an example of this, what was happening at what was happening in Diwana back in 2008, there had a Cinaloa cartel had a cell in Diwana. And they had a lieutenant that was in charge of a cell that reported directly back to Cinaloa to the head of the cartel, Cinal Carthel, which was not a chopper by the way. As a lot of your US media and a lot of Mexican media wants to make

him out as a head of the Cinaloa Carthel. The chopper Guzman was probably number three or number four in the in the whole scale things. He was not the head of Cinaloa Carthel. But that we'll talk about that later if you want. But what they usually do is they sent out a lugarte niente, like a lieutenant to run a cell. He gets fed money, he gets fed guns, and he gets fed instructions. His task is to secure drug routes, to attack any sort of rival, rival enemies or people that are going to want to gain control over any sort of a elicit or illegal activity. This includes human trafficking. This includes abduction for ransom. This includes stolen vehicle trafficking from, from the US into Mexico or even in Mexico when they steal some of the new vehicles and traffic and some of the cars themselves or they clone the serial numbers and send the cars all

the way down to southern Mexico and actually come up with different paperwork for them. So that their whole purpose is to report directly back to the head of the cartel to control distribution, to control all these illicit activities, and to tax people. They have several arms within that cell structure, the enforcement arm, the guys that go out and kill people, the guys that go out and intimidate people, the guys that go out and eliminate the competition, they have whole cells of people that just every night that go out and intimidate people, the guys that go out and eliminate the competition, they have whole cells of people that just every night they go out there hunting,

rival distribution networks or rival cartel guys. That's their whole deal, right? The reason why these cars are hard to get is that they drive around and roam around without any guns. They find somebody that they wanna get after and there's two ladies, old women women probably in their late 60s, drive up to them and hand over the guns that they use, use them and they get handed back to these old ladies. And they these old ladies are inconspicuously just moving about the city with a

trove of guns in their cars. They just dump them. Right. So that's the enforcement armament. And then there's the distribution and security armament. This distributed the drugs, they take care of distribution or movement of loads of drugs going into the US and or money coming down from the US or recently has been an uptake in precious metals being trafficked from the US into Mexico was away payments and money

So like a gold basically So there's a whole administrative the distribution part of it where they move money to the US money from the US and guns from the US and drugs up into the US so there's a whole thing there Then there's the administration side of it. People have to keep tabs over numbers. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of numbers. There's a lot of people going around

and figuring out what percentages of money are being taken in at certain times of the year. So they can ask questions at the second time of the year. So like when the COVID thing hit, sales dropped. So that kind of freaked out if some of these cartels up and then they started figuring ways of getting around some of the lockdown measures by actually going door to door and distributing their product.

No, sure. So they developed this drug over basically, right? And some parts of the country. So you have your enforcement or security arm, you have your distribution arm or distribution arm, and you have your administration arm, administrative arm, and then you have this at the center of all this, there's the figure of a look at the nian

to work cartel leadership. He usually has other underlings that also perform leadership tasks. And sometimes these underlings don't know each other or don't have any attachment to each other. So like a cell within a cell. So we would get somebody that was in charge of a group of 40 sec. And all he had was a different phone that would be handed to him so he could get instructions. How are they broken up? Are they broken up by region? Yeah, so like, Tijuana, that when I was active,

Tijuana was divided up into four pieces. There was a plias near the beach. There was a center or the old federal colonia, which is like one of the richest drug markets. That's where the Americans walk into by some of their drugs and then move back back to the US. The east side of the city where a lot of the trafficking from within Mexico, like large drug roads,

would come, be stored there, and then would get put into vehicles, put on people, put into tunnels, all that stuff. That's kind of the main part of their activity there. And some places like this, the older colonies and places like La Mesa as wet as all these other parts where they would have their houses, where they would party, where they would hide. So you'd have these divisions and each of these divisions had their own kind of like head guy that would know everything going on there.

He would have the police on their payroll, the people would have the investigative police on their payroll. He wouldn't have people, he would know in the media that would cover up things for them. He would pay for certain election processes of the local representatives. So again, they were more connected than the cell, than the phone company there.

You know, they had all these connections everywhere. That's how they worked. That can help real quick. Sure. You were saying lieutenants are kind of in charge. So a lieutenant of a cartel in a region would be in charge of multiple streams of revenue, which is mainly drugs, and then sex trafficking, car theft, whatever else. Then they are also in charge of the secarios. We're also in charge of the trafficking routes. So this almost kind of sounds like maybe

a corporate or maybe even a franchise model where each lieutenant owns, or maybe doesn't own, but is in charge of his business model. Yeah. And then they have the exact same business model all over fucking Mexico. Yeah. Does that include, is it run the same way in the United States? Yes. Yes.

Yes. So more so than a corporation, it kind of reminds you of some sort of underground government. Like because they not only provide money sometimes for things like schools and people's immigration processes or lawyers or they also police some of the communities. So there's some communities that you know something gets stolen. They don't call the cops. They call the cartels. That's why you see a lot of these videos popping up online. Cartel guys giving the board against a on some of these guys lower their pants and just you know go to town on them and they're that's corporal punishment provided by a quasi-narchal

government that is working at parallel with the government. Okay. So that way, that's, I think that's more equated to how they act. Of course, they're a business. And they just like the government taxes, they tax as well. So sometimes they task certain companies for protection. So there's a bunch of mining operation going on along the northern border in Mexico. They're all tax pipe cartels depending on where they are

so they can continue operating. And the US side, you get some of the same structure, not as overt again, the camp be as overt appear because you still have a working government. You still have a police force. You still have a federal police force that has, that isn't anywhere near as corrupt. That is other parts of the world, specifically in Mexico. So they work with fear here.

But in the same way, they have a single lieutenant or cartel head that runs the operation very much like they did down there with an armed branch or an enforcement branch or security branch that goes off and does things for them to a distribution branch that takes care of money, loads going down to Mexico, maybe a buying arm or an administrative arm that just gathers things like ammo or guns or whatever the people back home want, you know, sometimes clothing. Something that we're things like clothing or the latest and greatest Jordan shoes will get smuggled right where the in the drug tunnels where the drugs come into the US.

Some of those luxury goods might get smuddled back into Mexico because somebody sent a shopping list over, right? But they're, the act differently here in the US, the distribution arms in the US are usually done through other third parties, not in Mexico, that's not the case. So distribution down there is done by locals, they gather people that work for them as distributors. down there is done by locals, they gather people that work for them as distributors. Up here in the US, you see a lot of motorcycle gangs being utilized by cartels as distribution, as distribution or local gangs. Chicago was a good example of this. Seeing the local cartel runs a lot of their distribution with some of the local black gangs in place like Chicago. So they use them by proxy because they're aware that obviously I'm not going to get a Mexican

guy that works for that's loyal to my car to distribute this drug in this community where he doesn't look or talk like the people there. Yeah. So it's smart about that. So they go through secondary people like that here in the US. That's kind of what changes and how they operate here. So these guys, that they're creating their own, uh, they've, they have created their own fucking government essentially. Yeah.

And they're supporting their local communities. And they are on both sides of the border are acting as essentially they're acting as law enforcement in Mexico. And so these guys are probably fucking chomping at the bit right now for the police to be defunded right here. And you know that's because they're gonna take a major fucking role in that. I know for a fact that most of the places

where police presence is lower or basically non-existent because of the current situation. I know for a fact that they've taken all the advantages to move product, to move guns, to move and do and clear out whatever they need to do in this time of the great law enforcement paws that the country's going through. So there'd be an extremely far-off proactive with that. So think about this. The largest fastest growing cartel in Mexico was this new generation cartel grew exponentially

in influence and power, not just in Mexico, but in the US during the COVID epidemic. Seeing the whole cartel was struggling to get fentanyl for their product, they actually had to smuggle it from American ports down to Mexico, which a load was captured in the, to feed their apparatus. The reason why that happened is because the new generation cartel controls the Pacific side ports in Mexico and places like Lima, right?

So their distribution was clear and easy. China was sending their stuff. They were getting their product and they were growing exponentially. So the Paws only affected law enforcement in Mexico was also kind of paused a bit, but they grew exponentially with the shutdown. Also, the scene in the long cartels capacity to meet demand, Lord, their capacity was

uninterrupted. And they've been working on growing their influence on the US side for years. There was a recent operation that now about 86 of them or something like that by the DEA, including one of the head leader of the new generation cartels, kids. So they've been growing underground in the US for years. And that hit they had was nothing. Yeah, they didn't need people to adapt to it.

Growing. Nothing. Yeah, there's people to dent in it. They're growing. Um, and again, the fentonal heroin drug market now, uh, bogus fake pain pills coming out of China. Also coming into the US, right? Um, I wanted to get into this, but fuck it. We'll do it now. China, when I was doing my research, it sounds like China's taken a major interest in the cartels in Mexico. And I've operated around China overseas several times. And those motherfuckers are just as ruthless if not more than some of the cartels. And they also play by my no rules. Why is the interest in China or the why is China's interest in Mexico so becoming so strong? It's your Achilles heel as a country. It's your number two largest consumer

of American products in the world. It's a very destabil place that's getting destabilized, destabilized even more. So this whole weird thought process that Americans have that the cartels are getting their fentanyl from China from some sort of criminal element within China. from China, from some sort of criminal element within China. Like, let's be clear, nothing comes out of China, nothing happens in China without Chinese state being involved or knowing about it. This is a place where big brother is the real thing, right? Everybody's monitored, you saw it during the COVID shutdown,

you saw it with the way they're handling the weager population. So nothing coming out of China is coming out of China without them knowing so. So all that fentanyl being brought out of China into Mexico that's going to be being put into heroin or some of these fentanyl fabrication sites that are being found in Mexico now with clear instruction by Chinese laboratory specialists. That's not private entity. That's not the triads or that's not a criminal activity. That's a state-Chinese state-sponsored activity. It's clear state anyway to kind of look into this. One thing is regional destabilization. That usually, that usually happens when they want something from that country. So one thing happened politically within within the US and Mexico relationship.

The Trump phenomenon, right? A Trump came into office and said, we're going to take a lot of our business out of Mexico. I'm going to bring it back. That was one of the things that he said that was gonna happen and did happen. A lot of businesses took their plants and American business took their plants and companies out of Mexico.

Instead of it affecting Mexico in a negative way, Chinese plants and Chinese companies were planted them immediately. No, shit. So something happened in that interval where somebody on this side figured out that probably a mistake. And things start balancing out. Interesting thing to note, we currently have in Mexico what left this president that is

open Chavista, as open Maduro supporter, but somehow there's an open and like really friendly relationship with the US when it comes to the president and Trump and the president down there. I think Trump is very much aware of the danger that Mexico was in with the Chinese influence and the foreign influence within the country. Another factor that doesn't get talked a lot about is that Mexico has probably the largest mindable deposits of lithium right on the border in China through a Canadian company will actually won the rights to mine that a few years back and their mining rights got canceled. And I'm not going to go into Alex Jones territory, right? I mean, the conspiracy part of it. Right where that mining

discovery was made, that's where the the Mormon massacre happened. So it's a key place and things happen there. It's a very strange kind of environment for all the influences and all the pushing and pulling is happening in that area. Some of the people that I've talked to, and the security field, some of the people that I've talked to in security field, outside of the friendly neighbors of the US, like in Mexico, there's a lot of Cuban intelligence services, service operations going on all over the place, just like, place like Venezuela. You can see a clear

partnership and influence with China there, right? It's in their best interest to gain ownership and control over a place like Mexico, which is going currently going through a lot of bad stuff, a lot of crime, a lot of destabilization. There's whole swats of Mexico that are controlled by cartels. There's whole swats of Mexico that are controlled by cartels. The new generation cartel, I think, in a way is a product of that outside influence. It's the only cartel that grew during the COVID epidemic shutdown. That tells me that there's some sort of outside influence from China there. Are you seeing a lot of Chinese coming into Mexico and kind of setting up shop. The largest, one of the largest cash seizures was done on a guy.

Jan Lee said, going, Chinese, Mexican national, somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million dollars cash found at his house, he was trafficking fentanyl legally and met the producers into the country. There's some sort of paper work legality, so there's some shady stuff going on there. How long has this shit been going on? Would China? As soon as the US got a taste for math, I think that's probably the start of it. One was at 10 years ago.

Probably a bit more for the back than probably 15 years ago. 15 years? Yeah. This has just been exponentially growing. Is it weird? How do I phrase this? Are you seeing more and more Chinese people also becoming like a common thing to see Chinese communities

with Chinese nationals is growing all along the border. Wow. So I mean, again, this is not something that's not something the realm of conspiracy. If you can, this is clearly happening out in the open and a lot of regards. And people can research this and see it, they see it for themselves.

To deny that the largest cartel in Mexico has grew during the COVID epidemic, because they clearly had a supply chain from China. It was to deny what's right in front of your face to deny that more and more in front of your face, to deny that more and more Nuremko-made military grade stuff is popping up in printplaces in Mexico is also missing something that's in front of your face. And to deny that, so how many people die from fentanyl related issues here in the US?

Tons. If you want to confront the US as a superior military force, how can you corrode that? It makes perfect sense. Generation. Nothing with China is they're fucking extremely effective. No way. Whatever they do. They have a lifetime president.

Yeah. One one being they don't. They don't fucking play by rules president. Yeah, one one day and they don't, they don't fucking play by rules either. Yeah. And you know, China will come in and they'll open a warehouse immediately to start gathering intelligence because people are gonna go to the fucking warehouse. They're gonna fuck a Chinese hooker. The hooker is gonna milk him for information.

The information gets to where it needs to go. It happens like that. It's a Cuban intelligence services that are operating all central America and specifically Venezuela. That's how they act, right? That's their people are playing checkers with these guys that are playing chess and they play the long game. That's something that I think the US doesn't get. That's something I think the US doesn't get. Example, China has a lifetime president. Cuba has a lifetime regime with the Castro, with the Castro's.

They're playing a really long game against a country that has elections and politics change every, every, every, every, every every four eight years. Yeah, and and they see the dissed they're the clear line in divide. So I mean, there's blood in the water. And I think I think they can smell that everybody's taking advantage of it. Yeah, and I I got again, four in eyes. I'm back, but I'm new here. I'm trying to earn my way into becoming an American, but I still have that outside perspective. People getting offended by the whole Chinese virus wording or the Chinese in the villain in the country. People kind of coming into the defense

of that. People within the MVA, wanted to speak up about China, because the Chinese are the best, one of their best clients, as far as buying some of the rights to watching some of these NBA games. Disney. I mean, they can't say anything wrong. How surreal is it that you can't speak critically about China if you work for the MBA?

That is outside of the realm of what I thought being an American was. Right? So I don't know. It's a weird time. But I think that's It's a weird time, but I think that's, they're clearly waging some sort of long-term more campaign against the US. And Mexico is being utilized as a tool for that. Yeah, interesting. With the fentanyl going back to that, I always, what are they the front and all I heroin heroin and also Now they're they're building building or making fake pain medication

The kind of basing it off some of the pill designs and very badly made seen some pretty good ones Coming out of Mexico in the past few years the back when I was active they were cruelly made But you know somebody hands you some pain medication in a dark room somewhere, and you take it. You don't even know what it is. So usually some of the heroin that's being grown in the hillsides out there, weird phenomenon happened. California legalized marijuana called rattle. A lot of places are kind of falling through in the US.

So the demand for marijuana went down. It's not over though. It's still the still traffic marijuana into the US, which is pretty surprising. But a lot of the hillsides that were covered with weed back then are now covered in poppy fields. But the thing is that some of these hillsides have been growing, stuff has been growing in those hillsides for decades.

So the heroin yield and the strength of the heroin isn't anywhere near some place like Afghanistan or some of the stuff that comes out of the Asia. It's actually very low quality and strength. So the cartel side mill meals put fentanyl in it to give it a kick. It just seems kind of counterproductive because heroin is already so fucking addictive. Yeah. And then when you do here of people overdosing on heroin, a lot of the times, you know, comes out that it was laced with fentanyl.

So it seems it's, I mean, I'm sure there's a reason for it. But in my mind, I'm like, why would you do that? Because you're killing the fucking consumer, which seems to be bad for business. Well, you know, they, they, they, they, they, they shifted to the methamphetamines for a while, because the main thing and methamphetamines and cocaine. But then they realized how much of a grassroots effort there was in the US to make your own, and then like that. So they saw this perfect storm and window to just dedicate themselves to heroin, fentanyl, put them together. And a bunch of people that were on OBS already in the US, a lot of the crackdown that went on the US against prescription OBS that were left without a product. And it

was a perfect storm for the cartels to kind of fill that void. Do you think this is going to allow create any... Do you think this is going to create any problems with Afghanistan and Mexico now that they're getting into the opiate trade because that's the number one. Well, I've been when it comes to Taliban and al-Qaeda. That's ISIS. I've been researching anything to be clear and open about it. I have friends all over Mexico. A lot of them, people that I used to work with,

and they're still active within law enforcement in Mexico, some of the people that I've trained, I still go down there and train members of law enforcement and some of the security forces. So anything that's weird gets sent to me, like horrible, from horrible videos to get sent to me like horrible from horrible videos to far see translation books found in the desert somewhere. So I've always been always on the lookout for anything Middle East, turning Mexico. Yeah. And interestingly enough, it's an open order within most of the major cartels that run operations along the border to not touch anything related to Islamic extremism or Islamic anything. Why is that?

Because they don't want to, they're afraid of the word, the designation. They're afraid of the terrorist designation. That's something that puts fear on them. That's something we thought, all all those I thought it was coming after the after that family was murdered on the border. It's in a sorry for saying Mormon massacre, American massacre. They were they were American nationals. Yeah. And they also had a Mexican citizenship. I don't care if they pray to the moon. They're American. And also they were women and children.

I thought that was coming. I heard the designation. I heard the pressure coming on. And I said, that's. That's I think that's going to change things. But it didn't was walked back. You know, again, regional stability. I'm sure there's a good reason for that.

But they're afraid of it. So they sure there's a good reason for that. But they're afraid of it. So they don't want to touch anything related to extremism. I mean, there's probably a few cases of them kind of slipping through their cracks or some smaller cartels helping out some sort of Muslim group or something like that. But it's mostly like a touchy subject with them. They would, they, anything that smells of it, they won't touch it or they will, they will take care of it themselves. It's not good for their business. They don't.

So I don't see that becoming a problem. But who knows, this is, hold up. People are moving more freely in and out of Mexico now. Again, the government is losing a grip on sports of entry. It's declining in some places. We saw this with the Guglia Canaso incident,

where the government forces captured one of El Chapo's kids, and were basically beaten by the whole of the scene of the law cartel. Yeah. So, who knows? I mean, it could be something on the horizon. It'll be interesting. I mean, they're definitely dipping into their products or into

their profits by now. And the funny thing about them is they only use that to fund their intention. Yeah. And we know their intentions. And if they can't, you know, if that takes away from the money that they're dumping into their intentions, then I mean, fuck, man,

it could be something we'll see in the, like it could be something on the horizon. Yeah. Again, I think Mexico is getting worse. There's, there's no, if, as of, or about it. And people blame the COVID epidemic as far as the economic downturn that's going through, I mean, the incompetence and the, the, the, the death spike and the violence in Mexico flared up way before that. And again, it's, And again, it's a clear proxy war happening in Mexico between two major forces. American interests and probably Chinese-sponsored state interest in Mexico. Roughly how many different cartels are down there? I mean, it's different numbers. like hundreds, probably somewhere in the hundreds,

you know, five of us can form a cartel. Then we can be named, like a cartel, we've named the organized crime group and work in a town and work a cartel that just dedicates themselves to this town. So there's a lot of the small ones. But mostly all the small ones by proxy work for another bigger cartel. So yeah, there's a lot of small ones that just hold control over certain parts of the country.

How many main cartels are there? I'd say there's two major ones that people need to keep an eye and worry about the new generation cartel. Cartel de Jalisco de co de navajera, and iracion. A cartel that originally was formed as an armed enforcement elite wing to fight the Zeta cartel when it was still active when it was still the major threat for the Cinalar

cartel. So they basically, Cinalar cartel basically made this Mataseta's group to fight against the Zetas. And they turned into their own thing. They turned into a cart that figured out like that. Well, we can be cartel ourselves, yeah, okay. So let's gain control of, they gain strategic control of places like Guadaluja, places like

Olima where the major ports are. So they basically became the owners of the door for some of the precaurs. And this was at the start of this shift from cocaine to heroin, ventanol precaurs as a meth. So they got it at the right time, the ink told that,

they've been growing exponentially. And it's not a car tell like the Cinaloa car tell that the Flauncer lavish lifestyles and gold guns and fast cars, they're very militaristic. They're very blue key in some ways. They're smart enough. Yeah, and they recruit. They're always recruiting, but military to police.

They have legitimate training camps out there. You know, as we see, we used to see these ISIS, ISIS, Al-Qaeda training videos with the monkey bars. You know, that's happening now in Mexico. And then there's actually like camps with these guys, go out and train. There's rumors of American, American military guys advising them. It's the only

cartel in Mexico that's one of the only two only cartels in Mexico that has dominance over the skies, over the territories. So there's places in Lollahara where helicopters don't fly because they're afraid to get knocked down. They've already knocked down a few. So they're incredible for us to kind of face. Yeah. They recently got a crackdown from the government going after them directly, which leads a lot of people to think that the federal government in Mexico has a deal with Cinaloa cartel.

So there's some sort of effort being done against just the new generation cartel because they see them as a threat, but they're growing. There's no stopping their growth. And you can see that a lot of that growth is directly related to their ability to get stuff from the Pacific side of the ocean. That's one of the main reasons why it's growing.

Wow. You talk in depth several times about the Zeta cartel. And for those of you that don't know about the Zeta cartel. And for those of you that don't know who the Zeta cartel is, they were started by Mexican, Mexican special operations guys, correct? Yeah. Special forces is a lot of groups right now within the military claim that title. a lot of groups right now within the military claim that title. Back when they were, when the Zetas came about, that's a generation of people that had the GAFED title.

Groupal, I don't know whether the Forces of Suspecial, it's basically an air mobile special forces group, different breed of people. I actually had and still have people that I know that I work with every now and then that didn't go these at the route and remain on. Different pleader guys mostly college degrees, university degrees, some of them have master's degrees. All of them have language skills that say, you know, these guys are special. School of the America's trained. A lot of them have pictures in Fort Bragg and some crazy places and receive some crazy

jungle warfare training in Columbia and other places in South America. So these guys are, these guys monsters basically. And they were on government salaries, which are pretty shitty. Yeah. Eventually, the Gulf Cartel headed at that time by OCL Cardenas Guillén decided it would be an interesting thing to hire on some of these guys as bodyguards. So a former member of that group that worked for his cartel said, I'll help you recruit them. We went down there, made the offer, made the offer with money. All of them looked at each other and said, yeah, we're in.

Empty out the armory, filled their trucks, left on patrol, never came back. So all of a sudden you saw this high level, the sophisticated, highly trained SF group working for one of the major cartels in Mexico. And then they split off and became their own. And then again, just like the Matzazette does from the scene in the locker, I thought they figured out they were doing all the work.

We can be our own cartel. So they split off. They were labeled as being some of the most ruthless guys out there. I think they're being beat by the new generation cartel now. Really? Yeah. But they were ruthless. They were very cold calculated. And this is this comes from second hand stories and some of the stories that I've heard from some of the people that belong to that unit. They would have this thing where during training, they would get a dog that they would, you know, take care of for a few weeks. They would have this thing where during training they would get a dog that they would take

care of for a few weeks. They would sleep with it and feed it and all this type of stuff, name it, and then they would have to kill it and eat it after a time. Would random weaponry, crowbar, rock. So like, and if you didn't do it, you would get kicked out. So that's the type of individual that they were breathing, right? They were desensitizing these guys. And then all of a sudden, imagine you're this elite war fighter with all this training and all this oversight

and all this leadership behind you and rules, all of a sudden, no rules. Yeah. You're your own guy. You guys are just only what are the local cops going to do with their revolvers? It makes it enables the the operator to reach maximum potential. Yeah, it was so they were unchained.

One of the things that I don't hear talked about much, but during a time, the Zed does allied themselves with the Tijuana cartel to fight against Xenolong. Zed doesn't see no long enemies, long enemies. And there was a prison break in Tijuana that was at team level, like the A team did it. You know, I was working back then. I didn't get to witness it, but I got there to see the after effect. Tejuanah prison,

I've ever seen the movie Get the Green Go White Mel Gibson as based on that prison. It's a very old prison, basically the city grew around. It's still active. It's been trying to get the active in different years, but they haven't been able to replace it completely. A group of people dressed in a medical guard and a few ambulances came to do a weekly transport

of some of the members into their dialysis. It's like there was a weekly thing that happened at that prison. So everybody thought it was normal. And all of a sudden, precise sniper fire at the guard towers took them out. Explosives were used, small frame charges and paper frame charges were used on some of the doors. Angle grinders and highly coordinated escape from the inside and the outside,

full body armor and some of these guys. They managed to take out some high-level cartel guys that were inside. And a very coordinated thing, it shocked everybody how coordinated it was. a very coordinated thing. It shocked everybody how coordinated it was. Long-standing rumor is it was Zed Tagais. Interesting little bit of information there. All of them were doing port down. All of them were port down. Coordinated port down guys. All of them were using M4 specific rifles. All of them had exactly the same kit in the same place on their stuff. So you know where they came from? As some reported, as far as what's being reported,

another small element that you can tell these guys knew what they were doing. They had leg holsters, some of them. Hi. Oh, shit. Hi, leg holsters. You know, hi, not the drop leg holster, like all of them, that are fucking what's up. What they're doing, all of them had that high leg holster,

just clearing the armor on some of them. And they were wearing the lab coats to hide some of that stuff and all of a sudden they start working. Um, Zetas. That's fucking scary. You know, I mean, do you think that would have been fixed if their pay would have been better? I don't know in Mexico, everybody has a price because I'm scared they get the same in the US, you know, I mean Guys aren't I mean, yeah, got there are rumors of guys going down and doing shit like that and and Latin America But you know, I mean we saw big we saw a massive influx into the contracting world from, from the US military. I mean, you can work US military and kick the doors in. And that's what the guys want to do. They want to fucking kick doors in and they want

to fucking kill bad guys and they want to feel that rush. And especially towards the beginning of the war, you could do that exact same fucking job, not necessarily with all the same caliber of people, but you could jump over on some of these contracts and make, you could make an entire year's with a salary in one fucking month on certain contracts as you could in an entire year at a unit. And so, you know, there's a price there too.

And the only way they tried to combat that was up the real-enlistment bonuses. And so when I got out, there were E7 and above, I think, was getting $150,000 of real-enlistment bonuses. And so when I got out, there were E7 and above, I think was getting $150,000 a real-enlistment bonus, but still even that doesn't fucking compare to the money. No. You know, like salaries that I've heard from the elite guys, $12,000 every two weeks.

Yeah. Plus they kept to keep whatever they find. Oh. So that's, I mean, yeah, little extra and stunner. Also, Americans going down there, like I've heard rumors from specialty people going down in the train, training people in Mexico. You see elements of of that and everybody says, head, they laugh at the fact that every now and then they find these 50 cows or these long range platforms out there without any glass on them, not these sites.

And they're like, I mean, nobody was using that, right? One of the first things that gets repurposed by the military are the sites. Yeah, EOTEC, yeah, a cod, right? So you get presented naked rifle. One of the things we saw in some long range, we saw some long range shooting sites. They were training themselves up down there.

I was CC small elements of training and or some sort of specialty. Screws being painted on there so they know where they were. Uh, dialed in scopes, uh, German glass, uh, uh, spotter scopes found in conjunction with the, with the long-awaited scopes. So they have the dope on their gun. The dope is the calculations for the dope cards written dope cards. Well, the first time I found one, I know what it was. I'd send it to a to a Marisauk friend of mine.

And so what this is this makes sense here? Oh, yeah. That's pretty cool. Where'd you find that? Oh, shit. That's not cool. A duct tape, one of the things that I saw once a duct tape to a rifle. So duct tape next to a rifle with the rounds on the duct tape.

Which is a, that's a sniper. It's a very small detail that people might not know about that openly, but it's a thing I was like, hmm, that's interesting. And a lot of these things I would share with people that I would train with later on or would train us, or I formed a relationship with a lot of the advisors that would come in. I had good English so I would make a former report and I would share some of these things with people up here and they would like to figure out some of the details that I were seeing. And right now what I'm seeing is military grade 9 vision, like the good stuff, the $24,000, $30,000 being found randomly

in places down there. So that's what they're doing now. CNC machines making lowers, suppressors, high quality suppressors being made somewhere cracked out somewhere down there. Some people. And basically ripping off some of the major companies in the US designs and remaking them down there. Right. So that's scary stuff. They're getting the best training in the world. Well, I think experience is a bit of a teacher, but she will never lie to you. When you pair that with having the neighbor that has some of the best war fighters, I mean, the best war fighters in the world, that also had a lot of experience. There's some sort of cross-pollination there that happens and you get some scary stuff.

Weaponized drones, that's where seeing a lot more of those. So basically civilian grade weaponized drones with basically flying clay moors flying around homemade clay moors. We're seeing a lot of those now. And the way they the way they're utilizing drones themselves before an event, a criminal event. So like they're getting some of their, uh, is getting some of their tactics from some, but from somewhere, you know, that it's pretty interesting seeing some of those details and how they're advancing. Meanwhile, on the government side, they're patrolling in uniform in marked vehicles in the same way they have been for the past almost 25 years. Nothing's changed. This changed the uniform change the logo, but the

same things happening to say they're operating the same way. There's no advance there. So going back a little bit, you were saying that it went kind of from marijuana to cocaine to meth to heroin, heroin lace with fentanyl. Yeah, cocaine's always been one of the biggest cocaine marijuana, right? Even poppies as well. But yeah, the fentanyl and heroin put together to make a solid product to fill the void within the, basically the prescription opiate epidemic that you guys went through and there was, there was a crackdown on that end. So they found, all of a sudden you found this giant market where people wanted to wanted that product. So they filled that void.

But it's not just that. So the cartels just don't dedicate themselves to moving drugs around. They also, their local markets make the money. Protection rackets. Again, one of their biggest money makers outside of drugs is trafficking, human trafficking of all kinds. From kids to women to adults. We live in a country, the US, we live in a country where people are talking about reparations for slavery when there's actual slavery still in this country.

I'm, you know, California, very liberal, very interesting politics there. Has a governor that has a winery that did not shut down during the COVID epidemic because there are their employees were essential, yeah, essentially endangered endangered and endangered slaves from Mexico that have to work. No, shit. and dentured slaves from Mexico that have to work. No, shit. So anybody experienced any salad shortages in the US and California during the COVID epidemic?

Do you wonder what that is? One. A bunch of Mexicans working in the fields, illegally, but legally. Yeah. That's what's happening. That's a form of slavery, it's a clear cut slavery right now happening in the US. And all these people are

putting to this country by criminal groups that make a shit ton of money off ranting that ransom ransom in them to their families that are already settled here in the US. So let's say you want to come to the US and I'm a coyote. I'm a smuggler. I report back to a cartel because I can work if I didn't. You're gonna pay me whatever money you can, but $5,000 maybe, $8,000 depending on where you want to cross. And what type of security you have as far as being able

to live in, being able to successfully cross. Or I can just go the, you know, the weird way. And instead of crossing you physically through the border, through jumping the border, I can find a local like for you. And has, they already has paperwork that lives legal in the US. Rent his ID, rent his license, rent his car, drive it down to Mexico, pick you up, act like you're drunk, and you can't speak, and just pass down the back seat, and share the legal legit paperwork with the guy sitting there in immigration. You know, let you pass, and then give those IDs back to the guy that rented them out to me. Yeah. That's one way, or I can fly you to Canada,

back to the guy that rented them out to me. Yeah. That's one way. Or I can fly you to Canada and you just walked out. Yeah. That's it. Those are a few ways that people get through. But there's a cost to it. Sometimes people can't fill or pay that cost.

Some of the people you see in Arizona, New Mexico, those places where you find them in the desert and the coyotes are crossing them. They can't afford that service. So they get, so I'll give you credit. You're gonna have to work in certain field and certain farm for a certain amount of time or your family that's already settled out there has to pay us basically a ransom for you.

Arizona is the abduction capital of the US. Why do you think that is? Yeah. Why did they find people, you know, in basically conditions of abduction? Yeah. Human trafficking is a very real thing. It's a very horrible thing.

Also just indentured slavery is an actual thing that's happening right now in the United States while all these people are protesting for reparations or for problems that happen a few, you know, a while back. Things are happening right now. You don't see anybody protesting Governor Newsom and his winery that's open during the COVID epidemic for private events. You don't see any of that, you know. It, as a Mexican, I see these things, and again, I scratch my head where the attention goes

and where the eyes go. It's one of their biggest money makers. People traffic into the US is something that feeds the cartel criminal organizations in the US, just like drugs, but it's one of those things that doesn't get talked about a much. When it comes to smuggling immigrants into the US, what is the, why does everybody want to come here?

Is it because we're supposedly land of the free and they want to live the American dream or is it because they want to get the fuck out of Mexico And they have no choice to survive but that come over here both both both and yes that When I'll include myself we believe in the dream We believe that this country provides an opportunity for people like me that have nothing. And I had nothing when I came here. All I had was, thank God, I had friends. All of them were military guys. And it's at NSW member, reservist, Dan,

Stanfield. He was one of the guys that gave me my first, uh, it gave me a lot of help and opportunities to be in the US. Um, and a bunch of Marines, again, for some reason, I'm surrounded by them. And I thank God for that. Um, but I had nothing. You know, now I'm sitting here with you and I have an audience and I go around the country, training people and I get to make a living off that and I have an audience and I go around the country training people and I get to make a living off that and I support my daughter in that way. I could not have what I have here

back there and if I were to have to stay back there I would be dead right now. Right? The vision or the dream of what it is to be in America and what it is to live in the United States is something very real intangible to people in Mexico. So there's an element of believing in that land of opportunity, the land of the free. And also, you know, when I personally say the land of the brave,

that bravery comes with safety. I can express something like all the things that I'm saying in this interview that would get me shot in the face where I'm from. I could say all these things openly and share with an audience. I can do that where I'm from. So that's a very true thing. And again, completely from an outside perspective, it blows my mind that I can do this here. But a lot of them are free, fleeing from Mexico because of the poor conditions that are in some places. Not all Mexico was shithole as the people up here like to say.

There's some places that are amazing, that some places that do have a quality of life that is superior to places that I've been here in the US. I went to Detroit a few months back and that was pretty shocking and somebody from the third world. And I'm from TJ. And I said, what man? This is rough, right? I know that I know not not the whole of the US is Detroit, but but some parts are, right? So I don't judge the whole country for when I see there. The problem is that Mexico does have a rampant problem with this type of stuff and it's growing and it's in a lot of places. Traditionally, Guanajuato, the state of Guanajuato was one of the safest parts of the country. I wanted to retire, Guanajuato, the state of Guanajuato was one of the safest parts of the country.

I wanted to retire to Guanajuato when I was older, and now it's one of the most dangerous states in the country, with a rampant drug war going on there over control. So yeah, people moving up here, and again, I talked to people that are going through the process themselves illegally. That's another people that are going through the process themselves illegally. That's another thing. I went through the process legally and it was not easy. And it was long hard on myself and my family. And I feel like I earned it.

Some people don't go through that process. And they live better than me in some ways, right? So that's an interesting perspective as well. I get called a lot of things like race, trader, and all these things. Usually from second or third generation, Mexican Americans, that's usually where I get most of the hate from. None of them have, have actually gone through the process themselves. So I speak from pure experience. There's definitely a promise. There's definitely an attractiveness to moving to the US. I would not want to be in any other country. I feel like that's probably the best place to be. I don't want to keep it that way.

Well, I'm fucking proud to have you here, man. I really am. And I'm glad you made it out of there. And I'm glad you're here. And I fucking know Dan. Yeah. Yeah. I know Dan. So we'll have to talk about So left talk about that. Yeah, I can't talk about Dan. Dan and Kelly. Offline. I don't know Kelly. Yeah, I'm a man. They're pretty.

They've been pretty helpful with my whole process. That's awesome, man. Again, patriots, most of the people that have helped me out contrary to popular belief, fresh off the boat, immigrant to this country country and all the help that I had was usually from patriots and usually from service members. I don't know why maybe it's because of what I did maybe it's because of some of the relationships I formed when I was working down there but it was it's been rough man it's been been rough. And it's hard. I'll say this again, the worst enemy of Mexican

is another Mexican. And I've experienced that here several times over with some of the people that are up here, or have been up here for a few generations. There's something about her, there's something about us that we just don't give each other a hand for some reason. Doing my own research, you and kind of looking into how everything's run, it seems like a lot of the things

and a lot of the way businesses conducted through the Mexican drug cartels seems to be a model that they may have picked up from the Colombians from back in the 80s and 90s. Even the saying is you're using, I listen to, I think it was you talk about the cemeteries and how the cemeteries are split. And I mean, at the same exact same fucking thing, you have all the, in Columbia, you have all the, you know, the community politicians and all of the chief of police buried on one side

and on directly across the street is Pablo Escobar's fucking tomb. And it's fascinating to me to see like it kind of changed like that. And I heard you say that a lot of the cocaine was going actual like growing, was going up to Mexico. And they all say no, they also pushed a lot down to Bolivia and Peru as well. pushed a lot down to Bolivia and Peru as well. But with that being said, if the Colombians pushed the cocaine up to Mexico, which seems to be extremely fucking powerful, way more powerful than them, what are the relations like? Right now, it's going the other way. The Colombians would come and show Mexicans how to do their thing back in the 70s and

the 80s and probably early 90s. Now it's the other way around. Now there's legit cartel influence in places like Colombia. No, it's directly at the source. You, and you can see, you can see enforcement and ownership all the way down there. I'm not saying that replacing all the local organizations, but there's clear influence going the other way from origin point to all the way up.

So some of the stuff that is being grown or taken out thought of Columbia's forest growth, cocaine growth is actually funded and supported by Mexican organizations because they see the potential to move production out of it. They're looking for ways to expand and modernize. There's cartel influence in Northern Africa. There's a cartel group that a cartel sell. They was captured somewhere

in Australia, Indonesia or something like Indonesia. And they were trying to figure out a way to provide a source for some of the high-level heroin coming out of that region back into Mexico and then up into the United States. So they're looking to expand. They're like, they're international, basically. But what I see now is, Mexico is taking the lead when all that, when it comes to all that, from the origin and the production to the transfer,

to the transfer to even now in the US to the distribution side of it, which is that's pretty telling as far as their influence on this side. Yeah, the Pablo Escobar is, that's the guy. You can see him referenced. And you see some of the things he used to do down there being replicated in place like Mexico. Interesting little connection there. Palo Escovar was a follower and a very deep, it was a devoted follower of the Santo Nino Natocha. It's a saint, it's basically an image of a child,

a child like Jesus, that was venerated in Spain during the Mores invasion. It was basically the saint of the persecuted. So Palo Escovar would venerate del San Antonio de Tocha. When they caught El Chapo Guzmán's kid in Cinaloa recently that the past year and the whole mess happened where they beat the Mexican army on his neck, on a scapular of the San Antonio de Tocha. No, sure. All right, so overnight that saint, that saint's stock stalking rose if you want to buy a Scop with our about San Antonio, the docha in Mexico at that time hard to find like that one.

It's like the most sought after item. So it was a revelation that it worked. A miracle happened. You know this guy escaped federal custody. You know the whole of the Cinalogartel came in and just defeated the army in a miraculous event. So they fucking love him. Yeah, that's a Escobar iconography gets found in cartel houses and safe houses and places like that all the time. Memoirs, books, pictures, tattoos of Escobar,

he was like the guy that they all modeled himself after. Now we're making our own legend, our own Mexico's making their own legend, their own figures like Escobar, with people like El Seno de los Sielos, with some of the people that were involved in the whole Kiki Kamarana situation that are some of them are still alive and are actually still active out there. So that kind of legend continues on in that way. And it's also being propagated by things like Netflix. So another interesting thing you kind of think about is, you know, the original Marcos made Pablo Westcobar even more known. Yeah.

I was equated to the movie La Bomba. And remember the movie La Bomba? I didn't see that. La Bomba was basically based on this 1950s singer, Mexican American singer who died in a plane crash, right? Richie balance. And every time I say Richie balance or LaBamba, everybody remembers Lou Diamond Phillips. They don't remember actually Richie balance. They remember the movie about the singer, not the singer. And in a lot of ways, people that might have

not grown up during the whole, the whole thing with Palo Escobar or the whole situation around Palo Escobar never knew them. All they remember is the Netflix series, right? All they remember is the series narcos. And it's in the youth, it's in the music, it's in the culture, it's in the narco-cultura, which again, it's one of those influential things. You want to talk about, hey, when you were a kid, you watched the I Joe cartoon and make you maybe some way convince you to join the military later on in life. Maybe you saw a movie about some sort of badass military operation or something, I don't know. That might have convinced you to go into that line of work.

Well, now there's not a lot of that, but there's a lot of the narcos, narcos, Mexico going on right now. A lot of kids coding some of the show, like kids going into the culture, wearing the clothes, wearing some of the regalia. Who's your hero? It's in here that I'll see it. Who's your hero? Chapo Guzmán. Yeah. That's a different, it's a different thing. You want to talk about propagating. You know, again, freedom of speech, entertainment, and joy what you want. But let's say tomorrow, cartels are declared a terrorist organization. So Netflix would now be showing shows glorifying a terrorist network. Wouldn't that blow your mind? But it's a thing.

It's an interesting influence and transference of Colombian Medellin Cartel and how some of them operated back then, how Pablo Escobar turned into this figure. And now how that's moved into Mexico and that's turned into another different monster, bigger monster. Bigger monster. I mean, it's fucking scary, you know?

I mean, even the fact that they've adopted the model where they give back to the community and make it seem like they're being generous when... Hearts and miles. I mean, no, essential all they're doing is getting the populace hooked on the fucking tit. And they're getting free shit. They think they're generous. They fall in love. Life's fucking easy for them. And these guys can do whatever the fuck they want. Yeah. And combine

that with the fact that how well funded they are. And then you're bringing the training factor and how effective they are. I mean, this is going to be impossible to stop. Well, you talk about, again, somebody very famous told me once, never read the comment section, but I have to sometimes, right? Yeah. So right now, and then I get these online operators talking, laughing at some of these cartel guys without any sites on their rifles.

But you see a, you'll see this, this AR platforms, maybe a drako, little thing like that, and they laugh at it. Like, you live in a gun free part of America, you know, actually free America. You get to shoot a lot of cool guns, investing your guns and all that stuff. And you see a lot of people online that are influencers and shooting Instagram really fast and you know, all the stuff on their guns. Most of those kids in those videos, cartel videos without any sites on the rifles are actually going to drop more people in their lifetime than most of these Instagram shooters. Yeah. Because they live in a live environment. You don't need a lot of position when you just spray wildly into another group of people

that you're fighting. Yeah. Yeah. Am bushing, you know, the bad guys picked the time in the place. You know, the good guys have to prepare at all times for that reaction. And you have to fucking fight with rules. Exactly. Again, somebody that has no fucking rules. And he's going to get a lot more experience in

his lifetime, probably. Yeah. I don't mean to de-glorify them. I don't mean to say that they're better, that they are something to be respected. But I think if you dehumanize the enemy, I think if you laugh at them or you discount them, your dad already underestimate them. I don't underestimate anybody. I've seen 12-year-old cicareos with over four or five skulls on their repertoire as far as the people they've killed. 12-year-old. old. Yeah, 12 year olds. When it's a 12 year old kid, is that a choice that that 12 year old makes? Or is it more like, maybe the... Hey, we can't get close to that guy. Your little brother, he's cool, right? Yeah, he's fine. Can we go? No, good. He's just the product of his environment. So this, I mean, child soldiers,

we talk about Africa. Yeah, we talk, say child soldiers, you immediately think of Africa, but you don't think, yeah, it's right down there. It's like right across the border, child soldiers. Yeah. Childs, ecarios. Yeah. And also kids at night in Mexico sleeping in their beds, probably eight, nine, dreaming of growing up and being in the back of one of those trucks with an AK. Man, that's bad news. Being the next little chapo. Talk about the corrosion of the culture. Just like you black lives matter, the fund the police, all these things happening up here, nobody wants to grow up to be a cop anymore.

And then we want to grow up and be a doctor. They want to grow up to be a little chapo. Yeah. They want their Netflix series. They want Sean Pan to fly down there and be on the cover rolling stone. That's what they want Sean Pan to fly down there and be on the cover rolling zone. That's what they want. Again, imagine if tomorrow they get the Clare of the Terrorist Organization.

Now you have a picture of Sean Pan shaking hands with the Terrorist. Yeah. Again, that perspective is all skewed. When it comes to the cicareals of the assassins, and you mentioned how religious Mexico is as a country with Catholicism and everything like that, are these guys still religious? I mean, you talk about the desensitizing too. But the the the the the the the sensitization I the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's, I mean, it's, if you want to see, you know, what you could become if, you know, that's. Yeah, but you see certain elements of religion there, but not, not like you see in some of the secaries that are kind of made. What I mean by made is every cartel has their own kind of internal narco culture going on in there.

Some of them pray to different saints. Some of them pray to different forbidden saints. Santa Marta, the figure of death, that is basically, but basically, and views them with the power or the authority to, you know what, I know you're Catholic, but you're under the protection of me, that's the holy saint of death.

So anything you do under my protection got, it's not gonna know about it. So you have clear field to do what you need to do. Holy shit. All right, so that's like the base of the faith when it comes to Santa Marta. And Santa Marta, like people think Santa Marta is like a Catholic thing.

It's old, older than any sort of catholicism in Mexico. If you kind of look at it, Santa March has this figure of a skeletal figure with a robe on it. That's what she turned into during the 80s and 90s. But she used to be a skeletal figure with supple breasts and a skirt of snakes, two hands like that. She used to be quite liquid. The mother god is of the Aztecs. So if you think about it, the only surviving veneration of Aztec religion still in practice is Santa Marta.

And it's a practice that has faithful within police forces, within the military, within high little politics, and the cicareos. That's a lot of them actually benderied her. When I first started working, a lot of the older guys that I worked with prayed to Santa Marta. They took me to a Santa Marta shrine. We offered a, I remember offered a bottle of Pat uh, a patron. I was like, Hey, get a, get a bottle and I grabbed that cheap cheap ass bottle, you know, I said,

nah, nah, you need to get her something that you would drink or else it's not, it won't matter, right? And I was freaking out, you know, I raised Catholic and I was like, what the fuck am I doing? Put it there. And the older guy said, this is something that the other guy is prey to in fear. So you need to even view that fear within you. So where this scapular, where use this, I learn about this iconography because it's going to be used against you. So learn it now. Do these guys get ritualistic at all? Yeah.

Yeah. Columbia or I'm managing specifically a lot of the assassins before they go on a hit and how they do a hit nine times out of 10 there is on a mof f**king mof head. I don't drive up a stitchy up, but they will all go pray. It is very specific church. The significance of the left hand, the significance of the left hand, the significance of the left foot, the significance of coming out of the ground, out of the grave. There's a lot of ceremony that goes on in some of the more occult and kind of deeper levels

of some of these rituals and some of the, both on the police side, because a lot of these government organizations that I used to work with and some of the police organizations that I used to work with would take those things and view themselves with them. So I don't know, took quite it like people, snipers in Vietnam eating locally and dressing locally and smelling locally that kind of thing.

So people say, hey, are you like a practitioner of Santa Marta because you wear all these, you kind of use some of that regalia yourself. It's our version of a capture dices flag. So we keep what we keep what we get basically. But some of the rituals that I used to see some of these ecargis do and some of the guys that I work with and police forces. Silver was a very significant for Santa Marta. Probably because it has something to do with Judas or maybe it has something to do with just the availability of silver in northern Mexico and in a lot of parts of Mexico is a very rich silver producing thing. But you would when you would come into a job, a new job, you would get us one silver coin, like a silver peso, and somebody would lean into you and tell you in your ear, when this

job is over, you'll get another one. And the other one will be on your eyes or on your pocket. It's up to you to pick which one, right? So that's like an ominous moment of moiety that we would get. And when you would get in any sort of leadership position, I was the highest I went was a regional sub commander. And the only reason I didn't get commander was because I was too young. And I got a silver coin at the start and got that ominous warning.

And I managed to get the other one put in my pocket just here. You'll stay. You'll stay. You know, the secarios will wear silver. You won't wear gold. Because they think gold is the tracks too much attention from the devil, which is kind of like a, it's a weird, in Mexico, the devil is a different character. It's not like devil up here, which is in direct conflict with God. The devil, and the devil in Mexico is very much kind of the, it's, he's a counter force, but it's also a tool that God uses to get people. So somebody's doing something in various out there, he won't want to attract attention of the devil. He'll use the iconography and the generation of something like this to conceal his acts and to give

him authority over life and death basically. And that's something outside of the norm. So you see a lot of ritualistic stuff in there. Silver grips on the guns. Silver skull caps on the boots, silver skull rings, silver rosaries with black stones with skulls on them. There's a lot of iconography out there that could be kind of look at and kind of tell something about the people. I do some classes with law enforcement kind of familiarizing themselves with that type of stuff, but it's not out there. Yeah, well, I think that pretty much covers kind of the structure of the cartels and a lot of that kind of stuff that covers that subject. So let's take another break and then we'll come back and wrap things up. Cool. Well, my fire is kind of suck.

But my gummy bear is down. Head over to VigilanceLead.com Buy yourself a bag of gummy bears. And if you're fire is suck too, get yourself a Vigilance Lead beanie. Keep those grapes warm. Enjoy the show. Alright Ed, back from the break again and we're going to wrap this thing up but I want to cover two things and the first one being how do you cope with all the shit that you've seen.

We talked about some of the stuff you've seen. We've talked about the disposing of bodies and some of the gruesome stuff you've seen the cartel do down there. We covered the fact that you've gone on 2,700 fucking pills. There's no numbers. I don't know how many of those. Well, nine years years that whole experience Humor the big part of it, I think One of the things I always recognize with other people that I meet that have you know people like you would have an experience base

Other people like that it had kind of went through their own thing The student commonalities that I see and people like that, it had kind of went through their own thing. The student commonalities that I see in people like that, humor is one of them. Usually I can tell a lot about somebody if they don't have a sense of humor, you know, they take themselves too seriously. There's something, there's something to miss there. Yeah. Humor is one of those big things that has helped me out. It's a good mask. Yeah. It's a good cloaking device, humor. It helps get through the misery when you're in the middle of it, too.

I had this one of my closest friends when I was working. His name was Haramio. Very infamous name. I've kind of made him famous. It's my way of keeping him alive. He was one of the older guys I've worked with. He was a mess. I mean, he was a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire of a person. But he was very loyal. And it was a very good guy.

It gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional, you know. It gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional. You know? Um, Yeah, you're always kind of basically, you know, keep me laughing. Um, you would push me to go in into weird places and kind of getting out of my comfort zone and just, just taking every day as if it's the last one. Um, and just taking every day as if it's the last one.

And went on some weird adventures, including one that included a donkey show, which we won't get into, but and we would always get a shit face drunk every time we would come back from something. Yeah. There was a, there's a word that I discovered or learned about up here in the US called PTSD. It's not a word that we know down there in Mexico. There's no there's no concept of a veteran or or or a support network for people that go through the experiences that I went through with a lot of the people that go through those experiences down there. So I just don't talk about that. There's a there's a sense of my cheese.

I'm all you just take it. You know, it's fine. You know, just don't go crazy. Yeah. So you get a few days off. You know, you get you get to leave and you would go get drunk and come back and you would get asked if you were okay and he would lie your ass off and say yes, and just go through with it all, just go through the motions. Harmio was, he went through a lot, he went through a most of it with me, and every now and then

he would go out and the reason why we got along, we're completely different people, separated from, by almost a decade in age, he had a weird fetish for 80s, ranchetto music, and he more boots and you know, we're able to wear the pearly shirts and stuff like that, and he was into that whole weird cowboy kind of culture, and I was not grew up as a skater kid like punk rock and completely opposite. But what we shared is that we didn't take ourselves too seriously. We'd make the fun of ourselves and everything around us and every time we'd we'd go out and you know partake in some festivities and get drunk. We would get, I mean

and we'd try and get combatoes. That's what we would game after. Yeah. I don't know if there's a there's a X rating on this, but share a small story about them. It's a funny one. Let's do it. One of the times we went through a bad situation once and we were celebrating that we were still alive. And we got leave and we got money and we said, you know what? Let's just go out and just get blacked out. It went out and got blacked out drunk, not blacked out. We conscientiously went back home after the whole night. Alone, we were hunting for some sort

of female comfort, but we were too much for them. You know, we went back to the house where we were renting. We had this house where a lot of us would live, kind of a safe house setting for us, walked to the door and couldn't open the door. We wanted to pee. Harmy was like, God, I gotta pee, I gotta pee. Like we'll pee over there and we'll pee over here.

So I'm standing there really drunk with my handgun, like, lock with a light on it pointing towards the ground, being, I went out drinking with my gun, by the way. This is a Mexico, different country, different little sand, fine. And I hear Harmey say, oh, no, oh, oh, what's wrong, Harmey? Oh, something's wrong, Oh, something's wrong.

I turn around and point my light at him, you know. Oh, shit. Again, there's different times. And he's past his pants. And I was like, what, what's, what's so far of you? There's something wrong. Yeah, you peed your pants. No, no, no, something wrong. I think my dick is blocked and I have a hole in one of my balls. What? This is exactly what I answered. I think my dick is blocked and I have a hole in one of my balls. I didn't understand how me, you're not making any sense. So, took the light off my gun closer. He pulled one of his balls out to pee. Holy shit. He pulled one of his balls,

he was so drunk that he pulled one of his balls out to pee. That's amazing. And he was worried that his dick was blocked and he had a hole in one of his balls. First off, I had to explain biology to him in anatomy and physiology. And it was, I've never laughed more in my life. How long did it take you to figure that one out?

Oh, it was a process. It was a process. But it's retraced the steps here. He pulled the one of his balls up anyway, so I laughed we let we would I mean I laughed and he started laughing as well and we it was a solid hour of us Laughing out there in the misty Morning hours Kind of sobering up with that laughter. And we saw some horrible

stuff the night before and I was medicinal. I was a moment of escapism. We would just get numb. He was one of those characters that, you know, the stories, just legendary stories about him. He kind of taught me a little bit of that, that, that, that, that laughter part, and that humor humor just not taking myself too seriously. I think probably the kind of the most scary time or the most dangerous time for people that go through those types of experiences is the end.

The bus stopping and letting you out while the party is still going on on the bus stopping and letting you out. Yeah. While the party is still going on on the bus, yeah. And you get left on the sidewalk as the bus moves away, as a way I like to think about it. You know, the people that you lived, breathe, ate with, suffered with, blood with are still on the bus. Yeah. And you have to get out of the bus.

When everything stopped, when I had to leave the job and all of a sudden being involved, being in the know, being responsible for all these people, then being responsible for me, having homicide as part of your job description, guns and grenades, smoke grenades there, and just living this life, it was kind of surreal, but it was the normal. That was my normal for years. Yeah. All of a sudden, you know, last call called everybody out.

Some people stayed on and you're not a part of it anymore. And everything stops and gets quiet. Yeah. That's probably the most dangerous and closest I've been to ending, I think. Yeah. I think that's that's what a lot of people don't come back from or can't escape from when they everything stops. I don't know. It's like when you're too busy to notice that you got cut or when you're doing some sort of maybe you're training you did so when you got something really extended somewhere, it shouldn't have been what you wore.

So you don't feel it until you stop and then you start realizing how screwed you are physically. Man mentally. Yeah. When you start telling. You start counting your wounds, you start realizing how all of a sudden the family you had around you and all of you shared the same injuries, maybe all of you say this same outlook in life or the same normalcy. All of a sudden you're taking out from that and now you have to relate to people that have never been through that never gone through anything similar to that and you realize how abnormally you are and how out of place you are in a simple setting as going to a restaurant where your family and trying to figure out what the best place to be is, trying to figure out who there is armed or being distracted, not being in the moment,

and then basically that being a sacrifice and that being detrimental to your family health. And all that comes with it. Sleep disorder, substance abuse, alcohol, drugs for some people. drugs for some people. Not being able to find the right words to explain to somebody, like what, just no words to explain it to somebody. I think Alan Watts talks about poetry, that's a poetry is putting into words what is unexplainable. I do writing a lot of writing and I try and put into words what I can't explain. And I can find people that I could explain some of the stuff to until I found

veteran community in California when I moved up there and started doing classes and meeting people that had service experience. And I started kind of figuring out that there's a name for what I had that other people were struggling with going to the store and going into an anxiety or panic attack at a restaurant because somebody was doing something that manifested a event in the past. I mean, I don't know how it's been for you, but when some of these things come back into your head space, it's almost like there's no time. Yeah. You're there, you're here, you're both at the, like everything's happening at the same time,

and people around you don't realize this. You know, something horribly you saw, something how will it happen, and something you see and in the environment triggers it and you're back to, you're back there and you're here, and you express it through an anxiety attack of an outburst of some sort, apathy in the relationship you might have be having at the moment with somebody, or you just shut off and you go sleeping in a closet for a few weeks, because that's your safe place.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, yeah, I mean, you just kind of asked like I went through it. Fuck yeah, you know, I went through it and I went through I went to therapy for twice a day almost for three three years or not twice a day twice a week for three years and And you know, I still fucking struggle with it. It gets better, but you know and I still fucking struggle with it, it gets better, but you know, it's, you gotta be willing to invest your time into it, and one a while, and one a fucking poll yourself out, you know, I had a wake up call, and I tried to kill myself in my car, in my fucking garage, and I don't even remember it. But to be honest,

within my whole fucking house should have gone up in flames. But for some fucking reason, it didn't. Now, I'll ask this question. That's something I hear a lot, that's not the easy way out. For somebody, like you, or for somebody like me that tried to be alive and stay alive for that long, that's not an easy exit. No. I get this easy out mentality from some people that don't understand what that is. That's actually understand what that is, that's actually going against everything in your being in nature. Yeah. They'll leave. I've contemplated thought about and maybe approach that a few times myself. My whole thing is that is completely counter to the nature of what I am and what I became during

that whole time, where I was trying to figure out ways of surviving. And every time I hear somebody say that, they took the easy way out. That's, I don't think that's true. For most people that went through some of that stuff. Also, the honesty and being open to talk about this. Where I'm from, you talk about what I'm talking about right here. This is the end of your career. Yeah. You are local, crazy. You are non functional. You're not to be trusted. I write, I write some of these flashbacks down at times. I share them openly. It's a

very personal thing to share some of that stuff openly. Not easy again, not easy. It helps if you talk about it. It's like I heard from a therapist. It does, but it hurts a lot. It's like peeling off a scab and showing somebody, this is what was under that scab so you can see it. Here you go. Now, forget about the scab. You know, forget about the wound that you just saw treat me like an normal person. That doesn't work that way. There's a stigma to it.

And I think the stigma up here in the U.S. is, I mean, there's more conscience. There's a bit more conscience about it. And I think the stigma here in the US is, I mean, there's more conscience, there's a bit more conscience about it. There's a bit more of a community and support support around it. And I thought that's not that's not something I had when I was going going through that down there. There is now, but there there, there, it hasn't been a wrong around for very fucking long, you know, when I left the, when I left the seal teams, there was none of that shit. And it was exactly what you were saying. Was it was there a culture of suck it up? Yeah. I have to fuck yeah, there was. They're probably still is. They probably know it's better now. But um, and again,

I think, uh, and when you go back and kind of learn, I'm into history and I like reading about and took other warrior cultures and people that did, you'm into history and I like reading about other warrior cultures and people that did, you know, things that they had to do. You know, PTSD has always been with us. It's been, this is this, this, this, this, what you, we talked about your experience when I'm talking about, we're not talking about anything, you know, this is the history of the world. Yeah. But I think there's something that happened culturally that separated us from how people used to handle some of these things or how some people would talk about some of these things. From a spirit quest as they used to come or

finding yourself or going off on these pilgrimages or whatever form they took, ceremony. A ceremony is simply performing an act with a symbology just to convince your subconscious mind of something. So from going to mass and eating a cracker that's supposed to be the body of Jesus and drinking wine that's supposed to be a blood of Jesus. There's some bodgey there. To get it, to get to getting handed a silver coin at the start of a leadership position and getting told

that you're going to get another one because you go into it knowing it's going to end. I think some of those things are missing and some of our kind of modern way of approaching some of these things, some of these things have been amputated from us. We're suffering from a phantom limb syndrome when it comes to some of these things. You know, what happens after? Like I grew up having parties at the cemetery

during David's dead. And I get a weird feeling every time I travel up here and I see empty cemeteries, but no people there. Like they're forgotten space. There's no relationship there. I don't know. I think that whole culture of suck it up, be a man, go through it. I get that. It worked. It fucking worked. You know, it works when you're in, it works when you're in it, you know,

and then make sure you're soft. When you're off the bus. When you're out, you're fucked. Yeah. And yeah, my mom needs to say that at home, When you're off the bus when you're out you're fucked. Yeah Yeah, my mom needs to say that at home I got to quote that I'll get that quote again I went through a horrible a few bad situations, but I think one of the first ones

The war that I fought was at home With an enemy that spoke the same language that I did every now and then we share a few notary homes with the enemy. The counter guys were bearing bear being mourned over on that side of the street and over having our services for our guys over here. So it's different just it was different in that way. They had a very horrible thing happen. Very traumatic. I lost a few people. And I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood.

My sneakers, my socks, feel in my toes. And blood has a tendency to kind of dry out and crust a little bit. I remember I wrote the reports that I had to write and talk to the people that I had to talk, and I was let, you know, told to go to the hotel and wash up and come back the second day. I got in the car and drove straight home. Like unconsciously, just drove to my parents' house. I drove up probably three hours in the night straight there. I showed up some some time in the early mornings and my mom opened the door.

I actually saw. Yeah. She didn't say anything. She sat me down, took my clothing off, put in the washer, and made me, made me some coffee. She didn't ask anything. And I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like You're right back to home or the home you left changes when you're gone and you don't recognize it when you come back. So she told me going back home is that train is left to station. There's no going back home. So you have to figure out what that looks like for you next. I was very mind-ultering. She lived through a lot herself, so she was very wise.

Sounds like it. She, in her own way, she told me to suck it up. And in her own way, she told me to suck it up. I stood up and I remember smelling my clothes, like a downy fresh, you know. She bagged me a lunch, got in the car. I saw all the missing, missed phone calls on my cell phone. People were angry and went back and phased the music. Tell me, why did you go? So I just needed, I just need it a moment.

I got reprimanded for leaving. Yeah. But you know, it was, uh, I realized that, um, there was no going back home. So that gave me focus on going straight. Ah, surviving, figuring out what that, uh, what that road would lead me. That was aimless. The fucking changes. Yeah. How long did it take for you to realize your mom was fucking right on the money?

That's a probably a few days after she passed away. She struggled for a long time with a few issues. And before she went, she told me to leave that job, leave that bankless job, Ed. That's not that's no longer the war you should fight. That's not your war anymore. She passed away and I did a lot of self reflection. Again, I got two days off to mourn my mom. Yeah. She got to meet my kid, which I think was again, I got two days off to mourn my mom. Yeah. She got to meet my kid, which I think was, I was very soothing to my morning process.

And everything kind of aligned after that, she passed away and, you know, there are a few things kind of shifted politically down there and I had to leave. I kind of, she gave me that push at the end, I think. I remember taking back to that moment and I kind of wrote it down. I've shared that on. I've shared that openly a few times. I remember every time I smell that morning coffee, I remember that moment, I'm gonna bring me back to that. We're home and where there's no more innocence.

You're facing your mom and you're not what you were. Yeah. I know that feeling. Sorry, you're that, but you know, sounds like she was looking out for a man. Yeah, you know, but and sounds like she still is. After she passed. She's always been like a big inspiration. It's one of those teachers that you don't recognize as a teacher until they're not there anymore. One of the things she used to do when push me to

was the volunteer work. And we would go and feed some of the people at the Tijuana Canal, heroin addicts. She gave me the eyes to see humanity, even at the lowest levels. I remember one of the first self-defense classes that I gave was through a church group

that would work with some of the prostitutes in Tijuana. And that was my mom pushing me to do that. You know, all this cool as you think you're, I think you're some expert and stuff like that. Go teach them they need it. She gave me eyes, instead of the humanizing people, I think that's one probably part of biggest things to you gave me was the human factor people, I think that's one probably the biggest thing to get me was the human factor. So I can relate to people, I can talk to people, despite that they were trying to kill me, only a few moments later. I could set them down, give him a swig up to Keela and talk to people. That's a powerful armor that she gave me with that. And it's something I've been using to

try and process that whole life that I went behind. Again, the world has ended for me a few times over. So part of my process to kind of, there is no getting better, there is no healing, there is learning how to live with things, there is learning how to find a new normal, how to find a new center or a new base. That's what I think I'm kind of looking towards. And I've been basically on the road for the past three years trying to find that for myself. I've not found it yet. You're in it, man.

What? You're fucking in it right now. No, this is a, this is a, this is a, we all have these moments, right? Or we're trying to figure out where we are in the world, what we're supposed to do. I've been pretty aimless for the past, probably two, three years,

where I'm trying to figure out where I am. I travel a lot, every couple of weeks, I'm in a different state, you know, I hold waking up in a hotel room, figuring out where you are, when you are. Yeah. That when you are part, that's pretty interesting. Sometimes I dream that it dreams about being back somewhere,

sleeping in a hole or something. Waking up covered in cockroaches or ants, because I'm sleeping in a weird field somewhere. Reaching for a rifle that is no longer there. Hearing Haramia tell me that it's almost time to wake up. Hearing the radio, sat radio beeping as it's charging in the background. Tattoo's in your mind. You wake up and you're just brought back into here.

And driving here, seeing all the green scenery. We'll see all the life around, the trees, the mignoise, everything's green, everything's good, everything's alive. And it's just take this moment you're like, what, where, how did I get here? Right? Yeah. And why? I think part of the answer to, although why is sharing some, some of my experiences with people and having it resonate with some. I write these small stories I call fever dreams, because that's what they are. We're flashbacks into a path that I sometimes I kind of question.

I was like, was there really there? I write them down and all of them are basically just an honest expression of something that happened. And I've gotten a lot of people sending messages that they thought they were the only ones. They thought that nobody felt like that. They, uh, I gave them the words to describe something that they couldn't I gave them the words to describe something that they couldn't, that never being able to go back home quote, I remember sharing it in a lot of people, kind of responded to and resonated with a lot of people.

I think probably that's probably half of the reason in why I'm still here, I think. There's a story within me, I need to kind of share with people open that's. And it's been, I'm very selfish as well because that that that helps me out with my process kind of putting some of these things out. Well, just you saying that right there is going to fucking help thousands of people, you know, and it's, it's, you know, the, the similar, the everything you're describing is, like, very similar to what I've gone through and what a lot of guys have gone through and it's, I've worked with, or colleagues, you know, and it's, I mean, you're the first person I've had

on the show that's an immigrant that fought of some similar things, you know, and, and the, the, it's similar. It's extremely similar. And, you know, it takes a lot of fucking time. Yeah, you know, took me a lot of time. But I mean, fuck man, just the guilt. Don't stop working at it. and just the guilt don't stop working at it. Another thing, the guilt. You're here, a lot of people aren't. And get that, are we now in that? Yeah. Like there's people that are very deserving,

people that are not assholes. People that took care of their bodies that ate healthy. They're not here anymore. They're with me at some point. They got eaten up by it. And I'm here and I don't take care of myself. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a self,

I'm a, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a, I'm a self, I'm a, I'm a self, I'm a, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a self, I'm a times. I know there's it's like a common thing I've seen as well with some people. I'm that wanting to to keep them alive somehow, maybe by stories, maybe by naming something after them or I know that that's another weird part of it. That guilt you feel every day. You could be a green field petting an old packer in the middle of this green heavenly field. I'm thinking about somebody that you might have lost a long way that might have enjoyed that. thinking about somebody that you might have lost a long way that might have enjoyed that. And you feel guilty about it, you know. I don't know, we all process some of these things in a different way, but there's a commonality with how I've seen a lot of people that kind of went through the same thing that I did and how they process it. You know, I was I was I was dig finding those similarities. It helps me not feel alone, again selfish.

And I was going to catch myself when I start feeling that way. But I was talking about being around people that know the words to that song. And it is a song. It's a song that's old its time. I remember sharing this video of this Marine dressed in his dress blues. I think he was a Native American. I don't remember the name of his nation. his dancing with the wardrobe, his dancing with a spear in one hand, and a shield in the other. And a lot of people were expressing how beautiful that was, but I didn't know why.

He's singing the war songs of his people. He remembers them. He remembers their weapons. He remembers their ancestors. He remembers their names of their ancestors. He is everything that they survived into the point where he's dancing there in front of them. Ed, but he's dancing in the uniform of the nation than conquered his nation. Yeah, but he's alive. And he remembers the

songs that went before. He remembers the weapons of their people. He remembers the culture, the warrior culture, like he has an attachment to that. Can you remember the song of your ancestors? Can you remember the ways that their spears were made? A lot of us suffer from that amputation, that cultural amputation, we don't remember the songs. And one thing I always, I've always kind of realized recently is that if you don't remember the songs, you make up new ones. And if you see the new guy coming in, you teach him those songs,

so you can get an semblance of that. Remembering the ones I went before, that's the way you keep him alive. And that's the way you keep the new guys alive. So this helps. We don't have drums, and we don't have fireplaces, but we do have YouTube. Yeah. All right. So in that regard, I really appreciate you doing these. Thank you. This is the drum that a lot of people are going to hear after, after we're gone. Yeah. There's a there's a certain power in keeping some of these conversations alive.

I wish I had some of these conversations at the back of my head when I started. We didn't. I think there's a power in that. I talked to them. I talked to my boys aren't here anymore. I try to think about if the roles were reversed and I was them and they were alive, what I want them feeling like that, or what I want them to fucking enjoy, like what I want them to enjoy their life. And even just the fact, because that's what we're supposed to fucking do. You know, you were just talking about driving here and seeing all the green and the creeks and the animals and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, that's what 99% of the people in this country see every fucking day, you know what I mean? Have it. Is, yeah, they're happy people and, and, and, you know, with the career paths, like, with what we chose, we don't experience that.

And it takes a long time to, to get to a point where you were, it's okay. We can allow yourself to enjoy. Yeah. Yeah. The people that leave get brighter and younger in our minds, they've had a notice that as well. Yep. I remember some of the people that I lost were older than I was. And somewhere along the lines of mine's lie passed them along the way.

And they get younger and brighter. Now, I hear him sometimes, specifically car me, it's like a weird voice in the back of my head. He's always advising me to do the wrong things to take one more beer, to enjoy one more song, to ask a girl in the hands. He's a saist, you know. And I want that. He wants that. He wants me a he didn't see what he wants me to partake in all that. And I think that's probably probably part of my subconscious that just just told me to enjoy your life. You're allowed to enjoy. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's a Catholic guilt in me, built into me when I was a kid, but, you know,

there's something about enjoying those moments that you, some of us, you know, struggle with, every now and then I catch myself in this perfect moment. My kid, running around, finding Easter eggs, laughing. This moment of perfect laughter. running around finding Easter eggs. Laughing. This moment of perfect laughter. Ed, why don't you, you know,

there's a, there's a weird pain and happiness in that. I don't know, not a lot of people can understand. I want wider fill in a man. I really am. I got one of those voices too. He's very fucking mind you. That flag up there. But you talk about shamanism. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, have you done any? Have you, uh, yeah, I mean, it's

Mexico. Where we're all about it. We have a contact. I come from a culture where we party at the graves during David dead. We sleep over on grave sites. We have a altar toward dead. Neckomancy is part of our culture, which is, you know, weird. I heard from somebody up here in Tennessee once. He asked me if I was a Christian, it's on the amcatholic. Oh, so you're not, you know,

yeah, very much a paganist, a paganistic culture. Chalmanism is a big part of it. There's a, there's things called Bilalus. Bilalus are basically like, bilavis. Bilavis are basically like they were made famous by a lady, Savina, Madiya Savina, like the Beatles will go down to Mexico when they were a lot when they were like a thing and they would take these mushroom trips, midnight mushroom trips. So Simon at the core of most of that. I've heard a lot of good things about psilocybin and PTSD. I mean I've tried the pharmaceutical side of it. It takes certain things from you when you try and get back to normalcy. So I know, I mean, I'm sure some people have experienced

taking some of those most pharmaceutical medications and feel like a zombie or feel like you're like on autopilot or it's not you. Like in a backseat of a car driving from the backseat. I don't know what some of them have helped. Not all out of few people recommend Silas Sivan. Basically the mushrooms are micro dosing and macro dosing. But actually having a process before it, it's not just taking them. Yeah.

Charminism in different places, they have, the psilocybin and hallucinogenics have that long history and warrior culture. Like even, well, if you want to talk about Aztecs, Aztecs, some of the Aztec elite warrior cast would go on, hallucinogenic trips before they would go out and do whatever they did and when they would come back they would do the same. So I remember when I was younger, when I was younger and went through a bunch of bad horrible stuff. One of my vacation times I took a trip down to South America, went on to one of these veladas.

It was spiritual. The shaman, woman guides you into a velada. It's like a 12 at night, midnight trip with mushrooms. But one of the things she was very clear about was our intention at the start. Are you here to have fun? Are you here to feel funny? Are you here to work out something? Like what are you here for? And then she would have us write down our intention on a page. And then after that, we would have to physically write that down with our feet in the form of a pattern on the ground. And a lot of us were exhausted because we had

to travel on foot on up of all this hill. There was always some weird symbology throughout the whole experience. I think what it takes you towards is a comic, like a clear honest conversation with yourself. Are you by yourself? Yeah, you're with people, but when that hits, you're not with people. I have a donor. It's, again, it's one of those things where I don't recommend everybody. I think not everybody is meant to do it. If you have some sort of issues, it might wake, awaken some things that might be harmful

for people. I don't think people should do it recreationally. I think there should be some sort of people that guide you through the process. That's what I've had. And I think it's, it's helped me out tremendously in figuring, figuring and processing some of these things. I don't know, I mean, the best way I can explain it is when you, it's like a mental fog or like a mental cobwebs you might have. And Silicide, I'm gonna take some of that away from that process between having something, something or an event that affected you in a very deep way, and just having that event in your head doing circles and actually inserting yourself in that event

that event in your head doing circles and actually inserting yourself in that event and trying to figure it out by reconstructing it. Let's say it's like making a play about something that you had to go through and then as a director going in there and this could be over here and I should have done this over here, but it can't change it. So this is the thing.

So I just had to do all this to figure out that, I'm in charge of my own well-being, and it's stupid to try and force something to change, it can't change. So some of those processes I kind of went through, Silas-Haven is, I think it's, there's a lot of potential there. I don't think it should be illegal.

I think there's, you know, there's more horrible of potential there. I don't think it should be illegal. I think there's more horrible stuff out there. The more you're about it and the more you read about it, I mean, flaming hot cheetos should be illegal, not so exciting. I think they do more harm. It's not a, again, I don't think it's a recreational thing. Yeah. I think, I think our ancestors were on to something with that. I think it's probably as old as we are as a species. It does help. It does help. Would you recommend it? I would. Absolutely. I would,

again, not recreationally and do it with people that know what they're doing and be very sure about your intentions when you go through it. I don't think I don't think it's a it's something meant to be done several times. I think it's something you meant you're meant to be meant to do a few times maybe. And a lot of us didn't do it at the start to figure out ourselves out before we went through the fire. Yeah. But I think if anything, we should do it at the end after we come out of it. It helps you process. I think there's a medicine in that. That's awesome, man. I've been thinking a lot about it. But, um, let's move on. Sure.

Covered a lot of material there. And, uh, there and lose me with one question and how do we fucking stop the cartels? Is it even possible? I think there is a... I think it's not a Mexican problem. It's a regional problem. So that's the first part of the solution. To recognize that we are not only neighbors intertwined by blood, commerce, criminal organizations. We are a country that is very much linked, we're very much a symbiotic relationship going on.

And it's a regional problem. So treating it as anything else than that is a problem. Also I paid taxes up here now so I can say this. Every single person out there who is an American that pays taxes is paying for the drug war in different ways Even though you don't know it a lot of your tax money's going down there and funding Companies that make a living off that drug war keeping It's status status quo So as an example

When I was down there all of my uniforms uniforms were bought over that I would have to wear. They were all bought through a specific uniform tactical company that is American base, which I won't name. But they make a killing off that drug war. All of the vehicles that we have every wonder why every police corporation down there rides around and pick up truck. There's a deal. There's a vested interest in there. Americans need to demand that their representatives account for the money that's being sent down there. I would source in that drug war and why things are getting worse instead of better

despite that the money and the budget is getting higher. That doesn't make sense. Yeah. The way they're fighting the war is exactly the same way they've been fighting the war since I started. No. So there's something wrong with the whole process there and it starts in the US as far as the fight goes. Legalized marijuana federally. Honestly, it's not going to do any difference now. May have done a difference back 20 years back, maybe 15 years back, but right now, I think we're at a point where cartels have moved on from that substance. So realistically, having that does a schedule on one substance federally, that won't make a difference if you legalize it or not, but I'd say legalize it.

Go after not only the money that is related to that cartel by the money, the money that flows in and out of those organizations that there's ways of going after it. That's not my specialty, but I realize that if you give those groups a designation as terrorist, I think the US will have more tools to combat those organizations. And I think finally, there is no fighting the cartels without going into fighting a systemic corruption at high level politics in Mexico at all levels. There's no such thing. You can't go down there and clean out the cartels and expect everything to go better. There is a snake with two heads down there. On one end of the spectrum, there's the cartels, and the other end of the spectrum is politics.

These organizations can't subsist down there without some sort of help from the other side of that snake. So, and it doesn't even matter if they're from the right or the left down there. They all respond to money. So any sort of help or any sort of nation building as you as America calls it or any sort of offer to help Mexico is always going to meet met wood resistance because we don't want American interventionism in the country and all that's going to be pushed forward and pressed forward by the political class down there because it's not in their best interest to get rid of the status quo. So again, the problem is systemic. I think there's no solution without solving the problem at both of those ends. I do believe that there's going to be

a time in the near future where the Americans, the American, America as a country is going to have its hands forced into a conflict within Mexico. There's going to be some sort of event related to natural resources to foreign influence. I thought that event might have been the massacre in the desert in Sonora, the American children, women and children. But I don't think that's enough anymore. I think, uh, and that's a sad thing to say, that's not enough. Yeah. The force action. That's not enough to declare the materialist organization. You know, hey, yeah, they're not a terrorist organization. They don't have any clear political motives from, yes, they do. have any clear political motives from the yes they do. You want to talk about political killings Mexico was a cap world capital of political killings cartels assassinate political candidates

cartels assassinate members of the press when they report things that they don't want to be reported so they clearly have political motives they clearly are interested in having certain people in certain places power down there. So it is very much an organization that has, they're just politicized. They very much work within political structures to further their influence. And they hang people from bridges. Yeah. They cut heads off. They burn people alive. They torture people and put them on a video that then get this first on the internet. All the ISIS torture videos and execution videos were inspired by cartel videos that came out before them. So even ISIS is taking pointers from these criminal groups. Yeah. And for some reason, which is probably related to probably the influx of immigrants seeking asylum now having the legitimate claim of fleeing from a terrorist organization into the US.

Maybe that has something to do with the US's refusal to name the material organization. But I think they fit every single description of that of an organization that is a terrorist organization and more. As far as I'll cater or ice is stuff like that, I don't see any of them operating in a multi-million dollar businesses in the US. I mean, even if everything, you know, control and the money and all of that, I mean, the longer

we take to do it, you know, China is right there and it sounds like they've been there a lot longer than I thought after talking to you, but I don't know, you know, it's very, it's very, even with our military, you know, and the technology that goes along with it, it's very, it is almost impossible to defeat an enemy that does not play by rules when you are forced to fucking play by rules. And until until the general populace decides that it's fucking bad enough that we don't need to play by those rules anymore. In my opinion, it's never going to fucking go away. So you better get used to it. I think the world has witnessed the power of the US military. And as somebody that's worked down there, and have seen it up here, and have friends, and

working that in my eye, I know the US can change that landscape really quickly if they wanted to, if they had the political backing and if they had the ability to do so, it's not going to be easy. This is an enemy that lives across the ocean. This is not an enemy that lives across the ocean. I've heard conversations about what they would do with a full scale invasion happened or an armed intervention in Mexico would happen by US military forces and what the cartels response would be when they felt threatened. You'd hear then again, this is by an organization

that is not labeled a terrorist organization. Well, if the US starts, besides Syringe Revean, we'll just randomly poison drug loads going into the US and create a health crisis in this country that you have never seen in your history. Damn. Now, imagine that reaction. This is an organization that can take pictures

of people going in and a Coronado, have access to that area. They can take notes and numbers. They can go on social media. They can discover where people live. They can make you want to go back home with you quickly. They can get to you. It's not, again, this is not an organization that lives in a cave system somewhere in Afghanistan. These are guys that don't have their own cell phone networks. These are guys that have operate multi-billion-dollar business of drug trafficking. These are people that have tunnels underneath the border

that can go put anything in there. It's not uncommon to back in the post 9-11 era, people that have tunnels underneath the border that could go put anything in there. It's not uncommon to back in the post 9-11 era that Americans would put guideger counters in those drug tunnels because they were worried about what could get through. Now imagine somebody is an organization that is not worried about that anymore. All they're worried about is retribution. That would be a bad day, I think. worried about that anymore. Yeah. All they're worried about is a retribution. That would be that would that would be a bad day, I think. Um, it's not as easy as some people make it out to be, oh, send a group of,

just send the military down there and we'll clean everything up. I think it's a, I think it's a, it's a problem that if we, if you leave long enough to fester, it's going to become a snowball. Not a fucking already has. I think within our lifetime we'll see it. It's gonna be some event on the border. It's gonna be some sort of. I think it probably, the sad thing is it's probably not gonna be even related to American

blood spilled and or drugs. That's probably going to be a resource issue. But we'll see that intervention with an online time probably. I was saying five years and I'm still at that five year mark in my mind. I say five years because of the presidency going on down there and the competence, it's almost comical in competence as far as how it's handling the drug cartel issue and the violence issue and how it's each year just

become worse and worse. So I don't know. I just know that just in those such things as a Mexican solution or an American solution has to be a regional solution. And I'm not expecting the UN to step in at any time soon. Yeah. Well, I think we're gonna wrap this thing up, but I just wanna say, man, I really appreciate you making the trip and your story is fucking amazing, dude. So this is gonna help a lot of people especially with that one segment.

Yeah. And you know, I know it sounds like you're still searching for a purpose, but I'm telling you man, you're fucking killing it. And you probably are very similar to a lot of my friends and you don't reflect on your own success. I'm just going to tell you you're fucking killing it, dude. You're doing a great job and you're spreading a fucking great message and you're bringing to awareness to shit that people need to fucking hear about. Keep it up. Shit that people need to fucking hear about. So, you know, keep it up. Keep it up. Thank you for the reminder.

Sometimes I need a kick in the ass to keep going. I'm right on, man. Well, thanks for coming. Thank you. It's time to get away in a new Hyundai vehicle during the Hyundai Getaway sales event at Woodhouse Hyundai. The Hyundai lineup of sedans and SUVs has the capability you need and technology and features you want, like the all-new 2023 Hyundai Powseade and Hyundai Tucson. This holiday season gets into a vehicle that will give you confidence with Hyundai owner

assurance America's best 10-year 100,000-mile warranty. Visit us online at WoodhouseHundayOfOmaHA.com The Bullwork Podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties. Real sense of déjà vu 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,

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