#7 Ed Calderon Drug Cartel / Narcos Expert
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All right, it's finally here. Ed Calderon is on The Shawn Ryan Show. And yes, we've read all 2,282 emails requesting "Why the hell has Ed's episode not been released yet?" But before I give it to you, just a quick word from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Vigilance Elite. That's me.

Head over to vigilancedelite.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 who might be creating some issues to if you're just that guy or lady who's looking to get proficient with a firearm and just learn the basics to protect your family, we have that on there. And while you're at vigilanceleague.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 the New Generation Cartel. It grew exponentially in influence and power, not just in Mexico, but in the U.S. during the COVID epidemic. One of the biggest moneymakers 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. 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. Why is China's interest in Mexico becoming so strong? It's your Achilles heel as a country. I've seen the law cartel runs a lot of their distribution with some of the local black gangs in places like Chicago. So...

We used them by proxy. I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood. My sneakers, my socks, feeling my toes. Welcome back to The Sean Ryan Show. This is episode 007.

To kick things off, I want to 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 3 group, and I'm going to put them through a mindset challenge. So if you're on Tier 3, maybe you'll get picked. Two volunteers, we're 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 MacGyver. He is TSA's worst fucking nightmare. He's seen it all.

and been face to face with the cartels in the most real, vivid, dangerous ways possible. Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to present: Señor Ed Calderon. 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, um...

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 crazy.

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 on a low level and being around that kind of shit. And so...

Anyways, I'm super fucking pumped you're here man. I'm excited to be here man. So yeah, but I always start everything out with a gift Okay, so what first off always? Here if it's ticking always drop the cell phone far away from it 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. Oh

thank you for that yeah you're welcome oh yeah gummy bears all of it all about that right there thank you for that man that's pretty heavy i wonder what that may be oh look at that look at that thing right there hmm yeah i wonder what this fits it might happen to fit that right there but uh

I did a ton of research on you, and you have this thing for golden guns. Well, I mean, I think it's a Mexican. For some reason, 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 Moctezuma so they could, you know, Moctezuma could admit where the gold was hidden. No shit. So I think it probably stems back to that gold lust, you know. That's beautiful. Thank you for that. That is an amazing piece right there. Yeah. Well, yeah.

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. Actually, I found two of those guns in a water barrel somewhere in Baja.

that were traced back to the Fast and the Furious debacle way back when. They were 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 shit. You know, usually the officers in the army in Mexico don't get height requirements, so the guy was pretty short, you know?

so 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 it's a it's a pretty interesting gun gold guns have a long history down there um from chalino sanchez and his 38 uh commander uh commando gun to ochapo's uh famous uh pistol that had his uh ford 100 uh top uh 1000 number on there

Is it like a status symbol? It is. That's how you know who's in charge or who are the higher-ups in some of the cartel parties. See those gold guns floating around. It's kind of more of a Sinaloa 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 saint in Sinaloa, Malverde, Jesus Malverde.

It's a guy with a mustache and basically Mexican Robin Hood 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 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 him in and get the money and disperse it to the townspeople. So he was hung from a tree and the order was not to bury him, to leave him there to rot. No shit. 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 probable link to the whole gold fascination, how some of these things are used as symbols. Yeah, that's interesting. Well...

Ed, you're number 007. So, yeah, it's a pretty big episode. Nobody read too much into that, though. Yeah, right. But so you consider yourself a non-permissive environment specialist. Yeah. And you run an Instagram page, Ed's Manifesto, and you teach courses on, you know, how to blend in, how to survive, etc.

how to escape and evade. And after talking with you a little bit, it seems kind of like a hodgepodge class full of skills that seem to be very resourceful.

And I think that is fascinating. I actually wanted to go to your course in Cincinnati. 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 hood rat shit. I mean, 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, converse with and 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 moleskin notebook that I would write down things in as far as like class notes. Yeah. 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 your little manifesto was the thing that he kept asking. No, I'm just writing some notes. Right. I'm just kidding. I'm just fucking with you. So that's where the tagline as manifesto 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 detain. 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.

Example, 15-year-old Fernando. 15-year-old Fernando is the guy that just kid distributes cocaine and heroin to a lot of the people that travel into one of the Zonas Rosas or the tolerance zones in Tijuana. That's where all the prostitution takes place, legal prostitution, allowed prostitution.

We were on him for a while. We finally caught him, you know, caught him slipping. He was buying a cell phone for his girlfriend. And that's where we got him. Handcuffed him, put him in the car. He got free of the handcuffs, ran. A few of our guys caught him. And a few of them wanted to beat him up. I said, calm down, grabbed him, took him back to the car, zip tied him and handcuffed him this time and asked him, how did you get out of those?

And he proceeded to show me, right? Yeah. He used a small piece of metal from a street sweeper, a street sweeper bristle. And he would always carry a, like a rare magnet or a magnet to pick some of those up and he would always hide them 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.

Those two tricks I learned from him I've been showing across the country to some high-level people and some low-level people and they always get amazed by it Yeah, and I always say I learned this from a 15 year old kid Well, I mean you call it hood rat shit but all it is is fucking real shit that actually works that people have come up with and and You've documented it all and put it into you know 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 a lot of digital recordings of some of the conversations I have with some of these people. I have pictures and moleskins related to hood rat 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 reverberates the pressure on the steel. And all those notes and pictures and stuff like that, I have no idea how much I have, but I don't hoard it. A lot of people hoard that stuff. I've shared some of that stuff pretty openly on my social media. Yeah.

And every time I get a chance to train with or go and advise in 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 Service Academy, to some of those guys. Specifically how to hide things that are non-ferrous and non-magnetic 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 public, 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 abduction groups. The reason they made that that way is that a lot of these guys actually got to see an open laptop and doing some site exploitation stuff down in Mexico.

And I got to see their browsing history, which was fascinating to me, you know. What are these guys looking at? And YouTube, escape and evasion videos. People escaping from zip ties, doing the classic bursting method to escape from them. So they decided to put angles in them so that when you tried 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. Yeah. And you, and we as people that share some of that stuff are better served educating the public about some of these things. Yeah. So they can see how deep the hole goes and they can counter that preparation that the bad guys have or the counter guys have to what we are going to plan to do to counteract that. And if, if we find ourself in a situation like that, that's a small example of it. But, uh,

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 new tactics evolve. Yeah.

you know, because of that. But... An example of Hong Kong protests are using lasers. All it took was their action. Now they change the way people do things. Yeah. So, you know, some of those lasers you can source on in 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 weaponize basically focused light. Yeah. 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 kind of 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 live safely in the confines of whatever community they 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 that the well is deep. I get a lot of the negativity they get is usually based on the whole, you shouldn't share this openly. 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So 9-11, where were you? What did you do after 9-11? I was in the 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, it put the economy in the toilet along the border region, specifically in Tijuana, which lives off the border. 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 9/11. 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. I saw an ad in the newspaper that they wanted young, unmarried, no kids, bilingual young men for government work. I thought it was going to be community policing or some sort of information analysis type thing.

All of a sudden, I was going through paramilitary training and getting my hair shaved off by a bunch of Mexican GAFA guys. And I don't know what it was in for. Yeah. There was this open door when we go in there. The academy that I went to was a regional academy. It 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. Mm-hmm.

But a police academy, you know, they can get away with that. So it was not good enough to be a prison, but they turned it into a police academy, which is fascinating. Yeah. We were treated, they told us at the start, there was this colonel there. He said, we have two things for you, pan y verga, which is bread and dick. And guess what? Bread ran out two days ago. So all you're getting is dick, right? They had 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 backtrack it real quick. So were you, you were already being fed into, you

Like almost an elite unit of the 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. Yeah. But I thought it was going to be an analysis job, listening to phone calls, maybe translating stuff that I would hear somewhere in an office somewhere. And all of a sudden I was getting handed a ballistic vest, a Glock, and a G3 rifle. Just told the...

They would give us a badge and then they would tell us, just don't put it on, this will get you killed if you see this badge. So yeah, it was pretty badly organized. The training was very low quality. I remember getting trained how to shoot a Beretta 92FS pistol, a 99mm Beretta 92FS pistol.

And I shot 20 rounds out of it while going through training, basic training there. And when I got out, I got a Glock inside of a case. And I've never seen a Glock before. It's like looking at this thing, like, where's the safety? Like, where's the, you know, I was trying to figure this out. It was that type of retarded, low-level training. And, you know, you make fun of the guys that get the AK-47 shot around them.

to get them acquainted to combat. I was one of the guys on the ground getting shot with the AK-47 around to get them acquainted to... All it gave me was bad hearing. That's a good way to make death and dumb people. But 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. How bad were the cartels at that time? They were pretty bad, but 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, 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 roll around and kicked off. It was like there was bad stuff and violence happening.

But he basically militarized and basically gave a white card to governors across the country to do whatever they had to do to go after the cartels. Oh, shit. So that's when things really got interesting. There was a lot of fractioning going on with high-level cartel guys being grabbed and the one cartel turning into two, allegiances being tested around the country and...

kind of the violence 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 XYZ to say. That's what, one of the first lessons that I got was trust no one. Damn. 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 they estimate over 250,000 people

People have been murdered. Those are those are official numbers. So it's probably more. Yeah. Also, they don't count the people that went missing. Yeah. Body disposal turned into an industrial effort in places like Tijuana, where the famous stew maker was was active.

So what happened is that Felipe Calderon basically federalized the efforts against drugs and he put the military into the fight. And he also took 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 and they didn't. And also we knew our way 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 stew maker and actually got to meet him and talk to him. The stew maker was employed by the elements of the Sinaloa cartel. He used to actually work for the Tijuana, the Arellano Felix cartel, but there was a split that happened and he went over to the Sinaloa 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.

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 at any hardware store. I didn't, didn't, didn't get a lot of attention because he was a, he would always dress like an Albany, like a worker, like a construction worker. He would, you know, make his caustic mixture, uh,

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 it in the next batch. That's a sign of craft. Somebody showed him that. So, you know, it makes me wonder. The amount of people that he got rid of as far as the bodies go...

Is unknown. You know, 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 that I heard. One guy got rid of 5,000 bodies. Yeah, he never murdered anybody though. He said they would just get, you would just get bodies brought in. In a scene out of Auschwitz,

Where he was found, there was a room full of shoes and clothing. It was creepy as hell to see. All those shoes and clothing belonged to somebody. And they just made these bodies disappear. 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 is no such thing as being a cop in Mexico and not being shady somehow. Even I was kind of shady maybe. I don't know. But one of the older guys, we saw there was this pedestrian bridge and they had three bodies hanging from it. And I stood there and I thought, that's horrible. That's a horrible, cruel thing to do. The older guy said, the body's a gift. You 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. Damn. That in a place where that hanging a body from a bridge is a sign of kindness. Yeah. Well, that's a, that's a different kind of hell. That, uh, that, that can put some shit into perspective. Fuck man. How long, uh, how long after your,

How long into your career, into your law enforcement career in Tijuana did it take for it to become real? Where you're like, 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 Baja State. And I got to see...

It was immediately the no fucks given by the cartels. So I remember me and probably eight other guys moving through downtown Tijuana in full kit, driving around in some marked vehicles, getting the order to stop from the lead car that was in front of us. And we parked aside, and everybody ran out of the cars and adopted defensive positions.

A convoy of probably, I'd say probably somewhere around 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 had army uniforms. We didn't know who they were. We're getting calls from the 911 service they have down there from the municipal police that they were municipal cops, but they clearly weren't municipal cops. No.

So we just got in a Mexican standoff with them. Nobody shot around, but they just passed by us. We called for support from the local police, and nobody showed up. 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 that's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not like this.

Fuck, man. There's no winning a lot like this. Why do you think there were no shots fired? They didn't feel threatened by us. They didn't have any fear. So they just passed by and actually went to a local little restaurant there and adapted positions around it, had dinner, and then went back to their cars and left. No support came on our end. So that's when you realize how fucked you are and how no support and how there's just no backing there.

This was before the Felipe Calderon administration. Slowly but surely things changed. 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 opponent, the enemy, the cartel guys.

It took some time. At the start of it, it was just hopeless. Just hopeless. Yeah. Going through the motions, I think it 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 crossed the street, went to this convenience 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. They were zip-dyed and put into a van. They were found 24 hours later. One of them had his ID screwed to his forehead. They were being hunted. Yeah.

You know, that's when, like, paranoia. Less than a year. That's less than a year. And I came out of there in a generation of 32 people, and a lot of them are gone. But those were the first really close ones to me that I saw just leave in a horrible way. They're all young, you know? Like, I knew, like, I'd just been to a party with the girl, and I met the girlfriend of one of them.

It was a thing that told them, don't marry, don't get girlfriends because you don't want to leave widows. Just for perspective, it's a thing to be ashamed of or to hide if your profession is a cop, or at least it was back then. So because we're not the, depending on where you were, cops are despised. Yeah. So what would a typical day look like?

look like? What was your mission? It depends on the time of my career, like some of the harder core stuff. I was attached to a director by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Izaola for the first part of his administration as directing us. He's the one that really changed things. Like he was our

He was the guy, you know, I always equate him to a general math type individual. He was a lieutenant colonel that came out of the war college in Mexico, a 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 specialty training protecting somebody, but I got assigned to his security detail at the start of his turn as a director. And I went out patrolling with him in Tijuana. That was probably one of the most life-changing, altering experiences. There's this guy, you see this guy, he refused to wear a...

a um a lanyard uh um a strap on his rifle so he'd carry his ar in 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 together isn't coming after you he would have these meetings with the whole group and just say

I want villains. I want to fight fire with fire. If you're here for romantic reasons, get the fuck out of the room. I want bodies, not detainees. Did you like working for him? I mean, I think he treated us like dog shit.

But we felt the support. Yeah, he was a 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 for that We would always see him in the front lines. We did this raid on his compound in Baja where they guns drugs Everything was going on with stolen vehicles

money falsification, they were falsifying bills and it was an insane compound we found out there and they actually had a lion in there as well, which that's good 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 that had a bunch of bungalows there and

Some of the bungalows were actually rented out and some American families were staying there 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 sides and seeing this superhero character in the form of Lieutenant Colonel Lazo. Just standing there. The rounds were coming from all over.

Like, you can't make this shit up. We hit this place and he was with us throughout. He didn't hide somewhere or go to the background. And he was with us for all of it. It's probably one of the longest days as far as kicking doors in that I had in my life. There's a bunch of bungalows. Each time we would hit one, there was people and there was weird things and there were guns, whatever.

We hit all these bungalows at the end of it. There was a weird door, like a steel door with a refrigerator with a bunch of, uh, suckling, frozen suckling pigs. And I was like, what's going on here? Right. I remember I had my MP5 with a light on it. One of the, one of the, uh, the stream light ones, the first ones, the yellowish light. Remember 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. Um,

Open the steel door and go in there. And in the corner, like something out of a movie, this furry object just stood and turned around. I could see its lights, its eyes light up. The light was a lion. They had a lion in the room. They had a pet lion because cartels. They did one of those. And you got a fucking MP5. I have an MP5. Holy shit. In my mind, 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. It's like, and then we had to, the whole thing about now, what do we do with this lion? Lieutenant Colonel, he's all that walks in. I was like, what's in there? It's a lion. Okay. Don't open the door. We won't. Right. Calm, collected guy.

Mean some of the things that we experienced were completely out of this world. I never saw him bat an eye. All right 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 it took the took the use of his legs. I shot him in the back and

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.

I've supported him during these runs, even out, you know. Yeah. He's one of those guys that never acknowledges people, you know. He's like one of those leaders that any small hint of a pat on the back is just beyond him. Yeah. But he shared when I started getting a bit more notoriety, he shared something of mine on his social media. He said, oh, this man, this is one of the guys that I used to work with.

You should listen to him. He's talking about some of the work we did. And that was like an insanely surreal... Yeah. ...disacknowledgement of my existence. But that felt awesome. That was beyond awesome. And then, you know, and then I went over there and talked to him, and he humbled me back again. What's your name again? Yeah, 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...

with you and how many guys were on the cartel side? I mean, usually somewhere in the numbering in the 30s or 50s 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. So a lot of times we were outnumbered, completely outnumbered, surrounded. We had to basically adopt a defensive position and just wait it out.

Until the cavalry came in, 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 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'd call in 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 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 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 at high levels. Recently, the head of the National Security Administration or police force in Mexico under the Calderon administration was arrested for cartel ties. So...

I mean, again, trust no one. Yeah. Trust no one. So thinking back on that, we would, you know, 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. That's all I was.

How often were you guys going on raids? Was it every night? Every night. Was it twice a night? Every night. Every night we would get something of interest and off we went. Or we would get anonymous reports of armed people somewhere or whatever. And it was basically a race to see who could get there 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 to 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 would hear something was going on and just flip that back on. There's something to be said about the people you meet and you relate 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, going off shift and whatever happens, I'm fine. 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, as they call them down there, we would pull the string. We'd find a guy with a cell phone and the cell phone had him with an AK, gold AK on it.

And that would lead us to somebody else. And that would lead us to a house. And that would lead us to two 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 or three nights of just raiding and hitting houses all at once. Was there always shots fired? Sometimes. A lot of times. I was in a few big ones.

There's a famous one, La Cupula. People can look this up. There's a lot of footage of that. La Cupula was basically a castle-like structure house in Tijuana. It had a giant dome on top of it. It looked like a mosque. There was a report of armed people inside of it. So responding units went there and they started getting fire from on top of that cupula structure. 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're 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 in that regard back then

All of the police units showed up, like from the federal to the state to the local. And finally the army showed up with a .50 cal. This is the same fight? Yeah. How long did this go on? It probably took four hours maybe. Four hours? Or five hours. And this is in the middle of Tijuana. 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 politicians so we had access to armored suburbans. So we're bringing in the armored suburbans to see if we can evacuate some of these kids. It was a shit show. Everybody was shooting, nobody knew who, like some of the people who were showing up there were cops were wearing civilian clothing including us. So it was a shit show.

eventually it subsided and on the inside Open up to some of the doors in the army broke in and opened some of the doors to this place and a Fully uniformed the municipal police officer stepped out 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 over there. 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 ransoming out. And a lot of them got 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 freshly fresh. Not like somebody that's been sleeping.

in the same clothing for months. Yeah. And also they didn't have any raw wrist with the restraints, so they immediately got bagged and tagged too. A bunch of them were cops. No shit. Police radios and we would use satellite radios, Matra systems, and they had those there too. It was apparently encrypted 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, 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 were flying everywhere. Nobody was respecting anything.

They were in a fight for their lives, were cornered. So that was all they were up to. You can see them trying to snipe specific things. We had the helicopter flying overhead and you could see them trying to hit that thing out of the sky. Yeah, I mean, they do definitely have elements of 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 the police element in the community. 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 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 Sinaloa a few years back at Culiacan.

uh this the the center of the scene along cartel basically um 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 you know who is the governor governor there you know cartel guys or

yeah some of these communities that they built uh that build around what they do are pretty insane you know kids 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 um kids just running around with ak-47s and like in the middle of town um guarding somebody that was high level

This is, this is the, that's why I call it the upside down. Things are flipped in some of these places. Yeah. How long, how long were you in that, in that element where you were doing raids on a nightly basis? Probably somewhere along, probably nine years. Nine years? Probably nine years of that. Nine fucking years? Nine years of that. That's like 2000, 2000.

what is that, 2,700-something raids? I mean, that's just walking. That's a fuck ton of raids. Oh, that's when we talked last night at dinner. So I talked to you about how's your knees and how's your back? Because that's usually what goes. How much mentioned planning goes into one of these raids? Is it like, we're fucking going? Yeah, we're going. We're going. We're figuring things out. We got pretty good at figuring out how things were built and how...

A lot of the housing down there is pretty shitty. I mean, a lot of the economic housing is pretty cut and paste, basically. So we would know how things were built. Also, a lot of the shanty towns that we were working were very flammable.

Some of them were built out of cardboard or just tarp. So you wouldn't know what you would get. Some sites would hit what apparently was a shantytown type house and then would end up in a marble floor, four-story house with Doberman pinchers that have pedigrees guarding the outside of it. So we would never know what we would get there.

Some surveillance went into some of the work we did, and we'd try and figure things out. We tried to prepare as best we could for it. But we just, you know, I remember just experience would make us gather things in what we would carry. So I remember hitting this house once,

clear door there, just went up to the door, started banging on it, then crowbarring 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? I mean, you had to applaud that. And there's this secret door tunnel system thing on the back and nobody was in there when we got in there.

It was the ingenuity, basically. It was a back and forth ingenuity thing. We would try and always figure out how we would 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 over 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 mains into some of these places that can flush things. We would have to figure out ways of hitting everything simultaneously, so we'd have to spread out. Communication was a big issue. And also imagine...

going and hitting several houses in the same area at once. Crossfire's a bitch. Yeah. And there's just no way to kind of figure that out at times. So are 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. Hey, there's a bunch of weird cars here or some people that are not from here moving in with guns heading your way. And not to mention they're supporting the whole fucking community. Sometimes. Yeah. So again, it's,

It was losing battle in a lot of ways. I mean, some of the success we had, the president Felipe Calderon recently wrote a kind of a biography on, on his term. And he specifically mentions Baja as a victory for him. And it did, it was, you know, we calm things down in that part of the country. It was one of the only successes that, that, that, uh,

his whole, you know, counter-narcotic drug, counter-cartel effort had. 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 2,700 fucking raids that you've done. If you felt like you've made a dent and... But you did, and then it went back. Yeah. So, I mean...

the raids and then getting to work as a bodyguard in an advisory role for a governor that worked in Baja. And then I'm just trying to figure out all the effort that was being put into fighting these two large groups of cartels that were fighting for the richest drug route on the planet.

that goes right through Tijuana 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, you'd 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 revert back to the same problem. 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. A simple example of this: Felipe Calderón decided to militarize the police forces. So basically turned them into more of a militaristic approach to fight some of these cartels. The guy that replaced him said, "We're not going to do that. We're going to do something completely different." So they made a new police force and militarized it.

And then the current administration is a leftist guy, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Very to the left, crazy guy. Not a very good president. The first thing he said, I'm going to do completely the opposite of what all these people did. I'm going to amnesty for the cartels, abrazos no balazos policy, which means hugs, not bullets.

we're going to completely do something different. And the first thing he does is he forms a national guard force and he puts the military in charge. So he's like, this is the same thing again, right? Yeah. So it's a systemic form of amnesia. Every six years, they forget everything and just do it 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 the life of my family if I had to. He's a very stand-up guy. I witnessed his efforts. He didn't hide, you know. He really believed in what he was doing. And now he's being persecuted for cartel ties, which I know for a fact are bogus. But it's a leftist president now.

And he's going after all the conservatives to the right administrations in his best. That's the thing. He's not addressing the fucking problem. No. The easiest thing is to blame who was before. How long did it take for... It sounds like he cleaned up Baja pretty fucking good and made a massive dent. It was the most dangerous... 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 Lieutenant Colonel Azola, took charge of the local police forces there. He disarmed all of the Tijuana police force and cleaned it up, which was an insane thing to do.

It dropped off that list and things pacified. Cartel members and cartel convoys ceased to be in the open thing. Like when I started, you would see these fully armed cartel convoys just in the middle of the day just drive through the city and abduct somebody and just take them and nobody would do anything. He put fear into the equation. That in the open presence stopped. Yeah.

Abductions for ransom were a 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 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 of a community policing force. So again, bad times create bad men, strong men, strong men.

good times and we went into that cycle now and now we're back again into the whole Tijuana is on the one of the but I think it was Last year was the most dangerous city on the planet. No murders per capita And then there's a new generation cartel ally ship with the do you wanna cartel? But it's fighting for control over Tijuana with the Sunil or cartel and it's back to square one now seven eight people die every every night in Tijuana damn and

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 friends, you had already said that you had friends that had 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, they were always, they were always

You would always get intermediaries approaching you like, hey, Ed, this is much money. All it takes is for you to work with us. But it was obvious to anybody. As soon as you take an offer like that, you're owned. You're theirs. 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 or get killed by the rival group that you're working against.

Or your career ends, right? So I got a lot of offers, a lot of them. I 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 into a position where there was no choice. Plata o plomo, silver or lead. Colombian term, but it's popular in Mexico. Another code for it was one finger up and one finger down. What do you want? You want the...

You want plata, plomo. You know, you 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 and bury it in a wall or something or just be on 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's kind of scratching my head at it. A lot of us went through a certification process called CALEA. 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 got 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 that 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 were careful about everything, but I felt a bit better that everybody was going through it. Administration ends, somebody comes, another administration comes in.

And a landmark case declares everybody that 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, their wages being paid forward. And you had people that were suspected of seeing a lower cartel participation in the office now back at the office. So it got really bad. Yeah.

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. And 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.

There was just no getting out of it or 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 in 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, the duffel bag, handed in my MP5, my gun, my badge, everything, radio.

I 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, God bless the United States Marine Corps. And they helped me cross the border. Family in tow by this point, which was probably the hardest part. I had choices.

in the U S that I didn't have it in Mexico. Yeah. 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, got out of the job and seeked employment elsewhere. Yeah. Do you keep in touch with any of those guys? No, it's a, it's, 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's people that I worked with for years. I slept on the same floors as them, ate out of the same tuna cans as them. Yeah. Went to some of their birthday parties with their kids. And now I see them rolling out there in some luxury vehicles, getting $12,000 paid to them every two weeks as a salary. Yeah.

and working for some of the most powerful drug organizations on the planet with a lot of government training on their side, a lot of American government specialty training on their side, and just basically upping 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 to beat that year probably. And it's being fueled by people like me

that went into that fight got all these that all this experience all these skills and They'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 fueling some of this fight as well. You know some of these people just what what else I'm gonna do, right? Yeah None of them had the the opportunity that I had so and I don't blame them realistically. I just can't blame them. Yeah, I

yeah but a lot of them are out there well i'll tell you what let's take a uh let's take a quick break and then uh when we come back we'll kind of talk about the structure of uh some of these guys and you know and then and uh go into that there's a lot of people looking for land these days as we continue to uh lose our freedoms so we're on our way to look at a piece of property out in the middle of nowhere

And, uh, 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, uh, I want to kind of go into some of the structure of the cartels and, uh, and then I got like a hodgepodge of questions that are just a bunch of random shit, but, um,

He 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, it may have been in 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.

sounded like maybe five to 10 family members. And within a few years that had grown into a cartel organization that was over a hundred thousand, uh, with over a hundred thousand members of that cartel. And, uh, 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, uh,

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 want to 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 into 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 a lot of that's one of the things 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 night in Tijuana is like seven to eight or something like that every night. They're in different sales points in Tijuana where they're selling there locally. So that also feeds their organizations. They also have money within legitimate businesses.

There's a few tequila companies out there that have been linked to people like El Chapo's family. So it's legitimate money growing out of some of these. I think 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 they can buy with some of the money generated from trafficking drugs into the U.S. 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 people.

Each other's lowest level guys. The street guys. Their most exposed level, which is their sales points, local sales points. So how are they identifying each guy? You follow the user. You follow the user. Yeah, and they're pretty easy to spot. You follow the user, and there's a... I'm sorry about the French that I keep saying. You know, it's bad words, but they're the words that we used to use when we worked.

If you want to find somebody, find where they sleep, work, and fuck. When I say fuck, I mean where they partake in their vices. So like even we would follow the people that we recognize as users. We'd follow them around and we immediately recognize sales points. So traditionally, most of the sales points in Tijuana specifically, they're all kind of on the outskirts of the city, like in the eastern part of the city or some of the older areas.

Older parts of the city there on the hillsides 51 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 hillsides and then come back Okay, so that's where most of the killings happening mostly, you know again sales points and they identify each other because you know And grab a junkie off the street. Where are you buying it over there? That's not one of our guys Okay, I guess what I was

Kind of going towards is do they have a any specific markings for different cartels? No, no They've become very good at not doing that From tattoos these two 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 remove tattoos. And it was like a standing order within some of the organizations. Yeah. So they're very good at that and detaching themselves from some of these sales points. Okay. So the high-level distributors will give the loads that are going to be sold in different parts of the city to somebody else that is unattached.

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 bookkeepers. I mean, they're like, if you miss 20 pesos out of your cut over the day, you're going to get a visit by somebody. Okay. So,

It just seems like killing each other off, you know, cartel versus cartel, the turf war or whatever it is that's going on and why they're trying to eliminate each other. We just said, you know, one organization grew to 100,000, 100,000 person strong cartel within a few years. And it

When an organization's that fucking big, there's no way, I feel like there's no way you could possibly know who's on your side, who's selling drugs for cartel X, and who's selling drugs for cartel Y. So they divide themselves up into cells, basically. So an example of this was happening in Tijuana back in 2008. A Sinaloa cartel had a cell in Tijuana.

And they had a lieutenant that was in charge of the cell that reported directly back to Sinaloa, to the head of the Sinaloa cartel.

which was not El Chapo, by the way, as a lot of your U.S. media and a lot of Mexican media wants to make him out as the head of the Sinaloa cartel. El Chapo Guzman was probably number three or number four in the whole scale of things. He was not the head of the Sinaloa cartel. No shit. But we'll talk about that later if you want. But what they usually do is they sent out un lugar teniente, 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 enemies or people that want to gain control over any sort of illicit or illegal activity. This includes human trafficking. This includes...

for ransom. This includes stolen vehicle trafficking from the U.S. into Mexico or even in Mexico when they steal some of the newer vehicles and traffic in 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 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, sicarios, 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 they go out there hunting people.

Rival distribution networks or rival cartel guys. That's their whole deal, right? The reason why they're hot these cigars are hard to get is that they they drive around and roam around without any guns They find somebody that they want to get after and there's two ladies old women probably in their late 60s Drive up to them and hand over the guns that they use and

They use them and they get handed back to these old ladies and these old ladies are inconspicuously just moving about the city with a trove of guns in their cars. Or they just dump them, right? So that's the enforcement arm of it. And then there's the distribution and security arm of it.

They distribute the drugs, they take care of distribution or movement of loads of drugs going into the U.S. and or money coming down from the U.S. or recently there's been an uptake in precious metals being trafficked from the U.S. into Mexico as a way of payment instead of money. So like gold, basically.

So there's a whole administrative distribution part of it where they move money to the U.S., money from the U.S. and guns from the U.S. and drugs up into the U.S. So there's a whole thing there. Then there's the administration side of it. You know, people have to keep tabs over numbers. It's a lot of money. It'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. So like when the COVID thing hit, sales dropped.

So that kind of freaked 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 shit. So they developed this drug Uber, basically, right? In some parts of the country. So you have your enforcement or security arm. You have your distribution arm and security.

And you have your administrative arm. And then you have this at the center of all this, there's the figure of a lugar teniente or a 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 it's like a cell within a cell. So we would get somebody that was in charge of a group of 40 sicarios.

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, when I was active, Tijuana was divided up into four pieces. There was a playa near the beach.

There was El Centro and the old federal Colonia, which is like that's one of the richest drug markets. That's where the Americans walk in to buy some of their drugs and then move back to the U.S. The east side of the city where a lot of the trafficking happens.

from within Mexico, like large drug loads 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 the activity there.

And some places like this, the older colonies and places like La Mesa, Las Huertas, 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. He would have the investigative police on their payroll. He would 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 phone company there. You know, they had all these connections everywhere. That's how they worked.

Backing up 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 sicarios. They'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

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. Does that include, is it run the same way in the United States? Yes. Yes. So more so than a corporation, it kind of reminds you of some sort of underground government because they,

they not only provide money sometimes for things like schools and 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 uh against uh so on some of these guys they lower their pants and just you know

Go to town on them and they're that's corporal punishment provided by a quasi narco 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 their business and they Just like the government taxes they tax as well. So sometimes they task certain companies for protection and

So there's a bunch of mining operations going on along the northern border in Mexico. They're all taxed by cartels, depending on where they are, so they can continue operating. On the U.S. side, you get some of the same structure, not as overt. Again, they can't be as overt up here 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 corrupted as other parts of the world specifically in Mexico. So there's this they work with fear here But in the same way you they have a single Lieutenant or cartel head that runs the operation very much like they did down there with us with a with an armed branch or enforcement branch or security branch that goes off and does things for them and

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, sometimes clothing.

Sometimes the weird 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 smuggled back into New 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 and

In Mexico, that's not the case. Distribution down there is done by locals. They gather people that work for them as distributors. Up here in the U.S., you see a lot of motorcycle gangs being utilized by cartels as distribution or local gangs. Chicago is a good example of this. The Sinaloa cartel runs a lot of their distribution with some of the local black gangs in places like Chicago. Yeah.

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 cartel to distribute this drug in this community where he doesn't look or talk like the people there. Yeah. So they're smart about that.

So they go through secondary people like that here in the U.S. That's kind of what changes in how they operate here. So these guys, they're creating their own... 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 in the US because they're going to 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 pause that the country's going through. So they're being extremely fucking proactive with that. So think about this.

The largest, fastest growing cartel in Mexico was the New Generation Cartel. It grew exponentially in influence and power, not just in Mexico but in the U.S. during the COVID epidemic. Sinaloa 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 Tijuana, to feed their apparatus.

The reason why that happened is because the New Generation cartel controls the Pacific side ports in Mexico, in places like Lima. So their distribution was clear and easy. China was sending their stuff. They were getting their product and they were growing exponentially. So the pause only affected law enforcement in Mexico was also kind of paused a bit.

But they grew exponentially with the shutdown. Also, the Sinhala cartels capacity to meet demand lowered. Their capacity was uninterrupted. And they've been working on growing their influence on the U.S. side for years. There was a recent operation that nabbed about 86 of them or something like that by the DEA, including...

including one of the head leader of the new generation cartels, kids, right? So they've been growing underground here in the U.S. for years. And that hit they had was nothing. Yeah, didn't even put a dent in it. They're growing. And again, the fentanyl heroin drug market, now bogus fake pain pills coming out of China.

Also coming into the US. 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 taking 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 no rules. Why is China's interest in Mexico 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 destable place that's getting destabilized even more. So there's 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. 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 Uyghur 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 getting 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 a 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 to anybody that kind of looks into this. One thing is regional destabilization. That usually happens when they want something from that country. So one thing happened politically within the U.S. and Mexico relationship.

the Trump phenomenon, right? 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 going to 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 are planted them immediately. No shit. So,

Something happened in that interval where somebody on this side figured out that probably a mistake and things started balancing out Interesting thing to note we currently have in Mexico a leftist 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 is 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 mineable deposits of lithium right on the border. China, through a Canadian company, 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 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 that's happening in that area. Some of the people that I've talked to,

In the security field, some of the people that I've talked to in the security field, outside of the friendly neighbors of the U.S., like in Mexico, there's a lot of Cuban intelligence services, service operations going on all over the place, just like places like Venezuela. You can see a clear partnership and influence with China there. It's in their best interest to gain ownership and control over a place like Mexico, which is currently going through a

through a lot of bad stuff, a lot of crime, a lot of destabilization. There's whole swaths 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 cartels

Coming into Mexico and kind of setting up shop the the largest one of the largest the cash seizures was Done on a guy Jen Lee said gone Chinese Mexican national Somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million dollars cash found at his house. He was trafficking fentanyl legally and meth precursors into the country and

There's some some sort of paperwork legality. So there's some shady stuff going on there How long does this shit been going on with China as soon as as soon as the u.s. Got a taste for meth I think that's probably the start of it. When was that ten years ago? Probably bit more further back than probably 15 years ago 15 years. Yeah, then there's this been this has just been exponentially growing Is it is it weird? How do I phrase this?

Are you seeing more and more Chinese people? Is it becoming like a common thing to see? One of the largest communities with Chinese nationals are growing all along the border. Wow. Right. So, I mean, again, this is not something in the realm of conspiracy. This is clearly happening out in the open in a lot of regards.

And people can research this and 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 is to deny what's right in front of your face. To deny that more and more Norinco-made military-grade stuff is popping up in print places 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 U.S.? Tons. If you want to confront a military, the U.S. is a superior military force. How can you corrode that?

It makes perfect sense. Generationally. And the thing with China is they're fucking extremely effective. No way. At whatever they do. They have a lifetime president. Yeah. One being they don't fucking play by rules either. Yeah. And, you know, China will come in and they'll open a whorehouse immediately to start gathering intelligence because...

People are gonna go to the fucking whorehouse. They're gonna fuck a Chinese hooker The hooker is gonna milk them 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 over Central America and specifically Venezuela. That's how they act. All right, that's there People are playing checkers with these guys that are playing chess and they play the long game That's something I think the US doesn't get and

example china has a lifetime president yeah cuba has a lifetime regime with the castro with the castros they're playing a really long game against a a country that has elections and politics change every every every every uh every four eight years you know and uh

And they see the clear line and divide. So, I mean, there's blood in the water. And I think they can smell that. Everybody's taking advantage of it. Yeah. And again, foreign eyes. 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 China isn't the villain and

the country and people kind of coming into the defense of that people within the nba not wanting to speak up about china because the chinese are the best uh one of their best clients as far as buying some of the rights to watching some of these nba games disney i mean yeah you can't say anything wrong how surreal is it that you can't speak uh critically about china if you work for the nba

I mean, that is outside of the realm of what I thought being an American was. Yeah. Right? So I don't know. It's a weird time. But I think they're clearly waging some sort of long-term war campaign against the U.S. And Mexico is being utilized as a tool for that. Yeah. Interesting. With the fentanyl, going back to that, what are they putting the fentanyl in?

Heroin. Heroin and also now they're building or making fake pain medication.

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. But back when it was active, they were crudely made. But, you know, somebody hands you some pain medication in a dark room somewhere, you take it, you don't even know what it is. Yeah. So usually some of the heroin that's being grown in the hillsides out there,

A weird phenomenon happened. California legalized marijuana in Colorado, a lot of places are kind of following suit in the U.S. So the demand for marijuana went down. It's not over, though. They still traffic marijuana into the U.S.,

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 Asia.

It's actually very low quality and strength. So the cartel said, you know, put fentanyl in it to give it a kick. It just seems kind of counterproductive because heroin is already so fucking addictive. And then when you do hear of people overdosing on heroin...

A lot of the times, you know, it comes out that it was laced with fentanyl. Yeah. 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 shifted to methamphetamines for a while because their main thing, and methamphetamines and cocaine. But then they realized how much of a grassroots effort there was in the U.S. to make their own.

And they didn't like that. No. 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 opiates already in the U.S., a lot of the crackdown that went on in the U.S. against prescription opiates were left without a product. Yeah. And it was a perfect storm for the cartels to kind of fill that void. 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. When it comes to Taliban, Al Qaeda, that's ISIS. I've been researching anything just 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, like 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 from horrible videos to Farsi translation books found in the desert somewhere.

So I've always been always on the lookout for anything Middle Eastern in 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 Islam.

the designation. They're afraid of the terrorist designation. That's something that puts fear in them. That's something we thought, all those, I thought it was coming after that family was murdered on the border. Sorry for saying Mormon massacre, American massacre. They were American nationals. And they also had a Mexican citizenship. I don't

don't care if they pray to the moon. They were 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...

I think that's going to change things, but it was walked back. Again, regional stability, I'm 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 the 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. Anything that smells of it, they won't touch it or they will take care of it themselves. It's not good for their business. So I don't see that becoming a problem. But who knows? This is cold. People are moving more freely in and out of Mexico now. Again, the government is losing a grip on its ports of entry.

It's declining in some places. We saw this with the Culiacanazo incident where the government forces captured one of El Chapo's kids and were basically beaten by the whole of the Sinaloa cartel. So, you know, who knows? I mean, it could be something on the horizon. It'll be interesting. I mean, they're definitely dipping into their profits by now. And the funny thing about them is they only use that to fund...

their intention yeah you know and uh we know their intentions and if they can't uh you know if that takes away from the money that they're dumping into their intentions then i mean man it could be something we'll see in the like it could be something on the horizon yeah um again i think uh mexico is getting worse there's there's no if answer or about it um

And people blame the COVID epidemic as far as the economic downturn that's going through. I mean, the incompetence and the death spike and the violence in Mexico flared up way before that. And again, it's a clear proxy war happening in Mexico between two major forces, American interests and Mexico.

Chinese, probably Chinese-sponsored state interests in Mexico. Roughly how many different cartels are down there? I mean, it's different numbers. 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 an organized crime group and work in a town, and we're a cartel that just dedicates themselves to this town. So there's a lot of them, 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 on and worry about. The New Generation Cartel, Cartel de Jalisco de Nueva Generación.

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 Sinaloa cartel. So the Sinaloa cartel basically made this Mata Zetas group to fight against the Zetas.

They turn into their own thing. They turn into a cartel that figured out like, well, we can be cartel ourselves. Yeah, okay, so let's gain control of, they gain strategic control of places like Guadalajara, places like Colima, where the major ports are. So they basically became the owners of the door for some of the precursors. And this was at the start of the shift from cocaine to heroin, fentanyl,

Precursors were meth. So they got in at the right time to get in control of that. They've been growing exponentially. And it's not a cartel like the Sinaloa cartel that flaunts their lavish lifestyles and gold guns and fast cars. They're very militaristic. They're very low-key in some ways. They've smartened up. Yeah, and they recruit. They're always recruiting from military to police.

They have legitimate training camps out there. You know, we used to see these ISIS Al-Qaeda training videos with the monkey bars. You know, that's happening now in Mexico. And there's actually...

like camps with these guys go out and train. There's rumors of American military guys advising them. It's the only cartel in Mexico that's, well, it's one of the only two only cartels in Mexico that has dominance over the skies, over their territories. So there's places in Guadalajara where helicopters don't fly because they're afraid to get knocked down. They've already knocked down a few.

So they're an incredible force to kind of face. They recently had a crackdown from the government going after him directly, which leads a lot of people to think that the federal government in Mexico has a deal with Sinaloa cartel. So there's some sort of effort being done against just the new generation cartel because they see him 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 who the Zeta cartel is, they were started by Mexican special operations guys, correct? Yeah.

Special Forces is 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 GAFE title.

Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, 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 routings, remained on. Different breed of guys, mostly college degrees, university degrees. Some of them have master's degrees. All of them have language skills. That's how you know these guys are special.

School of the Americas trained. A lot of them have pictures in Fort Bragg and some crazy places and received some crazy jungle warfare training in Colombia and other places in South America. So these guys were monsters, basically. And they were on government salaries, which are pretty shitty. Eventually, the Gulf Cartel, headed at that time by O.C. El Cardenas Guillen,

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 emptied out the armory filled their trucks left on patrol never came back. I

So all of a sudden you saw this high level, 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 Matazetas from the Sinaloa cartel, they figured out, hey, we're doing all the work. We can be our own cartel. So they split off. They were labeled as being some of the most ruthless cartels.

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 comes from secondhand 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 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 with random weaponry crowbar Rock so like then if you didn't do it, you would get kicked out So that's the type of individual that they were breathing right there Desensitizing these guys and then all of a sudden imagine you're this elite warfighter with all this training and

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... What are the local cops going to do with their revolvers? It enables the operator to reach maximum potential. Yeah. So they were unchained. One of the things that I don't hear talked about much, but during a time...

The Zetas allied themselves with the Tijuana Cartel to fight against Sinaloa. Zetas and Sinaloa are enemies, long enemies. And there was a prison break in Tijuana that was A-team level. Like, the A-team did it. I was working back then. I didn't get to witness it, but I got there to see the after effect.

Tijuana prison, ever seen the movie Get the Gringo by Mel Gibson? That's based on that prison. It's a very old prison. Basically, the city grew around it. It's still active. It's been trying to get deactivated for years, but they haven't been able to replace it completely.

A group of people dressed in medical garb and a few ambulances came to do a weekly transport of some of the members into their dialysis. It 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 in some of these guys. They managed to take out some high level cartel guys that were inside in a very coordinated thing. It shocked everybody how coordinated it was. Long standing rumor is it was Zeta guys.

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 we know where they came from. As part of 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. High. Oh, shit. High leg holsters. You know, high. Yeah, drop leg. Not the drop leg holster, like all the way down to the knee when somebody knows what they're doing. All of them had that high leg holster, just clearing the armor on some of them.

And they're wearing their lab coats to hide some of that stuff and all of a sudden they start working. 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 mean, I think it's the same in the U.S., you know, I mean...

Guys aren't, I mean, yeah, there are rumors of guys going down and doing shit like that in Latin America. But, you know, I mean, we saw a big, we saw a massive influx into the contracting world from the U.S. military. I mean, you can work U.S. 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, um, especially towards the beginning of the war, you could do that exact same fucking job. Um, 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 worth of salary in one fucking month on certain contracts as you could in, in, in, in an entire year, uh,

at a unit yeah and uh and so you know there's a price there too and uh the only way they tried to combat that was up the re-enlistment bonuses and and so when i got out uh there were

E7 and above, I think, was getting $150,000 re-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 get to keep whatever they find. Oh. So that's, I mean... Yeah, a little extra incentive. Also, Americans going down there, like I've heard rumors from...

specialty people going down and train training people in Mexico you see elements of of that and Everybody says ahead 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 90 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, you know tech

No. ACOG, right? So you get presented a 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 would see small elements of training and or some sort of specialty. Screws, screws being painted on there so they know where they were. Dialed in scopes. German glass.

spotter scopes found in conjunction with the with the long range shooting scopes so they have the dope on their gun the dope is the calculations for dope cards written dope cards well the first time i found one i didn't know what it was i i'd send it to uh to a marisoc uh friend of mine and so what what's this does this make sense to you oh yeah that's pretty cool where did you find that

Oh shit, that's not cool. One of the things that I saw once, duct taped to a rifle. So duct taped next to a rifle with the rounds on the duct tape. It's a very small detail that people might not know about that openly, but it's a thing I saw. 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. I formed a relationship with a lot of the advisors that would come in. I had good English, so I could form a rapport. And I would share some of these things with some people up here. And they would freak out with some of the details that I was seeing. Right now, what we're seeing is military grade night vision. The good stuff. The $24,000, $30,000 stuff 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, cranked out somewhere down there by 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. So they're getting the best training in the world.

Well, I think experience is a bitch of a teacher, but she will never lie to you. When you pair that with having a neighbor that has some of the best warfighters, I mean, the best warfighters in the world, that also get a lot of experience. There's some sort of cross-pollination there that happens and you get some scary stuff. Weaponized drones, we're seeing a lot more of those.

so basically civilian civilian grade weaponized drones with basically flying claymores flying around homemade claymores we're seeing a lot of those now um and the way they the way they're utilizing uh drones themselves uh before uh an event a criminal event so like they're getting some of their uh getting some of their tactics from something from somewhere you know that's 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. It's changed the uniform, changed the logo, but the same thing is happening. 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

to cocaine to meth to heroin heroin laced with fentanyl yeah cocaine's always been one of the biggest cocaine marijuana right even poppies as well uh but yeah the fentanyl fentanyl and heroin put together to make a solid product to fill the void uh within the the uh 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 want to one in that problem So they fill 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 and

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. California, very liberal, very interesting politics there, has a governor that has a winery

That did not shut down during the COVID epidemic because their employees were essential. Yeah. Were essentially endangered slaves from Mexico that have to work. No shit. So anybody experience any salad shortages in the U.S. and California during the COVID epidemic? You wonder what that is? What?

bunch of Mexicans working in those fields, illegally but legally. That's what's happening. That's a form of slavery. It's a clear-cut slavery right now happening in the U.S. And all these people are put into this country by criminal groups that make a shit ton of money off ransoming them to their families that are already settled here in the U.S. So let's say you want to come to the U.S. and I'm a coyote.

I'm a smuggler. I report back to a cartel because I couldn't work if I didn't. You're going to pay me whatever money you can, like $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 successfully cross.

Or I can just go the weird way and instead of crossing you physically through the border, through jumping the border, I can find a local like for you that already has paperwork, that lives legally in the U.S., 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 in the back seat and share the legal, legit paperwork with the guy sitting there in immigration. Let you pass and then give those IDs back to the guy that rented them out to me. Damn. That's one way. Or I can fly you to Canada and you just walk down. Yeah. 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 I'll give you credit. You're going to have to work in a certain field and a 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 U.S.,

Why do you think that is? Why do they find people in basically conditions of abduction? 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 happened a few years ago.

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. 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 moneymakers. People trafficking into the U.S. is something that feeds the cartel criminal organizations in the U.S., just like drugs. But it's one of those things that doesn't get talked about as much. When it comes to smuggling immigrants into the U.S., 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 to come over here? Both. Both? Both. And yes, 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. NSW member, reservist, Dan Stanchfield. He was one of the guys that gave me my first, gave me a lot of help and opportunities to be in the U.S. A bunch of Marines. Again, for some reason, I'm surrounded by them. And I thank God for that. But I had nothing. 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 support my daughter in that way. I could not have what I have here back there. And if I would have to stay back there, I would be dead right now. The vision or the dream of what it is to be an American and what it is to live in the United States is something very real and tangible 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 say, when I personally say the land of the brave, it's 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 it with an audience. I can do that where I'm from. So that's a very true thing. Again, completely from an outside perspective, it blows my mind that I can do this here. But a lot of them are fleeing from Mexico because of the horrid conditions that are in some places. Not all Mexico is...

shithole as the people up here like to say. There's some places that are amazing, but some places that do have a quality of life that is superior to places that I've been here in the U.S. You know, like I went to, I went to, I went to Detroit, you know, a few months back and that was pretty shocking. And somebody from the third world and I'm from TJ. And I said, well, man, this is rough, right? Yeah. I know that, I know not, not the whole of the U.S. is Detroit.

But some parts are, right? So I don't judge the whole country for what 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 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 I can see, again, I talked to people that are going through the process themselves legally. 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. I feel like I earned it. Some people don't go through that process.

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 traitor and all these things. Usually from second or third generation Mexican-Americans, that's who usually gets where I get most of the hate from. None of them 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 that's probably the best place to be and I 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 and and I fucking know Dan. Yeah, I

Yeah, I know Dan. So we'll have to talk about that. Dan and Kelly? We'll have to talk about Dan. Dan and Kelly? Offline. I don't know Kelly. Yeah. 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,

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 rough and it's hard. I'll say this again. The worst enemy of a 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, you know, there's something about us that we just don't, you know, give each other a hand for some reason. Doing my own research and kind of looking into how everything's run, it seems like a lot of the sayings and a lot of the way business is conducted through the Mexican drug cartels seems to be a model that they may have picked up from the Colombians from, you know, back in the 80s and 90s.

Even the sayings you're using. I listened to, I think it was you talk about the cemeteries and how the cemeteries are split. And I mean, it's the exact same fucking thing. You have all the, in Colombia, you have all the, you know, the community politicians and all of the chief of police buried on one side and 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 also, I know they also 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, like 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 shit. Like directly at the source. Like you can see enforcement and ownership all the way down there. I'm not saying they're replacing all the local organizations, but there's clear influence going the other way from origin points to all the way up. So some of the stuff that is being grown or taken outside of Colombia as far as growth,

cocaine growth is actually funded and supported by Mexican organizations because they see the potential to move production out of it, right? They're looking for ways to expand and modernize. There's cartel influence in Northern Africa. No shit's gone all the way over there, huh? There's a cartel group, a cartel cell that was captured somewhere in Australia or Indonesia or something. 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 international, basically. But what I see now is...

Mexico is taking the lead when it comes to all that, from the origin and the production to the transfer to even now in the U.S. to the distribution side of it, which is that's pretty telling as far as their influence on this side. Yeah, Pablo Escobar is, that's the guy. You see him referenced everywhere.

And you see some of the things he used to do down there being replicated in places like Mexico. Interesting little connection there. Pablo Escobar was a follower and a very devoted follower of the Santo Niño de la Tocha, a saint. It's basically an image of a child like Jesus that was venerated in Spain during the Moorish invasion. He was basically the saint of the persecuted.

So Pablo Escobar would venerate del Santo Niño de la Torcha. When they caught El Chapo Guzman's kid in Sinaloa recently, that past year, and the whole mess happened where they beat the Mexican army, on his neck, on his scapular, was the Santo Niño de la Torcha. No shit. Right? So...

Overnight, that saint's stock rose. If you wanted to buy a scapular of Santo Niño de la Tocha 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. This guy escaped federal custody. The whole of the Sinaloa cartel came in and just...

defeated the army in a miraculous event. So they fucking love him. Yeah. That's Escobar. 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 the guy that they...

They all modeled themselves after. Now we're making our own legend. Mexico's making their own legend, their own figures like Escobar, the people like El Señor de los Cielos, with some of the people that were involved in the whole Kiki Camarena situation. 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. Yeah. So another interesting thing to kind of think about is, you know, Narcos, the original Narcos made Pablo Escobar even more known. Yeah. I was acquainted to the movie La Bamba. You remember the movie La Bamba? I didn't see that. La Bamba was basically based on this 1950s...

singer, Mexican-American singer who died in a plane crash, right? Ritchie Valens. And every time I say Ritchie Valens or La Bamba, everybody remembers Lou Diamond Phillips. They don't remember actually Ritchie Valens. 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 thing with Pablo Escobar or the whole situation around Pablo Escobar,

Never knew him. All they remember is the Netflix series, right? All they remember is the series Narcos. And it's in there. 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 G.I. Joe cartoon and made 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 Narcos Mexico going on right now. A lot of kids quoting some of the show, a lot of kids going into the culture, wearing the clothes, wearing some of the regalia. Who's your hero? El Señor de los Cielos. Fuck. Who's your hero? Chapo Guzman. Damn. It's a different thing. You want to talk about propagating. Again, freedom of speech, entertainment, enjoy 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 moving to Mexico and that's turned into another different monster, bigger monster. Yeah. I mean, it's fucking scary, you know? I mean, even the fact that they've adopted the model where they, you know, give back to the community and make it seem like they're being generous when... Hearts and minds. I mean, essentially all they're doing is getting the populace hooked on the fucking tit and...

they're getting free they think they're generous they fall in love life's easy for them and these guys can do whatever the they want yeah and combine that with the fact that how well funded they are and then you bring in the training factor and how effective they are i mean it's uh this is gonna be impossible to stop well you you talk about everyone again

Somebody very famous told me once, never read the comment section. But I have to sometimes, right? So every now and then I get these online operators talking, laughing at some of these cartel guys without any sights on their rifles. You see these AR platforms, maybe a Draco little thing like that, and they laugh at it. Oh, like...

You live in a gun-free part of America, you know, actual free America. You get to shoot a lot of cool guns, invest in your guns and all that stuff. And you see a lot of people online that are influencers and shooting Instagram really fast and all the stuff on their guns.

Most of those kids in those videos cartel videos without any sights on the rifles are actually gonna 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 ambushing You know the bad guys pick the time and the place, you know, the good guys have to prepare at all times for that reaction and

And you have to fucking fight with rules. Exactly. Against 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 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, dead already. Or underestimate them. I don't underestimate anybody. Yeah. I've seen...

I've seen 12-year-old sicarios with over four or five skulls on their repertoire as far as the people they've killed. 12 years old? 12-year-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...

Hey, we can't get close to that guy. Your little brother, he's cool, right? Yeah, he's fine. Okay. He's just a product of his environment. So this, I mean. Child soldiers. We're talking about. We're talking about Africa. Yeah, we're talking. Say child soldiers, you immediately think Africa, but you don't think. Yeah. It's right down there. It's like right across the border. Child soldiers. Yeah. Child sicarios. Yeah. 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. Or being the next El Chapo. Talk about the corrosion of the culture. Just like Black Lives Matter, defund the police, all these things happening up here. Nobody wants to grow up to be a cop anymore. Yeah. Nobody wants to grow up and...

be a doctor. They want to grow up to be El Chapo. Yeah. You know, they want their next, they want their next Netflix series. They want, they want Sean Penn to fly down there and, you know, be on the cover of Rolling Stone. You know, that's what they want. Again, imagine if tomorrow they get declared a terrorist organization. Now you have a picture of Sean Penn shaking hands with a terrorist. Yeah. Again, that perspective is all skewed.

When it comes to the Sicarios or 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. The desensitization I shared, the Zetas, those are a completely different animal, different breed of people.

highly educated, trained, military. Those are more mechanical. It's like us gone bad. 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 like you see in some of the sikaris that are kind of made. Yeah.

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 Muerte, the figure of death that basically imbues them with the power or the authority to, you know what, I know you're Catholic.

Uh, but you're under the protection of me, the holy saint of death. So anything you do under my protection, God's not going to know about it. So you have clear field to do what you need to do. Holy shit. Right. So that's, that's like, that's the, the, the, 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, uh,

Santa Muerte, 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 Coatlicue, the mother goddess of the Aztecs. So if you think about it, the only surviving veneration of Aztec religion still in practice is Santa Muerte.

And it's a practice that has faithful within police forces, within the military, within high-level politics, and the sicarios. That's a lot of them actually venerate her. When I first started working, a lot of the older guys that I work with prayed to Santa Marta. They took me to a Santa Marta shrine, and we offered her a bottle of...

a patron i was like hey get get a bottle and i grabbed the 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 was raised catholic and i was like what the am i doing put it there and the older guy said this is something that the other guys pray to and fear so you need to view that fear within you so wear this scapular

Where use this I learn about this iconography because it's gonna be used against you so learn it now do these guys Get ritualistic at all. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Columbia or in Medellin specifically a lot of the Assassins before they go on a hit and how they do a hit nine times out of ten there is on a motherfucking moped No, no, I'm stitchy up. Yeah, but they will all go pray. It is very specific Church the

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 imbue themselves with them. So...

I don't know, to equate it like people, snipers in Vietnam eating locally and dressing locally and smelling locally, that kind of thing. So, you know, people say, Ed, are you like a practitioner of Santa Marta? Because you wear all that, you kind of use some of that regalia yourself. It's our version of a captured ISIS flag. So we keep what we keep, what we get, basically.

But some of the rituals that I used to see some of these Ikaria guys do and some of the guys that I work with in police forces, silver was 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 a lot of parts of Mexico is a very rich silver producing thing. But when you would come into a job, a new job, you would get 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 in your pocket it's up to you to pick which one right so that's like a ominous momentum moiety yeah that we would get and when you would uh get an insular leadership position i was a the the highest i went was a regional sub commander and the only reason 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 and put in my pocket and just here you'll stay You know Sicario's will wear silver it won't wear gold because they think old is a tracks too much attention from the devil which is kind of like a It's a we that in Mexico. The devil is a different character. It's not like the devil up here which is in direct conflict with God and

The devil in Mexico is very much kind of the, he's a counterforce, but he's also a tool that God uses to get people. So if somebody's doing something nefarious out there, he won't want to attract attention of the devil. Although he'll use the iconography and the veneration of Santa Muertes 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 uh skull caps on the boots silver silver skull rings uh silver um rosaries uh that with black stones with skulls on them you know there's a lot of iconography out there that could be kind of look at kind of tell something about the people that's i do some classes with law enforcement kind of familiarizing themselves with that type of stuff but it's not out there damn well uh

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 fires kind of suck, but my gummy bears don't. Head over to vigilancelead.com, buy yourself a bag of gummy bears. And if your fires suck too, get yourself a Vigilance Elite beanie.

Keep those grapes warm. Enjoy the show. All right, 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 issues.

of bodies and some of the gruesome stuff that you've seen the cartel do down there. We covered the fact that you've gone on 2,700 fucking hits. There's no numbers. It's just a blur of years of blurs. I don't know how many of those. Well, you know, nine years. That whole experience, humor, a big part of it, I think. One of the things I always recognize with all the people that I meet that have, you know, people like you that have an experience base is

Other people like that had kind of went through their own thing. There's certain 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 amiss there. 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 Haramiyo. 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 that I 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 was a very good guy. He gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional, you know.

Yeah, he'd always kind of basically, you know, keep me laughing. He would push me into going into weird places and kind of getting out of my comfort zone and just taking every day as if it's the last one. We went on some weird adventures, including one that included a donkey show, which we won't get into. And we would always get shit-faced drunk every time we would come back from something. Yeah.

There was 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 concept of a veteran or a support network for people that go through the experiences that I went through. A lot of people that go through those experiences now, there's no talk about that. There's a sense of machismo. You just take it. It's fine.

You know, just don't go crazy. So you'd get a few days off. You know, 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, go through the motions. Jaramillo, he went through a lot. He went through most of it with me. And every now and then he would go out and the reason why we got along, we were completely different people, separated by almost a decade in age.

He had a weird fetish for 80s ranchero music and he wore boots and, you know, weird. He would have wore 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 opposites. But what we shared is that we didn't take ourselves too seriously. We'd make fun of ourselves and everything around us. And every time we'd go out and, you know,

partake in some festivities and get drunk, we would get, I mean, we would try and get comatosed. That's what we would aim after. Damn. I don't know if there's an X rating on this, but I'll share a small story about it. 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. We 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 we were renting. We had this house where a lot of us would live. Kind of a safe house setting for us. We walked to the door and couldn't open the door.

We wanted to pee. Jaramillo's like, I gotta pee, I gotta pee. He'll pee over there and I'll pee over here. So I'm standing there really drunk with my handgun, my Glock with a light on it pointing towards the ground being, I went out drinking with my gun, by the way. This is Mexico. Different country. Different little side front. And I hear Jaramillo say, oh no, oh.

Like, what's wrong, Javio? Oh, something's wrong. Oh, something's wrong. I turn around and point my light at him, you know? Oh, shit. Again, different times. And he's pissed his pants. And I was like, what? What's up, Javio? There's something wrong. Yeah, you peed your pants. No, no, no. There's something wrong. I think my dick is blocked.

and I have a hole in one of my balls. What? That's exactly what I answered. I think my dick is blocked, and I have a hole in one of my balls. I didn't understand. Jarmil, you're not making any sense. So I took the light off my gun a little 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 of his 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 and anatomy and physiology. And it was, I laugh, I've never laughed more in my life. How long did it take you to figure that one out? It was a process. It was a process. Let's retrace the steps here.

he pulled and he pulled one of his balls out anyway so i laughed we let we i mean i laughed and he started laughing as well and we it was solid hour of us laughing out there um in the misty uh morning hours uh kind of sobering up with that laughter and uh

We saw some horrible stuff the night before and I was medicinal. I was a moment. I was, I was remember that moment because it was, it was a form of escapism. We would just get numb. He was, he was, he was, he was one of those characters that, you know, the stories, just legendary stories about him. He kind of taught me a little bit about that, that laughter part, that humor, just not taking myself too seriously.

I think probably the kind of 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. Yeah. While the party is still going on on the bus. Yeah. And you get left on the sidewalk as the bus moves away. There's a way I don't like to think about it. You know, the people that you lived, breathed, ate with.

suffered with, bled with, are still on the bus. 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, them being responsible for me,

having homicide as a part of your job description, guns and grenades, smoke grenades there, and just living this life was kind of surreal. But it was the normal. That was my normal for years. Yeah. All of a sudden, you know, last call. Everybody out. Some people stayed on. And you're not a part of it anymore. And everything stops and gets quiet. Yeah. Yeah.

That's probably the most dangerous and closest I've been to ending, I think. Yeah. I think that's what a lot of people don't come back from or can't escape from when everything stops. That's the, 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 jiu-jitsu and you got something really extended somewhere and it shouldn't have been, but you're warm so you don't feel it.

until you stop and then you start realizing how screwed you are physically. And mentally. Yeah. And mentally. 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 stayed the same outlook in life or the same normalcy. All of a sudden you're taken 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 abnormal you are and how out of place you are in a simple setting as going to a restaurant with 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. Not being able to find the right words to explain to somebody. There's no words to explain it to somebody. I think Alan Watts talks about poetry. That's what poetry is. Putting into words what is unexplainable.

I do, I do writing a lot of writing and I try and put into words what I can't explain. And, uh, like I couldn't find people that I could, you know, explain some of this stuff to until I found, you know, a veteran community in California when I moved up there and started doing classes and meeting people that had a service experience. And I started kind of figuring out that I had, there was a name for what I had, um,

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 moment or an 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 headspace. 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 horrible you saw something how will that happen and something you see and in the environment triggers it and you're back to you're back there on your here and you express it through an anxiety attack of an outburst of some sort and

apathy in the relationship you might be having at the moment with somebody. Or you just shut off and you go sleep in a closet for a few weeks because that's your safe place.

Yeah. Um, I don't know. Um, I mean, yeah, no, I mean, you just kind of asked like if I went through it, fuck yeah. You know, I went through it, uh, and, uh, I went through, I went to a therapy for twice a day, almost for three, three years or not twice a day, twice a week for three years. And, uh, and, uh, you know, I still fucking struggle with it. It gets better, but you know, uh,

It's, uh, you gotta be willing to invest your time into it and want to, uh, and want to fucking pull yourself out. You know, uh, I had a wake up call and, uh, I tried to, I tried to kill myself in my car, in my fucking garage. And, uh, I don't even, uh, remember it, but to be honest with you, my whole fucking house should have, uh, gone up in flames. But, uh, for some fucking reason it didn't.

Now I'll ask this question. It's something I hear a lot. That's not the easy way out for somebody like you, 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 going against everything in your being in nature. Yeah. The leave. Um, I've,

contemplated and thought about and maybe approached 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 write some of these flashbacks down at times. I share them openly and

It's a very personal thing to share some of that stuff openly. Yeah. 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. Forget about the wound that you just saw. Treat me like a normal person.

It doesn't work that way. Yeah. There's a stigma to it. And I think the stigma up here in the U S is, I mean, there's more conscious, there's a bit more conscience about it. There's a bit more of a community and support support around it. And it's not, that's not, that's not something I had when I was going, going through that down there. There is now, but there, there, it hasn't been around for very fucking long. You know, when I, 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 there a culture of suck it up? Yeah. Fuck yeah, there was. There probably still is. I know it's better now. And again, I think...

And when you go back and kind of learn, I'm into history and I like reading about other warrior cultures and people that did things that they had to do. PTSD has always been with us. It's been, this is what you talked about, your experience, what I'm talking about. We're not talking about anything new. This is the history of the world. But I think there's something 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, you know, spirit quest as they used to call them, or finding yourself, or going off on these pilgrimages, or whatever form they took. Ceremony. You know, 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 the blood of Jesus. There's a symbology there 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 in some of our kind of modern way of approaching some of these things. Some of these things have been amputated from us.

I was suffering from phantom limb syndrome when it comes to some of these things. What happens after? I grew up having parties at the cemetery during Day of the Dead. I get a weird feeling every time I travel up here and I see empty cemeteries with no people there. It's like a 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 it makes you effective. When you're off the bus, when you're out, you're fucked. Yeah. Um, yeah, my mom used to say that whole, I got to quote that. I'll get that quote again. Um, I went through a horrible, a few bad situations, but I think one of the first ones, uh, um, the war that I fought was at home.

with an enemy that spoke the same language that I did. Every now and then we would share funerary homes with the enemy. The counter guys were being mourned over on that side of the street and we were having our services for our guys over here. 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 talked to the people that I had to talk. And I was 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 probably three hours in the night straight there. I showed up sometime in the early mornings and my mom opened the door. She saw. She didn't say anything. She sat me down, took my clothing off, put in the washer and maybe some coffee. She didn't ask anything. The next morning I passed out for a bit and she asked me, "What do you want to do?" I said, "I want to go home." She said, "There's no such thing as going back home, Ed."

Either you change on your way 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's left the station. There's no going back home. So you have to figure out what that looks like for you next. That was very mind-altering. 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. I stood up and I remember smelling my clothes. They were like downy fresh, you know. She bagged me a lunch, got in the car. I saw all the missed phone calls on my cell phone. People were angry. I went back and phased the music. Told me, why don't you go? I said, I just need it. I just need it in a moment. I got reprimanded for leaving. Damn. But, you know, it was...

I realized that there was no going back home. So that gave me focus on going straight, surviving, figuring out what that road would lead me. That was aimless. It fucking changes you. Yeah. How long did it take for you to realize your mom was fucking right on the money? I'd say probably a few days after she passed away. She struggled for a long time with a few issues.

And, uh, before she went, she told me to leave that job, leave that thankless job. And that's not, that's no longer the war you should fight. That's not your war anymore. Uh, she passed away and, uh, I did a lot of self-reflection. Again, I got two days off to mourn my mom. Damn. She got to meet my kid, which I think was, that was very soothing to my, uh, mourning process. And, uh,

Everything kind of aligned after that. She passed away and a few things kind of shifted politically down there and I had to leave. She gave me that push at the end, I think. I remember thinking back to that moment and I wrote it down. I've shared that openly a few times. Every time I smell that morning coffee, I remember that moment. It kind of brings me back to that weird moment where there's no more innocence.

You're facing your mom and you're not what you were. Yeah, I know that feeling. Sorry to hear that, but sounds like she was looking out for you, man. Yeah. You know, but, and sounds like she still is after she passed. She's always here. Yeah. Everything I do, she's always been like a big inspiration. She'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 and push me to was volunteer work. And so 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 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 shit. You think you're think you're some expert and stuff like that. Go teach them. They need it. She gave me eyes Instead of dehumanizing people. I think that's one probably one of the biggest things he gave me It was the human factor so I can I could relate to people and talk to people Despite that they were trying to kill me only a few moments later Yeah, I could sit them down give them phone having phone maybe a family member to tell them that okay, I

kill him a cigarette, give him a swig of tequila and talk to people. That's a powerful armor that she gave me with that. And it's something that I've been using to try and process that whole life that I left 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's learning how to live with things. There's learning how to

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? Where 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. Waking up in a hotel room, figuring out where you are, when you are. That when you are part, that's pretty interesting. Sometimes I dream vivid dreams about being back somewhere, sleeping in a hole or something. Yeah.

Waking up covered in cockroaches or ants. I'm sleeping in a weird field somewhere. Reaching for a rifle that is no longer there. Hearing Jaramillo telling me that it's almost time to wake up. Hearing the radio, sat radio, beeping as it's charging in the background. Like tattoos in your mind. You wake up and you're brought back into here. And I was driving here, seeing all the green scenery.

Seeing all the life around, the trees make noise, everything's green, everything's good, everything's alive. And you just take this moment, you're like, "How did I get here?" And why? I think part of the answer to the why is sharing 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. They're like weird flashbacks into a past that I sometimes I kind of question, you know, was I really there? And 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, that never being able to go back home quote. I remember sharing it and a lot of people kind of responded to it and resonated with a lot of people. I think probably that's probably half of the reason why I'm still here. I think there's a story within me that I need to kind of share with people openly. And it's been very selfish as well because that helps me out with my process, kind of

putting some of these things out well just you saying that right there is gonna fucking help thousands of people you know and uh it's it's uh you know that the similar the everything you're describing uh is um like very similar to what i've gone through and what a lot of guys have gone through and it's uh that i've worked with uh or our colleagues you know and uh it's

i mean you're the uh you're the first person i've had on the show that is uh you know that's an immigrant that uh fought a different fought in a completely different war and uh saw a lot of uh we we uh we we've seen a lot of some similar things you know and uh and uh the the it's similar it's extremely similar and uh you know it does it takes a lot of time yeah it took me a lot of time

But, I mean, fuck, man. The guilt. Don't stop working at it. Another thing, the guilt. You're here. A lot of people aren't. You get that every now and then? 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. I got eaten up by it.

And I'm here and I don't take care of myself. I self-flagellate with this guilt whip. Sleepless nights and don't take care of myself at times. It's like a common thing I've seen as well with some people. That wanting to keep them alive somehow. Maybe by stories, maybe by naming something after them. That's another weird part of it.

That guilt you feel every day. You could be a green field petting an alpaca in the middle of this green heavenly field and thinking about somebody that you might have lost along the 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 things that I did, how they process it.

you know what i was i was i was i always dig finding those similarities uh it helps me not feel alone again selfish i know and i was gonna catch myself when i start feeling that way but that's it's it's a i was talking about being around people that uh that know they know the words to that song you know and there's a song it's a song that's oldest time you know um

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. He was dancing with a war drum. He was 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 and 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 that 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. He has an attachment to that. Can you remember the songs 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 I think the one thing that 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 he can get a semblance of that. Remembering the ones that went before. That's the way you keep them alive.

And that's the way you keep the new guys alive. This helps. We don't have drums and we don't have fireplaces, but we do have YouTube. 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 we're gone. 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.

And we didn't. I think there's a power in that. I talk to them. I talk to my boys that aren't here anymore. And the guilt, you know, I try to think about if the roles were reversed and I was them and they were alive, would I want them feeling like that? Or would I want them to fucking enjoy their life?

And, you know, even just the fact, you know, 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 percent of the people in this country see every fucking day. You know what I mean? Heaven is. Yeah, they are happy people. And and and yeah.

you know, with career paths like with what we chose. We don't experience that and it takes a long time to get to a point where you, where it's okay. You can allow yourself to enjoy. Yep. The people that leave get brighter and younger in our minds. Have you ever noticed that as well? Yep. I remember some of the people that I lost were older than I was and somewhere along the lines of my mind's eye passed them along the way.

and they get younger and brighter. Now, I hear him sometimes, specifically Jarmil. 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 to dance. He's a sadist, you know? He wants that. He wants me to partake in all that. And I think that's probably part of my subconscious that just is telling me to enjoy.

You're allowed to enjoy. I don't know, maybe it's a Catholic guilt in me, built into me when I was a kid. But there's something about enjoying those moments that some of us 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. Ed, why'd you? There's a weird pain and happiness in that.

Not a lot of people can understand. Well, I'm glad you're feeling it, man. I really am. I got one of those voices, too. He's right fucking behind you. That flag up there. But you talk about shamanism. Yeah. A little bit. Yeah. Have you done any? Have you? Yeah. I mean, it's Mexico. We're all about it. We have a contact. I come from a culture where we party at the graves during Day of the Dead. We sleep over on gravesides.

We have alters to our dead. Necromancy 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. I told him, yeah, I'm Catholic. Oh, so you're not, you know? Yeah, it's very much a paganistic culture. Shamanism is a big part of it.

There's things called veladas. Veladas are basically like, they were made famous by a lady, Sevina, Maria Sevina. Like the Beatles would 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. Psilocybin 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, and it takes certain things from you when you try and get back to normalcy. So I'm sure some people have experienced taking some of those pharmaceutical medications and feeling like a zombie.

Or feel like you're on autopilot. Yeah, it's not you. Like you're in the backseat of a car driving from the backseat. I don't know. Some of them have helped. Not all of them. I had a few people recommend psilocybin. Basically mushrooms, microdosing and macrodosing.

But actually having a process before it doesn't it's not just taking them. Yeah shamanism in different places, you know, they have the psilocybin and hallucinogenic have a long history in warrior culture like even Well, if you want to talk about Aztecs, I asked some of the Aztec elite warrior cast would 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 and

So I remember when I was younger and went through a bunch of bad, horrible stuff. And one of my vacation times, I took a trip down to southern Mexico and went on one of these veladas. So 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 in a 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 up up above this hill there was always some weird symbology throughout the whole experience

I think what it takes you towards is 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 haven't done it. 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 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 helped me out tremendously in 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 psilocybin kind of take some of that away from that, uh, that process between having something, uh, 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 and trying to figure it out by reconstructing it. Maybe let's say, uh,

It's like making a play about something that you had to go through and then as a director going in there and, yeah, this could be over here and I should have done this over here, but I 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 that can't change. Yeah. So some of those processes I kind of went through. Psilocybin, I think there's a lot of potential there. I don't think it should be illegal. I think there's more horrible stuff out there. The more I hear about it and the more I read about it, I mean, it sounds... Flaming hot Cheetos should be illegal, not psilocybin. Yeah.

I think they do more harm. It's not a, again, I don't think it's a recreational thing. - Yeah. - I think our ancestors were onto 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 it's something meant to be done several times. I think it's something you're meant to do a few times, maybe. And a lot of us didn't do it at the start to figure ourselves out before we went through the fire. Yeah. 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 let's move on. Sure. Covered a lot of material there and leaves 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 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 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 is going down there and funding Companies that make a living off that drug war keeping its status as well So as an example when I was down there all of my uniforms were bought over but that that I would have to wear they were all bought bought through a specific

uniform tactical company that is American based, which I won't name. But they make a killing off that drug war. All of the vehicles that we ride, ever wonder why every police corporation down there rides around in a pickup 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. Outsourcing that drug war, 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 It starts in the US as far as the fight goes legalized marijuana Federally, honestly, it's not gonna do It's not gonna do any any difference now may have done a difference in

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 as a schedule, one substance federally, 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 that flows in and out of those organizations, 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 U.S. 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 is 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.

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 America calls it, or any sort of offer to help Mexico is always going to be met with 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 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 women and children. But I don't think that's enough anymore. I think, and that's a sad thing to say, that's not enough to force action. That's not enough to declare them a terrorist organization. You know, hey, yeah, they're not a terrorist organization. They don't have any clear political motives for that.

Yes, they do. You want to talk about political killings? Mexico is the 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 is 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 videos that then get dispersed 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. 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 U.S., maybe that has something to do with the U.S.'s refusal to name them a terrorist organization.

But I think they fit every single description of an organization that is a terrorist organization and more. As far as Al-Qaeda or ISIS, stuff like that, I don't see any of them operating in multi-million dollar businesses in the U.S. Yeah. I mean, even if everything, you know, controlling the money...

And all of that, I mean, the longer we take to do it, you know, China's 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 in 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 and

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 U.S. military. And as somebody that's worked down there and I've seen it up here and have friends and worked in that environment, I know the U.S. 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 isn't an enemy that lives across the ocean. Yeah. This is not an enemy that lives across the ocean. I've heard conversations about what they would do if a full-scale invasion happened or an armed intervention in Mexico would happen by U.S. military forces and what the cartel's response would be when they felt threatened. You'd hear, and again, this is by an organization that is not labeled a terrorist organization.

Well, if the U.S. decides to intervene, we'll just randomly poison drug loads going into the U.S. 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 out of Coronado. They 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 really 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 operate multi-billion dollar business of drug trafficking. These are people that have tunnels underneath the border that could go put anything in there.

And it's not uncommon to back in the post 9-11 era to that Americans would put Geiger 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. Yeah. All they're worried about is retribution. That would be that would be a bad day, I think.

It's not as easy as some people make it out to be. Oh, just send a group of, just send the military down there and we'll clean everything up. I think it's a problem that if you leave long enough to fester, it's going to become- It's going to snowball. Oh, fuck, it already has. And I think within our lifetime, we'll see it. There's going to be some event on the border. There's going to be some sort of-

I think probably the sad thing is it's probably not going to be even related to American blood spilled and or drugs. That's probably going to be a resource issue. We'll see that intervention within our lifetimes 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 incompetence it's causing.

it's almost comical incompetence as far as how it's handling the drug, the cartel issue and the violence issue and how it's each year, it's just becoming worse and worse. So I don't know. Um, I just know that there's no such thing as a Mexican solution or an American solution. It has to be a regional solution. Um, I'm not expecting the UN to step in at any time soon. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to wrap this thing up, but, um, I just want to say, man, I really appreciate you making the trip. And, um,

your story is amazing dude so this is gonna help a lot of people especially with that one segment and um and uh and uh you know i know it sounds like you're kind of still searching for a purpose but i'm telling you man you're killing it and uh you probably are very similar to a lot of my friends and um you don't reflect on your own success

And, you know, but I'm just going to tell you, you're fucking killing it, dude. And 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. 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. Right on, man. Well, thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you.

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