Ed Calderon details how China weaponizes Mexican cartels by supplying fentanyl precursors and swarm drone technology, effectively turning Mexico into a proxy war zone where criminal groups mimic state-level insurgency tactics. He argues that labeling these organizations as terrorists is counterproductive because it ignores U.S. complicity in arms trafficking and economic exploitation, while China's strategic investment in mining and pharmaceuticals accelerates Mexico's geopolitical shift away from American influence toward Beijing and Moscow. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that sustainable solutions require grassroots transformation within Mexico rather than foreign military intervention or simplistic policy labels. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Cartels Control Most of Mexico00:14:37
Tell people what it is you do.
That's a complex question.
I'm sure there's not many people that don't know, but for the people that aren't aware, I'm basically an instructor, first and foremost.
I train people how to survive and live in and go through non permissive environments, the moniker that I've been kind of given by the people that I've trained.
Specifically, my background is working for the government in Mexico, and that kind of gave me some experience as far as.
You know, how to survive some of the conditions that are down there.
When I came to this country about four years ago, I started getting invited out to different security companies and people that offer training of that nature.
So I kind of became a subject matter guy as far as how to not get into bad situations in foreign countries or in this country as well, escaping from situations of abduction, for example, how to manage emergency situations in places where you don't have the means.
That we have access to in this country from austere medical management stuff, which I, you know, I have people that I know that kind of give that specific type of training and I kind of set them up for some of these instructions, instructive courses out there in the world.
And also, you know, I've become kind of an advocate for people that don't have a voice in Mexico or not a clear voice that you don't hear a lot about up here, specifically people who are in law enforcement.
And, uh, Who were a part of that weird undeclared war in Mexico, the drug war, that's still raging on down there.
I had this whole joke about coming to this country and going to a veteran event with some Marine friends of mine.
And they all had hats with where they served on it.
And they jokingly made a drug war veteran hat for me and put it on my head with the Mexico symbol.
I do a lot of advocacy related to bringing a bit more awareness and a voice to people like myself that went through that conflict, that have seen things from the inside and are now on the outside of it, and kind of bringing awareness and a voice to some of these people who are still in the fight.
The honest ones, you know, because, you know, we are, anytime you mention law enforcement in Mexico, they're all kind of labeled in the same way all corrupt, all evil, all bad.
But I know that there are a lot of good ones out there doing the job.
Thankless job, you know, a job without retirement, a job that could end abruptly and leave you without a lot of options.
And so, in a lot of ways, I'm also an advocate for some of those people and Mexico as a whole, you know, trying to bring awareness to what's happening down there up here.
Can you show us your shirt?
Sure.
There you go.
I was drugged and left for dead in Mexico, and all I got was a stupid t shirt.
It's a movie reference.
But also, maybe you know, half a part true on my end, you know.
Um, it's a it's from a company called Black Triangle Group.
Uh, shout out to them.
Um, they uh, you know, sent me this t shirt and said, You wouldn't dare to wear this on a podcast, and you know, here I am with it, you know.
The thing, the crazy thing about Mexico when it comes to right now is that everyone is distracted with what's going on in Ukraine and Russia, and it's like no one's talking about Mexico.
That is, you know, like I posted something about that in the first 72 hours of that conflict.
Which was basically an armed invasion from Russia into the Ukraine.
Mexico outperformed that war zone in the first 72 hours as far as a body count.
The amount of people that died in violent altercations related to cartel violence in Mexico in the first 72 hours outperformed a war zone.
And this is happening right on the southern border.
Not just that, but also if you, I'm not a numbers person, but people can look them up.
The amount of people that have died in this conflict and the amount of people that are missing or reported missing in Mexico is.
Astounding.
And the amount of mass graves that are being found all over the country now, and the sheer amount of control that some of these criminal groups have over territories in Mexico.
There was a recent leak of military documents that has kind of come to light recently.
Guacamaya leaks is our version of the WikiLeaks situation, basically.
A hacker group basically penetrated the computer systems of the Sedena.
I just read this.
And A lot of documents that the government itself has written are coming to light.
And I think some reporting down in Mexico has put the estimates that the military themselves have put forth that over 70% of Mexico is under some sort of control over a criminal group.
And that there are no fly zones over some places because they're afraid to get knocked down.
And this is happening on the southern border.
To me, it's pretty amazing.
Again, it's a conflict that's been going on for decades.
It is kind of interesting that the US has or the media has in the US or in the government as well, as far as not wanting to call it what it is in Mexico, which is basically a multi grouped armed insurgency going on right across the border and utilizing, in many cases, military great weaponry,
fitting every single definition of not only a criminal enterprise but also a terrorist network in a lot of ways.
Very much politicized.
We have I think we have a record as far as the amount of political candidates being assassinated in Mexico and also, you know, reporters that are reporting on some of these things.
So if they don't meet the definition of a terrorist organization, I don't know.
I don't know what does, you know.
But it's interesting that it's just not being given the attention of a conflict as far as a war.
Do you think there's a reason that the U.S. is trying to bury this?
Or, I mean, is it because.
Let me phrase this differently.
Does the shit going on in Mexico benefit the United States at all?
I mean, it's Mexico is so there's a few levels to it, I think.
You know, Mexico is the second largest consumer of American products that the US has, if you want to think about it that way as well.
So we're very much dependent on each other.
You see a lot of people calling for like close the borders down and stuff like that.
That would, there's a reason why that doesn't happen, you know?
One of the reasons is because.
The US economy depends a lot on Mexico.
That's an interesting link that we have.
But it goes both ways.
Mexicans cross the border and work in this country in a lot of parts of the industry that are very much a backbone of this country in a lot of ways.
You want to think about how indispensable illegal immigration is to this country.
During COVID, the produce aisles were stocked.
The what?
The produce aisles were still stocked.
There was no shortage of goods.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So, Mexicans are essential workers in this country, I guess.
Illegal immigration is essential.
In the places where legislation has been passed to stop illegal immigration working on fields, you get the farming industry crashing these places, and some of these things get pulled back.
They send money back to Mexico.
So we're very much linked through blood, through commerce, through an economy.
And now through basically living next to the largest drug market on the planet, which is the United States.
Having the experience of seeing the poppy fields down in places like Michoacan, and then training law enforcement in places like Seattle, where I can get to see where that brown, light brown, light brown fentanyl infused heroin ends up, and seeing the government actually supply the tools to put that into your body stateside.
It's been insane, you know, and surprising to me on that end.
And seeing What do you mean they're supplying the tools?
There's government programs out in places in the United States where they supply syringes and means, crack vibes, basically, as well.
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't know that.
There's some government programs out there that supply some of these things to people, which basically they supply the vessels to infuse things that are coming into this country illegally that are supplied by cartel groups in Mexico, which is, again, there's a weird denial in the United States when it comes to some of these problems.
And also, the mentality that a lot of Americans have as far as it being a Mexico problem, like a foreign problem from a foreign country, and it's all on Mexico.
And the responsibilities and taken by Americans as far as their role in some of these things, you know, from having industry that is completely dependent on legal immigration and, you know, having the immigrants kind of be the bad guys in a lot of mentalities in the United States, you know, and that narrative of them coming here to take jobs from people.
Yes, there is a problem with illegal immigration, but the problem isn't the people that are coming over the border and working in industries that are essential for the United States.
The problem is in the immigration system and basically the enforcement on that border not being looked at closely and regulated.
I mean, people coming here to get a job seasonally should be a thing that could be regulated, I guess.
That has happened before in history.
Something went wrong, something happened, something changed.
The only people that benefit economically with the immigration being illegal are the people that are taxing those immigrants when they cross that border.
And those are not government officials, those are cartels, those are criminal groups that basically make, in some cases, most of what they earn comes from taxing people going across that border, paying, getting protection fees by some of the coyotes that work on that border, and putting some of these people in actual slavery.
You know, people, there's a big conversation in this country about historical slavery when there's actually still slavery going on in this country.
People like myself, Mexicans, coming to this country illegally and not being able to pay for that process, paying a coyote half of their payment or having their families stateside paying for that process over a time period and them working off that payment through labor.
Slavery, you know, this happens in this country right now.
How much does it cost to get across the border?
You have numbers from 8,000 to 10,000.
You have 6,000 in some places.
Some people say, well, I'll just go off myself and then get caught by people on that border and say, what are you doing crossing through our zone?
So, what is that process like?
So, if I'm living in Mexico, if I'm living anywhere in Mexico on the border or whatever, and I want to get across, who do I have to go to?
You have to go to a smuggler.
You have to go to a smuggler.
I mean, people do it independently.
They try and do it independently.
Some of them get through, some of them don't.
Some of them die in the desert.
Some of them get caught by the same smuggler.
So, what are you doing trying to cross yourself?
You need to pay us a toll.
Some of them get caught by the police down there and then get all of their stuff taken because the cops down there, some of them are really bad and some of them are not to be trusted, take their meager belongings and then get tossed back into whatever border town they're currently in.
The Border Patrol are working with them, though, right?
They're paying the Border Patrol.
Are they in cahoots?
I wouldn't say that.
No.
The U.S. Border Patrol.
I'll say this.
I've worked as an instructor with some members of the Border Patrol, and I've also seen how they operate on both sides of the border, both on the Mexican side with binoculars looking at some of them, you know, looking the other way as a group of people cross by.
So there is corruption in that, and there is corruption historically in the Border Patrol on the U.S. side.
You look at convictions as far as corruption charges.
The U.S. Border Patrol is one of the ones that have the most convictions when it comes to corruption.
And it's clear that.
It is not only underfunded, but it's undermanned.
I've also seen them perform acts of great humanity and paying out of pocket for things like toothbrushes and toys and cold medication for some of the people that are in detention centers.
You also don't see the fact that most of them are first generation or second generation Mexicans and do have a vested interest in some of these people being treated humanely, but also for them doing well.
So, it's a complicated issue as far as the border patrol.
And yes, they do, and sometimes I've seen when I was down there perform certain acts of corruption as well.
Corruption is stateside as well.
It's not just something that ends at the border.
But then you go into Mexico and you see municipal, state, and federal police agencies also being predators as far as trying to get some of these smuggling groups and tax them as well.
Or some of these people that are coming to the border, and it's known that if you're coming across the country to try and cross that border, you probably have some cash on you.
So they're perfect victims for anybody, for a lot of people that are coming up on that border, specifically authority figures.
Booby Traps Plague Civilian Areas00:05:20
How did you get involved in Ukraine and training people to go to Ukraine?
It's not even that I train people specifically for that, is that a lot of students that actually came through some of my classes, including.
One specifically, Vince, he's out there and listening to this.
I love you, brother.
Basically, some students that went through some of the training that I provide, you know, basically, I train people how to work in hostile environments.
And some of the stuff that I, some of the classes that I've done, you know, some interesting people have shown up, you know, people that have a background themselves, people, I've trained people from the military, again, federal agencies and people of that nature.
Some of them showed up and said, wow, this material could be.
Put to good use somewhere currently, you know, in a war zone.
It's like, oh, that's awesome.
You want to go, Ed?
And I'm like, yeah, I would want to go, but I'm just in no conditions to go, physically, mentally, and all.
I'm at 40 and I have a kid, you know, and I have my own fights, you know.
So some of them, can we take some of this material out there?
It's like, yeah, you know, I gave them what I could as far as educational material and they took it with them and they went out there, front lines, and trained a bunch of people specifically how to utilize.
What they had on hand as far as a medical management emergency, improvising medical management equipment, austere medical management type material that I gathered from some of the people that I worked with before.
And also how to get out of bad situations, restraints, how to get out of handcuffs, how to get out of certain improvised restraints like zip ties and duct tape.
It's a lot of stuff they're using out there.
They're not equipment rich, these Russian forces.
Improvising a lot of the stuff they're doing, which kind of like emulates or mirrors a lot of the stuff that I saw in Mexico as far as some of the criminal groups abducting people out there.
So it made sense for some of that material to be spread out out there.
What has, as far as like your communication with the guys that are out there, what has shocked you the most or what has sort of surprised you the most out of how they operate over there and some of the tactics they use?
Like you just said, using duct tape.
I mean, you know, I think both sides are doing a lot of horrible, horrible stuff.
You know, it's a war zone and, uh, There is no shining night in that situation, and there is no clear heroic side.
Some of them are defending their homeland.
That's to be admired and commended.
And then there's this Russian contingent coming in, and some of them are mercenaries and they're performing some barbaric acts against the civilian populace.
Booby trapping farming equipment as they're leaving some of the areas, mining planted fields.
Leaving improvised booby trap explosives in schools and places where people would try and scavenge food and stuff like that, I think is something that's pretty scary, alarming, and unneeded in a war zone like that.
But that's happening.
And then not to just focus on Russia.
I've also heard from other people going out there to try and fight for the Ukrainians, getting treated poorly by the Ukrainians.
Like civilians going out there?
Former military individuals, veterans.
There's at least two Mexicans out there that I know of who I used to work with who are now out there performing tasks out there.
They've reported back that they were treated poorly by some of the Ukrainian military because of the color of their skin.
Really?
So there's shit happening on both sides.
There's some elements of the Ukrainian military that are clearly.
Very racist.
Very racist.
Culturally detached from the fact that there are people out there that have brown skin that might want to go and help.
Yeah, I heard there's a bunch of rogue neo Nazi groups out there.
There are.
And there's some sentiment like that.
Not all of them, again.
This is just some stuff that I've heard from people like that that went out there.
The shocking thing for me is that the whole targeting of a civilian populace, basically, how they're setting booby traps, man traps, and explosive devices that are going to be probably plaguing that area for.
Decades from now.
Who are the ones that are setting those traps?
Is it both sides?
Mainly Russia.
Mainly Russian.
Russian retreating forces that are like letting the letting, uh, letting, uh, retreating in or, uh, moving back and letting some of that controlled territory be placed back in the hands of the Ukrainians.
And this is the kind of stuff that you teach to be able to, I mean, survive and to be able to recognize.
I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't show anything related to explosives, but I do show things as far as I try to surveil urban environments and to see, uh, risks involved in moving in places like that.
Drone Explosives Move From Syria00:03:56
You know, we weren't exposed to a lot of improvised explosives of that nature.
Well, not improvised, conventional explosives.
A lot of these things are military grade explosives that are being utilized in some of these conflict zones.
Down in Mexico, we faced civilian drones being used to drop grenades on people.
That happened in Mexico.
Like the little DJI drones?
Yeah.
That happened in Syria first and then in Mexico.
You know, that kind of happened in Syria first as far as it being kind of like shown publicly through videos on social media.
And then you start seeing it in Mexico.
The first improvised explosive that I saw in Mexico delivered by a drone was actually dropped in Baja.
It was a grenade that didn't explode in the end, but it was a grenade attached to a civilian drone that was dropped in the backyard of the private residence of the Secretary of Public Safety in the state of Baja.
And the first drone I saw used for criminal activity was actually crashed on the road to Playa de Tijuana.
It's a quad drone that was carrying a giant brick of meth.
This was like 2011, I think.
I think I remember that.
2011.
So it's the rise of drone technology as far as where it was going.
It was apparent to a lot of us when we started seeing them being utilized for stuff like that.
I remember seeing some of the first videos coming out of Michoacán probably two, three years ago.
Michoacán, right now, for people that don't know, is basically an active war zone in Mexico.
Can you tell, like, paint a picture of where in Mexico is Michoacán?
Michoacán is the center of Mexico.
Towards the Pacific side of the ocean.
It's next to a hotbed of activity that is related to the New Generation Cartel, which is one of the largest, most militarized cartels coming out of Mexico right now.
It's kind of vying for power as far as the Sinaloa Cartel and New Generation Cartel.
They are trying to gain entry and control of Michoacán, which is a very rich place as far as the ability to.
Plant and harvest things like poppy, and it's also on a drug route.
So it's a pretty strategic place for them.
The Mexican federal government is actually allying themselves with the Carteres Unidos out there, which is basically what is left of the cartels that used to dominate that area.
So they're involved in trench warfare against the New Generation cartels.
And the New Generation cartel, probably two years ago, I think some of these videos came out.
And I remember them coming out on social media and then kind of me sending them off to some of my US based friends, specifically EOT teams, so they can see it, you know, because I thought it was interesting and they were surprised by the fact that they hadn't seen some of this stuff before.
They were basically weaponizing, using mining explosives, conventional mining explosives, in combination with chemicals used to pesticide chemicals.
Right, so basically, using the explosive not to disperse these pesticide chemicals, uh, they're mixed and very harmful if you breathe them in.
And they were using them to drop on some of the fortified positions that the federal government and the cartels, the Carteros Unidos, had to fight against the new generation cartel.
God.
So, you know, that whole exchange of information that's going on right now, as far as social media and YouTube and live leaks and all these online sources basically exporting your methodology, has been kind of like a really interesting part of all of these conflicts that have recently kind of dawned on the world.
Social Media Used for Recruitment00:09:47
How are they exporting the methodology?
What do you mean by that?
I mean, you see.
Barmington back 40 millimeter grenades being dropped in Syria to stabilize that grenade as it goes down from a drone.
And somebody out there takes note of that, and then you see it in Mexico.
And then somebody takes note of the fact that some specific drones are better than others, taking some of that methodology and showing it to the Ukrainians.
And now Ukrainians are utilizing some of this.
So this whole.
This whole weird improvised civilian drone arms race that is going on right now in the world.
That combined with the group chats on WhatsApp of them sharing different things and photos and videos and learning.
WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, you know, social media.
Facebook used to be like a place.
It's not anymore because of all the censorship.
Instagram also used to be a place.
I mean, I remember.
I looked this morning.
I was looking for you this morning.
And for some reason, I couldn't find your Instagram.
I'm pretty shadow banned.
I'm shadow banned.
Basically, they.
You can't find a lot of stuff that I post because of repeated violations of the terms of service.
And usually they come from like news, me sharing news posts from our sister page, Demoler.
Most of my current strikes on the page have been of me sharing news about stuff that's going on in Mexico.
So some of the censorship online is pretty crazy.
So I had to put most of my educational information behind a paywall on Patreon because of this.
You know, because there's just no way that people can access that on social media without me getting some sort of strike on my accounts.
You know, that's insane, man.
That's insane that they're doing that.
And are they doing that because of like you're posting stuff that it actually violates the terms of service?
Are you just, I mean, if I'll give you an example of something that was that got a strike on my page.
Okay.
There was a major offensive by a certain cartel in Mexico and they left a bunch of their, their, uh, Plate carriers, basically armored plate carriers that they carry with them behind.
And I shared a picture of one of those plate carriers that had the name of one of these groups down there, you know, the four letters.
And that got a strike on my page because it was promoting terrorist organizations.
Right?
So that, so you can't see, or keywords in a news article related to that group, also promoting terrorist or hate group organizations, basically.
Meanwhile, I was telling you earlier, Luis Chaparro, the reporter who ensued at Juarez, was telling me that not only are El Chapo's kids and family all on Instagram, but as well as El Mayo's family and cousins and sons.
They're all over TikTok, all over TikTok, Instagram.
They have Instagram accounts.
They're basically utilizing TikTok as a recruiting arm for some of these cartel groups out there.
That's fucking insane, man.
It's.
I don't know how to describe it as far as experiencing it.
You see, I'm no saint.
I post things that are, I think, informational or educational in some cases, or some funny stuff as well, related to PTSD and alcoholism and all that stuff that I'm going through.
But it's funny when you post something related to news or dispersing information in this country.
Again, we have a sister page that deals specifically with reporting on specific cartel activities in Mexico in English, which is not an easy thing to do.
They're based out of Mexico.
And they're doing some amazing work.
But they get reported on, and their pages, I think the first page they had was taken completely down by Instagram, specifically because they got strikes on their page because, again, the wording, the imagery, and they're very good at blurring everything out.
But that gets taken down.
And on the other side of the aisle, you see some of these organizations basically posting videos and pictures of them spreading.
You know, some of these, when COVID was happening, they were giving, you know, dispensas out there with the name of the cartel specifically.
You know, here you go, family.
This is on behalf of this cartel, you know.
Or they were enforcing some of the mask mandates in Mexico.
And if you were caught without a mask outside or if you were caught partying outside, you would get, you would get la tabla, which is basically a board, a flat board that they would use to hit your ass.
And you would see that on TikTok.
You would see some of that on Instagram as well.
And it's, It was up and nothing happened.
No problems.
No problems.
So, yeah, there's definitely some strange allowances that some of these groups have, or at least preferences that I think we've seen as far as him, Chaparro, looking at how some of the stuff he posts and how maybe he's being censored on some of the stuff he posts, or how Demoler posts some things that are very much informational, dealing with some of the stuff that's going on down there.
And it getting, you know, blocked or banned because of it.
And meanwhile, some of these accounts that are out there, specifically TikTok, I think TikTok is, it's right now, it's the main platform for a lot of people, specifically in some of these criminal groups who, you know, it's out there.
No problem.
Kids running around, 17 year olds running around with AK 47s, you know, beating the shit out of people that.
That's so weird.
I've heard the opposite about TikTok.
I've heard that people have problems getting banned all the time on TikTok.
Well, they might get banned all the time on TikTok.
But I can, you know, you can do a search of specific criminal groups on TikTok right now and you'll find hundreds of videos of them rolling around.
Yeah.
What would you search?
Like, what would, give me an example of, like, what could we search for?
Cartel de Sinaloa.
Cartel de Sinaloa.
El Tres Letras, El Señor de los Gallos, El Chapo Guzman.
You can look for a lot of these things and also they'll just pop up as far as videos and imagery related to cartel and cartel corridos, for example.
Popular music down there that is kind of like, Glorifying some of these activities.
The fact that it's being utilized as a sort of propaganda arm or recruiting arm for them is very clear.
And many people have reported on the fact that some of these anonymous TikToks pop up every now and then.
We saw a few of them specifically in Baja related to recruiting people to a certain cartel.
Like, hey, if you want to work for us, reach out.
We're here, you know.
We had an incident in Tijuana where a bunch of young kids, recruited by one cartel, to put pressure on the government, basically burned a bunch of cars and caused a lot of vehicular chaos in Tijuana.
It was a specific day.
They had this whole orchestrated where they put some cars, set some cars on fire in some major traffic zones during peak traffic hours.
And later on, when they kind of put this message out on social media about what it was about and people, Basically, setting a curfew.
People don't go out because we're going to clean the plaza, basically.
Then later, they found out that some of these kids, you know, after they were paid by said criminal group and they skipped town, that a lot of them were basically recruited through social media.
A lot of them got like, hey, if you want to make some money, you know, do it through here.
Wow.
So, WhatsApp groups, social media, Signal, Telegram, a lot of these things are being utilized by some of these groups to.
How long have you been dealing with this censorship on Instagram, like being shadow banned?
And your account's gone down and come back, right?
Many times.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I'm at 300 something thousand.
I've attempted to be verified.
I've been quoted by Al Jazeera, New York Times, BBC, and I've been on some pretty major podcasts.
I worked on some movies, I write for a few magazines.
I've talked to the Senate, some Senate hearings myself as well.
All of this documented.
And I can't get a verification of that, you know, because of the controversial nature of what I talk about, or maybe specifically it's because of somehow some of the taglines and subject matters that I talk about are considered bannable offenses, I guess, on Instagram specifically.
Do you deal with any of that like on other platforms at all, like Twitter and YouTube?
I've actually recently started posting more on Twitter, and it's a breath of fresh air because a lot of stuff stays up.
And Twitter let you post anything.
Right.
Yeah.
But not Instagram.
And again, it's hard for people to find me on Instagram.
And some of the stuff that I've been posting recently has been very benign.
And it's mostly leads people to go and look at my stuff somewhere else.
But still, it's bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Luis Chaparro, one of his biggest media outlets is Instagram for his stories, too.
Living Near the Border Changes You00:15:32
The funny thing, the interesting thing about people like him is, especially when you decide to live there near the border, like where he is, like him in particular, he is not like a gun guy.
He's like, he doesn't like to own a gun.
And the question I have for you is: if you're a journalist living down there, reporting on these cartels, meeting with these cartels, would it be advisable not to have a fucking gun on you?
Or is it almost smarter to just not even have one and be considered harmless?
That's an interesting question.
Like, I am not a reporter.
So my mentality around a lot of this is completely different.
Right, right, right.
But you come from the opposite background.
But I have trained a lot of reporters that work down there.
Including again our sister Paige Demo there, who you know they work in Mexico and it's not easy.
And you know, there's some issues to that.
Arming themselves is not something I would advise for somebody that's going to go into the dragon's den to talk to some of these people because it basically turns you into a basically turns you into a combatant, right?
But that being said, not being safe or not knowing how to be safe or trying to get yourself out of some of these situations is probably you know ill advised.
You know, the amount of reporters that are killed in Mexico is mind boggling.
It's one of the most dangerous jobs in Mexico to be a reporter.
There was a lady that actually went on El Mañanero, which is basically the current president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has these daily meetings where he addresses the nation and rambles around about, you know, whatever thing is in his head that particular day.
And a reporter lady steps up and says, Hey, they've been threatening my life.
They want to kill me.
Can I talk to you about it?
They had an exchange there and nothing happened.
Nothing was done.
She went back to where she was from and popped.
Basically, that is the level of insecurity in Mexico.
She told people what was going to happen and it happened.
She told the president of Mexico.
Mind you, I speak ill of the government right now.
And I will speak ill of the government that I was a part of when I was working for it, from Felipe Calderon all the way to here.
You know, I think all politics in Mexico is corrupt as hell, you know.
But the current government is towards the left of the political spectrum, and there's a lot of sentiments of division in Mexico right now, as far as the left and the right.
The current presidency in Mexico said that they were going to make a civilian police force, that they were going to take the military off the streets.
That they're going to.
Oh, is this the hugs, not bullets?
Yeah, hugs, not bullets.
And now we have a militarized National Guard unit.
The civilian controlled federal police is gone.
And he's doing exactly what his main rival, Felipe Calderon, did back in the day, which basically militarized this war.
And it's surprising to me that people on both sides are in denial about it, too.
I get attacked a lot about my criticism as far as the current government.
But I criticize the whole of it, right?
I was a part of that government as well, and I criticize the shit out of the Felipe Calderon government and the Peña Nieto government and the current government.
All of it is there's no saving graces for a lot of these presidencies in Mexico.
And we've never lived in a more dangerous time to be a Mexican, you know, as far as the amount of violence that is occurring in Mexico and the scope that it is.
You know, 90% of all murders aren't solved in Mexico.
If you are a civilian traveling down there, for example, like if you're someone just traveling from Florida going on a surf trip and you catch a ride to, you know, a local beach to go surfing or whatever, and you end up running, getting intercepted by somebody in a cartel, what kind of, like, what should you do physically?
And what should you do, like, how can you use words to get yourself out of a situation?
You know, so first off, Mexico isn't all bad, you know?
There's a part of Mexico that's perfectly safe for people.
90% of all new houses in Tijuana are being bought by Americans.
So I have a friend who lives in Tijuana, just built a new house.
Amazing.
San Diego South is what they call it now.
Weed trafficking is happening from San Diego to Tijuana.
That's the weird thing about it.
Mexico has a bunch of economic migrants from the US living in Mexico.
They're reviled in places like Mexico City.
Some of them are, they don't want them there because they're driving up prices.
So, the whole notion of Mexico being this dangerous place is in some parts, it is very dangerous, in some parts, it is very safe.
Every now and then, I see people like, Oh, I live comfortably here and my kids go to town.
Yeah, but you live in a fucking resort fucking area.
Of course, you fucking could do that, right?
And also, you're American.
Your passport, even if you don't think that, your passport actually provides you with certain immunity to some of the violence because criminal groups don't want to target Americans because that'll bring in a lot of extra heat to them.
Oh, really?
Okay.
So that is a product of that.
You know, you're more likely to be stopped by a corrupt local cop and, you know, Get asked for a bribe than get abducted by a criminal organization down there.
So, the nature of the beast down there is completely different than the United States.
I always tell people from the US if you can't travel with your sense of normal, you can't travel with your legal system, and you can't travel with your Bill of Rights.
None of that means anything once you cross that border.
So, you have to adjust.
Your normal is a fluid concept.
The same thing happens up here.
I mean, I've been to, I remember going to Detroit with some friends of mine who are in law enforcement and getting to see certain parts of that city.
I'm from Tijuana, and man, some of those parts of that city were pretty gnarly.
I will say first off, you need to adjust what your sense of normal is and what you would expect somebody to react to or what you expect somebody to view as valuable on you or with you to change.
People going down to Mexico and getting their truck stolen, they think, oh, the cartels are targeting me.
No, they want your truck because that is a resource there.
People going off to a foreign country with their iPhone and getting stabbed in the neck for it by an 11 year old, that iPhone will pay for a lot of their issues in that place.
So it's worthy as far as an object to steal from you and murder you for.
So, first off, you have to regulate your sense of normal in some of these environments.
Mexico is a place that is varied.
There's places that are safe, there's places that are safe for the locals.
If you're local there, you'll know what those places are.
You are a sense of normal for somebody from Tijuana is completely different from a sense of normal from somebody from San Diego, for example.
You know, a shootout happens and you duck behind the taco counter and then you peek out, everything's fine, and you continue on eating your tacos.
Meanwhile, the American across from you is calling the embassy to get extracted or something like that.
I'll say this first off, you need to realize that you are in another country.
If you're in Mexico traveling or living down there, you need to realize you're in another country that has a very different set of rules.
That has a government that is pretty iffy as far as trusting it or not.
So they're not going to be the ones that you might have to call for something, maybe.
Some of these places are cartel owned.
What you're seeing sometimes in some of these resort towns, with the violence that's going on inside of them, is it's a fight for the giant drug market created by Americans living down there.
They brought their consumption with them when they go down to Mexico and live in some of these places.
So now it's an extra valuable place.
So people are trying to.
Kill for some of the drug markets that people are creating.
That's another aspect of this whole drug war that people don't realize.
Mexico has drug markets themselves.
It's not just the US drug market.
Mexico has giant drug markets themselves.
And Americans not needing to cross the drugs into San Diego, for example, to feed that drug market, having some of these Americans come down and now live in Mexico and live in places like Tijuana and bringing their habits with them.
That means that there is more violence as far as.
The people that are fighting for feeding that habit down there.
So, advice, you know, realize that you have to adjust your sense of normal.
Even if you're, I'm from San Diego, I have my rights.
I'm an American.
I live down here.
Things should change.
They don't give a shit where you're from.
They don't give a shit where you're from.
Also, the locals will be less empathetic to you, you know, as far as you trying to adjust things there.
It's a hard issue.
My buddy told me to tell, my friend told me to say, if I ever got in that situation, say, soy de Montre.
Oh, yeah.
Mexican Wakanda is what I call Monterrey.
That's where all the old money hides in Mexico.
And you go down there, you'll see a Lamborghini murcielo just rolling down the street.
You said also the white guys, too.
He's like, everyone in Monterrey is white.
Yeah, that's another aspect of Mexico that people don't realize.
There's a lot of white people out there in Mexico who are Mexicans and they would speak English.
I know, right?
My foster brother, Alberto, if he's listening to this, shout out to him.
He doesn't speak pretty clear English.
And sometimes we would go to San Diego, we're kids, and they would speak English to him and not me.
You know, he was like, And Louis C.K. is Mexican.
I know, that's crazy.
I just learned that like a couple months ago.
Louis C.K. is Mexican, more Mexican than a lot of these Mexican American comedians out there, as far as like he actually lived in Mexico, you know?
That's pretty insane to kind of think of.
That is insane.
But yeah, Mexico is very diverse.
Now, there's this whole, it's another weird thing about the American mindset as far as Mexico that it's Mexico is a single place where everybody's the same.
People from Baja, like even Baja, like that's what state I was born in Tijuana.
It's actually rare to meet somebody that was born in Tijuana.
It's not a common thing.
Very transient place?
It's a transient place.
So I was born on 7th Street in the hospital Hospital de Leon, right?
Which is, you know, a hospital with a lot of people.
If you're born there, you're either the son of immigrants that were kicked out of the U.S., or you were on your way to the U.S. and you.
Missed the date of your birth and you got born in Tijuana, right?
So it's an interesting little part of the world, Tijuana.
It's a city of immigrants.
It is one of those places, it's like a Narnia type place, you know?
Anything goes.
Opportunity, food, street food is amazing there.
Drugs are prevalent there.
There's a place called La Zona Rosa, a tolerance zone and a zona de tolerancia where prostitution is basically legal.
On top of that, there's the ocean there.
There's Ensenada to the south.
There's a wine valley there.
It's an amazing place.
There's a lot of opportunities for people.
There's beautiful parts of it.
There's bad parts of it.
Tijuana is whatever you want it to be, basically.
But people from Tijuana are known in other parts of the country because when they pass through there, they're predated upon by people from Tijuana.
I met somebody on, I think, Oakland.
He had a taco shop out there.
And I have this clear English because I actually went through language school and I've actually worked on not having an accent.
I can speak Spanish, I can speak English clearly.
So I turn off the Spanish when I'm in the US for no other reason than I don't want to be treated differently.
Right?
So I'm there.
Some friends of mine are there and they're kind of joking with this taco guy, this taqueria guy.
He's fucked.
Great tacos, by the way.
I wish I'd remember the name of the place.
It's in Oakland.
It's near the swap meet.
Amazing place.
Speaking jokingly, he's from Puebla.
Speaking jokingly with him, it's like, what do you think about people from Tijuana?
Right, and I'm like standing, I was sitting there, you know, eating the tacos.
You know, ah, they'll steal the t shirt off your back and sell it back to you.
It just looks at me like, Why do you say that?
When I went through there to jump to try and jump that border, um, I bought some gold necklaces for my daughters.
So, oh, these are beautiful, thank you.
Do you want to gift wrap them?
Yeah, which box do you want?
That one, and grab the box.
A few weeks later, when he was up there, he opened up the boxes and the chains were gone.
So he got duped.
Wow.
This is Tijuana.
This is part of Tijuana, also.
There's a lot of that going on there.
And then you go to places like Puebla, which people are beautiful there.
It's a beautiful place.
Most of the best food or the best people that make good food come from there.
I think Bourdain.
Had a chef that worked on one of his restaurants that actually came from Puebla.
He had a whole episode down there, but it's very innocent.
It is a very close knit town.
There's not a lot of shady shit happening down there.
So it's a completely different place than Tijuana.
Then you go to Monterey, where some of the old money is, and some of the people that have a lot of opportunities that not a lot of Mexicans have live.
And there's a certain aspect of almost like a bubble around some of the richer communities that they don't get affected by some of the stuff that happens in other.
Places.
And then there's Sinaloa, where everything goes.
It's the Wild West.
People from Sinaloa are known for their things.
I think there was a ban on people joining certain aspects of the military from Sinaloa for a while in Mexico.
It was that kind of note for it.
But all in all, I've met people from all over the country of Mexico up here in the United States.
Every time I'm up here, I see somebody who's like, hey, where are you from?
I'm from Guadalajara.
I'm from here.
And like being so far away from home, we just, you know, the feeling of warmth, like instant connection.
Oh, it's a connection.
The connection of we have to earn our place here.
Attacks Target Faith and Identity00:07:58
We have to, you know, it's like a responsibility for us, not only our place, but the place of our children, which is something that I think links most immigrants or every immigrant.
We're always looking for a better place, not only for ourselves, but for our kids.
But there's another side to it, you know, there's a.
There's a doggy dog eat type mentality in some Mexicans as well.
You know, I've always said this my biggest critics here in the United States are Mexicans or second generation, third generation Mexicans that have lost sight of what that struggle is.
That say that I talk too negatively about Mexico or that I don't know what I'm saying, even though I came from that place.
You know, they might know better if they've never been down there or if their only experience with Mexico is going to a resort town somewhere or visiting La Abuela and the Rancho.
Every few years, I guess.
But Mexico is a very diverse place.
If anything, you can't compare it to the United States.
I think I've seen more of the United States than most Americans.
Every weekend, I'm in a different state doing a class with the locals or doing a class for law enforcement.
In the last two weeks, I was in Atlanta.
I was in Los Angeles.
I was in San Diego.
I was in Texas and a few parts of Texas.
And now I'm here.
I think going back to California.
Like understanding Mexicans and Mexican culture and Spanish is such an important part of living in Florida.
I grew up in this town right here, and I am just like, it's been such a part of my childhood and my growing up and working.
And, you know, like I'm trying to teach my kids Spanish at a really young age because to be able to communicate and with the Mexicans around here, because there's so many of them, it's such an advantage in life.
Yeah.
And I mean, that's another aspect of it.
The whole fact that Spanish is very important.
And I remember having this.
You know, people talk about racism here, you know, or uh, and if I've experienced it, uh, the I've experienced a few cases of that, and you know, I've lived in Kentucky for a while, you know, so and I never experienced any of that there.
Um, I've been through this, I've been through all throughout the south and and and parts of certain parts of the east coast that are considered kind of rural, and and the only time I've experienced that has been in California, really, yeah.
Two times.
One of them was in a grocery store in California.
And I won't say the town, but it's in California.
And it was by probably a second generation Mexican berating me for the fact that I was speaking Spanish to my kid in a restaurant.
Well, it was a restaurant attached to this supermarket.
And she, She came over and said, You need to speak English.
You're in the United States and you need to adapt.
And also, if your kid's going to be here, she needs to speak English too.
And it was a weird moment, right?
Because I turned to her and I could see the brownness in her, you know?
Yeah.
I could see some of that.
You know, that was odd, you know?
And another occasion was.
Did you understand her?
Did you think she had good intentions or do you think it was just.
It was.
I switched to Spanish with her to see if she can talk back in Spanish.
And I just caught the fact that she had lost that Spanish.
Whatever Spanish she had was broken or completely unrecognizable to me.
So maybe that was being expressed when she said that to me that she couldn't speak it anymore or she lost that.
And I don't know.
That was a weird one.
And the other one was related to my faith.
I come from Mexico and I have a very weird faith to a lot of Americans, I guess.
In Mexico, we have a really close relationship to death.
We party at the graves of our ancestors.
That's one of the coolest things about Mexico.
We have that, you know.
And I've been trying to give that to my kid as well, that culture.
I don't want her to lose that.
Where some people were calling me out on the fact that I was wearing something very satanic or demonic.
You know, it's usually like I don't usually carry it out, but you know, I usually carry.
Can you hold it up like by your microphone so you can see it?
Okay, that's cool.
The Reaper.
So I usually carry La Virgen de Guadalupe, which is like Mother of Mexico, and La Santa Muerte, which is something I grew up with as far as the faith.
And I had some people calling, that's satanic.
That's devil worship.
That's the reason why Mexico is so bad, is because you're very satanic and you have this demonic relationship with stuff.
And in my mind, I was like, you wouldn't have the balls to call somebody out on that if I was a Native American now and I was expressing some of my Native American ancestry here.
You wouldn't have the balls to say anything about it.
But I'm from Mexico.
I'm an immigrant here.
And I'm a fair game person to say that to.
Right.
And I just found this weird openness to attack that faith aspect in me.
It's interesting.
Maybe not racist, but.
Pretty interesting as far as the ability to be able to say something about that openly and freely, you know?
That's, yeah, that's odd.
In California.
I feel like one of the most, one of the biggest misconceptions, at least from my point of view, with Mexicans is that they're all concerned, at least all the ones I know, they're like conservative country.
Yeah.
Like a lot of them I know, they walk around in cowboy boots.
They're conservative minded, like when it comes to politics and love country music, driving jacked up trucks.
The identity politics that, Politics that I encountered up here has been also pretty fascinating.
You're Mexican, you should be to this side of the spectrum.
Or the discussions that I have with Latinx terminology.
Oh, yeah.
That people want to Latinx said, like, like, que?
Latinx.
I have no idea what that terminology means.
The assumption that I'm an immigrant, so my politics should be of one end or the other.
So, first off, I don't like both sides, usually.
On my end, I'm with you.
I don't like both sides.
I don't particularly agree with a man in power that is completely detached from my generational needs and the generational needs of most of the people that I know.
The fact that he's clearly not mentally capable to be in office.
And on the other side of the political spectrum, there's this reality star who.
You know, we can talk about some of the stuff that he said about people like me and about some of the places where I come from and his politics.
I mean, you know, to each his own, I'm not here to talk about that specifically.
But there's an assumption that we should be on one side of the political spectrum or another.
CIA Piggybacked Weapons Trafficking00:14:41
You know, I come from a country where we're not allowed to have guns.
And I know what that freedom would mean to a lot of Mexicans.
If a lot of Mexicans were allowed to have that freedom, which is in our constitution, in Mexico, there's a constitutional part of it where it states that we have the ability and the right to bear arms in our homes for protection.
But we have one gun store and we have a military that has monopolized that right.
And if you are not a member of the officers club in the military, you can't own or possess a firearm and carry it legally.
Or if you're a member of a police organization, you might be able to carry one.
As long as it complies with the license.
Other than that, you have to be upper middle class to afford a plane ticket to fly to that single gun store and buy a gun that you're not going to be able to carry.
Meanwhile, on the other end, criminal groups are carrying around grenade launchers and can take down helicopters.
So coming to this country and seeing the right to bear arms, I have a weird relationship to that because I know what that means to people here and I know what happens when that right is gone.
But on the other end, I also see things like Fast and the Furious and how the proliferation of firearms in Mexico, and most of them, it's probably 70% of weapons in Mexico come from the US.
Civilian great AR 15s and handguns that are converted into full auto in Mexico, for example.
Not all, but a lot of them do.
Can you explain what Fast and the Furious is for people that don't know?
Fast and the Furious was an operation that probably started during the Bush administration.
It's not a people like the USA, Obama.
But it probably started during the Bush administration, what I know of it externally.
It started during the Bush administration and basically a program that the ATF had to track firearms, small firearms purchases by gun runners in the United States.
Let them basically buy a bunch of firearms that the cartels wanted, know about it.
Tell gun stores that, hey, let these walk.
I know that's a very suspicious purchase, but let these go.
Let this walk out of your store.
It's fine.
Them looking at these, following these gun straw purchasers, take them to a gunrunner.
The gunrunner loads them onto a car and then drives them to Mexico, and nothing happens because they were attempting to follow these somehow.
They were attempting to follow where the guns were going?
Yeah, they were trying to track them.
But of course, nothing was tracked, and a lot of these guns were.
Found in murder scenes across the country, you know, including, I mean, specifically, I have this memory of these FN.57 pistols, high velocity round, and these pistols that is able to go through soft body armor and 50 cals in the box with the manual and everything.
Basically, bought off an American gun store and sent down to Mexico.
Some of them were used to kill a friend of mine.
And I remember finding these, you know, in the murder scene and not knowing where they came from or they were pretty new and like almost like out of the box.
And you start finding them everywhere.
I only found out about them by watching the hearings related to the shooting of Ryan Terry, a federal agent shot with some of these guns that later were traced back to the ATF's Fast and Furious program.
It is amazing that we know the names of these federal agents that were killed on the U.S. side with those guns, but we don't know about all the Mexicans that were killed with those guns on the Mexico side.
And for people that might want to say that I'm being anti American with this, and somehow I actually raised money for the Ryan Terry Foundation during a charity event for them, despite the fact that you know I know that some of the people involved in this whole situation might not know about some of the victims in Mexico about it.
So I'm trying to be fair and and and balance about my views and some of my uh activism work that I do in both on both sides of the border, uh, but it.
That operation did great harm to Mexico.
There was probably some government participation as far as keeping it quiet after it was found out in Mexico by the Calderon administration.
I'm probably almost sure about it, which was the administration in Mexico during that time, the administration that I was working under.
So there was shady stuff happening across that border.
But the sentiment or the.
The mentality of Mexicans towards the United States after that happened changed.
You know, the trust in certain circles as far as the U.S. changed.
And it's all, Mexico has had a longstanding relationship of good and bad with the United States.
We had some suit massacres that were related to CIA activities in Mexico.
Yeah, I've heard about those.
We had.
I watched that documentary, The Last Knock.
That was.
A very, very dark, dark story.
And you got Kiki Camarena, the DEA agent, and the CIA agent.
I mean, there's clear involvement with the CIA in Mexico utilizing drug running at that time to basically piggyback weapons trafficking down to the Contras.
But there has not been any apology about that, you know?
Is that story, has that been verified or is that still like quote unquote conspiracy theory?
It's not in my, it wasn't in my time, of course.
You know, I started working in the early 2000s, but I've met people that were from that age.
In that time, you know, people that worked around that environment.
CIA and CIA involvement in a lot of stuff in Mexico has long been known, you know.
Mexico City specifically has been a hotbed for, you know, back then Soviet era espionage and activities.
You know, there's a few cases of Soviet spies being assassinated in Mexico.
Fidel Castro spent a long time in Mexico City, you know.
Some of his revolutionaries actually trained in Mexico.
Before they went off and took Cuba.
So it's been a hotbed of activity.
If people want to equate it to something, Mexico has basically been a staging proxy war area for the United States and its enemies for decades.
Starting off with the Soviets, I guess.
And now you see influences from China in Mexico that seem to hint at some of the same kind of activity as far as a foreign entity influencing or involving itself in certain aspects of Mexico.
And the United States is trying to combat that.
So, I mean, now it's no longer spies being sent to Mexico to spy on the United States.
Now it's a pipeline of fentanyl being pumped into Mexico to feed an American.
So, before we go into the whole China thing, I wanted to, like, for people that are listening, if they're not familiar with The Last Narc, basically the story of that is there was a DEA agent working in Mexico.
I believe his name was Kiki Camarena.
And he was kidnapped and taken to some sort of house.
And he was tortured for days.
And eventually, I forget how it was really, how who blew the whistle on it, but essentially, one of the guys that was in there torturing him, his name was Felix Rodriguez, who was a CIA officer.
He was actually the CIA officer who was responsible for the capture of Che Guavara, I believe.
Yeah, there's a weird connection between that, the Bay of Pigs, Cuba.
And the Bay of Pigs, yeah.
And again, this is Cuban intelligence, CIA operations all over Mexico.
This has been going on for decades.
But that specific case is interesting because to this day, you know, we just saw the recent recapture and arrest of Caro Quintero, who was one of the guys that was fingered for that.
Yes.
And he was up when they interviewed him, they brought him in front of the media for some sort of thing after that.
And he was just sort of like laughing and joking with everybody.
He was a scapegoat.
He's like, fuck you guys.
I'll be out of here in two months.
No, he, I mean, he was a high level cartel guy.
He got arrested for it.
That was pinned on him.
He was never extradited, which should be.
Something that people should look into, you know.
He was freed under weird circumstances, you know, then made a run for it again.
Then he was placed on the most wanted list by the US recently.
And then he was arrested again in Sinaloa.
Some people say he was betrayed.
But he's never going to be extradited to the United States, I don't think.
Right.
And there should, you know, I wonder why that is, you know.
What does he know?
I don't know.
But the interesting thing is that it was all pinned on him by the US government, has always considered him.
To be the responsible guy as far as that murder, that torture and murder of Kiki Kamarena.
There's a lot of questions there.
There's a lot of, again, the whole aspect of corruption only being on the Mexican side or shady stuff being done on the Mexican side.
I always get a kick out of the comment section when I post something about Mexico.
I recently posted about this woman assassinated, one of the ladies that led one of these.
Let's find our children groups, basically.
And it's a phenomenon that's been happening across the country where women organize themselves and parents of people who are missing organize themselves to go and find their kids by trying to find clandestine graves or knock on doors, basically doing the job that the police don't do down there because they're either don't care or overwhelmed or whatever.
And she was assassinated outside of her house.
Two guys in her motorcycle came in and shot her.
And she's one of five, I think, recently that have been killed in this way.
Now, you see this, and in the comment section, like, well, the U.S. should get involved somehow, or we should send the, I don't know, some sort of intervention, I guess, is what people think about.
And I'm asked, like, what does the public sentiment as far as U.S. intervention in Mexico feel like right now?
Yeah.
Nobody wants it.
Really?
They feel like the U.S. is responsible?
They don't view the, a lot of the Mexicans don't view the U.S. as a, Innocent party or a savior of any sort.
They see your foreign policy, they see the US's foreign policy history recently as not good.
So, how come we can protect a guy like Caro Quintero, but we have El Chapo?
How did we get El Chapo?
And why do you think we were able to get El Chapo?
I mean, well, El Chapo wasn't, you know, I don't know, people paint him as this major leader of the Sinaloa cartel, which he wasn't.
You know, he was probably a member and leader, he was a member in a leadership.
Part of that federation of cartels, which the cartel groups, which is the Sinaloa cartel, is basically a federation of smaller cartels that are all allied themselves and are based out of Sinaloa.
He was arrested and paraded in front of the press as the main guy.
That's the biggest misconception of him.
He's like the head honcho that everyone thinks of him as the boss of the Sinaloa cartel.
Yeah, which is, you know.
It probably was beneficial for the government at that time in New Mexico to parade him out as that.
And also for the US government to kind of push their drug war policy as, like, oh, look at this success.
We just arrested this guy.
But nothing changed.
Drug prices remained stable.
There was no, oh, no, there's a shortage of cocaine in the United States now because we arrested this major kingpin.
Nothing changed.
Why was he caught?
He was caught because he was, I think, this is my theory.
I don't know if it's true or not, but you saw his arrest after his meeting with Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo, who's a Mexican telenovela star.
And I think that conversation or whatever was happening at that point, as far as Ochapo's intentions, were to put his story or his narrative out to people and utilizing Hollywood for it.
And whatever he was going to say about that was probably not something that people wanted out there.
That's my theory.
I don't know if it's true or not, but you saw his capture pretty soon after.
So somebody got scared that he was going to put his.
I mean, he was talking to Sean Penn, you know?
Hey.
Right.
So that's, you know, he wasn't arrested by the Mexican military, by the way.
That's another misconception about it, which is there was a raid on some of the safe houses that he was at by the Mexican Marina, the Marines, but he escaped.
And he was stopped a few miles away by federal road police.
That's who he was arrested by.
He was stopped by two federal cops near the area where the raid happened.
He was with his head bodyguard covered in mud because they went through some sewer tunnels to get to a road outside.
They carjacked somebody and took his car, and then he was stopped by these federal road cops.
And then the Marines showed up.
Again, narrative is very important in Mexico and how to construct that narrative as far as who arrested him.
So you see these, you see the military parade him around, you know, they dress him well and they parade him around and we arrested him.
Chapo Escaped Through Sewer Tunnels00:09:57
But there's a lot of stuff that happens down there.
Again, narrative has to be controlled.
And who's seen as the victor, who's seen as the guy that the group that is specifically involved in arresting him?
It has to be the military, you know, because that is a narrative.
So, that on the other side of it, you know, there's a lot of narrative influences as far as the cartel and what's happening down there, but it's also the military is also doing its own narrative influence in Mexico.
Who is El Mayo Sembada and how important is he to the Sinaloa cartel?
And how is, what was his relationship with El Chapo?
So, what I know about him, and again, I'm a street level guy, I worked on the streets in Baja as an agent and in a few other parts of the country, but specifically Baja.
And what I hear about him comes from people out there working in that field.
Elmar Zambada was somebody that learned his tradecraft as far as how to move traffic and figure out drug routes all the way from Colombia up into the United States.
He learned his craft in Los Angeles, not in Sinaloa.
So a lot of people want to think of the Sinaloa cartel as a Mexican creation andor virgin or originating itself in.
In Mexico, but actually started in Los Angeles.
So it's a very much an American origin story.
Through his relationship with somebody that was by marriage linked to him, I think a Cuban national, if I don't misremember about it.
He learned some of the trade secrets as far as getting contacts, learning how to package what.
Distributors in the U.S. to get to, how to work distribution in the U.S., and how to finance and figure these things out.
Out.
He learned it in LA.
Later on, he went back to Sinaloa and started setting up some of this network from Mexico and started figuring out how to get people involved in it.
He's never been arrested.
The pictures we have of him are probably almost a decade old now of an interview he himself had asked for with a magazine called Proceso down in Mexico.
Did you say he asked for it?
Yeah.
He asked to be interviewed by somebody from that magazine.
He wanted to.
Talk about some things that were being said about him, I guess.
But he's in the shadows.
He's a shadowy figure.
You don't hear a lot about him.
That's interesting to me that nobody knows about.
Most people have never heard his name.
Well, I think now a lot of people have heard his name through his son being arrested in the US.
His son was not arrested in the US.
He was arrested in Mexico, but extradited to the US.
Amazing book written by a reporter, Annabella Choa, I think is her name, that is basically an interview with his son, the son of Mayo Zambada, and his experience in that family and the whole process of how he became involved in that business and how that business relates to a lot of the corruption, not only in Mexico, but on the U.S. side.
There's this whole story about that, and she's asked her on.
She's somebody to talk to.
But yeah, it's an interesting aspect that he's never been arrested and that not a lot of people know about him.
What ended up happening to his son?
He probably, I think he turned state witness, I guess.
So that's at least what you gather from some of the stuff that he talks about in that book.
So he's probably in some sort of protective custody somewhere, probably.
So his dad wants to kill him.
I don't know.
Jeez.
But yeah, it's interesting that you don't hear a lot about it.
And it's.
You know, there's some aspects of some of these criminal groups down there.
You know, Chapo was one of those where I think they turn into some kind of celebrity figures.
You know, Chapo escaped from captivity a few times in a very dramatic way.
You know, one of them, he was probably let out by the prison guards.
You know, there's a story about him being in a laundry cart and stuff like that, which again, I think is completely BS that the government kind of said to not be embarrassed.
He was probably let out of that prison.
And then, yeah, the other one was a drug tunnel that was dug underneath the prison where he's at.
And he was kept on the ground level for some insane reason.
And if you see the drug tunnel, the drug tunnel is shaped like that.
It's like you see some of the drug tunnels underneath the border that are shaped the same way.
So, why are they shaped like that?
It's the quickest way and the most stabilized way to create a tunnel in a hurry without having to create a shaft with support beams on it.
So, you make something that is.
Shaped like that.
Interesting.
And that was probably made by some of the same people that make the tunnels across the border.
It's a going theory.
It was wild seeing the video that Weiss did on that tunnel.
There was electricity throughout the whole thing with lights.
It was a major operation that cost a lot of money.
And all the people that worked in that jail were, you know, they had to have been complicit.
But you could see his celebrity.
Or his almost legendary status kind of builded from all these exploits he did.
And, you know, it also tells you a lot about sentiment in Mexico, you know, how people that are working for the government are vilified because of all these major issues with trust and the violation of trust and corruption.
You know, I understand that aspect of it.
You know, I'm considered a villain because of where I worked, you know, even though I despise and fucking say a bunch of shit about the government that I used to work.
But I'm still, I was still an agent in Mexico, a policia.
So that means all of us are corrupt and all of us are evil.
But on the other side of it, you see the Netflix series where, you know, the romantic, romanticized version of cartel members who are, you know, Robin Hood characters almost in all these cases and are romanticized.
And you see, you know, you see.
Why do you think that is?
Why do you think American culture is so fascinated by?
By cartel lore and cartel and drug stories.
It's a Robin Hood.
You can't help but root for the robber in these cases.
It's a Robin Hood figure, I guess.
I don't know.
It's one of the oldest examples I think Mexico has of this kind of phenomenon of rooting for the, I won't say bad guys, because I think Mexico is beyond good and bad right now.
There's devils on both sides.
But one of the first cases of this Robin Hood type sentiment.
Was a guy that later on turned into the saint of cartel, of traffickers, Malverde, Jesus Malverde.
Jesus Malverde is a folk saint in Mexico that came out of Sinaloa.
You see him depicted as a man well dressed with a mustache, usually carrying around money bags or weed on the bottom of him.
It's like in these statues that they have of him.
They call him El Santo, El Santo del Colgadito, or the Hanged Saint, basically.
He was a bandit.
A bandit that lived in the state of Sinaloa back when, you know, turn of the century.
Rich landowners used some of the rural roads to go in and out of the area.
And he would rob them, you know, just like Robin Hood would, you know.
He would rob them and he was known hard to get, you know.
He would know his ways around the rural areas so he would escape these government troops that were after him.
So he became a legendary bandit.
Eventually, the government got tired of his shit.
He tried to rob a rich landowner somewhere out there, and he got shot in the process and wounded.
He hid himself in the hills.
He knew he was going to die, so he told one of his friends to basically turn him in.
There was a, I don't think I remember clearly, but a 10 gold coin reward on him.
So, 10 gold coins for him.
So, he said to his friend, Turn me in, get the money, and just give it to the townspeople.
And well, that's the legend.
He was caught, he was hung, and there was an order for him not to be buried.
So just let him rot.
Eventually, his bones made it to the ground, and the townspeople one by one put a rock over his remains.
There was a mound of rocks there eventually.
People started praying to his anima sola, which is basically this soul that's stuck in purgatory type of belief that a lot of Catholics have.
They view people that died unjustly like that as a link or as a way to ask for favor or ask for intervention.
So he started granting miracles.
And there's a big shrine to him in Sinaloa.
Narco Juniors Thrived in Tijuana00:04:03
And you go there and you'll see pictures of some of these.
Traffickers in the US with their big trucks and their big houses.
And like, thank you, Malverde, for granting me this miracle.
You know, I think that is an interesting aspect of the psyche in Mexico this almost rebellion against authority or government that we have in us.
And specifically, higher in places where people don't have a lot of opportunities.
You know, the reason why some of these criminal groups are so large and so powerful in Mexico is because we have a lot of youth.
We have a lot of expendable youth bodies that have absolutely no opportunities other than going to work with some of these criminal groups down there.
Right.
So they start working for cartels as young as like 11 or 12, don't they?
Yeah.
You can work them in the fields and then they turn into the halcones.
You'll see 13, 14 year olds with a cell phone and a radio on the rooftops, their eyes and ears.
There's no way you can get close to any of these towns that are cartel controlled without them spotting you from a mile away.
You'll get, then you'll be able to ride a motorcycle.
So now they're following around military convoys in a city so they can report back all their movements.
And then you'll get an AK and you'll be in back of a truck or you'll get a gun and you'll get tasked with going to shoot somebody.
And the dream they used to have was through music.
You would hear about the exploits of this guy, this cartel guy.
You would hear corrido about this guy.
You would hear.
You know, stories about this other guy.
You would see a Mexican B movie in VHS about, you know, so and so, and you would get inspired.
But now we have Narcos Mexico.
Right.
Now we have a bunch of these online series related to them.
Now we have TikTok.
Now we have Instagram.
Now we have a lot of things that will give us, give youth a window into some of these lifestyles.
And like, I want to be that.
That's the way to get out.
That's the way to give my family what I didn't have.
You know, this is the way, I guess.
This is the lottery ticket.
Although it's like the easiest way to get out of poverty, right?
I mean, it's the way, you know?
The way.
It's the way.
There's no other options.
In some places in Mexico, there's no other options.
So, where you said you were born in Tijuana, were you raised as a young child there?
Or where were you?
Tijuana, Tecate.
Tijuana, and Tecate.
So, basically, the two municipalities that are joined.
We had a ranch with a pig farm on it.
So, I would go back and forth between the city and this pig farm area.
Is there like a key moment you can remember or reflect on in your life where you ever made a choice, like to go in that direction or where you had a choice to enter that world?
Yeah.
I mean, again, when I was my teenage years in the late 90s in Tijuana, where the whole Narco Junior phenomenon was happening in that part of the world, Narco Juniors were basically middle class kids being.
Brought into cartel activity.
I think at that time the Ariana Felix cartel was the main cartel in that area.
They were basically bringing the Tijuana was thriving.
It had poverty in it, but it also had a very big middle class population.
And they saw in this middle class population opportunities for them to infiltrate regular industry, to utilize some of the sons and kids that some of these families that are well off to gain entry into industry, gain entry into transport, gain entry into.
Middle Class Kids Join Criminal Groups00:02:29
Means of moving across the border through regulated legal means by utilizing transport companies and stuff like that.
So, you know, I saw friends of mine in that timeframe that went off to work for some of these criminal groups and saw them go from not being able to, and I was a skateboarder back then, you know, that was my thing, playing in a punk band.
I think a lot of that mentality that I got from that culture kept me.
Kept me out of it.
But some of my friends left that behind, or some of my friends were never part of that whole kind of culture, counterculture type of thing.
So I saw them go from driving around a beat up Hyundai XL to then showing up in a Ram, Dodge Ram, a brand new Dodge Ram, a sporter one with blue and a stripe going down the middle of it, and then showing me their AKs at street parties.
What about the old Ford Lightnings?
Yeah.
Remember those, the old school F-150 Lightnings?
Yeah.
I mean, you would see these guys go from nothing to everything, you know?
And they would come and, like, hey, yeah, check this out.
I'm standing there wearing dickies, wearing airwalks, and people, you know, my blind skateboard that its tails were all worn down because that's, you know, I've been riding around all this time.
Independent truck.
So people know that I'm legit.
I'm just talking about my board.
But I'm sitting there holding this, and these guys show up and they're like, walk out of this car wearing, you know, Italian stuff on them, you know, clothing and boots and flashy, you know, money is everywhere and women are there.
And it's like, what the fuck am I doing?
You know, you have these moments of like, where am I going?
You know?
But there was a specific place I used to hang out.
It was a straight street, and everybody on that street, all the kids went to work, went to work in that industry, you know.
And I remember when I was active, it almost became like this list that I would go down because I kept finding them in murder and executed scenes.
Fentanyl Smuggled From US to Mexico00:15:17
You know, a lot of these kids that I remember from that time all of a sudden are found in pieces over here.
There's another kid that's found dead over there.
Their houses were fucking raided and burned, you know.
And you saw this whole generation of people just get eaten.
I think there was one night when we found 12 kids, ranging from 17 to 28, just tied up, beaten, tortured, and strangled, and shot, some of them in one night, 12 of them.
And going through and looking at them and seeing, oh, I think I know that guy.
And some of our other guys that were there, like, I think I know him.
And these were kids, you know, and it's they were part of this machine that was trying to gain control of that part of the country to control the port of entry into the largest drug market on the planet, which is California.
And that's why they're dead, you know.
Do you see an end to this in the future, like even if it's the long term future, or are cartels forever just going to be a part of Mexico?
That's an interesting question.
And I've something that I talk, I consider, like, people talk about fully legalization or decriminalization of some of these substances across the board.
There was a moment and a time when some of these criminal groups only focused on moving narcotics across the border.
I mean, we've found xenolomic arthral activity all the way in Europe and Northern Africa.
Southeast Asia, you know, they're everywhere, you know.
It was a time and place when that was their only means of money making, but now they're local drug market, giant local drug markets in Mexico as well.
So you can decriminalize things in here in the United States, but that's not going to end anything in Mexico.
So that's an aspect of it that is no longer just like Mexico is no longer just a drug route.
It's also a giant drug market itself that is feeding a lot of these criminal groups.
So unless it's going to be like a regional decriminalization of narcotics of all kinds.
To regulate that, that's not going to be an issue.
We already saw the legalization of marijuana in certain parts of the United States.
And all that did is it turned marijuana fields into poppy fields.
That's what happened.
So they just shifted or adapted.
The reason why they started putting fentanyl in the poppy and the heroin was that a lot of these places where they were planting these poppy fields were already leached as far as nutrients.
And they didn't, that wasn't their industry.
So the potency of this lighter colored heroin was low.
So, you know, this is kind of legalization of pot in places like California was kind of around the same time that the prescription opiate epidemic was ending, was kind of petering out in the United States.
So it was like a perfect storm.
You know, you started seeing these marijuana fields now turn into poppy fields.
People started putting, you know, an extra kick in fentanyl into the heroin and it became the product.
Isn't the fentanyl cheaper?
Yeah.
I mean, it's a time dependent.
So during COVID, it was not cheaper.
Oh, okay.
Because of the shutdown, although a single cartel was the one that was getting most of it.
I think there was a case of Sinaloa cartel actually smuggling some of the fentanyl from the US into Mexico to load their drugs.
But it definitely gave it a kick, you know?
I mean, as far as whatever potency heroin had coming out, coming from down there, they added the fentanyl in it and it just turned into.
And not only drugs, but isn't the cartel also involved in like lots of other main industries?
Like even if we have a Ford factory down there, isn't the cartel somehow like doing this?
Any major industry in Mexico is either in some way, shape, or form financing criminal groups around it by paid protection schemes, by racketeering, racketeering.
Related to robberies inside of some of the mining industry, for example.
Oh, yeah.
And by, you know, feeding some of the drug habits in the communities around some of these industries, they have their hand in human trafficking.
They have their hands in regular industry.
There's been a few tequila companies that later were found out to be owned and operated by families that are attached to some of these criminal enterprises.
So, yeah.
I mean, the interconnectivity of the United States and Mexico, as far as all of these.
These illicit activities, the whole aspect or concept that Americans have of this is a problem that is out all the way out there in Mexico doesn't touch us.
It's like I think about is there a time in the future where like the cartel could just evolve into it's now the government?
Like, well, that's some of these leaks have.
We're going to start making our own rules.
Like, we're going to develop our new constitution of the cartel.
The reason why you're seeing so many political candidates being assassinated in Mexico right now is because that's what they're already doing.
You know, they already have their candidates, they already have their governors.
You think the governor of Sinaloa can be the governor of Sinaloa without the Sinaloa cartel saying that he's going to be the governor of Sinaloa?
I would bet no.
So that's an example.
Okay.
That's an example of that.
And the Mexican military doesn't work with the Marina, with the Mexican Marines.
You know, they don't work together.
So they don't trust each other.
So if members of the federal government don't trust each other in that way to work together in conjunction, Something's at a very high level wrong or broken, and they themselves are admitting that they are compromised in a way.
So, when you ask if the cartels will one day govern, they are already in a way, criminal groups are already in a way governing large segments of Mexico through influence.
It's already happened.
Because one of the presidents labeled them terrorist organizations, right?
So, the I think the people will think back on Trump talking about the fact that these groups would be labeled or the possibility of labeling cartel organizations as terrorist organizations.
And this happened after the massacre of Mexican American Mormons in Sonora.
There was a massacre of this family group in Sonora.
Now, there's a bunch of stories out there as far as if they were involved in cartel activities or not, if they had some sort of connection to any of that.
You know, conspiracy theories abide out there as far as that.
I'm not here to say exactly what the motives were.
I know that it was a bunch of women and children in cars that were basically shot and burned alive.
You know, that's what I know.
I know that they were Mexican Americans.
They had American passports and they had Mexican nationality.
So they had both nationalities.
When that happened, there was also this.
The surge of the migrant caravans going on as well.
And this was at the beginning of the Trump kind of the Trump administration's efforts.
And also, we had a new leftist president in Mexico who was utilizing all the anti American sentiment.
Just Lopez?
Yeah.
He was utilizing a lot of the anti American sentiment that Trump himself created as a political pressure point, you know.
So, when the migrant caravan happened and all these people moved through the country towards the border, Trump was trying to figure out a way to pressure the Mexican government to reinforce its own southern border.
And one of the ways that he put political pressure on them was to put this threat out as far as the United States labeling cartel organizations as terrorist organizations, which never happened.
He just made the threat, you know?
It was used as a political pressure thing.
What would that mean if he labeled the cartels as terrorists?
It means that anybody supporting them, relating to them, harboring them, working with them, financing them, moving their money, or anything of that nature would now be fair game for the U.S. military to go after.
Think of Saddam Hussein and what happened in Iraq when that happened and the Taliban.
But Iraq had.
A lot of resources that we wanted.
What would the U.S. gain by going in and invading Mexico?
Well, we have most of the minable lithium on the planet underneath the same place where all those Mormons were.
Really?
If you want to talk about resources, Mexico has a lot of resources.
Not in, I think, its main resources, its people, you know, but there's also a lot of.
I had this conversation with a former CIA agent yesterday and I asked him this question.
And he said, he said, the biggest incentive for any country is.
To improve its GDP, to grow its GDP.
Revenue is resources and money.
What will we gain by doing that to Mexico?
That was his question.
Most of the minable lithium on the planet is.
It is the number one deposit of lithium, I think, right?
It's the biggest minable deposit of lithium on the planet, I think.
And if you see what has happened to other South American countries that have lithium, that have had regime changes recently in the recent history, you would see some of the influences the United States have had and some of these regime changes.
South America is going to the left, and this sentiment against the United States is prevalent throughout Latin America right now.
When that threat was made of labeling cartels as a terrorist organization, it moved whatever apparatus was there to fortify the southern border.
To admit the whole policy that the United States now had as far as them saying, Hey, I know you're coming here illegally.
You wait in Mexico while you wait your turn, but in Mexico.
And the only reason all of that happened was because of some of the political pressure that happened with that threat.
Now, think about it you label cartel organizations terrorist organizations.
Now, do they meet that definition?
Are they politically motivated?
You see all these political cascade assassinated.
You can say yes.
Right?
Do they have an ideology that they want to put forth?
They're the heroes in their own story.
So there's an ideology there.
There's some certain cartel groups and leaders in the past that have actually turned themselves into saints in some parts of Mexico.
There's a case of a cartel member they nicknamed El Masloco who turned himself into like a crusader type saint and made statues and shrines to himself out there.
So.
There's clearly some of that to be said about some of these organizations.
They utilize assassination, murder, torture, and terror related tactics to further their intentions as far as what they're working on.
A lot of the ISIS, highly produced ISIS videos of executions and stuff like that that came out back then were actually influenced by some of the narco blog and execution videos that the cartels had.
So, even there, there's like, you know, they've been influencing that type of stuff.
Now, I consider that they meet every single definition of that terminology.
I don't think they will be labeled that because that means that the United States will have to fight that battle on both sides of this border.
You know, if they cartel organizations are labeled a terrorist organization, it means that any industry, government, or people that are harboring, Helping, aiding, supplying, all of that will be fair game.
And I think there's a lot of that industry and stuff like that here in the United States as well.
And there's a lot of political influence.
The US government helping create terrorist organizations.
The US government not being too farsighted with their foreign policy, specifically in Mexico, is probably spare to say.
Well, I'm just looking at what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So.
You, you, like, somebody that's not from here, and I don't know a lot about that war.
But the fact that you were attacked by a bunch of Saudis and Egyptians, and then you, you, you went off and, you know, took down the Iraqi government and the, and now looking at it now and seeing the Taliban back in power, like, that, that's, that's an interesting, that's an interesting lesson for other countries that are looking to the US for solutions.
Like the lesson is learned by the international community, specifically your neighbors down south.
Like, we don't, like, Mexico doesn't want the U.S. and Mexico to intervene or come as a savior.
That's not in the mind, that's no longer in the headspace of most people down there.
Which, again, it's you talk about looking for solutions and stuff like that.
It's hard to come up with any sort of solution that doesn't involve a bottom up solution.
Transformation of Mexico that includes its people.
You know, if you want to talk about true change, I think it comes from a grassroots effort from the people in Mexico that doesn't include the government and doesn't include the military in Mexico.
Mexico Rejects US Savior Complex00:12:52
Because I think, and these recent leaks of documents have shown that they are completely under equipped and overwhelmed by this problem down there.
It seems like if you could just alleviate all the fucking bloodshed and violence and brutality in these cartels.
That you could make shit way better.
Do you see any sort of way to just fix the problem when it comes to the killing and the murder?
Like, if you could legitimize them somehow or give them some sort of power, like, look, stop the killing, stop the murder, let's make this work.
Keep the cartels, lose the death.
It's interesting that, you know, the.
The drug war that was kicked off by this President Felipe Calderon chopped off the heads of certain leadership in some of these criminal groups, which basically meant now one group is two.
Right.
This group over here now has a vested interest in attacking this one.
So it was basically kicking a beehive and not having a bee suit on, is the analogy that I want to give it.
I think whatever options we have had of pacification or I don't know what to call it are gone.
I think these groups are fractured, like the CNL cartel is a fractured.
I mean, they have killings going on between their members.
You see places like Baja and Tijuana specifically, where you have one side fighting the other for control of the local drug market.
Most of the murders that happen in Tijuana are related to local drug sales.
So they're killing each other's sales points, people, right?
And then you see some of these criminal groups that are no longer able to maintain their organization through trafficking means.
So they start going into local extortion.
Going into abduction for ransom, going into people trafficking, and going into other types of things and making the worse and worse and worse, the situation worse and worse and worse.
And all we have to combat that in Mexico is a government that is in complete denial about the fact that every five years, six years, where a president comes in, all the stuff that was done before gets completely discarded, even if it was successful, demonized.
And all that is bad.
Now we're going to do this new thing.
An example of this, current president Lopez over there.
And again, I'm not to the left or the right of political spectrum.
People want to say that I am to the right or something like that.
I want to smoke a joint and take mushrooms at my gay best friend's wedding with a gun on my hip, and I don't want the government to come in to say those are my political views, right?
You can't put Ed Calderon in a box.
No, I mean, I'm cool.
I'm cool.
Everybody wants to live their own life.
I'm fine.
I'm about small government, I'm about responsibility, you know.
If there's one thing I would change in the world, it would be to declare the ability and the means to protect yourself and your loved ones as a human right.
And that would mean firearms.
Right.
Absolutely.
That wouldn't mean to be able to take that responsibility for yourself because in places like Mexico, that's not available to people.
So if people want to see my politics, that's pretty much it.
It's about responsibility and about being able to do that for yourselves.
The president right now in Mexico is doing this thing called the Guarda Transformación.
And he's being, he's highly popular as far as the masses.
To the right of the political spectrum down in Mexico, there's the conservative people that have done a horrible job at governing Mexico.
And it's clear now because of the complete disdain that the populace has towards them.
They have no political candidates that's going to rival anything that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is going to put forth as far as the next person that's coming into the presidency in the next two years.
So, but.
The main thing that the current administration does is criticize the right for their handling of the drug war, criminal, the drug policy, and all these things.
And they're doing exactly the same things that the past administrations have done, which is basically militarize the police, militarize the counter cartel activities, go into a fragmented effort against all cartel organizations out there, favoring some, not favoring others.
And the main thing that they promised was to create a civilian police, federal policing organization across the country, which they didn't.
They basically changed the uniform of the military from green to white camouflage and put a military member in charge of this new police group, which now the federal police is gone.
All these guys who had a lot of training, a lot of counter narcotics operational skills and experience.
Are gone.
Where are they?
This mass of people that work for that institution.
Where are the skills?
They're probably at work somewhere else, right?
A lot of these criminal organizations are recruiting somewhere else.
So they're probably somewhere currently working against our best interest.
You can turn this thing like that.
Okay.
So where are they?
And this is basically us shooting ourselves in the foot again.
When I left the job where I was, the same thing happened.
We.
The group that I worked with and some of the people in leadership that I worked with did an amazing job in Baja.
We took Tijuana specifically off the most dangerous city list on the planet with the work that not only we did, but some of the local government did there.
We were given a clean slate to try and figure that out.
And when that ended, political rivals came into power and everything was vilified and demonized, and all of us were now the villains.
Because there's a case of systemic amnesia that happens every five years.
So it's going to happen again.
Things are really bad right now in Mexico, as far as control that some of these organizations have over vast amounts of the population.
The leaks that just came out, this guacamaya leaks that just came out, that basically put bare all of the mistakes that this current administration has had and also past administrations have had.
How it taints all of their hands from Felipe Calderon to the current administration, how the military is completely underprepared and ill equipped to fight this problem, and how they are holding on to the responsibility and the power that was given to them by letting them go out of their barracks and do this stuff on the streets to try and gain control of it.
We just had some legislation passed that's going to put them on the streets even for like five more years.
Because they were trying to be put back into their military barracks.
Now they're involved in creating hospitals and creating airports, trains.
They're trying to create this whole thing, they're involved in all this infrastructure work down there, which is making a lot of people some money.
So you see all of this systemic problem basically cycling, and people are fighting as far as the political left and political right when there's the same problem that's just repeating itself, just under a different banner.
So, you know, it sounds just like the United States, but with different issues.
Yeah.
I mean, that division is what it is.
God.
We never explained it, but what were you doing specifically in Baja?
I was a member of a state organization that started as a state organization, basically.
It's an attempt in Baja to Americanize police forces, it's a modern police force that they attempted to create.
They were successful in some of it, basically, the initial efforts of it.
We were put through FBI background checks.
Our backgrounds were checked, financials, house visits, put through a paramilitary style training regiment.
And we were basically used as the tip of the spear, basically, to work against some of these cartel organizations in the area.
When I started, the federal police were soldiers dressed in gray and they would ride around the back of the truck with us.
It's funny now that the soldiers are dressed in white and the same thing happens.
They're riding in the back of the truck.
So I was part of that organization for 12 years.
I did a lot of stuff in that organization from working.
In conjunction with federal agencies, the military, you know, sometimes I would get invited with military units because they would know their way around.
Because the way the military works in Mexico, if you join the military in one part of the country, they send you to another.
So sometimes these specialized military units were doing counter narcotic operations, counter cartel operations, but they wouldn't know their way around.
So we would have to have us as guides in some of these areas.
So I worked with some of these mixed groups, basically doing some of those jobs in that area.
Not just in Baja, like we worked in other parts of the country and also the US.
I got to do a lot of executive protection and bodyguarding with some high level people, including the governor of Baja, and actually got to work here in the United States protecting him and his family.
Oh, wow.
So that's another aspect of some of the work that I did.
That led me to get exposed to American military training.
We did some time in Coronado and actually trained with some people in NSW and NCIS.
So, I remember getting this feeling or this taste of what we could be as a law enforcement and what our military could turn into if we had the backing of our government and if we had the confidence and faith of our people, but we don't.
So, I did that for 12 years until it became completely unsustainable for me.
What I mean by that is, I could no longer do that job without being compromised, as far as, you know, My person.
I was never on the take in any way, shape, or form.
Like, and people that doubt that, you know, I currently have a contract with the federal government and they looked at my background before I could get any of these.
So I trained federal agents in the United States and have in the past.
And I left that job with nothing, basically.
You know, there was a moment where I was basically brought into the office after.
After most of that situation was ended, and I was offered either to work for a team or not, and I just resigned.
And I had the opportunity that not a lot of people have of coming to the United States through marriage.
I had a marriage, I married an American and came to the United States.
I'd never envisioned myself coming to the United States and living up here.
Like, I was married for a few years down there.
And our plan was to live in Mexico.
It's not.
It's not expensive.
We would figure it out.
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I was going to leave that job alive or not just do that for the rest of my life.
But it became less and less sustainable until it just became like corrupted at the highest levels.
And, you know, when I was up here going through my immigration process and finally finalizing that, I remember seeing the arrest of Martinez Luna.
Garcia Luna, the guy that was head of counter cartel operations for the federal government when I was active.
Corruption Reached Highest Government Levels00:03:33
And now he's up here in the United States on cartel charges.
And this is somebody that was awarded FBI recognition.
And like the government was saying, this is the best guy out there.
And he was the guy that was in charge of overseeing the organizations that would keep us honest, you know, the people that would go and put us through polygraph examinations every year, you know, or if something would happen, they would, you know, Evaluate us and investigate all of us.
And all of a sudden, this is our boss.
And now he's under arrest up here for cartel charge.
How many times did you get approached when you were doing that?
Many times.
And what are their tactics to doing that?
They try to blackmail, leverage.
What do they do?
Through others, through other people that are working in the same organization as you, basically.
You'll get approached by people inside.
And there's a culture in Mexico of you don't want to tell on people.
And it is understood that there's people in there that have.
They're on the take, and there's people that are not on the take.
So you just.
Guys driving nice cars, living in nice houses.
Yeah, people suddenly get a giant house and arrive at work in a Hummer H2.
There's some people out there that are going to listen to this that work with me, and they're not going to let me lie about this.
There was a guy that showed up to work one day in a yellow Hummer H2, and everybody there was like, what the fuck?
He was later.
He was later let go of the job and he got into some shit and arrested and all this type of stuff.
But at that time, I was working as a bodyguard for one of the directors of the group that I used to work with.
And I remember him looking out the window and being like, he looked back at me and I was driving around a Sunfire Plymouth.
I think it's Plymouth Sunfire.
It's shit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know what Kyrie's talking about.
Shitty ass car, you know, but that's what I could afford on that salary.
And this fucking arrives in that car.
You know, I was basically driving a loaner car from my brother's car, and he loaned me that car because my truck was all fucked up.
And this guy just shows up in this car.
It happened regularly.
Or just getting, we would change our phone numbers every now and then just to, you know, for security.
And my phone would always get, you know, Somebody would call me and threaten the people that I was working with.
Hey, tell your boss that he's going to fucking die.
It's like, shit, who's that?
I don't even want to know.
Our information, our emergency contact numbers and personal information found in photocopy form at a safe house somewhere.
And all of us having to get a call and, like, hey, your information was found somewhere.
Move everything around.
It was a constant thing.
And also, there were a lot of cases where you would approach people and they were clearly more of them than there were of us.
And really, you would have to just, you know, stand down or stand back or getting a call from high up and say, whatever you're going to, yeah, don't go.
Death Threats Targeted My Team00:15:22
Okay.
There was a lot of that.
What were the guys thinking that would show up?
Like the guy driving an H2?
Like he must have known that everybody, it was obvious, right?
I mean, to when that happened, I remember everybody was like, It's obvious.
But it was at a weird moment in that institution's time where we didn't have a lot of backing and we didn't have a lot of people basically looking out for everybody's interests.
We were kind of compartmentalized, and these guys over here were doing what they were doing, and these guys over here were doing what they were doing.
And it was true throughout my time there, where we had people that we knew who we recognized who was cool to work with and who was not doing shit, and we recognized who wasn't.
There was a very influential man that came and was in leadership during some time when I was there.
His name's Lieutenant Colonel Liza Ola, who is a very famous character in Mexico.
One of the most famous lawmen in Mexico, basically.
He had a documentary done on him.
Oh, yeah, I've heard of this.
Incorruptible dude, senor.
Sorry, not dude.
Man, he's still out there, and I'm probably going to talk to him pretty soon.
He came out of the military.
He's a lieutenant colonel.
He came out of the war college.
Amazing man, fearless.
When you talk about like superhero characters, like these men that you meet that are supernatural, that has to be one of them for me.
The first time I met him, he came to Tijuana to take control of the institution that I was in, the organization that I was in.
And the guy that I was working with as a bodyguard said, You're going to drive him around.
So I go over and I introduce myself.
He looks at me, he looks at my equipment, he looks at all the stuff, like he looks at my firearm and things that are on it.
And he says, Who got you this equipment?
It's like I did.
How'd you pay for it with my salary?
Do you like this job?
I say, Yes.
What don't you like about it?
I wish we had more support.
I wish you had more training.
I wish we had more equipment and I wish we had better firearms.
And he just nodded.
And then I got into a car with him and we started patrolling Tijuana the first night he was active.
He would walk out of the car straight into shit, you know?
And I was supposed to be guarding him.
And I was like, sir, you can't.
What kind of shit would he walk into?
I thought he was got cartel members being stopped somewhere and surrounding.
He would just walk in there like, who are you?
Like, who are you working for?
Like, this man was fearless, you know?
He was a fearless man.
Had several assassination attempts on his life.
Several.
Like they tried to poison him.
Is that something that.
Like when you walk into those situations like that, like you explained him walking into just a group of cartel guys and he was fearless.
Is that something they can sniff out very easily?
Can they sense people's fear and they take advantage of that?
Yeah.
I mean, they sense people not being too sure about what they were doing or like, oh, who are these guys?
Are they who they say they are?
Who are they calling?
Who did they call before we stopped them?
You're watching your backs.
He would stop some suspicious people, and you would have to put people on the sides of the road pointing at both ways in case you would get ambushed by somebody trying to rescue them for something like that.
But he changed a lot of the ways we operated.
He basically turned us into a counterinsurgency in a lot of ways.
He started developing these nucleuses or cells of people that would move around the city.
At all hours of the night and operate.
And we were, nobody knew what was going on.
They would just move around the city.
And he would keep some of these groups on edge because where are these guys going?
What do they know that we don't know?
He got us better firearms.
I remember we had one AR 15 in two through three and one in nine millimeter in the armory.
And that's what we would roll with every night.
Some of the cells that I would work with at night, that's what we had as far as to arm ourselves.
We were moving five, six man strong groups.
And all of a sudden, all of us were carrying around G3 assault rifles and G36s, and we had the full backing of the military, and now we were a thing to be feared.
And we were operating in very much a counterinsurgency way against some of these groups.
And we had the backing of the government at that time, so they were pretty behind his efforts.
He changed a lot of stuff in there, he changed a lot of it.
I think one of the first.
The thing that I kind of noticed is that he had a selection process as far as who was going to be in charge, and he put to standards in front of us.
So it was no longer who you knew or who your compadre was, as far as if you wanted to be in leadership.
Now you had to prove yourself.
It didn't last, though.
It lasted a few years, and he was moved.
He did some great work in Tijuana.
He was then a police chief of the Tijuana Police Department for a while as well.
Oh, wow.
He was the one that disarmed the whole of the police department in Tijuana, which was insane.
The police in Tijuana was basically without an armed police force for a few weeks because of him.
How did that happen?
He had the military with him.
Oh, shit.
He surrounded them with the military and they said, give the guns up.
Specifically, he wanted those guns to go through forensics because a lot of them were being utilized as the murder weapons because a lot of the musical police department in Tijuana was undertake.
Not only undertake, but they were being utilized by some of the cartel forces to.
Move drugs around and perform hits.
He did such a good job that he was then sent by the federal government to take leadership of the police precinct in Juarez.
And he did the same out there.
He lowered the violence out there with the same approach he took in Tijuana.
Politics change, you know, amnesia comes in.
So he was on his way out of Juarez and.
He was with one of his kids and he was shot in the back in his last assassination attempt and lost to the use of his legs.
Jesus.
When that happened, you know, all of us were like, to the people that knew him and that worked with him, and, you know, it was kind of hard.
But then he came back.
He came back with a vengeance and he politicized.
He wanted to be the municipal.
President of Tijuana.
So he's made the run on the office three times now, I think.
Really?
Yeah.
I held a political rally for him at my family's house.
Where does he live now?
He's around.
He's in Mexico.
He's in Mexico.
Yeah.
But he's hard to find.
Right, right.
For good reason.
But he is, you know, if there's anybody that people should look at, as far as like, I think Mexico's lost, or I think there's nobody out there to trust, or nobody out there to kind of look at.
They should look at him.
I think he's what we need as far as a leader in Mexico right now.
He's not only proven himself as a leader as far as some of these problems that we have in Mexico, but he's also.
There's a reason why they try to kill him so many times, it's because they could buy him off.
That's the reason why they try to kill him so many times.
What was the most optimistic point of your career working in Mexico, doing this stuff, working on these?
Counter narcotics operations, or what was like the most successful point in your career where you thought, like, I'm working for something that's greater than me that could actually fix this country?
And then at what point did you lose hope?
Uh, I remember this.
Uh, it was almost a joke every night as far as how much bodies we would find.
Like, every night there was three over there, five over there, six over there, 12 at one night, you know, shootouts in the middle of the day.
Um, I remember coming to this point during some of the time that I was actually working as a bodyguard for the governor of Baja, towards the end, where I was sent to the police academy for retraining.
And during that retraining process that we got, we were basically told to tone it down a bit.
They said, Your militaristic approach, or this sense that you're still in this.
War and doing this job that you would used to do is not what we need anymore.
We need more community policing.
So you need to chill out.
And then we were shown some of the numbers and how the state itself was actually more peaceful than it was a few years back.
And how some of the work that we did made a difference.
And now we were being told to chill out, basically.
So murders were down.
And, uh, Some of these things kind of pacified or calmed down.
You know, Tijuana was no longer on the most dangerous city list on the planet.
And I had, like, I was like, I had this moment of, well, it worked.
But then, you know, then it came back with a vengeance.
And it's been back for a few years now.
People forget.
There's a short memory in Mexico, I guess.
And what was, what was, Done correctly for a while was forgotten or suppressed or pacified.
You know, they saw no wolves, so they shot all the guard dogs, basically, is what I kind of gathered from their political efforts down there when I was coming out of that experience.
And it wasn't whatever was successful, it wasn't popular anymore because it represented a past administration.
What was it like leaving?
Was it difficult to get out of there?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's, I've invested my 20s to it, my life, my body to it, you know.
There's a few teeth missing.
My nose is a pretty good example of some of the shit that went on as far as that work.
Some of the shit I saw is stuck with you, transformative, you know.
I had this notion that I was going to die in that job, you know.
I didn't think I was going to live to see 30, but I was okay with it, you know, because I was doing something.
You know, I felt like I was doing something.
And for people that are involved in the military or that do work like that in the world, it's never about the politics behind it, you know.
The people that went to Afghanistan and are seeing the exit of that whole conflict and stuff like that, they're not worried about the politics.
They were worried about the people that were there with them, you know.
They were worried about things mattering, life and death shit mattering at that moment when I were there.
So that was similar for me.
I wasn't in a far off land.
I was where I grew up.
So it really mattered to me.
And I was worried about the people that I was with, I was worried about some of the people that I was going to leave behind.
When I was in a command position, I had a few people go to school because of the influence that I had.
So I left a few lawyers.
And a few psychologists came out of careers, came out of the time that I was in command down there.
So I left it a better place in a lot of ways.
I had a lot invested in that.
And all of a sudden, I found myself in a place where I'm being told to either work for one side or the other.
And there's no backing anymore.
All the people that I mentored under were gone or not in a command position.
Some of the politicians that I work with are gone.
It's a different place.
So I just made the choice to jump, you know.
It wasn't easy.
It was, I felt a sort of abandonment by the people that were behind me at that time.
And also a betrayal of a sort from the government that I gave so much to when I was in this position and I had nobody to look to.
I'm still waiting for my severance pay.
They never paid me when I left the job.
I asked for a license, basically, to leave the job and come back to it after I did some things because I was under a lot of pressure and I had a lot of shit going on in my personal life.
It wasn't given to me.
So it was one of those moments where, like, fuck it.
And I just fucking risked everything, literally, risked everything.
I had a two year old at this time.
And no other means of supporting her.
And I decided to say, well, it's either me being dead and her getting life insurance policy or me being alive and struggling, but figuring it out.
So I had a lot of threats when I left, you know, like, why are you leaving?
This doesn't make any sense.
You have a good salary.
You have a category in the police, basically, a category there is they would have categories as far as your.
Leaving Risked Everything for Safety00:06:17
Your level and how much time you would work there.
So I had a good category, had a very good salary.
And why are you leaving?
That's suspicious.
Who are you working for?
What's going on?
Like all this type of stuff.
I got called, like a bunch of calls, threats.
I grabbed all my stuff and left.
They question your motives, like what you could be doing.
Like you could be going to the other side or.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it was odd, I guess, to them and also suspicious.
So, but I, I just couldn't continue on there.
So I left.
I found myself in the US during the election of Trump.
So that was a unique time, you know?
It wasn't easy at all.
Very unique time.
It was not easy at all.
Luckily, I had some pretty good people with me, friends that I made on the US side during my time active, helping me out through some of the process of making my way up here.
And I found myself in a place where I was trying to forget or leave that shit behind me, you know, leave that whole experience behind me.
And then finding out that the only bankable skill that I had was that past behind me, you know, my experience and.
Grab it right here.
There you go.
It's just lowering slowly.
Yeah, always, really.
I gotta make sure it's like lined up.
Just turn the base towards it.
There you go.
There you go.
So, you know, I find myself in the U.S., and I find myself in the U.S. without what I thought was no bankable skills.
And that experience is what I was looked out for.
I mean, I started doing classes related to some counter abduction, for example, and like, what's your experience base?
And I'm like, well, you know, I did 12 years here.
And they would be like, oh, that's an interesting experience base.
And I just realized that one of the things that I could do as far as changing things was to take that experience and take some of that voice that came from that experience and use it.
And you were, it was, you moved here for the first time.
It was right in the beginning of Trump when he was running for president.
Yes.
How did you meet Joe?
That was like right during the time you first went on his show.
Yeah.
So it's like you came straight from here and went straight to his studio.
No, not at all.
I was going through my process of basically my immigration process.
And I got it.
It was very complicated.
The thing that made it complicated with the election of Trump is that everybody thought that window was going to close for people.
Right.
Everybody went after it.
So a process that would take.
Eight months turned into two years.
I started being involved in going off and training people, specifically people that wanted or needed to know some of the things that I knew about moving and operating in a place like Mexico, just for personal safety, what to carry, what not to carry, how to social engineer certain things.
And I realized that, oh, I have this whole experience base that I know.
One of the first companies that hired me in the US was a company called Triple Lot Design.
It's a clothing company, but they used to run a training wing based out of San Francisco.
Shout out to those people.
Great people, great company.
And I started doing training, opening classes for people basically there.
And they would sell out.
And I was like, man, I'm on to something.
At this time as well, I had a blog that I was running first off Tumblr, then Facebook, then Instagram.
And I had a lot of people following since I was active.
When I didn't have my name out there, I would just blog about some of the stuff that I would see.
So, my name started kind of being known out there.
Was that, did you call it Ed's Manifesto?
Yeah.
So, the Ed's Manifesto thing was actually something that came out of my time in Coronado training with the NCIS guys and NSW people.
They would see me write down everything in a little black moleskin notebook and they would say, What are you writing in your little manifesto?
That's where the Ed's Manifesto came from.
That's cool.
So, I started posting a lot about Mexico.
And then, when some of the horrible violence started happening in Mexico again, and It was at a time when social media and people with camera phones and cell phones and videos were more prevalent.
And a lot of the people that I used to work with would send me some of this stuff that they would gather directly from the field.
Wow.
So I started sharing some of these things on my social media platforms and talking about it or commentating around them.
That led into me being invited to write for a few magazines and then to talk to the news and to be quoted by a few news agencies.
And then all of a sudden I would look at my following and I would see different people on my following that were known, you know.
He had a Joe Rogan had a guy on, an author that talked about cartel activities.
Was it Grillo?
I think it was him.
And a lot of people in the comment section said, You should have Ed to talk about some of these issues.
I mean, he was actually working down there.
And then he just reached out directly.
That's amazing.
And got a DM.
And then I realized that he'd been following for a while.
Uh, not only following, but also kind of like actually legitimately wanting to learn about some of the issues down there.
He asked me a bunch of questions, and all of a sudden, I found myself in a studio, you know.
Um, that's incredible.
Uh, I did two episodes with him, and it's you know, it was life changing, you know, life changing to be certain.
Um, but specifically for me, all it changed was, uh, Now, more people know about me.
Chinese Know-How Fuels Meth Production00:15:54
Right.
But as far as it changing my life in other ways, I mean, I've been since I came up here, I've basically been on a road, not only training people, but also, you know, learning stuff for myself.
You know, I go out there and train with other people myself to better myself.
And I've been on this weird, you know, kind of pilgrimage to try and figure things out as far as my own healing after my experience down there and kind of how to make sense of all of it, you know.
So, how long has China been an influence in Mexico?
And when did you first find out?
Was this happening or were you aware of this happening when you were in Mexico?
Not specifically.
I think there was an arrest of a Mexican Chinese national in Mexico who had a record as far as the amount of money that was found in his house.
Zen Shi Legong, I think.
I don't remember the name clearly, but he was basically somebody that was involved in the pharmaceutical industry in Mexico.
Chinese, Mexican, American, Mexican national.
He had over $100 million worth of cash in his house.
Holy fuck.
The stack was about the height of this table.
Gold, you name it.
His house was basically this giant money pit.
And the government, the federal government, obviously took this money and made it.
Disappear.
And, you know, he got involved in some suing the Mexican government.
There was this whole case around it.
But that was the first sign of public, kind of very public sign of Chinese national involvement in some of the issues related to precursors coming into the country and what the pipeline might look like as far as some of these products and precursors to create meth or to construct meth in Mexico.
And also, the proliferation of some of these chemists, Chinese chemists, actually teaching or bringing some of the equipment to Mexico to create some of these substances in Mexico.
Some of the first fentanyl production facilities in Mexico were kind of found around that time.
And this is the Felipe Calderon administration era.
So that kind of started being a thing, you know, specifically around meth production, not fentanyl, but fentanyl started kind of looming in the background.
Meth production in Mexico and the quality of meth that was produced in Mexico that was better than anything was being produced stateside, you know, the things that inspired probably that.
That series here in the US, the Breaking Bad series.
Breaking Bad, yeah.
Yeah, the whole finding these giant crystal shards that are clear and the quality in them coming from Mexico into the United States and some of these industrial level laboratories in Mexico kind of popping up and who was showing them how to cook it, how to create in some of the equipment to make it.
And the precursors to make these were Chinese sourced.
So that's kind of, as far as on my radar, that's when they first kind of started popping up as a player in Mexico.
What is the motive?
What do you think the primary motive is of developing and helping produce all this stuff in Mexico and traffic it around the world?
Do you think it's financial motivations or is there something else?
So there's no criminal enterprise in China that's happening without the government knowing about it.
Right, right.
There's no Chinese mafia moving fentanyl and having an alliance with Mexican cartels.
That doesn't exist.
That shouldn't really kind of make sense to anybody.
So it's impossible to have some rogue organization that's not tied to government there.
It's impossible for anything coming in and out of China without the Chinese government knowing about it and not doing anything about stopping it.
Okay.
So that's what I'm saying.
Okay.
So there's a pipeline of fentanyl coming out of China into Mexico and into the United States as well through a lot of ports, probably Canada as well.
So there's a pipeline of precursors to make methamphetamines and also to make.
To fentanyl coming into Mexico and other parts of the world, but specifically Mexico.
That is happening under the watchful eye of China, right?
This is produced in laboratories and chemical plants in China that are clearly under the supervision of somebody up there.
There's people who have gone out there to report on these things.
All you have to do is change a molecule in some of these substances and it turns into something else.
There's people out there manufacturing and making these things and kind of circling back and engineering some of these things.
But whatever it is, it's coming out of China with Chinese know how.
They know about it.
I don't know if they're making money off it and the government's like using it to fund anything, but they know about it and they're not doing anything about it, basically.
That's one part of it.
Another part of it is basically all the money that's made off some of these processes and some of these trafficking and distribution networks goes into, sometimes goes into Chinese money laundering networks and banking networks.
Two years ago, there was a news breaking about Chinese banking apps used by Chinese money brokers stateside to basically take money earned from sales and distribution in the United States to go into the Chinese banking system, basically disappearing from US eyes and then materializing in Mexico with another money broker down there.
So, even in that case, there's an involvement, you know, as far as moving money and moving funds from one part to another.
Now, This is a place where people have social credit, you know?
Right.
Where people are being watched, where there's people that can't move from one part of the country to another.
This is a big brother area.
So there's nothing happening there without them knowing.
How is it possible for these criminal enterprises to be operating completely in the open and utilizing some of these systems that they're completely supervised and under supervision without the Chinese government knowing about it and knowing what they do or what they do with those funds or where those funds come from?
They either don't care or they are seeing it as a way to affect.
This country and saying, Oh, that's a pretty interesting thing that's happening with this whole process.
Let's just not do anything about it.
Is the United States the biggest country or is it the most affected by fentanyl deaths?
Do you know?
I don't know about if it's the most affected by fentanyl deaths.
I think it, from what I see in the amounts of the numbers that are being reported, it's clearly that's killing a major amount of people and in youth.
Some of the arguments I've heard of.
China is trying to specifically disrupt America.
Is that this is happening in a bunch of other countries that no one's just talking about?
I mean, there's fentanyl deaths in Mexico.
There's a giant market in Mexico, but that doesn't matter to Americans, I guess.
People dying in Mexico from fentanyl related deaths, but it definitely happens.
You know, I'm not, I don't come from the war college.
I'm not somebody that's involved in international geopolitics or war scenarios, but.
If you wanted to affect the United States in a big way, you would, you know, if you can't attack it directly militarily because you guys have, you spend more than any other country on the planet as far as your military industrial complex.
Right.
You attack it indirectly.
Yeah.
And one of the most indirect ways of attacking it is through your youth, you know, and influence.
You know, I think the fact that the NBA can't say things like Taiwan as a country is mind blowing to me in this, to be living through a day and age where in the U.S., When the private entity like the NBA can't have its players say that Taiwan is in a country, that Taiwan's a country, or else they'll get.
So there's talk about the influence and censorship that's going on.
So I think they're very much playing the long game as far as influence in this country and their pipeline as far as fentanyl.
Completely passive reactions to its banking institutions and monetary systems being utilized to move around money is just a clear sign that they're not looking out for the best interests in the United States.
And I'm sure the United States is doing the same.
Oh, that's just the number of deaths.
According to the CDC, 107,000 people in the US died of drug overdoses and drug poisonings in the last 12 months, ending in January. 2022.
A staggering 67% of those deaths involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Okay.
So fentanyl is an opioid.
Yeah.
Some of these deaths were attributed to fentanyl mixed with other illicit drugs like cocaine.
See, that's what I don't understand.
If you're selling cocaine, why would you mix it with fentanyl?
That's just going to kill somebody.
Like fentanyl is the opposite, right?
It's insanely cut down, maybe.
They're small time distributors that are trying to figure out how to give a kick to their product that is extremely cut down.
You know, you want to make more money, you're greedy.
It's an illicit market, so nobody's going to supervise you.
Hey, wait till you buy these drugs.
Right.
What I'm saying is, if you got clientele buying cocaine and it's killing everybody, they're going to stop buying you.
This isn't Ford Mortar Company.
They're not worried about being sued or anything.
No, but right.
But they're worried about making money.
They're worried about selling their cocaine, right?
They're not, apparently.
They're not, apparently.
They don't give a shit.
Some of these people don't give a shit.
Do you think it's deliberate or do you think it's by mistake?
I think it's by mistake.
I mean, being able to give percentages as far as the mixture or the amounts is.
These people on chemists, some of these guys are getting some of their product from Alibaba through weird underground black market means arriving at their houses and they're just cutting the shit in their basement.
Right.
Just to make a quick buck.
Now you're seeing the change right now is not specifically related to putting it into existing stuff like heroin.
Now they're actually involved in manufacturing fake pain medication and camouflaging or creating their own.
Packaged pills.
So, not even that is safe anymore.
I saw that when I was in, I forget where, I think it was like, I forget the name of the town, but it's like one of the biggest tourist destination places near Punta Mita.
Okay.
And I remember going through town, there's all these pharmacies.
Pharmacy, every single drug, every prescription drug was there Viagra, Cialis, Vicodin.
The, what's a white people meth is what they call, they call some of that down there.
White people meth?
Yeah.
Basically, A lot of stuff is over the counter.
And even if it isn't over the counter, you can go down there, get a prescription, like, hey, you need a prescription for it.
Okay, where can I get it?
And the guy just turns around, you know, and hello, I'm here to do it.
You know, that's one aspect of it down there.
It's interesting that there's a giant pharmaceutical industry down there.
People should question that.
Why is there so much, so many pharmacies and giant pharmaceutical industry down there?
It makes you wonder what else they're making, you know, behind that curve.
Are there US pharmaceutical companies based down there?
Or operating down there?
A lot of the bigger ones are mostly Mexican ones that are operating under the guise of making similar pharmaceuticals as the major ones for the populace that are more affordable.
Oh, wow.
And right now, what you're seeing.
What China does.
With everything else.
That's the influence, I guess.
But what you're seeing now is the evolution into fake medication.
And fake pain medication and things that look exactly like a prescription opiate, which is fentanyl-loaded fake opiates.
Pain pill presses being found in safe houses and manufacturing facilities in Mexico.
Packaging.
So, why would I risk smuggling a break of something when you can just put it in medication, just put it in a purse, crossing the board?
So, that's what you're seeing now as far as an evolution of some of these things, as far as the US.
So, they're sending chemists over here, and the cartels are working directly with Chinese chemists and they're teaching them how to manufacture this fentanyl.
That's something that's been documented and it's happened a few times.
Yeah.
That's already documented and that's happened.
Yeah.
And how does that benefit these, like the Sinaloa cartel?
Does that just save them money?
Yeah, it's a money saver.
I mean, they don't have to go to, even though.
So, another thing to kind of think about as far as some of these criminal groups in Mexico.
They operate in all the way down Colombia now.
There's factions of the Sinaloa and the New Generation Cartel operating in Colombia at the source.
I mean, they're not taking control of the whole operation, but they're already down there, kind of like basically doing this.
They can't get over, you know?
Wow, man.
They're in Northern Africa.
They're in Europe.
You know, there's networks of them that are now trying to find a way into places like Australia.
You know, they're everywhere.
Jesus.
As far as they're, you know, if they can figure out a way to produce and not depend on anybody, that makes it more money.
When COVID happened, it was a big hit to some of these groups because they couldn't get access to precursors and fentanyl specifically.
It was interesting that you had cartels that were on the Pacific side that had control over some of the Pacific side ports in Mexico, like the new generation cartel, actually grow during this time period because they had access to the Pacific side ports, which led into a route directly to China.
Even during COVID, they were getting supplied.
So that's, again, an interesting phenomenon of that.
But you see this whole proliferation, specifically around fentanyl and kind of cartels and criminal groups moving into manufacturing and creating it for themselves.
That's going to be the moneymaker in the future.
They can figure out how to basically develop that industry and stabilize it there.
It's going to be just a supply line.
What else is China doing in Mexico?
Lithium, buying mine.
There were rumors of them gaining ownership over a Canadian mining company that.
Was actually a Chinese owned company that wanted to gain some of those mining rights in the state of Sonora.
Surplus Weapons Tested in Foreign Lands00:09:53
There was a massive exodus of American companies during the Trump administration when he was basically bringing our companies back, that whole policy.
That didn't affect the economy in Mexico at all because Chinese industry just moved in quickly.
So there's a lot of influence as far as China, as far as industry in Mexico, a big influence.
Politics in Mexico again is moving far from the US for a lot of reasons.
It's popular to be anti American in Mexico.
Really?
Yeah.
You know, the Ukrainian thing, they abstained from voting during the Ukrainian resolution thing.
You know, during COVID, they got supplied with some of the Sputnik, the Russian vaccines.
Mexico did?
Yeah.
So it was like there was this relationship of, you know, Pro Russia thing in Mexico.
Interesting.
For a lot of people in Mexico, Putin seems like a, you know, he kind of like fits into the macho.
Well, it's kind of like, it's interesting to hear that.
I've heard that from other people too.
And what's interesting about that is how we have the, in America, you have this constructed lens of Russia.
Like we have our, we're under our own propaganda.
We can't see it clearly because the way our government, our media feeds it to us is different than how people in Mexico see it.
Yeah.
Can you see?
Do you notice a difference in like the propaganda in the US compared to Mexico on what the views of Russia are?
I mean, I think in a lot of ways, I don't know, like you get the sentiment in Mexico that Russia is basically trying to unify its historical territory.
That's the sentiment I get from a lot of people that I've talked to down there.
And the US is basically destabilizing and pushing its influence in places where it shouldn't.
And it's propping up a corrupt regime, which is the Ukrainian regime that is currently there.
They see its current president as an American plant.
They saw some of the troubles that happened there as American backed situations.
So they see that, again, the whole aspect of the US being like meddling in foreign affairs and putting its influence and supporting things to an extent and then leaving those people behind or abandoning them is something that is kind of in the hearts and minds of a lot of people out there.
What happened in Afghanistan?
What's happening in Ukraine now, where you're sending armaments, but you're not going to be there if the Russians actually get to the capital?
Yeah, it's like with Ukraine, it's like an excuse for us to use up all of our surplus weapons and war machines that we have and be able to test new things for when the time does come.
That we have to face China.
This is like an excuse for us to.
I think it's an interesting example of the fact that Russia wasn't everything they said they were.
Right.
It wasn't that crazy.
But also, the US isn't really backing Ukraine.
No.
They said, and also, all this green energy, sustainable energy politics in Europe have made it completely a slave to.
Russian energy.
So, and so that's an interesting aspect of it that people are now kind of realizing that this whole thing about how people were moving green and stuff like that were really not green.
You know, they're kind of dependent on this energy, this dirty energy from Russia.
And as far as the visuals of it for other people, including myself, seeing the exit from Afghanistan and what happened to the people that you supported in that country and now they're.
Left to their devices.
What might happen in the Ukraine?
I don't know what's going to happen there.
People are celebrating Russian retreats and people are leaving Russia's retreating and stuff like that.
And you see it in the media as a major victory.
But then you see the Russian media and they say it's there.
And then you see some military advisors.
That looks like a tactical retreat and they're gathering forces.
They're probably going to do an offensive on this side of the country next.
So you don't know.
The fact that some of these weapon systems that are being sent to the Ukraine are showing up at the black market Stinger missiles and remote control guided missiles and stuff like that.
They are.
That's something that's been documented out there.
Some of these things are going to disappear off that battlefield and a remote control guided missile of that nature might show up somewhere.
Do you imagine if one of the cartels got their hands on a nuke?
I don't know about a nuke, but.
They got submarines.
Why can't they get a nuke?
I mean, I don't know what they would do with a nuclear bomb, but specifically with a remote guided missile, the ability to take down a helicopter, which they've already done, the ability to take out a plane, which may or may not have already happened.
It's scary.
Capabilities like that are scary.
And my whole fear is some of the stuff that is being now kind of in the wind, like a rocket launcher.
A rocket launcher can do a lot of things, you know.
A 50 cal, a 50 cal rifle, which is a civilian grade rifle here in the United States in some parts, you can buy a 50 cal rifle.
My father, yeah, my father in law has one.
My buddy just bought one.
Yeah.
A single one of those rounds somewhere in the power grid.
They're like that big.
A single round like that somewhere in the power grid.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
If again, there's, there's, uh, well, yeah, because the power grid's already going down everywhere in Ukraine, right?
Yeah.
So the amount of fuckery, basically, that we can do with military grade equipment that is now out there or with something small.
Drone technology.
The thing that people should wait for and see is swarm technology related to drones.
Cheap swarm technology militarized in this war field that we're seeing right now in the Ukraine.
I think when people see that, that's when all of us have to really worry about.
What is that?
Swarm technology.
Basically utilizing a bunch of drones in unison to attack a specific target.
Let's say 100 drones in unison swarming a specific target.
You can have military grade technology trying to take all of them down, but not all of them.
One of them will get through, or a lot of them will get through.
So imagine that ability, which has already been showcased by China, I think has already done some public demonstrations with that technology.
And it's viable, it's accessible, it's possible.
So seeing some of that technology in the wrong hands, people worry about a nuke.
I worry about swarm.
What do you think about those fucking things that those fighter pilots are seeing off those ships off of San Diego?
Ah, those, I don't know.
Is that cartel technology?
Could be.
I mean, they have the money to make some shit like that.
I don't know.
I've seen some weird shit in my life.
I've seen some weird lights and shit like that too.
But I don't know.
I don't know what that is.
You see them, how they move, the fact that the military and some of these pilots are reporting on it.
Those guys are.
Yeah.
You want to talk about people that go through a lot of scrutiny?
Yeah.
I mean, those guys go through all the crazy things.
They just started seeing it when they got the upgraded radars on their jets.
Like they never saw it before.
Then they all upgraded their radar and now they were seeing them everywhere.
The weird thing about them that gets to me, like, again, I'm not Alex Jones.
Yeah.
The Mexican Alex Jones.
Ed.
There's the cartel alien drones.
I worked on that for a while.
I got a shout out from him once.
I was weird.
The ability, these are.
The ability for them to go into the water and also go into like a hillside, which I've seen, you know, evidence of that kind of like I talked about.
That's weird.
The fact that they interplay with what's observing them is also kind of weird.
I don't know.
I don't know what they are.
Like, I have no idea.
For me, I don't think they're aliens.
Yeah.
I don't see that.
I mean, I don't know.
They very much perform or act like drones, like something you would send, like a probe or something like that, is what they seem like.
I don't know.
I don't know if there's something in them, but I know something's controlling them, probably.
Right.
That's what I think.
I don't know.
I mean, I dread the day that those things are what are being used for warfare.
I can't fucking imagine.
I don't know.
Again, this is me just talking.
They don't seem like war technology.
They seem more like surveillance, maybe.
Yeah.
Well, there's a lot of stuff that's being declassified of them appearing around nuclear facilities.
Yes.
Yes.
And.
The historical presence of them, as far as a mass of people knowing about them, was around nuclear testing.
Right.
Yeah.
Ancient Pyramids and Nuclear Secrets00:05:37
There were more UFO sightings during all of the nuclear.
Yeah.
There's a great documentary called The Phenomenon, and they actually show a graphic of the map of the world and they show the timeline where all the nukes were detonated in history.
And the period in time where there was the most detonated nukes, like when we were doing all the nuclear testing in Arizona and shit, and the Russians were doing all their nuclear testing, that was the biggest spike correlated in UFO sightings.
That's a weird thing.
My funniest alien related thing that I like a lot is that you go to Egypt, aliens made this.
You go to Mexico, all those pyramids out there, Mexicans, man.
Who says the Mexicans made them?
All of us.
The Aztecs?
Yeah.
We made those, man.
I saw those pyramids, like, aliens didn't make this shit.
You can see the mortar, and she's like, ah, we made that shit.
You can see it.
You can see the hand of man there.
Man, there's a lot of fucking pyramids in South America and Mexico.
A lot of crazy, like, temples and pyramids and shit.
The.
The interesting thing about some of the stuff in Mexico, as far as the culture wise, we're very advanced.
There's the cradle of culture in Mexico, as far as astronomy, math, writing.
When the Spanish came, there's this whole misconception that the Spanish took down Tenochtitlan.
They took down the Mexica Empire, the Athic Empire, as it's called now.
That's not true.
They came and they allied themselves with all the enemies of the Mexica Empire.
Their enemies are the ones that took down that empire and they were aided by the Spanish.
But it was basically a cultural implosion what happened in Mexico.
That's we took ourselves down in a lot of ways.
Interesting thing about the Spanish coming to Mexico and doing that conquest, they were conquested themselves before that.
They were coming off the Moorish conquest.
So a conquested people that got liberated went to another part of the world and conquested another people.
My maternal grandmother is from, I think she is Tlaxcaltecan ancestry.
They're the ones that allied themselves with the Spanish when they came.
Really?
Yeah, warrior people.
Wow.
They got finished taking down the Aztec Empire and they got on a boat in a place called Barra de Navidad.
It's a little coastal town on the Pacific side of Mexico.
I went there a year ago.
There's a big placard there where this is where the expedition to the Philippines went from.
So, when they got done doing what they did in Mexico, they got on a boat and went to the Philippines to do the same thing.
Oh, shit.
At some point in history, Mexican warriors fought samurai pirates in the ocean in the Philippines.
I want to see a movie made about that.
Wow.
That happened somewhere in history.
That'd be a cool movie to watch.
That would be a cool fucking movie.
Holy shit.
But yeah, Mexico is a place, and a lot of the stuff that happens in Mexico historically and why it is how it is now.
So much history there.
We're so rich in culture and history.
You want to talk about old things.
I remember going to Boston, and somebody said, Well, this church is from this.
And I'm like, That's not old.
I've stood on top of the pyramid of the sun.
That's old.
You know, when we talk about old things, right?
Yeah.
And I don't know.
I think it's something we forget as Mexicans about how old our culture is, how rich it is, and how many times people have tried to destroy it, take it over, deconstruct it, suppress it, and it's still holding on.
I just learned that El Día de los Muertos was based off of the Younger Dryas cataclysms.
So, like, El Día de los Muertos was supposed to be a couple days before.
A crazy comet impact wiped out civilization.
And that's where the stories of like Noah's Ark comes in.
And that was like somewhere between 11,500, 12,500 years ago.
So, Dia de los Muertos, a lot of people consider it like a native celebration of some sort.
That actually came as a nationalistic movement in Mexico during a presidency.
We had a president down there who nationalized petroleum and did a lot of stuff for Mexico.
And part of his efforts was to.
Create a nationalistic sentiment about the culture in Mexico.
So he created Dia de los Muertos, which is not a native celebration, actually.
It is kind of a created institution or celebration that wanted to rival some of the other celebrations out there in the world as far as Halloween and stuff like that.
So it doesn't go all the way back to Aztec or Mexica culture, but it definitely has some sort of influence as far as the ways other parts of the world celebrate in that specific period and timeframe.
I don't know if it has anything.
Maybe that was Halloween specifically.
Maybe it wasn't LDL.
I just thought there was a connection there.
Anyways, thank you, man, for doing this.
Manifesto Radio Rivals Halloween00:01:48
No, thank you for the invitation.
Fascinating.
Where can people find you?
If they want to find me, I'm super shadow banned on Instagram.
But Ed's Manifesto underscore, at Ed's Manifesto underscore, if you want to find me on Instagram, I have a website, www.ed'smanifesto.com.
You can find out about the training I do, classes I do, some of the appearances I have.
And you can also find your way to the Patreon that I have, where I kind of put everything related to my personal notebooks, observations, video interviews.
And I have a podcast too.
Oh, you do?
Yeah.
Manifesto Radio, Manifesto Radio on YouTube, specifically focusing on talking to people that have similar experiences of mine, people that I've met and learned from.
My first guest was a rapper named Conejo.
He was arrested on murder charges in Tijuana.
He was wanted by the FBI back then, and I was part of the organization that arrested him.
And I got to, he was my first guest.
Our kids were playing outside while we were talking.
So it's a pretty good example of how, you know, time is a flat circle.
That's so amazing.
Some of these conversations are on my YouTube channel, Manifesto Radio.
Are you going to get that guy on there who was the leader of your group in Mexico?
We're trying to get him on to basically have a one on one conversation with him.
I can't wait to hear that one.
He is going to run for mayor again.
And if people want to look at an example of somebody that is actually providing hope for people or somebody that could make a change, look him up.