Danny Jones Podcast - #171 - Inside Mexico's Narco Battlefield: Sinaloa Cartel are the Good Guys Now? | Luis Chaparro
Aired: 2023-01-31
Duration: 02:48:09


=== Chaos in Culiacan (14:59) ===

[00:00:08]  Luis Chaparro is back.
[00:00:11]  Hey, compa.
[00:00:11]  Thank you, bro, for coming, man.
[00:00:13]  If anybody knows what the fuck's going on in Mexico right now, it's you.
[00:00:17]  I mean, unfortunately, probably.
[00:00:20]  I wish I knew less.
[00:00:22]  Dude, I could not believe what I was watching when I was watching you walk through Ovidio's house after he was captured.
[00:00:30]  Yeah, man.
[00:00:30]  What gave you the idea to go to his drive to his house and walk inside and start filming?
[00:00:35]  And how, and maybe for people that aren't familiar with the whole thing, Thing, just give me like a rundown of like what's going on in Mexico right now.
[00:00:42]  Sure, definitely.
[00:00:43]  So, right now, Mexico and the U.S. is going full on after Los Chapitos faction, right?
[00:00:49]  The sons of El Chapo Guzman, he inherited the, you know, like the power inside the Sinhalo cartel to his three sons.
[00:00:56]  Two of them are Guzman Salazar, which are like blood brothers, and Ovidio, which is a half brother of them.
[00:01:04]  Ovidio Guzman Lopez is from a different mom.
[00:01:08]  And this, in 2019, they already had tried to arrest Ovidio in Culiacan.
[00:01:14]  That's the famous video, right?
[00:01:16]  Exactly.
[00:01:16]  What we call it, Culiacanazo, when they went apeshit against the government and forced the government to let Ovidio go, to release Ovidio after he was already being arrested, right?
[00:01:30]  And so, after, I guess that was like a big shame for the government.
[00:01:35]  It was embarrassing to see how a kid forced a whole government to let him go, you know?
[00:01:42]  So, I guess he got confident.
[00:01:45]  And, like, you know, this is not going to happen again because they know what they're going to face.
[00:01:50]  But it happened on the 5th of January this year.
[00:01:55]  That night, they did a huge operation in a small town called Jesus Maria, which is 40 kilometers north of Culiacan, pretty close to Culiacan City, which is called the cradle of the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:02:08]  And they managed to grab Ovidio Guzman, the youngest of Los Chapitos.
[00:02:13]  And in 10 minutes, they were already.
[00:02:17]  Putting him in a chopper back to Mexico City.
[00:02:20]  But the gunfight lasted for like 10 fucking hours.
[00:02:23]  So it was crazy, man.
[00:02:25]  A lot of people killed, mostly, allegedly, mostly sicarios.
[00:02:31]  But right now, there's a lot of families looking for their kids, for young kids, for women, different men around town that they say are disappeared and that they were taken by the Mexican military.
[00:02:46]  Who really knows?
[00:02:47]  But I mean, who really knows if they were part of the organization or not?
[00:02:51]  But the fact is that there's a lot of families with missing relatives from that operation right there.
[00:02:57]  So, why right now are they deciding to do this?
[00:03:00]  And it seems like why did he keep going after Ovidio?
[00:03:03]  Is he like a big deal?
[00:03:04]  Not really.
[00:03:05]  I think they went after Ovidio because he was embarrassing the government.
[00:03:09]  Even before the Culiacanazo in 2019, Ovidio is very much like his dad.
[00:03:15]  You know, he's flashy, he wants to be seen, he wants to be the center of attention.
[00:03:19]  And because he's the youngest, he grew up differently than his older.
[00:03:24]  Older brother, Ivan Archivaldo, which is the head of Los Chapitos.
[00:03:29]  Ivan Archivaldo is like more cautious, more low key, but the three of them are extremely violent.
[00:03:37]  So I guess Ovidio, yeah, got confident in like feeling that they owned Culiacan and they owned Sinaloa.
[00:03:46]  He got married in, I guess, 2015, 16.
[00:03:51]  And he basically shot the whole city down.
[00:03:53]  You know, like he had a bunch of sicarios closing streets around the church where he was getting married.
[00:03:58]  So he was already, you know, like doing too much.
[00:04:02]  And I guess there is an agreement between government and these kind of organizations like the Sinaloa Cartel, where the government is like, I'm going to do like if I don't see you, but you know, don't overdo yourself, you know?
[00:04:15]  Right.
[00:04:16]  Like keep it low on the low.
[00:04:20]  So he was already embarrassing the government by doing that kind of like flashy shit, like getting married in a church and then closing the whole fucking town for several hours.
[00:04:30]  And then the Culiacanazo was another embarrassment.
[00:04:33]  So, I guess he had a comment.
[00:04:35]  What was the Kuliakan also?
[00:04:36]  When they tried to arrest him in 2019.
[00:04:38]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:39]  That's the video of him casually on the phone calling somebody.
[00:04:42]  Yeah, he was calling his older brother, Ivan Archibaldo, because Ivan Archibaldo had asked his men to put gasoline on the houses of the families of the soldiers participating in the operation.
[00:04:56]  So, he sent a message over the radio, over the walkies, telling everyone that if they didn't release a video, he was going to set everyone on fire.
[00:05:07]  Including kids, their families, houses.
[00:05:09]  Yeah.
[00:05:11]  So they let him go.
[00:05:12]  I guess that was the right thing to do, right, by the Mexican government.
[00:05:16]  Like, you can grab a video or you can save, you know, like a bunch of families.
[00:05:21]  So I guess that was the right thing to do.
[00:05:23]  But he had it coming.
[00:05:24]  They started, like, following him around.
[00:05:28]  And it's not that he was really hiding, to be honest.
[00:05:32]  The last few times I was in Culiacan, one of those two times I saw him, you know, like in the streets of Culiacan.
[00:05:40]  And it was like, I mean, it was a lot of detention.
[00:05:43]  He used to drive this green defender, followed up by this black, massive SUV with a mount on the rooftop to mount like a 50 call, and then 40 pickup trucks behind them.
[00:05:59]  So it's like, dude.
[00:06:01]  Have you seen him multiple times?
[00:06:03]  One time before his arrest and after 2019.
[00:06:10]  Very recently, he was riding around Culiacan.
[00:06:14]  And everybody was like, well, that's Ovidio.
[00:06:15]  That's El Raton, right?
[00:06:17]  That's how they call him.
[00:06:19]  So he was not really hiding.
[00:06:21]  I guess he was just so confident that he was going to do the same thing again if they try to capture him, that he was just like driving around.
[00:06:31]  So, yeah, apparently he sort of like laid low during the holidays.
[00:06:35]  He couldn't spend the holidays with his family because he thought that he was going to be a target, of course, like someone was going to be watching.
[00:06:43]  So he held the holidays until a week later.
[00:06:47]  After New Year.
[00:06:50]  And then he called his wife, his three daughters, and his mom to his house in that rancho in Jesus Maria to have holidays.
[00:06:59]  So, the house when I was in, it was an absolutely mess.
[00:07:05]  Like, there was a lot of fucking blood, a lot of like unexploded grenades, weapons everywhere, bullet holes everywhere, but also a lot of decoration, like Christmas decoration, you know, like small Christmas trees.
[00:07:20]  A full nativity scene outside, full sized, you know.
[00:07:25]  So I guess they had a party the night before.
[00:07:29]  So at four in the morning, when the government stormed his house, everybody was asleep.
[00:07:36]  So I guess that's what they.
[00:07:38]  And his family was there at that time?
[00:07:40]  Yes, yes.
[00:07:41]  And somebody must have known this, right?
[00:07:44]  Yeah.
[00:07:44]  So was there like a mole or a rat on the inside who was like letting them, Mexican military know about what was going on?
[00:07:52]  Or how did they know?
[00:07:53]  Did they know that his mom and his daughters were there?
[00:07:55]  They had intelligence since like six months earlier.
[00:08:01]  One of my sources inside the Mexican military told me that this was the third attempt to go and capture the video because the other two were stopped like right a minute before, you know, like having the green light.
[00:08:14]  They were like ready to jump and then something will happen and they will be called off, like, not today.
[00:08:21]  Wow.
[00:08:21]  So, yeah, they were like looking at his movements, following him.
[00:08:26]  And for these, they had unmanned.
[00:08:31]  Planes, you know, like I guess drones, surveillance drones all over his ranch.
[00:08:37]  And then military members started arriving in these buses that take farmers from the town to the city to, you know, like to sell their tomatoes or, you know, like the products they harvest.
[00:08:53]  And Jesus Maria, when these buses were taking the workers back in town, a group of, you know, like Four or five members dressed as civilians will jump in that bus and then stay there in the mountains, you know, just like watching his movements and slowly putting like more and more soldiers inside Jesus Maria, inside the town.
[00:09:16]  So, yeah, they really started like, they had good intelligence.
[00:09:19]  I mean, yeah, that's what they had.
[00:09:21]  So, let's pull up your video and let's like walk us through what you're doing there and how, so how far, what is this in Culiacan?
[00:09:30]  And that's in the outskirts of Culiacan.
[00:09:32]  Okay.
[00:09:33]  It's 40 minutes, it's a 40 minute drive.
[00:09:35]  From Culiacan.
[00:09:37]  It's a small road, it's a small highway, one way in, one way out.
[00:09:42]  And so the morning Ovidio was captured, I thought they had captured someone else, not Ovidio, right?
[00:09:49]  So I kind of like disregarded a bunch of messages I was getting from my sources in Culiacan until I heard one of the walkies.
[00:09:59]  Why did you doubt it was him?
[00:10:01]  Because I didn't think that the Mexican government will go again and face another Culiacanazo, another, you know, like mayhem, like the last.
[00:10:10]  Time they did in 2019.
[00:10:12]  I was like, they have to be smarter than that, right?
[00:10:14]  They're going to capture him when he's going to try to fly out to Europe or, you know, like to other places in Mexico.
[00:10:22]  They're going to capture him in a plane arriving to Cancun or some stuff like that.
[00:10:27]  But not like that, not in his own town again, you know?
[00:10:30]  Right.
[00:10:30]  Can you play this, Austin?
[00:10:36]  That's the entrance to Jesus Maria.
[00:10:39]  It's all riddled with bullet holes.
[00:10:42]  I was writing with a local contact that.
[00:10:45]  He's the one driving.
[00:10:47]  He's part of the organization.
[00:10:49]  He's really well connected.
[00:10:51]  And the guy in the back is a local photojournalist that I wanted to take with me because I thought that it was not going to be the best idea to write only with a member of the.
[00:11:04]  And how long ago did you record this?
[00:11:06]  This was the 12th of January.
[00:11:11]  So this was like 10 days.
[00:11:14]  10 days ago.
[00:11:15]  Yeah.
[00:11:16]  Wow.
[00:11:17]  Yeah, that's his house.
[00:11:18]  That's like his main.
[00:11:19]  And only 10 days after he was taken from there.
[00:11:21]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:11:22]  After the shootout.
[00:11:22]  Yeah, that was very relieved.
[00:11:26]  So, what gave you, like, what, how did you know it was going to be safe to go there?
[00:11:31]  Because I thought, like, honestly, that was a bit dumb by me.
[00:11:35]  I was, what I thought is, like, all right, so I need to go and talk to people.
[00:11:41]  My main goal was to talk with neighbors to learn what happened and to, because I started hearing rumors about, You know, like a lot of people disappearing, a lot of young kids getting hit by the military bullets and all that shit.
[00:11:56]  So I was like, I need to go and report on that.
[00:12:00]  But I thought I was going to see a bunch of like military.
[00:12:04]  What are we seeing right now?
[00:12:05]  What is all this shit on fire?
[00:12:06]  That's the night he was captured.
[00:12:09]  That's what his people do.
[00:12:11]  That's the Mexican government firing down the whole town of Jesus Maria.
[00:12:15]  From helicopters?
[00:12:16]  From helicopters, man.
[00:12:17]  Good God.
[00:12:19]  Yeah, that's, I mean, they went full in.
[00:12:22]  Go back to that part where the building's on fire.
[00:12:25]  The operation lasted 10 hours of nonstop.
[00:12:30]  Firearms.
[00:12:32]  His soldiers, the henchmen of the Sinaloa cartel, you know, started like putting fires all over the city.
[00:12:39]  Oh, the cartel henchmen started doing that.
[00:12:41]  Exactly.
[00:12:42]  To block the government from getting more people to the town of Jesus Maria.
[00:12:50]  And also because they thought, look at that, man.
[00:12:52]  That's nuts.
[00:12:53]  That's fucking crazy.
[00:12:56]  Yeah, that's nuts, man.
[00:12:58]  And they thought that they were going to take Ovidio by ground from Jesus Maria to the local airport.
[00:13:05]  So, if they're like right there, if they're in a helicopter firing a machine gun, I guess it's just like some sort of fucking machine gun.
[00:13:11]  Yeah.
[00:13:11]  Are they firing that into his house?
[00:13:13]  They're firing all over the town, man.
[00:13:14]  Like, all over the town.
[00:13:15]  Yes.
[00:13:16]  I'll show you footage later on from the houses of local residents.
[00:13:20]  An old woman, you know, like in wheelchairs, and her house is all riddled with bullet holes.
[00:13:27]  Their roofs are like riddled because they have these metal roofs, you know, like metal sheets roof.
[00:13:36]  And another man was like living a couple of, I guess one block or two blocks from the house of Ovidio.
[00:13:43]  His car was all completely destroyed with bullets.
[00:13:46]  And that's the only car he has where he takes his sick wife to the doctor in Culiacan.
[00:13:53]  So it was crazy.
[00:13:55]  But why fired all these civilians?
[00:13:57]  The government just didn't give a shit, man.
[00:13:59]  They started like firing all over the town.
[00:14:01]  And that's the thing.
[00:14:02]  Like most, I'm getting a lot of hate mail from people saying that I'm vouching for the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:14:10]  And honestly, why would I vote for the Sinaloa cartel?
[00:14:12]  It's just like, dude, if the U.S. government will be doing that kind of stuff in a small town in Texas or in Florida, wherever, people will lose it.
[00:14:24]  It was like, why the fuck would you fire all over a town?
[00:14:28]  Not only a house, especially if your target was already out of there, right?
[00:14:33]  I mean, they got him out within the 10 minutes of the operations.
[00:14:36]  That was way after they got him out.
[00:14:38]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:38]  That was like way out.
[00:14:39]  What the fuck, man?
[00:14:41]  That was crazy.
[00:14:42]  What is the Mexican government's response to all this?
[00:14:45]  Nothing silenced.
[00:14:46]  They're not saying anything.
[00:14:48]  They said that what they said is that they killed 29 sicarios of the Sinaloa cartel, but that it was a clean operation.
[00:14:56]  And I was like, dude, this was everything but clean.
[00:15:00]  This doesn't look like a clean operation.
[00:15:05]  So, yeah, I basically wanted to go and report on that.

=== A Messy Raid (12:00) ===

[00:15:08]  What happened?
[00:15:09]  What are the neighbors living, going through?
[00:15:12]  I thought I was going to face a lot of like military up in the hills and in the town of Jesus Maria.
[00:15:20]  I was expecting also maybe like local press.
[00:15:23]  So I wasn't feeling sketched out until I got there.
[00:15:27]  That's the road to Ovidio's house.
[00:15:29]  And those are his lawyers.
[00:15:31]  Oh, is that right there?
[00:15:33]  And his mom, that's not his mom.
[00:15:34]  His mom was, I mean, you cannot see Griselda Lopez.
[00:15:40]  Go a little farther.
[00:15:43]  But she was there.
[00:15:45]  So, when I jumped out of the car and saw that there were no government, no Mexican military, only two attorneys and Griselda Lopez, who is also flagged by the U.S. Department of Treasury for being part of the Sinaloa cartel and is the mother of a video, I was like, okay, this could go very wrong.
[00:16:06]  From this on, we need to be super careful because this definitely can go absolutely wrong.
[00:16:14]  What was the.
[00:16:15]  Worst case scenario that you were afraid of?
[00:16:18]  I was afraid of, well, right there, I thought, like, I can, maybe I can talk my way in inside his house if she allows me to go in, because I saw them going in the house taking photos.
[00:16:34]  And I asked one of the lawyers, like, hey, man, what are you guys doing here?
[00:16:38]  Like, are you planning on doing something?
[00:16:40]  What happened?
[00:16:42]  Is Ovidio, you know, like, he's good in jail.
[00:16:46]  And, but his mom was like really jumpy.
[00:16:48]  He was not happy.
[00:16:49]  She was not happy to see me or press there.
[00:16:54]  So she just pulled on his, her face mask and she started like saying, no, And then she told one of the attorneys, like, just get rid of these guys.
[00:17:03]  I don't, I don't want to hear.
[00:17:05]  And that guy like came up to me and told me, like, you need to stop recording.
[00:17:09]  I'm like, I'm not recording yet.
[00:17:11]  He's like, yeah, don't, don't record anything that while we're here, you know, just wait for us to leave.
[00:17:18]  Oh, really?
[00:17:18]  And then do whatever you want.
[00:17:19]  But, Don't record us here.
[00:17:22]  I'm like, all right, what are you guys doing?
[00:17:24]  Can I know at least?
[00:17:26]  And he told me that they were going to sue the Mexican government for abuse of power and for injuring one of the girls inside the house.
[00:17:36]  One of his daughters?
[00:17:37]  One of his daughters, apparently, and for stealing.
[00:17:42]  They looted the whole house of a video.
[00:17:45]  Later on, you'll see photos, I mean, video from these Rolex boxes.
[00:17:50]  And he had a lot, a bunch of like jewelry and money around.
[00:17:54]  And when I went in, it was like completely gone.
[00:17:57]  And apparently, it was the Mexican soldiers that took everything.
[00:18:00]  I mean, the closet was empty, man.
[00:18:04]  They took his shoes, his shirts, you know, pants, jeans, everything.
[00:18:10]  And so the house was absolutely looted inside.
[00:18:13]  Wow.
[00:18:14]  Okay, keep going.
[00:18:19]  It looks like nothing when you're driving up there.
[00:18:21]  It looks like you're, it doesn't look like you're going into a fucking kingpin's hand.
[00:18:25]  No, exactly.
[00:18:25]  Cause it's a, you know, it's a small town, very rural.
[00:18:30]  Most of the people there live by fishing from a local dam and harvesting tomato and, oh, really?
[00:18:37]  Like chili and that kind of stuff.
[00:18:40]  So, how bad was his daughter injured?
[00:18:42]  Do you know?
[00:18:43]  I have no clue, man.
[00:18:44]  Like, I entered her, one of the rooms of Ovidio's daughters, and you could see a huge blood stain.
[00:18:54]  Like, Pretty big on the blankets.
[00:18:57]  I don't know if that's from one of her kids or from a sicario that, you know, like try to, because apparently many of the sicarios try to hide inside the house after they took a video.
[00:19:09]  Oh, really?
[00:19:13]  So, yeah, man.
[00:19:14]  I mean, I wasn't really planning or expecting to go inside his house.
[00:19:20]  But while I was there, I was like, you know what?
[00:19:22]  I'm already here, man.
[00:19:23]  Fuck it.
[00:19:24]  Yeah.
[00:19:25]  I'll just go in.
[00:19:26]  And my friend, this local photographer, he told me, like, dude, if you spend more than six minutes inside that house, we're leaving.
[00:19:34]  We're leaving you here, man.
[00:19:35]  Really?
[00:19:37]  And I didn't even say, okay.
[00:19:39]  I just literally jumped in the house from a hole on a fence.
[00:19:42]  I was like, oh, fuck it.
[00:19:43]  Were the attorneys and the mom still there?
[00:19:45]  No, they had already left, yeah.
[00:19:49]  Yeah.
[00:19:50]  Right behind me, that's the local photographer and another guy who works with the organization.
[00:19:55]  But even he called his people and told him about, like, this guy wants to go inside the house and all this shit.
[00:20:04]  And they told him, like, nah, just let him, like, tell him to not risk it, you know?
[00:20:09]  It's not worth it.
[00:20:12]  But I don't know, man.
[00:20:14]  I had to do it.
[00:20:15]  I mean, That sneak peek reveals a lot about.
[00:20:20]  Are those all bullet holes?
[00:20:22]  All those are bullet holes, yes.
[00:20:24]  Plaza?
[00:20:24]  It'll go back to it, I'm sure.
[00:20:28]  It is like the.
[00:20:29]  So, people that aren't watching and that are only listening on audio, he has these two giant gates going up into his house through his driveway.
[00:20:38]  And they are like Swiss cheese.
[00:20:40]  There's a bullet hole per square inch of this giant wooden gate.
[00:20:46]  That parking lot, that was an app.
[00:20:49]  Like an outer parking lot, he had.
[00:20:52]  That's where these black SUV with the mound on top was parking.
[00:20:57]  Like, that's where they used to park that one up.
[00:21:01]  People guarding his house, you know, like in another white Volkswagen TikTok one, also armored.
[00:21:08]  He had all his vehicles armored, even to the motor, you know, and that's where they were.
[00:21:15]  This might just be me being stupid because I don't know a lot about how these kind of things work, but.
[00:21:22]  I would imagine if they really just wanted to capture him, they would do some sort of like super surgical, tactical, like in and out kidnapping, not make it this giant fucking gunfight.
[00:21:33]  And I think that's what they did on the first 10 minutes that they got him because they even sent out paratroopers that landed inside like paratroopers.
[00:21:41]  Yes, behind those gates in the middle of the night.
[00:21:45]  They arrived there and they managed to go inside the house.
[00:21:49]  They blew the whole doorknob.
[00:21:51]  Went inside.
[00:21:52]  They already knew where the room of Ovidio's room was.
[00:21:56]  They knew the layout of the house.
[00:21:57]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:58]  So they went in to the right, boom, hands on Ovidio.
[00:22:01]  He, of course, thought of like, I have my whole family here, my mom and my daughters.
[00:22:06]  So he just liked to win.
[00:22:07]  So he's like, Yeah, let's go, let's go, let's go.
[00:22:09]  They took him outside from a back door, put him on a chopper.
[00:22:13]  He was out within 10 minutes of the operation.
[00:22:15]  Wow, up into a fucking helicopter.
[00:22:17]  Up into a fucking helicopter.
[00:22:18]  No way, bro.
[00:22:19]  But his people kept fighting.
[00:22:21]  And I mean, that's the thing.
[00:22:22]  Like, the government should have just.
[00:22:24]  Fucking left, you know?
[00:22:25]  It's like, let's not keep fighting.
[00:22:27]  Let's just fucking go.
[00:22:29]  But they stayed and they, you know, like they kept fighting for 10 fucking hours.
[00:22:35]  And that's crazy.
[00:22:36]  That doesn't really make sense.
[00:22:38]  Yeah.
[00:22:38]  He was already out.
[00:22:39]  If they had him out, why?
[00:22:41]  What's the purpose of fucking shooting up, wasting all those bullets and shooting up all those innocent people's houses and lighting the whole show?
[00:22:48]  They shot a 12 year old teenager that was walking.
[00:22:54]  To get tortillas to have some breakfast, they shot him.
[00:22:58]  He's like he's struggling for his life right now.
[00:23:01]  It's crazy, man.
[00:23:02]  And of course, they said he was a puntero, like a lookout for the cartel, whatever.
[00:23:08]  But there is a kid and he's unarmed and he was just walking down the street.
[00:23:11]  It's crazy, man.
[00:23:13]  All right, keep going.
[00:23:16]  So you obviously didn't walk through that gate, right?
[00:23:19]  No, those gates were blocked, like with that.
[00:23:24]  That's a whole.
[00:23:24]  Okay.
[00:23:26]  That's the hole right there.
[00:23:28]  So, there were no other houses anywhere near this house, right?
[00:23:30]  There are a couple of houses around, but not a single one like this one.
[00:23:36]  This is a huge house.
[00:23:38]  Okay, what are you thinking right now?
[00:23:40]  Like when you first go over that fence and you're in there with all these fucking cars shot to hell.
[00:23:45]  Right there, I was trying to be seen by the neighbors that I was doing some shots of Obedio's house to expect a reaction, right?
[00:23:53]  I was like, let's see how they react.
[00:23:56]  Like with me just putting a camera inside the front porch of his house.
[00:24:03]  No one said anything.
[00:24:04]  Everybody went back into their houses.
[00:24:07]  So I was like, okay, I'm not getting any like.
[00:24:09]  Extreme reaction from them.
[00:24:11]  The sicarios that we met as we were driving in the town, they were not around.
[00:24:17]  So I was like, okay, so probably they're not going to be as sketched out with me coming in.
[00:24:25]  Probably.
[00:24:27]  So I went out again.
[00:24:29]  Pause that.
[00:24:31]  And then I found these unexploded grenades.
[00:24:34]  A fucking grenade next to a modelo.
[00:24:37]  Next to a modelo.
[00:24:38]  Yeah.
[00:24:39]  And that was the.
[00:24:40]  Papas.
[00:24:40]  Papas, that's what they call them, like the papas, right?
[00:24:44]  The grenades, the potatoes.
[00:24:46]  And my friend, the one with the organization, he told me, be careful, man, because that's unexploded.
[00:24:54]  And I think inside the house, you're going to see many more.
[00:24:57]  So if you go inside, be careful of where you step, you know?
[00:25:01]  Right.
[00:25:02]  Because you could, like, get blown up inside.
[00:25:07]  So, yes, I mean, on top of everything, I had to be careful of where I was stepping, you know, inside the house.
[00:25:14]  That's so crazy.
[00:25:15]  Okay, keep going, Austin.
[00:25:19]  That is wild.
[00:25:20]  Yeah, man.
[00:25:21]  Like, it was a complete.
[00:25:24]  Oh, just a grenade sitting in my backyard next to a modelo.
[00:25:28]  Next to a pier, you know?
[00:25:31]  But it's crazy because there was like no government whatsoever no Mexican military, no police around, no one.
[00:25:37]  It was like completely abandoned.
[00:25:40]  And then I broke in.
[00:25:42]  That's me walking inside of the front porch.
[00:25:45]  And you can tell if you turn the volume up a little bit.
[00:25:48]  You could tell by the tone of your voice that your heart rate is spiked.
[00:25:54]  Dude, I was with a rush of adrenaline.
[00:25:59]  You got any volume, Austin?
[00:26:02]  No, I don't hear it.
[00:26:02]  How about now?
[00:26:05]  I had two cameras my cell phone camera and a GoPro.
[00:26:09]  No, I got nothing.
[00:26:11]  Oh, wait, now I got it.
[00:26:12]  A little bit more.
[00:26:15]  Someone had a line up.
[00:26:16]  What is that?
[00:26:17]  Those are grenades.
[00:26:18]  Okay.
[00:26:23]  That's like the second bathroom, a visiting room where Obedio's mom was staying.
[00:26:31]  That's his daughter's.
[00:26:32]  And that's the blood on that comforter right there.
[00:26:35]  Holy shit.
[00:26:41]  Look at the nativity scene outside.
[00:26:48]  And then I'm going to Obedio's.
[00:26:53]  Ovidio's room.
[00:26:55]  A and O, Alejandra and Ovidio.
[00:26:58]  That's the name of his wife.
[00:27:00]  Oh, really?
[00:27:04]  So, what happened to his wife and his kids and his mom?
[00:27:07]  Where are they at?

=== The Extradition Dilemma (04:44) ===

[00:27:08]  Look at the Rolex box.
[00:27:11]  Oh my God, his closet.
[00:27:12]  Go back to his closet.
[00:27:13]  His closet, absolutely empty.
[00:27:16]  Yeah, go ahead and play it from there.
[00:27:22]  Looted.
[00:27:23]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:27:27]  Rolex gone.
[00:27:29]  Look at that.
[00:27:30]  They had a bunch of like boxes with watches, jewelry, you know, like rings.
[00:27:39]  That shit, I mean, I'm pretty sure that the soldiers that took that stuff are everybody trying to get rid of it, you know, like trying to sell it.
[00:27:47]  One of the neighbors told me that they walked, the soldiers walked out of Ovidia's house with a pillow bags, with a pillow.
[00:27:57]  Yeah, pillowcase.
[00:27:58]  Pillowcase.
[00:27:59]  Yeah.
[00:27:59]  Packed with shit they stole from inside.
[00:28:03]  Like they were putting that.
[00:28:04]  Like inside the pickup trucks.
[00:28:06]  That's going to be a huge problem for the Mexican government within the next month, man.
[00:28:11]  As soon as the attorneys put, I guess, a list of everything that is missing from his house and all that stuff.
[00:28:18]  And as soon as one of those watches pops up in a market or with someone, that's going to be a huge problem.
[00:28:27]  How is that going to go?
[00:28:28]  What is the justice system like in Mexico when you got El Chapo's son's attorneys going up against the Mexican military?
[00:28:35]  Like, how fair is that going to be?
[00:28:36]  I think honestly, they have good chances of making a case against the Mexican government.
[00:28:44]  The attorneys for these kind of people have limited resources.
[00:28:48]  They have a bunch of money, they have a bunch of contacts.
[00:28:52]  They could easily put a judge on their payroll, on their benefit, like they just did.
[00:28:59]  They just managed to get a, in Spanish, called an amparo, which is like a legal figure to stop Ovidio's extradition to the US.
[00:29:12]  So, like a legal resource to stop him from Mexico.
[00:29:18]  So, he's probably not gonna be extradited to the US, at least for now.
[00:29:25]  He still has an order for his extradition that the US government requested in 2019.
[00:29:33]  That one is unstoppable.
[00:29:35]  You cannot have any legal resource against that one.
[00:29:37]  So, that one is still ongoing.
[00:29:40]  But these guys were super quick to, you know, like to have a whole.
[00:29:45]  You know, like legal apparatus to stop him from getting extradited immediately.
[00:29:50]  Wow.
[00:29:51]  How close does the Mexican government work with the U.S. government now?
[00:29:55]  I know from what I've heard is that they had like a good relationship when Trump was the president, but what is it like now?
[00:30:00]  It's not good, man.
[00:30:01]  Like, I think the binational relationship in terms of security with the Mexican and the U.S. government is at its worst right now.
[00:30:10]  It's never been like these bad.
[00:30:13]  The Mexican government wants to stand up.
[00:30:17]  To make a point to the US saying that we are a sovereign country and that we don't pledge to any foreign government and all that stuff.
[00:30:29]  And not long ago, the Mexican government literally rescued a military, I guess the highest top ranking military in Mexico from the DA's hands.
[00:30:42]  They arrested him in LA for drug trafficking as he was.
[00:30:49]  In a plane with his family because they were going to Disneyland.
[00:30:53]  They grabbed him, put him in jail, and the Mexican government stepped in to rescue that guy back to Mexico.
[00:31:03]  Who is this guy?
[00:31:04]  It's called Cienfuegos, Salvador Cienfuegos.
[00:31:06]  He was the chief of the military for several years in Mexico.
[00:31:13]  And so the Mexican government even threatened to kick out all the DEA agents that the U.S. had in Mexico if they didn't release.
[00:31:22]  Cienfuegos.
[00:31:24]  So that added to the tension between both governments.
[00:31:27]  The Mexican government then issued a law that requested every single agent in Mexico to report, to fill and file a report if they got contacted by a foreign agent.
[00:31:45]  So let's say the DA reaches out to the National Guard and say, hey, man, we're doing this operation.

=== Prison Escape Plans (15:33) ===

[00:31:53]  By the moment they pick up the phone, they have to file a report that I was reached out by these.
[00:31:57]  DA agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, in order to have a green light or a red light, right?
[00:32:03]  Like, no, you cannot share any information with the DA or whatever.
[00:32:06]  So they're making it really hard for them.
[00:32:08]  Yes.
[00:32:08]  For us, for the US.
[00:32:09]  Exactly.
[00:32:10]  Okay, keep going.
[00:32:11]  And right there, my heart really started racing right there.
[00:32:21]  Oh, you heard somebody knock.
[00:32:22]  Dude, I was literally coming out of Ovidio's closet and then I heard someone knocking and then a woman saying, like, And she said in Spanish, llamala Griselda, like call Griselda, Ovidio's mom.
[00:32:38]  And I was like, shit.
[00:32:42]  Like she was in the house?
[00:32:43]  She was like in a house behind, but her house, the house where she was in, is a bit higher up than Ovidio's house.
[00:32:51]  Okay.
[00:32:51]  So she saw me through one of the windows inside his house.
[00:32:55]  And she was like, mama, llamala Griselda.
[00:32:58]  Oh my God.
[00:32:58]  And I was like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
[00:33:03]  And I guess I didn't explain myself fully on that scene.
[00:33:07]  I'm saying it seems like I'm saying that I was not afraid of being killed.
[00:33:11]  I was afraid of being killed, but I thought that that was not gonna be like something very plausible right there because they didn't want to bring more heat into the scene.
[00:33:21]  What stop right there.
[00:33:22]  Go back to that tunnel.
[00:33:26]  Yeah, play it from there.
[00:33:27]  A little bit back right there.
[00:33:29]  Press play and then pause.
[00:33:30]  Get ready to pause it right there.
[00:33:31]  So I didn't see that tunnel when I walked in.
[00:33:35]  But I was coming, as I was coming out, I went to a corner trying to hide from because I already heard the bikes, the motorcycles of the Sicarios that we met entering the town.
[00:33:48]  Oh, shit.
[00:33:49]  So I could hear the motorcycles like circling around the house.
[00:33:52]  And then my friend outside, he told me, Hey, man, like, agachate, like, lay low.
[00:33:58]  And I was like, What?
[00:33:59]  He was like, No, stop, stop, stop right there.
[00:34:01]  They're outside.
[00:34:02]  And then he turned and started talking to them.
[00:34:05]  And I was like, Shit, man, they're already talking to these guys.
[00:34:07]  These guys are Sicarios, so they work.
[00:34:10]  That guy was a photographer.
[00:34:11]  The other guy who worked for the organization oversees sort of like the financial things of one of the factions of the Sino Dog Cartel.
[00:34:20]  But he left and went inside his car.
[00:34:23]  He was like, fuck it, this is too crazy.
[00:34:25]  He went inside his car, and my friend, the photographer, was just like watching over me and he's like, hide, hide, hide.
[00:34:32]  And then he started like, no, we're just here taking photos, you know, like of what happened.
[00:34:37]  And I was like, fuck, man, they're already outside.
[00:34:40]  So, this was just a tunnel that was like hidden under a drain or something?
[00:34:43]  Exactly.
[00:34:44]  It was made to be seen as a drain or as a water sewage system or something like that.
[00:34:50]  And this is for this kind of situation.
[00:34:52]  Exactly.
[00:34:53]  And where does a tunnel go?
[00:34:54]  I had no clue, man.
[00:34:55]  I literally just saw that as I was coming out, and it had, you could see that you could get, like, you had to jump in, and then it had like a stair, like a ladder.
[00:35:08]  And then it went to, like, it looked like it went.
[00:35:12]  Like inside the house, you know, back again, at least on that direction.
[00:35:15]  Right.
[00:35:16]  So I don't know if that was going like under the house or, you know, I have maybe it's like a neighboring house or something.
[00:35:22]  Yeah, very probably.
[00:35:24]  Wow, man.
[00:35:26]  I didn't have much time to look into it.
[00:35:28]  You said in the video that you weren't afraid of being killed in this moment.
[00:35:32]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:35:32]  I mean, not because I wasn't afraid of being killed, but because I wasn't, I didn't think that was like a real possibility.
[00:35:39]  Because I thought like these guys don't want more heat, right?
[00:35:44]  They are already facing a lot of like government.
[00:35:46]  They took a video, a lot of like the military members are around.
[00:35:49]  And if I get killed, they're going to get a bunch more attention, like probably even from the US, you know.
[00:35:56]  Saying, like, they killed a reporter that was under.
[00:36:00]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:01]  They can.
[00:36:02]  Obviously, they can.
[00:36:03]  I mean, right.
[00:36:05]  But I think.
[00:36:05]  It wouldn't be like an obvious thing that they would want to do.
[00:36:08]  Exactly.
[00:36:08]  Because they will have to ask for permission, like authorization from their bosses.
[00:36:12]  And probably one man high up will be like, nah, man, let's not bring that hit.
[00:36:16]  But what I was afraid of is to be taken into prison in Culiacan by his attorneys.
[00:36:24]  I was like, dude, if the sicarios grab me, hold me here until the attorneys get back.
[00:36:30]  And then they charge me for entering or for whatever they want.
[00:36:34]  Something stupid.
[00:36:35]  Exactly.
[00:36:36]  Something small.
[00:36:37]  They have enough resources to keep paying to keep me inside jail for forever.
[00:36:44]  My dad and my family have a law firm in Mexico, they are attorneys as well.
[00:36:54]  But in this case, I mean, we don't have that many resources to pay my way out.
[00:37:00]  Yeah.
[00:37:00]  These guys have every single resource they want to keep me inside jail.
[00:37:06]  And, like, I guess I'd rather be killed and kept in a prison inside jail.
[00:37:11]  What would happen if you went to what prison would you go to?
[00:37:15]  I guess I will have to go first into Culiacan's prison.
[00:37:20]  So imagine that, like being surrounded by Ovidio's henchmen inside prison, inside jail, and them knowing that I broke in his house or whatever.
[00:37:30]  And then his attorney is paying every single judge and Prison cell to make a hell, living hell for me inside that prison.
[00:37:39]  I was like, fuck, man.
[00:37:40]  I mean, I don't want to face prison here.
[00:37:42]  I need to get out.
[00:37:43]  I was supposed to have a flight that same afternoon because my security team only allowed me to do this reporting trip by promising and showing proof that I was just going to be there for seven hours.
[00:38:02]  Like, I arrived in the morning, go up to the town.
[00:38:05]  And by six in the afternoon, I was already flying out of Culiacan.
[00:38:11]  But it didn't go that way.
[00:38:13]  I had to overnight in Culiacan.
[00:38:15]  Of course, I didn't sleep like a single fucking minute.
[00:38:18]  So, you stayed in a hotel close to here?
[00:38:20]  Yes, I stayed in a hotel because our fucking car broke as we were going out of town.
[00:38:27]  What's a shit show, man?
[00:38:29]  Keep playing it.
[00:38:36]  So, yeah, I mean.
[00:38:37]  Did you say that they bought off judges in Mexico?
[00:38:41]  Yes, that's something that happens a lot in Mexico.
[00:38:45]  The justice is up for the best bet, I guess.
[00:38:50]  If you have enough money, you can get to a judge.
[00:38:53]  What do you think is going to happen when they sue the Mexican government?
[00:38:56]  I think they have a really good chance of not, probably not getting away with anything like money or reparations, but getting Ovidio out of court.
[00:39:09]  Of prison.
[00:39:11]  I think that's still a possibility in the Mexican justice system.
[00:39:18]  And why did they take him to Mexico City?
[00:39:20]  What is so special about Mexico City?
[00:39:23]  That's where the Altiplano is, the maximum security prison, like the top security prison in Mexico is.
[00:39:31]  But that's the one where Ochapo escaped for the first time.
[00:39:37]  You can turn the volume down.
[00:39:38]  The second time.
[00:39:40]  So, I mean, it's not, you know, like it's not that.
[00:39:45]  And he escaped basically by paying guards, right?
[00:39:47]  Like he paid people that were in the prison.
[00:39:49]  He paid the chief of, Of the prison, like the security chief of the prison, the director of the prison, to bail him out.
[00:39:59]  It's called Damaso Lopez.
[00:40:00]  And he became the.
[00:40:03]  Oh, that's Damaso Lopez.
[00:40:05]  He was the guy who also kidnapped Los Chapitos.
[00:40:09]  Yeah.
[00:40:10]  Yeah.
[00:40:11]  He's the compadre of El Chapo Guzman.
[00:40:13]  He's the godfather of the three of them.
[00:40:15]  Okay.
[00:40:16]  So let's lay out that story for people.
[00:40:18]  So when El Chapo got arrested the second time and he was in Mexico City, that Mexican security prison, the head of security, like you just said, What was his first name again?
[00:40:27]  Damaso Lopez.
[00:40:28]  Damaso Lopez.
[00:40:30]  He's known as the Elique Licenciado.
[00:40:33]  Okay.
[00:40:33]  And he was the primary way that El Chapo got out.
[00:40:37]  Exactly.
[00:40:37]  El Chapo paid him and he moved everything around the prison to get El Chapo out of prison, right?
[00:40:46]  When the Mexican government learned about Damaso, like basically he broke El Chapo out, they went against Damaso.
[00:40:55]  So Damaso went into hiding.
[00:40:58]  But he was part of the organization of the Sinaloa Cartel.
[00:41:00]  Chapo was sort of like his right hand.
[00:41:04]  He was his compadre.
[00:41:05]  He was the godfather for his three kids.
[00:41:08]  And was this only after he got him out?
[00:41:10]  After he got him out.
[00:41:11]  Yeah, he earned all the trust and all the, you know, like, yeah, he was in very good standing with Chapo.
[00:41:21]  But when they captured Chapo for the third time, then Damaso thought that he was going to step in as the next.
[00:41:28]  Big boss for the Sinaloa cartel, right?
[00:41:29]  I mean, I guess in his mind, it only made sense.
[00:41:33]  It's like, dude, I'm.
[00:41:34]  He got the boss out.
[00:41:35]  Exactly.
[00:41:35]  Like, El Chapo is out.
[00:41:36]  My compadre is out.
[00:41:38]  And it's only natural that I step in.
[00:41:40]  I broke him out.
[00:41:41]  I basically saved his life.
[00:41:44]  I'm the godfather of these three kids.
[00:41:46]  So that's me, right?
[00:41:49]  But it didn't happen that way.
[00:41:51]  El Chapo ordered that Ivan Archibaldo, the oldest of the Chapitos, stepped in as the one who inherited the power inside that faction of the cartel.
[00:42:02]  And then I guess Damaso felt betrayed, and the Sinaloa cartel was not on his power.
[00:42:12]  He started to.
[00:42:15]  I'm getting a lot of questions about if it was Cartel Jalisco who kidnapped Los Chapitos in Guadalajara in a restaurant called Leche.
[00:42:23]  But it was Damaso.
[00:42:24]  Damaso.
[00:42:25]  Okay, so who is Jalisco?
[00:42:26]  The Cartel Jalisco, Nueva Jalisco.
[00:42:27]  Cartel Jalisco.
[00:42:28]  Okay.
[00:42:29]  El Menchos Cartel.
[00:42:31]  That's a separate.
[00:42:32]  Cartel from Sinaloa.
[00:42:33]  Exactly.
[00:42:34]  That's a different.
[00:42:35]  I guess that's the second biggest cartel in Mexico right now.
[00:42:40]  CJNG.
[00:42:41]  Is that the same as the new generation?
[00:42:43]  Yes, your new generation Jalisco cartel.
[00:42:47]  Damaso tried to make a deal with the new generation cartel to go against the Sinaloa cartel, against Los Chapitos faction.
[00:42:58]  And that's how they managed to kidnap Los Chapitos in Guadalajara, in Jalisco, in that restaurant.
[00:43:05]  El Mayo had to step in to set Los Chapitos free to negotiate between El Mancho and Damaso to set him free.
[00:43:14]  So they set him free.
[00:43:15]  They go back in Culiacan.
[00:43:17]  They start preparing for war.
[00:43:19]  And then Damaso.
[00:43:21]  So Damaso, he just had so much confidence.
[00:43:25]  He thought, okay, El Chapo, I got him out.
[00:43:28]  He went back, got arrested again.
[00:43:30]  This is after he went back to the U.S., right?
[00:43:32]  Exactly.
[00:43:32]  So he just thought, I'm just going to kidnap his kids.
[00:43:34]  Yeah.
[00:43:35]  So I can take control.
[00:43:35]  Exactly.
[00:43:36]  Yeah.
[00:43:37]  And he always denied that that was him.
[00:43:40]  So he sent out a letter to O'Malley, to El Huano, and Los Chapitos asking them for.
[00:43:47]  For a meeting because he wanted to clear out his name.
[00:43:49]  He was like, I wanted to clear this shit out.
[00:43:51]  That was not me.
[00:43:52]  They didn't have any evidence it was him?
[00:43:54]  They didn't have any evidence, but they had a lot of people saying it was Damaso.
[00:44:01]  So he got every single one of them together in the hills of Sinaloa.
[00:44:09]  Meaning, like, so Damaso, he got El Mayo, El Guano, El Guano, and Los Chapitos.
[00:44:14]  And El Guano, for people listening, is El Chapo's brother.
[00:44:17]  El Chapo's brother, yeah.
[00:44:18]  It's another faction of the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:44:20]  So let's lay out the factions for people that don't know.
[00:44:22]  There are four main factions of the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:44:25]  Yes.
[00:44:25]  El Mayo's faction.
[00:44:26]  He's the founder of the cartel.
[00:44:28]  El Guano, which is El Chapo's brother.
[00:44:31]  El Chapo's brother.
[00:44:32]  Chapitos, which is his kids.
[00:44:34]  And then Los Salazar, which is like another big player, more like regional to Sinaloa, Sonora, probably Chihuahua, but not as huge as the other factions, right?
[00:44:44]  Right.
[00:44:46]  So when they got there, Damaso was nowhere to be found.
[00:44:49]  He was not in that meeting.
[00:44:51]  And then they started to get a rain of bullets.
[00:44:55]  Like it was a setup, right?
[00:44:57]  Damaso had set everyone up to.
[00:44:59]  So El Mayo himself in person showed up there?
[00:45:02]  Showed up there.
[00:45:03]  El Mayo, El Juano, and the three of them, Los Chapitos.
[00:45:06]  What kind of security did they have showing up in the hills of Sinaloa like this?
[00:45:11]  They felt pretty confident because they were like, yeah, this is our turf, right?
[00:45:15]  This is our hills.
[00:45:15]  And it was at a common place of all of them.
[00:45:19]  Still, they had their sicarios with them, the head of sicarios.
[00:45:22]  Los Chapitos had.
[00:45:25]  I think it was El Guerro Ranas back then, which was the head of Sicario before El Nini.
[00:45:32]  Ivan Archibaldo had this guy called El Pano, which was a former special operations from the Mexican military.
[00:45:43]  Okay.
[00:45:45]  He did similar to what Ed Calderon did?
[00:45:48]  Similar to that?
[00:45:48]  No, I think it was more like a special force, a special task.
[00:45:55]  They're called Fuerzas Especiales.
[00:45:59]  So he was like, they're very elite groups inside the.
[00:46:02]  Would these be the same type of guys who kidnapped Ovidio?
[00:46:06]  That got Ovidio, yes.
[00:46:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:46:09]  One of the Chapitas got hurt.
[00:46:11]  I think it was Ivan Archibaldo.
[00:46:14]  So they had to take him to a local hospital all around.
[00:46:18]  And they managed to get out.
[00:46:19]  And that was enough confirmation for them that Damaso was trying to take over the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:46:26]  Damaso, at the end, had to, well, was arrested.
[00:46:29]  He was extradited because he was put in a.
[00:46:32]  Prison in Sinaloa, and he was like, of course, fearing for his life, he knew that he was gonna be taken out, so they extradited him on his own request to go to the US.
[00:46:44]  Really?
[00:46:45]  Uh, yeah, and then his son, what year was this?
[00:46:47]  That was, I think, 2019, okay, 2018, something, somewhere around there, okay.
[00:46:54]  Um, and then his son stayed in Sinaloa, kept fighting for a bit, uh.
[00:47:02]  And then he also went to Tijuana at the border to ask for, you know, like to basically be arrested and taken to prison in the U.S. because he was going to get killed in Mexico.
[00:47:13]  So he's also in jail in the US.
[00:47:15]  And during that big shootout in the hills, too.
[00:47:18]  So during that shootout, when he basically ambushed everybody, Los Chapitos, those guys, Ovidio, they were all there.

=== El Nini's Vulnerability (15:34) ===

[00:47:26]  Yeah.
[00:47:27]  And then that was when El Nini kind of like showed his stripes for the first time.
[00:47:33]  Exactly.
[00:47:33]  El Nini was a kid from Tijuana that I'm sorry.
[00:47:39]  A contact recently called me.
[00:47:42]  He's very close to El Nini and to those people.
[00:47:45]  And He told me, Can I tell you a funny story?
[00:47:48]  And I was like, Yeah.
[00:47:49]  And it was like, El Nini grew up in Tijuana, and his mom thought that it was not a safe place for El Nini to grow up because she didn't want him to get into the malandros.
[00:48:03]  What do we call the malandros?
[00:48:04]  Like the bad people, the cartel people.
[00:48:10]  So she sent him to Culiacan.
[00:48:12]  She thought that she was going to be better there.
[00:48:15]  And he became better.
[00:48:16]  Head of security for Los Chapitos.
[00:48:20]  So, yeah, he showed up to El Guerra Ranas and to Obanu and all those guys working for the security of Los Chapitos.
[00:48:29]  And he proved himself during that gunfight.
[00:48:32]  He stayed there.
[00:48:33]  Everybody took off to take care of Los Chapitos and El Mayo and El Guano.
[00:48:38]  And El Nini put together a group of very young soldiers for the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:48:45]  And he ordered them, let's stay here and fight back.
[00:48:48]  And they stay there fighting.
[00:48:50]  El Nini is a weird, it's a rare, you know, breed inside the Sinaloa cartel, inside the cartels.
[00:48:58]  He has brains and he has muscles.
[00:49:00]  There's a lot of them that only have muscles, right?
[00:49:03]  They know how to fight.
[00:49:04]  They're well trained in the use of arms.
[00:49:06]  They are like, you know, colonel, colonel.
[00:49:10]  But this guy is also smart.
[00:49:12]  He's very sneaky.
[00:49:13]  How old is he?
[00:49:15]  He should be around 30, 31 years old.
[00:49:20]  So he's pretty young.
[00:49:22]  But he started.
[00:49:23]  With the organization when he was like around 20, you know, so he started like really young.
[00:49:28]  And what was his background?
[00:49:29]  How did he have like, how did he have like, did he have a military background before that or?
[00:49:33]  No, not at all.
[00:49:34]  He, I think he didn't even.
[00:49:36]  So he learned all this in the cartel?
[00:49:38]  In the cartel, yes.
[00:49:40]  By having the right or the wrong connections inside the cartel, one person introduced him to another and then to another.
[00:49:48]  And at the end, he started working as a sicario for Los Chapitos, as you know, like one of those disposable kids.
[00:49:57]  That they used as sicarios.
[00:50:00]  But he started to prove himself with the cartel and started going up.
[00:50:07]  And when they killed El Guero Ranas, which was the former head of security for the Sinaloa cartel, he stepped in.
[00:50:14]  Ivan Archibaldo vouched for El Nini too, stepped in as head of security for Los Chapitos.
[00:50:21]  And up until this day, he's still head of security for Los Chapitos.
[00:50:25]  And there was another big attempted raid on him.
[00:50:29]  So they had planned to take out.
[00:50:32]  Ovidio and then El Nini.
[00:50:34]  And they also call, what do they call him?
[00:50:35]  They call him Chicken Little.
[00:50:37]  Chicken Little.
[00:50:38]  Yes.
[00:50:39]  They call him Chicken Little because he's a, you know, like a slim guy.
[00:50:43]  He's super young.
[00:50:45]  He looks even younger because he's really skinny, you know, like white skin.
[00:50:50]  And he looks like fucking Chicken Little, man.
[00:50:53]  So he is one of like the most wanted people in the cartel by the Mexican military.
[00:50:57]  Yes, because they know that he's a big player in Telecinoma Cartel.
[00:51:03]  It's not only like this.
[00:51:05]  Chief for Los Chapitos.
[00:51:07]  He's a big player.
[00:51:08]  He's very valuable to the organization.
[00:51:10]  And I guess what the Mexican government wants to do right now is to demoralize that faction, to make them feel that they're not powerful.
[00:51:19]  They want to make a point.
[00:51:21]  And that's why they took the lower hanging fruit of the faction, right?
[00:51:25]  Ovidio.
[00:51:26]  He was not the poncho of the cartel.
[00:51:30]  He was the youngest.
[00:51:32]  He was the one that Ochapo wanted a different life for.
[00:51:36]  Really?
[00:51:36]  Ochapo sent him to a private, very exclusive school in.
[00:51:41]  Elementary school in Mexico City when Ovidio was really young.
[00:51:46]  Why did he want a different life for Ovidio?
[00:51:48]  I guess he already had fucked up too many of his kids, like Ivan Archibaldo and Jesus Alfredo, Joaquin, who ended up being killed in 2008 in Culiacan.
[00:52:01]  So I guess he wanted something different for Ovidio for his youngest.
[00:52:05]  And he sent him to school.
[00:52:07]  He sent him to this very private, exclusive school.
[00:52:11]  So he's kind of like the most vulnerable one in the cartel for them to control.
[00:52:15]  Take out exactly so they have the old guy, have a chapel, and that's demoralizing enough for that faction.
[00:52:24]  Um, now they have Ovidio, and now they want a ninny because they want to, like, you know, bring down the whole Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa cartel by first demoralizing them, and then when they're demoralized, and like the other factions of the Sinaloa cartel see them as weak, then they're gonna go after Ivan Archibaldo.
[00:52:49]  They're going to go after who?
[00:52:50]  Ivan Archibaldo, the oldest of the Chapitas, the one who's the real head behind the Chapitas faction.
[00:52:56]  So let's go.
[00:52:59]  What happened with the raid of El Nini's house?
[00:53:03]  So that happened two days after they captured Ovidio.
[00:53:06]  And pull up, Austin, pull up, I think it's your latest YouTube video.
[00:53:09]  Yeah, that's the latest YouTube video.
[00:53:10]  If you pull up his latest video, he shows some footage inside of El Nini's house on Luis's YouTube channel.
[00:53:18]  By the way, which is youtube.com.
[00:53:20]  What's your name?
[00:53:21]  It's just Luis Chaparro.
[00:53:23]  At Luis Chaparro, yeah.
[00:53:24]  All right.
[00:53:24]  We'll make sure we link it below for everybody.
[00:53:28]  Yeah, that's it right there.
[00:53:29]  Yes.
[00:53:30]  So, yeah, basically, they started these operations.
[00:53:35]  Pause that.
[00:53:37]  They started this operation around Hidalgo neighborhood, which is a very middle class neighborhood in Culiacan, two days after they captured a video.
[00:53:46]  Some of my sources also started like, Sending me messages like there's something huge going on because we were seeing a bunch of pickup trucks from the military about lights off.
[00:53:57]  They're like driving around the town with their lights off, circling this neighborhood.
[00:54:02]  And one of my other sources told me that's where El Nini's mother in law lives.
[00:54:11]  So apparently I was like, oh shit, they're after him.
[00:54:15]  The Mexican government never said that they were after El Nini.
[00:54:19]  Many local reporters said, like, no, they didn't capture anyone.
[00:54:22]  They actually killed an old man by mistake again, another casualty of the Mexican military.
[00:54:29]  But they didn't capture Elini.
[00:54:32]  And then I started, like, looking into, you know, like, Elini is or used to be huge on social.
[00:54:39]  He's very flashy with his watches.
[00:54:41]  He has, like, these hobbles, you know, like, super expensive and exclusive versions of watches.
[00:54:47]  He loves watches and he loves his miniguns and, you know, like, Is he one of those guys that was like a TikTok cartel?
[00:54:54]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:54:55]  He's driving his Lamborghini, Urus.
[00:54:58]  Oh, yeah.
[00:54:59]  So he drives the SUV Lambo.
[00:55:02]  Yes, exactly.
[00:55:03]  A red one.
[00:55:04]  A red one.
[00:55:05]  So he's flashy as fuck.
[00:55:07]  So he doesn't give a fuck.
[00:55:08]  He doesn't give a fuck.
[00:55:09]  He has enough men, enough power to go around the world.
[00:55:12]  He's not afraid of any sort of military.
[00:55:13]  Not at all, man.
[00:55:14]  Because, I mean, a lot of them are on the payroll as well.
[00:55:18]  So they feel safe.
[00:55:19]  They felt safe.
[00:55:20]  But when they raided his house, I saw the photo on the right with a black stripe and the white style with a bunch of weapons that he had on the house.
[00:55:31]  So is this photo of after they raided his house?
[00:55:35]  Yes, exactly.
[00:55:39]  A bunch of like heavy weapons, uh, in Thai, right?
[00:55:42]  They never said it was El Nini's or his name or whatever.
[00:55:45]  You keep playing in Austin, and then I remember that tile that is very particular with that black strip.
[00:55:53]  Um, that is the same from that photo of that.
[00:55:56]  That's the last photo of El Nini with the Richard Mail watch.
[00:55:59]  Yes, exactly.
[00:56:01]  Look at his shoes, it's like a half a million dollar watch.
[00:56:03]  Yes, and that's the black stripes again with the white tile.
[00:56:08]  So, uh, that.
[00:56:10]  That for me, that was enough confirmation that they were after Alini.
[00:56:14]  And then after making a couple of calls, they told me, Yeah, they're after him.
[00:56:19]  So, I mean, again, like, I these video I just uploaded on YouTube, and I said, This is the end of Los Chapitos.
[00:56:28]  I'm also getting a lot of like messages from, I guess, I don't know if they are part of the organization or just fucking Alucinous, as we call them, you know, like fucking wannabes.
[00:56:39]  But they think that I'm saying that Los Chapitos are, you know, like, are.
[00:56:45]  Ending and I want them to, I want to see them down or arrested or whatever.
[00:56:49]  What I'm saying is like, this is a plan.
[00:56:52]  This is the plan of the US and Mexico government to go against Los Chapitos specifically.
[00:56:57]  They're not going to go against El Mayo.
[00:56:59]  They're not going to go against El Guano.
[00:57:01]  They're going to go after Los Chapitos.
[00:57:03]  You know, that's the next target for both of the governments.
[00:57:06]  But what's the point?
[00:57:08]  I guess the point is to, first of all, and again, I might not have enough proof of this, but.
[00:57:18]  I guess if you look closely around Elmayo and look how he started to be who he is, his first connections, the guy who introduced him to the drug trafficking business, it's very possible that Elmayo has strong ties with the CIA, at least with someone high up in the operations of foreign intelligence in Mexico.
[00:57:49]  That's how Elmayo has managed to.
[00:57:51]  Keep safe and to keep, you know, alive.
[00:57:53]  And he's 73 and he has diabetes, but he's still out there.
[00:57:58]  I was just there.
[00:57:59]  I'm posting that video in a couple of weeks on my YouTube channel where I'm hanging around with his sicarios, very young man as well, very similar to Amayo Sicario.
[00:58:11]  With Amayo Sicario, his first security ring.
[00:58:14]  Amayo was not more than 10 kilometers away from where I was that night.
[00:58:19]  And it's a ranch, a rancho really similar to Jesus Maria.
[00:58:24]  His house is really similar.
[00:58:26]  His people, so they live very, very similar.
[00:58:29]  So, if the Mexican government wants to go against El Mayo, they could easily get him.
[00:58:34]  Easily.
[00:58:34]  He's an old man.
[00:58:35]  He doesn't even have enough power or energy to run like Ovidio or all that shit.
[00:58:42]  He's a 73 year old, diabetic man.
[00:58:47]  But he's really well protected, and the people in Sinaloa really love him.
[00:58:52]  The people in Culiacan and a lot of other places in Sinaloa, they love El Mayo.
[00:58:58]  They feel protected.
[00:58:59]  A recent survey by a Mexican institution found that more than 50% of the people living in the three major cities of Culiacan feel protected by the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:59:11]  That's 50% on the major cities.
[00:59:13]  That's not even taking into account all the small towns like Jesus Maria and these places where O'Malley lives and all this shit.
[00:59:21]  Who put out a survey like that?
[00:59:23]  It was a Mexican institution to have an impression on how people felt about the security forces in Sinaloa.
[00:59:32]  And turns out that more than 50% feel protected by the Sinaloa cartel.
[00:59:38]  So they've managed to earn a lot of social basis in Sinaloa.
[00:59:41]  And regular people, they said they started saying before a video was captured, they started putting out the word that the Los Chapitos were getting too violent.
[00:59:54]  They're getting too violent, man.
[00:59:55]  They're getting too powerful.
[00:59:57]  And they were basically asking Elmayo to step in.
[01:00:00]  They were like, Elmayo is not like that.
[01:00:02]  Elmayo is going to put an end to these guys because they're getting like.
[01:00:06]  Too violent.
[01:00:07]  El Mayo was taken out of Culiacan by Los Chapitos.
[01:00:13]  He was displaced by Los Chapitos.
[01:00:15]  So Culiacan is owned by Los Chapitos, but El Mayo didn't want to go to war against them.
[01:00:21]  So what he did is he complied with what Los Chapitos asked him for, which is paying 30% of all his operations in Culiacan.
[01:00:30]  And El Mayo is currently paying Los Chapitos faction a 30%.
[01:00:36]  Caught to use the territory of Culiacan.
[01:00:41]  Didn't he help get Ovidio out in 2019 when he got caught?
[01:00:45]  Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of beef as well during that operation because people started saying that El Mayo's man didn't step in to rescue Ovidio, but in terms of how he did, like he did, he stepped in.
[01:01:01]  I guess El Mayo is cool with Los Chapitos and Los Chapitos respect a lot El Mayo and they owe El Mayo for that rescue in Jalisco.
[01:01:11]  From the hands of Damaso and the New Generation cartel.
[01:01:16]  But still, they feel like they own Culacan and that O Mayo has to pay 30% as a cut to operate in that city.
[01:01:24]  And O Mayo is a strong man.
[01:01:26]  I mean, what he decided to do is to pay and comply with what he was requested by Los Chapitos, but he started owning most of the border cities like Tijuana, San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexicali.
[01:01:40]  He owns that strip.
[01:01:42]  So, when Los Chapitos needs to stash drugs on border cities or to get drugs across, he asks again for that 30%.
[01:01:51]  He gets it back.
[01:01:52]  Yeah, he gets it back.
[01:01:53]  30%.
[01:01:54]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:01:55]  He's a smart man.
[01:01:55]  And I don't think he is or was behind Ovidio's capture, to be honest.
[01:02:03]  I don't think that's the case.
[01:02:05]  Are some people saying?
[01:02:05]  Yeah, there's a lot of people saying that.
[01:02:08]  Not what I've heard from people knowledgeable, people close to El Nini, people close to Los Chapitos, people close to Omayo Zambada.
[01:02:17]  On the contrary, they say that Elmayo Zambada sent out a bunch of his henchmen to try to rescue Ovidio.
[01:02:25]  But at the same time, I think Elmayo is a happy bystander of what was happening.
[01:02:31]  He feels that, I guess, if I know that people are saying that Los Chapitos were becoming too violent for Culiacan, I'm pretty sure he's heard that too.
[01:02:43]  And they respect a lot Elmayo.
[01:02:46]  They feel protected by El Mayo.
[01:02:49]  So most of them are not even asking the Mexican government to help them out with the violent input that Los Chapitos are having in Culiacan.
[01:02:58]  They're asking El Mayo to step in.

=== CIA Operator Suspicions (03:41) ===

[01:03:01]  So if El Mayo was working with the US government or was working with some sort of US intelligence, would the Mexican government know about that?
[01:03:10]  I don't think so.
[01:03:11]  I don't think so.
[01:03:12]  I don't think even that many.
[01:03:15]  I mean, who knows even if El Mayo knows himself, you know?
[01:03:18]  He's being used by one of these operations.
[01:03:22]  But if you look deep enough into Elmayo's background, you'll find these Cuban men that used to be a police officer for the Cuban Revolution for Fidel Castro.
[01:03:36]  And he fled to Florida.
[01:03:38]  And from Florida, he was arrested.
[01:03:40]  This is the guy from The Last Narc, right?
[01:03:42]  Exactly.
[01:03:42]  The guy who, the CIA agent who killed, is it Felix Ruther?
[01:03:45]  No, no, no, no, that's not Felix Ruther.
[01:03:48]  He used to be a police officer.
[01:03:49]  Then he flew to Miami.
[01:03:53]  And then he was charged with drug trafficking.
[01:03:56]  And then something like there's a blackout on his history.
[01:03:59]  And he pops up again in Cuba doing some shady shit.
[01:04:04]  And then in Nicaragua and Colombia.
[01:04:06]  And then he pops up in LA.
[01:04:07]  Like way back during.
[01:04:10]  During Fidel Castro's revolution.
[01:04:11]  Really?
[01:04:12]  And then he pops up in LA where he meets Modesta Zambada, El Mayo's older sister.
[01:04:18]  And he falls in love with her.
[01:04:22]  They move to Culiacan.
[01:04:23]  And then he starts pulling the whole Sambadas into the business he owned.
[01:04:28]  He's like, dude, I have this multi million business of selling and trafficking weed to the U.S.
[01:04:34]  I have all the clients.
[01:04:36]  Probably, he said, I have all the green light from the U.S. government, but this is what you need to do.
[01:04:43]  And it's known that he was an operator for the CIA, he was operating for the CIA.
[01:04:47]  And he was the one that got Elmayo into this business.
[01:04:52]  Through Elmayo's sister, Oh shit, I just kind of remember her name.
[01:04:58]  I just said her name, but I completely forgot her name.
[01:05:02]  Is this dude still alive?
[01:05:04]  Yes, he's 73.
[01:05:05]  What's his name?
[01:05:05]  I don't know.
[01:05:05]  That guy?
[01:05:06]  The CIA guy who got out of Miami.
[01:05:08]  He's a shadow man.
[01:05:09]  There's like one photo of him, and you have to really look deep into it to find his name.
[01:05:14]  I can't remember his name, but I'm putting out a short documentary on that in two weeks on my YouTube channel.
[01:05:23]  So, yeah, if you want to watch that, I have a photo of him and his whole history, how he moved around, and how he got.
[01:05:30]  Modesta Sambada in love with him.
[01:05:33]  And he brought, he was like the dad for Amaya.
[01:05:37]  It's wild.
[01:05:38]  I had no idea about that.
[01:05:40]  It's crazy, man.
[01:05:41]  Yeah, there's a lot of shit going on that we don't really know.
[01:05:44]  You really need to go in like that fucking rabbit hole.
[01:05:47]  Yeah.
[01:05:48]  And still, I'm still, I can't be wrong, right?
[01:05:52]  I mean, I can't be wrong.
[01:05:53]  That's a reality.
[01:05:54]  I mean, I'm not saying I'm right and I have the truth, but that's factual.
[01:05:59]  That guy existed.
[01:06:00]  That guy was married to Amaya's sister.
[01:06:03]  That guy was an operator for the CIA.
[01:06:04]  So that makes everyone very suspicious about El Mayo, right?
[01:06:09]  Why he hasn't been captured.
[01:06:11]  Did you say his name already?
[01:06:12]  Did I miss that?
[01:06:13]  No, I can't remember his name.
[01:06:14]  I can't remember his name, but I'm sorry.
[01:06:16]  Do some research if you can find him.
[01:06:19]  No, that's Kiki Camarena.
[01:06:21]  That's the guy who was killed in the safe house.
[01:06:23]  Yeah.
[01:06:24]  No, so I've brought up Felix Rodriguez many times in this podcast, even with like I had a former CIA guy on here and I was telling him the story and he was like, there's no fucking way.
[01:06:33]  And I was like, I looked him up and we pulled him up, and then we saw that he was involved in the Bay of Pigs.
[01:06:38]  Yeah.
[01:06:40]  Not a lot of people know about that story either.

=== Destabilizing Mexico (05:50) ===

[01:06:42]  Exactly.
[01:06:43]  That's the thing.
[01:06:43]  I mean, people really think that the CIA foreign operations are not real.
[01:06:48]  They think that that's like a movie, a 007 or whatever, but they do operate.
[01:06:54]  I have a contact also who was a contractor for the CIA.
[01:06:59]  And dude, he was all over the place in Latin America doing all sorts of shit.
[01:07:03]  And what they do is like they basically destabilized.
[01:07:07]  I had the same fucking problem saying that same word on the last time I was here.
[01:07:10]  What word?
[01:07:11]  Destabilized.
[01:07:14]  Destabilized.
[01:07:15]  Dude, I had the same problem saying that word.
[01:07:19]  Destabilized.
[01:07:20]  That's what they do.
[01:07:22]  They operate to destabilize certain regions.
[01:07:24]  Either that be by blowing up a single bridge, you know, if you have a bridge that connects rural country to the city, and then you blow that up, you're going to make a war, you know, like you're going to make people angry, protest, and you're going to make a lot of like destabilization in that region.
[01:07:48]  Either that be Like giving a lot of fucking power to one single cartel member, or putting shit like divide and conquer, right, in between a single cartel.
[01:08:04]  And if you start pushing the version that El Mayo betrayed Los Chapitos, and Los Chapitos are becoming very violent, and then El Guano, who the fuck knows who that is, and you start like beefing around them, they're gonna end up fighting.
[01:08:21]  And if you destabilize the Sinaloa cartel and you bring down, hypothetically bring down the Sinaloa cartel, isn't that just going to create a massive power vacuum?
[01:08:30]  Yes, exactly.
[01:08:31]  And what's that going to create in Mexico is going to be a weak government, a government into a lot of shit, you know, that they're going to try to put all those fires.
[01:08:45]  And probably, I don't know what agenda could be thrown in when a government is like asking for help, is desperate for help, is desperate for more.
[01:08:54]  Training for more weapons, for more money, for more whatever.
[01:08:59]  So, who would rise up in that case if the Cinaloa cartel went down?
[01:09:02]  Would it be the new generation cartel?
[01:09:04]  The new generation cartel.
[01:09:05]  Now, I'm very positive that the Cinaloa cartel is not going to go down.
[01:09:10]  It's just this faction of the Cinaloa cartel, those Chapitos.
[01:09:14]  The Magus faction is always, well, maybe not always, but it's still going to go for a while, for a good while, to be the dominant faction.
[01:09:24]  What?
[01:09:25]  What is America's interest?
[01:09:26]  What would America's interest be in doing this stuff and destabilizing these cartels?
[01:09:33]  There's a lot of interest, especially in Mexico.
[01:09:35]  In Mexico, Mexico is a third world country with a lot of natural resources, with a lot of potential to.
[01:09:47]  We do a lot of good business.
[01:09:49]  The US and Mexico have a very good partnership with production and manufacturing.
[01:09:55]  But that's the thing.
[01:09:56]  It's a very good relation trade.
[01:09:58]  I don't know what the trade, I don't know exactly what the dynamics are of trade, but I know, I've heard they have a good trade relationship.
[01:10:04]  After NAFTA, I guess it has been a very good relationship for the US, right?
[01:10:09]  It's not been that good for Mexico or Latin America in general.
[01:10:13]  It's a very exploitative relationship, right?
[01:10:16]  That's why you, if you want to make a factory, you set it up in Mexico and you pay shitty wages to people that face a lot of fucking poverty and scarcity.
[01:10:28]  So that works for the US, not really, not that much for Mexico, right?
[01:10:33]  So when Mexico tries to step in with a president like we have now, that he has many flaws and he's a shitty president, but he has knowledge of the working people.
[01:10:46]  He knows the working people.
[01:10:48]  He knows the people who's the working class and the most impoverished population of his country.
[01:10:57]  And he tries to step in and say, no, let's renegotiate or trade.
[01:11:03]  Let's renegotiate our security relationship.
[01:11:07]  Let's renegotiate our policies and politics.
[01:11:14]  I guess that's scary for the US, right?
[01:11:18]  And probably not for a single president, you know, like because a president is there as a king is there, you know, like the kings are just the face of a monarchy, but they don't really do shit.
[01:11:28]  And that's the same thing for a president.
[01:11:30]  But who's behind that president?
[01:11:32]  Probably corporations like Walmart trying to set up better businesses in Mexico.
[01:11:37]  Corporations like the arms factories, right?
[01:11:40]  There's a lot of like car manufacturers, car manufacturers, McDonald's, all those like big corporations that want to have a better grasp of that country.
[01:11:50]  Car manufacturers right now are stepping into electric cars, right?
[01:11:55]  Tesla's big in Mexico, right?
[01:11:56]  Tesla's huge in Mexico.
[01:11:58]  Ford is going all the way to try to fight Tesla for, you know, like lithium powered cars.
[01:12:05]  And Mexico just recently discovered the fucking.
[01:12:08]  Biggest deposit of lithium after Bolivia.
[01:12:11]  So, I mean, that has to be one of the main things that these companies are pushing for the US government to fight in Mexico, right?
[01:12:21]  To lobby in Mexico.
[01:12:22]  Now, lobby in a politician's world looks like a lot of like men in suit trying to convince another man to do business with him or to go his way.

=== From Narcos to Business (14:58) ===

[01:12:33]  But lobbying in Latin America looks like the fucking new generation cartel killing a bunch of people in a certain region to.
[01:12:41]  Get him out of there.
[01:12:44]  Loving in Latin America means something very different than what it means in the US.
[01:12:48]  So, when you destabilize the country, when you put fires that only you can put out, you earn leverage.
[01:12:58]  You get a lot of leverage.
[01:13:00]  Wow, man.
[01:13:00]  In a country.
[01:13:02]  It's fucking wild.
[01:13:04]  It's a bit, yes.
[01:13:05]  I mean, it's crazy.
[01:13:06]  It's sad because, I mean, a lot of like regular people are being killed by these wire and drugs that has anything to do but.
[01:13:15]  With trucks, man.
[01:13:16]  I mean, so going back to when you had your sources calling you about trucks like pulling down Kiki or uh pulling down El Nini Street or his mother in law street with their lights off, they what happened?
[01:13:30]  What went down with that raid and what happened to uh El Nini?
[01:13:33]  So basically, they arrived in this neighborhood where they know El Nini is or was, and then El Nini uh puts up these um helmet, jumps in a puntero bike, which is a lookout bike, it's like these.
[01:13:48]  You know, like a dirt bike, like shitty dirt bikes, and he left, he leaves the area.
[01:13:56]  And of course, like the militaries are like, stop that guy.
[01:13:59]  But then they thought it's just a fucking Luca, I'll just let him go.
[01:14:03]  Uh, and he was out of there, and they got another man because he he put a group of people saying he's he's known as Nini Chicken Little, El Cero 9, 09, or the 19, El 19.
[01:14:17]  Why, why does that mean?
[01:14:18]  I have no clue, but I think that those are his codes on the walkies, right?
[01:14:23]  If you go and say, like, hey, you know that it's El Nini.
[01:14:27]  Because I've heard Sicarios getting like super scared when someone is like talking on the talkies and they don't know who that is.
[01:14:37]  And then he says, So you're the 09, culeros.
[01:14:41]  Hey, motherfuckers, I'm the 09.
[01:14:44]  And they're like, Oh shit, it's the 09, man.
[01:14:46]  They're like, Oh, wait, wait, wait.
[01:14:48]  So they squared up to Alini, of course.
[01:14:51]  And he put a group of people to start yelling, There's a 19.
[01:14:59]  So the military was like, Where is him?
[01:15:01]  And he went after that guy.
[01:15:03]  And of course, that was just one of his, you know, like sicarios or whatever.
[01:15:07]  Right, right.
[01:15:08]  That was not El Nini.
[01:15:09]  So, where is El Nini right now, do you think?
[01:15:11]  I think he's hiding.
[01:15:12]  He's hiding.
[01:15:13]  I have no clue.
[01:15:14]  And I don't want to know where he is.
[01:15:17]  But of course, he's hiding in the mountains of Sinaloa.
[01:15:19]  Sinaloa is a tricky place geographically.
[01:15:23]  I mean, Culiacan is a plain.
[01:15:28]  In the middle of a bunch of very tricky mountains.
[01:15:31]  So they know all those mountains.
[01:15:33]  They grew up there.
[01:15:34]  Ivan Archibaldo, Ovidio, El Mayo, all those guys grew up from those hills.
[01:15:40]  So they know those hills better than anyone else, better than the Mexican government.
[01:15:45]  So if Los Chapitos are gone, who takes their place?
[01:15:51]  Does anyone take their place?
[01:15:52]  Or does El Mayo and El Guano just sort of like absorb that?
[01:15:56]  Yes, I think that's if they go out, if they really go out.
[01:16:02]  There's going to be a huge gap in the Sinaloa organization, or at least in that brand, because I don't think it's an organization anymore, just like a brand, right?
[01:16:10]  There's going to be a huge, huge gap.
[01:16:12]  And one of the possibilities, and I guess that's why they're going after Nini, is that Aldini steps in.
[01:16:17]  Is that Aldini is like, okay, so.
[01:16:21]  Because they imagine that he would be the first one to step in.
[01:16:23]  Exactly.
[01:16:24]  So I guess that's also why they're going after Nini and not right after Ivan Archibald, right?
[01:16:29]  The real head of Flot Chapitos.
[01:16:32]  Yeah, where is he?
[01:16:34]  Ivan Archivaldo is like, he has been seen around Culiacan because he also drives up with like 40 pickup trucks behind him and that kind of shit.
[01:16:45]  But he knows better, you know, he knows better than Ovidio to don't show up in a, you know, like the only Starbucks in Culiacan with a line of pickup trucks and driving a chihuahua.
[01:17:00]  He's more low key and he's definitely more violent.
[01:17:04]  He's definitely more in control of the Sinaloa cartel Chapepepe's faction.
[01:17:09]  I was recently inside the weed manufacturing operation they have in Culiacan.
[01:17:17]  Because after the U.S. legalized weed in most states, they lost a lot of money.
[01:17:23]  That's what they went all the way to methamphetamine and fentanyl, right?
[01:17:28]  To make up for those losses.
[01:17:30]  I heard that they were actually using, when the U.S. legalized weed, that the cartel started because these dispensaries, Only allowed to take cash.
[01:17:40]  So now they keep all this cash in a vault in the Federal Reserve.
[01:17:42]  They have these big armored trucks to take it.
[01:17:44]  So the cartel have been using that to launder their money.
[01:17:46]  Yes, they use that to launder money, but they use that also to, it's a trial and error phase, right?
[01:17:53]  They're trying to, they're taking a lot of intel on how California and Colorado is making it, right?
[01:18:02]  So they grab a bunch of kids from Sinaloa that were living in California or living in Colorado that they love weed and they know how to grow that.
[01:18:10]  And they set up a bunch of like a huge setup.
[01:18:14]  To start growing better quality weed, I went in greenhouses, state of the art.
[01:18:21]  They played music 24 7 to their plants.
[01:18:24]  They played like really four in the morning till six.
[01:18:28]  It's Oprah and then soft rock and then hip hop.
[01:18:30]  And you know, it's crazy, man.
[01:18:33]  Um, and then they have these huge uh manufacturing places where they do the pre rolls and they do like these edibles and other shit.
[01:18:40]  They they a lot of cartel is copying this shit, exactly.
[01:18:43]  Yeah, they they have like really cool brands that I cannot say the name of the brands because that's what got me into a lot of fucking heat with those guys.
[01:18:52]  Um, because they allowed me in, they showed me everything.
[01:18:55]  They even because their brands are being sold in the U.S. That's why you.
[01:18:58]  Can't say the name of it?
[01:18:59]  No, because apparently, I mean, apparently I was not allowed to say their brands.
[01:19:05]  They showed me everything, but I think they forgot to tell me not to, you know, like public, to publish their brands.
[01:19:15]  And I fucked up and I did a story for Business Insider where I put one or two of their brands or their best brands in the story.
[01:19:24]  So they came at me really hard.
[01:19:26]  They started like calling me and threatening me and asking me to not ever.
[01:19:30]  Put a foot again in Sinaloa and here I go again.
[01:19:35]  Like, I went to fucking Ovidio's house.
[01:19:37]  Fuck me, right?
[01:19:39]  So, yes, yes, I'm getting a lot of heat from that document.
[01:19:42]  And I mean, and that was only one story with being this insider.
[01:19:46]  I have a full fucking documentary dropping soon on my YouTube channel from inside those places.
[01:19:51]  They were pretty cool.
[01:19:52]  They were not intimidating a lot at all.
[01:19:54]  They even let me press, you know, like wax on one of their machines.
[01:19:59]  And I got like super stoned in one of their manufacturers'.
[01:20:03]  So, if they're doing all the shit that the dispensaries are doing, like as far as the pre rolls and all that stuff, who is that going to?
[01:20:10]  To Los Chapitos.
[01:20:12]  All of that money was put in by Los Chapitos, and everything they're selling is going back to Los Chapitos.
[01:20:20]  It's only allowing these guys to play with weed, right?
[01:20:22]  Because they want to play with weed.
[01:20:24]  They want to grow their own weed.
[01:20:26]  They want to be Rafael Caro Quintero all over again, one of the founders of the Sinaloa cartel, who was in love and who invented.
[01:20:34]  La sincemilla, right?
[01:20:36]  These Mexican breakweed with no stems on it.
[01:20:42]  It's called sincemilla.
[01:20:44]  Oh, okay.
[01:20:45]  Though it's like super popular back in the 70s.
[01:20:47]  And who in the US is buying these things, this type of weed?
[01:20:51]  That's not for export.
[01:20:53]  They're making a business.
[01:20:54]  Oh, it's not even exported.
[01:20:56]  That's only for the Mexican market because they're trying.
[01:20:59]  Like tourist markets?
[01:21:00]  Exactly.
[01:21:00]  Tourists or local people.
[01:21:03]  There's a huge weed market in Mexico because a lot of what started happening.
[01:21:08]  Is that a lot of people started trafficking weed the other way around?
[01:21:14]  They went to LA or San Diego and then they packed the whole trunk of a car with high quality weed and drove all the way back to Mexico City and sell that shale like crazy high prices.
[01:21:28]  And this was not like cartel or anything, it's just like regular people that thought that it was a market for better weed in Mexico.
[01:21:35]  And it was probably really easy to get weed into Mexico.
[01:21:37]  Exactly, yes, exactly.
[01:21:39]  I wrote a story back in 2009.
[01:21:41]  Saying that this was about to happen if the US was to legalize weed.
[01:21:46]  Yeah.
[01:21:46]  And it ended up happening that way.
[01:21:50]  And so Los Chapitos are like, you know what?
[01:21:52]  This could be interesting.
[01:21:53]  This could be the national market, could be like a good money making for us if we are the first ones and if we monopolize the whole fucking industry.
[01:22:01]  So let's start now when it's still illegal because we have the power and the means to do with legal shit.
[01:22:10]  But also, That could be their way out and become eventually, if Mexico legalizes weed, they're going to go from narcos to business owners, like what happened with alcohol.
[01:22:23]  Well, they already are kind of business owners, right?
[01:22:27]  It's like the drugs just got them the original huge flow of cash and now they're into everything else.
[01:22:34]  Exactly.
[01:22:34]  And that's the thing.
[01:22:36]  I think what they wanted is to have an exit strategy from the narco world, right?
[01:22:43]  And say, if weed becomes legal, we might have a very well established multi million making business.
[01:22:53]  How would that happen in Mexico?
[01:22:54]  The same way it happened with alcohol.
[01:22:57]  Prohibition in the U.S. was still in place.
[01:23:01]  A lot of people, a lot of Mexicans were alcohol traffickers.
[01:23:05]  They will, you know, like produce a bunch of whiskey, tequila, and export illegally that to the U.S., making huge profits.
[01:23:13]  And when the U.S. legalized everything, they became who they are.
[01:23:16]  They own the biggest business owners in Ciudad Juarez, you know, the guys who own the city in Juarez, in Tijuana, in Sonora.
[01:23:28]  It's people who were.
[01:23:31]  They were criminals.
[01:23:32]  They were a chapel back in the prohibition era of alcohol.
[01:23:36]  And now they are like, you know, like family, you know, like wealthy, wealthy families, like probably one of the most wealthy families in northern Mexico.
[01:23:46]  And I guess that's what they were aiming or are aiming for to wait for that to happen, to lobby.
[01:23:53]  Because the people from Los Chapitos told me that they were lobbying in the government to legalize weed.
[01:24:02]  And I guess that's an exit strategy.
[01:24:05]  Do you think there's a better chance of weed being legalized in Mexico if it's legalized federally in the US?
[01:24:13]  Yes, absolutely.
[01:24:14]  So you think that'll be like a domino effect if it happens in the US?
[01:24:17]  Yeah, I mean, not necessarily like a domino effect, but definitely going to put more pressure in Mexico to legalize it.
[01:24:22]  More pressure, right.
[01:24:24]  And also, Mexico's looking both in the middle of both, right?
[01:24:27]  In the middle of like Latin America, like places like Colombia, who's planning also on legalizing weed.
[01:24:34]  And the US, who is planning also on legalizing weed, at least in the federal government.
[01:24:39]  What if the US legalized weed, like all drugs, weed, cocaine, heroin?
[01:24:45]  That's going to create a fucking hell in Mexico with the criminal organizations, man, because they're going to stop from being drug traffickers and they're going to have to find new revenues.
[01:24:54]  And those first new revenues are always kidnappings, extortions, all that kind of shit.
[01:25:03]  Every time that their business goes.
[01:25:07]  They jump immediately into like kidnappings, extortions, carjackings.
[01:25:13]  Really?
[01:25:13]  I wonder if this may be the stupidest thing I ever said, but if Coke became illegal in the US, if like big pharmaceutical companies that are now legally selling Coke would start working with the cartels.
[01:25:28]  That will be the best case scenario if they actually manage to work together, the US and Mexico, right?
[01:25:34]  Where Mexico says, like, okay, maybe we don't sell, you sell it, we produce it.
[01:25:40]  Legally for export, and that will be good, right?
[01:25:44]  But Mexico will have to legalize production of, you know.
[01:25:48]  I mean, first of all, like cocaine, like the coca plant, um, doesn't grow in Mexico, it only goes in certain altitudes, like Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay.
[01:25:59]  Mexican cartels have been attempting to grow coca in Mexico for a while, in Guerrero and in Chiapas, uh, but they haven't succeeded.
[01:26:08]  The Mexican government has found like small, um.
[01:26:13]  Where they planted, you know, like a couple of hectares of coca leaves.
[01:26:18]  Really?
[01:26:19]  But they don't grow up as much as they grow in Colombia.
[01:26:23]  I had a guy in here who lives in Brazil in the rainforest, in the Amazon rainforest.
[01:26:28]  And he said that one week he went on a solo sort of like adventure through the Amazon, like up the river and like on a crazy, dangerous solo journey.
[01:26:40]  And he saw whole parts of the Amazon forest that are like hollowed out for airplanes to like fly under the canopy of the forest and land there and load up.
[01:26:54]  And then he also ran into a group of dudes on a boat.
[01:26:58]  He actually, I think he actually caught a ride with them.
[01:27:01]  There were a couple of dudes that were just had a boat full of bricks of cocaine, bricks of coke that were just going down the Amazon and I guess just transporting it.
[01:27:11]  But I guess there's a lot of little pop up factories in the Amazon that are manufacturing coke.
[01:27:16]  And are those Sinaloa, are those like Mexican cartels?
[01:27:19]  Those probably are providers, right, for the Mexican cartels.
[01:27:25]  Now, the biggest factory in Latin America for cocaine production is a national park in Bolivia.

=== Amazon Cocaine Operations (03:33) ===

[01:27:31]  It's in a national park.
[01:27:34]  I put up a story like a couple of months ago about that park and how they're like huge operations.
[01:27:41]  There's not like they have like these small cooking sites of cocaine, right?
[01:27:46]  It's huge operations, massive fucking operations because it's a massive national park.
[01:27:51]  Did you go there?
[01:27:52]  I didn't, but I got photos from the Bolivian police that raided that place.
[01:27:57]  And dude, it looks.
[01:27:58]  See if you can find pictures, Austin.
[01:28:00]  I think I have them somewhere on my Instagram account, at least one of them.
[01:28:04]  But if you Google.
[01:28:06]  Let me tell you what the name of the national park is because it's fucking crazy, man.
[01:28:11]  And it's crazy that that's the biggest factory right now.
[01:28:15]  That's the place where most of the cocaine is being.
[01:28:18]  And the government there, they obviously.
[01:28:21]  They can't, you know, like they can't have their hands on everything at the same time.
[01:28:25]  It's just so huge.
[01:28:27]  Yeah.
[01:28:28]  So what is this that we're seeing?
[01:28:30]  That's a photo from one of the national parks being raided.
[01:28:36]  After finding a massive cocaine lab.
[01:28:41]  And that is happening almost on a weekly basis that they're finding a new kitchen in that same place.
[01:28:49]  So they're cooking a lot of cocaine in that part, in the national park in Bolivia.
[01:28:55]  That's kind of like all news to Bolivians because they keep finding labs in that same part, like almost on a weekly basis.
[01:29:02]  Yeah.
[01:29:03]  So I'm interested.
[01:29:04]  What is it like being.
[01:29:07]  Being you reporting on this shit every week, finding all these new stories, dealing with all these sources in the different cartels, and reporting to all these different news sites like that's gotta be like it's gotta make it hard to sleep at night when you're dealing with all these fucking violent people.
[01:29:26]  Sort of, man.
[01:29:26]  I mean, I've been doing this for 15 years now.
[01:29:29]  So at the beginning, I guess more at the beginning, I was still having like adrenaline rushes all day and like.
[01:29:39]  Getting like you know, hard nights trying to sleep and that kind of stuff, but you still get used to it.
[01:29:46]  You know, like to me right now, it's not that it is only a job, but I have a mechanism right now.
[01:29:53]  You know, I have different cell phones for starters.
[01:29:57]  Um, like that cell phone, you yeah, I messaged you today.
[01:30:00]  I'm messing it now.
[01:30:02]  I give that phone only to very specific people, right?
[01:30:06]  Because I know that that's my personal phone and I'm gonna answer every call or message I get from.
[01:30:12]  From on that phone because only very specific people have that phone, and I always ask the people who have that phone not to share it with anyone.
[01:30:20]  I was like, don't share this with anyone.
[01:30:22]  And as soon as I find that.
[01:30:23]  I haven't shared it, I promise.
[01:30:25]  Thanks a lot.
[01:30:26]  And as soon as I found that my phone has been shared with somebody, you know, like if they told me, hey, I'm this or that, and I don't know, like Danny shared your phone with me, I need to change my phone back again because I've started losing track of things.
[01:30:43]  I'm doing a hundred things at the same time.
[01:30:47]  So I need not to worry about my safety on my cell phone or at my home.
[01:30:52]  Like my house, you know.
[01:30:54]  I mean, I guess less than four people know where I live.
[01:30:57]  You know, I'm very cautious about my address and where I live.
[01:31:03]  And you're no longer living in Mexico at all, right?

=== Protecting My Phone (16:25) ===

[01:31:05]  I'm not.
[01:31:06]  You're in El Paso.
[01:31:07]  Not that that would make you any safer, would it?
[01:31:09]  No, I mean, to be honest, I mean, I could very well be in Japan and still be out of hand reach from these people, right?
[01:31:16]  I mean, if they really want to put money and resources into getting me, they will.
[01:31:22]  Right.
[01:31:23]  I think it's not.
[01:31:25]  I'm not that big of a fish for them or a threat or something like that.
[01:31:29]  And I get hate from both sides, right?
[01:31:31]  Because I mean, a lot of people say or send me messages on social saying that I work for the Sinaloa cartel.
[01:31:39]  And of course, you're in the payroll.
[01:31:41]  That's the only way that will give you access.
[01:31:44]  And I get that.
[01:31:46]  It's really complicated to understand that a guy like me could just walk inside a video's house.
[01:31:53]  That was at my own risk, taking a lot of fucking risk into doing that.
[01:31:58]  For some, it's very unbelievable, right?
[01:32:00]  It's like, no, there's no fucking way.
[01:32:02]  I mean, if there was another way, I would have said it, right?
[01:32:05]  It will be even better and easier for me.
[01:32:07]  Maybe I will have had more time inside his house.
[01:32:11]  If I had the permission of someone of the organization, you know, like touring me the house, that would be fucking cool.
[01:32:17]  That would be even better than just being inside for six minutes, all like scared and out.
[01:32:22]  Right.
[01:32:23]  I would have someone touring me the house and saying, like, yeah, this was Ovidio's room or this was his backyard and he was here when.
[01:32:31]  You know, like the military arrived and all that shit.
[01:32:34]  Yeah.
[01:32:34]  I think people don't understand like to be you, you have to maintain a good relationship with these people.
[01:32:41]  Absolutely, man.
[01:32:41]  You can't just be there fucking questioning them, pointing your finger in their face, or else you're not going to be who you are.
[01:32:47]  You're not going to get the stories you get.
[01:32:48]  Exactly.
[01:32:49]  And at the same time, it's a thin line because you could end up doing PR for a fucking cartel, you know?
[01:32:56]  Right.
[01:32:57]  Yeah.
[01:32:58]  So how do you maintain sort of, or like how do you.
[01:33:05]  Vet out stories from your sources and know when they're trying to just make you a PR mouthpiece versus when they're actually being honest with you.
[01:33:12]  I just recently burned a bridge from one of my sources in Sinaloa for the weed story.
[01:33:19]  And I'm hurt by that because he is a good source and he's a good man.
[01:33:25]  But that's what happened when, I mean, that guy told me something that is.
[01:33:34]  Very true.
[01:33:35]  And when he told me that, I was very hurt by his words because he told me, I understand that you are more a journalist than anything else.
[01:33:45]  Basically, saying that I'm more a journalist than a fucking human being or something like that.
[01:33:49]  And I was very hurt by his words.
[01:33:52]  I was like, what are you trying to say, man?
[01:33:54]  This was face to face or was this a real conversation?
[01:33:56]  That was face to face.
[01:33:58]  And I was like, what the fuck?
[01:34:01]  But I kind of reflected on it and probably I am.
[01:34:04]  Probably journalism is first than everything else for me.
[01:34:08]  It's.
[01:34:09]  Not saying that I don't care for human beings, but I mean, to be a journalist, you have to be a good person, right?
[01:34:15]  You have to respect every single human.
[01:34:17]  Not really.
[01:34:18]  Well, I mean, to be, I guess, a good journalist with yourself.
[01:34:25]  You're never going to be a good journalist for everybody, you know, not for editors.
[01:34:28]  Not all journalists are created equal.
[01:34:30]  Dude, I made pieces with like taking shit from my editors, taking shit from my family, taking shit from cartels, taking shit from governments, taking shit from the US or Mexico, taking shit from my, you know, like I take shit from everyone.
[01:34:42]  And at one point I was like, no, no, no, man, like I want to be cool with everyone.
[01:34:46]  It's like, dude, you can.
[01:34:47]  I mean, I'm going to make peace with that and be in peace with myself and the kind of journalist I am.
[01:34:53]  And just keep fucking walking my way, you know, doing what I feel that I need to do, like walking inside Ovidio's house.
[01:35:01]  At that moment, I was like, I don't know if this is on the ethics books of journalism or not, but to me, it is fucking important to go in.
[01:35:11]  And this might be my last chance to have a sneak on how Ovidio or someone like Ovidio was living and what happened inside his place.
[01:35:22]  I care about.
[01:35:23]  You know, even criminals, because they're fucking human beings, you know.
[01:35:27]  That's why we have a justice system, quote unquote.
[01:35:31]  That's why we invented jails, right?
[01:35:34]  If you're a criminal, you go to jail.
[01:35:35]  You just don't end up dead.
[01:35:38]  If you have a family, I want to understand that side of those criminals.
[01:35:42]  They have families, they have daughters, they named their daughters after their grandmothers or their kids after their granddads.
[01:35:51]  Yeah.
[01:35:52]  It's just regular people.
[01:35:54]  And.
[01:35:55]  I don't know.
[01:35:55]  To me, that was a major opportunity to go inside to the house, to the room, to the closet, to the kitchen, to the bathroom of one of the major targets of the US.
[01:36:09]  Because in the US, it's all like politics, right?
[01:36:12]  We're handing $5 million for a video, Usman.
[01:36:16]  And you keep hearing that on news outlets, either it be Fox News or Vice News.
[01:36:22]  Both of them keep repeating the same thing, right?
[01:36:25]  Ovidio is a huge narco.
[01:36:28]  The scene of El Chapo is a huge narco.
[01:36:30]  El Chapo was supposed to be the major drug trafficker in the fucking world.
[01:36:35]  He's in jail and the trade hasn't stopped, it's at an all time high.
[01:36:39]  Right.
[01:36:39]  Right.
[01:36:40]  So was he really?
[01:36:43]  I want to find those stories.
[01:36:44]  And so.
[01:36:46]  So when he said to you, he said, You're more of a journalist than a human, is what he said?
[01:36:50]  Exactly.
[01:36:50]  He told me, He told me, like, You're.
[01:36:56]  More of a journalist than anything else.
[01:36:59]  He, of course, it hurt because I was like, and he said this because of the weed story when you outed his brand.
[01:37:04]  Yeah, because I had to burn that bridge for journalism.
[01:37:11]  So that was a decision that you consciously made.
[01:37:13]  You basically had two options.
[01:37:15]  It wasn't something that was like a mistake or something you overlooked.
[01:37:18]  It was you consciously decided, I got to sell this guy out.
[01:37:21]  Yes.
[01:37:21]  I mean, not sell him out.
[01:37:23]  But the thing is, I'm pretty, I guess that's what makes me.
[01:37:28]  Respectful with these people, with these kind of people with cartels.
[01:37:32]  I never, I never ever say something that I'm not gonna do or that I'm gonna do if I'm planning on doing something different.
[01:37:39]  Right.
[01:37:40]  You tell the truth.
[01:37:40]  That's how you maintain your relationships.
[01:37:42]  100%.
[01:37:42]  I'm always, always telling the truth.
[01:37:44]  If I tell them your face is not gonna show, I'm gonna make sure their face is never gonna fucking show.
[01:37:51]  If I tell them I need your face on camera because of this and that, if they say no, I totally respect that.
[01:37:58]  That's cool, man.
[01:37:59]  If they say let's do it, Then let's do it, right?
[01:38:03]  I mean, I don't back up on things.
[01:38:07]  So this time around, I asked as many other times around, I need to go inside like the whole fucking weed business.
[01:38:13]  And I think it's a very cool story to tell.
[01:38:17]  I want to go in and show how they are making a national business, a national market that it's not being fulfilled, right?
[01:38:29]  But also how all this money goes back to Los Chapitos and how they are putting money into these.
[01:38:35]  I want to show that.
[01:38:37]  So these guys told me, like, yeah, come over and let's do it.
[01:38:40]  I went there for four days.
[01:38:41]  We had a blast, it was pretty cool.
[01:38:44]  But after I came back home, He called me and said, like, dude, I mean, just don't write anything about Los Chapitos linked to this story.
[01:38:54]  And I was like, how come?
[01:38:56]  What happened?
[01:38:57]  And I sort of felt that something was not right when I was reporting.
[01:39:03]  Because every time I would ask something, I would ask, like, so this is an operation, this is an expensive operation.
[01:39:11]  I guess this is coming from the pockets of either Ovidio or Ivan Archibaldo.
[01:39:17]  And then When the guy in front of the camera will answer and say, like, see, see, this is coming from Los Menores, the Chapitos, this guy will step in all nervous and, like, no, no, pero, pero, this is a different thing, you know, like, I mean, yes, yes, but it's a national market.
[01:39:34]  It's, you know, like trying to, I don't know, like trying to stop me from asking or saying the name of Los Chapitos.
[01:39:42]  And I feel it weird, but he never said anything about anything.
[01:39:46]  Later, I learned or I figured.
[01:39:49]  That he didn't really disclose what I was going to do to the people he was introducing me to, right?
[01:39:55]  That I was going to write about Los Chapitos and about their multi million business on weed in Culiacan and in Mexico.
[01:40:03]  That was not on me.
[01:40:04]  That wasn't him.
[01:40:05]  I was very honest and very clear about what my intentions were, and I was making the right questions all through my reporting.
[01:40:13]  And then after I got home, he asked me not to put or link.
[01:40:19]  Los Chapitos to the weed business industry.
[01:40:21]  So I had, that was not a story.
[01:40:25]  That was half a story.
[01:40:26]  And I told him, dude, if I do that, that's going to be fucking PR for the Sinaloa cartel, man.
[01:40:33]  Showing just how good of a weed you guys are doing, like, are making or growing in Sinaloa, right?
[01:40:40]  That's fucking PR.
[01:40:41]  That's not journalism.
[01:40:43]  And I didn't say that since the beginning.
[01:40:45]  I told you what I wanted and what I wanted to do.
[01:40:49]  He told me, yeah, man, but I don't know.
[01:40:51]  Things changed.
[01:40:53]  And I was like, what changed?
[01:40:55]  He's like, I mean, they're getting like super sketched out about the weed business.
[01:41:00]  And I was like, I didn't feel anything like that.
[01:41:03]  Like, nobody was really sketched out.
[01:41:06]  We even smoked a couple of fucking plants and, you know, have beers and everything.
[01:41:13]  And he was like, yeah, but you can't put that out.
[01:41:16]  I was like, dude, sorry.
[01:41:18]  I know that you might get in trouble.
[01:41:19]  I know that you're not going to get killed because you're valuable for them.
[01:41:22]  They're your friends.
[01:41:24]  And they love you and they respect you, you're not going to get killed.
[01:41:27]  I know that for a fact.
[01:41:29]  I'm going to put out my story, man.
[01:41:31]  I signed up for that.
[01:41:32]  And you probably were not clear or honest, completely honest with those guys.
[01:41:38]  But I mean, I have to.
[01:41:42]  This is what I signed up for, right?
[01:41:44]  And I published the story, and he got pretty angry at me.
[01:41:51]  A lot of his people also started threatening me and telling me that.
[01:41:55]  I should not be saying the name of Los Chapitos and all that shit.
[01:42:00]  At the end, nothing happened, right?
[01:42:03]  Everybody knows that Los Chapitos control that fucking weed industry.
[01:42:06]  I'm not the first one, you know, calling them out.
[01:42:09]  I think it was a matter of him not being completely honest with the people he introduced me to.
[01:42:16]  So that was it, man.
[01:42:19]  And I'm still having Second Sunset putting out the documentary.
[01:42:22]  Of course, I caught everybody's faces from it, all their brands showing on the documentary.
[01:42:29]  I cut all that off.
[01:42:33]  But I mean, it's got to be a difficult line to dance.
[01:42:39]  It's hard.
[01:42:40]  That's kind of like the things that keep me awake at night.
[01:42:43]  You know, like, am I doing the right thing?
[01:42:46]  I'm not doing it for fucking likes.
[01:42:47]  I'm not doing it for fucking views.
[01:42:49]  I'm not doing it for that.
[01:42:50]  I'm doing it for the story, for my own path as a journalist to explain things, to know and learn things.
[01:42:57]  And that's why I want to be very honest every time I go out there because I don't want to have to face this kind of bullshit when someone calls me and says, like, no, you can't publish that.
[01:43:06]  Yeah.
[01:43:06]  I want to make sure that since the beginning, they want to have their cake and they want to eat it.
[01:43:11]  Too.
[01:43:11]  They want to have the attention.
[01:43:12]  They want to bring you in, but they want it to be just their way.
[01:43:15]  Exactly.
[01:43:16]  You can't have it that way.
[01:43:17]  Not long ago, the attorney for one of El Mayo Zambada's sons called me as well on my other cell phone.
[01:43:24]  He gave me a call because I published a story saying that El Mayito Flaco, one of El Mayo's sons who was arrested in the U.S. for cocaine trafficking and who was recently released, I published this story about him going to Sonora, to places like Caborca in Sonora, to Still make business for the cartel on behalf of El Mayo Zambada.
[01:43:51]  And his attorney called me, he's a US based attorney.
[01:43:54]  And he called me and he told me that that was not true, that his client wasn't even allowed to go into Mexico at all.
[01:44:01]  So that I needed to correct my story and to, you know, like make things right.
[01:44:07]  And I was like, I'm going to stand by my sources, man.
[01:44:11]  I have really strong sources in Sonora that have seen El Mayito Flaco in Sonora.
[01:44:19]  Making business on behalf of his dad.
[01:44:22]  And he then texted me something like a full fucking paragraph.
[01:44:27]  And he told me, You need to put that out.
[01:44:29]  And I'm like, I'm going to quote this, but who I'm quoting him.
[01:44:32]  I thought that it was a statement.
[01:44:34]  And he was like, No, no, no, don't quote me.
[01:44:35]  And I was like, So I'm going to quote your client.
[01:44:37]  Is this a statement straight from El Mallito?
[01:44:40]  And he's like, No, no, that's what you need to write on your story.
[01:44:44]  And I was like, Fuck no, man.
[01:44:46]  That's fucking PR.
[01:44:46]  I'm not doing this.
[01:44:47]  This is not how it works, right?
[01:44:48]  Right.
[01:44:49]  Hit me up, call me back when you're ready to give out a statement on your behalf or on the behalf of FedMahito, right on the record.
[01:44:58]  But I'm not getting, I'm not doing PR for anyone.
[01:45:01]  So I knew that that could get me in trouble as well.
[01:45:05]  But dude, that was the right thing to do.
[01:45:07]  That was the right story.
[01:45:08]  I was telling the truth.
[01:45:10]  So yeah, I mean, I've fucked up many, many fucking times before.
[01:45:15]  And I know that I'm still going to keep fucking it up many times in the future because that's what I do.
[01:45:20]  We do breaking news when things are happening.
[01:45:23]  Especially covering writing about drug trafficking operations.
[01:45:28]  It's shit that you're not supposed to know happening at that minute or during those days.
[01:45:35]  So the chances of fucking it up are huge.
[01:45:39]  And I guess people don't understand that, right?
[01:45:41]  When you put out something really quick, when you put out an article about the capture of video and I talk to different sources and I have a million different versions, I have to go for the one that makes more sense to me at that moment.
[01:45:54]  And maybe.
[01:45:55]  Clear it out on the next story, right?
[01:45:58]  But you get a lot of shit.
[01:45:59]  It's just a long process of putting together so many puzzle pieces and triangulating so many different sources and finding out what's right, what's bullshit.
[01:46:09]  How do I make sure I don't fuck these guys over and make sure these guys are safe?
[01:46:14]  Don't compromise my source.
[01:46:15]  Don't compromise myself.
[01:46:16]  Still have a decent story for my editors on time, which is like two hours from the time I learned that Ovidio was arrested.
[01:46:28]  It's fucking 5 30 in the morning to me and it's like a shit.
[01:46:32]  You fuck it up.
[01:46:33]  You fuck up.
[01:46:34]  You know, you fuck up in your stories.
[01:46:36]  You fuck up by trusting a source that wasn't really reliable.
[01:46:39]  That happens all the fucking time in Stormont.
[01:46:41]  But people tend to believe that journalists need to have it right 100% of the time.
[01:46:49]  That's not possible.
[01:46:50]  That's not something realistic.
[01:46:52]  You fuck it up, especially writing these sort of stories where there's a lot of things going on.
[01:46:58]  Now, back to your question, you have to have a thick skin.
[01:47:04]  And a cold blood and the right mindset to.
[01:47:08]  Yeah, because people are, a lot of times, people are not going to be happy.
[01:47:12]  Most of the times, man.
[01:47:14]  Either I get accused of working for the Sinaloa cartel, or Sinaloa cartel people start telling me that I work for the U.S. government, or the U.S. officials say that I work for the Mexican government, and the Mexican government says that, you know, I'm always in the middle of something.

=== Manipulated Evidence (04:02) ===

[01:47:30]  Always, always.
[01:47:32]  It recently happened with that story from.
[01:47:35]  From Ovidio's house, I entered with this photographer from Culiacan and he took a bunch of pictures.
[01:47:43]  And as you could see from my video, the scene has been manipulated many times before, probably by the attorneys or the neighbors who entered before, or the Mexican military or the sicarios who stayed there.
[01:47:56]  Who the fuck knows?
[01:47:57]  But when we went in, we made sure that we didn't fucking move anything, that we didn't touch anything.
[01:48:04]  So we saw those bullets lined up on a Table that grenade lined up to a beer bottle, all that stuff.
[01:48:13]  And one of the things the photographer found was an unexploded bullet poked in a hole, on a bullet hole.
[01:48:25]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[01:48:26]  So you're telling me about this before we started.
[01:48:27]  So, someone obviously poked that bullet inside that hole.
[01:48:31]  Where can we find a picture of this online?
[01:48:33]  I think it's on my story also with Vice.
[01:48:37]  Okay, just go to just search.
[01:48:39]  Vice Louis Shaparo, and there'll be a list of all your articles, right?
[01:48:41]  Yes, exactly.
[01:48:43]  And if you go to that story.
[01:48:46]  So that bullet hanging out of the wall, that was at his house?
[01:48:49]  That was at his house.
[01:48:50]  And it was just like one of a hundred photos we took from inside his house.
[01:48:56]  But somehow, this super right wing comedy webpage got a hold of that photo and made a huge campaign about how liberal media was so fake and that.
[01:49:12]  That's why you shouldn't believe my stories because it's all bullshit because of that photo.
[01:49:17]  And first of all, it's like, dude, I didn't take the photo.
[01:49:19]  Second of all, how does that mean liberal media was fake if there's an unexploded bullet hanging out?
[01:49:24]  Because they thought that I was, they thought that I didn't know how fucking bullets work.
[01:49:29]  Oh my God.
[01:49:30]  So they thought that I thought that I was actually a bullet and I was trying to make people believe that I was a fired bullet, a complete unexploded bullet.
[01:49:40]  Dude, I've been doing this fucking job for more than 50.
[01:49:43]  15 fucking years.
[01:49:44]  I know how bullets work, you know.
[01:49:46]  Which one is it?
[01:49:47]  It's entitled Chapo's Son's House.
[01:49:50]  That one.
[01:49:51]  After the League on Fight?
[01:49:52]  Yeah.
[01:49:52]  That one.
[01:49:53]  And if you scroll down, you'll see that photo somewhere.
[01:49:56]  There it is.
[01:49:59]  Look at that shit, man.
[01:50:01]  It's obvious, right?
[01:50:02]  That it was manipulated.
[01:50:03]  Yeah.
[01:50:04]  I mean, at least to me, it's obvious.
[01:50:05]  Now, somebody just stuck the bullet in the hole.
[01:50:07]  Exactly.
[01:50:08]  And that was interesting enough for a photo.
[01:50:10]  It's like, wow, someone put a fucking bullet across a bullet hole.
[01:50:14]  Just looks cool.
[01:50:15]  Just look, it looks interesting.
[01:50:16]  But it has nothing really to do with the story, right?
[01:50:18]  With a, doesn't really affect the story in general, especially when in the story, I'm saying that the house is.
[01:50:27]  Many of the stuff inside the house was already manipulated.
[01:50:31]  One of the first paragraphs says about these lined up bullet caskets on a table.
[01:50:41]  So, but I guess that was a campaign.
[01:50:43]  And I'm in the middle of those fucking campaigns all the fucking time, man.
[01:50:47]  A girl just disappeared in Mexico City.
[01:50:49]  And then three days later, she was found inside a plastic bag, alive, all completely naked.
[01:50:54]  What?
[01:50:55]  The Mexican government is saying that she did that to herself, which is confusing.
[01:51:00]  And it's bullshit.
[01:51:01]  And I tweeted, like, this is fucking bullshit.
[01:51:03]  This is the same thing over and over.
[01:51:05]  When a girl disappears, the Mexican government goes out and says, it was herself.
[01:51:10]  She fell in a fucking hole.
[01:51:14]  She killed herself.
[01:51:16]  She, you know, always, it's always the same fucking pattern.
[01:51:18]  Yeah.
[01:51:19]  And now everybody's like accusing me on Twitter of being a fucking right winger against the president of Mexico and having a U.S. propaganda.
[01:51:30]  You know, against the Mexican press, some shit like that, man.

=== Fox News Hypocrisy (02:21) ===

[01:51:33]  It's like, dude, I don't even pay attention to that shit, man.
[01:51:37]  I get that.
[01:51:37]  I get that from everywhere because I'm writing the news as they happen.
[01:51:42]  Do any of the different, like, obviously, you're doing a lot of work for Vice.
[01:51:47]  And I saw recently you just did a little segment with Jesse Waters.
[01:51:51]  Yeah.
[01:51:51]  Do you get, like, them talking to you, like, why are you doing Fox?
[01:51:55]  No, not at all, man.
[01:51:56]  You can't do Vice and Fox.
[01:51:58]  Not at all.
[01:51:58]  I guess my editors, they're cool with everyone, but it's weird to be in the middle of stuff like that, bullet because.
[01:52:06]  Fox News Digital, who started the whole campaign, had just contacted me to start writing for them, right?
[01:52:13]  They're like, oh, hey, man, can you write a couple of stories for us and these and that?
[01:52:18]  And I'm always, as I'm telling you, I was very honest with everyone, with editors, with people.
[01:52:23]  So I told that editor with Fox News, one of the things I told him was that I just wanted to write stories that I feel personally engaged, that I find them interesting enough, and that we're not.
[01:52:35]  Part of, you know, like a campaign or some shit like that.
[01:52:38]  So I will only accept or pitch assignments that I feel comfortable enough and enticed enough to write them.
[01:52:45]  Right.
[01:52:46]  And that's the same thing that I did for Vice and that I do for everyone, you know, like who wants me to write for them.
[01:52:54]  And what did they say?
[01:52:55]  They said, of course.
[01:52:55]  They're like, yeah, I'm in.
[01:52:56]  Like, pitch me stories that you want to write that you feel it's a good angle and that shit.
[01:53:02]  And I'll pitch you stories.
[01:53:03]  And if you feel that that's enticing enough for you, you know, the New York Post also recently.
[01:53:10]  Send me an assignment, but it was a boring assignment.
[01:53:13]  It was an assignment that I didn't really want to take.
[01:53:15]  So I told him, I don't think this is an assignment for an email.
[01:53:18]  Thank you for reaching out, but I'm not happy with this assignment.
[01:53:22]  As cringe as Fox News can be, the one thing I will give them is that they'll have on people from the right and the left.
[01:53:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:53:30]  I will give them that.
[01:53:31]  And I mean, as soon as somebody from the left goes on Fox News, people on the left will fucking throw them to the wolves.
[01:53:37]  Exactly.
[01:53:38]  And when these happen, Fox News is trying to.
[01:53:43]  Get me as one of their freelancers.
[01:53:45]  At the same time, they're publishing a story about my story with Vice.
[01:53:49]  So that's how hypocritical media works.
[01:53:52]  And that's what people need to fucking know.

=== Adrenaline Crash (04:37) ===

[01:53:54]  I don't stand to the left or to the right or to the north or to the south.
[01:53:59]  I stand only by my fucking self as I've always been.
[01:54:03]  I usually report on my own.
[01:54:05]  I usually go on my own with my own resources, with my own risk, with my fucking backpack.
[01:54:11]  I'm always alone, man.
[01:54:13]  I'm walking everything in Latin America and the US, writing stories alone.
[01:54:19]  And I don't need more people to join me, you know, like to.
[01:54:24]  And that means that I don't need the left.
[01:54:25]  To support me or their right to support me, or North or South or Mexico or the US or whatever, I go there and tell a story.
[01:54:32]  You have a unique perspective.
[01:54:35]  I try to think of every story as a fucking story.
[01:54:40]  I couldn't give less of a shit about a US political campaign or Mexican political campaign.
[01:54:47]  I don't give a shit about that, man.
[01:54:49]  If I find a story and I try to find a story that interests me enough, I will go and write it the way I feel that that story needs to be written.
[01:55:00]  Was Jesse Waters dead fucking serious when he asked you if the US would do a tactical drone strike in Sinaloa?
[01:55:08]  This is the thing.
[01:55:10]  When they call you, I couldn't believe you kept a straight face.
[01:55:12]  Dude, at that time, I was just out from Ovidio's house.
[01:55:18]  My fucking adrenaline was still pumping because they call me and they're like, You're going in at 5.
[01:55:25]  And I was like, at 5 30.
[01:55:27]  And I was like, Shit, man, by then I should have been in Mexico City already out from Culiacan.
[01:55:32]  My fucking car broke.
[01:55:34]  I just literally walked in the hotel and looked at the van in front of me, which was the van of the attorneys.
[01:55:41]  They were staying at the same fucking hotel.
[01:55:42]  Oh my God.
[01:55:43]  So I put on my fucking hoodie.
[01:55:45]  I was like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
[01:55:47]  And then as I.
[01:55:47]  I forgot about that.
[01:55:48]  At the end of that video, you're in the hotel and you're like freaking out.
[01:55:51]  I'm freaking out.
[01:55:52]  And as I walk in, I receive a call from Jesse Waters producers.
[01:55:58]  And they're like, you're up in five minutes.
[01:56:00]  I was like, fuck, I still need to set up my lights and everything.
[01:56:03]  And that was from in the hotel.
[01:56:04]  In the hotel, like right after going that fucking adrenaline rush.
[01:56:09]  So, and then they told me something like, just answer straight up answers.
[01:56:15]  You're not going to have like much time.
[01:56:16]  You're going to have like five minutes or some shit like that.
[01:56:18]  So, we need your answers to be, you know, like super fast.
[01:56:21]  Yeah.
[01:56:22]  Don't elaborate.
[01:56:23]  And then all of a sudden, I'm like right there with fucking Jesse Waters asking me if what will happen if the US will bomb strike Mexico.
[01:56:31]  What the fuck was that about?
[01:56:32]  Dude, when I hung up that fucking call, I was like, boom, I need a moment, man.
[01:56:37]  I need a moment to fucking debrief.
[01:56:40]  I put tricks on myself to make sure that I'm coming back from dangerous assignments.
[01:56:46]  And one of the things I did before taking off to the mountains of Ovidio's town was that I left everything ready for a shower and I didn't shower in those two days.
[01:56:59]  Because when I was trying to get out of Ovidio's house and I felt that that was not going to happen, I was like, fuck, man, I'm fucked here.
[01:57:08]  I was like, no, I left everything ready for a shower.
[01:57:11]  I need to go and take a shower.
[01:57:12]  I haven't showered in two fucking days.
[01:57:14]  So, I'm going out.
[01:57:15]  And that's what pushed me to go out and say, let's fucking go.
[01:57:20]  I'm not a mechanic.
[01:57:22]  I don't know much about cars, but when the car broke, my mind was like, boom, fix it.
[01:57:26]  I was like, it's the radiator, man.
[01:57:28]  You need water and you just put water here and that.
[01:57:30]  I fixed it in a fucking second and let's go.
[01:57:33]  It's fucking adrenaline.
[01:57:34]  So, when I finished the interview with Jesse Waters, my adrenaline was like intoxicating me.
[01:57:43]  I was intoxicated by adrenaline.
[01:57:44]  So, I.
[01:57:46]  I laid on the carpet just like thinking what the fuck just happened.
[01:57:51]  And I remember that I felt like I really wanted to cry a lot, you know, but nothing was coming out.
[01:57:57]  I just felt that I wanted to cry a lot.
[01:57:59]  And I was like, fuck, man, I'm feeling so bad.
[01:58:03]  But nothing, like tears are not coming out.
[01:58:05]  It's a weird feeling.
[01:58:08]  I don't know what I guess it was from.
[01:58:10]  I think I was intoxicated by.
[01:58:11]  I think it was just like a come down from that adrenaline.
[01:58:14]  Yeah, I think I was intoxicated by adrenaline.
[01:58:16]  I think it has been a while since I didn't feel that scared during reporting a story.
[01:58:25]  I think also that I realized that those words made sense for me.

=== Processing the Trauma (05:12) ===

[01:58:32]  You're more of a journalist than anything else.
[01:58:33]  And I'm like, fuck, this is probably true.
[01:58:36]  I'm risking my own life here a lot for a story.
[01:58:41]  And I still feel that it's worth it.
[01:58:44]  I don't know, man.
[01:58:45]  I guess it was all that.
[01:58:47]  It was a reflection.
[01:58:48]  I've heard stories like that from other journalists, like war reporters, that have been like, specifically, I believe actually the guy who I'm referring to was.
[01:58:58]  Either working for Vice or the BBC, and he was explaining the same thing you just explained to me that he was in the middle, he was in the Middle East somewhere, and he was holding his video camera, and he was in the middle of like a firefight between American troops and like the Taliban or some shit.
[01:59:13]  And in the moment, his adrenaline was so peaked that he wasn't scared, he didn't feel anything.
[01:59:20]  He was just looking in that viewfinder, just making sure he got the shot.
[01:59:23]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:59:25]  That's what happens.
[01:59:28]  Because you get so excited, you know what I mean?
[01:59:30]  Because that's why you're there.
[01:59:32]  That's your purpose.
[01:59:33]  Like, you want to go home and have the most fucking mind bending shots of fucking firefights between terrorists and American troops.
[01:59:41]  And that's fucking all that matters in the world.
[01:59:44]  Exactly.
[01:59:45]  And the other thing is like, that's a distraction from your brain from realizing that you're about to die.
[01:59:50]  Yeah.
[01:59:51]  You want to get away from that thought that you might actually die there.
[01:59:55]  And you're like, yeah, but I'm doing my job.
[01:59:57]  You know, I need a per.
[01:59:59]  So you hyper focus on something else than the fact that you're fucking going to die.
[02:00:05]  But yeah, I mean, I go regularly to therapy.
[02:00:08]  So I talk to people in therapy.
[02:00:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:00:11]  I mean, that you have to because going back from that shit to your little suburban city with a super quiet neighborhood and your kid and your wife and your regular life where you still have to shower your kid and make the bed and brew some coffee or make dinner for them.
[02:00:37]  Debriefing from that adrenaline and feeling that you just went inside Ovidia's house, and all of a sudden, the next day, you're back home, just being you, washing the dishes, you know, making dinner for your kid, facing regular shit.
[02:00:55]  That could be hard going like back and forth.
[02:00:58]  And then all of a sudden, you wake up in the morning and someone tells you, Ovidia has been captured, you need to go to Jesus Maria.
[02:01:05]  And boom, then you're like, I'm gone again.
[02:01:08]  And then you're back again.
[02:01:09]  And then you're gone again to a different thing.
[02:01:11]  And then you're back again.
[02:01:13]  And then you get a call from Jesse Waters or a DEA agent or someone in the Mexican military or an arco in Sinaloa or someone from the new generation, Jalisco Gertel.
[02:01:26]  And still you're talking to those guys, watching your kid play Nintendo in your living room.
[02:01:32]  So you have to really have your feet on the fucking ground so you don't like mix everything up and slash at your family.
[02:01:40]  Or fuck up that, or stop reporting and send everything to shit.
[02:01:47]  So I spoke with my therapist and I told her what happened.
[02:01:54]  And she was like, and how do you feel?
[02:01:57]  And she started taking me into this journey about how I was worthy as a human and not only as a journalist and all that stuff.
[02:02:06]  And I was like, wow, that's interesting that she received that for me, that I might be putting my life at risk.
[02:02:11]  To prove myself valuable in some way, some shit like that.
[02:02:15]  So I started reflecting on that and I'm still kind of like digesting the words of that guy from Sinaloa, from my therapist and all this shit.
[02:02:24]  Because I feel that I'm getting to a point where, oh, and I remember I called a former DA agent who was, dude, he's fogging nuts.
[02:02:32]  So I'll share a couple of stories of him later.
[02:02:38]  But he was basically this 007 agent undercover.
[02:02:45]  In the Sinaloa cartel with the cartels in Brazil.
[02:02:48]  He's fucking nuts.
[02:02:49]  He's retired now.
[02:02:50]  And I told him what happened and everything.
[02:02:53]  And he's like, you know, the most dangerous thing is that adrenaline you just felt because that's addictive and that's what's going to get you killed.
[02:03:03]  So you need to take it down.
[02:03:06]  Like that has to be your roof.
[02:03:09]  Yeah.
[02:03:09]  Nothing more from there.
[02:03:10]  That's your roof.
[02:03:11]  And go down from there.
[02:03:13]  And I was like, yeah, you're totally right.
[02:03:15]  And he's like, yeah, don't go down the fucking adrenaline road, man, because that's what's going to get you killed.
[02:03:20]  It's not going to be a cartel.
[02:03:21]  It's not going to be anything.
[02:03:22]  It could be driving at a super high speed just because you need that adrenaline rush.
[02:03:27]  So you need to be aware that that's going to be your roof and nothing's going to go over that adrenaline you just felt on that assignment because then you're broken.
[02:03:38]  I think what you see with a lot of people who are really good at what they do.

=== Disconnecting from Chaos (07:14) ===

[02:03:44]  Like what you're doing with your journalism is people get they become or they get lost in their work and they neglect everything else in their lives, like their family or their kids.
[02:03:56]  And there's a lot of people who are just okay with it.
[02:03:58]  A lot of people who choose not to have families, not to do any, not to, you know, maintain friendships with anybody.
[02:04:04]  It's just, it's their career and their work is everything in their lives and nothing else matters.
[02:04:09]  Exactly.
[02:04:10]  But that's a choice you got to make.
[02:04:11]  If you can live with that and you're happy, then good for you.
[02:04:14]  But, but, um, I mean, You have a kid and a wife, and you got to balance being a father and then going into these life and death situations.
[02:04:26]  And that's got to be brutal.
[02:04:29]  Yes, exactly.
[02:04:29]  That's the thing.
[02:04:30]  I saw myself in the eyes of this guy.
[02:04:32]  He's an older guy, never had kids, never got married.
[02:04:35]  He has no friends because all he did was his work, right?
[02:04:43]  And I found myself losing more and more touch with.
[02:04:47]  You know, like my friends, my family, you know, like going into a shell of my work and, you know, feeling always better when I'm working than when I'm not.
[02:04:58]  And so I'm like closing myself in.
[02:05:02]  And I was like, fuck, man, this is how it starts.
[02:05:05]  I need to go back again to enjoy my fucking life other than journalism and then leave, actually fucking leave, you know, enjoy again my friends and get back in touch with them.
[02:05:16]  Because every time they give me a call, I'm Fucking busy, or I start losing interest in, you know, like, or day to day talks, you know, like when they told me about their businesses or about their jobs and their wives and their kids.
[02:05:33]  And I was like, sometimes I find myself like, yeah, you gotta like, you gotta be get around people too, and just like get, just disconnect from it sometimes.
[02:05:42]  Just turn your fucking mind off one way or another, and just get around people who not that they don't give a fuck about you, but just like talk about other shit.
[02:05:52]  Get around people who aren't in the same world as you are.
[02:05:55]  Yeah.
[02:05:55]  And that's, that's, that, I mean, this is kind of like cyclical to me.
[02:05:59]  After 15 years reporting on the same fucking things, I face like the same thing in spiral, right?
[02:06:04]  Every time I feel that I'm going that rabbit hole, Um, I kind of like take a turn and then go back and enjoy life, and that's like that's that's like that.
[02:06:13]  I feel it's a spiral because I feel that my professional life is going upwards and not you know like backwards or in circles.
[02:06:21]  I think that I've been growing a lot, yeah, since.
[02:06:25]  Um, but yes, I found myself in this position many many times before, also with uh with um alcohol or um drugs, you know, like so at one point in my life, that was my yeah, like I can only.
[02:06:41]  Feel good if I'm like extremely, you know, high or drunk.
[02:06:46]  Right.
[02:06:47]  Which was pretty bad for everyone, you know.
[02:06:51]  So I was like, no, I need to take a turn.
[02:06:53]  And then I think I managed because of like therapy, I've managed to dodge that, those bullets that are like more like on a personal note.
[02:07:03]  And by now I can see myself immediately going down a rabbit hole.
[02:07:07]  That's why I decided to.
[02:07:09]  I've been, I've always been like a super lonely guy, you know, like I, I, I'm not very much with a lot of people around me.
[02:07:17]  That's always, that's also like something that has been really, I don't know, like weird to me to have like more social media life with a lot of people.
[02:07:30]  But I think that's also what has been helping me navigating like a bunch of like messages, requests, and hate mails or love mails, you know, and that stuff that doesn't really move me because I've always been, You know, like a lonely guy, you know, someone like a loner.
[02:07:47]  Yeah, I've always been a loner.
[02:07:48]  And my editor recently told me also, like, hey, man, you are with a team now.
[02:07:53]  You're not that fucking lonely wolf just going around and reporting.
[02:07:56]  You have to keep that in mind.
[02:07:58]  Well, one of the best lessons I learned when I was young was that only drink or do drugs when you're happy and you're celebrating.
[02:08:08]  When you're sad, don't drink and do drugs.
[02:08:10]  That's the worst.
[02:08:11]  Yes, exactly.
[02:08:11]  That's the worst.
[02:08:12]  It's pretty simple.
[02:08:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:08:13]  But it's worth it.
[02:08:14]  It could get you in a very fucked.
[02:08:16]  Fucking bad mood when you start drinking or doing drugs when you're not happy or you don't feel good.
[02:08:21]  Or when you're using it to mask bad feelings.
[02:08:24]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:08:25]  Like coming down from adrenaline of being in the fucking middle of a narco's house.
[02:08:30]  Exactly.
[02:08:31]  Being chased out by Sicarios.
[02:08:32]  And that's the thing.
[02:08:33]  When I feel like that, I don't touch more than one coffee.
[02:08:38]  Nothing that could alter my brain a lot.
[02:08:43]  No alcohol, no coffee, not a lot of spice.
[02:08:48]  I do intermittent fasting for several weeks so I can start regulating myself back again.
[02:08:55]  Yeah.
[02:08:55]  I'm feeling well.
[02:08:57]  And then when I feel good, I start having a beer or two when I'm with my friends and enjoying conversations.
[02:09:02]  And I decided not to have any journalist friend or.
[02:09:06]  Do you do anything like a lot of people have different habits to get out of their own heads?
[02:09:14]  You know, like it kind of can be really miserable if you spend a lot of time just thinking about different things and.
[02:09:21]  Whatever is going on in your life.
[02:09:22]  And some people go on like fucking 10 mile runs every day just to like get fucking turn their mind off, or they go to the gym or they do fucking ballet or jujitsu, whatever it is.
[02:09:34]  Do you have anything like that that you do to try to just like turn your mind off and just get out of your head?
[02:09:39]  Whenever I can, I try to meditate.
[02:09:41]  I do meditation, morning meditations.
[02:09:44]  Sometimes when it's super cold, because I'm always like in the backyard.
[02:09:48]  When it's super cold or freezing temperatures, I don't, Meditate.
[02:09:53]  I don't like meditating to my house.
[02:09:55]  I used to run as well when the weather allows me to go out and run.
[02:09:59]  But another thing is, I play the guitar or read a lot.
[02:10:05]  I read a lot of poetry.
[02:10:06]  So poetry takes me completely out of that shit, you know.
[02:10:10]  And so I spend many nights just reading poetry or playing the guitar, even if it's just like the same three notes all over and over, like in a loop.
[02:10:18]  It gets me into a meditation zone, you know.
[02:10:22]  It's like just, yeah, going.
[02:10:24]  Like playing the same arpeggio all over and over and over and over and over for maybe one or two hours.
[02:10:30]  And then I feel like reset, you know, it's like, okay, that's good.
[02:10:34]  You got to take care of your brain, dude.
[02:10:36]  That's important.
[02:10:36]  Exactly.
[02:10:37]  And I try to, I try to, I mean, I think I'm getting better and better after more and more years of doing this.
[02:10:43]  It's not easy.
[02:10:43]  You have to keep yourself, you have to keep examining yourself, you know, like, am I good?
[02:10:48]  Am I feeling good?
[02:10:49]  Why am I feeling like that?
[02:10:50]  All that stuff in a constant daily basis.
[02:10:54]  And yeah, I mean, most of my days, Are very fucking unpredictable.

=== Killed Stories and Fees (08:22) ===

[02:10:58]  Like, I wake up every single morning at 5 30 in the morning to read certain different newspapers in Mexico and Latin America, newspapers from Venezuela, from Brazil, from Paraguay, in the US.
[02:11:14]  Like, I have like 10, 15 different newspapers, mostly local.
[02:11:18]  So, you read from like multiple different countries and see what every angle is on Mexico?
[02:11:23]  I start on local newspapers and then go to national newspapers and then to international outlets.
[02:11:28]  And then, like an hour later, 6 30, probably, I know if there's something that I want to write or if it's a good story to follow up.
[02:11:37]  And I put stories like middle term story, long term story, short term story.
[02:11:42]  So, probably I can find a story that is a daily hit.
[02:11:46]  I'm going to be done with this story in two hours.
[02:11:49]  That's going to be a super quick turnaround.
[02:11:52]  And then a middle term story, something that's going to take me up to one week, two weeks, three weeks, and then longer term story.
[02:12:00]  Something that it's going to take me up to six months, eight months, one year to report on.
[02:12:03]  What's the longest story you worked on?
[02:12:07]  I don't remember, man, but I don't know.
[02:12:13]  I mean, it's weird because it's weird to talk about one single story.
[02:12:19]  And there are stories that take a lot of fucking time and it has nothing to do with the story itself.
[02:12:23]  It has to do with the fucking legal department to approve a green light and then the security department and then the police and that.
[02:12:32]  Like, right now, I'm writing a A story for you mean the legal department of like the publication, yes, exactly.
[02:12:38]  Okay, sometimes most of the times, like every not every single so, but many of the stories I write need to have approval from the legal department because they are on sensitive issues or you know they involve right the government or that kind of right.
[02:12:53]  And then also, I just cut you off.
[02:12:55]  You said you were working on some story with a guy, yeah, with these guys called uh Rest of World.
[02:13:00]  Uh, dude, I love those guys, they they focus on technology to tell very compelling stories.
[02:13:06]  You guys should check them out.
[02:13:07]  They're super fucking cool.
[02:13:08]  Rest of the world?
[02:13:09]  Rest of the world.
[02:13:10]  And they're pretty new.
[02:13:12]  They're pretty small, but they're doing like a great fucking job, great fucking reporting all over the world.
[02:13:18]  And I'm writing a story for them about how Uber is enticing criminal bands to do a lot of fucking crime, you know, from sex trafficking to migrants trafficking.
[02:13:30]  I don't want to blow up the story, but I'm writing this story for them.
[02:13:34]  But it's taking a lot of time for security to approve me jumping into that story.
[02:13:40]  I've already done most of the story, like 90% of the reporting, it's already done, but I still need to go like.
[02:13:47]  Feeling a shit ton of paperwork and you know, all that's going through their security department, their legal department, their editorial.
[02:13:54]  Right.
[02:13:54]  So sometimes stories will take a long time because of that kind of stuff before I can just like jump in and write those stories.
[02:14:03]  I'm also currently writing a story for Rolling Stone about how cartels are laundering money through record labels for narco corridos.
[02:14:12]  What?
[02:14:13]  And it's pretty cool.
[02:14:14]  I don't want to blow the story as well.
[02:14:16]  I'm nearly there.
[02:14:17]  I'm on the last.
[02:14:19]  Editing round, hopefully.
[02:14:22]  Do you ever have to deal with editors where you're like working on a story and you're working with an editor, and then all of a sudden you just feel like the editor is going, is trying to take this thing in a different direction that's not meant to go?
[02:14:33]  Yeah.
[02:14:34]  Like a non natural direction.
[02:14:36]  Yeah, definitely.
[02:14:37]  Yes, I've had that.
[02:14:38]  I mean, and sometimes it's, well, at least in my case, I felt that, but maybe not because they want to feel an agenda, but sometimes it's just like clickbait, you know?
[02:14:46]  Clickbait is the main thing.
[02:14:47]  So, yeah.
[02:14:48]  What about it?
[02:14:49]  Have you ever gotten the impression that one of your editors is.
[02:14:52]  Dealing with intelligence or like, I just talked to a guy who was working on a story for a big publication about a CIA operation going on in Ukraine in the US.
[02:15:06]  And this was like, he was working with a really big American publication and he was working with them for six to eight months on this story, going back and forth.
[02:15:13]  Great, great communication, great rapport.
[02:15:17]  And this guy had a lot of former CIA sources giving him this stuff.
[02:15:22]  So he was like, this was like very solid information.
[02:15:26]  Whoever was their point at the CIA somehow got into the editor's way and essentially killed the story and tried to change it and like change the whole entire thing after eight months of working on it.
[02:15:41]  And he ended up publishing it on his own website after that because he just couldn't work with the editor anymore.
[02:15:46]  That's the thing.
[02:15:47]  That's the way to go, man.
[02:15:48]  Like when you're a freelance, you have, you know, good things and bad things about the industry.
[02:15:54]  The bad thing is you, on top of like writing a lot, Finding sources, getting compelling stories enough, compelling enough to compete with all the staffers your publication might have.
[02:16:05]  Because otherwise, why would they choose you as a freelancer if some of the staffers could do the same stories, right?
[02:16:12]  So you have to be a step above the rest of the staffers.
[02:16:17]  But you've never been in a situation where you thought like intelligence was trying to get in the way of your story or like whether or it be like the state, like somebody in the US or somebody in Mexico.
[02:16:30]  No, I guess not.
[02:16:32]  Nor that I've noticed.
[02:16:35]  I've had stories killed for kind of like those situations where someone feels that, you know, like, I don't know, this is not going to be a good fit for us because of legal and legal talk.
[02:16:48]  Mostly like brands, you know, like where, I don't know, we're supported by that brand and you're talking shit about, I don't know, like let's, as an example, let's talk Uber.
[02:16:58]  Uber reached out and Uber is a big sponsor for us.
[02:17:01]  Yeah.
[02:17:02]  They don't say it that clearly and all that, but I know that that's what's happening.
[02:17:07]  I'll just, when I get an assignment or pitch an assignment with a publication that it's my first time working with, I always ask if they have a kill fee.
[02:17:19]  A what?
[02:17:20]  Kill fee.
[02:17:21]  There's a fee for if they kill your story, right?
[02:17:26]  Usually, it should be around 50%, but some of them just give you 20% of the agreement, of great payment.
[02:17:35]  If you're freelancing, you have to know about the kill fee, man, and ask before you even start working with them.
[02:17:41]  Like, do you have a kill fee?
[02:17:43]  They'll tell you, yes, it's a fixed $200 rate or a 50% of what we agreed upon payment.
[02:17:50]  Right.
[02:17:51]  So, when you find yourself in that kind of shitty or tricky situation, you're like, you know what?
[02:17:56]  I'm just going to take my story back and just give me the kill fee.
[02:18:00]  And they'll give you like 50% or like a percentage of that story.
[02:18:03]  And then I will take it to another publication, disclosing everything.
[02:18:07]  For that publication, right?
[02:18:08]  Like, I'm like, now if you're not going to go through with this story, I'm going to take it to someone else.
[02:18:12]  Is that cool?
[02:18:13]  Right.
[02:18:14]  And usually, yeah.
[02:18:15]  Yeah, that's got to be another hard thing to deal with when you put so much effort into a story and they try to like change it or try to like put a spin on it.
[02:18:21]  And you just got to make the decision do I take this out?
[02:18:24]  Do I take this somewhere else or publish it myself or do I just let it go and get paid?
[02:18:28]  Exactly.
[02:18:30]  So, yeah, I mean, I guess 80% of my days is dealing with the paperwork.
[02:18:37]  Editors also want to submit.
[02:18:39]  I couldn't give a shit less of a shit about prizes and you know, those kind of stuff.
[02:18:46]  I don't give a shit about that like at all.
[02:18:48]  And I'm barely perfectly honest.
[02:18:51]  But sometimes publications will ask you to submit your own stories to different prices, you know, and that's a massive fucking work to do.
[02:19:00]  You have to write essays and to go and follow the guidelines and all that shit.
[02:19:05]  So I have to do invoicing, I have to do my own fucking expenses filing.
[02:19:11]  File my stories, go through edits, go with the legal department, security department.
[02:19:17]  Everybody listening, this is a good time to subscribe to Luis's YouTube channel.

=== China's Latin America Push (07:12) ===

[02:19:21]  Please do.
[02:19:22]  At Luis Shaparo on YouTube.
[02:19:24]  It's linked below.
[02:19:25]  I'll even put a little fucking whatever you call pop up on the video.
[02:19:29]  Please do.
[02:19:32]  What is like China's perspective?
[02:19:34]  You said you read the publications of other countries that are talking about what's going on in Mexico.
[02:19:39]  What is China's perspective or like?
[02:19:42]  That part of the world's perspective on what's going on in Mexico?
[02:19:46]  China has never been closer to Mexico than what it is now with this government.
[02:19:52]  And I think it's because they know that they can bank on this government being lefty, you know, being more prone to the left side of the world, you know.
[02:20:02]  And the embassy in Mexico, the China embassy in Mexico, is now booming.
[02:20:12]  It's having a lot of like, Parties and celebrations and meetings and all that stuff, dude.
[02:20:17]  I mean, they and their investment is, I think, twice or three times the money that the U.S. is putting in Latin America.
[02:20:26]  The China investment towards Mexico and Latin America in general, I think it's twice the budget of the U.S. Wow, so it's they're putting a lot of money, yeah.
[02:20:38]  They're putting money everywhere, a lot in Africa, too.
[02:20:41]  Yeah, exactly, man.
[02:20:42]  They're using Africa as a proxy.
[02:20:46]  And I don't think it's a coincidence that the new generation cartel is also like having massive operations in Africa.
[02:20:56]  Are they really?
[02:20:57]  They're having like a massive, massive fucking operations in Africa.
[02:21:01]  Africa has one of the, if not the largest, local drug selling industry, right?
[02:21:07]  The street selling.
[02:21:10]  The local market for drugs in most African countries like Burkina Faso and, well, different countries in Africa, it's a huge market.
[02:21:23]  And El Chapo tried to earn that market, but apparently he couldn't get.
[02:21:29]  His organization to break a deal with the local organizations in Africa, but the uh Cartel Jalisco, the new generation cartel, um, is popping up really hard in Africa very recently.
[02:21:43]  And if you go to my Instagram as well, I you'll find a story about but it was Instagram, uh, about this guy.
[02:21:52]  I talk, dude, are you talking about uh, I think we've talked about this before, or maybe I talked about it with somebody else, but there's a it's called something.
[02:22:00]  Guinea Bissau, country in like Northwest Africa, where like the head of the navy in the country was importing all the fucking cocaine?
[02:22:11]  Very, very fucking probably we did.
[02:22:12]  I mean, for like, I guess in Aloha Cartel is now huge in places like the Netherlands and Spain.
[02:22:21]  Netherlands in Antwerp, they're popping up huge, Spain, but they need Africa because most of the trucks coming from Latin America places like Bolivia or Panama or Colombia.
[02:22:34]  That are meant to be for the Europe market, they stop in Africa.
[02:22:42]  They live through Africa.
[02:22:44]  So I think the new generation cartel is a step.
[02:22:52]  It's, you know, it's reading that through the lines and saying, like, well, I need to get a hold of Africa because this is the only way I'm going to overthrow Sinaloa in Europe.
[02:23:03]  Right, right.
[02:23:04]  That's pretty smart.
[02:23:06]  And yes, I mean, like, Can't remember the name of the guy, and I should have it somewhere around my.
[02:23:12]  So, what is, as far as like the media and like what's being published in the media in Europe and China and wherever else, Latin America, what is like the media narrative on what's going on within the cartels and their relationship with the US?
[02:23:32]  And like, I'm interested, what does the Chinese media say about these cartels?
[02:23:36]  Honestly, I don't know because I mean, what we get from.
[02:23:41]  From the China media in English is mostly English washed.
[02:23:48]  Right.
[02:23:48]  So it's kind of like the same.
[02:23:50]  If I cool read Chinese, probably I will have a really interesting knowledge about how they're looking into Mexico and criminal organizations.
[02:24:00]  But for what I know, China has always said that they don't have a precursors problem because all of their businesses making precursors that are used to.
[02:24:15]  To make fentanyl and meth, um, are regular legal established business in China doing uh, I think it's like cleaning, cleaning product serve um, precursors, right?
[02:24:30]  Precursors to make cleaning products, cleaning products that's what they call it.
[02:24:36]  Um, but I mean, they're sending tons of those precursors to Mexico, uh, through Manzanillo and Acapulco and Mazatlan.
[02:24:47]  So, and and the U.S. have been.
[02:24:49]  Going hard against this guy called Fat Yep, which is like El Mayo Zambada in China.
[02:24:55]  And in China, he's one of the most respected businessmen and he operates freely.
[02:25:02]  A guy, a writer and journalist that I just recently met, and we're putting together a conference called From China to Mexico, the Fentanyl Trade.
[02:25:13]  When I was inside a laboratory in Sinaloa, a fentanyl laboratory, he was meeting Fat Yep in China, playing.
[02:25:23]  Buyer from Mexico.
[02:25:25]  Who was meeting this fucking journalist from the US?
[02:25:28]  Oh, shit.
[02:25:29]  He has photos with Fat Yap and his daughter.
[02:25:32]  And dude, we're putting together this fucking conference that I think is gonna, you know, like, cause we're gonna tell the whole fucking story from inside these two major organizations, Korean organizations sending shit tons of fentanyl to the US.
[02:25:44]  I guess he's the only one or one of the few that have had access to that guy in China.
[02:25:51]  And I'm probably one of the few guys that have had access to laboratories in.
[02:25:56]  In Sinaloa, so we're trying to put a narrative together to have a like a touring conference, you know, about how this trade works.
[02:26:08]  I think it's gonna, I mean, I was completely blown up by his story, and he felt the same way about me because when we met, yeah, I was like, dude, you, you, we were in China with those guys.
[02:26:19]  I was like, come on, dude, you were in Sinaloa with the Mayo Zambara people, you know, the laboratories.
[02:26:25]  So, like, we have to do something together, man.
[02:26:27]  Let's.
[02:26:28]  That's incredible, man.
[02:26:30]  So I think it's going to come up well.
[02:26:31]  It's going to come up interesting, at least.

=== Helping a Colleague Escape (07:43) ===

[02:26:34]  Are there still a lot of journalists that are dying in Mexico?
[02:26:36]  Yeah, they're getting murdered.
[02:26:37]  Yes, man.
[02:26:38]  Why?
[02:26:38]  How are journalists getting murdered?
[02:26:39]  How the fuck are they ended up getting murdered?
[02:26:41]  Are they working for the Mexican media?
[02:26:44]  Yes.
[02:26:45]  It's the same fucking profile all the time.
[02:26:54]  It's very low wages jobs they have with hyper local publications.
[02:27:02]  They're always exploited by their bosses, by the owners of that media, or it's independent journalists trying to put out their own little operations, either a radio station or a website or stuff like that.
[02:27:19]  Mexico, first, Mexico was using the cartel to kill these guys, right?
[02:27:24]  I mean, back in 2010, 2015, I think, the Mexican politicians, when there was an uncomfortable journalist that would use, The narcos to go and kill journalists and say they were them.
[02:27:39]  It was them.
[02:27:40]  Then they changed strategy and they started going, hiring sicarios and, you know, like doing the hit themselves, like a governor.
[02:27:52]  Let's say you are an uncomfortable fucking journalist getting into my thing or my business as a governor.
[02:28:01]  I wouldn't call a cartel.
[02:28:03]  I will just hire a fucking hitman and.
[02:28:06]  Have you killed?
[02:28:08]  And then no one will blame responsible, right?
[02:28:10]  Like, we don't know.
[02:28:12]  But it's always been politicians.
[02:28:14]  It's always when you get in the way of politicians, that's what you're in danger.
[02:28:18]  You can go to Mayo Zambada's house, you can break in Ovidia's house, and something can or could happen to you.
[02:28:26]  Mostly sure is that you might just get fucking beaten up and be sent to the hospital or shit like that.
[02:28:33]  Right.
[02:28:34]  But if that house was from a governor, a congressman, Or the Mexican president, man, I wouldn't be here, man, at all.
[02:28:45]  The most dangerous story I've ever reported was on Chihuahua State Governor and all the houses he had in El Paso, Texas, from public money.
[02:28:56]  That guy is now in jail.
[02:28:57]  He's behind bars.
[02:28:59]  But when he was on the loose, I found him.
[02:29:02]  I found what he was living and I knocked on his door in El Paso.
[02:29:06]  He got so fucking pissed.
[02:29:07]  He sent an armed man outside my house in Juarez for a full week.
[02:29:13]  There was a man with a fucking gun on his hand outside my house.
[02:29:17]  And.
[02:29:18]  I'm friends with the son of his right hand.
[02:29:24]  So, the right hand of this governor has a son who is my friend.
[02:29:28]  We went to school together.
[02:29:29]  Okay.
[02:29:29]  And one night he called me and told me, he calls me Cholo.
[02:29:33]  And he's like, Cholo, you need to be careful, man.
[02:29:36]  My dad just told me that you're in big shit trouble for that story you published about Duarte.
[02:29:43]  It was on the cover of the main publication in Mexico.
[02:29:47]  It's called Proceso Magazine.
[02:29:50]  And he wasn't the cover.
[02:29:50]  My sword wasn't the cover of that magazine.
[02:29:53]  And right the next day, they put that guy outside my house for a full fucking week.
[02:29:58]  And I've never had something like that reporting on cartels.
[02:30:02]  It was just that time that I reported on fucking politicians.
[02:30:05]  It's always the fucking politicians, man.
[02:30:09]  It's always them.
[02:30:10]  And now they're not doing that.
[02:30:11]  Now, because of all the shit that has been going on, like they've killed so many journalists.
[02:30:20]  Us journalists have been paying attention to those stories and telling their stories and everything.
[02:30:25]  They know that they were counting and that we're paying attention, and international organisms have been paying attention.
[02:30:32]  So, what they're doing now is they pay major publications to start a campaign against a single journalist and start calling him out as a rapist or as someone who stole money or is working with the cartels.
[02:30:53]  So he will be left alone without a job, without anyone to hire them.
[02:30:59]  And then they will go after them for crime.
[02:31:02]  And that's been happening a lot.
[02:31:04]  The fucking Mexican jails are full of journalists wrongfully accused of rape, of sexual abuse, of stealing, of taking bribes or money from anarcho.
[02:31:17]  I just recently helped, last month, I helped this guy from Cancun who arrived.
[02:31:23]  To Juarez after being raped by several men in Cancun.
[02:31:29]  All of them were working for the government, were secretaries for the government.
[02:31:32]  And this was because he found that the electricity company in his state was stealing shit tons of fucking money through fake contracts.
[02:31:42]  And he published that story.
[02:31:44]  They fired him from the paper.
[02:31:45]  And then another one hired him.
[02:31:47]  And then three days later, they fired him.
[02:31:49]  And no one will take him again.
[02:31:50]  So he was jobless.
[02:31:53]  He put out his own publication.
[02:31:56]  He got threatened by armed men that they were going to kill him.
[02:32:00]  He kept writing about that.
[02:32:01]  And then they kidnapped him, have him captured for three days, raped him with a fucking, what's the name of it? Scoba, with a broom.
[02:32:12]  Oh, I killed that.
[02:32:13]  Fucking broomstick.
[02:32:15]  And after that, he fled to Juarez and he tried to cross the border illegally to hide from those guys.
[02:32:23]  I helped him put him in touch with an immigration attorney and he managed to claim he's asylum.
[02:32:30]  Process and he's now in New Mexico hiding from those guys.
[02:32:35]  And, dude, that's just the latest case in a case where I could personally help a colleague to get out from the fucking Mexican government, man.
[02:32:44]  It's bad.
[02:32:45]  It's getting fucked.
[02:32:46]  Jesus Christ, man.
[02:32:48]  Yeah, man.
[02:32:49]  He's a fucking brave man.
[02:32:50]  He's a fucking brave man.
[02:32:52]  Of course, when I met him, he was a tall, dark man, like, you know, with a strong face.
[02:32:57]  He's a brave man.
[02:32:59]  And when I met him in Juarez, he was crying like a fucking baby, man.
[02:33:03]  He was completely.
[02:33:05]  Hurt, you know, like he was demoralized.
[02:33:07]  He was feeling like shit.
[02:33:09]  And he was like, dude, I was a journalist and now I'm a fucking migrant trying to sneak into the US.
[02:33:15]  And I put him in touch with this attorney and he helped him up.
[02:33:19]  And I'm glad that he's in New Mexico safe.
[02:33:21]  We speak often.
[02:33:24]  I helped him with, he had his files.
[02:33:26]  Everything he had was his computer and like five different hard drives.
[02:33:32]  And he's like, dude, this is all I have.
[02:33:34]  This is all the information from those fucking.
[02:33:36]  Guys stealing money, and I'm still planning on publishing.
[02:33:39]  So help me.
[02:33:40]  And I was like, give me all of that shit.
[02:33:42]  I'm going to hide them in my house.
[02:33:45]  And when you're safe in the US, I'll hand them back.
[02:33:50]  And when he called me and said, do it.
[02:33:52]  I made it.
[02:33:53]  This attorney helped me to go the right way to do it, like through an asylum process.
[02:34:00]  I handed him over all the information, and he's about to keep publishing all that shit in the US.
[02:34:06]  Mexico has the bravest fucking journalists in the world, man.
[02:34:09]  They really are.
[02:34:11]  I mean, I feel obviously, I feel like a fucking joke, you know, like to the side of those guys.

=== Political Turmoil Ahead (03:46) ===

[02:34:17]  Those are the real fucking guys reporting on Mexican corruption and Mexican politicians.
[02:34:22]  How often do you report on the corruption that's going on in the government there?
[02:34:26]  Not often, man.
[02:34:26]  Do you have any sources that are close to that or are they fucking hard to come by?
[02:34:30]  I mean, the hardest part is they always have an agenda.
[02:34:39]  So I try to stay away from.
[02:34:42]  Filing agendas from one side to another.
[02:34:45]  Right.
[02:34:47]  They always have an agenda or no pulse.
[02:34:49]  Yeah, exactly.
[02:34:50]  It's fucking crazy.
[02:34:52]  It's crazy.
[02:34:53]  But yeah, man, that guy is Alfredo.
[02:34:56]  That's his name.
[02:34:56]  And I don't know if he's going to be listening to this.
[02:34:59]  He doesn't speak English, but I pledge my respect for Alfredo, man.
[02:35:04]  So, where does this all go from here?
[02:35:08]  What do you think is on the horizon for this whole fucking war going on right now in Mexico?
[02:35:15]  And with the future of the Sinaloa cartel and just the whole balance of power in the cartel world down there, I really think that things are still yet to get worse.
[02:35:28]  Um, the whole thing about the Sinaloa cartel and Los Chapitos faction is gonna make a huge war and a gap, huge gap in Sinaloa, in Culiacan, in a place that had been as safest as El Paso, Texas, for a while, right?
[02:35:46]  Um, I think we're getting closer to the federal elections, and that's always a turmoil.
[02:35:55]  Always, always a bunch.
[02:35:57]  That's where I want to stay away from Mexico as far as possible when every single time elections come.
[02:36:04]  Are there any good options?
[02:36:05]  Are there any good options for new presidents to take over from Lopez?
[02:36:09]  Not really.
[02:36:10]  Not really, man.
[02:36:11]  I mean, the two, I guess, more popular options, one of them is the foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard.
[02:36:20]  Which I think is a great foreign minister, but I'm not sure if it's the right president.
[02:36:28]  He thought, I don't think he has the sensibility that Mexico needs on a president.
[02:36:33]  He has a political knowledge.
[02:36:35]  He has the, yeah, basically that's why he has like the political knowledge and the career long enough to be a president.
[02:36:43]  But to be a president in a place like Mexico, you have to have a lot of sensibility towards your people.
[02:36:49]  And if you have never walked Mexico, you know, the streets of Mexico, the little towns, if you don't know about Jesus Maria, El Alamo, El Salado, those little towns where the criminal organizations have earned such a big, Social basis.
[02:37:06]  If all you have visited is Mexico City, the wealthiest parts of Mexico, in Monterrey, you know, and you are a foreign minister that are always in Spain, in Qatar, in Canada, you know, what kind of like sense of political you have towards your people.
[02:37:24]  Right.
[02:37:25]  And the other one, which could be an interesting outcome, it's a woman.
[02:37:29]  If she gets to be president, she will be the first woman to be president of Mexico.
[02:37:34]  It's called Claudia Scheinbaum.
[02:37:37]  But I think she is still of the same of Andres Manuel López Obrador, the current president.
[02:37:44]  She's basically a clone of Andres Manuel.
[02:37:49]  She has strong chances because she's the favorite of the president so far.
[02:37:55]  So she has strong chances, but she's going to be more of the same stuff that we're facing now.

=== Drug Trafficking Networks (07:04) ===

[02:38:03]  It's hard to imagine these cartels going anywhere anytime.
[02:38:06]  In my lifetime, even.
[02:38:08]  It's just there's so much power and influence there and here.
[02:38:13]  Do you see any possibility of them like setting up shop in the United States?
[02:38:22]  I think they have already since a while back, man.
[02:38:26]  Yeah.
[02:38:27]  Those guys.
[02:38:30]  And this is, I think this is like, like if back in the days, like you were talking earlier in Prohibition, how the Prohibition basically.
[02:38:38]  Incessantly created like the mafia, the New York mafia, and then they eventually tied their way into the US politics.
[02:38:44]  Yeah.
[02:38:45]  So I think that this is a thing where we need to untangle what stands as a cartel and what we understand as a cartel in the US.
[02:38:55]  It's not what a cartel is.
[02:38:57]  A cartel in Mexico, or for I guess for everyone, a cartel is the armed branch of an organization, right?
[02:39:06]  It's the guys with the bullet proof baths, with the guns.
[02:39:10]  Those guys are a cartel.
[02:39:11]  Right.
[02:39:12]  The rest of that is the drug trafficking organization.
[02:39:16]  And on top of that, it's what I call this criminal insurgencies.
[02:39:24]  Drug trafficking is just one branch of a wide fucking portfolio of a criminal insurgency.
[02:39:31]  Back then in the 70s, 80s, and I think we need to update like a general population, we need to update those terms because we're still using terms used.
[02:39:42]  In the 90s, in the 80s, about drug traffickers.
[02:39:45]  I guess that's because what we see in mainstream media or in entertainment productions, right?
[02:39:50]  Hollywood and Netflix.
[02:39:52]  But that used to be the main branch back then.
[02:39:55]  Drug trafficking was making money from trafficking drugs, right?
[02:39:59]  That's just one branch now of these criminal enterprises.
[02:40:03]  They are banking on extortion, on corruption, on natural resources, like monopolizing water, monopolizing certain.
[02:40:15]  Goods like alcohol in certain places, cigarettes in certain other places, even tortillas or chicken or avocado are being monopolized in certain regions.
[02:40:27]  And that's where they're getting a lot of money as well.
[02:40:30]  And one branch of all this criminal enterprise or this criminal insurgency, one branch is drug trafficking, that is not even the most profitable right now for these criminal enterprises.
[02:40:42]  And that branch, drug trafficking, has sicarios, an armed group, you know, that's called a cartel.
[02:40:49]  Right.
[02:40:50]  That cartel could serve the different portfolio actors.
[02:40:54]  If a guy who's in charge of breaking corruption deals with the Mexican government to build hospitals or highways or whatever, If he needs to earn that contract from the government.
[02:41:11]  But there's a lot of people leaving in that area, a lot of farmers that have their cattle and their farming places or whatever.
[02:41:20]  This guy will call up one of the cartel guys, the enforcers, to make a lot of fucking violence in that territory.
[02:41:28]  So people will just leave or be killed or sell super cheap their lands because they don't want anything to do.
[02:41:35]  The government will step in and say, like, yeah, we're helping these guys.
[02:41:38]  And then they will.
[02:41:39]  Break into a huge fight, and then the Mexican army is the law enforcement for a corrupt government, and the cartel is the law enforcer for a criminal enterprise.
[02:41:51]  And after all the people are out of that town, they're gonna make a pact.
[02:41:55]  They're gonna be like, Yeah, we're gonna pacify this territory because we need peace.
[02:42:01]  These people have suffered enough.
[02:42:02]  The government is gonna look well because they pacified the territory, and the guy is gonna bank on corruption, building new schools, new development, new residential houses, super expensive.
[02:42:13]  Spiking up the prices of that territory, right?
[02:42:16]  So, do you think we'll ever see these like criminal insurgencies in cities in America?
[02:42:21]  Like, we traditionally used to see gangs in Chicago, but there's like famous, like the Bloods and the Crips in LA and the gangs in New York and like small criminal, like mini insurgencies in these cities in America trying to like start small and like work their way up?
[02:42:38]  I don't think so, man.
[02:42:39]  I think that's that happened during the 90s probably.
[02:42:44]  Early 2000s.
[02:42:45]  You don't hear about it anymore.
[02:42:46]  No, because what happened with the drug trade is as the 2000s started, we started seeing a worldwide gig economy, and that also impacted the drug trade and the criminal enterprises.
[02:43:00]  So they don't work as an integrated organization, right?
[02:43:03]  Like as a vertical.
[02:43:05]  They are horizontal and mostly working as a gig economy.
[02:43:09]  So everybody's a freelancer for everyone.
[02:43:11]  Got it.
[02:43:11]  And the Mexican cartels or the Mexican criminal enterprise organizations, what they did is that they stopped.
[02:43:18]  Trying to deliver or to move their own drugs in the US.
[02:43:24]  And they just sell huge bulks of drugs to gangs in the US, to the Crips, the Blots, the Mexican Mafia, Los Aztecas, whoever.
[02:43:35]  The guys that weren't, who were the guys that were in Chicago?
[02:43:37]  The guys who were part of like getting El Chapo arrested?
[02:43:42]  Yes.
[02:43:43]  The, the, fuck, I forgot their name.
[02:43:48]  Yeah.
[02:43:48]  The two, their brothers, right?
[02:43:49]  Yes, the Flores brothers.
[02:43:51]  Flores brothers.
[02:43:51]  Yes.
[02:43:52]  So, guys like them that are part of a gang, you know, are buying in bulk from Mexican organizations.
[02:43:59]  So, if you have 10 tons of cocaine, you're not going to distribute them on your own.
[02:44:06]  You're just going to move them to Tijuana and then have a buyer on the other side, usually a biker's club or a gang.
[02:44:16]  And they're going to pay you in full, in cash for the whole fucking bulk.
[02:44:19]  And that there's going to be their travel or their business to distribute that.
[02:44:23]  And that's where it stops.
[02:44:24]  And that's where Mexico stops.
[02:44:25]  That's where the Mexican.
[02:44:27]  Cartels or a criminal organization stop.
[02:44:30]  They're like, okay, so that's your.
[02:44:31]  I'm back.
[02:44:32]  They have no interest in having like distribution, more distribution than the U.S., trying to make more off of it.
[02:44:38]  They try to.
[02:44:38]  I feel like it'd be better because like you got these fucking people in the U.S. cutting shit with fentanyl and trying to mix shit and people.
[02:44:46]  That's why the drugs in the street started changing so much because it's a huge market in the U.S. right now.
[02:44:54]  It's a U.S. based market and a U.S. based operation.
[02:44:59]  It's not operated by.
[02:45:02]  Mexican organizations.
[02:45:03]  Yeah.
[02:45:04]  And that, if it was, if it stayed Mexican all the way into the US, we could trust it.

=== The Changing Drug Market (03:01) ===

[02:45:08]  Yes, man.
[02:45:08]  I mean, they will, it will be the same fucking dealer, right?
[02:45:11]  Right.
[02:45:12]  It's too many hands already in that, in that drug.
[02:45:15]  So if you, if you trace what's on every single drug you get in the streets, you, you get a lot of different shit that they caught their shit with.
[02:45:25]  It's, it's changing the whole game in the street selling.
[02:45:29]  I don't remember if it was you who told me this or somebody else that told me, but there was like some sort of like very strict, Policy the cartels had that none of the cocaine was cut with fentanyl.
[02:45:41]  They wanted to make sure that there was absolutely zero fentanyl in any of the cocaine that they were shipping out and they were somehow like testing it.
[02:45:47]  Yeah.
[02:45:47]  Yeah.
[02:45:48]  Exactly.
[02:45:48]  Is that real?
[02:45:48]  Yes.
[02:45:49]  Yes.
[02:45:50]  That's what the Sinaloa cartel is putting out.
[02:45:51]  Like fentanyl is for export and you can use fentanyl in Mexico.
[02:45:55]  There's a couple of guys that have been using it and they, most of them, they get what they call the tablazo.
[02:46:02]  They get spanked in the ass with these massive, like, sort of like the cricket.
[02:46:07]  Thing you know, it's called the tablazo man, and and and I mean, they go hard on you, and yeah, so that's what they used to.
[02:46:16]  That's I have of these videos that I'm gonna put up next on my channel where I talk about the constitution of the Sinaloa cartel, and that's the constitution, the the tablazo that's what they rely on to keep people you know in a straight line.
[02:46:32]  I need to get one of those for here, I can get it up on the wall.
[02:46:35]  Fuck yeah, I can get you one, I can easily get it.
[02:46:38]  Can you really?
[02:46:38]  Yes, that would be sick.
[02:46:41]  I'll let you.
[02:46:42]  Are you and Ed Calderon going to collab?
[02:46:44]  I saw somewhere that you guys were doing a podcast, but that never happened.
[02:46:47]  Did it actually happen?
[02:46:48]  Yeah, we tried to.
[02:46:49]  And then he recently invited me on a live, but his connection kept breaking.
[02:46:55]  Oh, really?
[02:46:56]  And yeah, he just yesterday reached out to invite me to his podcast.
[02:47:01]  That would be a fun one.
[02:47:03]  I would love to listen to you guys talk.
[02:47:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:47:06]  I mean, he's an interesting guy.
[02:47:08]  And I think it's going to be a great conversation with that.
[02:47:11]  Yeah.
[02:47:11]  For sure.
[02:47:12]  Well, cool, man.
[02:47:13]  Thanks again.
[02:47:14]  Tell people where they can subscribe to your YouTube, find your Instagram, and all the stuff that you're doing, all your independent work.
[02:47:20]  Yes.
[02:47:20]  Please go to my YouTube channel and subscribe.
[02:47:23]  It's at Luis Chaparro, double R, single P, because many of the people confuse that and say they write them as double P, two Ps, single R.
[02:47:32]  Yeah.
[02:47:33]  It's Luis Chaparro on YouTube.
[02:47:36]  I'm going to try to keep that up, keep that channel.
[02:47:38]  That's my exit from taking bullshit from editors and shit.
[02:47:41]  Hell yeah, man.
[02:47:41]  That's what, that's not, that's not.
[02:47:43]  That's my long run project.
[02:47:44]  More people that go and subscribe and follow him on all social media, the more freedom Luis will have to report on whatever the fuck he wants.
[02:47:52]  Definitely, man.
[02:47:52]  Thank you very much, man, for getting me here.
[02:47:54]  I really appreciate it, man.
[02:47:56]  Todd was pretty cool to talk for hours.
[02:47:58]  Dude, this was great.
[02:47:59]  This was great.
[02:48:00]  We got to make this like at least twice a year thing.
[02:48:03]  Every six months, we come back.
[02:48:04]  I'll be happy to.
[02:48:05]  Hell yeah.
[02:48:06]  Fuck yes, man.
[02:48:06]  All right, everybody.
[02:48:07]  Thanks for listening and good night, world.