Feb. 26, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:06:16
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Here we go. | ||
| Five, four, three, two, one. | ||
| First of all, how many people get your name wrong when they try to pronounce it? | ||
| Well, so many people I don't even care anymore. | ||
| I just hear where it comes out. | ||
| Because I live in... | ||
| It's a funny name where I come from. | ||
| Right. | ||
| From England. | ||
| Growing up, it's a funny name. | ||
| But in Mexico, it's even stranger names. | ||
| So I just normally make it Ian. | ||
| And my second name, Grillo, which in Spanish is Grillo. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So everyone... | ||
| They mess that up too, if they see it spelled. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Pull this microphone about a fist from your face. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yoan. | ||
| I don't think I've ever heard that name before. | ||
| There's an actor called Yoan Grufford. | ||
| What's he in? | ||
| He's in Fantastic Four. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| He's the stretchy guy. | ||
| Oh, no shit. | ||
| In Fantastic Four. | ||
| So yeah, he's made that name a little bit more. | ||
| A little bit more acceptable. | ||
| How did you wind up living in Mexico City? | ||
| So I came to Mexico or went to Mexico in the year 2000. | ||
| And I kind of messed around for a few years in the UK. | ||
| Wanted to get into journalism. | ||
| So I found one way to get into it was to start working in a foreign country. | ||
| Rather than going to my local newspaper and work and go to a foreign country and start working. | ||
| And I had a romantic idea about Latin America. | ||
| Thinking I'd be like, I saw the movie Salvador. | ||
| You know, Oliver Stone's movie from the 80s. | ||
| I kind of had a romantic idea about running around with guerrillas. | ||
| Fighting military dictatorships. | ||
| So I arrived in Mexico in 2000. | ||
| And got a job at an English language newspaper. | ||
| How old were you? | ||
| 27 when I first left the UK, yeah. | ||
| I messed around for a bit in Mexico as well and then got the job when I was 28. Mexico City's a wild place. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's so packed. | ||
| I've only been there twice for UFC events. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But every time I'm there, I'm just shaking my head like, I can't believe how this traffic works. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, 18 years and I've spent a lot of time in that traffic. | ||
| Nobody cares about red lights, green lights. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| It's stressful. | ||
| Everyone wants to cut you up all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People shout at you a lot. | ||
| You have to get used to people calling you like, pendejo, cerdo. | ||
| I try different tactics. | ||
| Now I just try and relax and not get angry. | ||
| Did you know how to speak Spanish before you went there? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I spent one year in Spain, living in Spain before I went there. | ||
| I spent a year in the Middle East as well. | ||
| But yeah, I started off, when I arrived, I spoke more to Spanish-Spanish, which is like, Oye, tío, coño, tío. | ||
| And then I changed more to like the Mexican Spanish, which is like, Oye, wey, que paso, wey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So when did you start getting into narcojournalism? | ||
| So, like I arrived to say with a romantic idea about what I might cover in Mexico or Latin America. | ||
| And right away I realized all that idea of guerrillas and military dictatorships that had gone. | ||
| That was the last century. | ||
| Che Guevara, all that stuff had gone. | ||
| But right away when I arrived, my very first arrived. | ||
| First, back in the UK, I grew up around a lot of drugs in the UK. So, going back to the 80s, I grew up with a lot of people taking drugs. | ||
| I had a few friends who died from heroin overdoses back then. | ||
| Four people I knew died of heroin overdoses. | ||
| I had a sister who became schizophrenic. | ||
| She became schizophrenic and there'd be a lot of drugs being smoked around that time as well. | ||
| Was it pot? | ||
| Yeah, back then it was Moroccan hashish. | ||
| There is a connection, you know, and we've been exploring that a lot lately. | ||
| We went into this marijuana debate between Alex Berenstein and Dr. Mike Hart from Canada, and we talked about it, and I know people that have had that happen to them. | ||
| Where they've had schizophrenic or psychotic breaks because of just massive doses of marijuana, especially people that don't do it, or people that do it too much for too long. | ||
| It does happen. | ||
| I heard that debate. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why it came to mind. | ||
| I mean, I don't know... | ||
| A lot of people smoke weed, smoke hash. | ||
| A lot of people, it's fine. | ||
| Now, when my sister had a breakdown when she was 18 and I was 16 at the time, and when that came out, it turned out also my grandmother had an issue with schizophrenia. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think, I don't know if it was a time bomb waiting to go off, or if it was how much the hash was involved in that. | ||
| There's other issues as well. | ||
| So I don't really know the science of it, but... | ||
| Anyway, going back, so I've been around a lot of drugs before. | ||
| So when I arrived in Mexico, actually, one of the first arriving in Mexico, I ended up hanging around with some people, and they were smoking a lot of crack in Mexico. | ||
| It's one of the first people I met. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I went down to the beach, like backpacking down to the beach, and these people were smoking crack, and I was like, this is kind of strange. | ||
| I didn't know there were people smoking crack down here. | ||
| So when I got a job at the local newspaper in English, And I just started looking at the crime thing. | ||
| One of the first tools I did was on the issue of crack being sold locally and how that linked to cartels. | ||
| And then very soon, just very, very quickly, I just fell in right away. | ||
| Like I said, all these things happened by accident. | ||
| I just fell into covering the crime beat. | ||
| And this is going back to 2001. So 2001, that was the same year that Chapo's man escaped from prison. | ||
| Then I was calling a lot then to a great journalist from Tijuana, a real legend from Tijuana, who survived the shooting by cartels. | ||
| And phoning him up all the time, just getting him to give me information, give me tips. | ||
| And that was how I really started. | ||
| Another big story I did back in those days was the court-martial of some generals for drug trafficking. | ||
| And that was really where it began back then. | ||
| Generals for drug trafficking, how much of an issue is that? | ||
| I mean, corruption must be unbelievably rampant. | ||
| So, I mean, corruption even isn't a strong enough word for it. | ||
| Sometimes I call it state capture. | ||
| I mean, so this is the real beginning, and this has been a whole crazy 18 years of covering this stuff. | ||
| I mean, this was just the very beginning back then. | ||
| I've seen a whole lot of very crazy stuff in that time. | ||
| But just to get a sense of how bad the corruption is or what it really means on the ground level there. | ||
| There's policemen. | ||
| You interview policemen and you get to know the policemen in a certain town, certain city. | ||
| And it's hard to know, or military guys or politicians. | ||
| And you want to believe these are good people. | ||
| You want to believe there's good policemen out there who really want to stop crime. | ||
| So there was one policeman, his nickname was Tyson, like Mike Tyson, his nickname was Tyson because he was a well-built bloke, well-built guy. | ||
| And he was friendly with the press, a guy from Michoacan, friendly with the press. | ||
| And then it came out that he was actually a drug cartel member, a ranking member in the drug cartel. | ||
| And he... | ||
| Actually confessed. | ||
| They used to have a thing where the police, the federal police when they got him, got him to confess on camera. | ||
| And he confessed not only was he turning a blind eye, not only was he carrying out murders, he was training the young kids how to decapitate people, how to cut people up. | ||
| And he was explaining in graphic detail how he'd like... | ||
| You know, how they manage to cut limbs off, how it gets young people to train them to cut limbs off, to get them to lose their fear. | ||
| So that's the level of corruption. | ||
| That could be a policeman you're dealing with, and that's really who they are. | ||
| So that's one of the crazy things about the corruption down there. | ||
| Did you have any hesitancy in getting involved in narcojournalism knowing this? | ||
| I mean, I would imagine that's one of the most dangerous... | ||
| avenues to pursue in journalism. | ||
| So this was little by little I got involved in covering this. | ||
| So like going back to 2000, this hadn't happened. | ||
| This war hadn't happened. | ||
| It was still like a crime issue at that moment. | ||
| So I began to cover these things and then around 2004 I got a job for the Houston Chronicle out of Houston, Texas. | ||
| I was a stringer covering Mexico for them. | ||
| And I flew up to a lot to Nuevo Laredo. | ||
| And there was a turf war beginning there, which is really the beginning of the drug war, which has torn Mexico apart. | ||
| Began on the border with Texas in this city called Nuevo Laredo, over the bridge from Laredo, Texas, back in 2004. So there was a lot of interest from the Texas newspapers, what was going on. | ||
| There was a whole bunch of bodies piling up there. | ||
| But again, going back to these days, and this is kind of innocent looking back, innocent looking at myself then, and innocent looking at what Mexico was like then. | ||
| They would simply say, go to the place, I'd drive up to Monterrey, rent a car, and just drive the car to Nuevo Laredo, just by myself. | ||
| And now, people just don't do that. | ||
| There's just too much crazy stuff going on. | ||
| But back then, it was still like, oh, you can just do that. | ||
| When you say crazy stuff, like what kind of crazy stuff? | ||
| I mean, now you can get stopped by an armed group driving on those roads. | ||
| You could just drive along and there could be a group of guys with guns, could stop the car, get someone out, take you away. | ||
| I mean, there's a whole... | ||
| People are a lot more careful about where you... | ||
| Now when you move around the roads, you can be very careful how you move and how you plan this stuff. | ||
| You don't just wander by yourself, drive around these places. | ||
| So back then when this was happening and there was these bodies turning up and I was trying to figure out why and there was one guy interviewed who was the head of Chamber of Commerce. | ||
| And I talked to him, you know, very interesting guy. | ||
| About a couple of weeks later he became the chief of police for the city. | ||
| And they asked him, they said, are you scared? | ||
| You know, are you scared about being killed? | ||
| He said, no, I'm not scared. | ||
| It's only the corrupt people who get killed. | ||
| And he was shot dead six hours after he gave that statement. | ||
| They shot him dead. | ||
| And that was one of the real markers of something really strange is going on in Mexico. | ||
| Something is, like, going to erupt in Mexico. | ||
| And then from there, it kind of just escalated and escalated. | ||
| And I started working for other media, Time Magazine, New York Times. | ||
| Different people, and after a while I've said, I can't do this, I can't just write news stories about this, I've got to write books about this, because this stuff is big and it's complicated. | ||
| It must be immensely complicated. | ||
| For the people that live there, it seems like there's no escape. | ||
| I mean, if you can't turn to the police, the police are the cartel, there's the cartel, the police, all of the politicians, most likely, if they're alive, have to be compromised. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's been some very, very desperate people. | ||
| I mean, there's been some inspirational people as well fighting this. | ||
| There's been heroes. | ||
| There are heroes. | ||
| Just to get more of a sense of what that means on the ground as well, you know, and some of the things you see, you know, some of the things that stay with me. | ||
| You know, for a while it was quite romantic covering this. | ||
| It was like, wow, I'm covering, I'm going to these places where Chapo Guzman is from. | ||
| You know, I'll go up to the village and meet his mother and meet his family. | ||
| I'm writing about these crazy people. | ||
| But then you start seeing the human pain in all of this. | ||
| One of many stories that stick with me was a mother in Monterrey, a school teacher. | ||
| When you have armed guys moving around, they're also really affecting the civil population, attacking the civil population. | ||
| And one mother, she was in her home with her two children in Monterrey. | ||
| And a It was like in the night just chilling in their house and then the door broke down and about 15 guys in bulletproof jackets all came in, long arms, just taking stuff from the house. | ||
| Held the family, you know, pinned them down and they said to their mother, Which of your children is the oldest? | ||
| And she was like, didn't know how to reply. | ||
| I mean, which of your children are the oldest? | ||
| How do I reply to that? | ||
| She just couldn't speak. | ||
| And the eldest son, she had two sons, one 18, one 15. The 18-year-old was a philosophy student. | ||
| And he said, I'm the oldest. | ||
| I said, okay, you're coming with us. | ||
| And took him away. | ||
| The next day she got a phone call saying, okay, we've got your son. | ||
| Give us this amount of money. | ||
| We'll give him back. | ||
| So she went around to like relatives, just got the money. | ||
| She wanted to get the money right away. | ||
| She turned up with the money, gave some money, and then they just cut off the calls. | ||
| She hadn't heard from him since. | ||
| And I've been seeing her face, the devastation. | ||
| The pain, she said, I just couldn't get on with life after that, just not knowing, not having the closure. | ||
| And I met her when I went to report on one of the worst atrocities, which was 49 bodies, who'd all been decapitated, all had their hands and feet cut off, and all been dumped on a road. | ||
| And they were taken to the morgue in Monterrey, and I arrived at the morgue. | ||
| I was inside the morgue, just smelling the smell of Of the dead bodies, this kind of weird smell you get from like decaying flesh, kind of like a sweet smell you get from when you're around those places where you can smell that the body's decaying. | ||
| And I was inside the morgue and I came out and she was outside the morgue. | ||
| And she was trying to see if if her son might be among those people among those bodies But you know, it's it's so insane that this is right next door to America and there's so little effort put on doing something about it including doing something to mitigate the influence of illegal drugs by making drugs legal and | ||
| That would be one gigantic step. | ||
| You're not going to stop people from doing drugs. | ||
| This is an illogical, ridiculous approach. | ||
| I don't think people should do most of those drugs. | ||
| But when you make drugs illegal, only criminals are going to sell those drugs. | ||
| And this is exactly what you have right next door to America. | ||
| I mean, it's just unbelievably insane that there's this amount of crime, a drive away from San Antonio. | ||
| Yeah, and talking about that issue of the money and the economics of this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you look at cocaine. | ||
| There was four main drugs. | ||
| Now you've got fentanyl coming in as well, and the cartels are making fentanyl. | ||
| They're making it? | ||
| Making it, yeah. | ||
| They're making it, bringing in precursors. | ||
| There was one lab. | ||
| I was in Nogales about a year and a half ago. | ||
| They passed a lab in Nogales right on the border. | ||
| They had the lab there making the fentanyl and bringing it up. | ||
| But as well as that, you've got the other four main drugs. | ||
| Historically, Marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth. | ||
| And this goes back 100 years. | ||
| So Sinaloa, which is the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking. | ||
| Sinaloa is a bit like Sicily is to the mafia, like Sinaloa is to the Mexican drug cartels, where it began. | ||
| And it began right... | ||
| So you go back to 1914, you had in the US the Harrison's Narcotics Tax Act, when they restricted opium and cocaine in the United States. | ||
| And from 1915, they began a cross-border trade from Mexico to the United States. | ||
| So that's when it started. | ||
| All the way back then, so over 100 years ago. | ||
| Some of the very first people doing it were actually Chinese Mexicans. | ||
| They were Chinese immigrants who'd arrived in Mexico. | ||
| They began doing this. | ||
| They bought opium from China and planted it in Mexico. | ||
| And some of the first people receiving it were Chinese Americans. | ||
| Some of these very early cases, a case from 1916 investigated, there's documents about this case where there was Chinese Mexicans trafficking to Chinese Americans here in California. | ||
| And at that time there was a governor of Baja California involved right back then. | ||
| What is the solution? | ||
| Is there any solutions to this? | ||
| Well, I mean, I think a lot of people covering this, you get very weary. | ||
| You want to see solutions. | ||
| You want to find solutions. | ||
| And you want to come with that optimism of finding solutions. | ||
| And you want to justify why you're doing this, what you're doing this for. | ||
| Not just to tell the stories, but to look for solutions to this. | ||
| And it gets weary, but there's three areas, I believe, that are solutions. | ||
| First, I do agree with you on the idea of drug policy reform. | ||
| Again, it's a tough uphill battle. | ||
| I mean, going back to 2012, I wrote editorials about, you know, one of the reasons you should legalise marijuana is because of the marijuana coming from Mexico, which goes to cartels, which pays for killers, which pays for corruption. | ||
| But at the same time, marijuana, a lot of, you know, a lot is legalised in the United States, and the violence actually just got worse in Mexico. | ||
| So you've also got the issue of heroin poisoning, Cocaine, crystal meth, fentanyl, and you've got the cartels who got into a bunch of other rackets now. | ||
| They steal crude oil, which is a big deal. | ||
| They steal billions of dollars worth of crude oil, criminals down there, from pipelines. | ||
| Just tap into a pipeline or something? | ||
| Yeah, you go into a pipeline. | ||
| You normally put in two taps. | ||
| You drill two holes in the pipeline. | ||
| You drill a hole to take the oil out, and you drill a hole to put water in to try and keep the pressure. | ||
| I don't know if you saw this crazy video recently in a small town in Mexico where a bunch of, there was a tap open, a really bad tap. | ||
| The oil was just spraying out. | ||
| And a bunch of people were lining up just to pick up the oil from the pipeline. | ||
| And it exploded. | ||
| And it was just like crazy death toll. | ||
| Yeah, I did see that. | ||
| But anyway, I do believe in drug policy reform. | ||
| We have to talk about this. | ||
| It has to be on the table. | ||
| I mean, Americans, you know, no one knows really what Americans spend on drugs. | ||
| But there's this survey, which you can find online, if you just tap in what do Americans spend on illegal drugs. | ||
| And there's an estimate of $100 billion a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Phew. | |
| So, you know, that amount of money, I mean, that's an estimate. | ||
| I mean, it could be right, you know, it's hard to know. | ||
| It's a very round number, but like $100 billion a year. | ||
| Now, if you think about that pumping into these cartels year after year, I mean, decades, you know, how much of that, you know, if it's $30 billion of that going down to Mexico, then over 10 years, $300 billion, over 30 years, close to a trillion dollars. | ||
| That really creates this monster. | ||
| But a second area, so I believe in drug policy reform. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how, I mean, rehab for everyone who needs it, because heroin addicts buy a lot of heroin. | ||
| So everyone you save from that, you can, you know, you can stop a lot of heroin and a lot of that money, which does money goes to these people who are doing this stuff. | ||
| But a second area, I believe, is social work in the neighbourhoods. | ||
| I've done a lot of interviews with, particularly with the assassins, with the killers in cartels in Mexico and also around Latin America. | ||
| I've been traveling around Jamaica, Brazil, Central America, Colombia, talking to a lot of the killers especially. | ||
| And when I sit down with them, I try and get their life story. | ||
| Like, how did they first get into this? | ||
| Because you're not born doing this stuff. | ||
| And often, I mean, in some cases, there's different profiles. | ||
| There's some of them... | ||
| You know, there's one guy. | ||
| This is down in Honduras, which is also a crazy situation. | ||
| There's a guy there. | ||
| I'd actually met him before. | ||
| I'd met him when I was doing some reporting down there back in 2015. And he was driving for us. | ||
| And he was also carrying a gun to help protect us. | ||
| I was with a journalist who'd been hit before, who'd been actually shot before. | ||
| And then I met him again afterwards and got him to tell his story, which is kind of typical of a lot of these guys. | ||
| And he described how he'd been abandoned as a kid by his parents. | ||
| And had this real hate that he had with the world. | ||
| Like, you know, just fuck the world. | ||
| And he described the first time that he... | ||
| Carried out murders. | ||
| Later on, he documented all these hits he'd done and decapitations he'd done and this kind of crazy stuff. | ||
| But the first time he carried out a murder was probably the freakiest when he was, I think, 14. And they got a family. | ||
| They went into a house. | ||
| They got a family and they butchered a family. | ||
| And he described, when he described that, and then described later on, you know, how he became a hired killer. | ||
| And the thing about him, like some of these people, you think they're psychopaths. | ||
| They just, they really don't care. | ||
| But some of them really do have these conflicts inside their heart. | ||
| I think he was someone, or at least back to that interview, and he had, and it's hard to balance that, someone who does evil, But also has been a victim as well, a victim and a victimizer. | ||
| And you feel that pain. | ||
| Since then, he's himself been murdered. | ||
| So how you get social work to reach people from a very young age, because often they're recruited into organized crime when they're 12, 13 years old. | ||
| So he butchered this family when he was 14. Was he stealing money from them? | ||
| So the story with that was he said that he was hanging around with these basically street kids. | ||
| And one of the other kids said, I know where there's some money in a house. | ||
| We can get some money in a house. | ||
| So they went in there and killed this family. | ||
| And it turned out there was no money there. | ||
| And the reason the other kid had said go there was because he'd actually been living with this family. | ||
| And he said they'd been abusive to him. | ||
| So he wanted to have revenge on his family. | ||
| But what was so really sick about this, when he was describing it, was they had this family and they would, to stop them defending themselves, they would take them one by one, pin them in a room and take them one by one, take them out, butcher them, how the other ones didn't really know what was going on. | ||
| And think, I mean, the action itself, but how teenage kids can think about that stuff. | ||
| And then later on, when he was talking about the decapitations, he was talking about... | ||
| They get contracts with decapitation inside the... | ||
| Like they say, we want this killing. | ||
| We want you to decapitate the guy. | ||
| We want this... | ||
| We want to see video of the guy being decapitated. | ||
| We want that. | ||
| We want the guy to suffer. | ||
| And when he hacks the heads off, there'll sometimes still be a moment when the life goes out of them. | ||
| And when the body is still like twitching. | ||
| Like he says, they can still see, like, there's a bit like nerves, like a chicken, like a headless chicken. | ||
| There's a bit, there's a part when they're still like twitching a bit, even after they, you know, they've lost their kind of connections there. | ||
| Now, when you're interviewing these people, how nervous are you? | ||
| I mean, this seems like if you're putting all this stuff down, you could implicate them in some crimes and It seems like it would be very convenient for them to try to get rid of you. | ||
| So there's a whole bunch of different situations around interviews. | ||
| Sometimes I've interviewed people in prisons, a lot of time in prisons. | ||
| This took me years to get to a lot of these people. | ||
| First of all, when I first started doing this, I was like, how do I reach them? | ||
| I started going around to drug rehab places and talking to people in drug rehab. | ||
| I'm going into prisons in Ciudad Juarez. | ||
| I did a lot of interviews in one prison. | ||
| I got to know a lot of prisoners in the prison in Ciudad Juarez in a Christian evangelical wing there. | ||
| And they were going through this weird Christian discovery of God there. | ||
| And then on the street, often like through contact, I mean, well, all the time through contacts on the street. | ||
| In Honduras, a lot of great contacts with a friend who's a journalist who grew up in his neighbourhoods with all these guys. | ||
| He just knows loads of these guys from growing up. | ||
| Now, there's different things. | ||
| There have been bad situations. | ||
| I think anybody covering this has had some bad situations. | ||
| Sometimes people get angry, people threaten them and so forth. | ||
| But a lot of the time when you talk to people, A lot of the time you have to be very stringent about protecting their identity and really serious about that because there's been various cases where other people have interviewed killers and shown their identity either through showing their face or through some dumb thing being shown. | ||
| And they have been themselves murdered, butchered after they've given these interviews. | ||
| Or like other things that happened, they've been threatened or something, their family or arrested or so forth. | ||
| So you've really got to protect people's identities. | ||
| In a way, in terms of when they talk and stuff, and I don't really feel nervous when I interview a lot of these people. | ||
| I probably feel more nervous here talking to you. | ||
| That's just probably because it's on a big show. | ||
| It's a different thing when you're talking to... | ||
| First, you start with easy questions. | ||
| Like anything, you start talking about how you... | ||
| People are human beings, and people are complicated. | ||
| And I haven't just interviewed, and I've also got drunk with some of these people and hung around with some of these people for time, trying to get closer, like, you know, spend time to try and understand their world a bit more. | ||
| What's the most time you've ever spent with these people? | ||
| I mean, several days. | ||
| Several days, yeah. | ||
| Like, you know, like, I mean, I'll see them, see them again, hang out, you know, hang out with them. | ||
| In different places. | ||
| Not all the time. | ||
| Sometimes just, you know, sit down, do interviews and just leave. | ||
| But it's a complicated world. | ||
| For them, it's their normality. | ||
| For them, it's normal. | ||
| It's what they've lived, what they've been through, what's happening around them. | ||
| I mean, this level of murder that's happening in a lot of parts of Latin America now, it's crazy. | ||
| But in these areas, in this world, you talk to other people who are just on the edge of this or have family members involved in this. | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| They're living this. | ||
| I mean, these are levels of violence and it's interesting to compare historically these levels of violence because you look at some of the worst cities like San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Caracas, Ciudad Juarez. | ||
| And these are places which have levels of violence which are like way worse than medieval Europe. | ||
| A lot of places in medieval Europe. | ||
| I mean, look at the figures per 100,000. | ||
| Because some of them have over 100 per 100,000. | ||
| 150 per 100,000. | ||
| And medieval Europe, a lot of these cities were like 20 per 100,000. | ||
| So they're way worse now, way worse in the Wild West than like, now there are some places in the United States today, like I've done some research recently in Baltimore, Maryland, and I was kind of, it's interesting to compare that to Latin America. | ||
| And that's a high level, that's 40 per 100,000. | ||
| That's not the same level, but it's significant. | ||
| Still more than medieval Europe? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Baltimore is worse than medieval Europe. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess you have to, some professors, they might say, well, Jerusalem in this time, or you've got to try and, it's hard to really dig down exactly, I don't know if there was outbreaks of violence and killing in certain places. | ||
| But the overall average? | ||
| Yeah, overall average, yeah. | ||
| That's a significant leap, 100% leap. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Baltimore. | ||
| What about South Side of Chicago? | ||
| It's not that, I mean, like, the level, I think, in Chicago comes at around 20 or something, so it's not... | ||
| Now, the whole city. | ||
| Now, again, one of the things about the violence in the United States compared to Latin America... | ||
| I mean, Baltimore is significant, but it's a fairly... | ||
| Well, the city of Baltimore is a fairly small place, what they're talking about. | ||
| So in Mexico, you have entire states that are, like, really violent, or entire countries in Latin America... | ||
| Whereas in the U.S., it tends to be neighborhoods which are violent. | ||
| So if you really focus on the south side of Chicago, it's probably similar levels to Baltimore. | ||
| But if you look at the whole city, you've got neighbors that are pretty safe in Chicago as well. | ||
| Now, through all of this time that you spent down in Mexico, have you seen it escalate? | ||
| You've seen it get worse and worse? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So first, this really big escalation happened in 2008. It was the first big escalation. | ||
| What was the cause of that? | ||
| So you had... | ||
| There was a steady build-up that was happening. | ||
| And then in 2006, you had the president, Felipe Calderón, declared a military crackdown on drug cartels. | ||
| And after that, there was this big response and things started really getting out of hand. | ||
| We'd already seen violence escalating before. | ||
| And my idea, my kind of theory behind this is that You had in Mexico back in the 20th century more of a top-down, centralized government controlling everything. | ||
| You had the PRI in power. | ||
| And they were, basically they were controlling it through corruption. | ||
| So back then they'd have the drug cartels working for them. | ||
| An interesting story going back then to the late 1970s, a story in a book called Drug Lord by Terence Popper who interviewed a drug trafficker in the 80s. | ||
| When he got his job as the hefe de plaza, which is the head of a certain territory. | ||
| When he got the job, he went with the state police at the time and said, I want to become the head of the plaza. | ||
| And they took him in and tortured him for two days and beat the crap out of him, put electric shocks on his nuts, one of the big torches they do in Mexico, put water laced with chili in his nose. | ||
| It's not like one of these big, so your whole face burns. | ||
| These are like torture techniques they have. | ||
| And after two days of torturing, they said, yeah, well done. | ||
| You know, you survived well. | ||
| You've got the job. | ||
| So, you know, what it shows is that the police had the upper hand. | ||
| The police controlled this. | ||
| They were like, okay, we control this racket. | ||
| And, you know, we can fuck around and torture and kill drug traffickers when we like. | ||
| You know, and all up to the presidency. | ||
| I mean, there was, in that time, Carlos Salinas became president in 94. His brother Raul Salinas, the Swiss, investigated his bank accounts and said he had $500 million in bank accounts, which they, you know, they believed it was drug money. | ||
| So right up to the presidency, this was being run. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| When Mexico changed democracy, so when I arrived in Mexico, it was changing to democracy. | ||
| It was like, wow, great, democracy is going to happen. | ||
| Free markets are going to happen. | ||
| You know, we're in the good days of the 21st century now. | ||
| But what happened was you looked, the political control shifted. | ||
| So you had a bunch of different political parties. | ||
| And they were fighting over the drug trade. | ||
| And, you know, I was one time in Nuevo Laredo when the federal police had a shootout with the municipal police. | ||
| They were fighting each other, probably because they were working for different drug cartels. | ||
| So that's what started. | ||
| But then you had the techniques, like the technique of beheading wasn't really a big deal. | ||
| It was very, very rarely used up until around 2006. And one of the first incidents was in Acapulco in 2006. In about June 2006. Now it might have been after, inspired by the Al-Qaeda Saqawi video, which was shown in full on Mexican TV. I remember when that came out, when they decapitated the guy in Iraq. | ||
| And they decapitated, first it was two policemen they decapitated. | ||
| Later that year, in September 2006, there was five heads they rolled onto a disco dance floor. | ||
| And then this thing just became just escalating. | ||
| It just became this kind of like using this terror, public terror. | ||
| So 2008 was a big escalation. | ||
| And then 2011-12 were like crazy. | ||
| And then it subsided a bit and the violence got a bit less public. | ||
| And it was more like hidden, like mass grave stuff. | ||
| Now the worst mass grave that's been discovered so far It was in Veracruz. | ||
| I've been to the side of it. | ||
| And it was 250 bodies were found in this mass grave in one place. | ||
| And it was right next to a housing estate. | ||
| And there's families. | ||
| One of the saddest things was you could see there... | ||
| Kiddies' bicycles and basketball hoops and stuff right next to this. | ||
| And the field next to that, they dug up 250 bodies. | ||
| And the smell was like emanating to this housing estate. | ||
| And it's like the dream of becoming middle class that was the kind of something, this housing estate, and right next to it, this violence. | ||
| But when I say a lot of these stories, I mean... | ||
| These are crazy stories, but the weird thing is a lot of Mexico lives a normality around this. | ||
| This is not what you see every day. | ||
| This happens, but there's also just a normality that could just be like you're outside here in LA and normal people living normal lives around this as well. | ||
| What is the response in Mexico? | ||
| After they wanted to have this military action against the cartels, obviously that hasn't really put a dent in it. | ||
| What's the current thought process behind dealing with this? | ||
| So there's a bunch of like citizen protest movements various times. | ||
| During these recent years, and one of them was a very interesting guy called Javier Cecilia, who's a poet and a writer whose son was murdered. | ||
| And he, when it first happened, his son was murdered and he just came out. | ||
| The press was like, you know, I can't. | ||
| This is just like, this is just, you know, Mexico's gone. | ||
| I can't deal with this. | ||
| My son's being killed. | ||
| And then he began talking in very, you know, and then he went to the streets and people were coming out publicly, crying. | ||
| And that was one of the first times there was a realization a lot of innocent people are dying with this. | ||
| And people come out and, you know, I went to some of these things, people come out crying, family members. | ||
| Actually, in a sense, we're victims here because there was, for a long time, a sense of simply bad guys killing bad guys. | ||
| And that wasn't the case. | ||
| Now the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who just won the election last year and just took power on December 1st. | ||
| So he's got two mixed things. | ||
| So one of them is this idea of the war's over. | ||
| I'm going to create peace. | ||
| We can have forgiveness, reconciliation. | ||
| It's hard to know what that really means. | ||
| And the second thing is we need to have more of a unified state police. | ||
| So like what I described before about you had Local police fighting the federal police. | ||
| So we've got to have... | ||
| So he's got this idea now of a National Guard, which is a kind of hybrid between military and police thing around. | ||
| And that's basically his... | ||
| These kind of two thrusts he's in now. | ||
| He's only been in power a couple of months. | ||
| January was still a bad month in terms of murders, in terms of bodies. | ||
| Last year was more than 33,000 dead last year, which is the size of Mexico, so the equivalent of the United States, having close to 100,000. | ||
| Imagine what that would mean in the United States if you had that many people dying in a year. | ||
| A month. | ||
| Or the whole year. | ||
| In the year, yeah, 100,000. | ||
| Now, when these people are being recruited by the cartels, when the police officers are being recruited, The big issue must be, well, there must be two issues, right? | ||
| Safety, like if they don't join the cartel, they'd probably get murdered. | ||
| And two, the amount of money the cartel would give them would be far more than the government would give them to be a legitimate police officer. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And that's like known famously, plateau plumber, like silver or lead. | ||
| You want to have the silver of the bribe, the lead of the bullet. | ||
| But even beyond that, for a long time, a lot of these people who join the police are like from the beginning there, you know, I've got a video, made a video back in 2010 in Sierra Juarez of a bunch of rappers just hanging around in the middle of all this. | ||
| And one of their friends was saying, and they were talking and these people were saying, you know, some of them have been done for taking drugs over the border, they've been in gangs and stuff. | ||
| And one of them was like, I want to be a policeman. | ||
| And he was like, I want to be a policeman and make some money, basically through corruption. | ||
| So that is the mentality of some of these people joining the police from early on. | ||
| Another guy I opened the first book with is a guy who became a policeman when he was 18. He was basically a hard, tough guy. | ||
| Played American football from Durango. | ||
| Became a policeman when he was 18. And in the police, learned to torture and learned to murder. | ||
| He said, that's what I learned in the police. | ||
| And just at 20, after two years, just left the police and went full-time into crime. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| So, you know, you've got a situation where, you know, it's not, you know, it's worse even, it's beyond the bad that a lot of people might imagine of corruption. | ||
| God, so all of this essentially has escalated from the time you came to Mexico. | ||
| So when you came to Mexico, it's almost like you got in, I mean, if it was a story, you got in at almost the perfect time. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| In a horrible way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| I mean, like, you know, you don't do these things on purpose. | ||
| You know, you don't think... | ||
| If I look back 20 years ago, I mean, it's 18 years I've been in Mexico now. | ||
| I had a whole... | ||
| I'd grown up in Mexico in that sense. | ||
| I never look back and think that. | ||
| Now, in terms of myself... | ||
| Seeing this, I mean, I think for anybody, it's painful. | ||
| I mean, how you process that level of death, that level of murder, that level of suffering, it's horrible stuff to see. | ||
| You can still have a lot of people... | ||
| Separated from that, you know, families, people are bringing up children. | ||
| And, you know, you want to separate, you know, kids from that. | ||
| So often, like, middle class kids in Mexico are quite sheltered. | ||
| Because families want to shelter them as much as they can from that violence. | ||
| And just, you know, not let them see that side of things. | ||
| How much of that do you have to deal with in Mexico City? | ||
| So Mexico City, you know, is about the same murder rate as Houston. | ||
| So Mexico City is not super violent. | ||
| Now it's still not super safe. | ||
| But it's not super violent. | ||
| So Mexico City is kind of... | ||
| And there are parts of Mexico which are fairly safe. | ||
| Now, the state of Yucatan, where Merida is, is the same murder level as Belgium. | ||
| So you've got oasis within Mexico where you don't have this level of violence. | ||
| So Mexico City is a great city. | ||
| Mexico City is a great city to live in, in many ways, apart from the traffic and the pollution and various things. | ||
| I mean, there's a bunch of things that are... | ||
| And I love all of Mexico and I love all of Latin America. | ||
| I love even the bad places I still love. | ||
| I enjoy going to these places. | ||
| I enjoy meeting people there and hanging out in these areas. | ||
| There's a lot of good things about them still. | ||
| But dealing with all the horrific tragedies that you report about and experience, do you look for an escape route? | ||
| I mean, are you looking to get the fuck out of Dodge? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's been different times where I... I've thought, you know, I want to stop this now and cover other things as a journalist. | ||
| And he's the other journalist doing that as well as a journalist called Jesus Esquivel, a great Mexican journalist who's just, I just saw him at the Trial of El Chapo over in New York, who's been covering this for years, one of the really great Mexican correspondents who's covered the drug stuff. | ||
| And he was like, he just said to me, oh, but I've got some stuff, maybe I can give you this. | ||
| This is the... | ||
| This is the last thing I'm going to do covering drugs now. | ||
| We'll see if that's true. | ||
| I think a lot of the time you get caught still doing this stuff. | ||
| Especially when you've covered something, people want more, people are interested. | ||
| And there's relevance to this. | ||
| I think some of the other struggles beyond the danger and stuff is simply with journalism in a bad way. | ||
| A lot of the media are in a bad way. | ||
| I'm a freelance journalist. | ||
| I love being a freelance journalist. | ||
| I love the independence. | ||
| I love being able to write books and travel and write magazine stories and make documentaries and do these things. | ||
| But having the economic base for that has degenerated a lot in the time that I've been doing it. | ||
| Have you personally been targeted at all? | ||
| There's a couple of situations I've had. | ||
| First, I'm going to have to give some Come respect and condolences to so many colleagues, Mexican colleagues, who have been murdered, threatened, had to leave the country and various things, and they've had it bad. | ||
| Including a friend, a good friend, a great colleague called Javier Valdez, who was shot dead In 2017, May 2017 in Kulikan. | ||
| A guy who I'd known since 2008. Great guy. | ||
| Got drunk with him in the cantina. | ||
| Very generous guy. | ||
| Wrote eight books. | ||
| A charismatic, I mean, you know, really lovely guy who was shot dead. | ||
| And many other stories. | ||
| So I kind of don't want to compare my own words to a lot of them in many ways. | ||
| But yeah, sure, there's been times. | ||
| There's one time in... | ||
| It was in a state called Michoacan. | ||
| And this was 2014. And there was a thing that happened there when a lot of regular people rose up with guns against the cartels. | ||
| They were known as out-of-defensers or like self-defense squads. | ||
| And they rose up to fight the cartels. | ||
| And a bunch of guys with guns. | ||
| There was this kind of crazy situation where there was this almost like a trench warfare happened between cartels and these self-defense groups. | ||
| And then what happened was a lot of regular gangsters started saying, oh, we're self-defense groups as well. | ||
| You know, just coming up saying, oh, yeah, we're self-defense groups. | ||
| You know, those guys are out on the street with guns. | ||
| You know, we're just going to go out with our guns. | ||
| So anyway, I went down, I drove down at the end of this. | ||
| I've been covering this right through and it had been fairly okay to do. | ||
| The self-defense squads, the outer defenses were pretty easy going to work with. | ||
| But I drove down there to Michoacan and I wanted to do some stuff on it. | ||
| And I was going to meet a friend on a journey. | ||
| She just backed out at the last minute. | ||
| I just went down there anyway. | ||
| And arrived there, and there was about 50 guys, arrived in this place near the city called Apatzingan. | ||
| And there was about 50 guys, who were supposedly a self-defense squad, in a parking lot, getting ready to go on a mission to try and take down this drug trafficker called La Tutta. | ||
| And they were sitting there. | ||
| There was a guy signing them up for this kind of mission. | ||
| And there was a bunch of guys. | ||
| They were... | ||
| And they had very heavy weaponry. | ||
| They had AK-47s, they had AR-15s, they had grenade launchers on the top of their guns and beneath their guns. | ||
| They had grenades strapped to them, like actually grenades on belts around them, ammunition belts around them. | ||
| I mean like crazy, you know, like you see old revolutionary stuff. | ||
| I mean like real crazy like desperado stuff. | ||
| And then... | ||
| I was talking to them and I realized quickly these were not self-defense guys. | ||
| These were narco. | ||
| These were gangsters. | ||
| They came out and they were like, how long have you been in the self-defense movement? | ||
| Oh, a couple of days. | ||
| And then they had guns with diamonds, jefe. | ||
| What does jefe stand for? | ||
| The boss. | ||
| And... | ||
| And I was kind of like joking with these guys and taking some photographs of them. | ||
| So they were posing for photographs. | ||
| So they were sitting there posing with their guns and stuff. | ||
| And they said the word huero is like, it's not really white boy, it's like blondie. | ||
| It can mean like, if you're white in Mexico, you often get called a huero. | ||
| So we're like, Wero, how much do prostitutes cost in your country? | ||
| I was like, I don't know, you'd have to go there and see. | ||
| And they're like, Wero, do you like taking meth? | ||
| Do you like taking meth? | ||
| You know, I'm okay. | ||
| And they were still like, you know, kind of joking. | ||
| And this guy came up among them and he said, to the other guys. | ||
| At first, there was a big guy. | ||
| And he said he was carrying a big gun. | ||
| He's got a really massive head. | ||
| And he said to me a bit aggressively, just don't take my photo. | ||
| I was like, yeah, no problem, I won't take your photo. | ||
| And then a guy came up and said to the other guy, he said, what are you doing? | ||
| It's a DEA guy here. | ||
| It's a DEA agent among you taking your photographs. | ||
| You know, what are you doing? | ||
| And I was like, I'm not even American, I'm British. | ||
| And he said, no, no, this is a DEA guy. | ||
| My brother was arrested in Texas and the DEA guy pretended to be a journalist. | ||
| That's some bullshit story. | ||
| And I said, look, I can show you my website. | ||
| So they got the cell phone out and looked through the cell phone and found my website. | ||
| And the guy calmed down a bit and he said, if I see you, I'm going to put a bullet in your head. | ||
| I'm going to throw a grenade at you. | ||
| He added. | ||
| So, I left. | ||
| I kind of tried to talk a bit. | ||
| I left. | ||
| And... | ||
| Yeah, and they went. | ||
| And then I didn't publish the photographs. | ||
| One of the guys sent me an email saying what happened to the photographs. | ||
| My email's on my website. | ||
| So I just ignored it. | ||
| And I think a lot of them got killed in a big fight they had with the federal police afterwards. | ||
| So that was one. | ||
| And there's been a few more. | ||
| So it's a lot of touch and go when you're in these situations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The federal police, do they have a plan to try to eradicate these mobs or is it a lot of lip service? | ||
| Is it really possible to eradicate these gangs or is it just one of those things where they say they're going to do something but they have to kind of protect themselves? | ||
| You know, there's been different times. | ||
| I mean, sometimes there's been the federal police have done well going after a particular guy or sometimes with the Americans. | ||
| You know, there's been... | ||
| You know, arrests of very many significant kingpins. | ||
| The problem is as well, or one of the deeper questions, is that, like, when you take down some of these kingpins, you've always got other people who will fight over their same territory. | ||
| So, for example, you know, you take out Chapo Guzman, and then you get a fight among his sons and one of his lieutenants over the empire. | ||
| Now what's happened and one of the reasons the violence has increased in Mexico is because they've had this onslaught attacking cartels. | ||
| Over the years. | ||
| Then you end up with like the lieutenants then taking over and then their lieutenants taking over and then their lieutenants taking over. | ||
| That's what happened in Chicago as well. | ||
| I spoke to a police officer in Chicago and he said the violence escalated afterwards some big gang arrests. | ||
| And once they had gotten some leaders of some gangs and other people tried to fill the void. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So then you get some of the people who are in power now. | ||
| Like very young, very violent people and people who are not as smart, not as mature. | ||
| Not calculated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also you end up, they're fragmented territories. | ||
| So you have people controlling, rather than having big cartels, some leader who controls half the country, you end up with these cartelitos, like these gangs controlling a part of a state. | ||
| Now there's one state called Guerrero, which you've seen this really like cartel fragmentation. | ||
| And you've got maybe 12 different groups in this one state. | ||
| And you get like a place where they, you know, one controls it up along a road and then another group controls it passing a certain point. | ||
| So there were some friends went up there. | ||
| Seven journalists went up there and got held up on this road up there. | ||
| 2017 as well. | ||
| And they were in a car going up there, two vehicles. | ||
| And about 200 guys blocked the road. | ||
| And the leader of this group was a guy I believe called El Huero Palaya. | ||
| Like again his name, Blondie Palaya. | ||
| And he's like maybe 23 years old. | ||
| Like 200 guys there. | ||
| They said some of the kids, I talked to one of the friends who was there. | ||
| And they said he saw kids who was young, like 10 years old among this mob of people. | ||
| And they held him up. | ||
| They took away one of the vehicles. | ||
| They took away all their laptops, cameras, all that equipment. | ||
| Stuck them in the car. | ||
| Said go. | ||
| Do you have to be careful when you're traveling that you don't have an obviously expensive laptop or camera or something along those lines? | ||
| I think from the point of view of it, they can take it away. | ||
| It's happened a lot of cases recently of colleagues just being robbed. | ||
| I mean, you get like an armed group and they'll take away their... | ||
| Basically, they'll hold them down, take all their stuff. | ||
| So you don't... | ||
| So I've got, you know, I know various colleagues, photographers. | ||
| If you're a freelance photographer and you lose a good camera, then, you know, like... | ||
| You know, some of the TV people, they have less expensive cameras than they used to. | ||
| I remember a few years ago, a TV group interviewed some gang members in Honduras and they stole their camera. | ||
| And at that time, it was like an $80,000 camera. | ||
| And the TV network, I don't want to say who it was, the TV network apparently was more pissed about losing the camera than it was about these guys getting held down and having guns pointed to them. | ||
| What is the attitude in Mexico, especially amongst people who are studying the narco wars, with all this build that wall stuff? | ||
| All this, what's going on in America, there's this very strange right versus left polarization over here about whether or not there should be a wall between the United States and Mexico. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, well, I mean, the thing where Mexicans are obviously very anti-Trump in Mexico is, you know, Trump is very unpopular from the very beginning, you know, when he said, you know, they are rapists. | ||
| And murders, yeah. | ||
| Someone's doing the raping, yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's kind of, you know, if you look at surveys, the level's very low. | ||
| Does anybody like Trump in Mexico? | ||
| There's always contrarians somewhere. | ||
| I mean, I've seen numbers like, you know, people say like, I don't know, 80% or something think he's terrible. | ||
| So it means there must be a 20% somewhere who don't. | ||
| I haven't met a Mexican who's been, like, pro-Trump. | ||
| I never have. | ||
| I met a Salvadoran who was pro-Trump one time, and he had a guy who'd been deported. | ||
| And he was like, you know, this guy Trump's going to turn out to be a great president. | ||
| So I see that. | ||
| But, no, Mexico's very, very anti-Trump. | ||
| In terms of the wall, I mean, in terms of what... | ||
| In terms of the smugglers, I was talking to a smuggler in Nogales about this. | ||
| And he was describing... | ||
| He was from Nogales, from a neighborhood called Buenos Aires, which is right on the border with the United States. | ||
| You know, it's Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona. | ||
| Sorry, Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona. | ||
| And he was from the neighborhood right on the border there. | ||
| And he described... | ||
| He first took people over the border of the United States back in the 1980s when he was at school. | ||
| He was at high school. | ||
| And the reason was that time it was just an old fence. | ||
| And there was a hole in the fence that used to go through into the United States and go back into Mexico, just an old wire fence. | ||
| And the first time he took people through, people would arrive from southern Mexico and say, you know, how do we get into the US? And he'd say, oh, you know, this way. | ||
| And they give him a tip. | ||
| He said the first time he got the equivalent of about 50 cents was what he made to take people into the United States. | ||
| 50 cents. | ||
| Nowadays, the cost of going into the U.S. is $5,000. | ||
| That's what you pay to go illegally into the United States, $5,000. | ||
| So we're saying, wow, look at that increase. | ||
| Every time that the U.S. puts more security, it means it's more expensive. | ||
| When it's more expensive, that means more money going to criminals, which means there's an industry doing it. | ||
| So now, The cartels make a big percentage of that money of human smuggling into the US. But in terms of the wall, when Trump first came in, he had the line that Mexico's going to pay for it. | ||
| And then there was this kind of line, right at the beginning, he threatened the Mexican president saying, if you don't agree to pay for the wall, then why are you going to come and meet me? | ||
| And then it was like, wow, he's really going to try and shake down Mexico for, like, billions of dollars. | ||
| He's really going to try and do that. | ||
| And that was a kind of scary moment then, I think from the point of view of Mexico. | ||
| When he first got to power, it was like, he's going to do that, and then he's going to deport three million, and he's going to kill NAFTA. Actually, those things haven't really come to pass. | ||
| Actually, if you look over the last couple of years of Trump, it hasn't really hit Mexico very hard. | ||
| So the concern was that he was going to take money that should be allocated to other ways that's going to help Mexico, and he was going to try to take that and use it to build the wall? | ||
| I mean, no one really knew. | ||
| When he first came in, he was like, Mexico's going to pay for this wall. | ||
| Right, the wall just got 10 foot higher. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Yeah, and it was like, how are you going to do that? | ||
| Are you going to start threatening Mexico militarily and say, give us money? | ||
| I mean, it was kind of like, is it a shakedown? | ||
| It was kind of a crazy diplomatic thing when he first got in. | ||
| So that was kind of scary for a moment from the point of view of Mexico. | ||
| But I think after you look at the last couple of years, he hasn't really hit Metzger with it. | ||
| Now, if he wants to build the wall, obviously there's the big fuss in terms of the spending here. | ||
| But if he wants to build it or extend it, because there is wall in sections of the border already. | ||
| If he wants to extend it, it won't stop a lot of the hard drugs. | ||
| I mean, if you look at heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, high-value drugs, they normally go through the ports of entry. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Shipping? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or through the ports of entry, through like, I mean, you have, in cars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Cars, trucks. | ||
| I mean, you go through, if you look at the Laredos, Laredo or Noble Laredo, One of the reasons that was a big fight and the war started there in Mexico is because that's a very valuable territory. | ||
| There's something like 8,000 trucks go over that border every day. | ||
| Now, if you have 8,000 trucks, how many of those can you search in a day? | ||
| And also the way they can hide this stuff in trucks, they can hide drugs in like a metal, they can put them in some kind of metal container, seal it up, solder it up, put a bunch of stuff so it doesn't smell. | ||
| So somebody has to say, I'm going to open that with a blowtorch, I'm not just searching, I have to rip that vehicle apart to find the drugs. | ||
| They were putting them inside wheels. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Inside tires and stuff, that's one of the older tricks from the 70s. | ||
| There's a song, one of the first Narco Corridos, the drug ballads. | ||
| It was called Contraband and Treason from the 1970s, and that was about hiding marijuana back in tires back then. | ||
| But yeah, the trap cars now are super sophisticated. | ||
| They have some weird trap cars where you have to do a bunch of stuff Like open the door, move some stuff to actually open and find the drugs. | ||
| Oh, there's like some trick sort of door that has to be activated. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine if there's a will, there's a way. | ||
| I mean, I remember hearing that from, I mean, it's not a reliable source, but from the Sopranos. | ||
| They were talking about only 20% of all the shipping containers that get brought into America get searched. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So the hard drugs are going a lot of time through the ports of entry. | ||
| And another classic trick they have is they allow some to get busted. | ||
| So you allow one guy to get busted. | ||
| They set somebody up. | ||
| So they're taking some drugs through. | ||
| They get busted. | ||
| All the energy is on them. | ||
| And then meanwhile, more drugs are going through. | ||
| And is this the United States border that's catching this guy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they're not getting tested in Mexico as they cross over, right? | ||
| It's only the United States border. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes they might catch him in Mexico. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| But the majority is going to be the United States. | ||
| Are the United States Border Patrol guys, are they ever caught being corrupt? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, yeah. | ||
| There's been cases of US Border Patrol and customs entry people who have been caught taking a bunch of money, taking bribes, allowing certain cars through. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Certain vehicles through, so yeah. | ||
| How does one fix this? | ||
| I mean, if you had a magic wand, you were going to wave it over Mexico and fix this problem. | ||
| Like if somebody said, Yohan, you're a smart guy. | ||
| You've been in the business for a long time. | ||
| We're going to let you dictate how this takes place. | ||
| So I'd say, yeah, three things. | ||
| So like drug policy reform. | ||
| So we've got to talk about how we deal with this drug situation. | ||
| So, I mean, some of that is here, isn't it? | ||
| And you've probably got a better idea than me about how to... | ||
| Why do Americans take so many drugs? | ||
| I mean, I come from a drug-taking community myself in the UK, I guess, so maybe it's not that different. | ||
| Well, I think there's a lot of answers to that. | ||
| The biggest one is entirely that most people don't enjoy what they do and they want an escape. | ||
| I think that's probably the biggest one. | ||
| There's some ridiculous number that was just... | ||
| Who's discussing the number on the podcast of how many people actually... | ||
| It was Johan Hari, wasn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was talking about the number of people that actually enjoy their job. | ||
| 67% of people in this country don't like what they do. | ||
| Or just sleepwalking through their life. | ||
| There's another significant percent that hate what they do. | ||
| And then there's a few left over that love what they do. | ||
| I mean, it's a very small number of people, maybe like myself or maybe like yourself, that actually enjoy what they do for a living and feel like they're following their passion. | ||
| Most people are just working a job and they fucking hate it. | ||
| And then when they get off work, they want to get fucked up. | ||
| And a lot of these people, you know, they have psychological issues, they're suffering from abuse, childhood abuse. | ||
| I mean, there's been some significant statistics about childhood abuse and how many people from childhood abuse wind up using drugs and becoming addicted and even overdosing on drugs, and it's ridiculously high. | ||
| It's about pain, pain and suffering, and trying to remove that pain and suffering from your life. | ||
| And, you know, people that don't know how to make healthy choices and don't have friends that are making healthy choices and don't know what to do with their life. | ||
| That's a big, big part of it. | ||
| There's another part of it because it's illegal. | ||
| There's something about things that are illegal that are intoxicating and enticing. | ||
| You know, when you look at the statistics in Holland in particular where marijuana has been, you know, you could buy it in coffee shops forever. | ||
| Not that many people smoke marijuana in Holland. | ||
| It's a lot of marijuana tourism, especially back in the day. | ||
| Now that America has legal marijuana almost everywhere, not a lot of people are going to Holland specifically to get fucked up. | ||
| But that was always the thing, man. | ||
| When we were younger, it was always like, hey, he's going to go to Holland. | ||
| Go get high. | ||
| I used to go there when I was a teenager. | ||
| I went over there for some of that on a boat and arrived in Amsterdam back in those days. | ||
| Actually, it made me smile what you were saying just there about enjoying the job. | ||
| And it's true. | ||
| I mean, when you said that, I do love what I do and enjoy what I do. | ||
| You can tell. | ||
| That's one of the sides to that thing. | ||
| But... | ||
| In terms of the issue of drugs, we have to talk about this. | ||
| How can Americans stop spending that money or allow that money, if it's going to be spent, not to be going to a black market and destabilizing these countries? | ||
| But also a lot of issues in Mexico as well. | ||
| Again, that social work. | ||
| How do you change the reality? | ||
| People who are abused and suffer taking drugs, but people who are abused and suffer In Latin America, becoming assassins. | ||
| Because one of the weird things on a moral level, on a level of morality, you know, I knew a lot of kids growing up who sold drugs. | ||
| And it wasn't really an amazing immoral thing to think about. | ||
| I sell drugs. | ||
| It was an easy step to take. | ||
| I'm going to sell some weed and then I'm going to sell some speed and sell some ecstasy and then later on heroin or whatever. | ||
| But for somebody to commit a murder, that seems like a lot bigger deal. | ||
| How do you cross that line to becoming a murderer? | ||
| How do they cross that line? | ||
| Well, I think it goes back to that young boy that you were talking about that butchered that family. | ||
| He was abandoned and angry and hurt and just so much pain that he's suffering. | ||
| That's often the case. | ||
| They want other people to suffer. | ||
| When you see people that are doing terrible things to people, they're almost always suffering. | ||
| They're almost always wanting other people to feel what they feel. | ||
| They're lashing out. | ||
| That social work aspect that you're discussing is so critical and something that we've discussed about this country, that how few people are putting, I mean, very few politicians, very few people that are running this country are putting efforts into trying to heal these communities that have suffered from Just years and years of systemic racism, | ||
| years and years of just embedded poverty that's almost impossible to escape, years and years of crime and drugs and just growing up in this community of despair. | ||
| This is what you were talking about with Baltimore. | ||
| This is what we're talking about with South Side of Chicago and various cities all over this country. | ||
| They don't get better, man. | ||
| They stay fucked up. | ||
| I had Michael Wood, who is a police officer from Baltimore, and he was discussing what it was like being in Baltimore as a police officer and then looking at some documents from the 1970s that detailed the crime in the very same areas that he was patrolling in, and the same crime in the and he was discussing what it was like being in Baltimore as a police officer and then looking at Just overwhelming futility. | ||
| There was nothing that he was going to be able to do that was going to put a dent in this. | ||
| A lot of it was a product of these areas in Baltimore where there was law that you were not allowed to sell homes to black people in these certain areas. | ||
| So they kept these people in these poor areas. | ||
| And even though they had this desire to escape into the more affluent or safer communities, they weren't allowed to for a long time. | ||
| I mean, there's so much of that in this country that, you know, the people that are in control, everybody just wants to get elected. | ||
| Everybody just wants to, you know, and then once they get elected, then they're looking to get reelected. | ||
| So they spend a gigantic percentage of their time campaigning. | ||
| There's no universal effort on the part of all the citizens of the country to try to look at all these areas and say, hey, this is us. | ||
| Just because you don't live in the south side of Chicago, those are human beings. | ||
| Those are just like you and I. You could have been them. | ||
| They could have been you. | ||
| If they were you and you were them, wouldn't you hope that you would help? | ||
| Wouldn't you hope that someone would come in and try to fix this area? | ||
| We pour so much money into foreign countries. | ||
| We pour so much money into subsidizing various industries that a lot of people disagree with. | ||
| I mean, I'm not an economist. | ||
| I don't know what economic sense any of that stuff makes, but I do know that money is allocated in a lot of different ways, and the idea is that it's going to be better for all of us. | ||
| Well, it's not better for all of us to keep these communities as fucked up as they are right now. | ||
| There's no effort. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Very little done. | ||
| No movement. | ||
| No change. | ||
| No gigantic step. | ||
| No 10-year plan to eradicate gang violence. | ||
| No 10-year plan to eradicate illegal drug sales and murder. | ||
| There are some great social workers down there. | ||
| There are some heroes in these places. | ||
| There's somebody I talk to a lot, based in Sierra Juarez, a woman called Sandra, who grew up in this neighborhood. | ||
| She was one of the first people who introduced me to young gang members in this area. | ||
| She used to work in a factory there, got into social work. | ||
| Now she's a psychologist. | ||
| And she's somebody who really will do the work and reach people and will save lives. | ||
| And some of the basic stuff you really get in the community and try and reach. | ||
| And you have to reach the kids. | ||
| When they're often 12, 11, 12. And you can often see in these areas who are the kids who are going to get into this, who are going to be recruited by the cartels, who are going to get to gangs, because there's certain profiles in these people. | ||
| They haven't got their families. | ||
| I was talking to some guys from the Barrio Azteca, which is one of the big gangs there. | ||
| It started in the U.S. actually among prisoners and spread into Mexico and became almost like a paramilitary group in Mexico. | ||
| About how they recruit people. | ||
| And this guy was saying, like, you know, we'll see, you know, I can see from these young kids who's going to be able to kill and, you know, who's going to be a real fighter and who's not. | ||
| And if these people have got, you know, parents who love them and so forth, these guys aren't going to, they're not going to work for me. | ||
| I need someone who's, like, got hate, who's got anger in them, and I can do something with one of those. | ||
| It's kind of a perverse... | ||
| Opposite of this stuff really, but so if people don't have that families and and this makes my guest think a bit more Sympathize I guess as well to you know the art the idea of how how important family is Yeah, how important loving parents is you know whether you're together or separately and loving parents, you know, having that. | ||
| But if you don't have that, you know, you need social work and need people who can offer something and try and... | ||
| Now, there was an interesting mayor of Medellin called Andres Guajardo, and he had these ideas of trying to change the reality of the city. | ||
| And he said, I'm going to build the most... | ||
| He said, he was a mathematician. | ||
| So I'm going to see this as a mathematical problem, this issue. | ||
| And I'm going to build the most beautiful building in the ugliest part of the city, in the worst part of the city, to make and force people who want to... | ||
| See, we made a conservatory and put it in the poorest neighbourhood. | ||
| So that people who want to be in this conservatory have to travel to the poorest neighbourhood and go there and try and change the reality. | ||
| Because if you see around you a horrible neighbourhood, a dirt street, no light, nothing working, what do you turn into? | ||
| And if you see a nice environment around you, can you change people that way? | ||
| Wow, how did it work? | ||
| You know, it worked for a while. | ||
| It's hard to know exactly because also there was a truce between some of the gangsters there as well for a while. | ||
| Was it related to the construction of the conservatory? | ||
| I don't know if the government was involved in the truce or not, but there was for a time the murder rate did drop quite dramatically in Medellin. | ||
| I don't know if people have carried on, but Medellin has improved. | ||
| I mean, Medellin, Colombia was the worst, the most violent city in the world back in the 1990s, and it's not, you know, people do like their city now in Medellin. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it had some impact. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, yeah. | ||
| And the social workers, I'm sure they have some impact on individual people, but I would imagine that the overwhelming volume of children that are being recruited, that it's very hard to put a real dent in it. | ||
| But I think in Ciudad Juarez it had an effect because when that was the most violent city in the world, around 2010-2011, and there was this turf war there between the Sinaloa cartel, which was Chapo Guzman, against a local Juarez cartel. | ||
| And there was 9,000 killed in that city over four years of that war. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| I was covering it there and just driving around from scene to scene. | ||
| It'd be like, massacre here, massacre there, just driving around. | ||
| Bang, bang, this thing's happening. | ||
| And afterwards, there was a lot of social work put into the city. | ||
| And Sandra described right then, she said there's a waterfall of aid money coming in. | ||
| There was like USAID and stuff would start putting money into this and other different groups. | ||
| And the murder rate did really drop. | ||
| So, and it hasn't gone back up to that level since. | ||
| So I think it does have a real effect when it's put as a policy. | ||
| You know, it does have an effect on these things. | ||
| But also, when you talked a little while ago about a magic wand on this, I mean, in making a police force that actually protects the community, or making a police force that has some kind of effect. | ||
| I mean, I grew up in England, which is, you know, a pretty safe place, relatively, and I used to not like police and, you know, hate being anti-police or whatever growing up. | ||
| And now I appreciate, wow, you know, you have police who actually protect the community in some way. | ||
| And the same in the United States. | ||
| I mean, in the United States, the police do protect people to a large extent compared to these countries. | ||
| And, you know, obviously there's issues here. | ||
| There's an issue with racism and killing and violence and so forth. | ||
| But still, I think a lot of the people who believe that they're, you know, a lot of people believe they have guns for self-defense. | ||
| And I respect the right to have guns for self-defense. | ||
| But really in America you're generally safe because the police are pretty hard on clamping down. | ||
| But how do you create a police force which really has the will to protect people? | ||
| How do you have that with the word and the passion and the commitment to help people in Mexico? | ||
| That would be a dream. | ||
| The people that have dealt with police officers that are corrupt have a very difficult time hearing what you're saying, right? | ||
| Those people would be angry at what you're saying, saying, no, no, no, the police officers here are corrupt, they are bad, there is racism, there are real problems. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there is but I think there's also a real problem being a police officer period I think police officers have an insanely difficult job and I think most of them are dealing with PTSD I think there's a giant percentage of them like all over the world and in America too that are constantly dealing with violence and the threat of violence and arresting criminals and being shot at and People lying to them. | ||
| I just don't think I think most people are very ill-equipped to handle something like that. | ||
| I mean, I agree there are definitely problems with the police, and there are problems. | ||
| I mean, the police shootings are very real problems. | ||
| Police killing innocent people here is very real. | ||
| And you've always got to look for improvement. | ||
| And you know there's people, families again, suffering from that violence. | ||
| I don't want to belittle their story. | ||
| No, you're not. | ||
| I know you're not. | ||
| I just have to sort of clarify because I know so many people will be hearing this and going, yeah, Mexico's terrible, but the United States, there's a ton of videos. | ||
| The real issue though is we're also dealing with the sheer number of interactions that police have with people. | ||
| The vast majority of them are fine. | ||
| Yeah, but I was going to say on the other thing, like, say the crime of kidnapping. | ||
| Kidnapping is a horrific antisocial crime. | ||
| I mean, a horrific crime that destroys lives. | ||
| There's one video, a video which really made me sick, which was given to a family of a kid, like a 14-year-old kid, who was taken and they sent this video to his family in Mexico. | ||
| And they were beating this kid and saying to this kid, you know, this is... | ||
| And the guy was saying to the camera, this is your fault, you bitch, to the mum. | ||
| This is your fault. | ||
| Look how your kid's getting beaten. | ||
| Now you're going to give me the money. | ||
| So I was asking for like, what was it, $300,000. | ||
| And those kind of crimes and kidnapping doesn't happen in the United States on a very big level because you've got effective law enforcement. | ||
| I was at one conference and there was a real nice guy, but there was people calling for the abolition of the police and there shouldn't be a police force. | ||
| So you really want to live like with no police. | ||
| You really want to live with a dysfunctional police where they can just kidnap your kid and like send a video to you like that and you've got no protection from that kind of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean there's definitely problems here but also you've got to see the other side of having a completely dysfunctional police. | ||
| There's just such a staggering difference between the United States and Mexico in that regard, in regard to gang violence, drug violence, just overall murders and the stories that we hear from over there. | ||
| It's so different. | ||
| The fact that you could just draw a little line in the dirt. | ||
| You cross that line, you're in hell. | ||
| And then you cross this line, you're in Houston. | ||
| I mean, that's fucking crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, again, I mean... | ||
| I get criticized sometimes from, you know, sometimes Mexican government sources or Mexican tourism sources, you know, like I'm covering this stuff, so I'm showing the worst. | ||
| And it can give a distorted picture sometimes because, you know, when I tell a story of 49 decapitated bodies with their hands and feet cut off, people think, wow, you know, as soon as you say this stuff and some guy describing decapitating people, this kind of does... | ||
| You know, knock people out. | ||
| So I do want to say, as well as that, it still is a great country. | ||
| I still... | ||
| I love the United States, but I probably love Mexico more. | ||
| What do you love more about Mexico besides the food? | ||
| I would say generally the atmosphere is good. | ||
| I just feel people are nice, generally, despite all of this horrific violence. | ||
| Do you think it's because they don't have the same sort of ruthless ambition that people in the United States have? | ||
| I think there is a sense... | ||
| We were talking before about why people are into drugs. | ||
| And one thing that occurred to me is this kind of hyper-competitiveness of society. | ||
| And people can feel like failures. | ||
| Like if you feel like a failure, if you feel like, I guess maybe social media has affected this as well because you see what people have and you expect you to have more. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you feel you haven't lived up to it. | ||
| I think in Mexico people, you know, if you're broke in the United States, you can often maybe feel like a personal failure. | ||
| How come you're living in America and you're broke? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whereas in Mexico, lots of people are broke. | ||
| So you don't feel that same kind of personal failure with that. | ||
| When I'm there, one thing that always strikes me is how happy people seem. | ||
| And that I think there's a certain stress level that a lot of Americans put themselves into where they're constantly pursuing material possessions, material wealth and success. | ||
| And that oftentimes this leads to... | ||
| Really exacerbated stress levels, and it doesn't make you happy. | ||
| The whole idea of having things in our mind is, someday, if I buy this car, I'll be happy. | ||
| If I live in this neighborhood, I'll be happy. | ||
| So they work 12 hours a day to try to achieve that dream, and they're never happy. | ||
| And they're always stressed out. | ||
| The vast majority of the United States, I mean, there's some insane number, like 34, if you make more than $35,000 a year, you are in the top 1% of the world. | ||
| So, there's a giant percentage of this country that's in the top 1% of the world, yet the overall happiness level, at least from what I've read, is quite a bit below the people in Mexico. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, yeah, a lot of these things, I mean, how do you see your own happiness or measure your own happiness or sense of success or failure? | ||
| So yeah, so that's part of it. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yeah, and the food is great. | ||
| The food is amazing. | ||
| I'm a giant fan of Mexican food. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| There's a place down here that I take the guys here that work here all the time. | ||
| It is as Mexican as you get. | ||
| No one speaks English there. | ||
| They have Mexican soap operas playing on the television, and the food is just sensational. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So some of these things as well as that. | ||
| But before you talk about this border between Mexico and the U.S., yeah, it's a huge... | ||
| It's that vast difference between countries and cultures. | ||
| And the interaction. | ||
| Another issue, I guess, is the issue of guns going south. | ||
| And we talked about how the drugs come up. | ||
| We've also got a lot of firearms. | ||
| A lot of firearms. | ||
| Like that Fast and Furious deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Eric Holder thing that went down years ago where they sold, it was some sort of a sting, and they sold guns, and those guns wound up being used to kill Americans and even American police officers. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that was, so the ATF, I'm going after this, and there's, I mean, the number of guns, no one's really sure how many guns are going down, but there was one study. | ||
| That came to the conclusion that over 200,000 guns every year go from the United States into Mexico. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's an insane number. | ||
| 200,000 guns. | ||
| And I interviewed a guy in prison in Ciudad Juarez for gun trafficking. | ||
| And he would drive every weekend from Mexico up to the United States by like 10 to 15, mostly AR-15s, some other guns as well, and drive them down into Mexico. | ||
| And it's pretty easy to get into Mexico. | ||
| So you drive them in, it's like a piece of piss. | ||
| It's very easy. | ||
| Basically, most of the time, you've got no control. | ||
| Now, he would actually hide them... | ||
| In fridges and in stoves and would pay an import tax for the fridges and stoves. | ||
| But he was buying them and he said to himself, how did you buy the guns? | ||
| He said, I would have no idea. | ||
| So what idea did you show to buy your guns? | ||
| He said, nothing at all. | ||
| He said, no idea whatsoever. | ||
| He said, no, nothing at all. | ||
| So did you buy them from gun shows? | ||
| So he'd buy them from gun shows. | ||
| But then what he would do was he would use the private sale loophole. | ||
| Which they're trying to close now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So he would go in there and then I went to a gun show in Mesquite in the greater Dallas area, known as the Gun Show Capital of America. | ||
| And went to a gun show there and asked people, can you sell me guns? | ||
| I don't live here, can you sell me guns? | ||
| And first they said, no, you need to be a tax resident. | ||
| Someone said, oh yeah, sure, I can sell you these guns. | ||
| The reason they get out is they say it's a private sale. | ||
| However, some of them, and I know some of the pro-gun people get angry talking about this, but I saw this with my own eyes. | ||
| They've got a whole bunch of boxed up AR-15 rifles and they're selling them as being private sellers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, so he was just simply buying these guns and taking them down. | ||
| I saw right in front of me as well, somebody who said to the person, I can't buy, was looking for a different gun and said, no, I can't buy it. | ||
| I can't use ID to buy the gun. | ||
| And the person, you know, is still happy. | ||
| Like, even the private sale loophole, if you, in theory, if you suspect the person is a criminal, or we use them for criminal purposes, you shouldn't sell them a gun. | ||
| But they don't care. | ||
| And so one thing, I mean, you really want, do people really want people who, they could be MS-13, undocumented, they can still walk in and buy guns in some of these places. | ||
| But then, yeah. | ||
| So that's a big issue as well. | ||
| Yeah, those gun shows are pretty bizarre. | ||
| You're walking around with a bunch of people just itching to shoot somebody. | ||
| They're just hoping somebody breaks in their house. | ||
| I know a guy who keeps a gun on his ankle at all times. | ||
| He keeps one on his back. | ||
| He's got a holster that he carries with him sometimes. | ||
| He carries a knife as well. | ||
| I mean, he's literally begging for someone to fuck with him. | ||
| I mean, I've got no problem with the people who like... | ||
| I talked to a guy from the Alaska Machine Gun Association. | ||
| He has about 200 guns in his basement. | ||
| 200 guns. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| And I don't have a problem with people doing that. | ||
| But then there's still like, how do you stop... | ||
| The guns go into criminals. | ||
| The criminals in Baltimore. | ||
| I also interviewed in Baltimore a gun trafficker who was taking guns into the city of Baltimore. | ||
| Yeah, the gun show loophole is very strange. | ||
| It's very strange that that's allowed. | ||
| And this is coming from someone, me personally, who owns guns. | ||
| And I believe in the Second Amendment. | ||
| I don't think that the way to stop people from doing illegal activities is to make those activities illegal for people who don't do anything illegal. | ||
| I think the real issue is the psychology behind people that are willing to shoot people in the first place and to deal with the overall mentality of these human beings and try to figure out what's wrong with our society. | ||
| Cure it at a base level, at a human level. | ||
| That's what's really wrong. | ||
| It's not the inanimate object of a gun that's the problem. | ||
| It's the human beings that are willing to use these guns to commit horrific acts. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| But when you have something like drug cartels, which exists, or gangs, which exists, and then you have this thing called a gun show, and then you have this gun show loophole, well, boy, you got a fucking giant hole in your dam. | ||
| You got water pouring right through right there. | ||
| How do you not fix that up? | ||
| If you are a person who believes in the Second Amendment and you believe in legal and responsible gun use, you should be angry at that. | ||
| Because that represents a gigantic problem. | ||
| And that also represents a threat to legal gun ownership. | ||
| Because if this keeps happening and people keep getting outraged and more mass shootings happen with illegally acquired guns, after a while, it's going to come to some sort of a real conflict with people. | ||
| Yeah, I'm actually doing a new book about gun trafficking. | ||
| So I'm really interested to hear about these issues and what the actual room for compromise is. | ||
| Or like someone like yourself who believes in the Second Amendment, how much room for compromise do you think there is on these issues? | ||
| I mean, like closing the gun show loophole. | ||
| The other thing, like for example, the issue of 50 cals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, 50 cals in Mexico, the cartels use 50 cals. | ||
| They use them to set up ambushes. | ||
| They use them to hit military vehicles, police vehicles. | ||
| So they sit on the side of a mountain and they have 50 cals and go bang, bang and go right through. | ||
| They're like baseball-sized bullets. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Not quite that big, but they're big-ass bullets. | ||
| Now, I understand a lot of these Mets, police and military are corrupt as well, but you know, if you are an honest one or whatever, you're going in a car and you start getting hit by one of those going into your vehicle, then they open up on you. | ||
| So is there any room there, do you think, for like, clamping down on 50 cows? | ||
| I've never heard that discussion that much. | ||
| I have a friend who has one, Anthony Cumier. | ||
| He's got a.50 caliber. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, the idea that you're using that for self-defense, unless you're going to war with Russia or fighting against some gang, cartel gang that's invading your city, that seems, that's a military weapon. | ||
| I mean, it's the same argument, I think, for having a fighter jet with Hellfire missiles. | ||
| Do I think you should be able to own a Cessna and fly a little plane around? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do I think you should be able to own a jet? | ||
| Well, I mean, there are a lot of rich folks with private jets. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do I think you should be able to own a fighter jet that goes the speed of sound? | ||
| Oh, I mean, it's just a faster jet, right? | ||
| Yeah, okay, okay. | ||
| Do you think you should be able to own a fighter jet with.50 caliber guns strapped to it? | ||
| Oh, well, what the fuck is that? | ||
| Are you starting a war? | ||
| Like, what are you doing? | ||
| There's like these levels that things get to, you know? | ||
| That's the argument against automatic weapons. | ||
| Like, you can't use automatic – like, certain states have regulations in terms of what you can – in California, you can't even have a silencer. | ||
| I don't know why, because it's very bad to have that loud bang of a gun. | ||
| It's terrible for your ears. | ||
| And if you're a hunter or someone who likes to shoot target practice or something, that's a terrible thing for your ears. | ||
| And there's a suppressor that they could put on the end of the barrel and it'll mitigate that. | ||
| But for whatever reason, I think mostly because of films and public perception, people think that those silencers are only used by assassins or something like that. | ||
| You're using to kill people. | ||
| So they convert the semi-automatics from the States. | ||
| In Mexico, they convert them to fully automatics. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They do that here, too. | ||
| And then, of course, you know about bump stocks, which makes it much more free with the trigger, much easier to fire rapidly, rather. | ||
| So how do you feel about the issue? | ||
| You know, one of the issues is of having a database, like the ATF, or they're not allowed to have a searchable database. | ||
| On guns in the United States. | ||
| So they have like paper files and stuff they go through still. | ||
| They can't have like a digital database on guns. | ||
| That seems ridiculous, doesn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I guess the gun lobby see the idea of a gun registry as being a step to taking away their guns because like once you start registering, then you can go then afterwards and say, well, we know where the guns are or whatever. | ||
| But how do you think there's flexibility on that issue of like the gun... | ||
| I like having searchable databases. | ||
| I mean, like with a car, like you have a license plate, and if there's a hit and run, you just type it in and you know whose car it is within seconds. | ||
| With gun tracing, you can't, you know, you find a gun at a crime scene, whatever, you can't just put a button and go, bang, that's whose it is. | ||
| They have to go through a whole formal trace and go through this kind of search. | ||
| So you think there's flexibility on that issue as well, or how do you feel about that yourself? | ||
| Well, I myself feel there should be a traceable database. | ||
| I mean, it's just like a car, and I'm glad you brought up that analogy, because when you get a car, you have to know how to drive a car. | ||
| In order to have a license to drive a car, you have to take a test. | ||
| You have to take a written test, and you have to take a physical driving test with an instructor. | ||
| They have to – and think about how many more people drive cars than own guns. | ||
| So it's possible to do this with guns, yet it's not done. | ||
| When I bought my first gun, they're like, here you go. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| Like, that's it? | ||
| Like, yeah, you're not a criminal. | ||
| Look, we did a check on you. | ||
| You're not a criminal. | ||
| Here's a gun. | ||
| I bought a pistol. | ||
| I bought a .38 revolver. | ||
| That was my first gun. | ||
| And I went to the gun range and practiced with the gun, and I read about how to do it, and I talked to an instructor about safety and put goggles on and earmuffs and make sure you're protected and how to properly hold the gun while you shoot it and all these different things. | ||
| But it's stunning to me that you don't have to do that. | ||
| I mean, you can own 150 guns and know how to operate zero of them, and they're all yours. | ||
| You don't even have to prove you know what the fucking safety is. | ||
| You don't have to prove you know anything. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I mean, I admit it's fun to shoot guns. | ||
| And since I've been doing research for this new book, I've been shooting a few guns in places. | ||
| I went over to Serbia. | ||
| And I arrived in Serbia on a hangover. | ||
| I'd seen my friends in the UK and got drunk with them. | ||
| I arrived on a hangover and I'd met the contact there and said I wanted to go to a gun club. | ||
| And he took me into a nuclear bunker and fired an AK-47. | ||
| Just came off the plane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And it was like, wow, they had a crazy amount of guns there. | ||
| So I can see it's fun to fire these things. | ||
| Do you think they actually are good in self-defense? | ||
| I mean, do you actually think, I mean, I don't, in Mexico I don't have guns. | ||
| I wouldn't, when I travel in the field, I won't go with security. | ||
| Generally, security is going to be more of a hindrance. | ||
| They attract attention. | ||
| Yeah, attract attention. | ||
| And they've got to go basically with my hands up and say, look, this is me, this is what I'm doing. | ||
| Most of the situations there, you've got to have a lot of people with heavy guns. | ||
| You're not going to outgun these guys. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In Central America, it was a bit different. | ||
| In Honduras, I was with guys with guns there, not out of choice of choosing security because the journalist himself was carrying a gun. | ||
| And had friends carrying guns. | ||
| And he was carrying a mini Uzi. | ||
| He was driving with this journalist friend of mine, Orlean Castro, his name is. | ||
| Great, great journalist. | ||
| He was driving around and he had a mini Uzi. | ||
| On his lap as he was driving around to crime scenes and running around doing stuff. | ||
| But do you think guns are actually effective for self-defense? | ||
| I mean, do you have guns for self-defense and believe in that or simply just enjoy the sport of shooting guns? | ||
| Well, I hunt and one of the things I have used, although I archery hunt now, most of the hunts I go on when I go to these places to bow hunt Specifically. | ||
| But I have rifles for hunting. | ||
| I have handguns for self-defense. | ||
| And it depends entirely on the situation. | ||
| That's like saying, do you think cars are effective to get you where you want to go? | ||
| Well, they are effective if you drive carefully and you use the blinkers and look when you change lanes and make sure you observe the speed limit and all the different laws and Are aware and don't crash into anybody. | ||
| But if you're an asshole, no, they're not effective. | ||
| You're going to wind up dying in a car accident. | ||
| You're going to flip your car over on the side of the road. | ||
| If you're in a terrible situation, it is better to have a gun than to not have a gun if you know how to use it. | ||
| If someone's breaking into your house, there is countless stories of people protecting their families from bad guys when they have guns. | ||
| These are real stories. | ||
| They do exist. | ||
| There are people that I've talked to. | ||
| You can find them. | ||
| There's countless stories. | ||
| There's also countless stories of people leaving their guns unlocked and a child gets a hold of it and kills himself accidentally. | ||
| There's stories of children accidentally killing their mothers. | ||
| There's all those stories, too. | ||
| So, can a gun be effective in self-defense? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That's why the military used them. | ||
| That's why police officers used them. | ||
| That's why people train and they go to the range and they take tactical courses to learn how to use a gun for self-defense. | ||
| Absolutely, a gun can be used for self-defense. | ||
| It's the best thing, the best tool for self-defense. | ||
| Other than, you know, obviously living in a good neighborhood, having a... | ||
| Security alarm, all these different steps. | ||
| A dog. | ||
| Dogs are good. | ||
| Especially a dog that's a trained dog. | ||
| But, yeah, guns absolutely can protect you. | ||
| If you're in a situation and someone breaks in your house and you shoot that person dead, you're safer than that person killing you. | ||
| That has happened. | ||
| But this is a gross generalization that's entirely dependent upon the situation that you find yourself in. | ||
| But if you're not protected... | ||
| If you don't understand how to use it, if you're not trained, if you don't have training to keep your shit together when things go south, because when you're in a situation and your life is in danger, if you've never been in a high pressure situation before, How do you know you can keep it together and even hit something you're aiming at? | ||
| People have wild trigger panic. | ||
| And they have a really hard time dealing with life or death situations if they haven't served in the military or been in some very, very high-stress situations where you have to learn how to control yourself under extreme pressure conditions. | ||
| There's a lot of factors there. | ||
| But I would say the same thing as, like, You would also say that with martial arts. | ||
| Like, can you defend yourself if you know martial arts? | ||
| Well, it depends on what you know. | ||
| I mean, some martial arts are fucking horse shit. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there practicing nonsense, and if someone who actually knew how to fight just punched them in the face, they would be doomed. | ||
| And then there's other people out there that are experts, that would be very calm if someone tried to fight them, and they would know what to do and what not to do, and if the person wasn't armed, they would be able to easily dispatch them. | ||
| It really is dependent upon the situation, how much effort you've put into it, how much thought you've put into it. | ||
| But there's a lot of people out there that if you broke into their house, you're making a huge mistake because they're trained and prepared and ready because they don't want to be a victim. | ||
| And it doesn't mean they're bad people. | ||
| And I think we have a problem in this country where we look at things. | ||
| They're very binary. | ||
| They're one or zero. | ||
| They're good or bad. | ||
| Guns are bad. | ||
| Guns are always bad. | ||
| I don't want a gun. | ||
| Bad guys take your guns sometimes. | ||
| Sure, sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes you kill the bad guy and you protect your family, though, too. | ||
| That's real, too. | ||
| Yeah, no, I have respect for people having guns for self-defense. | ||
| When we're talking about shooting, I've been around a few shootouts in Latin America and over in Haiti. | ||
| And one thing about that from a journalist's point of view and being around, and I've been seeing a lot of violence as well, a lot of people fighting, even going back to England, people having physical fights or with knives and that kind of thing. | ||
| So one of the differences, I think, with guns is, and it's funny, you can't see bullets in, It's not like a small thing, but you can't see the thing that's hurting you. | ||
| When you see a guy with a knife, it's like the guy's scary. | ||
| You can see, you can imagine that knife sticking into you. | ||
| But the gun, it's like you're seeing the object. | ||
| You can't see really the bullet going in. | ||
| So one of the times I was in Haiti, and I went there to cover the earthquake in 2010, which was real sad, like crazy amount of dead there. | ||
| And we were covering the looting afterwards. | ||
| And the police came and started firing right into where people were looting. | ||
| And I was with a cameraman. | ||
| And the police were firing, bang, bang. | ||
| And during the same situation, not right in that scene there, but in another scene, they shot and killed somebody. | ||
| The police just firing at the looters. | ||
| And all the looters started running. | ||
| When the police were firing, they were firing... | ||
| How high were they firing? | ||
| But they were firing, you know, bang, firing these police down. | ||
| And the cameraman I was with was just sat there and he was, like, filming this. | ||
| And I think this is one of the problems that why a lot of cameramen get shot in these places. | ||
| You start to feel like you're watching it on TV. Oh, wow. | ||
| Because you feel like, you know, you're sitting there listening, wow, this is amazing. | ||
| Look at what I'm watching. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're seeing this. | ||
| And I was saying, run, we've got to go. | ||
| Like, they're firing. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| Who wants to get the shot? | ||
| We've got to go. | ||
| There's another sad thing of a guy filming, an American journalist called Bradley Rowland Will, rest in peace, who was killed in Mexico back in 2006. And he was filming a shooting in the state of Oaxaca. | ||
| And he filmed these guys shooting, and he fell and was hit, and it carried on filming. | ||
| So he literally filmed his own death. | ||
| I mean, you can literally see there. | ||
| Yeah, I was working for a news agency that day when he was killed then. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of courageous camera people, and they get locked into that job, and it becomes normalized, almost like you were saying, the people that live in these war-torn areas, it becomes a normal way of life to them. | ||
| And although there are a lot of murders, if you're there on a daily basis, it seems almost like a regular life. | ||
| A lot of these cameramen, I mean, they're courageous people. | ||
| You see these guys who go over to war zones and film what's going on in Afghanistan, and I've met some of these guys. | ||
| It's a crazy way of life to just accept the fact that you're an observer that might be a victim and you're capturing all this so people like me can get some semblance of a perception to what's going on in that part of the world. | ||
| I went over to the Philippines, Southern Philippines, and saw the fight against the Islamic State there in the end of 2017. And it was interesting seeing that compared to the violence I cover normally in Mexico. | ||
| So that was ISIS. They took over a city called Marawi. | ||
| And it was an area, they called it, it was interesting, it was more self-contained. | ||
| They had an area called the Main Battle Area, the NBA, the Main Battle Area. | ||
| So in that area was ISIS and the Philippine Army just gung at it all the time, just like a constant bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. | ||
| And planes gung over and bombing. | ||
| But actually, even when you're outside that main area, even if you're, you know, we were just outside it, and even if you're like 600 metres or 600 metres from it, but you're not in the fight, and the fighting is over there. | ||
| Whereas in something like Mexico, South America, a lot of times this fighting is kind of happening everywhere. | ||
| There's no real control over where the main battle area is. | ||
| But they didn't really let any journalists inside, like deep into the main battle area. | ||
| They didn't really let any journalists in. | ||
| We're sitting outside and hearing this constant ricochet of gunfire. | ||
| But sometimes bullets will come out of the area. | ||
| So there was an Australian guy and I think he bent over to pick up some cookies and a bullet hit him in the neck. | ||
| I saw the x-ray, actually, of the bullet embedded in the side of his neck. | ||
| And actually, it was taken out. | ||
| So it must have been at the end of its terminal velocity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so it must have been a far, far, far shot. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or it went through something else before it hit him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So he maybe didn't go in too fast. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So it was kind of a... | ||
| He's okay? | ||
| Yeah, I think he was okay. | ||
| He's okay with it. | ||
| Boy, that guy's lucky. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get shot in the neck and you're okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, in terms of some of the people who've really been in... | ||
| One of the guys, one of the police special force guys had a camera on his helmet. | ||
| And he showed me that footage. | ||
| And he was right there, right inside there, going there like really, really close buildings, fighting with these Islamic, ISIS people. | ||
| And it was the same techniques. | ||
| I talked to the general and he had a big chart showing how the techniques of guerrilla warfare had evolved from like Fallujah, Aleppo, Mosul, and how this kind of weird new form of guerrilla warfare they have of like fighting house to house. | ||
| So basically it's suicidal kind of guerrilla war. | ||
| They rise up. | ||
| And they'll be like, you know, super close, fighting really close. | ||
| And then when they're born, they hide in like, you know, basements and stuff. | ||
| And they drill holes in the walls so they can fire through and fire through. | ||
| And the footage he had, he showed me the footage he had from being like right inside, close up, like running literally in the room, bang, taking these people out. | ||
| And it was like, wow, this is just crazy. | ||
| I was trying to persuade the guy to let me put that footage out there You know, it looked like a kind of crazy video game kind of Call of Warfare Sorry, Call of Warfare is that what it's called? | ||
| Call of Duty Call of Duty, yeah Call of Duty, yeah I mean, Mexico right now is almost like a war I mean, you can call it a drug war, but because it's not like an army versus army war, we don't think about it that way, but In terms of the amount of violence that goes on over there and the amount of casualties, it rivals anything that's going on in the world right now. | ||
| Yeah, so I've been talking a lot about this over the years and with some experts. | ||
| There's a good writer called Robert Bunker who's an external researcher for the Pentagon and he investigates this stuff. | ||
| There's a guy called John Sullivan from here in California who's a police officer who also did a bunch of research and got a doctorate in studying a lot of this stuff as well. | ||
| Talk to them about their ideas about what this means. | ||
| How can you define this in terms of warfare? | ||
| How does it fit in? | ||
| And they directed me to one book by an Israeli historian called The Transformation of War. | ||
| And this was written back in the early 1990s. | ||
| And he basically predicted then you're going to see a transformation in war, an armed conflict around the world. | ||
| And, you know, we have like nuclear weapons, but they're useless in these situations. | ||
| Nuclear weapons, you can't use a nuclear weapon to solve the problem in Mexico. | ||
| You can't use a nuclear weapon to deal with the Islamic State. | ||
| You know, these are internal insurgencies in countries. | ||
| So if you look at Mexico, it's a kind of weird hybrid. | ||
| So between crime and war. | ||
| So I use the word crime wars in some of these places. | ||
| El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, where you have... | ||
| I mean, there are some situations in Mexico where, you know, there was a group called the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. | ||
| Some of their guys shot down a military helicopter using an RPG-7. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And they killed eight soldiers and a federal policeman in that helicopter. | ||
| There was one shootout which involved 2,000 federal police and 500 soldiers. | ||
| It's like 500 cartel hitmen had this crazy battle in Michoacan. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So sometimes you actually get, it actually starts to look more like a kind of regular conflict, but generally it's all, you know, way more kind of hybrid. | ||
| So it's kind of weird mix. | ||
| And so I was trying to get my head around this for a long time. | ||
| For some years I was trying to think, is this a civil war? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Should we look at this? | ||
| And then it becomes, okay, this. | ||
| And then it was, you know, Robert Bunker when I talked to him one time and he said, You know, like, this doesn't fit into these theories. | ||
| You know, it's not quite war. | ||
| It's more than crime. | ||
| It's a weird hybrid in between. | ||
| It's a kind of crime-war, and that's the way you've got to understand these things. | ||
| But a lot of the conflicts around the world today, these are spreading. | ||
| I mean, you look at Somalia, you look at Libya, you look at a lot of these places, the kind of weird mix, instability. | ||
| And then this is what a lot of refugees are fleeing from. | ||
| And I was down in Tijuana at Christmas. | ||
| I followed the migrant caravan that came through Mexico of Central Americans, you know, which caused a big storm here that Trump kind of hit before the election. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| Was that overblown? | ||
| I think it was a big deal. | ||
| Was it a publicity event? | ||
| Like, is that why they were doing it and making it such a big deal and everybody's walking towards the border? | ||
| Like... | ||
| There's a bit more than that. | ||
| I think there was... | ||
| These caravans had started a few years ago, and they started off in Mexico for security. | ||
| There was an issue back a few years ago where the cartels would kidnap migrants en masse. | ||
| They would just get loads of migrants. | ||
| Now, you think these people are poor, how can they make money from them? | ||
| But they'd get them, put them in camps, and they know they have family in the United States. | ||
| So they say, okay, we've got 50 people in a camp. | ||
| We want $5,000 off each one of you, off your family. | ||
| Like, give us a number. | ||
| We're going to call your family. | ||
| Okay, send us the money down. | ||
| And then sometimes they'd agree on, okay, $2,000. | ||
| So it sounds like you're making money out of poor people, but you do it en masse. | ||
| You do it 10,000 people, and you get a couple of thousand dollars each. | ||
| That's like $20,000, $200 million. | ||
| So they started doing caravans for strength to avoid these mass kidnappings. | ||
| What was different about the latest caravan, they actually became a caravan crossing borders. | ||
| They used to be going through parts of Mexico together. | ||
| Then they started crossing borders. | ||
| Now the caravan began in October, around October 12th. | ||
| And there was a call for them to meet. | ||
| And my friend Orlean, again, the journalist down in Honduras, he was down there filming with his TV crew, putting it on TV. Now they're down here, they're going on this caravan, and suddenly it went boom, and loads of people saw it on TV, and they're like, I'm going, I'm leaving, I'm leaving. | ||
| Now the desperation was so heavy, now Honduras is in a real meltdown kind of stage. | ||
| Honduras is bad. | ||
| Venezuela's worse, but Honduras might be like number two for our real meltdown cases in Latin America right now. | ||
| So people were like, and I was talking to some of these people, they would say like, I saw it on TV and I was, that's it, I'm going. | ||
| Just decided right away, I'm going to get my bag and I'm going to go. | ||
| So they arrived, when they went through Guatemala into Guatemala, you know, they became big, like 7,000 people. | ||
| We arrived at the border with Mexico and, you know, first of all, there was a push and shove on the border and tear gas was fired and they went down and crossed the river, some of them walking across with a rope, some of them going across on tyres. | ||
| It was a kind of crazy scene, you know, the scene down there was squatted half the bridge and then they came down, so it was kind of a big deal. | ||
| The idea of calling them an invading army and so forth was obviously overblown, but like, I think it was significant scenes, quite historic scenes that were happening down there. | ||
| And what was the overall goal to make it through to the United States? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, different people had different ideas. | ||
| It was kind of one of these weird things, you know, like it was go to the United States. | ||
| Now, some people had no idea where they were going, had no real plan. | ||
| Some people had very clear cases of being like, I'm a refugee, you know, understanding a bit about refugee legislation. | ||
| And, like, fleeing very specific cases where they've been targeted by gangs working with corrupt police who want to kill them, who have, like, attacked them, and they've run, and, like, I want to seek refuge in the United States, or in Mexico. | ||
| Someone was seeking refuge in Mexico, which is not the safest place to seek refuge. | ||
| I mean, like, there's been cases of people who have, one cameraman I know who fed Honduras and then was killed in Mexico. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Has there ever been any discussion of the United States military intervening and trying to do something about the cartels? | ||
| So there's been like a U.S. you know some U.S. forces like U.S. marshals sometimes Mexico is very proud of its constitution and very proud of its sovereignty and doesn't want U.S. force acting in Mexico. | ||
| And I think the kind of idea really of U.S. military is pretty out there. | ||
| It wouldn't help if it would be bogged down into more problems and there'd be no appetite in Mexico for that. | ||
| But there have been some cases of U.S. Doing some kind of activity in Mexico, like for example, when they went after Chapo Guzman, When they got him and there was a big shootout. | ||
| They got him the first time, actually, without shots fired. | ||
| And then he went to prison and escaped. | ||
| That one escape? | ||
| He's escaped more than once, right? | ||
| Yeah, escaped twice, yeah. | ||
| Did he get helicoptered out once? | ||
| No, there have been... | ||
| Prisoners have been helicoptered out, which is crazy. | ||
| He had the one tunnel escape with the electric bike, which is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| When he went to the John and went to the bathroom and just stepped behind the door and he's gone. | ||
| That was insane. | ||
| It was really weird when I went to New York right now, seeing him in the court in New York, like seeing him in the flesh after all these years covering this stuff. | ||
| And I saw him and it was like, you know, I've been to his village before. | ||
| I talked to his mother. | ||
| I'd stayed the night with his cousin in his village. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Up in the mountains. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| What's it like up there? | ||
| It's quite rugged mountains. | ||
| Sierra Madre is like you go in a car up in a 4x4 series off-road up and down. | ||
| And There's people, you know, wandering around there, fully armed. | ||
| I saw guys with, like, ski mask. | ||
| One guy, like, camouflage gear, camo gear, ski mask, AK-47, just, like, on, like, quad bikes, just driving around the area. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And we went up there with a colleague and a photographer, Story for Time magazine. | ||
| And we went up there and drove into the village. | ||
| And I bought a bottle of whiskey, thinking to kind of offer to the family member to say, here's a bottle of whiskey. | ||
| And when we arrived there, and he said we could stay at his house, and I bought out a bottle of whiskey. | ||
| And he said, we don't drink in this house. | ||
| We're Christians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| We don't drink. | ||
| And there's this nice guy, and he was like evangelical Christian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And we'd sit there talking, and he'd be like quoting the Bible. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does he not understand that? | |
| And there's a church. | ||
| It's an evangelical church right there, which is supposedly built by Chapo, which his mother goes to, right in front of her house. | ||
| And we sat through a three-hour evangelical service, sitting there with Chapo's mom there and all these family members were sitting there. | ||
| And the cousin even said, oh, we've got some friends here. | ||
| Basically, he said, stay with me. | ||
| You're my responsibility. | ||
| If something happens, I'm going to have to pay for this. | ||
| So we're like, yeah, we're going to behave ourselves in the village. | ||
| And he said during the church, we want to also have somebody from England here and somebody from the US come out in this church ceremony. | ||
| So yeah, really, really bizarre scenes up there. | ||
| So bizarre. | ||
| Did you talk to them about the contradiction of being an evangelical Christian, being involved in essentially a mass murder and drug running operation? | ||
| So the cousin is supposedly, you know, he was like a cattle rancher now. | ||
| I don't know exactly, you know, obviously he calls... | ||
| I don't know how much he might have been involved in the past, but he says he's a farmer there. | ||
| And the mother, Chapo's mother, who's 88, was 88 then now, is like 89, 90 now. | ||
| She talks about her son with kind of pride. | ||
| I didn't push too hard. | ||
| There was a bunch of gumming around and stuff. | ||
| I didn't push too hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But yeah, this is their way of life. | ||
| So seeing him in the court was kind of bizarre. | ||
| Seeing him right there in New York, in Brooklyn. | ||
| Right there in Brooklyn. | ||
| And they brought in all of these crazy characters as cooperating witnesses. | ||
| They brought in 14 cooperating witnesses and a bunch of other gangsters. | ||
| How do they protect those people? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, heavily, heavily protected. | ||
| I mean, I think... | ||
| I think it was ethically very questionable why they brought a lot of those people in. | ||
| They brought in one guy whose nickname is Chupeta, who confessed himself to as many as 150 killings. | ||
| And maybe he did a lot more. | ||
| And he makes a deal, likely, makes a deal to cooperate against Del Chapo. | ||
| So... | ||
| You get into a kind of weird intrigue there about what the government was doing with this whole case. | ||
| There's a history in this country with prosecuting the mob, John Gotti and Sammy the Bull Gravano who was an admitted murderer and talked about the murders that he committed and still they allowed him to get free. | ||
| Yeah, one of his, John Gotti's lawyer was one of the lawyers for our chapel. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, and then they had... | ||
| So then they got some of these lawyers there. | ||
| It was a crazy kind of show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was weird. | ||
| It was like in New York and the show they were putting on there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I felt a kind of disconnect with the things I've been seeing over the last few years and it didn't really... | ||
| Why was it in New York? | ||
| You know, they indicted him in a bunch of places, and I think they chose New York for the reason they wanted more of a show. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I think they brought more than 50 witnesses, you know, three months of trial. | ||
| What was his defense? | ||
| So, they originally tried a bit of a defense of, they wanted to give a defense of how there's a kind of government conspiracy of, like, showing things like Fast and Furious that you mentioned. | ||
| Like saying, oh, how come the government's trafficking guns to the cartels? | ||
| And one of the witnesses had before, one of the witnesses against him, before used this weird defense called public authority, saying he had permission from the United States government to traffic drugs. | ||
| So basically saying there's a kind of conspiracy involving the Mexican government, totally corrupt and working with cartels. | ||
| The US government is corrupt and working with cartels and having various suspicious agencies. | ||
| And El Chapo is kind of a fool guy that they're putting this blame on. | ||
| Now that didn't really... | ||
| The US prosecutors shut that down and the judge, they just said, you can't talk about this stuff. | ||
| You can't say that. | ||
| So when Fast and Furious came up, They said, no, you can't talk about it. | ||
| You can't talk about it. | ||
| You couldn't talk about it in a court. | ||
| Well, that's ethically ambiguous, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Because, like, that's a real thing that happened. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, you know, we can't talk about that. | ||
| And then the defense tried a bit well. | ||
| They had audios of their chatbot, and they said, well, you know, how do you know it's him? | ||
| And is he really the main guy in the lower cartel? | ||
| Now, there is... | ||
| As well, very possibly he's not the top guy in the Sinaloa cartel. | ||
| There might well be another guy called Miles Ambada, who's really the number one. | ||
| And he might be more of an emblematic figure. | ||
| But for some reason, El Chapo became the most famous In the world. | ||
| And so this other guy, is he still free? | ||
| Yeah, he's still free. | ||
| What is his name again? | ||
| Mayo Zambada. | ||
| And where's he at? | ||
| Somewhere in the mountains. | ||
| They're always in the mountains? | ||
| Often. | ||
| I mean, one of these weird things you think like, if you're a drug lord and you've got all of the money, you know, you've got millions, billions they say, let's say hundreds of millions. | ||
| I think they exaggerate how much money some of these guys have individually. | ||
| But then you could go in the world. | ||
| You could go somewhere out. | ||
| But these guys tend to be in their places. | ||
| They're people like some of these people are people who are very uneducated. | ||
| I mean, I'm a chaper who's a kid. | ||
| He was carrying sacks full of oranges to sell, almost no education, and they start handling billions of dollars there. | ||
| They're dealing with a billion dollar international business and they've got the capacity to understand and deal with that. | ||
| But at the same time, they're still really hyper local in some ways. | ||
| They're still like people who they understand their world. | ||
| They understand it from their environment to control and become masters of their environment to become kind of powerful in in that place. | ||
| The idea of them going to, like, sitting in Italy in a cafe and kind of running it from there, it's kind of beyond them. | ||
| They would have to be there near the business because otherwise someone would just take it over, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You probably have to run that thing with an iron fist. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you could think, though, or maybe, like, yeah, I guess so. | ||
| Maybe get your Christian cousin. | ||
| He won't rip you off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But also, how much money do you need to make? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| When can you get out? | ||
| Again, with corruption. | ||
| I mean, there's the issue of a lot of police in Mexico are poor, so that's why they take deals. | ||
| But there's an ex-governor called Thomas Yarrington, who I met a few years ago when he was governor of Tamaulipas State. | ||
| And again, he was not only taking money from drug traffickers. | ||
| After he left being governor, he got into drug trafficking himself. | ||
| And it's like, you think, well, once you've made a couple of million, do you need to make another 10 million? | ||
| But then again, the same with, I don't understand that. | ||
| With business. | ||
| With businesses. | ||
| What's that incentive? | ||
| Why do they think they always want to make more money? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, we were talking about that recently with Jeff Bezos when we found out he has $150 billion. | ||
| like when do you just say we're good we're good yeah i mean i don't know i I think it becomes... | ||
| It's a game more than it is anything else. | ||
| Like, they might as well be playing Parcheesi or Monopoly or whatever. | ||
| They're trying to win. | ||
| You know, they're trying to constantly win. | ||
| And also, you have an obligation because you're a CEO of this company. | ||
| So, you're running this enormous business that's... | ||
| Earning money for all these other people as well. | ||
| It's all very complicated, though, that has to do with a lot of psychological factors where people can't put things into perspective and they get caught up in the race. | ||
| I guess, yeah, I mean, drug traffickers are thinking that same thing. | ||
| I mean, also, like, you know, people have explained to me, involved in this world, They make a lot of money, but they spend a lot of money. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Why these numbers are wrong like with Chapa they said he's worth 14 billion dollars. | ||
| That's what the US government said in that case is worth 14 billion. | ||
| But then he's you know, people explain to me, you know, 14 billion is when you take the value of drugs. | ||
| You're saying he trafficked and you're adding that up and saying it's 14 billion dollars worth. | ||
| But really all the time you're paying back supplies. | ||
| You're paying people off. | ||
| You're owing money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you're buying hippos and jets and gold-covered Rolls Royces. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Though some of that might have been exaggerated with him. | ||
| He had a lot of more middle-class houses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| I went to one of the last hideout he was caught in. | ||
| It was more like a middle-class house. | ||
| It's a normal house. | ||
| Kind of house, but you'd have a lot of those. | ||
| What the fuck happened with Sean Penn? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why was Sean Penn up there talking to him? | ||
| That was so strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That photograph of Sean Penn shaking hands with him. | ||
| And then Conor McGregor wore that same t-shirt and took that same pose on when he was going to fight Eddie Alvarez, I believe it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was that about? | ||
| Why was Sean Penn visiting him? | ||
| Yeah, bizarre moment. | ||
| I mean, you have a... | ||
| An actor who's played gangsters. | ||
| There he is, right there. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| An actor who's played gangsters with a gangster who they're having, you know, movies made about him. | ||
| And there was a woman that Sean Penn knew that hooked this all up, right? | ||
| Kate de Castillo. | ||
| She's a famous Mexican actress? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So the whole story starts, there she is, yeah. | ||
| Look at them all palling around. | ||
| Hey, here's me with the murderer. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Nice to be married to Madonna. | ||
| So the story started. | ||
| So Keita Castillo, who you see there, she was an actress in a TV series about drug traffickers, which have now become a huge deal in Latin America. | ||
| They're called like, telenovelas means like soap operas kind of thing, series, TV series. | ||
| And a whole bunch of them made about drug traffickers, which are really popular. | ||
| And she was in one called La Reina del Sur, The Queen of the South. | ||
| And in that, she played this drug trafficker. | ||
| And afterwards, in some kind of weird moment afterwards, I think she was really into her role and stuff. | ||
| She came out with this message she wrote saying, you know, Mexico, this is such a tragic situation in Mexico. | ||
| You know, why don't they come, you know, drug traffickers come and like traffic with love. | ||
| I trust you more than I do the government. | ||
| These are kind of sentiments that some people have, but it was kind of a strange thing, kind of a bit of an out there thing for a TV star to say. | ||
| And then El Chapo apparently became kind of enamoured with her, seeing her on TV, and they started this kind of communication. | ||
| Now Sean Penn then got involved in this, And was like, you know, I'm going to go there as well and we can talk about the idea, you know, the pretense of the meeting was as well talking about making a movie or TV series of his story. | ||
| And El Chapo giving the rights to Kate de Castillo and Sean Penn was kind of involved in this somehow. | ||
| Now, Sean Penn, there's a bit of discussion now that Sean Penn and Kate de Castillo fell out over this. | ||
| They have different versions of what happened there. | ||
| But Sean Penn decided to go and write this story for Rolling Stone about the whole experience. | ||
| So they went then and this meeting was arranged and they went up to the mountains and when that photo was taken, Now, at that point, he didn't actually give an interview to Sean Penn, but they had a dinner and they had a meeting up in the mountains. | ||
| And then left, and then they were meant to... | ||
| Afterwards, there was then a big attempt to hit Chapo, but he escaped. | ||
| So that's when some people say that... | ||
| The Mexican government had followed them and used their trace to try and get to El Chapo. | ||
| But he did escape. | ||
| He almost got caught close to there quite soon afterwards, but escaped. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| I mean, how else would Sean Penn be able to slide through? | ||
| He's a famous actor. | ||
| I bet he doesn't even speak Spanish. | ||
| Does he? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| If so, if he was followed, I'm not saying that he was in any way deliberately leading them there. | ||
| But it's something that I think about all the time. | ||
| I think about, okay, if I'm going to meet criminals, am I being followed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And am I going to lead, you know, what's my connection with law enforcement, what's your connection with criminals? | ||
| It's a very difficult thing that I've been balancing and thinking about for a lot of years. | ||
| So anyway, Chapo escaped and then said he couldn't meet up again for the interview because it was too hot for him. | ||
| So they made this video interview where he was sent some questions and he videoed himself on Answering the questions, which is kind of interesting. | ||
| It was the first kind of statement he made. | ||
| And he said, I know various things. | ||
| I've been doing this since I was 15. Didn't really give much away. | ||
| And then he was caught. | ||
| And when he was caught, they were like, we've got to move the stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then the story came out, like, bang after he was caught in early 2016. So it had to have some sort of an impact in them catching him. | |
| It must have. | ||
| I mean, it's possible. | ||
| It only makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I mean, Chapa, I think, was pretty... | ||
| You know, he'd already been caught before. | ||
| He was caught in 2014. Was... | ||
| In prison, escaped in 2015 through that tunnel, and then was caught again in 2016. So, yeah, I mean, maybe it had an impact. | ||
| I don't want to... | ||
| But they were looking for him. | ||
| Yeah, they were looking for him, and he seemed to have lost a lot of his protection. | ||
| Before, going back a few years... | ||
| He had enormous protection. | ||
| And there's mountains. | ||
| I mean, in the village, you see there's a house above. | ||
| There's kind of a main clearing where his mother's compound is. | ||
| It's pretty basic still, that village. | ||
| Then up from there, you see a house on a hill. | ||
| And apparently that's where El Chapo, for a long time, used to go and just stay in that house. | ||
| You know, when he was on the run in the past. | ||
| He had so much protection. | ||
| Anytime the military would come close up the mountain, you've got hundreds of people on radio saying the military are coming up. | ||
| Get clear. | ||
| Man, what a crazy world you study. | ||
| Really, it's amazing. | ||
| I really appreciate you coming here and talking to me about this. | ||
| And this book is El Narco. | ||
| Do you have more books that are available? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So my first book is El Narco. | ||
| My second book is Gangster Warlords, which also has stuff on the MS-13, on the gangs in Brazil, the gangs in Jamaica, as well as Mexico. | ||
| And I'm working on my third book now. | ||
| And the third book is about? | ||
| About gun trafficking. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I really appreciate your time and you've lived a very, very fascinating life. | ||
| Stay safe out there, man. | ||
| Great to be here. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate it, man. | ||
| Thank you. |
Export Selection